I'm increasingly uncertain if much of what we consider simple actually is

Friday 11/21/25

Best opinion writer in the world. From something I did this AM. Now to try and move it. Get better every day.

The episode’s set-up is simple, but I’m increasingly uncertain if much of what we consider simple actually is or whether it’s just that well-designed and vital. Bob is supposed to go with his wife Emily to visit her family for Thanksgiving in Seattle, but he feels—not entirely altruistically—that he can’t leave his patients behind, because the holidays will grind you down, as you likely have occasion to know.

She travels without him, and Jerry, Elliot, and Howard foregather at the Hartley high rise apartment to watch bad football, take swigs out of a veritable drum of vodka and cider, sing songs, descending into levels of Dada-esque humor where the rough edges of the human soul are to be found, if not exactly understood.

“You know you’re at a bad party when Elliot Carlin is the happiest man in the room,” the poobah of despondency himself deadpans, but this isn’t a bad time, as Carlin realizes. It’s a different time, a make-do time, a holiday as bridge, as conduit.

To what? I don’t know. Unscripted connection, which also happens to be the only true kind.

But I do know that when we aren’t in lockstep, our heads are on a swivel, and we’re looking. You have to be, or else you won’t see where you’re going. And it’s then that we stand the better chance of reaping a greater repast of purpose. The harvest has new meaning. It energizes us, rather than merely sustains us, which is what Thanksgiving is fundamentally about.

Thanksgiving is overshadowed now, a speed bump on the road between Halloween and Christmas, in large part because in capitalist-at-all-costs America, there’s less to sell and consume with Thanksgiving. But there’s also the idea that the blinders of our ever more restricted gazes are cutting down our field of vision as to what’s what and truly important.

The winged Thanksgiving is the wiser way to go, which is only a bird-based pun if you wish it to be. You’re going to be where you already planned to be, but mix it up within that context. Rather than avoiding the firebrand of a table companion who you think can’t wait to dump their rhetoric in your ears, ask them about how they’ve been feeling and getting on. So many of us say what we say because we don’t feel seen and heard. We will warp ourselves in order not to fade away and just be gone, as far as the world is concerned.

Help yourself by helping those people between the bits of gab. Talk to a niece as though they were the adult with something to teach you. If you aren’t going somewhere, call an erstwhile pal who’d be surprised to hear from you, because they’re apt to like it. Begin a new tradition every year. The Thanksgiving morning jog to regather. A few hours at a soup kitchen. Tell someone you’re sorry. You don't need to be a puritan to redeem yourself.