“Hey, are you already there?”
Meet me at Bungalow 8 at eleven.
Runner-up in ‘Already Here’ Challenge / Published in Futurism
Once upon a time, millennials lived in an era where we agreed to a plan once. You’d throw an arm up into the gritty Manhattan air, hop into the back of a yellow cab, and say four words to the driver: take me to Bungalow 8. And somehow, something unimaginable would happen. You’d both arrive at 515 West 27th street at around eleven.
No are we still on text typed out on a Motorola Razr. No what time are you leaving. No I just called the Uber. No I’m five minutes away. We had the luxury of waiting, and the luxury of not knowing. We didn’t watch a little blue dot crawl south through Manhattan like a Pac-Man, reassuring us that our date, in fact, honored the commitment they’d made two days earlier over a landline, or a quick chat on the sidewalk.
We had no idea where each other was. Think about how wild that sounds now. We’d trust a person we’ve known for a week with the unsupervised, unmonitored task of finding their own way somewhere.
Years ago, I dated this guy who I only ever saw on Sundays. Brunch at Pastis, then drinks at Bungalow 8, ending the night at L’Express for a tomato soup—and before the check would come, we’d agree to meet again on the next Sunday. Things were simple. We didn’t speak all week. Maybe a photo of whatever he’d cooked for dinner. Then, once we knew each other better, a what are you up totext was sent. But it was mostly silence, and then Sunday rolled around.
It felt good. It wasn’t suffocating. It was exciting. When I tell that story to younger women now, their minds go somewhere dark within seconds. He had a girlfriend while dating you. Why wouldn’t he text you all the week? Why only Sundays? The story reads to them like evidence of something sneaky, because in their framework, a week of avoidance can only mean a person is hiding something. They can’t wrap their heads around the fact that discussing your week in person is ten times better than giving someone the mundane play-by-play over a text message.
But the answer was always simple: we had trust. The conversations we had in person don’t compare to whatever this new generation thinks it’s having through a screen. I heard his voice. I watched his expression change when a topic got too heavy. We actually laughed out loud, It was real in a way a phone can’t replicate. Because behind a screen, you can delete, re-type, pause, calculate. You can’t tell me that’s honesty. That’s borderline acting.
We’d make a plan, then disappear from each other’s lives for days—no maintenance, no check-ins—until it was time to show up. Get dressed. Maybe print out some MapQuest directions like you were prepping for a small expedition. Walk until we felt like hailing a cab, and then arrive to the destination. A plan was a damn plan, and God forbid one of us was five minutes late. Do you know what we did then?
We waited. Because we were already f**kin’ there.
Those five minutes must’ve been the longest minutes of the night. Standing outside the bar, flirting with a bouncer so you didn’t look lonely, bumming a light for a smoke from a stranger walking by who didn’t even care to ask your name. We knew how to sit still inside not knowing. It’s a millennial skill. Nobody teaches it anymore, because nobody has to use it.
Maybe he forgot about our date. Maybe he changed his mind. There was no map to consult. No read receipt to autopsy. Maybe something happened. No location to refresh.
Maybe he’s dead.
We just stood there looking fabulous, embracing the night. That was anticipation. Once upon a time this was real life. Today, it sounds like science fiction.
The science fiction part was never the smartphone. People talk about modern tech like the miracle is the hardware itself. But it isn’t. The unbelievable part is our real-time access to other human beings. Their words. Their whereabouts. Their availability. Their attention. It’s all on demand for as long as we want it to be. But then, one message from a Razr to an iPhone, the definition of confirmation has spun into reassurance.
If I told you on Tuesday that I’d meet you on Saturday night at eight, why exactly do I have to tell you again Saturday afternoon that I still intend to do the thing I already told you I was going to do? What changed since then?
Nothing changed. That’s the whole point. Nothing technically is supposed to have changed, yet we still ask anyway, because we’ve been trained to need the asking, because it’s courtesy.
We didn’t lose romance to technology. We lost the five minutes before it.
This isn’t just an aesthetic loss. It’s turning people into monsters who can’t trust each other, including themselves. A whole generation raised with zero tolerance for silence has also, and not coincidentally, has become a generation that treats silence as evidence of wrongdoing. My background is in psychology and criminology, and if there’s one thing both fields agree on, it’s this: uncertainty doesn’t just disappear because you’ve engineered a way to check in on it every three minutes. It just moves. It goes from I wonder where he is—a simple, passing thought you could put down—to he saw my message at 5:36 and didn’t answer until 6:15, what does that mean? What did I do? Is he losing interest? Should I have not text him first?—a chaotic spiral you carry around all day.
With all the modern tech around us, we have yet to eliminate doubt. The only thing we did was give it Wi-Fi access.
There used to be a tiny amount of blind trust built into making plans. Millennials left our apartments without knowing if our date had left theirs. We stood outside the bar, even when they were late, and we still waited. We didn’t scroll through a feed. We people watched. Other times we got distracted with a cigarette, chatting up a stranger in front of us. Not through an Instagram DM.
Now, making the plan is no longer enough. We must maintain it. Throughout the day, hour by hour, like a puppy that will die if we look away.
Technology didn’t invent the human desire for reassurance. It made reassurance available every minute around the clock. And because it's so available, its absence starts translating into something like: If you've seen my message, why didn’t you answer? But nothing actually happened, other than not sending that confirmation text. But that’s the trap. Technology builds the expectation, then makes us anxious the moment somebody opts out of it. A generation ago—my generation—that silence between making a plan and showing up was normal. There was nothing to overthink because there was nothing to check. Now that same silence demands interpretation.
We are killing anticipation with information.
There was something exciting about getting ready without knowing exactly when your date would arrive. Something about scanning a crowded restaurant to see if your date had beaten you there. That tiny gap between expectation and reality; anticipation lived inside it. So did self-respect. You were living your actual life until the moment arrived to stop and greet your date into theirs.
Today, we fill that gap with garbage.
Leaving now. In the Uber. 10 mins away. Traffic. 5 mins. Parking. Walking in. I don’t see you. Jesus Christ. By the time you get to me, I've been emotionally drained from your entire commute, and we haven’t even said hello yet.
We've confused information for intimacy. Knowing someone's location, ETA, the weird guy they saw at a traffic light, the minute they’ll walk through the door—it’s all a phony feeling of closeness. But some types of closeness only ever worked because we didn’t know everything. Mystery was part of the process.
This is the science-fiction we've stopped noticing. Anticipation craves uncertainty. So does excitement. And I’d argue even trust does too—but the real kind, not the GPS-verified kind. Trust, by definition, is what you extend to someone in the absence of proof. The second you need a ‘sharing location drop pin’ to believe someone is telling the truth, you don’t have trust. You have surveillance masked as politeness.
Hey, are we still on for seven?
When people used to imagine the future, they shoved flying cars and robots down our throat. They told us machines would do extraordinary things no human is capable of. But the science fiction we actually got is far less dramatic. Two little checkmarks, a moving dot on a map, a device small enough to fit inside our purse that can report our location to someone else every second of the walk between the front door to theirs.
We built technology that lets two people chat instantly from almost any spot on the planet. It erased distance. It erased the waiting game. It erased those particular, low-grade, thoughts wandering into the depths of insecurity. And then we pick up this same extraordinary technological advancement to type: hey, are we still meeting up tonight?
Maybe the strangest part isn’t that we can know where everyone is. It’s that somewhere in this modern world, we became uncomfortable, almost intolerant to not knowing. We now call this intolerance—communication.
Once upon a time, you told someone where you’d be, and you trusted that they’d meet you there. Meet me at Bungalow 8 at eleven. And somehow, magically, we both got there.
