Some writers start with an idea. Others an image. Here’s one I can still picture: two middle aged men splayed out on beach chairs baking under the Italian sun. Their beautiful wives in the water, tending to the children. The men themselves had seen better days. They carried their weight in their stomachs, in their flabby chests, their unsculpted arms. And yet none of this had the power to diminish the men’s combined aura. At worst, such signs of aging merely hinted at a past when both men had been in their primes. Other signs suggested that they were still firmly in their primes, or — even more tantalizing — had yet to hit them. I’m picturing their deep tans, their silvery hair, the faded bathing suits and tortoise shell sunglasses and chunky sport watches whose wristbands glinted in the Ligurian sun — all the traditional signals of men firmly entrenched in their peak earning years.
But none of that is what really resonated. Rather, it was how the men conducted themselves that transfixed me. How at ease they were with themselves, their surroundings, the moment itself. This was at a beach club in Paraggi, a scalloped indent along the coast between Portofino and Santa Margherita. One of those places south of Genoa where the water is more green than blue, and when you swam out into the small bay, you could still hear the cicadas calling from the umbrella pines and the whine of passing Vespas. Back on shore, I watched the men fling themselves from the dock into the water, how they threw their kids around, and then later, how they flung themselves back into their beach chairs, content as tom cats stretching out in the sun.
“Look at them,” my wife said. She peered over the frames of her big, cherry red sunglasses, a slight smirk on her face. “Probably down from Milan for the weekend. Meanwhile their wives are here all August taking care of the kids.”
My wife was right, of course, these weren’t exactly model husbands and fathers. And yet I couldn’t bring myself to judge the men. Not fully. Yes, the scene itself — the beautiful wives, the idyllic families, the Mediterranean setting, the fact that the men could seemingly fuck off and do what they wanted — ticked many boxes of a basic, two-dimensional male fantasy long since dated. Even back then. The year was 2017. The great #metoo reckoning had yet to recalibrate our understanding of men. As for my wife and I, we’d yet to have children. No parents had been lost, no marital problems had arisen. We were in that breezy period of life in which most couples can cosplay as adults.
All that, plus smartphones, while then already a feature of contemporary life, had yet to fully takeover. We hadn’t surrendered ourselves to the screen, been completely sucked in. I remember one of the two Italian men picking his up after it chirped with a notification. I remember how he looked at it with annoyance, disdain even. I imagined who had sent the message. His office. Maybe a mistress. No sooner had he picked up the phone and he’d already tossed it back onto his towel, folded his hands behind his head and got back to what mattered: the hot sun on his face, the sound of his family in the water, the thoughts in his head.
It’s hard to believe that the scene above is less than 10 years old. So much has happened since then, so digitally hijacked have our lives become, that it’s hard to even imagine people could still have lived — at least during the beats between checking their phones — in such analog bliss. Of course I’m simplifying things through the rosy lens of nostalgia, but still, that day at Paraggi seems to belong to a different age entirely.
We all know phone addiction is real. I don’t need to enumerate the studies and rattle off the data points. I don’t need to quote Jonathan Haidt about the collective unhappiness that the smartphone has wrought. The same goes for optimization culture that has turned wellness into a religion; one whose false prophets go on fake podcasts clipped for Instagram and YouTube to instill us all with guilt for not ice bathing and proteinmaxxing our lives away. Sobriety! Sleep scores! Seventeen thousand steps a day and whatever else the latest Silicon Valley wearable’s marketing department is preaching as their brand barrels toward its inevitable IPO. Enough! I live in Connecticut now, and commute in daily to Manhattan via Metro North. I imagine a train that used to be full of men in suits bound for Wall Street. Plump men, perhaps, or at least those who hadn’t altogether abandoned the principle of pleasure in their lives. Now these same archetypes wear ill-fitting athleisure and gaudy Oura rings on their index fingers, locked in on the new religion of self-optimization.
That Paraggi beach club that is so perfect in my memory probably isn’t the same today. Maybe those same Italian men are now glued to their phones, doomscrolling in search of life’s meaning, or at least flicking through their algo in search of one more fleeting hit of dopamine. Maybe they’ve lost the flab that back then seemed like a right of passage to me — a who-gives-a-fuck sign of swagger and lust for life that a middle aged man could sometimes pull off. But I’d like to think that they haven’t. I’d like to think that somewhere along that sleepy Italian coast, with the mountains of Corsica rising, mirage-like in the hazy distance across the Mediterranean, that those two Italian men exist in all their flabby, phone-free excellence.
Regardless, I’m going to try to capture some of their vibe this August. There’s no Ligurian coast in my immediate future, but the family and I should be able to sneak away for a few days to the Cape. Short of that, there’s always the backyard and a cheap can of beer that goes down like water. I’m going to eat carbs, too, and sit al fresco and drink wine and if someone’s got a cigarette and the mood strikes, I’ll take a drag or two, gloriously guilt-free. Let the man boobs bloom, the waistline sag; there’s always the gym for a rainy fall day. Because as the old saying goes, life is an amusement park, not an ice bath. Or something like that.
I hope you do the same. I hope you join me. Go have yourself an Italian August.
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