Washington D.C. Felt Like It Was Holding Its Breath
When I stepped out of Union Station, I could hear my own footsteps. That’s never happened to me in Washington, D.C., a city I’ve known for more than two decades, one that usually hums loud enough to drown out your own thoughts.
I’ve known this city in different lives: first as a congressional page in the summer of 2001, then as a college student at The George Washington University, later as a young nonprofit professional after grad school, and now as someone who drops in for a week or two each year to visit friends. For me, D.C. is a second home, a place that has always hummed with ambition. It’s a city of specialists, of overeducated strivers who gossip about policy and foreign affairs the way other cities gossip about sports. The air itself used to feel caffeinated—people talking about projects, bills, and causes in every coffee shop.
This first week of October was gorgeous—unseasonably warm, the kind of early-autumn weather where you could wear shorts and still sit outside without breaking a sweat. And yet, everywhere I went felt hollowed out. K Street was quiet. Union Station was calm in a way that made me uneasy. The usual late-night spill of voices and laughter that makes D.C. feel alive was muted. If you went out at 2 p.m or 6 p.m., you could hear your shoes on the pavement.
I started noticing the National Guard first: clustered in affluent areas, standing in front of Whole Foods, taking selfies at tourist sites, talking about their dogs. They weren’t stationed where tension or poverty might be expected; they were where comfort is. And they didn’t seem to have anything to do. They were a presence that underscored absence.
The larger absence is the federal payroll. This trip took place roughly six months after DOGE cuts and in the first week of a new, protracted government shutdown. D.C. has lived through shutdowns before (it’s almost muscle memory at this point) but this one felt different. No one was asking, “When will we be back?” The question had become, “Will there still be a job to go back to?”
I caught up with a friend who’d worked as a USAID contractor. It wasn’t a glamorous job: underpaid, overworked, and emotionally taxing. When his contract was cut in April, he didn’t just lose a paycheck—he lost a sense of mission. He’s been living on unemployment for months, applying to everything, hearing nothing back, because everyone who lost a job is applying for the same few positions. He told me he had believed in the work, but not the conditions, and now he’s not sure where he belongs. The jobs he’s trained for barely exist anymore.
Then there was the community orchestra. My friend, who plays violin, invited me to his concert. Tickets were $41. “Why so expensive?” I asked. He said their usual funding didn’t come through this year (cut by the Republicans), so the patrons were covering the full operational cost. At the last rehearsal, the conductor asked who in the orchestra had lost their job this year, and two-thirds of the hands went up. The program featured a piece out of Soviet Russia about persistence under pressure. It was defiant, yes—but mostly it felt like endurance, an act of faith. People paid $41 so an orchestra could keep rehearsing because a city without music is a city that’s already giving up.
I also saw friends who had pivoted into the private sector and regretted it. One college friend had left a federal job for a tech company: better pay, better perks, and after a year, brain rot. She missed the intellectual seriousness of the government—where, despite the bureaucracy, people generally knew what they were doing. Her husband still works for the federal government and, even during the shutdown, was considered essential. He works on the tech side of customs, building digital systems for immigration and border management.
Our brunch conversation turned existential: How long should he stay? Should he leave before being asked to build something harmful? Could he quietly undermine bad directives from the inside? And if he did, what would happen to him—and to their family? It was the kind of moral calculus that people in D.C. have always made, but it felt more precarious this time, like the ground beneath those questions had shifted.
A few days later, I met my cousin for lunch at a private members’ club on K Street. This part of town used to buzz with lobbyists and consultants speed-eating overpriced salads between meetings. That afternoon, maybe six tables were filled, including ours. He works in commercial real estate and said he can’t move a single office building right now. No one is relocating to D.C., no one is expanding, and he can’t sell apartments or condos either. “The only things moving,” he said, “are warehouses and data centers.”
It made perfect sense. The human infrastructure is stalling while the digital infrastructure booms. The physical spaces built for people—offices, condos, restaurants—are sitting empty, while the spaces built for servers and logistics thrive. The capital of government, once run by bright people, is slowly becoming a capital of storage.
That’s what this visit showed me most vividly: the quiet isn’t just economic; it’s existential. D.C. has always been a city of purpose. Even the cynics here believe in something—policy, democracy, order. All of that purpose is still bubbling beneath the surface, trapped; it just can’t actualize. It’s like potential energy with nowhere to go. When those systems falter, people lose not just income but identity. And it’s not only personal identity that erodes. In D.C., where work and patriotism are often intertwined, the self is bound up in the state. When that collective sense of purpose dissolves, the country’s identity begins to vanish, too.
COVID emptied the city overnight. This feels like a different kind of pandemic: slower, intellectually lonelier, and harder to measure. People aren’t fleeing en masse yet; they’re just quietly listing their houses, weighing options, running out of savings, recalculating. It’s a city in deliberation, a place built on motion now learning what democratic stillness feels like.
I came home thinking about what “holding” a city actually means. It’s not waving signs or passing bills—it’s making sure the people who sustain its daily rhythm can stay. It’s funding musicians, supporting local businesses, giving people reason to believe the lights will come back on—literally and metaphorically.
D.C.’s hum isn’t guaranteed. If you love the city—if you love the music, the debate, the earnest, over-caffeinated chaos that defines it—it’s worth paying attention now, not later. Because when a city built on purpose starts to lose that purpose, the silence doesn’t stay local. It spreads.
