Agony Addison // hangxiety in the age of the apps
I still have no chill about posting myself ugly on the Lord's internet
This March brings us a New Moon in Aries just one day after the Spring Equinox, a hinge upon which two seasons swing. It’s time to shake the dust off your wintry bones and push through the brittle frost into a blooming spring with fight and fervor. New beginnings abound; take time to step with intent into this freshly balanced way of being.
Hellllo my darlings! Hellllllllo my babies! HellllllllOOO my ragtime gals!
Do you smell that? The brisk breeze of a retreating winter, coated in pollen with the promise of verdant abundance upon the horizon. Grab your Zyrtec and your winning attitude, kids, we’ll be free of this freezing yet!
Apologies for popping out for a month without warning, I was unexpectedly down in Alabama and up to no good for an extended stay. Seasons of rest are frequently most necessary when least expected; that, or I’m still just no good at knowing when I need a break until it smacks me on the back of the head. But I’m coming out of my cage, I’ve been doing JUST FINE, and I have a noggin full of freshly-fermented wisdom to bestow upon my mangled masses.
I missed you guys! I want to hear from you!! Drop me a line here and make it squiggly. And seriously, make some preparations to barricade yourself against the impending onslaught of plant paraphernalia. Evolution is no match for the powers of ragweed and a blusterly northern wind.
Questions have been edited for length/clarity.
Hey Addison,
Every time I drink, I get crippling hangover anxiety the next day. But also, drinking feels socially essential in NYC, and the anxiety seems to come regardless of how much I actually drink, and without correlation to anything I’d done the night before. The obvious answer is to stop drinking, but are there other ways to move forward or battle back the muscle memory of my hangover anxiety?
— Hangxious Hank
Hey Hank! Sorry about your hangovers, that sucks! If you’re still on the unripe side of 25, just know that it only gets much, much worse from here. Your body seems to lose all ability to even attempt to cope with minor alcohol poisoning as soon as it knows you can’t legally be on your parents’ health insurance plan anymore. Thanks Obama!
As far as city living goes, I would argue that NYC is actually one of the more non-drinking friendly locations available to a young American socialite! Especially if you can choose weed instead, since every single bodega in the city is now loudly advertising their technically-still-illegal-but-no-one-is-doing-anything-about-it-I-guess cannabis sales on every inch of their available window space. Although chronic hangxiety doesn’t exactly instill confidence in your ability to toke without, as the kids say, seeing the hat man.
Honestly though, taking at least a lil’ break from the beers is probably the best first step you can take toward reclaiming your Sunday mornings. You can still blend in at the bar without drawing tons of attention to your lack of alcoholic consumption; all you really need is a seltzer with a slice of lime and a tiny black straw that you still don’t really know if it’s just for stirring or also for sipping but it’s too late to ask anyone at this point so you tell yourself stories in order to live. As long as you still let loose and kick off your Sunday shoes, odds are your tipsy friends won’t even notice that you’re still making better decisions than them by 2am.
If it feels impossible to go out without drinking, maybe that’s a sign that you need to find new people to go out with. Any grown man yelling at you to “take a shot you lil’ bitch” is definitely already pissing off everyone around you at the bar and scaring off his Hinge matches anyway. You can find better people with way better attitudes by hitting up some events where drinking is not the main event, like an art class, or a book club, or a comedy show, or a sports league. Literally anything else you like doing! Then you automatically have something in common with everybody else there. This city is gigantic and there are so many more worlds inside of it than you can even imagine. Leave the day-after ChaCha Matcha crawls for the painful transplant TikToks and get out there! And leave the hangxiety at home!!!
While we’re here - any favorite hangover cures?
C&B Cafe on 7th and Avenue C in the East Village. Something with chickpeas and runny eggs and an iced mocha to drink. When in doubt, chocolate milk it out. And I’ve ALWAYS said that!!!
Auntie,
Should I get BeReal?
Sincerely,
BeingSoSerious
In the name of BeingHonest, I must admit that I downloaded this app on a whim in February after months of campaigning against the peer pressure to add yet another social platform to my phone addiction symptoms list. I absolutely panicked when the little demons in my screen immediately prompted me to send my first BeReal within the next two minutes while I was sat quite comfortably in the damn tub. I threw my hair in a towel and hunted down the cat because my apartment wasn’t clean enough to photograph anything else. I retook the photo eight, count them EIGHT, times because I didn’t yet know how the app publicly shames you for not knowing your own angles.
You may have picked up on the vibe that I do NOT know what I’m doing in here. Is this finsta vibes?? Are people violently honest about the states of their apartments, or has clean girl aesthetic come for the fruit bowls here too? How am I going to get away with not leaving my apartment for five days in a row with all of this damn evidence???
I hit send on the cat pic and realized that I might have just committed an act of heinous millennial-ry online. The first friend who added me back had, mercifully, sent an extremely similar dog selfie hours previously. So if I am already an old loser who pauses imperceptibly at the beginning of recorded videos, blame it on Buzzfeed!
I don’t *love* the idea that apps like BeReal and all the other ones already ripping it off are training us to be more responsive than ever before. We’re definitely getting Pavloved on a massive scale. Maybe the idea is to hashtag connect in a more hashtag authentic way, but this authenticity comes at the price of posting yourself before you can even engage with anyone else’s content. Makes me feel real suspicious and squinty. There is a literal countdown clock blocking your way to everyone else’s photos, like a fucked up little troll demanding answers to his riddles in exchange for safe passage across his rickety-ass bridge. I resent myself for giving him business.
Now that Twitter is being strangled in front of us by a billionaire with terminal rizz deficiency, I’m less willing to grow attached to any new interfaces. So far, BeReal as an app has only been funded by venture capital and investors; how are they ever going to make enough profit to run the thing without clogging up the feed with ads, or charging a subscription fee that scares off all the users? This gets me real itchy about what kind of data the app might already be mining, like daily locations and routines, as well as notification response times, in order to sell off to marketing firms in massive and specific data packages. How could that information be used in the wrong hands? Before you start yelling about my shiny new tinfoil hat, just remember that if you’re using a technology platform for free, you are the product. Did we learn nothing from Jeremy Renner?!
The iconic Jeremy Renner app actually didn’t sell off user data (that we know of), but I have an affinity for self-defeating egos. Schadenfreude, with a poetic lilt. For all my hand-wringing about data security, I still have TikTok downloaded on my phone with approximately 800 saved videos, so I’m pretty deeply screwed already. IDK if I think you should voluntarily toss your data to another future tech overlord; it feels unnecessary, but also like maybe we have to grab the fleeting moments of joy we can still see as they flit by. I suppose it all comes down to one essential question: How much, on average, would you enjoy receiving daily photos of someone else’s cat?
Here’s a teaser from what you can expect in my Realest moments. Sweet, sweet girl was doing her best to help remove my stitches but she’s not done with medical school and doesn’t work well under pressure. Also, I got stitches because a knife fell off the kitchen counter and into my leg, which was not nearly as painful as the ER bill is going to be. God Bless America ha ha HA. Unrelated, I can definitely vouch for the Veark Chef’s Knife’s razor-sharp edge and clean cuts!
Last month, we discussed the new social rules by which we are allowed to have a society, a trilogy of relationship films made by the dude who did “Dazed and Confused”, and, most importantly, a guy on a buffalo. LMK if you guys know any way ‘out’ other than ‘through’, this bridge troll is really starting to salt my emotional apples.
xoxo and a Groupon to one of those IV hangover places,
Agony Addison <3