Even the champagne in their willowy flutes, the conceptual art of brightly colored balloon dogs, and the wood chairs custom-carved with lions’ heads were embarrassed. Later, he would say it was a joke and he was so fucking tired of the way that everyone took everything seriously. Back in the day, we could be raconteurs and provocateurs—all well-functioning societies needed people who would push boundaries and force others to reconsider their positions in order to continue thriving. Everyone now was too anxious. There was proof of cultural stagnation all over the globe and it was because of fear. And for a little while, to prove a point, he funded some research studies to see if there was a correlation between hormones in milk and clinical anxieties.

The fourth member of the expedition was the most annoying one’s sister. She was allowed to come as a nod to the woke values of today; she was practical and was also a decent amateur filmmaker. Her preparations for the journey were a mixture of intense personal training that involved running five miles a day wearing a backpack filled with rocks and digging and refilling a large hole on property her family owned, and using replica hand-crank film cameras to get around the fact that electronics did not work within a certain radius of the doors. The footage was important because there was no point of going elsewhere, of doing new things, if in the aftermath they had to spend all their time arguing with people about the experience’s truth. We used to take a man at his word was one of the frequent conversational turns in the adventurers’ group chat. We would look at the things he had accomplished, the way he spoke, where he was educated, and be able to feel the righteousness. Sometimes at night, she stared into her silk sleep mask and almost trembled with a mix of delight, excitement, and anxiety while considering what it would feel like to take historical footage that would be studied and discussed past her lifespan. No one watched her YouTube channel. Only her friends and her parents’ friends had come to her most recent video installation.