sociologicallyinsignificant - Tumblr blog

[sociologicallyinsignificant]

My cat Meowy Oliver plans to spend her one wild and precious life tucked in with her heated blanket.

Very upsetting that on this fresh morning in this broken world I am subjected to emails

[sociologicallyinsignificant]

my bf messaged me at 3 am to inform me that he'd purchased a pillowtop mattress pad. i mentioned some 5 months ago that his bed was really hard on my body, that i really missed my bed whenever i visited him, and that i had gone so far as debated buying a twin mattress pad for my side. i always sort of jokingly say that I miss my bed whenever i have to sleep somewhere else: his house, a friend’s house, an airbnb, a hotel. i love my bed. im touched that he’s trying to make his space more comfortable for me.

relatedly, i asked him if i could bring all 5 of my cats with me for our upcoming visit so that i wouldn’t have to miss them. he told me duh if it meant that i might stay longer. 

[sociologicallyinsignificant]

i was outside talking to my neighbor Sammy earlier, and we were talking about how the murder trial is finally starting on Monday. Apparently the DA (I think?) had called him recently to ask about the sweatshirt found at the scene; Sammy had said he had thought it was mine, that he’d remembered me taking it off and using it to put pressure on Mike’s bullet wounds. For a horrified minute I thought they were asking so that it could be given back to me. I realize now they probably just wanted to clarify if it belonged to Mike or Kendall.

It is really weird being on the periphery of a traumatic event. I’m not Mike’s family; I was just his neighbor. 

[sociologicallyinsignificant]

I do not hate my body, because such a thing would be pointless, shortsighted. You cannot hate an animal for what she is, especially one who bears your ungrateful mind through this terrible world. And anyway, how do you hate something who marks her territory so dramatically, with such violence and panache? Who reminds you, with each step, I am here, I am here, I am here?

Carmen Maria Machado Unruly, Adjective

[sociologicallyinsignificant]

“The modern Millennial, for the most part, views adulthood as a series of actions, as opposed to a state of being,” an article in Elite Daily explains. “Adulting therefore becomes a verb.” “To adult” is to complete your to-do list — but everything goes on the list, and the list never ends. “I’m really struggling to find the Christmas magic this year,” one woman in a Facebook group focused on self-care recently wrote. “I have two little kids (2 and 6 months) and, while we had fun reading Christmas books, singing songs, walking around the neighborhood to look at lights, I mostly feel like it’s just one to-do list superimposed over my already overwhelming to-do list. I feel so burned out. Commiseration or advice?” That’s one of the most ineffable and frustrating expressions of burnout: It takes things that should be enjoyable and flattens them into a list of tasks, intermingled with other obligations that should either be easily or dutifully completed. The end result is that everything, from wedding celebrations to registering to vote, becomes tinged with resentment and anxiety and avoidance. Maybe my inability to get the knives sharpened is less about being lazy and more about being too good, for too long, at being a millennial. There are a few ways to look at this original problem of errand paralysis. Many of the tasks millennials find paralyzing are ones that are impossible to optimize for efficiency. Other tasks become difficult because of too many options, and what’s come to be known as “decision fatigue.”  Other tasks are, well, boring. I’ve done them too many times. The payoff from completing them is too small. Boredom with the monotony of labor is usually associated with physical and/or assembly line jobs, but it’s widespread among “knowledge workers.” As Caroline Beaton, who has written extensively about millennials and labor, points out, the rise of the “knowledge sector” has simply “changed the medium of monotony from heavy machinery to digital technology. … We habituate to the modern workforce’s high intensity but predictable tasks. Because the stimuli don’t change, we cease to be stimulated. The consequence is two-fold. First, like a kind of Chinese water torture, each identical thing becomes increasingly painful. In defense, we become decreasingly engaged.” My refusal to respond to a kind Facebook DM is thus symptomatic of the sheer number of calls for my attention online: calls to read an article, calls to promote my own work, calls to engage wittily or defend myself from trolls or like a relative’s picture of their baby.

Anne Helen Peterson How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation 

[sociologicallyinsignificant]

All of this optimization — as children, in college, online — culminates in the dominant millennial condition, regardless of class or race or location: burnout. “Burnout” was first recognized as a psychological diagnosis in 1974, applied by psychologist Herbert Freudenberger to cases of “physical or mental collapse caused by overwork or stress.” Burnout is of a substantively different category than “exhaustion,” although it’s related. Exhaustion means going to the point where you can’t go any further; burnout means reaching that point and pushing yourself to keep going, whether for days or weeks or years. What’s worse, the feeling of accomplishment that follows an exhausting task — passing the final! Finishing the massive work project! — never comes. “The exhaustion experienced in burnout combines an intense yearning for this state of completion with the tormenting sense that it cannot be attained, that there is always some demand or anxiety or distraction which can’t be silenced,” Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst specializing in burnout, writes. “You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless.” One of the ways to think through the mechanics of millennial burnout is by looking closely at the various objects and industries our generation has supposedly “killed.”We’ve “killed” diamonds because we’re getting married later (or not at all), and if or when we do, it’s rare for one partner to have the financial stability to set aside the traditional two months’ salary for a diamond engagement ring. We’re killing antiques, opting instead for “fast furniture” — not because we hate our grandparents’ old items, but because we’re chasing stable employment across the country, and lugging old furniture and fragile china costs money that we don’t have. We’ve exchanged sit-down casual dining (Applebee’s, TGI Fridays) for fast casual (Chipotle et al.) because if we’re gonna pay for something, it should either be an experience worth waiting in line for (Cronuts! World-famous BBQ! Momofuku!) or efficient as hell. Even the trends millennials have popularized — like athleisure — speak to our self-optimization. Yoga pants might look sloppy to your mom, but they’re efficient: You can transition seamlessly from an exercise class to a Skype meeting to child pickup. We use Fresh Direct and Amazon because the time they save allows us to do more work. This is why the fundamental criticism of millennials — that we’re lazy and entitled — is so frustrating: We hustle so hard that we’ve figured out how to avoid wasting time eating meals and are called entitled for asking for fair compensation and benefits like working remotely (so we can live in affordable cities), adequate health care, or 401(k)s (so we can theoretically stop working at some point before the day we die). We’re called whiny for talking frankly about just how much we do work, or how exhausted we are by it. But because overworking for less money isn’t always visible — because job hunting now means trawling LinkedIn, because “overtime” now means replying to emails in bed — the extent of our labor is often ignored, or degraded.

Anne Helen Petersen How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation 

[sociologicallyinsignificant]

“Abortion care workers and pregnancy options counselors have long acknowledged that abortion involves a kind of death. Charlotte Taft, former president of the Abortion Care Network and a pioneering abortion provider and counselor, notes that just as joy and relief can show up in abortion experiences, “there can [also] be grief, because we are talking about death, about not carrying a life forward, and we don’t know how to talk about the ending of life in a way that honors life.” Melissa Madera, founder of The Abortion Diary, echoes Taft; Madera has listened to hundreds of people tell their abortion stories, and she notes that feelings about death can play a part in those stories. “Even though this is not a being that exists in the world already,” Madera told me, “we’re deciding whether or not life will go on—and there is death involved in that, in order to choose life, or a different life, for yourself.””

[sociologicallyinsignificant]

Alissa Quart at New York Magazine defines hipster sexism as “the objectification of women but in a manner that uses mockery, quotation marks, and paradox: the stuff you learned about in literature class.” In other words, it’s ironic, and this is what separates hipster spaces that use sexualised imagery from long-standing beacons of cheerful lechery like Hooters. ‘Hipster spaces’ is a murky and unfortunate phrase, but we’re talking about spaces that are marked by two dimensional, aesthetic nostalgia for times or places in which its patrons have probably never lived, as well an oppressive air of self-awareness about its image. These spaces are not problematic in themselves, but because the self-defensive mode of irony thrives in these contexts, they can be fertile soil for the slippery appropriation and reinforcement of the male gaze.

In hipster spaces, classic sexism is probably not welcome. I feel confident letting hipster bar staff know if I am being harassed, but I would be much less confident letting them know that the poster of the topless girl with fried chicken over her nipples made me uncomfortable. How to explain that it’s not because I’m prudishly uncomfortable with the female body, or even my own body in comparison, but because what I’m observing is the incidental reinforcement of a very specific, but increasingly pervasive male gaze that permeates hipster spaces, one that’s ‘relevant’, self-conscious, and almost defensive in its posture? It is a gaze that pre-empts criticism, preparing to bat away accusations of sexism with a cute girl swinging a deep fried chicken drumstick. There’s a studied irreverence about it, and the idea that you can simultaneously indulge and parody sexism, when really, the latter is being used to facilitate the former. The implication is that because it’s self-aware, and funny, and because we all know that what we’re seeing is a bit cheeky, that we’re in on the joke and our awareness of that negates the impact of the content. It actually flatters us into thinking that, as a culture, we’re above the base level objectification of women, and we can now quietly mock it.

Ironic sexism is beholden to the specific facet of hipster culture that prefers to repurpose old things to enjoy ironically, rather than show earnest enthusiasm for anything. Ironic sexism will always bring you to a frustrating, paradoxical junction, because hipster culture mocks earnestness and it takes earnestness to call this stuff out. In ‘How to Live Without Irony’, Christy Wampole suggests that to “live ironically is to hide in public. It is flagrantly indirect, a form of subterfuge, which means etymologically to ‘secretly flee’ (subter + fuge). Somehow, directness has become unbearable to us.” If directness is unbearable, then earnestness might be downright excruciating, but in my experience, it’s also one of the only things that disarms and cuts through. It requires a vulnerability that the situation hasn’t earned – a personal response to a universal problem. When we meet the eye of staunch apathy with earnest sincerity, we turn the tables on it; we make it uncomfortable. We dismiss its units of measuring coolness as irrelevant. We call out its defensive indifference as a front for the discomfort caused by the revelation of its privilege, be it male privilege, white privilege, thin-privilege, able-bodied privilege, etc.

[sociologicallyinsignificant]

The Old Boy’s defining characteristic may just be that he wants. It’s not clear what he wants, and in the end, it doesn’t much matter. His drive lacks focus and can’t be satisfied, but it can’t be stopped by things like ethics or law or introspection. And he’s terribly scared of losing. The Old Boy regards all of life as a strategic contest to be won. “Puerility makes everything into a game, even things that are not games, even things that must not be games. Puerility is detailed, nitpicky, often rulebound, but always in the service of play,” Natalia Cecire argued in one of several essays on the role of a certain kind of boyishness in American life. This is what “scoring” means, of course, and that logic seeps into how men like these think of everything, from business deals to electoral fraud to abuse to murder. [...] To the extent that the Old Boy is effective (outside of inherited wealth and its associated power), it’s because he sees nothing besides his own game. [...] This is the kind of Trump story we read all the time, but (if you’re like me) you’re still not great at dealing with it. It stuns you at a core register that’s hard to nail down or even access, because it’s still feels axiomatic that the president is supposed to care about more than just himself. When he doesn’t, when he acts like the weird thing would be caring about the long-term effects of his policies on the people he governs, it’s tough to react because you don’t even know at what point to start explaining why that’s a problem. Communication requires a shared frame of reference, but it’s not clear whether any premises of governance are held in common. Trump is a public servant, but there is no public interest in his framework; there’s only Trump. This was the year we saw exactly how the Old Boys dismiss high-stakes favor exchanges as silly male play. The nexus these Old Boys form isn’t just class- or age- or power-based, and the alliances being revealed don’t reduce to simple profit seeking. It’s profit-plus. It’s the timeworn social code of the Old Boys’ network, in part. But it’s also the thrill of feeding appetites that can’t actually be satisfied, of gloating, of winning the game.  And the dangerous thing is that they never feel like they’ve won. Hence their ill-temper, and their astonished outrage when asked to account for their actions. The Old Boy is in a double bind of his own devising. His loyalty to his own greed means he can never, by definition, be satiated. If you notice Old Boys getting more abusive, or flailing more desperately, this is why: The philosophical endpoint of a junkie’s increasing resistance is panic that satisfaction will never come. All the money and power in the world won’t get the Old Boy what he wants because what he wants isn’t a thing but the dopamine rush of victory (and nothing wears off more quickly). What he wants isn’t anything in particular; it’s just more.

Lili Loofbourow, The Year of the Old Boy

[sociologicallyinsignificant]

when people ask where you see yourself in 10 years

[sociologicallyinsignificant]

Wheel of emotions graphics to help people better articulate what they are feeling.

[sociologicallyinsignificant]

[sociologicallyinsignificant]

undefined

“Don’t worry, I totally meant to do that.”

Video by Scott Stringer