Evan could not believe he missed the twenties.
Not his twenties. The twenties. COVID, the Iran war, the oil shock and the eighteen-month period during which international travel became an expensive method of remaining inside airports. He missed all of it. This seemed both obscene and diagnostically significant.
He had not enjoyed the decade while it was happening. Nobody had. Its principal activity had been announcing that no previous decade had placed the human nervous system under such sustained and unreasonable pressure. Every year had arrived already condemned by the preceding one, then contrived to make its predecessor look spacious and well managed. People had spoken of 2021 with nostalgia by 2024, of 2024 with nostalgia by 2027. Even then, the past had been improving at extraordinary speed.
They had been wrong about the pressure, of course. The human nervous system had merely been warming up.
Evan turned into the park and checked the time. Seven twenty-three. He had been walking for nineteen minutes and needed another twenty-one before breakfast. Forty minutes of low-intensity movement, ideally performed within an hour of waking. Natural light into the eyes. No glasses unless essential. No phone, except to check the time, the air quality, his pace and whether the absence of his phone was producing any measurable benefit.
He had followed the routine for three years. It did not make him feel good. Nothing made him feel good with the reliability implied by the phrase. The walk made him feel less bad than he would feel if he did not take it, although the benefit could be identified only by removing it. Miss one morning and the day acquired a faint internal gradient. Miss two and ordinary tasks began to require preliminary negotiations. By the third, the kitchen bin was no longer an object awaiting evacuation but a referendum on whether he remained capable of participating in life.
So he walked.
The park was crowded. Exercise participation had risen every year since 2033 and was regularly cited as one of the period's encouraging social developments. Alcohol consumption was down. Smoking had almost disappeared. People ate vegetables, protected their sleep, monitored their blood sugar and performed resistance training with the solemnity of villagers strengthening a flood barrier.
Nobody in the park looked encouraged.
They moved with the grim custodial concentration of people preventing an internal emergency. Running had once been undertaken to become attractive, fast or unusually good at running. Now people ran because missing two consecutive sessions caused the floor of the mind to tilt. The healthiest population in history felt too bad to live carelessly.
There was a phrase people used: mental slack. Evan could not remember who had coined it. A psychiatrist, probably, or one of the public thinkers who spent their careers attaching handles to general despair. Mental slack was the surplus by which a person absorbed a bad night, a humiliation, a hangover or an unexpectedly large bill without the entire system seizing. In the twenties people had possessed more of it than they knew. They had spent it extravagantly. They drank wine on weeknights, smoked cigarettes outside pub entrances, remained awake until two in the morning arguing with strangers and ate food delivered by motorcyclists whose location they watched on a map with imperial impatience. Then they got up, complained and recovered.
They had damaged themselves casually because they assumed there was a self beneath the damage capable of repair.
Evan found their recklessness moving.
Now a bottle of wine was six bad days poured into glass. Everyone knew it. People still drank, but usually in the furtive, self-punitive manner of diabetics eating the thinnest possible sliver of a wedding cake. The pleasure arrived with its invoice already attached.
Evan passed a man of approximately sixty performing slow squats beside a bench. The man wore weighted gloves and the empty expression of someone completing maintenance on a body whose occupant had not requested an extension. They nodded to one another. The nod counted as neither man's daily human contact, but it was not nothing.
That was another phrase: not nothing. The age had developed a tender regard for whatever could not quite be called something.
He missed COVID. There it was. An indecent sentence, but true.
He did not miss the deaths, the sealed wards, the arguments or the small blue masks floating in gutters. He missed the boundedness of it. COVID had waves, variants, dashboards, press conferences and an eventual afterwards. It was an interruption, which implied that somewhere beneath the interruption life remained intact. People spoke continually of getting back to normal. They disagreed about when, how and whether normal had been good, but even the argument assumed a destination.
The later crises retained something of that structure. Wars still began on identifiable mornings. Markets crashed between an opening and a close. Governments announced packages. Experts drew curves which rose, peaked and—this was the important part—fell. Even catastrophe observed the old dramatic unities: something happened, people reacted, and eventually a person on television used the word recovery without being laughed out of the studio.
In 2039 nothing was happening.
That was the problem.
The oil shock had been the last great happening. It began toward the end of 2026. Refineries burned, two shipping channels closed, then reopened, then became commercially unusable. Insurance costs completed what the missiles had started. Oil did not run out. It became too politically charged, physically vulnerable and financially erratic to organise ordinary life around.
For eighteen months, aircraft remained on the ground in white ranks. Supermarket shelves acquired long pale interruptions. Private cars became expensive furniture with windscreens. People said the world had stopped.
It had not stopped. It had paused.
A pause still contained the promise of resumption.
The planes eventually returned, but not in their former numbers. Routes came back as seasonal privileges, then premium services, then something people discussed in the historical register. International travel became a pain anyway. That was what everyone said. Evan said it too. Airports had been demeaning. Security was theatrical. Seats had been designed around an extinct human pelvis. Foreign travel damaged the climate, spread disease and converted cities into international franchises selling versions of themselves.
He did not miss it.
He kept his expired passport in the top drawer of his desk. Sometimes he opened it and looked at the stamps. Not because he missed airport queues, foreign beds or the administrative hostility of borders. The document belonged to an age in which another country had remained an available answer to the question: Where might I go?
By the early thirties, flying had become the preserve of the rich. This was denied for several years on the grounds that technically anybody could still purchase a ticket. The distinction between availability and affordability had become regarded as an ideological complaint. Aircraft continued to cross the sky. Therefore international travel continued to exist. The fact that most people experienced it as a white line seen from the ground was unfortunate but statistically complicated.
Evan watched one now, a bright incision above the trees. Perhaps two hundred people were going somewhere. He felt no envy towards them individually. He envied the sentence: Going somewhere.
He reached the lake at the centre of the park and began its outer circuit. Nine minutes remaining. His mind had started to perform the modest correction for which the walk was intended. Thoughts no longer caught quite so sharply against one another. The day ahead seemed possible provided he did not examine its contents collectively.
This was how people lived now: they kept moving.
Nobody could afford to stop, though some couldn't help it. They stopped the morning walk first, because it had never appeared to achieve anything. Then the light exposure, the regular meals, the fish oil, the strength training, the calls to friends conducted partly to satisfy both parties' awareness that social isolation accelerated decline. They stopped keeping the curtains open. The collapse looked voluntary from outside because each individual action was voluntary. Nobody was compelled to remain in bed, ignore messages or allow plates to accumulate beside the sink.
They had merely stopped running, and the belt had carried them backwards.
Everyone knew somebody to whom it had happened. Everyone had privately adjusted the distance between themselves and that person in case collapse possessed a field. Invitations became less frequent because refusals were painful to receive and embarrassing to issue. Messages went unanswered because the answer required an account of why earlier messages had gone unanswered. Shame sealed the structure. Within months, a human being could disappear without changing address.
Knowing this made the running harder. A missed walk was not a missed walk; it was how it began. A takeaway was not dinner; it was an early concession. An evening alone with bad thoughts became evidence that one might soon spend every evening alone with them. People feared depression, then monitored themselves for fear of it, then interpreted the monitoring as proof that depression had already begun.
The mind watched the mind watching the mind.
By 2035 the arrangement became official, although nobody announced it. Language changed first. People stopped asking whether someone was depressed and began asking what they were doing for their depression. Employers offered mood-maintenance hours. Restaurants printed affective-impact guidance beside the alcohol content. Exercise was prescribed not to the unwell but to the population. The distinction was initially too small to notice.
Four years later it contained almost everybody.
Evan remembered an old survey question: Have you experienced low mood for a period exceeding two weeks? By 2037 it had been removed because respondents no longer understood what comparison they were being asked to make. Low relative to what? Which two weeks? The condition had ceased to present as an episode and become a climate. Happiness still occurred, but locally, unpredictably and with the guilty brightness of unseasonable weather.
He was not severely depressed. This was important. Severely depressed people received interventions. Evan worked, paid bills, answered most messages and changed his bedding every Sunday. He laughed when material justified it. He anticipated meals within reasonable limits. He possessed no desire to die.
He was managing.
Managing had once described what people did between experiences. Now it was the experience.
His watch vibrated. Forty minutes.
He could go home, eat the breakfast he had assembled the night before and begin work. Thirty-two grams of protein. Fermented food for the gut-brain axis. No news until ten, no caffeine until ninety minutes after waking, no contact with algorithmically selected images before he had established an internally generated sense of self. At twelve he would lift weights. At one he would stand outside again. At six he would telephone his sister, unless she telephoned first, and each would prevent the other's company from deteriorating into a recognised risk factor.
It was a good routine. He was fortunate to possess the discipline for it.
He had once possessed a life which could tolerate indiscipline. He missed the slack. People could make themselves ill in pursuit of pleasure because illness was temporary and pleasure did not yet require a recovery plan. They could cut loose because something inside them remained loose enough to cut.
They had complained constantly. Complaining was one of the freedoms they failed to recognise. A complaint contained an expectation. This is unacceptable meant that something better remained imaginable. This cannot continue meant that time was expected to perform an intervention.
By 2039 people had become more reasonable.
International travel became a pain anyway. Private cars were selfish. Fast fashion was obscene. Alcohol was depressive. Cigarettes killed. Parties disrupted sleep and produced shallow social contact. Spontaneity was merely poor planning described by its beneficiaries. One by one, the age supplied excellent reasons not to miss anything it had lost.
Evan accepted every reason.
He missed it all.
And people—what had happened to people? Evan knew that every generation accused the next of decay, but this was not hairstyles or manners or the traditional old man’s grievance against noise. Across the decades, people seemed to have become steadily more vain, more mercenary, more boastful about smaller achievements, more casually cruel and less capable of forgiveness. They advertised compassion and practised contempt. They treated loyalty as stupidity, restraint as repression and pleasure as the only appetite whose demands carried moral authority. Everyone displayed goodness; fewer people appeared burdened by it. Perhaps humanity had not worsened at all. Perhaps the machinery for revealing character had merely become perfect. But Evan could remember when ugliness still felt obliged to lower its voice.
At the park gate he passed the sixty-year-old man again. The man had finished his squats and was stretching one calf against the railings. His face was flushed. Whatever internal fall he had got up early to prevent had, for another morning, been prevented.
Evan nodded. The man nodded back.
They were doing well.
Evan walked home beneath a sky crossed by a single aircraft. His mood had not improved. This was not considered a failure. The walk had prevented it from becoming worse.
In 2039, that qualified as health.