#21: How Do You Understand a World That Won't Sit Still?
Fast consumption is wearing out my attention, my critical thinking, and my wardrobe
Do you have an unhinged domestic behavior?1 Mine is that I hang dry 90% of my clothing. I’ve done this for over a decade to the frustration of many a roommate. The practice is time-consuming, space-consuming, and laborious (especially during my fifth floor walk-up years when I schlepped bags of damp clothing home from the laundromat to hang dry on garment racks). I wish I could tell you that the motivation was environmental. It’s not—though energy and cost savings are benefits. Nothing in my wardrobe is pricey enough to warrant this care. I just really, really love my clothes and want them to last as long as possible.
You can imagine, then, the horror I felt a few years ago when some of my repurchased staple items (t-shirts, denim, bras) started showing signs of wear much sooner than their predecessors. My neurotic laundering couldn’t be blamed, that was a constant. The changing variable had to be the quality of the clothing. Stemming from this realization, I started noticing how most goods, from my shoes to my pans to my computer, didn’t seem as durable as they had versions prior.
At the beginning of this year, Vox published an article about this very phenomenon, citing the cult of consumerism’s role in declining product quality. The apt headline: “Your stuff is actually worse now.” I think about this article once a week.2 We’re perpetuators of a vicious cycle: consumers demand new designs, corporations produce news designs. Consumers want more stuff, brands want us to want more stuff. Prices must be consistent and affordable, so quality and laborers suffer instead.
For someone like myself who makes careful purchasing decisions and delights in artisanship and the curation of personal effects over decades,3 this is a devastating new normal.
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I took an unintended hiatus from writing this month. I endured my first bout of writer’s block. Even when I’ve neglected writing as a practice in the past, I’ve always been filled to the brim with ideas and opinions. That enviable “flow” state that so many people search for was guaranteed when I sat down at a keyboard, like magic. This month was different. I still had plenty of ideas, but they felt jumbled and difficult to articulate. I’d sit down to write and my focus waned. I’d struggle to find the right words and quit instead of pushing ahead.
This creative impediment coincided with an awareness that I was taking in too much online input. An unsustainable amount of newsletters and TikToks and Instagram Stories and Reddit forums and tweets. I became a diseased sponge absorbing every opinion and every feeling from every source on every topic. As if I consumed all the candy bars displayed in the supermarket checkout line and wondered hours later what caused the unpleasant buzz. This chaotic intake of information was clearly scrambling my output.
This experience felt particularly on-the-nose, given the newsletter in question I struggled to write examined the collective disillusion we’re experiencing with the Internet (and social media and technology by association). Earlier this month Katie Notopoulos broke down the demise of online discourse in her prescriptive MIT Technology Review piece, “How to fix the internet.” Kyle Chayka wrote about why being online isn’t fun anymore. Once a new land to be explored, our digital terrain is now exploited. “The Internet today feels emptier, like an echoing hallway, even as it is filled with more content than ever,” Chayka writes, observing the hierarchal nature that social media favors, firmly dividing audiences and creators. “In large part, this is because a handful of giant social networks have taken over the open space of the Internet, centralizing and homogenizing our experiences through their own opaque and shifting content-sorting systems.”
In the same vein as Notopoulos and Chayka,
muses,I’m thinking about how nobody shares on the web anymore, outside of a small percentage of influencers and brands with big content marketing budgets… Where are the spaces where you can share the process of thinking, not just the finished thought? Spaces that are less about projecting authority and more about individuals weaving the threads of their mind and connecting different ideas. More curious and iterative, less defensive and definitive?
Given the flush of think pieces and my subsequent block, I’ve been ruminating on how I use the Internet. I pin images and bookmark webpages with the assumption that I will revisit them. I rarely do. I watch things, I read things, and I promptly forget. I’ve long rationalized that, much like the unremarkable daily minutia that compounds to a life (doing the dishes, walking the dog), much of what I consumed online—and then abandoned—was still critical in shaping who I am, my tastes, my preferences. The very romantic notion of carving a marble sculpture and becoming something original from a uniform block. You don’t pay mind to the pieces that are chipped away or the instrument doing the chipping.
I worry about how I engage with all this ephemerality, what it’s doing to my brain and my disposition. What it means to flit through news and trend cycles in a matter of hours instead of weeks or months without time to really process or consider the quality of what’s being offered. To routinely absorb more wounded stories than scarred perspectives. A sentiment I can’t shake: if the Internet is forever, why are its contents disposable?
I’m troubled not just by the speed and ease we procure information and goods, but the transitory qualities of them. Qualities that inform and teach us how to interact with them. We dispose of that which we don’t value or respect. Why mend a cheap sweater knowing that another can be procured with a few taps of the finger? Why take time to understand an incomplete news story knowing that a revised version (or something even more sensational) will soon replace it? How do you understand a world that won’t sit still?
For Dirt, Mariah Kreutter writes,
Social media encourages us to think of every thought we have as interesting; it makes everyone else feel accessible, and therefore disposable; it exposes us to endless bad actors, hardening our hearts and compelling us to suspect the worst; it rewards vulnerability, but also incentivizes defensiveness… It is easy to forget how to talk to a person, because you’re not talking to a person: you’re Replying. Everyone involved is either an abstraction, an ideal, [or] entertainment
Kreutter strikes upon my biggest fear: at what point will we start viewing other people the same as our sweaters or our inboxes: one dimensional, fleeting and replaceable? Are we already there?
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A couple weeks ago I removed all social apps from my phone. They’re still reachable on desktop, but I find myself less aroused by the prospect of scrolling when they’re not on my person. In my downtime, I’m prioritizing slow engagement with materials that have been lovingly assembled by trusted and empathetic people. Books, old movies, documentaries, in-depth reporting by subject matter experts. I’m spending the extra time doing—what else?—laundry. We talk about slow living, I needed slow consumption. I needed parameters put in place to digest ideas over time and not let them crash over me. And, of course, I needed to write.
Writing always helps.
How you understand a world that won’t sit still? You sit still and take notes about what you see.
Sidewalk Reporting
Happy Halloween!!! A couple weeks ago I spotted TikTok’s favorite spooky celebrity at Target. Two teen girls rushed in front of me. “We found him,” one gasped. She pressed the button a dozen times until his signature catchphrase, “I am not a jack-o-lantern. My name is LEW-IS,” echoed throughout the Halloween department. Bless them for saving me the chore.
Kindly disregard typos, as they are actually small prayers to the universe that one day my writing will support an editor’s salary
Inspired by the revelation that David Beckham’s “pet hate” is an unkempt candle. He trims wicks and wipes the vessels clean nightly
I wanted to wedge this in: Amanda Mull wrote an excellent companion piece of sorts for The Atlantic this month about quality decline in sweaters
And let’s be honest, someone who strongly dislikes change that they cannot control!!!