Where I Was From (Joan Didion)

I was about to explain this to Quintana - the saloon, the wooden sidewalk, the generations of cousins who had walked just as she was walking down just this street on days just this hot - when I stopped. Quintana was adopted. Any ghosts on this wooden sidewalk were not in fact Quintana's responsibility. This wooden sidewalk did not in fact represent anywhere Quintana was from. Quintana's only attachments on this wooden sidewalk were right now, here, me and my mother.

In fact I had no more attachment to this wooden sidewalk than Quintana did: it was no more than a theme, a decorative effect.

It was only Quintana who was real.

Later it seemed to me that this had been the moment when all of it - the crossing, the redemption, the abandoned rosewood chests, the lost flatware, the rivers I had written to replace the rivers I had left, the twelve generations of circuit riders and county sheriffs and Indian fighters and country lawyers and Bible readers, the two hundred years of clearings in Virginia and Kentucky and Tennessee and then the break, the dream of America, the entire enchantment under which I had lived my life - began to seem remote.

-- Where I Was From, Joan Didion, pg. 219-220

The Conversations of Cow (Suniti Namjoshi)

But she feels I haven't been suitably impressed. 'I'll tell you another thing, and this is a top secret, a well-guarded one - all Martians are unsatisfactory ones.'
I laugh. 'But B, that's a well-known fact.'
She looks put out. 'Well, at least you'll concede that you and the Martians have something in common.'
I smile, but it's an unsatisfactory solution. At last I ask, 'Are you trying to tell me that Men from Mars are really women?'
'Yes. You've got it at last.'
'But , B, why do they behave so differently from women?'
'Lack of opportunity and education, my dear.'
-- pg. 108

TikTok Is Training You To Leave People (@naomibabybu)

TikTok is training you to leave the people who love you. And the most disturbing part is that you think it's your own idea. There's a very persuasive new attitude that has started to quietly colonize how we think about our relationships. Romantic relationships, friendships, family relationships, and it tells you one thing over and over again.

Which is, you deserve better, you are the prize, if he wanted to he would, and you gotta leave what no longer serves you. And I'm not telling women to stay in abusive and toxic relationships, that's a very real and historical pattern, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the rest of us. The young, free, chronically online people who sit with our phones at midnight, post-argument, feeding the algorithm our pain, and the algorithm feeds us back an answer.

Here's what actually happens in your brain as you're scrolling. Your prefrontal cortex, the part that's responsible for impulse control, empathy, long-term thinking, that all gets progressively weakened by long-term short-form video consumption. A 2023 study done by Dartmouth actually confirmed that heavy short-form video use actually degrades attention coherence and emotional regulation over time, and you literally lose the neurological capacity to sit with discomfort without immediately needing to resolve it. And love, real love, requires exactly that capacity. Love requires you to hold ambiguity, without turning it into an accusation. And it requires you to endure friction without outsourcing your interpretation of it to strangers online.

And the feed that destroys that, let's say that you have a really bad night with your partner or a fight with your friend. You're stressed, you're tired, you're already defeated. You go home, you get into bed, and then you just reach for your phone, you know, subconsciously. And it's for relief, but it's also for, kind of, anesthesia. And anesthesia is precisely the state in which beliefs get implanted without resistance. So, you pause on a TikTok or a reel about emotional unavailability, and that's it. That's all it takes for the system to register that pause and infer your vulnerability. And all of a sudden your feed is filled with videos about men doing the bare minimum, or love-bombing, choosing yourself, you're not his priority, all of this stuff. You didn't actually search for it, and now it's all over your feed. And here's what should actually disturb you. It's the second exposure that does the most damage.

Because after the second time you see it, it no longer feels like something you were shown, it feels like something that you know. And you stop saying This is what I saw, and instead you say This is how I see. This is when, on a subconscious level, that person, your partner, your friend, stops becoming a person, a fully-dimensional human, and they start becoming a problem to diagnose. And I think about this a lot because these ideas have affected me a lot more than I would like to admit, especially in the past few years. I was literally told from birth from my family, "You can have your ambitions, you can have your goals, but your ultimate goal in life should be to marry fucking rich." And I really refuted that idea my whole life. But then, as I started tog et into my twenties and get older, and I started to see some of that rhetoric online, it really did start to influence me. And somewhere along the line I did star to actually believe it. Not in the way that my family meant it, but in this new, slick, repackaged way that sort of labeled it empowerment.

It does kind of remind me of something that this filmmaker Celine Song said when she was doing her press tour for the film The Materialists. And she was talking about how capitalism has started to dictate literally every aspect of our life. To the point that now it's dictating our own hearts. I think now the way that so many of us think around love is the way that we'd evaluate a business. Like, what is the ROI here, what is the value that I'm getting, am I due for an upgrade? And we financialize intimacy and started to label it self-respect. And the feed doesn't show you how to repair, it shows you how to leave.

And content about repair, about mutual containment and the very unglamorous slow work of staying and working on something, that doesn't trend. Do you know what does? Departure that's labeled as an "awakening," and disillusionment marketed as "growth." And the bond is no longer this shared interior space, it is a public performance. And the audience is invisible, it is everywhere, and it is always watching. Discernment is literally being trained out of us, and we think we're becoming aware. We think our standards are being constantly raised, but awareness and programming can literally look identical from the inside.

And the feed will find you at your lowest fracture. That loneliness right before you're about to fall asleep. And it doesn't offer you a perspective, it offers you a narrative. And once that narrative settles, it doesn't feel imposed anymore. It feels like you. And that is the trap. Love is not something that you just find. It is something that you build over time. And building love requires a tolerance for imperfection and friction. The question was never whether you deserved better, the question is whether you still know how to love what is real without scrolling away.

-- @naomibabybu, TikTok, via Twitter