Week In Review

Another Week Ends

Comparathons, Acceptance, More Norm Macdonald, Anne Lamott, and the Real Reason for Hope

CJ Green / 9.24.21

1. As terrified as I am of Facebook and the other less-than-benign gods in our machines, I am equally as tired of the panicked commotion about them. For one thing, it usually comes from people who use such platforms. But also there’s an element of smoke and mirrors — of avoiding what’s really going on, beyond corporate subterfuge. Which is what makes Kat Rosenfield’s recent remarks so remarkable: in an article for the Spectator, she responds to this week’s major news that Facebook knows full well its deleterious effects, especially on young women, having acknowledged that “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.” But as Rosenfield writes, it’s not just Facebook who already knew this.

[T]he biggest surprise about all of this is that anyone finds it surprising at all. Making young women hate themselves has always been a highly lucrative business — and the only new thing here is the technology they’re using to do it. […]

None of this is to say that the toxicity of Instagram is fake news. It’s more like old news, a social phenomenon that has existed for as long as young women have competed with each other to be the prettiest, fittest, most attractive, most accomplished — which is to say, for as long as society itself has existed. Does this relentless comparathon make girls feel shitty about all the ways in which they don’t measure up? Of course it does! It always has.

Yet if you tried to put an end to it, you’d find fierce resistance from the very people you were ostensibly trying to protect. Even as readers are still reeling from the litany of stories about the destructive power of Instagram, the WSJ drops this tidbit: ‘Many of the teens interviewed for this article said they didn’t want Instagram to disappear.’

Girls may suffer under this system of ruthless social competition, but they are also undeniably complicit in it, in a way that all the descriptions of Instagram as ‘addictive’ or ‘toxic’ or ‘harmful’ fails to capture. The app giveth as much as it taketh away. Social media might be a compulsion, but it is also a choice, one that users are drawn to keep making because they do get something out of it.

I’m reminded of what Oliver Burkeman writes in his newest book 4,000 Weeks, re: distraction. Yes, social media distracts us, and yes, we want to be distracted. Again, it doesn’t exonerate the major powers of their insidious legacies, but “Something in us wants to be distracted, whether by our digital devices or anything else — to not spend our lives on what we thought we cared about the most. The calls are coming from inside the house.”

2. If that sounds a tad dark, stay with me … More about Burkeman’s book: It’s about time management, or mismanagement; how we respond to our mortality by not responding to it, by occupying precious time with trivial matters. In a recent interview about the book, Burkeman (in the spirit of efficiency) boiled down his entire project to one word — actually, two:

Uri Bram: …I was wondering if in one word — exactly one word — you could tell us how to make peace with mortality and the finitude of our time on earth.

Oliver Burkeman: [laughs] … I guess it would have to be: surrender, or accept. … to confront the fact that we have a short amount of time and not much ability to control how time unfolds or to plan for the future. To just drop back down into reality on these matters and to withstand some of the discomfort of that — not so that you then say “life sucks and there’s no point trying to do anything,” but precisely so that you can get some purchase on life and use your time and attention to do some things that matter.

3. At the New York Times, Mathew Walther pushes this idea — beyond acceptance, to jubilation. He’s reflecting on Norm Macdonald, last week’s obituaries of Norm Macdonald, and what most of them missed about his life and work, his Christianity. According to Walther, “the Christian dimension in [Macdonald’s] work was implicit and offhand,” most evident in his “belief in the intrinsic metaphysical dignity of the human person.” But there was also his quiet acceptance of suffering, and through humor, a manifest claim to resurrection.

Perhaps the most obviously Christian element of Mr. Macdonald’s legacy was his quiet acceptance of what we now know were nine years of cancer, from which he died without acknowledging his illness in public. (The closest he ever came to referring to his disease was in a stand-up bit that mocked the fashionable rhetoric of “battling” cancer: “I’m not a doctor, but I’m pretty sure if you die, the cancer dies at the same time. That’s not a loss. That’s a draw.”) Unlike secular ethical systems — stoicism, for example — Christianity almost uniquely invites its adherents to find value in suffering because it allows us to unite ourselves with Christ in his Crucifixion.

But the acknowledgment of suffering is not the final goal of Christian religion, which ultimately derives its meaning from the joy of Christ’s Resurrection. In the early centuries of the church, Christians were mocked by their pagan fellow citizens for a kind of blithe silliness that reminded them of drunkards. Even in his final years of pain, Mr. Macdonald, too, exhibited an almost Falstaffian joie de vivre. “At times, the joy that life attacks me with is unbearable and leads to gasping hysterical laughter,” he told his Twitter followers in 2018. “How could a man be a cynic? It is a sin.”

4. As for that sin of cynicism, author Anne Lamott has some advice to combat it. Yesterday Time featured a new interview with Lamott, who in typical fashion shared some old wisdom in fresh, very funny language. Most exceptional is her staunch refusal to point the finger outward, despite identifying as an “unabashed” political activist.

SS: How do we keep from falling into a pit of cynicism?

AL: I wanted to start my book, ‘it’s all hopeless,’ because a couple of things can be true at once. It really feels completely hopeless. And at the same time, I always turn to the serenity prayer which says, ‘grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,’ which is 99.9% of things, ‘and the courage to change the things I can.’

I tell my writing students, you start where you are. You start where your feet are. And that means, ‘what can I do today?’

I find a place to land. I land in my faith. I land in my political activism. I land in my understanding that the people about 15 minutes from where I live are having extreme food deficits. So what I will probably do is to go to Safeway and fill up a couple of bags of canned food and dried food and, of course, Oreos.

And I practice radical self-care. I’m making myself a really delicious breakfast, I’ve boiled some eggs, and I’m gonna have egg salad with lots of mayonnaise. I think fat is delicious, fats are one of the communion elements. And I’ll see how I can be of service today.

SS: There’s a lot of anger in the U.S. right now. Does it get to you?

AL: There’s a chapter in the book based on what Martin Luther King said, which was, ‘don’t let them get you to hate them.’ Once you let them get you to hate them, you’re doomed, you’ve lost your center, you’ve lost all that is wonderful and true and sweet and dear and probably messy about your life. …

SS: I loved what you wrote about the ‘third third of life,’ and how it has changed your perspective.

AL: I’m 67. There are a lot of things I really don’t love. I don’t love the upper arms. I’m a really religious woman, and I’m obsessed with the fact that my upper arms just look like hell.

But what I do love about being older are the blessings of myopia — I can’t see as much of what’s wrong with everybody else as I used to be able to. […]

SS: Do you still have feelings of unworthiness even with all the bounty in your life?

AL: I will always have episodes of low self-esteem and self-loathing and not-enoughedness and self-recriminations. But the thing about the third third is that [those episodes] last so much shorter. They might last for a few hours instead of my entire 20s.

…when [my husband] Neal is doing one of his know-it-all things, and I want to correct him, I’m the crazy person. If you’ve got a problem, you gotta go look in the mirror. Same with what we were talking about earlier, the anger. It’s not them. They are not my problem.

SS: My fantasy is to escape to another place or country where I’ll definitely be nicer.

AL: If it’s out there, it’s not gonna work. If it’s another country, if it’s a perfect spouse, if it’s a perfect diet, if it’s out there, it’s gonna work only for part of a day.

It’s not out there. No, it’s an inside job… Horribly, horribly. It’s an inside job.

5. Sometimes I reflect on the funny fact that, in April 2020, the theme of Mockingbird’s first canceled conference was Hope. The theme had been chosen in response to the doomsaying and doom-scrolling that became routine before anyone had even heard of COVID-19. In hindsight, Hope’s cancelation feels ironic, smirk-worthy, but at the time, it was starkly symbolic of how many of us felt; even now, it can feel as if Hope is canceled. This week, Christian thinkers were wrestling with the gravity and prevalence of this feeling. At the Atlantic, Arthur Brooks emphasized why it’s so important to have hope:

Hope is more than a “nice to have” for well-being; lacking it is disastrous. In a 2001 study of older Mexican and European Americans who took a survey between 1992 and 1996, 29 percent of those whom researchers classified as “hopeless” based on their survey answers had died by 1999, versus 11 percent of those who were hopeful — even after correcting for age and self-rated health status.

As for the way Brooks defines hope — it’s iffy. For Brooks, hope is “a conviction that one can act to make things better in some way.” It’s not an unusual way of thinking about the topic. This week Christianity Today, for example, ran an article titled, “Don’t Wait for Hope. Work for It.” Seems natural for such claims to circulate during a time when — at least online — hope feels scant. But defining hope as a matter of personal agency seems distinctly un-hopeful. For me, at least, hope is a gift of faith; it’s something that exists completely independent of me and my doings — and I thank God for that.

6. This looks spooky and RAD:

7. Here in Virginia, sultry summer air has given way to crisp autumnal breezes. As such, this New Yorker cartoon hits all too close to home. And so does “Behold, I Have Returned From a Hike!”

Lastly, there’s “How to Handle Rejection Like a Professional.” You could always “Make rejection your brand and try to monetize that somehow.” Failing all that, try reading David Zahl’s recently published essay on the topic:

Funny as it sounds (and painful as it feels!), every rejection you experience now brings you closer to the heart of God in a way that you can hardly imagine.

Strays: