Transcript
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: I was 14 years old, standing at a food court, holding a slice of Severo pizza I did not want, surrounded by people i did not know, feeling absolutely free.
Speaker: This makes no sense. I understand that. The mall was a commercial trap, a cathedral of consumption, a manufactured space designed to separate teens from their allowance money through the strategic development of Cinnabon smell.
Speaker: It was not a third space in any meaningful civic sense. It was not a park, a library, or a community center. It was a privately owned, aggressively monetized, climate controlled simulation of public life.
Speaker: Yet, I was free there. More free than I was at school, where authority was explicit. More free than I was at home, where surveillance was parental.
Speaker: The mall was the first space I inhibited, without permission, without purpose, without the structuring narrative of education or family.
Speaker: I went because I chose to. i stayed because I could.
Speaker: Jeff Padlisco. This Xenialist, episode six. The mall is a graveyard I miss. Third spaces, teenage autonomy, the commercialization of youth, the places we went when we needed to be somewhere that was not home.
Speaker: I want to describe the mall to you, not the mall as a concept, the mall as a physical experience. Because I think the details matter.
Speaker: I think the details are where the freedom lived. The mall had rules. But they were rules you could learn, exploit, transcend.
Speaker: You could not run. Security would stop you. You could not loiter without purchasing. But you could purchase a single Orange Julius, a $2 pretzel, a token at the arcade, and claim that space for hours.
Speaker: You could not skip school. But you could leave campus at lunch, walk to the mall, return before fifth period. No one the wiser. The mall had a rhythm.
Speaker: Morning was old people, power walking in track suits, drinking coffee from paper cups. Afternoon was teenagers, the main event.
Speaker: The reason the mall existed. We arrived at packs and pairs. alone. We circulated. We orbited.
Speaker: We performed elaborate social rituals around the fountain, the food court, the store we could not afford, but entered anyways. Evening was families, couples, the Siri shoppers.
Speaker: The teenagers retreated, regrouped, planned tomorrow's invasion. The mall was an ecosystem. It had niches, hierarchies, territories.
Speaker: It was a world, a small, fake, commercial world, but a world nonetheless. And here's what I want to emphasize. We were unsupervised.
Speaker: Not completely. There were security guards. There were store employees. There was the ambient threat of parental phone calls. But functionally, we were on our own.
Speaker: We made decisions. We navigated social dynamics. We learned through error, through embarrassment, Through the specific embodied experience of being a body in public space.
Speaker: How to exist among strangers. Now, teenagers do not go to the mall. The mall is dead. Dying. Converted to Amazon fulfillment centers.
Speaker: Medical offices. Sad, fluorescent-lit husks of their former glory. Teenagers stay home. They socialize through screens. They experience public life as a performance, a broadcast, a curated feed.
Speaker: They do not learn to exist among strangers because they do not exist among strangers. They exist in bedrooms, in group chats, in the infinite scroll of content that simulates social life without requiring its risks.
Speaker: I'm not romanticizing them all. I am mourning what it represented. A space where young people could practice autonomy, could fail in public, could learn through the slow, cumulative experience of physical presence, how to be a person in a world of other people.
Speaker: Xennials, we were the last generation to have this. The last to roam unsupervised through commercial spaces. To treat consumption as a social activity, to learn the rules of public life and environment that was fake but felt real.
Speaker: We are also the generation that killed it. We shop online now. We deliver everything. We have made the mall obsolete, then wondered why our children lack social skills.
Speaker: Let's talk about what the mall did to us. Because it was not neutral. It was not a benign space of teenage freedom. It was a machine designed to monetize our insecurities, our desires, our need to belong.
Speaker: I remember the stores, the specific branded templates of aspiration. Abercrombie Fitch with its cologne-soaked darkness, its shirtless models, its prices that said, you are not cool enough to afford this, but you should want to be.
Speaker: The Gap with its sanitized, multicultural, norm-core vision of America. Hot Topic, where the misfits went to buy their uniform of nonconformity.
Speaker: Each store was a identity. Each purchase was a vote. Each bag you carried through the food court was a signal, a status marker, a declaration of who you were or wanted to become.
Speaker: We knew this. We were not naive. We understood that the mall was selling us identities and That our desire for belonging was being exploited. That the freedom, we felt, was purchased.
Speaker: Literally. With our babysitting money, our allowances, the cash we scraped together from minimum wage jobs we worked on weekends. Yet we went anyway, because the alternative, staying home, waiting for permission, existing only in the space adults designed for us, felt like a worse kind of trap.
Speaker: At least the mall was our trap. At least we chose to enter it. At least we practiced a version of agency, however compromised, however commercialized.
Speaker: Now... Youth is commercialized more than ever, but the commercialization is invisible. It is algorithmic. It is the influencer selling skincare to 13-year-olds through TikTok.
Speaker: It is the targeted ad that knows your insecurities even before you do. It is the personal brand, the content strategy, the pressure to monetize your own adolescence before you have finished experiencing it.
Speaker: The mall was crude. It was obvious. It smelled like pretzel's desperation. But it was external. The pressure came from outside, from the store, the brand, the billboard.
Speaker: You could recognize it, resist it mock it with your friends over slices of Sbarro pizza. The digital commercialization of youth is internal. It lives on the phone, in the feed, in the constant ambient pressure to perform, to curate, to convert your life into content that generates engagement, that generates value for platforms you do not own.
Speaker: The mall sold you a shirt. TikTok sells you a self. Time for the Zenial confessional. This one is about place, about a specific place, about the graveyard we visit in memory.
Speaker: And the listener wrote in, I went back to my hometown last year. The mall was still there, technically. Half the stores were empty. The food court had one restaurant, a Chinese place that looked like it was waiting to die.
Speaker: I walked the full length, past the shuttered Abercrombie, past the darkened arcade, past the fountain where I kissed someone in 1999. I sat on a bench.
Speaker: I was the only person there. I cried. Not because the mall was beautiful. It was never beautiful. I cried because I could feel my teenage self standing in the same spot, feeling free, feeling possible, feeling like the world was opening up inside of closing down.
Speaker: I wanted to tell her, enjoy this. Does not last. The freedom, the possibility, even the mall, It all goes away eventually, replaced by something faster, cheaper, lonelier.
Speaker: I wanted to tell her. I could not. She was already gone. Thank you, listener, for sending that in. I went back to my mall too.
Speaker: It's a medical complex now. You can get an MRI where the gap used to be. You can get physical therapy where I spent hours trying on jeans I could not afford.
Speaker: The fountain is gone. The food court is a waiting room with uncomfortable chairs. I did not cry. felt nothing.
Speaker: Which was worse. The absence of feeling. The inability to connect my present self to the person I was in that space. That was the real loss.
Speaker: The mall was already a memory. I was mourning a ghost I just could no longer see. i want to end with a question. The question I'm carrying into the next episode.
Speaker: What did you own that you cannot own anymore? I mean this literally. Physical objects. Media you held in your hands. Music on CDs you could lend, lose, break, keep.
Speaker: Movies on tapes you had to rewind. had to wait for, could not skip. Books with pages you turn, with margarines you wrote in, with weight you felt in your bag.
Speaker: Games on cartridges that required blowing into them, that required patience, that could not be updated, patched, made obsolete by a server shutdown. We were told that streaming is better, that ownership is a burden, that access is the future, that the cloud is infinite, convenient, always available.
Speaker: Yet the cloud is not yours. The cloud can change its terms. The cloud can delete your library, remove your access, restructure its pricing, disappear entirely, leaving you with nothing.
Speaker: No object, no proof, no memory pressed into physical form. Xenials, we are the generation that own things. CDs, tapes, DVDs, video games, books, magazines, photographs printed on paper.
Speaker: We are also the generation that surrendered ownership. that traded objects for access, that accepted the narrative of convenience without fully understanding what we were giving up.
Speaker: What did you own? What do you miss? What would you retrieve, if you could, from the era of physical media, of limited access of objects that aged, degraded, became precious through their impermanence?
Speaker: That is episode six of Xenialist. The mall is a graveyard I miss. If you have a confession about a place you lost, a freedom you practice, a commercial space that felt like home, send it in.
Speaker: I will read it. I will sit with it. I will meet you at the food court. Next episode, why we cannot have nice things. The subscription economy.
Speaker: Planned obsolete. The end of ownership. We are talking about what we owned, what we rent now, what was surrendered when we traded objects for access.
Speaker: Until then, go somewhere that is not home, not work, not a screen, a bookstore, a coffee shop, a bench in a park.
Speaker: Be among people. Be alone in public. Practice the ancient, endangered art of existing without purpose, without purchase, without a notification to justify your presence.
Speaker: Store closing in 15 minutes. Please bring your final purchases to the register.
Speaker: I'll take it. Marshall, remember what we can haul it.
Speaker: take it marshall they're moving the hollywood swing
