I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how and why things feel off in this lingering quasi-post-pandemic period. For some reason, I’ve been thinking about that dusty old term “reentry anxiety” lately, and about this piece that I wrote in 2021 bouncing off the anxiety of one of my friends.

And the other week I wrote a long, maybe somewhat jumbled piece about all of this, based on a dispiriting day on the road in Maryland’s D.C. suburbs.

What I kept feeling was not something as simple as inflation—that is, high prices, though I do see plenty of high prices—nor something as terrible as the collapse you’ll read about in conservative news outlets. Cities beset by crime! Hellholes on fire! Get out!

What I perceived was more subtle. I came upon the word deterioration to describe this feeling. I met a woman involved in urbanism work the other day, and she had read this recent piece of mine and said it resonated with her. And I was meeting with an old colleague yesterday and as we were talking about cities I suggested that word, deterioration, and her face sort of lit up.

It’s dispiriting and almost eerie exactly because it’s subtle.

Outright shortages or other kinds of sharp crisis moments are almost invigorating, in a way: Walker Percy’s hurricane theory. And there’s the understanding or expectation that they’ll pass. But here, now, the feeling that we’ve lost a lot of things we never even thought about gnaws at you. It’s like the mental and psychological equivalent of a computer virus running in the background, sapping processing power—a successful parasite that doesn’t quite kill the host...