Easy: A Netflix Original

What do you do when you're no longer surviving but you're not yet living the life you imagined?

I started Easy when it first came out on Netflix, and ever since then I've been asking people, "Do you know what I mean when I say Easy?" Most of them don't. Netflix was terrible at promoting it and quietly ended it after three seasons—honestly, I'm still surprised it made it that far.

The show follows a web of people living in Chicago, all navigating sex, relationships, friendship, and creative work in contemporary adulthood. Each episode is it's own story, like a short film, but as the series unfolds you begin to notice the overlaps—someone's ex is another's character's coworker, a background face becomes a central story three episodes later. Everyone is connected, even if only by proximity, timing, or feeling.

What makes the show so compelling is how natural it feels. The conversations are messy in that very real way—people interrupt each other, stumble over words, say the wrong thing, or sit in silence. It doesn't feel scripted so much as observed. Watching it feels less like consuming television and more like accidentally listening in on real lives.

It's still one of my favorite series Netflix has ever made. I highly recommend it.

But loving it is also what unsettled me.

At the end of nearly every episode, I felt an ache—like something in my own life was slightly out of reach, like something was missing. I was drawn to the casual intimacy, the crossed connections, the creative collisions, the sense of community where people make things together, date each other's friends, forgive each other, reinvent themselves, and keep showing up throughout the process. Life looked fluid. Interconnected. Possible.

Whenever I visit my cousins in Pittsburgh, I catch glimpses of that same rhythm. The way they run into people they know. The ease of shared history. The feeling that life is happening collectively instead of in parallel. Being there feels like stepping into an episode—like life is that easy.

For a while, I wondered if it was just a generational thing I missed by landing on the cusp of being a so-called "Zillennial." Maybe I was born a few years too late for that texture of adulthood.

But then I dated someone in another city nearby. I met their friends. Their community. Different ages, different backgrounds—and the same feeling was there. So it wasn't generational.

It was environmental, it was cultural and it was most certainly intentional.

When I was twenty, I cared deeply for someone who embodied that same energy. We never got the timing right, but whenever we cross paths, the social rhythm snaps back into place like muscle memory with him. The conversation flows. There's a charge of familiarity.

I've thought about him a lot recently, he's actually what sent me spiraling back into this Easy mindset.

Because I've realized something uncomfortable:

I don't just want that kind of life. I feel like I'm grieving one I was supposed to have.

When I tell you watching Easy makes me physically ill, I wish I was kidding.

It's the same sickness some people describe how nostalgia can be or homesickness.

How does someone feel like that for a version of themselves that hasn't fully arrived yet?

And then it clicked.

Out of all the reasons I say I want to move, this is the one underneath all the practical ones. I feel like I'm missing a place and people I haven't yet met.

What do you do when a life feels both completely attainable and impossibly far away—like you're standing outside a door with a window, watching it happen for other people? When does longing become a compass instead of a wound? What if the version of adulthood we imagined isn't gone—just happening somewhere we haven't rooted ourselves yet?