more and more muted every time

Posted: January 25th, 2026 | Tags: Uncategorized | No Comments »

this is a wild article. two highlights:

To be clear, I take fandom seriously, but I have rarely been caught up in it myself. Don’t get me wrong. I write about culture for a living, and there are things that I love: I’m a Bruce Springsteen completist, and the first nonassigned short story I ever wrote, in 10th grade, was a kind of fan fiction about the song “Thunder Road.” I got really into Taylor Swift a couple of years ago, but everyone did. Sometimes when the Knicks are having a great season, I think about them a lot and wonder if they hang out when they’re not on the court.

but this — bolding my own:

Maybe the answer is that B is 8 and I am 50, and what B doesn’t know is that as they get older, there will be fewer things to love like this. That it will come along when it does, if it does, but it will feel more and more muted every time, so that by the time you find yourself feeling it again, by the time you realize that it is great to mellow with age but that before the process is complete you will panic, because you can feel what you’re missing and know that one day missing it won’t even bother you anymore. And right now I am in the gloaming of all that — in the perimenopause of all my passions, a time when I still remember what it is to want, but from the shoreline. This might never happen again to me, I want to tell B. It’s a surprise it happened at all. Hasn’t anyone told you yet, B? It becomes rarer and rarer to be struck in the heart by something that consumes you, and one day you forget that it used to happen at all.

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