This is why reality television is often so unsatisfying. We know it is, so we try to fix the problem of our unsatisfaction by consuming more of it. Shields says that this results from two simultaneous conditions of being: as a culture, we are, he claims, both “desperate for authenticity and in love with artifice.”[5] In being torn between the two, we ask too much of reality television: we ask it to give us what we want, when what we want involves an unholy synthesis of opposites. This conflict ensures that we go away hungry at the end of each episode, only to return the next time with the same old hopes for nourishment.

Such restricted movement between work and home is a problem, Oldenburg claims, because “social well-being and psychological health depend upon community. It is no coincidence that the ‘helping professions’ became a major industry in the United States as suburban planning helped destroy local public life and the community support it once lent.” What Oldenburg is saying is that where communal life and social infrastructure are lacking, individuals find themselves forced to pay for access to support systems. This means that, rather than talking to a family member, we book an appointment with a therapist; rather than asking a neighbor if we can borrow a tool or get help with a physical task, we purchase equipment or someone else’s labor and have them do it; rather than exercising with a friend, we pay a personal trainer to motivate and steer us toward our fitness goals.

At the market, the girl picked out the wine: it was sunset-colored, more orange than red or pink. Émile had never heard of the type and, afterward, he could never manage to conjure up its name again. At her parents’ house, they opened the wine and had it alongside a first course of braised leeks in mustard sauce and it was the most glorious thing Émile had ever tasted, he said. The wine was sharp and dry and acidic, but also laced with honey. It was like the whole day at the beach had been boiled down and put into a bottle and then served cold, still smelling of all its good, warm summer smells.

Years later, back in Pittsburgh, Émile chanced upon the same wine for sale in a shop. He’d been looking for it for years but hadn’t known what to ask for. He recognized it immediately, though, from the label and also the orange color, and he bought a bottle to take home and then picked up some leeks and whole grain mustard to go with it. But, as he would always tell it to me, when he tasted it all those years later, he realized it wasn’t the wine, it had never been the wine. Rather, it had been “the flavor of the whole day,” as he used to put it—that was what he had been tasting back then. It was brewed, that flavor, from a complex assortment of impressions, the beach and the bike ride and the girl and her hair in his mouth and her family’s second-floor apartment with its windows open to the street and the leeks in mustard sauce and then also, finally, the wine. But it had never been just the wine.

What I’m trying to show by way of this conjecture is that, while modern communications technologies tend to make the space of even friendly disagreement feel more narrow and thus also more uncomfortable, hanging out is actually about the opposite. Hanging out, which involves killing time in the presence of others, is about carving out a space that is big enough to accommodate these kinds of relational fluctuations, allowing them to stretch and unfurl as necessary. It’s a way of announcing up front that it doesn’t always have to be good, that we don’t always have to catch a person on a good day in order to care about or honor our connection to them. Hanging out means marking out a space that is big enough to house both the camaraderie that gets built in the moment along with mistakes, attitudinal spikes, and second chances.