“Elastic Nation: Why We’ve Unbuttoned Our Clothes and Our Culture”

🧵✍️ Count Your Buttons and Write About It (If You Still Remember How)

Today the calendar informs us it’s both Count Your Buttons Day and Everyone Writes Day — which feels less like a celebration and more like a cry for help. Somewhere, a marketing intern probably thought, “Let’s honor the tactile and the textual — two things humans have entirely outsourced.”

Buttons and writing once held civilization together. Literally and metaphorically. Without buttons, shirts flapped open in the wind, exposing not just torsos but truths. Without writing, history was just gossip with better lighting. Yet here we are in 2025, living in a world where T-shirts and touchscreens have replaced both.

The Lost Art of Buttonry

There was a time when buttons were status symbols. The nobility wore them like jewelry — mother-of-pearl, bone, silver — tiny circular declarations of class and fastidiousness. The working class had wooden ones that cracked after a few honest laundries, but by God, they had buttons.

Buttons fastened more than clothing. They held dignity together. The morning ritual of buttoning up wasn’t just about getting dressed; it was about becoming presentable to the world. Try doing that with a zipper — all you get is an angry metallic hiss and the faint threat of entrapment.

In the glory days, buttons were everywhere: on shirts, coats, gloves, boots, even mattress covers. There were buttons for soldiers, buttons for bureaucrats, buttons for babies, and even emergency buttons for when things went terribly wrong (which, incidentally, was also when you’d start unbuttoning).

Then came the leisurewear revolution. Sweatshirts declared independence from the tyranny of fastening. Joggers rose in rebellion against the waistband. And one morning, we all woke up elasticized and unaccountable.

“Count your buttons,” the holiday urges — but where? On your hoodie? On your Crocs? Perhaps buried in the family sewing kit, that dusty relic that once smelled of mothballs and responsibility. Counting your buttons today is an act of archaeology.

The Writing on the Wall (and Everywhere Else)

The second holiday, Everyone Writes Day, used to be a noble affair — a time to put pen to paper, soul to syntax. Now it sounds like a punishment. “Everyone Writes” has the same ring as “Everyone Detention.”

Once upon a time, writing was sacred. Kings carved decrees on stone tablets. Lovers wrote letters that crossed oceans and decades. The phrase “the writing on the wall” was biblical — divine graffiti announcing destiny. Today, the writing on the wall is just “LOL” followed by an emoji.

In the analog age, writing meant permanence. Ink stained fingers and paper carried weight. There was poetry in a fountain pen, tragedy in a typo. Now, the delete key has replaced regret. And autocorrect, that unholy ghostwriter, has replaced thought.

We write emails without greetings, texts without punctuation, essays with AI assistance. We compose with our thumbs — the least literary digit — and call it communication. “Everyone Writes Day” feels ironic when no one really writes anymore; we just enter data.

Buttons and Writing: Two Relics of Attention

Both buttons and writing demanded time. You couldn’t rush a row of buttons; you had to line them up, push them through, one at a time. Writing was the same — each word a small button in a sentence, fastened with care.

Today’s equivalents are faster, smoother, frictionless — which is precisely the problem. Zippers zip, swipes swipe, and messages vanish after ten seconds. We’ve replaced the patience of fastening with the dopamine of scrolling.

In a way, buttons were the original multitasking devices. You could count them in boredom, fiddle with them in anxiety, or pop them dramatically in seduction. They had character. Try seducing someone by zipping your hoodie — it’s less romantic, more chainsaw.

And writing — real writing — was the buttoning-up of thought. You had to assemble ideas, stitch them together with grammar, and present them to the world. Now most of us just wear our thoughts like oversized sweatshirts: loose, vague, and full of typos.

The Buttoned and the Unbuttoned

There was once even social meaning in the act of buttoning. “Button up” meant be proper, be discreet. “Unbutton” meant relax, let go. Both implied control — that you had something to button or unbutton in the first place. Today, with our drawstrings and emojis, we’re perpetually in-between: too casual to button up, too numb to unbutton.

Imagine a Rotary Club game show from the 1950s, when couples were asked whether their spouses buttoned shirts “upward or downward.” That’s how civilized society once was — debating buttoning directions instead of algorithms.

Now, we can’t even agree on whether to use “there,” “their,” or “they’re.” The art of fastening and the art of phrasing — both undone by convenience.

Fastened to Nothing

So today, as you look down at your hoodie and realize there’s nothing to count, take a moment of gratitude for the humble button — that tiny clasp between chaos and decency. And maybe, just maybe, write something by hand. Feel the pen drag. Misspell something honestly.

Because when the last button falls and the last sentence is autocorrected into oblivion, we’ll realize those tiny circles and those scribbled lines were what kept us — literally and linguistically — together.

Now, if you’ll excuse us, we need to draft our next blog post:
“In Praise of the Zipper: Society’s Unsung Innovator.”

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