Damian Writes About Stuff

3/27/2026

My Month of No Rest and No Relaxation

Bourgeois Urban Life, Activity Maxxing, Mindless Consumption, and some stuff I’ve been up to

I’m obsessed with the TikTok “My weekend as a 28-year-old in Chicago”. I think about it a lot, it’s one of my favorite pieces of content on the internet, and it never fails to cause me immense existential dread. It’s a parody of “day in the life” videos that were popular with yuppie influencers, portraying an increasingly surreal single weekend in our protagonist’s life, all starting with a mandatory mental awareness day at work on Friday. As the weekend progresses, the absurdity escalates one Marg Tower at a time, with the narrator expressing how places were “actually pretty dope” and that he “highly recommends” his third dinner, Lando at Tanta. Over the course of the weekend, our protagonist visits 19 bars & restaurants, mentions 27 people, and consumes 6 Marg Towers, all while narrating in a perfect TikTok voice.

If you look very closely you can see that it’s fake, which I know is shocking. Mike S., the creator, took clips from other videos and stitched them together for this masterpiece. It’s fun to see when friends I show this to start catching on, usually around when they visit the Museum of Ice Cream for a second time in a single day (that’s where the line gets drawn). According to Wikipedia historian Depths of Wikipedia, this is the first individual TikTok to have its own Wikipedia page, which is sort of a testament to its cultural impact. I still see people talking about it online, and Mike even made an appearance at the Depths of Wikipedia live show in Chicago earlier this month.

I said that this video causes me existential dread because I’ll think about all the different things that I’ve committed to, want to go to, or the random encounters I want to have and wonder if I am doing too much, like our friend Mike. I can’t help but think that I’m living my own mindless consumption lifestyle that the video is being critical of. The last month or so especially has been nonstop with all sorts of very normal dinners (max one per night I swear), get-togethers¹, and whimsical events like speed dating on BART (and being featured on the local news) and crab fishing on Ocean Beach. I feel like I sometimes lose perspective on what a normal amount of busyness looks like, if there even is such a thing, and feel like talking about this video could be a good way to reckon with it and also a way to set up talking about some of the quirkier stuff I’ve been up to.

I began my February neither as a 28-year-old nor in Chicago, but instead as a 29-year-old in Park City, Utah on the last day of Sundance. We (Anusha, Pauline, Sid, Sara and Steph) had some time to kill before the flight back to San Francisco so we trekked over to the temple square in Salt Lake to wander around. I had déjà vu because I had done basically the exact same thing 2 years prior. Since it was Sunday a bunch of stuff was closed but we were able to make a pit stop at Dave & Buster’s. Afterwards we embarked on our journey home, and I was able to write up the entirety of my Sundance post on my phone’s Notes app.

If you haven’t noticed from my other post, I’m a bit of a politics pervert and in SF almost every week you can find all sorts of demonstrations, rallies, and protests. When I saw that there was a march FOR billionaires on Twitter I knew I had to go, I had to know if they were serious or if this was an elaborate prank. Was this performance art? Was I fulfilling their performance’s need for an audience? At city hall the crowd was split between counter-protesters heckling and reporters talking amongst themselves trying to figure out if the 10 or so people giving speeches were actually serious (I think they were).

Speaking of Depths of Wikipedia, I went to her live show at August Hall with Justin, Jules, Kevin, and Peter. The show felt like a communal scroll on Instagram led by Annie Rauwerda, the person behind the account and also of eternal stew fame. There was even a musical performance with audience participation and resident SF prankster Riley Walz was the special guest. It’s fun to see someone so passionate and knowledgeable about something so dorky. Afterwards we hit up one of the few remaining “24 hour” establishments in the city: Pinecrest Diner, for some late night breakfast, which I highly recommend.

Attempting the Muni Bar Crawl is the closest I got to reaching the video level of locations in an evening, where one day after work (no mental health day) my friends Sasha, Jill, J, and Bancks decided to complete the Hop On Muni Beer Crawl in one night. After saying the next drink is my last one four bars in a row, I felt like our night peaked when we drunkenly sprinted out of a bar one at a time to catch a bus, then shooting the shit with the bus driver as we headed to the promised land: Panchita’s Pupusas #2, which I highly recommend.

My friend Kevin had been mentoring a 2nd year high school First Robotics team and he said they were in need of someone who knows how electricity works (and speaks Spanish) so through a recruitment system reminiscent of a pyramid scheme, I’ve been spending my Sunday afternoons helping out the students. It’s extra fun because I didn’t do FRC in high school so sometimes no one really knows what’s going on. The club reminds me a lot of the house building class I took when I was in high school so I do get some bonus nostalgia there.

One last short one to tie everything back together, as part of my friend Sally’s birthday, she had people do a table read and reenact a fight from Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. There was a lot of yelling and a good time was had. I can’t believe I didn’t experience this during my time in SLC.

The last thing I wanted to mention is that despite the implications, it would be fun to make a video of my weekend as a 28-year-old in SF. Does a remake of a parody still work? If we go out and actually film all the stuff ourselves, are we missing the whole point since the original was made up of other people’s clips? We have already gotten twin Espresso Martini Towers so we can’t back out now. It is a philosophical conundrum, but since a bunch of the clips are filmed already I think we have no other choice but to complete it!

So yeah actually pretty dope!