It happens almost every week.

Friday rolls around, someone asks what we want to do, and despite living in a city with restaurants, bars, concerts, farmers markets, movie theaters, arcades, escape rooms, VR experiences, and enough coffee and boba shops to keep all of us caffeinated well into retirement, my brain suddenly forgets every form of entertainment humanity has invented and comes up with the same answer: “I don’t know. There’s nothing to do.”

As someone who writes about culture and entertainment for a living, this is an incredibly stupid thing for me to say because I know there is stuff to do.

Half the time, I probably wrote about some of it.

Take this weekend, for example. DISCIP is playing at Fulton 55 on Friday night, there’s a downtown country bar crawl, there are seemingly always 5Ks happening at Woodward Park if you’re into that sort of thing, and farmers markets are happening across the area.

That’s before getting into all the restaurants, movie theaters, shopping centers, arcades, golf simulators, escape rooms, and VR places around town.

There is plenty to do, and yet if you ask me at 5 p.m. on a Friday what I genuinely want to do, there is a pretty good chance my answer is go home and sleep.

Maybe we’ll get dinner first, perhaps drinks afterward, and if we’re feeling particularly feral, we might venture into Tower, but somehow my imagination rarely stretches much further than food, drinks, someone’s house, and eventually my bed.

We Have Everything and Nothing Sounds Good

The more I think about it, the less convinced I am that Fresno has a “nothing to do” problem. I think some of us, myself very much included, might have a “we don’t know what the hell we want to do” problem, and I manage to prove that every time I sit down on my couch.

I can open Netflix, Hulu, Max, Disney+, Prime Video, and however many other streaming services have quietly attached themselves to my credit card, scroll through thousands of movies and television shows for half an hour, and eventually announce that there is nothing to watch.

Spotify gives us access to practically every song we’ve ever loved, and I still listen to the same playlists, while food delivery apps put hundreds of restaurants in the palm of my hand only for me to scroll through all of them and decide nothing sounds good.

Then Friday arrives and we bring the same broken decision-making process into the physical world.

Someone asks what we want to do, nobody knows, somebody suggests food, nobody knows where they want to eat, another person throws out an idea that gets met with a collective “maybe,” and 45 minutes later our spontaneous night out has turned into four adults discussing possibilities like we’re negotiating an international treaty.

Maybe millennials have simply reached the point of maximum choice.

We’re old enough to remember when entertainment came with limits, but young enough to have enthusiastically embraced every piece of technology that removed those limits.

In theory, having endless options should be freeing, but sometimes I think we’ve overloaded ourselves to the point that choosing nothing feels easier than choosing something.

Maybe I Don’t Know Fresno as Well as I Think

I’ll admit my perspective is probably warped because I get to travel around California for music festivals and cultural events, which means I routinely experience places like Los Angeles and San Francisco when they’re putting on some of their biggest events.

Then I come home and compare those experiences with a random weekend in Fresno, which isn’t exactly fair.

Fresno isn’t Los Angeles or San Francisco, and I don’t think it needs to be.

I absolutely want more festivals, more major artists, and more weekends where I can leave my house, drive 10 minutes and arrive at the event, the thing everyone knows is happening, and nobody in the group chat has to spend an hour debating.

Still, wanting more doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty here already, and one of the strangest realizations I’ve had is that I might actually know less about Fresno than I think.

When I’m traveling, I don’t know every restaurant, neighborhood, venue, or event, so I’m actively looking for things to experience.

That ignorance makes everything feel exciting because every street potentially has something I haven’t seen, and I don’t spend nearly as much time worrying about whether I’ve selected the absolute best possible option.

When Having Fun Starts Feeling Like Work

At home, I assume I already know Fresno, even though restaurants and businesses are constantly opening and closing, and events happen that I sometimes don’t hear about until someone posts pictures the next morning.

There are VR places and escape rooms that I think sound genuinely fun, for example, but then I start thinking about who wants to go, when everyone is free, whether we need a reservation, and who is going to make it, and suddenly something that sounded fun 30 seconds ago has become a small corporate retreat I apparently volunteered to organize.

You know what’s easier? Getting dinner and going to a friend’s house, which is exactly what we end up doing.

When I was younger, Friday night didn’t need an itinerary because we already knew what we were doing: We were going to the bars.

Was Fresno objectively more entertaining then? Probably not.

I think I was just easier to entertain, and going somewhere was enough without needing to make sure we had selected the absolute best use of our Friday night.

The older I get, the more I understand the commitment involved in going out, and after working all week, sometimes the thing standing between me and Fresno’s entertainment scene isn’t a shortage of things to do.

It’s the gravitational pull of my bed.

Fresno, Shove It in My Face

That doesn’t mean I don’t want more. I want the things happening in Fresno shoved in my face.

I want more festivals, concerts, and weird new things to try, and I don’t want to hear Monday morning about something I would have loved doing Saturday night.

Where are those moments when somebody drops something into the group chat and everyone immediately agrees that this is what we’re doing?

But I also have to admit that Fresno probably isn’t failing to entertain me nearly as often as I think it is.

We have so many choices that there is always the possibility of something better, and instead of making us more adventurous, all that possibility can make us weirdly indecisive.

We do it with Netflix when we say there’s nothing to watch despite having thousands of choices, with Spotify when we have nearly every song imaginable and listen to the same 50, and with restaurants when hundreds are available but nothing sounds good.

I suppose it was inevitable we’d eventually start doing it with our own cities.

And we use Fresno as the butt of the joke so often that sometimes I wonder how much of what we say about this city we actually believe, and how much of it we’ve just gotten used to saying.

So the next time I catch myself saying there is nothing to do in Fresno, I’m going to try to be a little more accurate, because I know that isn’t really what I mean.

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