I was on the phone with Lola earlier, talking about feeling bad for skipping my daily/weekly murmurs, when I reminded myself of something: the founding principle of this newsletter is, “no one gives a shit.” And I don’t mean that to sound cold, because I know that some people reading this do give enough of a shit to read it, but what I mean is—this is for fun, a nice thing in the background. Maybe you find this in your inbox and it reminds you about a movie you want to watch, or something you’ve been wanting to try. Maybe you find it in your spam folder and are too exhausted or busy or not in the mood to really read it, but in your skimming a thing or two pops out at you and gets added to the swirling ecosystem of your mind.
The thing is, pretty much everyone I know is having a tough time right now. The impending doom of winter, the non-transition of power, the racism, bigotry, and hatred, the rise in cases, the omnipresence of death, the loneliness, the reminders of the many ways that a body can fail you. Every day we’re reminded of the fragility of the project of being alive.
This phrase, “the project of being alive,” is something I heard New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino say on Ezra Klein’s podcast. Tolentino is talking about social media and the internet in general, and she perfectly gets at the insidious paradox of a life lived online, as many of us live these days. Around 13:15, she says:
What we do to figure ourselves out, what communities we seek out and how we triangulate who we are in context of these systems, this is a really beautiful, human thing. It’s actually important for us to figure out who we are.
[But] social media platforms promise connection and they induce just mass alienation. And I think one of the reasons that upsets me so much is that the desire to connect is really important and it’s gotten so perverted and turned on us by the internet. There’s something about what the market at this stage of acceleration can do to things that are really necessary to the project of being alive . . . that’s what I have become so afraid of or wary of.
I liked this phrase and I agreed with Tolentino’s indictment of social media. I feel like we’re all grasping toward happiness and connection and instead just scrolling into oblivion. For some reason, the happy moments I experience when I look at Instagram or Facebook are far less potent than the sad ones. Something I see online can alter my mood for hours, and it’s never the full story.
This is where Jenny Odell’s ideas come in handy. A couple of weeks ago, after starting to read Tolentino’s book Trick Mirror (which Willa gave me for my birthday last year) and Odell’s book How to Do Nothing, I decided to try going off social media for a week. Ironically, I hadn’t gotten far enough in Odell’s book to see that she doesn’t actually recommend total abstinence, but rather “standing apart”:
To stand apart is to take the view of the outsider without leaving, always oriented toward what it is you would have left. It means not fleeing your enemy, but knowing your enemy, which turns out not to be the world—contemptus mundi—but the channels through which you encounter it day to day. It also means giving yourself the critical break that media cycles and narratives will not, allowing yourself to believe in another world while living in this one. Unlike the libertarian blank slate that appeals to outer space, or even the communes that sought to break with historical time, this “other world” is not a rejection of the one we live in. Rather, it is a perfect image of this world when justice has been realized with and for everyone and everything that is already here. To stand apart is to look at the world (now) from the point of view of the world as it could be (the future), with all of the hope and sorrowful contemplation that this entails. . .
But most important, standing apart represents the moment in which the desperate desire to leave (forever!) matures into a commitment to live in permanent refusal, where one already is, and to meet others in the common space of that refusal. This kind of resistance still manifests as participating, but participating in the “wrong way”: a way that undermines the authority of the hegemonic game and creates possibilities outside of it. (62)
Odell explains that the people who can fully abandon social media are often those whose social capital transcends the digital world. And that’s a privilege that a lot of people don’t have; having a life that allows a “margin,” as Odell calls it, that gives you the luxury to orchestrate your attention. Odell writes: “If you can afford to pay a different kind of attention, you should” (94).
I do think I was happier the week I stayed off social media, but I’m not sure I totally accomplished the goals I thought I might (which were basically have my own thoughts and don’t spend so much time staring at my phone in bed). But I guess I’m trying to stand apart. To be on social media and use it for the good things—spreading the word about and contributing to mutual aid efforts, paying a kind of tribute to people in my life (like my grandmother and her 96 years of life), seeing what my friends are up to, checking in on everyone’s individual projects of being alive and doing my best to cheer them on.
P.S. I was reminded of the Frankie Cosmos song, “Being Alive,” where she sings:
Being alive matters quite a bit
even when you feel like shit,
being alive!
So I started this playlist and it only has that song and a Better Oblivion Community Center song that has another lyric that stood out to me, which can be interpreted as significantly darker, but hey, still topical:
To fall asleep I need white noise to distract me
Otherwise I have to listen to me think
Otherwise I pace around, hold my breath, let it out
Sit on the couch and think about
How living’s just a promise that I made.
If you have any songs that a) make you feel especially alive, b) talk about the importance of the project of living your life, or c) you just really vibe with, I would love if you’d add them:
have been feeling the same way this week ;__;