The Adults Have Entered the Room
The flyer arrived on a Friday.
It was hidden inside our new issue of The Atlantic, a slick sliver of alarm, poking out as if it knew it didn’t belong.
I noticed it right away.
“Conquer the Dynamic World of Retirement” the headline read, bold and unblinking.
Conquer. As if this next phase were a hostile country.
“Do you wonder about your future and your finances?” another headline in alarming red type asked. Beneath it, a photo depicted a man and a woman, white-haired and robust, gazing out toward a hopeful future they seemed certain would arrive. Their faces wore the same confident expressions you see in stock photos and pharmaceutical ads.
I set the flyer aside and laughed. The brittle kind. Dynamic was one way to put it. Panic was another.
My friends and I, all of us nearing retirement, all of us doing the right things — saving, planning, dreaming — knew that our sense of stability had been upended by a powerful and reckless president who had decided stability was no longer convenient.
Each morning: another text, another headline, another friend asking, Can you believe this?
I declared a digital blackout.
No news. No texts. No conversations about markets crashing and potentially mucking up the good last years of a career.
My wife Jan and I would go to the movies. See something silly, something not real. Surely that was still safe.
That night, at the theater, a girl about high school age scanned our ticket. She didn’t flinch at the yellow tape strung across the entrance of the auditorium behind her where our movie was playing.
Employees emerged from the taped off room, carrying heavy plastic bags sagging with waste. Just kids, they moved with the slow, practiced indifference of people who already knew how little they could control.
The air smelled of popcorn. Two men in leather jackets waiting for the theater to open murmured about tariffs and the economy. I turned away.
Later we learned what had happened. A TikTok meme. Kids throwing popcorn into the air, a theater-wide reenactment of a joke no one could explain. The world trashed itself now not out of anger, but out of boredom.
Eventually, they let us in.
The floor crunched underfoot, kernels of popcorn embedded in the carpet like small, sad fossils.
At the entrance, four employees stood stiffly in a line, like players awaiting a penalty kick. Their faces were careful, closed.
They had seen what people could do.
I smiled.
“Good news,” I said. “The adults have entered the room.”
One of them smiled back, a smile stretched thin by the knowledge that it wasn’t true. There were no adults anymore. My attempt to escape for two hours amounted to two more hours of work for him.
We found our seats. The lights dimmed. The movie began.
For two hours, the worry stayed outside.
When the credits rolled and the lights came up, the debris on the floor was still there.
Outside, the world would still be there too. Dynamic.
