I saw this a few days ago while taking my dog for a walk in the pueblo. Imagine being so annoyed about leaves, you scrawl this on your neighbor’s driveway door. Qué fuerte.
Year: 2019
How to Be Okay Being Online in 2019: A Listening List
“We’re not meant to be able to understand everything, to be able to take in an unlimited supply of horrible information everyday. Our brains aren’t built to allow us to identify what we can do about something, and what we’ll never be able to do anything about.” — Jia Tolentino
I’m finishing up Ezra Klein‘s interview with Jia Tolentino this morning and also thinking about other recent interviews both she and Jenny Odell gave to the guys at Longform.
- Longform #352: Jenny Odell
- Longform #354: Jia Tolentino
Both resonated with me, in part because I feel like they, in different ways, identify the tension of being a person online in an age of social divide while recognizing the personal and systemic themes that come up; trying to live morally in a late capitalist economic system, dealing with attention and time, creating art, self-promotion, having an opinion on the internet, self care, and learning to live and grow in a strange time.
Actually, upon reading that, I’m sure I’ve mischaracterized these interviews. But this is what I got out of them. Anyway, next is to find the time (or rather, a peaceful gap in my scattered attention) to read Tolentino’s Trick Mirror and Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.
Cologne Window Plants
Deciding which plants can fit in a packed van is tough.
Amsterdam Eats
Doubt and Belonging in Search of Truth
I could quote every paragraph of folio’s post on searching for truth in a time of modern secularity but I’ll leave this gem that resonated with me.
The desire to be a part of a movement or a community of the likeminded is a deceptive diversion from reality: it obscures what we are really called to, replacing personal ethical responsibility with group-think. In contrast to what is commonly taught amongst Muslims, the Qur’an cautions against following herd instinct: “If you obey most people on earth, they will take you away from the easy path of God.” [6:116] Belonging, really, is not what it is all about.
Sometimes I am surprised how little these friends of mine know me, as they bombard me with the ramblings of men linked to me only by a very generic profession of faith. We are not called upon to embrace what others say out of a sense of pious solidarity. The truth is just truth; it is founded on the argument, not on belonging to a particular group or ethnicity. None of this is new.
I’ve tried writing my own thoughts, but it all comes out as gibberish. Soon, God willing.