Field of Fragments

Aging is a wonderful gift. Yeah, the knees start to hurt, the memory imperceptibly but irrevocably fades, your doctor starts making you get colonoscopies (if you’re over 40, ask your doctor whether you should get one – they give you Cheez Its afterward at MNGI!), and realizing you may have less years to live than you’ve been alive is quite the trip; but, man, the wisdom and perspective you gain really slap.

Individual things and events become less urgently chaotic with dichotomous outcomes and more open to nuanced appreciation. There’s a pause between input and emotional response that wasn’t there before (I’m certain that’s due to geriatric synapses rather than any mastery of mindfulness, but give me this cope). And the world starts to narrow just enough that it’s a bit easier to see what matters most and where you should spend your next minute of life.

The wildest thing, though, is the massive collection of lived experiences we accumulate through the years. On the sheer basis of continuing to stay awake and marginally aware, moments of unbridled joy, bottomless despair, laughter with friends, career successes and failures, love, apathy, ennui, hate, and reconciliation all get turned into a delicious, if sometimes bittersweet, broth in the Instant Pot of our lives.

The broth changes as we add new ingredients, all of which are flavored by the ingredients that were there before it. Like good sherry, Madeira, or balsamic vinegar our new experiences are educated by and integrated into the existing matrix, changing it; but in most cases subtly and without a great deal of drama. Each moment, we change and our relationship with the world changes. We usually pay it no heed.

That steaming vat of memories and feelings is the stock for our narrative: the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. My narrative is very different at 49 than it was at nine, 19, 29, or 39. I’ve been lucky enough to have had a ton of therapy and got to see how old ingredients continue to flavor the current broth; but even with that, I couldn’t tell you with any specificity why I am the way that I am, why one flavor transcends the others. There’s an emergent quality to our narratives that defies explanation.

The real crazy shit, though, is when my Broth of Mysterious Qualities is mixed with the broth of 7.5 billion other people and we’ve got a goddamned society. My lived experiences and the stories I believe about it are now combined with your and everyone else’s in the best/worst fireman’s booya in the universe.

And then we form group narratives based on our individual and collective experiences. And then maybe I don’t like your ingredient: fuck you garlic gives me hives get it the fuck out of my soup. And then perhaps someone convinces a bunch of us that garlic has always been bad and that anyone with any garlic in their broth is a vector for hives and shouldn’t be associated with. And then shit gets real. And it gets real in emergent ways we can’t explain.  

Once you accept that narratives are emergent you start to notice how fragile they actually are. Not fragile in the sense that they shatter easily, but fragile in the sense that they depend on continuity. On the assumption that tomorrow will rhyme with yesterday closely enough that the story still makes sense.

Most of the time, that works just fine. The broth simmers. The flavors integrate. You go to work, you go to dinner, you argue about dumb shit on the internet, you watch the same teams you’ve always watched. The story updates quietly in the background.

And then sometimes it doesn’t.

Sometimes something gets dropped into the pot that doesn’t dissolve. It doesn’t blend. It doesn’t politely educate the existing flavors. It just sits there, stubborn, insoluble, daring the whole thing to explain itself. And when the narrative can’t absorb it, can’t assimilate it into our individual and group identities, you get this strange sensation that something has happened without meaning, which is deeply unsettling for a species that runs almost entirely on story. That’s when you start to feel the disconnect.

I think about this a lot in the context of Minnesota Golden Gophers football, which might seem like an odd place to look for insight into societal narrative collapse, but, hey, it’s a Gopher blog. College football has always been a story machine. It takes geography, identity, memory, ritual, and time and turns them into something that feels coherent enough to invest in. You don’t just watch games; you inherit them. You learn how to feel about certain outcomes long before you understand why.

When I was younger, Gopher football had a very clear narrative function. It taught you patience. It taught you guarded hope. It taught you how to recognize effort even when results lagged. Losses fit into the story. Wins felt earned, sometimes disproportionately so. You could explain what happened, even when what happened wasn’t good.

And, crucially, the narrative updated slowly. Coaches changed. Schemes evolved. But the underlying grammar of the thing, the reasons we showed up, the way fandom worked, the way commitment was expressed, the way meaning accumulated felt stable. You could literally miss a season, come back and still recognize the story you were stepping into.

Over the last decade, that’s changed. Someone tossed some garlic in there and some of us got hives. Not all at once. Still subtle. But it fundamentally changed the nature of the soup.

Everything still looks identical on the surface. The field is the same. The band still plays. The same old chants echo through the same old beautiful stadia. Fans still show up in the cold, still complain about the weather like it’s a moral failing and talk about lingering pain from games that happened 20 years ago. We still wear jerseys that haven’t been relevant since Clinton was in office (but absolutely not from local heroes who chased the bag). But the narrative engine underneath it all has been quietly retooled.

The incentives changed. The timelines compressed. The language shifted from continuity to optimization. From memory to metrics. From patience to leverage. None of that is inherently evil. Systems evolve. Broths get new ingredients. The problem is that the old story doesn’t quite know how to absorb the new ones. Indiana, for fuck’s sake?

So, you get these experiences where something happens that feels both real and totally illegible within the context of your identity. It doesn’t fit the grammar you’ve learned. It doesn’t come with an explanation that satisfies the accumulated wisdom in your broth. And then you become unmoored. Lost in the sense that you no longer have the words, wisdom, or temperament to navigate the new reality. You don’t know who put the garlic in there, but they sure as hell did. The broth is fucked and you hate them for it. And they hate you for not liking garlic. Every soup has garlic.

And then you go to work.

You make dinner. You check the score. You argue about whether the offensive coordinator should be fired. You hammer away on Discord with your friends. You show up next Saturday. The ritual continues, because ritual is what we do when narrative fails. It’s how we keep time when meaning gets wobbly.

That’s the experience that feels new to me. We’ve added a whole bunch of new ingredients to the broth, but collectively pretend it’s the same it’s always been. “I don’t taste any garlic!” you tell your friends as you surreptitiously scratch your hives. To be extremely trite, it feels like things changed slowly and then all at once.

It’s like watching a game where the teams do their usual bit, but the crowd isn’t quite sure what they’re reacting to anymore. There’s a half-beat of hesitation before anyone commits emotionally, like the audience is waiting for confirmation that what they just saw still means what it used to mean. We all sort of tacitly acknowledge the rules have changed, that there’s something really fucking different, but no one can explain it, the referees are nowhere to be found, and the NCAA is on a meth bender.

And we still show up. People still bring their kids. Still explain traditions. Still tell stories about games that happened before those kids were born, because that’s how narrative continuity works: you lend someone else your memory so they have something to build on.

What’s different now is that those stories increasingly feel like artifacts rather than foundations. Like heirlooms from a version of the world that assumed coherence was durable.

And this isn’t just a football thing. It’s a city thing. A state thing. A country thing. We all share this massive, interlinked broth of lived experience now, and every once in a while something drops in that doesn’t just change the flavor, it challenges the idea that the broth can be described or whether it’s even broth at all. It’s not that we don’t care. It’s that we don’t know how to tell the story anymore without lying.

So we default to routine. We keep showing up. We keep doing the things that once meant what we needed them to mean, hoping that repetition itself will reassert coherence. That if we just clap at the right moments, chant the right chants, wear the right colors, the narrative will snap back into focus. And sometimes it almost does.

You’ll feel it briefly, usually in the quiet moments. A shared glance in the stands. A pause after a big play where the crowd collectively inhales. For a second, the story feels whole again. And then it slips like a dream you can’t quite hold onto when you wake up.

The grief here isn’t loud. It’s not performative. It’s the grief of realizing that the story you relied on to make sense of things no longer updates the way it used to and no one has really agreed on a replacement.

We live in this strange in-between state. The plays still run. The seasons still turn. The rituals persist. But underneath it all, there’s an unspoken awareness that we’re participating in something with a meaning that is no longer relevant or useful. That it does more harm than good. That it will not persist for the rest of our lives and we’ll be tasked with making a new collective narrative. We don’t have a recipe, we don’t know where to find the ingredients, and we’re not even sure how to make the damn broth. But we may have to do it anyway.

Maybe this is what it feels like to live inside an emergent narrative at scale. To recognize that coherence is no longer guaranteed, that continuity has to be actively tended, that showing up doesn’t automatically resolve anything but still matters anyway.

We don’t stop going to games because the story broke. We don’t stop going to work, making dinner, or caring about our neighbors. We keep doing those things because they’re the connective tissue that holds the broth together long enough for new meaning to form.

And maybe that’s the work now. Not pretending the garlic isn’t there. Not insisting the soup tastes the same just because the bowl looks familiar. Aging gives you the curse and the gift of seeing the illusion that “normal” was never stable, just sufficiently coherent for long enough that we stopped noticing how much effort it took to maintain. Once you see that, you can’t unsee it. You don’t get to go back to easy stories, easy optimism, or borrowed certainty. You have to decide, consciously and repeatedly, whether you’re still willing to show up without the comfort of believing the narrative will take care of you in return.

That’s hard. Harder than outrage. Harder than disengagement. But there’s something quietly hopeful in it too. Because showing up after the illusion breaks isn’t habit: it’s a choice. It’s choosing to tend the connective tissue anyway. To lend your memory to someone younger. To clap even when you’re not sure what it means yet. To keep making dinner, going to work, and caring about your neighbors not because it all makes sense, but because meaning has always been something we cook together, slowly, imperfectly, with whatever ingredients we have on hand. The broth is different now – very much worse in some ways. But it’s still warm. And as long as we’re willing to stand over the pot together with our eyes open and no lies to each other, there’s still a chance it becomes something worth passing on.