TPO#5: New Beginnings in a Dry Month
So.
It’s a new year, and with it there is the inevitable talk of renewal. If you’re rolling your eyes, I understand. There is something about resolutions — or new starts, self-help, life advice — that people who self-define as “smart” often eschew, and for good reason. We all know “a new you” is a key way in which capitalist structures either prey on or produce insecurities, to which they always conveniently have a solution.
But perhaps renewal is still worth thinking about. After all, TPO isn’t a clearing house for the detritus of my mind; it is a newsletter about modernity and living the good life. And as someone forever somehow uneasy with both my life and myself, how to make things better is a topic I think about a lot.
Recently, at my friend Denise‘s 40th birthday party, my other friend Neil and I found ourselves chatting (in a very loud bar behind a fake gift shop) about happiness — about why, despite being comparatively fortunate and privileged, we found it very hard to be content. No doubt, part of it is the ennui born of privilege itself: the fact that one is not only surrounded by success, comfort, or wealth, but that it can feel as if that same privilege does little to help you actually address the ills of the world. Something Neil astutely pointed out, though, is that now that we have moved out of postmodernism and into whatever we live in now, it is also easy to feel ideologically adrift, particularly if one is older and was raised under a different set of assumptions. Even the theoretical anchors we once had have slipped loose: If you spent your life paying close attention to how signs signify, or how discourse and ideology are linked, what do you when the material experience of those things have shifted significantly?
So. How does one find a ground?
Anna Codrea-Rado writes a very good newsletter for freelancers, a group of people who often need help when it comes to setting goals. I think Anna has some plain, simple, but very good advice.
First, on the type of goals one sets:
…of all the reading I’ve done about goals, what’s really stuck with me is the importance of distinguishing between an outcome goal and a process goal. An outcome goal is something that you don’t have control over whether you reach it. For example, “get a book deal”, “write for the New Yorker”, “lose 10lbs” are all outcome goals. Whereas, “email ten book agents”, “send five magazine pitches a week”, “go to the gym three times a week” are all process goals. It’s fine to set outcome goals, but make sure you also set process goals that you actually have control over.
And then, about why one should set a goal at all:
Set a goal you actually want, not the one you think you should do. I truly believe that the real reason why people don’t meet their goals is that they set the wrong ones. Or, at least, were motivated by the wrong things. Comparison culture has led many of us to think we want certain professional achievements because we should be doing them. As writers, there’s an assumption that we “should” want to write a book or get bylines in certain publications but that’s not the case the for everyone.
Substitute “byline” or “book” for whatever you’re into. Again, not groundbreaking, but a good reminder, whether January or December.
Navigating the Miasma
Last newsletter, I asked what some of you do to mitigate the effect of screens. A couple of you responded! And brilliantly, too.
Kat Eschner, who is an excellent writer and fellow freelancer, had an intriguing suggestion when we met for drinks a while ago: deliberately reading mulitple things at once in order to hit different a variety of emotional and intellectual registers. Kat says that if you just focus on, say, one book, that might target the same parts of you that work addresses, leaving you drained. But what if you need multiple things at once? i.e. something novel, something challenging etc. I really like this idea, in part because it reframes how one approaches media as about finding what you need, rather than a diet of things with which you feel you should be engaging.
Meanwhile, my dear friend Angela, who may well be the personification of the phrase “too smart for their own good,” had this to offer about sustained attention, physicality, and habits. Angela is so insightful and interesting I think it’s worth excerpting a big chunk:
All the desires that digital evokes in me are brutally episodic, with no over arching meta narrative of desire… Maybe there’s a difference in how desire is structured between my digital and material experiences. My hobbies cultivate and work to satisfy a kind of long-term desire. There are episodic satisfactions of learning a song or completing a painting, but there’s the ultimate satisfaction of mastery that is in perpetual deferral, or improvement whose path seems infinite…
I think that’s where the discipline comes in with maintaining hobbies: cultivating a desire you know you can’t satisfy. As opposed to satisfying small desires in a kind of death driven repetition. Solitaire wins. Likes. Comments. Chuckles. Clever memes. GIFs. It’s different for people who have tied digital to their careers and they’ve set metrics goals, or people who have cultivated deep relationships out of an updated kind of epistolary structure. But for me, the intersubjective relationality that digital offers rarely produces intimacy, and when it does it’s a kind of intimacy that is akin to the intimacy of low stakes, shallow friendships that I have in, say, my neighbourhood…
How to mitigate the effects of tech? Maybe I do have an answer even though I’m bad at implementing it. Pay attention to how it structures your desire, and figure out what’s unsatisfying about its satisfactions, and seek pleasures of materiality and deferral outside your device, preferably things that require your whole body to move.
Obviously, my experience of digitality is different from Angela’s. I have found connection and depth and intimacy through screens, both in terms of people and language. But I love how this pays attention to both the screen as a structuring mechanism, and also the material differences between one good thing and another. As I say on Peach all the time, I am so lucky to know such good people.
Netflix and Wine
I am, for a variety of reasons, doing the whole “Dry January” thing this year. I love wine and cocktails and beer and whisky and bourbon and gin and uhh… But it’s easy to forget that alcohol is both a drug and a carcinogen and not just a thing with which to treat oneself (how’s that for a doubled meaning?). So I am going to skip the wine recommendations for this month’s newsletters. Some, plain, simple reccos for the new year, though.
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It is on Amazon Prime, not Netflix, but if you haven’t seen Booksmart, rectify that. It is the perfect teen movie, and may make you ache for how new everything felt in high school, even if only briefly.
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I don’t exactly know how I feel about Nikki Glaser and her brand of comedy, but if nothing else her episode on Netflix’s The Degenerates at least shows how to do a good #metoo joke.
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When I was going through a rough time a few years ago, I watched Katherine Ryan’s In Trouble about… oh, 20 times. It isn’t perfect: I think Ryan is the epitome of that phrase “white feminism.” But I have a soft spot for it and Ryan who, despite having earned her fame in the U.K., is from Southern Ontario. There are some very solid jokes in this, too.
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Support the Girls is that ideal little indie movie that, if it hits you at the right time, might be just what you need. Regina Hall in particular is excellent in the film.
Ephemera
- Via my Dad (???), this is a fascinating look at how India became part of the Persian world for hundreds of years after around 1200. Even now, I’m amazed at how many Persian words are part of Punjabi (which, if you don’t know, is my parents’ first language). It also stands in stark contrast to the parochial Hindu nationalism that is currently dominating India.
- Haley Mlotek is among my favourite writers, and also may well be the coolest person I kinda sorta know. Last year, she went to England to discover the history and the future of the famed Barbour jacket and wrote about it for Esquire. Among other things, I just really like the idea that the jacket produces “a unified theory of casually contradictory Western elegance: royalty prized for seeming, somehow, ordinary and ordained.”
That is it for this week, friends. Just an admin note: for you brilliant people who have paid subscriptions, I’ve had some trouble with folks being double charged. I’m working on getting it fixed; please let me know if you’ve had this problem (though I do refund pretty quickly).