The hysterics keep telling me this country is “irreparably fractured,” “coming apart at the seams,” or even a “failed state.” If we are becoming North Korea, though, the news doesn’t seem to have penetrated Upper West Side apartment prices, which appear to be sticking stubbornly higher than a condo in Pyongyang. If this is a failed state, I sure manage to find a lot of things to be grateful for: A rewarding job! A loving family! Chocolate milk! Lately I’ve discovered a new source of appreciation: the understanding that, as a child of the Seventies and Eighties, I missed out on an awful lot of freedom, and this is probably a good thing.

No, I don’t think I would have been better off in Pyongyang than in western Massachusetts, but I can easily picture how a younger me might have gotten waylaid by personal liberty and amused himself right into oblivion.

Somehow, without Gary Johnson ever attaining 4 percent in a presidential contest, America evolved into a libertarian paradise to a degree that should stun anyone old enough to remember even the Reagan era. Not only is gay marriage the law, but homosexuality is now less remarkable than being left-handed. Marijuana is legal in 37 states with a note from your Dr. Feelgood, or 18 without. What about abortion? Well, if more fetuses should enjoy the right to be born, grow up, smoke weed, and be gay, shouldn’t libertarians welcome that too? Anyway, abortion fans will still be able to drop by San Francisco or D.C. or New York to empty their uteruses, which means that even in a post-Roe America it’ll be easier to abort than it was to place a legal bet on a football game during the Obama administration.

It’s the sports-betting revolution that really blows my mind. Everywhere I go in New York City, posters of J. B. Smoove dressed up like a Roman emperor from the Bling Dynasty remind me that I can whip out my cellphone at any time, log on to Caesars Sportsbook, and try my luck on the question of whether the Rays and the Angels will combine to push more than 7.5 runs across the plate tonight. I can even take a powder on underdogs Neptunas Klaipeda (+5.5) to upset favorites Zalgiris Kaunas. Neptunas and Zalgiris turn out to be Lithuanian professional basketball teams, though they might as well be planets mentioned in Thor: Ragnarok to me. Is it not tempting to peer deeply into this storied rivalry and try to discern which quintet of the pituitarily gifted might enjoy the edge when it comes to stuffing the pill into the basket? Whose thumb does not hover over the phone and grow itchy for a little action?

Mine, as it turns out. The current iteration of me is not addicted to gambling or anything else. This is not due to any particular strength of character but rather to the steady advance of apathy. Things that used to take my fancy out for a sprint barely even attract my notice anymore. These days, you’d have to give me the Nobel Prize in Literature on the same day I won the lotto to cause me half the excitement I used to feel for the arrival of a new Steven Spielberg picture.

The 19-year-old me was subject to the iron grip of obsession in any number of areas — tennis (playing), David Letterman (watching), girls (chasing). If sports gambling had been legal, young Kyle would have been sorely tempted to spend his nights and days diving face-first into sports statistics, gobbling up knowledge, confidently placing bets, and, ultimately, at best making enough cash in a given year to amount to a sub-minimum-wage salary for the hours expended. Gambling would have been my life, and it would have been a miserable, truncated existence that paid worse than working at a gas station (which is what I was actually doing when I was 19).

I thank the regulatory regime of the 1980s for not allowing me to throw away many hours a week on meaningless competition. (Today, I have Twitter for that.) But I despair for those who are now young: So many addictions can be indulged, some (like porn) without leaving the home and without interacting with others. Why venture outside when the weed guy delivers? Did anyone count on a sharp turn toward libertarianism leading to everyone doing his thing alone?

Technological and legal limitations created a lot of boredom in the Eighties. On the plus side, though, boredom was the main reason my friends and I went over to one another’s houses, or spent time playing team sports or just talking on the phone. Even after cable TV arrived, television was garbage. As late as the early 1990s, Bruce Springsteen could chant, “Fifty-seven channels and nothin’ on.” The Internet and on-demand television were the stuff of sci-fi.

What all of this frustration led to was interaction. Access to recorded entertainment was so tightly rationed by price that you might have to actually leave the house to experience the desired item. (Say, Monty Python’s Matching Tie and Handkerchief album. Many times I biked over to my friend John’s house to listen to it.) Or somebody would rent Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and everyone would gather to watch it together over pizza.

Do young people do any of this anymore? I fear that they have no reason to go anywhere. An unbounded vista of online opportunity yields a lone kid sitting in her bedroom surrounded by devices instead of buddies. True, those devices can produce an infinite number of connections online. Does TikTok count as meaningful interaction, though? Boredom has been destroyed, but maybe it took down friendship with it.