There are two kinds of optimism.

The first is believing mankind will someday cure cancer.

The second is believing every businessman flying to Palm Springs with an attractive blonde is traveling with his wife because the reservation form says so.

The airline industry, during the 1960s, embraced both with equal enthusiasm.

It was the golden age of aviation. Flying was glamorous.

Stewardesses wore white gloves. Men wore hats.

Everyone smoked indoors with the serene confidence of people who had not yet read the Surgeon General's report. Even the cocktails seemed to have frequent-flyer miles.

Airlines were desperate to fill seats, particularly on business routes.

Some marketing executive—whose confidence exceeded both his curiosity and his knowledge of human behavior—dreamed up a promotion called "Take Me Along."

There is something quietly radical happening this summer.

Thousands of young women are announcing that they are taking a break from dating. They are deleting the apps. Ignoring the "You up?" texts.

Declining blind dates. Opting out of the endless cycle of matching, messaging, wondering, hoping, and being disappointed.

Social media has given the movement a memorable name:

Nun Girl Summer.

The title is playful.

The mood beneath it is not.

Most headlines have treated the trend as another internet curiosity.

Is it anti-men? Is it feminism? Is it celibacy wrapped in a catchy TikTok phrase?

Is it simply the latest viral challenge destined to disappear in a few weeks?

Those questions are understandable.

They are also asking the wrong question.

Somewhere along the line, the internet decided that the female buttocks had become a public utility.

There are influencers devoted entirely to building them, surgeons devoted entirely to reshaping them, algorithms devoted entirely to displaying them, and comment sections devoted entirely to pretending that everyone's preferences are entirely personal and have absolutely nothing to do with biology.

The remarkable thing is that everyone is only half wrong.

Beauty is one of those subjects that attracts certainty like a porch light attracts moths.

One camp insists attraction is almost entirely cultural.

Another insists evolution settled the matter somewhere around the Ice Age.

Both camps usually speak with impressive confidence and very little curiosity.

Science, fortunately, is less interested in winning arguments than asking inconvenient questions.

Why do humans—even across remarkably different cultures—show similar preferences for certain body proportions?

Why did one particular muscle become so visually prominent in our species?

Why would body fat accumulate in places that seem, at first glance, almost artistically inconvenient?

And why does one of the most discussed parts of the human body turn out to be carrying information that has almost nothing to do with modern beauty standards?

The answer begins several million years before anyone invented yoga pants.

There is a new ritual unfolding in American kitchens, bedrooms, parked cars, and grocery store parking lots. It rarely makes the news because it is too ordinary. No one announces it. No one posts about it afterward.

An argument ends.

Someone picks up their phone.

Not to text their spouse.

Not to call a friend.

Not to cool off.

They open ChatGPT.

Then comes the modern equivalent of confession:

"What did my husband mean?"

Or:

"Is my wife manipulating me?"

Or my personal favorite:

"Analyze this conversation."

In 1963 I lusted after comic books.

Not liked.

Not enjoyed.

Not collected.

Lusted.

The distinction matters.

People enjoy a cup of coffee. They enjoy a sunny afternoon. They enjoy a comfortable chair.

Nobody enjoyed comic books the way I experienced them.

Comic books occupied the same territory as desire.

The same territory as hunger.

The same territory as religious longing.

A ten-cent comic book was not ten cents.

A ten-cent comic book was access.

Access to another world.

Access to another self.

There is a particular kind of grief that does not fit neatly into the categories.

No one died yesterday.

No catastrophe appeared on the evening news.

There is no funeral.

No casserole arrives at the door.

And yet something feels gone.

Folks describe it in odd ways.

The neighborhood doesn't feel the same.

The profession doesn't feel the same.

The country doesn't feel the same.

Dating doesn't feel the same.

Marriage doesn't feel the same.

The future doesn't feel the same.

The feeling is difficult to name because the object of grief is often invisible. What has disappeared is not necessarily a person. It is a world.

A set of assumptions.

A map of reality.

A future we quietly expected to inhabit.

This may be one reason the enduring appeal of Supergirl feels increasingly relevant.

For all the capes and cosmic battles, Supergirl is not fundamentally a story about superpowers.

It is a story about surviving the destruction of a world and waking up somewhere that no longer follows the rules you were taught.

In that sense, she may be one of popular culture's most compelling trauma icons.

Not because she suffers.

Many heroes suffer.

Because she remembers.

A strange thing happened when we built the most powerful attention-capturing machines in human history.

We rediscovered the family dinner.

Not because dinner changed.

Because attention changed.

For thousands of years, human beings developed rituals that directed attention toward what mattered most.

Meals. Holidays. Birthdays. Weddings. Sabbaths. Bedtime stories. Seasonal celebrations. Shared traditions.

These practices were so common that they became nearly invisible.

Then, within a single generation, we built an economy designed to redirect attention somewhere else.

The result was not merely distraction.

It was a crisis of continuity.

There is a peculiar superstition circulating among modern adults.

The superstition is not that human beings are good.

The superstition is that human beings are terrible.

Mention marriage and someone will tell you about divorce.

Mention religion and someone will tell you about hypocrisy.

Mention politics and someone will tell you about corruption.

Mention social media and someone will tell you about narcissists.

Mention trust and someone will look at you as if you have just proposed investing your retirement savings in a pyramid scheme operated by ferrets.

The hopeful person is considered naïve.

The trusting person is considered gullible.

The cynic, meanwhile, is treated like the adult in the room.

Suspicion has become a form of sophistication.

Pessimism has become a personality.

And distrust increasingly passes for wisdom.

A fascinating new study suggests we may be getting the math wrong.

Long before artificial intelligence arrived, America had already developed a habit.

We started describing human beings the way accountants describe office furniture.

Workers became labor costs.

Patients became utilization rates.

Students became performance metrics.

Citizens became demographics.

Customers became eyeballs.

Somewhere along the way, the language of management escaped the conference room and began colonizing everything else.

This happens so gradually that nobody notices.

One day you wake up and discover that an entire society has become remarkably skilled at calculating what human beings cost.

Less attention is devoted to calculating what human beings are worth.

Artificial intelligence did not create this habit.

Artificial intelligence merely wandered into a culture that was already halfway there.

That observation sits beneath a recent economic idea known as the AI Layoff Trap.

Every civilization eventually develops a fantasy about its own childhood.

Rome had one.

Britain had one.

America's fantasy childhood is the 1950s.

A decade so beloved that millions of Americans who never lived through it spend their evenings trying to move back there emotionally.

The remarkable thing is that almost nobody actually wants the 1950s.

They want the feeling they imagine the 1950s produced.

Those are very different things.

You see it everywhere now.

"I want the 1950s back."

It appears in comment sections. Political speeches. Parenting discussions. Podcasts. Social media debates. Family gatherings. Sometimes all before breakfast.

The phrase is remarkably popular for something almost nobody actually means.

Because nobody wants the actual 1950s back.

Most people remember Archie Bell & the Drells for one thing.

A groove.

A dance.

A few minutes of irresistible joy from 1968.

What most people do not remember is that Tighten Up begins with instructions.

Actual instructions.

Archie Bell introduces himself, introduces Houston, Texas, informs us that he and his friends can dance as well as they sing, and then proceeds to tell America exactly what to do.

"Now tighten up on it..."

And America, apparently thinking this sounded reasonable, did.

The song became a number-one hit.

Millions danced.

Nobody seemed especially troubled by the fact that they were enthusiastically participating in a cultural phenomenon built around compliance.

Most partners do not wake up one morning and decide to stop loving each other.

That is the comforting myth.

The dramatic myth.

The movie version.

The affair.

The betrayal.

The screaming match.

The slammed door.

Real life is usually quieter.

A husband is lying in bed beside his wife.

He is laughing.

Not with her.

At something on his phone.