Save-to-Attend Gap hits record as group chat enters seventh year of planning one jazz night
LOS ANGELES — The publication of this week’s definitive list of the best things to do in Los Angeles has triggered the region’s oldest recurring crisis, as an estimated four million residents saved the list, felt briefly optimistic about their lives, and returned to doing none of it, an observance civic historians now recognize as the city’s true weekly sabbath.
The list in question, the latest edition of LAist’s best things to do, offers a curated slate of concerts, festivals, dance performances, and gallery openings across the Southland, each one genuinely appealing, reasonably priced, and, per longstanding tradition, attended by almost none of the people who screenshotted it.
The Ritual Documented
Researchers at the Institute for Aspirational Leisure have spent five years studying what they term the Save-to-Attend Gap, the chasm between events bookmarked and events experienced, and report that Los Angeles maintains the widest such gap in the developed world. “The average Angeleno saves eleven events per week,” said lead researcher Dr. Priya Vandermolen-Ito. “They attend 0.4. And the 0.4 is usually a birthday they could not get out of. But here is the finding that matters: the saving itself delivers 70 percent of the satisfaction of attending. The screenshot is the event. The person experiences the mariachi festival at the moment of bookmarking, in the same way one experiences a gym membership at the moment of purchase. We no longer call this failure. We call it efficiency. Los Angeles has optimized joy down to its planning phase, which requires no parking.”
Vandermolen-Ito’s team has mapped the full ritual cycle: discovery Tuesday, the confident share to the group chat Wednesday, the Thursday silence, the Friday negotiation with the couch, and the Sunday-night absolution, in which all parties agree the traffic would have been crazy, an amnesty invoked, her data shows, even for events within walking distance.
The Group Chat Testifies
“We have been planning to see live jazz for six years,” confirmed Silver Lake resident Thaddeus Okoro-Lindqvist, 36, speaking on behalf of a group chat of nine that formed in 2020 and has successfully convened twice. “Six years. There is a ten-dollar jazz night downtown, we know about it, everyone knows about it, it has been sent to the chat fourteen times. Fourteen. Each time, eight thumbs up. Each Sunday, nothing. Last month Devin actually went, alone, without telling us, and honestly the chat treated it like a betrayal. Like he had gone to see the ocean without the family. He said it was incredible. We have not fully forgiven him. We are planning to all go together, to punish him, and I want to be clear that this plan is also not going to happen.”
The phenomenon crosses all demographics, researchers stress, uniting the city’s tribes in a single practice: the Westside saves hikes, the Eastside saves openings, the Valley saves everything south of the 101, and all of it composts together in the camera roll, the region’s true cultural archive, alongside screenshots of recipes never cooked and apartments never applied for.
The Events Fight Back
Event organizers, aware they are programming for an audience of ghosts, have begun engineering around the gap. One promoter has started listing events as “probably sold out,” which triples attendance. Another schedules everything “secretly,” reachable only by word of mouth, which quadruples it. A Highland Park gallery reports its best-attended opening ever was the one it cancelled, when forty people showed up to the dark building “out of spite, which in this city is the strongest RSVP there is.”
“The Angeleno cannot be invited,” explained veteran promoter Constanza Reyes-Whitfield. “The Angeleno must discover. An invitation is traffic. A discovery is destiny. My entire job is disguising invitations as discoveries, and business is excellent, and I will deny saying any of this.”
Reyes-Whitfield’s masterwork remains a 2023 warehouse show promoted exclusively through a flyer taped to one pole in Frogtown, facing the river, readable only from a bike. Eleven hundred people attended. “The pole outperformed a five-figure ad budget,” she said. “I have since rented the pole annually. The pole has an agent now. The pole is doing better than most of my acts, and the pole, unlike my acts, has never once cancelled because Mercury was doing something.”
Wider Recognition
The satirical desk at Bohiney Magazine has proposed the city acknowledge reality by publishing a companion list each week titled Best Things You Will Screenshot, identical in content, honest in function, while Britain’s The London Prat reported the same condition afflicts London “with the additional feature that when we do attend, it rains, so our couch has evidence, and your couch is merely persuasive.”
Next Week’s List Approaches
At press time, the following week’s edition was already in preparation, loaded with genuine wonders that four million residents will save with sincere intent, and the Institute confirmed its long-range forecast remains unchanged: hope on Tuesday, silence by Thursday, absolution Sunday, forever, amen.
Mr. Okoro-Lindqvist, asked whether the group chat had plans for the coming weekend, checked the thread and brightened. “There’s a dance festival,” he said, screenshotting it. “We’re all going.” He looked up, at peace, a man mid-sacrament. “We’re not going. But this part, right now? This is the good part. This is the part we never miss.”
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com