Things I Like
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The hoop displays motifs detailing our travels and adventures, the damn election, a potential move due to too much bass from a nearby nightclub, losing a toenail and enduring a norovirus, copious amounts of food, footwear and apparel, kitchen appliances, health-related items, hobbies and sports, etc.
This is amazing and I love it and wanted to share it, even if belatedly.
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The trap and the fallacy that people have fallen into is the idea that these platforms are the ONLY way to get further: to sell, to advertise, to be seen. You trade convenience and a "free" app for the ensnarement and caging of your creativity.
A good reminder from Naz, another blog I'm enjoying so much lately. His post on simpler screens has helped me think through how I use my phone as well.
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Life feels gentler lately. But also horrific. Gentle in my personal spaces. Horrific in the public spheres. Both true at the same time.
I've been really enjoying Annie's writing lately and last night I read this post and the above resonated so strongly. I immediately copied it into my journal. I've been home alone for a few days and they've been quiet, slow moving days. Snow is still on the ground and the sun has been shining so brightly warming the house that I feel languid in the afternoons. And yet there is so much awful out there. The dissonance is odd, but also as Annie says, both things are true.
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If we are spending our energy on outrage or its opposite, apathy, we won’t know what’s ours to do. We won’t volunteer to coach the basketball team in the first place, and we certainly won’t know it’s Senior Night, let alone make the drive to be there.
Murphy-Kangas has been a voice I've really appreciated over the last year or so and this post hit perfectly this week. I'm finding the things I can do and trying my best to let go of the rest.
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If my choices had been different, everything would have been just…different: a quantum rippling.
A short, but wise post.
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So: in the morning I go through my RSS feeds and newsletters, and then when I’ve read everything I want to read I’m done. Maybe I check back later in the day, maybe not — I have things to do.
Jacobs has been on this for a while now, but he's right. And I've been adapting the way I take in information this year and I gotta say, checking things in the morning with my tea is the way to go. I tend to read a book or poetry first thing, then breakfast, then check in online. And as more and more people fill up my RSS feeds, it's become more and more enjoyable to open Feedbin.
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My explanation of what is happening is this. We tend to think of the problem of social media as a problem of disinformation - that is, of people receiving erroneous information and being convinced that false things are in fact true. Hence, we can try to make social media better through factchecking, through educating people to see falsehoods and similar. This is, indeed, a problem, but it is not the most important one. The fundamental problem, as I see it, is not that social media misinforms individuals about what is true or untrue but that it creates publics with malformed collective understandings. That is a more subtle problem, but also a more pernicious one.
I found this piece super duper interesting and it is long, but the conclusions about how so much of our public discourse is being controlled by really rich dudes with clear agendas is awful for our public life. We're seeing that in a lot of ways and I fear it's going to get worse before it gets better.
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Over time, I came to understand it differently. Butler is saying: people need a transcendent goal, a way of tapping into the awe and wonder of the universe. The impossibility of travel to the stars in the Parable is neither here nor there. The power of Earthseed is that it demonstrates that anyone in any circumstances can hold an audacious and global dream for humanity in their heart. The existence of a nearly impossible vision inside Lauren Olamina is, itself, a form for power; it says, you cannot kill off the spirit through brute force and immiseration.
There's been a lot of talk about Octavia Butler and Parable of the Sower lately, for good reason, and this piece really resonated with me. One of the things I've been thinking about a lot since the US election is that neither candidate gave me a vision for the future, it was about not going back or going back, but I didn't get a clear sense of the future and what that would look like. It feels like a huge missed opportunity.
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Through it all, one truth has become increasingly clear to me: the quality of our lives isn’t measured in grand gestures or accomplishments, but in the small, intentional choices we make each day.
This is so dead on to the way I ended 2024 and my thoughts about a whole slew of things. I have some concrete things I'm doing in 2025, but in the end I've realized that it's the day-to-day that makes a huge difference and what will help me get through whatever is coming.
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Boredom is when you do the dishes, run the errand you’ve been putting off, respond to the text you’ve left on read. Boredom is when you bring a book to read on the subway or make small talk with the person in front of you in line about how slow the pharmacy is. Boredom is when you do the things that make you feel like you have life under control. Not being bored is why you always feel busy, why you keep “not having time” to take a package to the post office or work on your novel. You do have time—you just spend it on your phone. By refusing to ever let your brain rest, you are choosing to watch other people’s lives through a screen at the expense of your own.
This, so much this. Letting your mind wander, being bored, it's when the ideas also pop up and usually for me it's when I'm doing the life things that turbo charges this because I'm just distracted enough to let things percolate.
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This is among the reasons why I try to use the word “work” expansively, referring not only to waged work but also to creative work, care work, work in our homes and in our neighborhoods and in our hearts. Not because everything should be work (it should not), but because work in all its many forms is the means by which we weave and cultivate and nurture a different world. It is liberating, in that respect, even when—perhaps especially when—it’s difficult.
Words I needed to hear this month.
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A quick post that I think about a lot. I don't want to quote it because I think reading it in its entirety is worth is much more than skimming anything I could quote.
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Zadie Smith is quickly becoming a voice in my generation that I listen to carefully and read carefully and this interview with Ezra Klein shows a lot of the reasons why. The way in which Smith thinks about social media, technology, words, and our current times always makes me think. I especially enjoy the way in this interview that she pushes back on Klein and rejects some of the premises he bases his questions on. Also: I love that she carries a map book instead of using a smart phone.
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False flag operations. Disproportionate cultural panics. Disproportion generally. Censorship. Self-censorship. Conspiracies. Deep dives. Doing your own research. Keeping receipts. Putting you on blast. Registering your deafening silence. Living in bubbles. Living in echo chambers. Let that sink in. #Nuance. Team Fact. Team Feeling. For the past fifteen years we have—all of us—been subjected to a truly monumental network of psychological influence that our governments have failed to regulate in any real way whatsoever. Just as it was in the Thirties, our version of the propaganda megaphone is “subject to no legal or moral restraints.” Maybe it’s time that it is?
More Zadie Smith but this piece is really interesting, taking something written about living in Germany in the 1930s and seeing how that can help us view today. As is usual for Smith, her insights on social media and algorithms and how they are affecting our society and us as people. Something I'm thinking about weeks after reading it.
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Your phone should be used as a tool, not a constant companion. To accomplish this: (1) keep your phone plugged into the same spot when at home (instead of having it with you); and (2) remove all apps from your phone where someone makes more money the more you use it.
I don't love everything Cal Newport posts, mostly because I think in order to live the way he advocates he must have someone doing a lot of the work of life for him (cleaning, cooking, etc), but I did find some of this post making me stop to think. I'll admit that I do treat my phone the way he talks about by leaving it mostly in one spot most days, but I'd not thought of apps in quite the way he put it, about making money off of you.