Assets

“Welcome to the best hotel in all of Mexico” beamed our driver as the gate swung open in front of us.

To be fair, this was definitely not THE BEST hotel in ALL of Mexico. But it certainly was a very very very nice hotel. We had found an off-season deal and booked our trip entirely on credit card points: that most ethereal of currencies, immaterial yet addictive.

We had a delightful time although we probably won’t return no matter what currency we use. Not quite worth it, especially if your center of gravity is the kiddie pool.

At least that kiddie pool gave us a good vantage point of the main pool and the adjacent beach, so we got in some good people watching. You can learn a lot about a person by seeing the way they order a $25 poolside cocktail…for some people even cash seems ethereal.

One young mom was clearly paying for the trip not in cash or points but in content. Each morning she brought her setup with her: tripod to hold her phone, ring light for when it got cloudy, an assortment of outfits, and cute two-year-old in a matching swimsuit. We’d see her clips end up on the hotel’s Instagram. I watched her in amazement - what a life! What a world!

At first I felt skeptical that enough people would watch her content to make all of this production worthwhile. And then as I scanned the rest of the pool scene, I realized where the other side of the screen was. Every day we were there, 80-90% of the adults by the pool were scrolling on their phones 80-90% of the time.

You don’t need more evidence of how hacked our brains have been by these devices than to see grown-ass wealthy people who have flown themselves and their families to an astonishingly beautiful place only to plop down in a chair and spend their time scrolling through glimpses of other people’s worlds. Watching the influencer mom upload her content to the cloud right next to everyone else downloading their content from the same cloud and no one is looking up at the actual clouds gave me a lump in my throat that hasn’t gone away.

What a life! What a world!

As it turned out, the influencer mom was actually really nice. We spent a great deal of time in the kiddie pool with her and her matching swimsuit two-year-old and her husband - himself an entrepreneur who had started and recently sold a popular apparel company.

We started talking about starting companies, and I asked him what he was working on next. He told me about his “AI psy ops” startup that populates specific online media with hundreds of AI-generated “experts” and “influencers” on behalf of a brand in order to sway consumer opinion in a certain direction without explicitly marketing the product. It found it utterly dystopian and depressing. And again I felt skeptical that anyone would really believe that AI content, but all it took was a look around at the privileged adults scrolling their phones all day to believe it.

At one point when I mentioned I had nearly gone to rabbinical school before starting my business, he said he was Jewish too.

“But I’m not really practicing or anything. My wife is Catholic and she and my daughter go to church every Sunday. I don’t go but I’m glad my daughter is going. There’s a lot of families who go every week and she is making friends, she loves it. It’s so important. I just want her to have something.”

I nodded - perhaps extra vigorously, wordlessly assuring him via my pseudo-rabbinic status that I forgave him on behalf of his ancestors for bringing his lineage to a dead end.

It wasn’t until later, recounting the conversation to my wife after our kids finally fell asleep, that I thought deeper about what he said.

I just want her to have something.

What is that something? It wasn’t religion itself, and I didn’t feel like it was just “a source for meaning and morals.” Good parents can provide those things, and these two did seem like good parents.

I think he meant community. Connection to a specific collection of past, present, and future humans. But not just connection - ownership.

We all want to feel a part of something bigger. The scrollable digital glimpses of other people’s worlds offer to answer that deep yearning with shallow and accessible simulacra. But when we put the phone down we don’t walk away with anything. A most ethereal form of connection, immaterial yet addictive.

Community is different: you have it or you don’t. And if you can have community then you can find it, lose it, and build it. It has worth because we can act on it and it can act on us.

I just want her to have something. This coming from a man and a family that objectively has it all; everything one could ask for to enable a cushy, healthy, newly-renovated Brooklyn Heights townhome life.

But even when you have all that, there’s another thing worth having.

Community is an asset that begins where assets end.