1. I write to you from Central Texas, a place rightly and wrongly understood in pop culture. Yes, it’s true that we have mall-sized gas stations called Buc-ee’s, where a rest stop is not restful at all and you can buy everything from brisket tacos to paintings of Jesus sitting in a field of brightly colored blue bonnets (ok, this is a lie, but almost!). Another truism: the cowboy narrative of “picking yourself up by your bootstraps” runs deep, and even those who Texas-pride themselves on being altruistic, generous, and empathetic can’t ignore how inextricable the myth of self-reliance is from the Texas’ self-conception. Of course, this isn’t just true of the Lone Start State; it’s an American ideal, and an insidious one at that.
Writing for the Atlantic, Emi Nietfeld explores the perils — and favors — that propel the myth of a society built by meritocracy, through a review of Alissa Quart’s new book, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream.
According to Quart, the fiction that anyone who works hard can have a better life increases inequality and promotes policies that hurt us. Meanwhile, blaming people for their supposedly bad choices is “a kind of nationwide bullying” that the poor internalize. Bootstrapped puts words to beliefs that I struggled to articulate as a teen and that haunted me into adulthood: Both success and failure were up to me alone, I was valuable only when I triumphed, and if I couldn’t overcome, I’d be better off dead […]
While Henry David Thoreau stayed at Walden Pond — for many, the mecca of American individualism — his mother did his laundry. Ayn Rand, patron saint of libertarians, collected Social Security near the end of her life.
Just as important, Bootstrapped urges readers to rethink their narratives of accomplishment. Quart encourages us to stop shaming others, and ourselves, for needing assistance and to acknowledge the ways we are all interdependent. When I was a teenager, no amount of praise for my tenacity could have replaced the help I received: encouragement from teachers who believed in me, rides from friends’ parents, a few nights in a shelter, and, yes, the financial aid that let me graduate without debt—a modern miracle. There’s a clear irony to a charity that rewards “self-sufficiency,” even as it attests to our deep impulse to help others.
2. The church, too, has been formed by this idea of sufficiency. Successful pastors sometimes perform false humility to counteract their self-conceptions of indispensability. Meanwhile the most conscientious congregations pride themselves on the self-gratifications of their collective generosity. Living and working mostly alone, I make my solitude a spiritual badge of honor. Prone to double-mindedness, even on the days when we’re most surrendered, it is only with immeasurable amounts of help that we can deny our default ways of valuing and measuring ourselves and instead receive ourselves in Christ.
At Christianity Today, Jeff Bilbro asks “in an age of productivity and obsessive optimization, what does it mean to deny the self?” Along with the Gospel of Luke, Walker Percy has some ideas in his wry self-help book Lost in the Cosmos, Bilbro suggests.
Percy’s prescription for deep-seated despair is not to deny the many valid reasons for despair. Rather, Percy seeks to relinquish the myth of the indispensable self.
Percy’s point is that the intrinsic value of our lives does not stem from our productivity or efficacy or perceived importance; when we die to these ways of measuring the self we may be freed to receive life as an immeasurable gift … if we let go of the measurable self, we are freed to receive the given self, and this exchange has profound implications for how we live. In particular, relinquishing the measurable self dethrones the idol of greatness — and its mirror image: paralyzing futility — and allows us to live faithfully without worrying about our potential impact or significance.
If we cling to the myth that we are indispensable, we — both as individuals and institutions — will be tempted by any technology or political movement that promises to extend our reach and make us more effective. If we think that success depends on our efforts, we will turn to the thought leaders and celebrities that have achieved apparent greatness. What productivity hack do they use? What app enables them to maximize their reach? What political strategy have they followed? Aspirations to greatness can justify all manner of means.
All of this talk of bootstraps, false autonomy, and the need for a selfhood that is “received” rather than a selfhood made by our own delusions of optimization reminds me of an incredible short film that I saw at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, courtesy of the Windrider Forum.
Ousmane is the story of a homesick Burkinabé immigrant in Montreal who, after learning of his neighbor Édith’s living conditions and dementia, becomes her caretaker as if she was his own mother. In an interview with the New Yorker, the film’s director said, “I was trying to show this feeling of invisibility that these individuals experience in our society … I also believe that the circumstances involving these characters came to be a way to express ‘feeling inadequate’ in the eyes of the world. A feeling I often experienced in my life.”
3. Speaking of self-renunciation, Elizabeth Bruenig wants to reminds us that the point of Lent “isn’t to hate oneself or one’s world, but rather to relinquish what brings pleasure in favor of what brings peace.”
Vast, cheap, kaleidoscopic pleasure has complex consequences. Almost everything that fits the bill — candy, social media, porn — has a tendency to encourage in some users what we might think of as self-regulatory issues, or trouble with keeping occasional indulgence from developing into full-blown problematic use. Certain pleasures become hard to replicate over time, especially if one can attempt to replicate them in various iterations in short periods. It is perhaps because of so much pleasure that the language of addiction has never been so readily deployed: sugar addiction, social-media addiction, porn addiction. Even if you indulge only moderately in a range of mostly harmless delights, you may still find yourself, like me, a little bereft by the experience. […]
(Sneering at oneself and one’s world is a kind of pleasure in most cases, anyhow.) The purpose of Lenten fasting and mortification — a taboo-sounding word meaning the restraint of desire — isn’t total self-abnegation, nor is it to rebuff, with a self-satisfied kind of piety, modernity. The work of Lenten fasting is more delicate than that. The point isn’t to induce pain, but to help distinguish luxuries — even God-given pleasures — from necessities, sources of enjoyment from sources of nourishment. It’s an inward journey in a superficial era, a season for plainness and restraint in a time of overwhelming pleasure and excess.
Though my family growing up wasn’t Catholic, we rarely ate meat on Fridays during Lent. In high school I gave up watching MTV after school as a means of expressing my devotion, and by college my friends and promised (and failed) not to sneak cigarettes during our study sessions. All grown up, I am trying to extend some of my dry January restraint right on through Easter, but then inevitably Cadbury mini eggs are substituted for cocktails. It all starts to seem a little random, and so it is a consolation to be reminded that the aim of Lenten renunciations is not mastery over the little pleasures of our lives, but the promise of peace and the conditions by which it can be cultivated.
4. Unsurprisingly, for many people this peace comes by silencing their social media and its attendant dopamine hits. In her book Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke emphasizes “that we are now all addicts to a degree. She calls the smartphone the ‘modern-day hypodermic needle’: we turn to it for quick hits, seeking attention, validation and distraction with each swipe, like and tweet.” While adults, many of whom lived many decades without a social network, may be able to pretty well self-regulate and “shut off,” there is growing concern over teenager’s capacity do to as such.
In a concise essay for The Hedgehog Review, Alan Jacobs suggests that, nearly three centuries ago, Scottish enlightenment philosopher David Hume could’ve predicted that the kids wouldn’t be alright on smartphones. The question is: “what exactly smartphones are doing to teens that makes them so miserable?” In his first book, A Treatise of Human Nature (1740), Hume distinguishes between ideas and impressions. Ideas, he says, are the result of thinking and reasoning, which make their first appearance in the mind; while impressions are sensations, passions, emotions, and they make their first appearance in the soul. The world of social media is the world of impressions.
And that’s where Jacobs’ thesis comes in:
The effect of our smartphones on our mind — as those devices are typically used — is to suppress wholly the realm of Ideas, and to suppress greatly the “impressions of the senses,” and instead to stir the passions.
Instagram envy and Twitter doom scrolling are getting the best of us, and especially of teenage girls. Obviously no one wants this for themselves of their kids, but what can be done. Again Hume with a suggestion:
The good or ill accidents of life are very little at our disposal; but we are pretty much masters [of] what books we shall read, what diversions we shall partake of, and what company we shall keep … When a man is possessed of that talent, he is more happy by what pleases his taste, than by what gratifies his appetites, and receives more enjoyment from a poem or a piece of reasoning than the most expensive luxury can afford.
Jacobs with the takeaway:
The cultivation of taste, in morals as well as in art, is neither snobbish nor elitist; it is, rather, the key means by which we emancipate ourselves from the tyranny of passions that the people who make our smartphone apps would like to see dominate us. By cultivating “delicacy of taste,” we become less vulnerable, less manipulable; and as the world of the passions ceases to dominate us, the great domains of Sensation and Idea become available to us once more.
5. At the New Yorker, B.D. McClay reviewed Eleanor Catton’s new novel, Birnam Wood, with some provocative insights along the way on the nature of choosing and self determination:
This willingness to let characters be mistaken — really, lastingly mistaken — is another quality that emerges from Catton’s privileging of human choice. When Tony uncovers proof of Lemoine’s rare-earth mining, he draws reasonable but slightly incorrect conclusions, assuming that Lemoine must be conspiring with Sir Darvish instead of deceiving him. The only people who would be in a position to correct him don’t — and so he carries on with this not false, but not true, version of events to the end. When Rosie Demarney, alone in her apartment, succumbs to an evening of Internet-stalking Tony, she stumbles across evidence that he could be in danger. In a Dickens novel, a character like Rosie might turn out to be pivotal; she’d connect the dots and save the day. Instead, she leaves the story for good. Would you, after all, go on a wild chase for someone you’d just been drunkenly Googling in your sweatpants? Someone you didn’t really know? Would it even matter if you tried?
One of the tragedies that plot brings to light is the degree to which our inner lives and intentions can simply come to nothing — unrealized despite our best efforts, misunderstood and fruitless, as the story we played our part in generating goes on without us. It is only by elevating human choice that we can see how often our choices don’t matter, after all. Or maybe it would be better to say that our choices matter only unpredictably. There’s no way of knowing what will really count until later, and by then it’s too late. Better choose.
6. How about some laughs? Girlfriends, you and your friends will be rolling down nostalgia lane when you read this quick, pithy list: “How I Relate to Emo Lyrics as an Elder Millennial,” by Lindsey Smith. Teaser: Fallout Boys’ “Am I more than you bargained for yet?” now translates to “coming home with a dozen eggs.”
While you’re fondly remembering your baggage-less youth, “Don’t Be Fooled: No Amount of Throw Pillows Will Make You Feel Whole Again.” And finally, on the subject of smartphone use (see above), McSweeney’s had “I Misplaced My Phone for Forty-Five Minutes and Now I’m a Mindfulness Expert.”
7. Wait … Basketball was invented by a presbyterian seminary grad? And ice hockey’s penalty box is a stand-in for the Catholic confessional booth? For this and more fun facts on the intertwining of religion and sports, the Guardian highlights what looks like a fascinating book with some serious #seculosity overtones. I guess Nike’s church of basketball isn’t all that far-fetched after all:
The links between religion and sport, the author argues, can be traced to early days the of ice hockey, basketball, baseball and football. One prominent factor was Muscular Christianity, a philosophy shaped by clergymen of the Church of England who felt that once-rugged young men were growing soft from office work.
“It’s fair to point out that these four major team sports developed around the middle of the 19th century into the middle of the 20th century,” Balmer says. “It’s a crucial period when rules develop and various conventions surrounding these sports begin to emerge. Muscular Christianity was a big part of that.”
As he explains, some clergymen “began to argue for a kind of robust Christianity. They understood it would be to their advantage if men falling away from the church associated their faith with athleticism. It really drives the development of each of the major team sports.”
He calls the invention of basketball “the most obvious example.”
The sport’s founder, Dr James Naismith, was a trained Presbyterian minister who joined a movement called the Young Men’s Christian Association, now known as the YMCA. Naismith was on the faculty of the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1891, Dr Luther Gulick, the head of the college, gave his protege an assignment: Create an indoor game for bored young men between the football and baseball seasons. With players trying to shoot a ball into peach baskets, the new game proved popular among men and women from its early years. It became a global sensation through the Y.
Strays:
- The global podcasting market size grew from $20.14 billion in 2022 to $25.85 billion in 2023 at a compound annual growth rate of 28.4%. Can the popularity of podcasts be somewhat attributed to a decline in third spaces, defined by Ray Oldenburg as where you relax in public, where you encounter familiar faces and make new acquaintances? Fast Company seems to think so, saying that: “A relationship formed at a third place is typically reciprocal, but a podcast creates what’s been called a “parasocial” (or one-sided) relationship that transcends constraints of time and place.”
- This month’s Harper’s Index reports some wild, yet not altogether shocking stats: Percentage of toy sales that can be attributed to adults buying toys for themselves: 14%; Percentage increase since 2013 in average household spending on pets: 67%.
- Jenny Odell Can Stretch Time and So Can You: A conversation with the writer and artist on her new book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, collective burnout, and ways to live off the clock.
- She Said and Women Talking examine the collective power of women’s words for a MeToo era.
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