Friday Night Life

The Intangible Space That We Lost

Welcome back to the wasteland!

Summer is on so let’s go back in time for this week’s post. Let’s travel back to rediscover that nebulous time between the week and the weekend that has been muddied over the decades: Friday Night. More than anything, I want to touch on what it was and why it mattered more than the nostalgia that remains around it.

First, watch the video above to get a handle on what exactly we’re talking about. It’s not an easily definable thing we’re going to be talking about from here on in.

You might think that Friday night is still a big deal these days, but it isn’t to the same extent it once was. This is for multiple reasons. “Friday Night” was a cultural institution when everyone had more or less the same work and school week, with the same promise that weekends would be for you and those around you and no one else. It was your time. This is what made Friday Night such a powerful force. Everyone was off at the same time, with the same options, and in the same communities, and that knowing shift is what drove a lot of what made it all so enchanting.

Work exists for leisure, not the other way around, which means that leisure has to be more meaningful than work. Therefore, once the weekend actually comes, it is anyone’s guess as to what happens next. It’s a whole other world divorced from the long week being left behind. The actual activities on the weekend itself don’t matter as much is the reality that it’s time for you and yours, and the world comes in distant second. But that’s the weekend: not what lays between it and what was left behind.

Friday Night, however? That’s where the magic is.

Friday is a lot of people’s favorite day of the week because of more what it symbolizes than what might actually occur during it. A Friday symbolizes a coming break from work and a retreat into leisure. Nights are already seen as the leisure time (it is when most people sleep, after all), but when you add in the weekend ahead and (usually) the lack of no big plans ahead, it makes Friday Night a time of endless possibilities. You can do anything, and anything can happen.

It isn’t so much what you do, but the knowledge that you can do it. This is your true reward for getting through the week, and it is what made the work truly worth getting through. Friday Night represents real freedom, the kind we tend to get less of these days regardless of your age or station in life. Everyone had the same shared experience, which is what made it all the better. you could also meet anyone, and you were all on the same equal ground and in the same mindset.

No one really says this anymore.

I try to be careful with these subjects on here, mostly because it is easy to fall into the nostalgia trap of thinking old things were better simply because they were old. It’s what I and many others my age did when we were young, but I think at this point the conversation has moved beyond nostalgia arguments when industries are collapsing and the online space is rotting away at faster and faster speeds. We’re trying to find that place we lost before we lose the chance to rediscover it for good. What people are looking for is that intangible space between the past and the present, the spot that we can’t seem to find, and put something down there to begin building on.

A sort of new monoculture? Who can say, but it’s something we know we lost and something we know we need to regain.

Nostalgia isn’t really an argument anymore as much as it is now a Brand like everything else, and you already realize that, as does everyone else. You don’t actually want the 1980s or the 1990s or even the 2000s back. You want that cohesiveness and sense of belonging and wider societal purpose they had in spades compared to now. You want to be able to go out and find things with other people as curious as you are: someone to connect with and something to find. The loneliness epidemic is not just for single males, after all. It effects everyone living in a world where fragmentation through consumption is the end goal. This world is the end state of striving for perfect individuality, after all. The perfect individual is alone.

But perfection isn’t possible. Convenience doesn’t necessarily make things better, either. Those were things taken for granted back then, and now we can’t even entertain going back to it again. However, the Friday Night experience we all want and desire, is not possible in a world of easy convenience. It requires being able to go out and find people who think, act, and believe, at least a little like you do: a cohesive communal experience where anything can happen. That is a big part of the magic.

That requires risk, but it requires risk of a different sort: where putting yourself out there doesn’t result in an internet video from someone who thinks so little about their neighbors that they will toss them to the sharks and be rewarded by those around them for doing so. It requires a world where you can talk about the same things with people you barely know and find yourself at least a little better off for it. You can’t do that if your neighbor has nothing in common with you and has no desire to even try to connect. It’s a two way street, and that isn’t where we currently are now.

Perhaps this is why the past is currently looked at with more curious eyes beyond the nostalgia, and why Zoomers and younger are hungry for it despite having no memories of that era. We all know the way things are isn’t sustainable and is not ideal, but we don’t know how to retain what we lost without pretending the clock is a different time than it is.

The point is that making everything more convenient hasn’t really made anything better. Yes, we still get good books, video games, and music, but we were already getting those before. What it hasn’t done is made our quality of living better as a whole. Life itself hasn’t benefited from these changes, which is how a nebulous feeling like Friday Night became a pale shadow of what it once was. Yes, you can go out somewhere, but Everyone won’t be there which means Anything can’t happen. The magic is no longer there, just as the majority no longer is.

It’s gone, but the hunger for it remains.

And that’s what we need to get back.

So the next time Friday Night rolls around, think twice about what it really means, and what makes it truly so special. Perhaps if we try to reclaim that feeling, we can come that little be closer to reclaiming that certain undefinable quality we can’t seem to nail down. It can’t hurt. In fact, it’ll only bring us closer, in the end. What else can be better?

A new episode of Letters from the Wasteland is available on the Patreon! In this one I talk about the downfall of the video game industry!