November26, 2025
Jeb Lund
“He’ll watch 30 minutes of YouTube Reels before bed, and then I’ll tuck him in, and he’ll ask, ‘Mom, instead of a story, can we watch a few Reels?’ I don’t know!” she shouted and threw her arms in the air. “At least he can spot AI fakes instantly.”
There it was, I thought. Family, togetherness, the complete collapse of a shared knowledge base and epistemology. Everything you need for the annual Thanksgiving column.
You might be reading this after Thanksgiving. That’s fine. The Thanksgiving column is never really about Thanksgiving. It is a hook for the hack to hang a grievance on, and you can make a home bingo game of it. The Andrew Tates of the world, whose promise is that real masculinity comes from giving him money every month to rain sexist abuse on you, surely has a thick meaty male take on how to grill your proteins. Presumably the trad-Cath column is recipes and encomia about silence. Bari Weiss and the new CBS News are good for at least one explainer on how your facile infatuation with human rights and the First Amendment is unfairly othering your cousin who came dressed like Reinhard Heidrich.
One could respectably chart the late Gen X-and-Younger zeitgeist over the last two decades of Thanksgiving columns. At the start of first Obama term, it emerged as an extension of the snarky blog era, shorter and punchier and still operating under the belief that debunking was as an arcane and dogged wizardry that unraveled the spells of false Fox News incantations. By the second Obama administration, that same impulse had reached the ritual apotheosis of High Sorkinism, with each person deserving their moment like President Bartlett raking a Dr. Laura manqué over the coals via a tight exegesis of Mosaic law.
But if the late Obama era felt like sealing everyone in the vault, Trump’s 2016 win felt like encasing the whole thing in concrete. By the midterms, the atmosphere had moved to, “Let us please be human to each other this holiday and pretend that nothing outside the walls is on fire.” The pandemic spared us the next evolution. We’d tried zingers, concatenations of argument and desperate attempts at empathy. But, until now, we never walked through the final political door: Direct Action against your uncle who sucks.
That’s right: It’s time to leaflet your neighborhood with images of Your Uncle who sucks, the things he believes in that suck and how to avoid being around him and the consequences for that — which, oh buddy, are gonna suck. Finally: publicly confronting Your Uncle and seeking local volunteer organizations and stakeholders who are willing to take a stand and show your fellow citizens that Your Uncle is simply not acceptable, and we as a society cannot afford and will not consent to Your Uncle’s Bullshit any longer.
Which, honestly, sounds like incredible fun, not least because I’ve met many of Your Uncles, and haven’t cared for them at all. But in practical terms, I think a lot about my friend’s YouTube-brained son — and mine — and our understandable worry about what being fed a dopamine-pushing heavily mediated clip-form reality is doing to their brains, and wondering what weird or disappointing or amazing things they’ll be good at. One thing they seem preternaturally good at, at least for now, is spotting when some fraudulent bit of reality is a bit too over-engineered.
What comes next for their brains and ours worries me, but for now I am content to let him be That Guy, and find myself celebrating when my friends wander into their version of being That Guy. The administrative nurse pal who can explain what the administration’s war on nursing means in practical terms. The cousin, perhaps hot, whose business’s supply chain is dependent on imports whose prices have reeled up and down like a roller coaster. That uncle with the history degree and the slightly infuriating “well well well, who’s laughing now” expression now that you’re going to take him seriously.
Oddly, the one promise left of social occasions or social media is to let you meet That Guy or That Woman or That Weird Kid in your life who is still something of a measure against the mess. The trick, at Thanksgiving or Christmas or just on the timeline is, I suppose, to be the most polite and amenable version of That Guy or Gal you can be. We tell stories at Thanksgiving — we’re wired to, every day — about who we are and what brought us here and what the world outside has done to us.
Whatever else this Thanksgiving and the upcoming holidays bring you, it’s a world where your measured experience is about all you’ve got left. The cliché thought about the Trump administration is that there will be so much to rebuild, but the fact is that there’s so much that’s going to have to be torn down and built anew by different hands. Each of us can build a little bit of a media of the real, a little web here or there, across friendships and careers, of things that actually happened, are still happening, are bound to happen again.
Maybe you’re the person who’s watched every abusive ICE video and has an example at hand, or maybe you’re a hospitalist who sees what the alleged best health care in the world does to people and makes them choose, every day. Maybe you became a timeline omnivore in response to 2016, but there’s one thing that you feel a greater commitment to, and it’s a bit of reality you are determined to keep from being forgotten. So, be That Person, to the best of your ability, and in care of what bit of truth you think matters most. Just don’t be That Guy so much that you become an annual anecdote about it.
Jeb Lund
As we carve the turkey, we can
all serve as something of a measure against the mess.
We had been talking about our
children’s YouTube dependency and how much it reminded us of gambling addicts
when a PTA mom I like started ranting.
“He’ll watch 30 minutes of YouTube Reels before bed, and then I’ll tuck him in, and he’ll ask, ‘Mom, instead of a story, can we watch a few Reels?’ I don’t know!” she shouted and threw her arms in the air. “At least he can spot AI fakes instantly.”
There it was, I thought. Family, togetherness, the complete collapse of a shared knowledge base and epistemology. Everything you need for the annual Thanksgiving column.
You might be reading this after Thanksgiving. That’s fine. The Thanksgiving column is never really about Thanksgiving. It is a hook for the hack to hang a grievance on, and you can make a home bingo game of it. The Andrew Tates of the world, whose promise is that real masculinity comes from giving him money every month to rain sexist abuse on you, surely has a thick meaty male take on how to grill your proteins. Presumably the trad-Cath column is recipes and encomia about silence. Bari Weiss and the new CBS News are good for at least one explainer on how your facile infatuation with human rights and the First Amendment is unfairly othering your cousin who came dressed like Reinhard Heidrich.
One could respectably chart the late Gen X-and-Younger zeitgeist over the last two decades of Thanksgiving columns. At the start of first Obama term, it emerged as an extension of the snarky blog era, shorter and punchier and still operating under the belief that debunking was as an arcane and dogged wizardry that unraveled the spells of false Fox News incantations. By the second Obama administration, that same impulse had reached the ritual apotheosis of High Sorkinism, with each person deserving their moment like President Bartlett raking a Dr. Laura manqué over the coals via a tight exegesis of Mosaic law.
But if the late Obama era felt like sealing everyone in the vault, Trump’s 2016 win felt like encasing the whole thing in concrete. By the midterms, the atmosphere had moved to, “Let us please be human to each other this holiday and pretend that nothing outside the walls is on fire.” The pandemic spared us the next evolution. We’d tried zingers, concatenations of argument and desperate attempts at empathy. But, until now, we never walked through the final political door: Direct Action against your uncle who sucks.
That’s right: It’s time to leaflet your neighborhood with images of Your Uncle who sucks, the things he believes in that suck and how to avoid being around him and the consequences for that — which, oh buddy, are gonna suck. Finally: publicly confronting Your Uncle and seeking local volunteer organizations and stakeholders who are willing to take a stand and show your fellow citizens that Your Uncle is simply not acceptable, and we as a society cannot afford and will not consent to Your Uncle’s Bullshit any longer.
Which, honestly, sounds like incredible fun, not least because I’ve met many of Your Uncles, and haven’t cared for them at all. But in practical terms, I think a lot about my friend’s YouTube-brained son — and mine — and our understandable worry about what being fed a dopamine-pushing heavily mediated clip-form reality is doing to their brains, and wondering what weird or disappointing or amazing things they’ll be good at. One thing they seem preternaturally good at, at least for now, is spotting when some fraudulent bit of reality is a bit too over-engineered.
What comes next for their brains and ours worries me, but for now I am content to let him be That Guy, and find myself celebrating when my friends wander into their version of being That Guy. The administrative nurse pal who can explain what the administration’s war on nursing means in practical terms. The cousin, perhaps hot, whose business’s supply chain is dependent on imports whose prices have reeled up and down like a roller coaster. That uncle with the history degree and the slightly infuriating “well well well, who’s laughing now” expression now that you’re going to take him seriously.
Oddly, the one promise left of social occasions or social media is to let you meet That Guy or That Woman or That Weird Kid in your life who is still something of a measure against the mess. The trick, at Thanksgiving or Christmas or just on the timeline is, I suppose, to be the most polite and amenable version of That Guy or Gal you can be. We tell stories at Thanksgiving — we’re wired to, every day — about who we are and what brought us here and what the world outside has done to us.
Whatever else this Thanksgiving and the upcoming holidays bring you, it’s a world where your measured experience is about all you’ve got left. The cliché thought about the Trump administration is that there will be so much to rebuild, but the fact is that there’s so much that’s going to have to be torn down and built anew by different hands. Each of us can build a little bit of a media of the real, a little web here or there, across friendships and careers, of things that actually happened, are still happening, are bound to happen again.
Maybe you’re the person who’s watched every abusive ICE video and has an example at hand, or maybe you’re a hospitalist who sees what the alleged best health care in the world does to people and makes them choose, every day. Maybe you became a timeline omnivore in response to 2016, but there’s one thing that you feel a greater commitment to, and it’s a bit of reality you are determined to keep from being forgotten. So, be That Person, to the best of your ability, and in care of what bit of truth you think matters most. Just don’t be That Guy so much that you become an annual anecdote about it.
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