Find a better god

Feb 27, 2021

I spent the entirety of my twenties being Extremely Online. For years, the events of the news cycle had either a literal effect on my day (I had to write about them in some direct or tangential way) or a psychological one (I was not able to look away). Of course, I knew that paying so much attention to the news and the dysfunction of New York / London media was pathological and unhealthy, but I was so devoted to the person I was trying to become, I just saw it as an occupational hazard.

In September, when I resigned from my full time reporting job, I spent the first few weeks mildly terrified. I had resigned because I wanted to be able to log off, but immediately I was like an addict in withdrawal, listless and tetchy, and looking for a replacement. Would I feel relevant if I detached from this daily assault of news? Would I still want to write? What about? Would anyone care what I had to say if it was not neatly pitched with a hook to the trending news of the day? Would anyone open my emails if I ceased being A Person Who Tweeted A Lot?

It took about two months to stop reflexively scanning the morning news, filled with dread, to determine if anything was going to massively alter my planned workday. And another month before I finally logged off from Twitter (initially it was going to be for a month, I’ve mostly stayed off since). Six months since leaving that job, I feel like I’m exiting the withdrawal phase of the exercise and now entering a brain space that is less defined by what people are outraged about online. I am taken aback by how different I feel.

A year ago, as the world was falling apart, my identity as a person who staked her identity online had just started to unravel as well. I couldn’t figure out where I went wrong. Twelve months later, I realize that the problem was not due to anything I did, the problem was that I thought I would ever find what I was looking for there. The kinds of things I crave — indeed, what we all crave — cannot be bestowed online or through a career staked on the internet. I needed to “grow up, log off, and find a better god,” as this great piece about cancel culture by Rich Juzwiak so perfectly put it.

I know this probably sounds extremely obvious to some, but it is difficult, when you genuinely love to write and tell stories, to separate that act from the accompanying online life that is required to make a living doing it. That life is one that comes with increasingly high psychological costs and diminishing stability.

Joan Didion famously wrote “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking” and I feel much the same. But it’s only very recently that I realized how much “what I’m thinking” was influenced by 11 years of life extremely online. How much I learned to couch my words and bend my stance to avoid a situation where I might be misinterpreted and canceled on Twitter, or have to deal with days of angry and abusive emails from baby boomer-aged white men named Craig and Mike. How I learned to create pithy sentiments and takes rather than the kinds of sprawling, nuanced thoughts that more accurately reflect the contents of my brain. How often the expectation that I create those neat arguments on demand meant I ended up arguing something I didn’t actually think.

And is it just me, or has the internet gotten worse recently? It used to just be media people that were at once caustic and hypersensitive online — now it feels like everyone is. I read comments on Instagram (the only social media I’m still on, with self-imposed limits) and notice how people either 100% identify with a given viewpoint, or the person espousing it is an absolute monster. I see people preemptively apologizing for existing, lest they offend someone in their followers by straying from unspoken expectations. I see people creating content out of a kind of frayed exhaustion, where if they stepped back and looked at what they were doing in a vacuum they would agree: It’s time to log off. Both sides of the transaction — creator and follower, writer and reader, poster and scroller — aren’t getting what they want, but neither of them can seem to get enough of it.

We are all looking for certainty, connection, and compassion in a place that is not equipped to give us those things. I also suspect we’ve all been online for so long, aided and abetted by for-profit internet companies that sell our attention, that we’ve forgotten how to think for ourselves. That’s the part I’m trying to get back. I’m trying to make the act writing less synonymous with the act of being online, and think about what that may mean for a career. (Please don’t ask me to answer that yet.) I’m also trying to respond less eagerly to what the online space demands of me, which is why many days right now I can barely respond to text messages from people I know, let alone send tweets to people I don’t.

It’s early days, but I have a sense that truly thinking for myself — which, ideally, leads to writing things that feel meaningful and not just reactive to the internet machine — is not just a cerebral exercise. It’s a full body and mind endeavor. It requires quite a bit of time. It’s a delicate balance of input versus output, rest versus productivity, being versus doing, silence versus noise. I see now how the first decade of my career only allowed for one side of those.

People often tell me I should send this newsletter more often. While I am flattered, I tell them that’s impossible. The particular kind of writing I do here is the kind I have to feel in my life, in my body, in a ripple through my worldview first. If I stopped doing that, and just sat down to write it so I could hit send when scheduled, I don’t think they would like it so much anymore.

Things I wrote

The last edition of this newsletter was quoted in the New York Times this month, which was something. Thanks to my former colleague Corinne for the shout-out, and welcome to the new followers here.

I’m guilty of telling pretty much everyone I know that they should go to therapy. Which makes me wonder: Why do we all need so much therapy? What went wrong? I wrote about it for Forge.

Things I read

I can’t entirely explain to you why you should read Ann Patchett’s account of having Tom Hanks’ personal assistant as a pandemic house guest but I can assure you your life will be better as a result. [Harpers]
Physical pain can be “all in your head” — but that doesn’t mean it’s not real. [Slate]
“Something you always hear in twelve-step rooms is that religion is for people who are afraid of going to Hell, and spirituality is for people who have already been there. Most of the people who follow both of us have been to Hell—or are in it.” Ariel levy on Glennon Doyle is goooood. [New Yorker]
Everything is broken. As a result, “we should seek out friction and thorniness, hunt for complexity and delight in unpredictability.” [Tablet Mag]
A genuinely fascinating (and at times unexpected) read about why Covid hasn’t yet affected parts of the world — namely India and Africa — as badly as modeling suggested. [New Yorker]
On rethinking what we call erotic. [Esther Perel]
On the peripatetic lifestyle as a way of running from yourself. [The Guardian]
Is it wise to dwell on the versions of our lives we just narrowly missed living? [New Yorker]

Things I enjoyed listening to

I have not yet read Katherine May’s book Wintering (I think I’m going to save it for next November), but I love thinking of our pandemic year as a “one big extended communal experience of wintering.” [On Being]
Louis Theroux’s quarantine podcast Grounded has some amazing female creatives as guests, if you can get past his bumbling Britishness. I loved his conversations with FKA Twigs, SIA, and the astonishingly self-possessed Michaela Coel.
The pandemic has changed yoga from a collective experience into a primarily solo one. But it’s worth remembering that the yoga studio as we know it has little to do with yoga’s origins. [The Cut]

A small you can do to support this newsletter, if you want

I’ve started curating lists of the books I’ve read and liked on Bookshop.org. If you buy a book using the link on one of my lists, I get a cut, and the book comes from an independent bookshop, rather than Amazon. I will continue to update this as I read. (Note: this probably only works if you’re in the UK, but there is a US version of the site if you’re trying to avoid Amazon, which you should.)

Word Soup

“My process is very small. I do one thing at a time. I never work on two things at a time and I have to really have a deep connection and belief in the thing I’m making. And often that begins with me.” —Michaela Coel

Thank you for reading. If you enjoy this newsletter, will you kindly share it on social media or forward it to a friend or two who may also enjoy it? The subscribe link is here.