I’m a cynic and a nonjoiner — sometimes I suspect I don’t even really like other people. And yet one Sunday night this summer, I found myself shoulder-to-shoulder with 40,000 or so strangers, all of us sing-screaming song lyrics in unison.
In the videos my husband took that night, I am happy in the crowd, as well as painfully out of tune. My rhythm is nonexistent as I do something that only vaguely resembles dancing. Occasionally, I make unintentional and surely unwanted physical contact with the people to my right, my elbow or hand drifting Elaine Benes-style into their personal space. But somehow my fellow concertgoers are unbothered by this — and, actually, they’re dancing wildly too, all of us so earnest in our happiness.
The live-event industrial complex is worse than ever these days, with concerts and sports costing far too much to attend. Tickets seem procurable only via the psychic pain of a six-hour online queue, the physical pain of selling a kidney or the existential pain of handing over an egregious sum of money to a bot that is better at computers than you. The traffic to World Cup matches at MetLife was so bad that a writer at The New Yorker attempted to canoe there. (He succeeded but acknowledged the water was toxic.) A Diet Coke at Citi Field recently cost me $11.
And yet the biggest surprise of all is that it’s still worth it. Yes, someone should probably fix those aforementioned problems (Congress?), but that could take a while. In the meantime, I recommend spending all your disposable income on events that make you feel alive.
I don’t know that I would have advocated this position five years ago, but it’s been a weird summer. The lettuce got infested with explosive diarrhea parasites. Wildfires cloaked wide swaths of our earth in hazardous air. When the smoke cleared — and assuming you didn’t eat any contaminated salads — the thing to do was to dip into communal sources of joy and hope.
Like cheering on the Knicks, even if you thought you didn’t care about sports. OG Anunoby’s tip-in was enough to make anyone believe in basketball, as well as God. And then all those fans out on the streets, an electricity in the air for days. People actually being nice to one another!
Or taking in the World Cup — the wild outfits, the exuberant cheering, the Norwegians doing that weird rowing thing.
Or chasing the solar eclipse — people lining up outdoors in Spain and Iceland, clad in their matching glasses, simultaneously astonished.
It feels good to have good things happen, but it feels better when they’re happening to you and other people at the same time. This fact runs counter to one of my core tenets in life — schadenfreude, obviously — and is also somehow true. A communications professor I once interviewed called the phenomenon “collective effervescence.” When you’re surrounded by people experiencing the exact same emotion as you, he said, the feeling multiplies, refracts, comes back to you heightened.
Increasingly, I believe this is what makes life worth living. I will do anything to feel it. At a time when logging on to Instagram generally makes me hate everyone, swaying in a stadium reminds me of the inherent goodness of humans, the thread between us all.
Not that my fellow humans make this easy. My recent transcendent concertgoing experience began with the party bus in front of us abruptly stopping in the left lane so that someone could projectile puke out the door.
My husband, Dave, and I were taking our kids to see their first big show — the Vermont singer-songwriter Noah Kahan. Ages 7 and 9, they now appeared traumatized in the back seat. We assured them this was all part of the fun, and also that they should never drink alcohol.
Months before, Dave had managed to score four seats in the upper deck at face value, $140 a ticket. Suspiciously, Dave is a kidney doctor. I asked no questions. My daughter began singing Mr. Kahan’s profanity-laden lyrics each morning over breakfast, and my Gen Z barre instructor played “Stick Season” during a workout class, then asked if anyone had extra tickets to the show. I felt cooler than I’d ever felt while exercising.
At the stadium, we were met with mobs of young people. Dave was confounded by the merch line — couldn’t one just buy a sweatshirt online? — and I was confounded by the dress code. Everyone but me seemed to know to wear a prairie dress and cowboy boots. I cursed my ongoing effort to avoid Instagram — a futile attempt to be a better person! I was now a mediocre person who was also out of the loop, a millennial pariah in an athleisure tank top.
The sun went down, and the sky over the stage streaked pink and orange, and soon no one could see my athleisure tank top anyway. And then the band came out, and an actual cottage descended as if from the sky — very “Folklore” — and Noah Kahan himself emerged from the cottage door. He strummed his guitar, and he belted out our favorite lyrics, with such feeling. In the bowl of the stadium, thousands of lights flickered from the wrists of fans, everyone wearing those fancy bracelets they give out now, and I thought of the fireflies that dotted the summer nights I knew as a kid.
To my left, my daughter was singing along. To my right, my son was clapping. Here it was, their first time experiencing collective effervescence.
I had found the one thing that could make mine sweeter.
Rachel Feintzeig is a journalist at work on a book about staring down 40.
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