Source: inloveforever
Tag: Social Media
T.G.I.F.: I want what I want because I want it.
There is no end of advice these days on how to be a good person, how to make good decisions, how to be mindful and compassionate, how to have boundaries, how to be open, how to be assertive, how not to be self-effacing, how to be politically invested, how to live in the now, how to live in a world that demands immediacy, how to think about the future, how not to think too much about the future, how not to think. For a certain kind of person — the person who, usually, strives to be a responsible parent, a sensitive friend, an upright citizen, a person who tries to care about their community — it can be impossible not to succumb to the incessant urge to mimic someone else’s supposed balance and feeling of wellness in life. What do we even know about them really? […]
Listening to patients, it feels to me like we’ve reached a real pitch of delirium regarding generalized advice, prescriptions, moral codes for behavior and images of some supposedly achievable balance. This infinite pedagogical universe was recently, and aptly, named the shame-industrial complex; poured out from every angle of life on social media, pushed by algorithms. In this vertigo we’ve forgotten that no one knows, or has ever known, what it really means to be an adult. Also that pleasure is hard-won, small, ephemeral; singular to each person. Wishes are historically overdetermined — meaning it really is your pleasure, and your pleasure only…
What I found, after much work in analysis, is that there is no justification possible, no matter how hard I tried to find it. I want what I want because I want it. You have to live with your choices which are more-or-less inexplicable to others…
We are contradictory creatures, wondrously and terrifyingly so.
— Jamieson Webster, from “I Don’t Need to Be a ‘Good Person.’ Neither Do You.” (The New York Times · August 25, 2023). Jamieson Webster (@jamiesonwebster) is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst and a professor at the New School. She is the author, most recently, of “Disorganization and Sex.”
Portrait via Peter Rollins
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
The beautiful thing in some ways about the smartphone, for example, is that my robotic vacuum will never do anything but vacuum instead of me. But my smartphone can be an instrument in that I can decide every time I pick it up whether I’m going to use it in a way that actually develops my heart, soul, mind and strength that is subordinate to and for the purposes of love.
If I pick up my smartphone and I develop a relationship with people I’ll never meet — influencers and celebrities — by watching videos, that diminishes me. But if I pick up my smartphone and I call my daughter or FaceTime her, that activates love and relationship. Basically, it’s using the thing to more deeply engage with the world rather than to retreat from my investment in the world.
— Andy Crouch, from “Nurturing Our Relationships in a Digital World” (The New York Times · Interviewed by Tish Harrison Warren · June 4, 2023). Crouch is the author “The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World.”
Entire article is worth a read here.
Monday Morning Wake Up Call
I lived when simply waiting was a large part of ordinary life: when we waited, gathered around a crackling radio, to hear the infinitely far-away voice of the king of England… I live now when we fuss if our computer can’t bring us everything we want instantly. We deny time.
We don’t want to do anything with it, we want to erase it, deny that it passes. What is time in cyberspace? And if you deny time you deny space. After all, it’s a continuum—which separates us.
So we talk on a cell phone to people in Indiana while jogging on the beach without seeing the beach, and gather on social media into huge separation-denying disembodied groups while ignoring the people around us.
I find this virtual existence weird, and as a way of life, absurd. This could be because I am eighty-four years old. It could also be because it is weird, an absurd way to live.”
— Ursula K. LeGuin, Interview by Heather Davis. “Stories from wide open, wild country: An Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin” Hobo Magazine 16: 130-131. (2014)
Notes:
- Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels
- Portrait: The New Yorker by Dana Gluckstein
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
Perhaps then it’s no surprise that the idea of preening on social media makes Ruth Wilson physically recoil. In some respects, Instagram would be useful – somewhere her fanbase could find her smaller projects, for instance. But the very idea fills her with dread. She dramatises an imaginary feed: “Oh, heyyy guys. It’s Ruth Wilson herrre.” Then shudders. “The self is so important on social media, it’s created a very narcissistic society. Everyone is their own famous person; everyone can be the centre of their own world.” She jabs a finger at her phone. “But it isn’t human. It’s a constructed world. It lacks actual connection or feeling.”
What’s more, she’s watched friends become “obsessed. You can’t have a conversation because they’re looking for the next shot. Everything is, ‘What can I put out there?’ When they don’t get hits, they feel low, not validated.” She clicks her tongue at the performative feminism, the performative activism; the fact that everyone rushes to post on national whatever-whatever day. “Nothing is real. I don’t believe any of it. No one has real or strong beliefs. They are just dictated to.”
Quite apart from anything, being a slave to her phone would intrude on the things she loves best – “thinking. Just thinking” is one. She has a “restless mind”. Also, reading. […]
“I think back: brilliant, you made people so uncomfortable they had to leave. I think it’s important to face things you don’t want to see. Because only then will you grow. Only then will you live properly…Art should change the way you think. Art should change your life. Art can save you.” Wilson wants her work to be art. […]
Standing on that hinge between pre- and post-#MeToo was, Wilson says, “extraordinary. To actually witness Hollywood” – she makes a whistling sound – “shift like that.” The most disappointing aspect was the volte-face hypocrisy. “To see the survival instinct. You realise how fickle that industry is. There’s no moral backbone.” Attitudes, habits, the way people spoke changed, yes – but only out of fear of being caught. “People were like, ‘We’re going to have a meeting about how badly we’ve behaved and then we’ll all be fine.’ It blew my mind.
“It made me understand a whole swathe of human behaviour. So many people don’t really believe anything – only what makes them money.” Weinstein knew “how to get people Oscars”, so his behaviour was ignored. “They’re opportunists. You see that. But it makes you sage about what you want, what’s important. Do you want to live in that world? Or would you prefer to be doing something else, like this weird 24-hour play, where you can explore things in a safe environment?” […]
This is her safe environment, among artists who challenge. I’m not surprised that Katharine Hepburn – who won Oscars, but “paid no heed to the awards system” – is one of Wilson’s heroines. “I love her. What a legend.” She didn’t play the Hollywood game? “No. And I’m useless at playing the game. I don’t want to play the game. Like, what game? What does that even mean? That’s my answer. I can’t. I physically can’t.”
— Charlotte Edwardes, ‘So many people don’t believe anything – only what makes them money’: Ruth Wilson on being a Hollywood outsider ‘ (The Guardian · May 6, 2023)