Can’t believe capitalism is owning up to the fact that it makes all of us into people desperate for last minute cliff notes because the point is to just have all the general ideas you need so you can brag about them and competitively network while reading as an enjoyable pursuit in itself and having your own ideas you are passionate about is laughable, but instead of it being a last minute emergency studying scenario it’s as a default setting for people who are already on a full schedule
Like I saw an ad for this on tv and the nonfiction work featured was 7 habits of highly successful people and I kind of wanted to die
not to romanticize the loneliness that inevitably comes from refusing to engage in competition culture or absorbing the mindset of wanting to “get ahead” in life, but pushing away that kind of thinking where I feel as if I have to show why I deserve to exist and take up space is so freeing, even though I feel like I’m suffocating most days from severe depression and anxiety where images of future success provide no sense of comfort. re-evaluating the things that actually matter to me like love and connection brings me closer to myself rather than trying to act on any of my “potential” to get ahead in life, especially when that potential only matters to other people when it can pull in profit. it’s actually pretty fucked up that I think it’s radical for me to say “i’m enough right now, as I am, and I don’t need to be daydreaming about coming up with a plan where I become a better version of myself, because I’ll keep on being the same ugly versions and someone somewhere will still love it, and that’s all I need”
Vince Staples and Anne Boyer both have really similar perspectives on the way art and celebrity exist in and are shaped by the Market imo I’m willing to pay someone to explore this more thoughtfully and with more detail
@010180000 @decadent-romanticism I truly don’t really have particularly coherent thoughts on this lmao but there’s a lack of sanctimony and self-aggrandizement in both their self-presentation and in their attitude towards the work they do + a skepticism towards both critical acclaim and audience acceptance that doesn’t ring false or insincere because they both seem conscious of and readily/frequently acknowledge how arbitrary those things are I guess? How artistic notoriety, accolades, sales etc aren’t determinants of any intrinsic artistic merit (or lack thereof. Like it’s mainly important in the grim economic sense that it helps you feed your family and continue working in your chosen field) and have much more to do with the fact that your work was able to be commodified in a manner that happened to command more attention/accrue a certain degree of cultural or monetary capital in like the broader marketplace into which they were disseminated? And the fact that they’ve maintained this viewpoint even as they’ve become more conventionally successful (I know neither’s near being the best known name within their respective medium but they hopefully are on solid footing more or less) is really refreshing honestly idk they also both seem to not have severed internal ties to the part of their lives when they were materially/psychologically in extremely dire straits (the frequent mention of shame, poverty, fear, survival, trauma etc in both of their writing and of their commentary on their writing), so they’re able to explore the ways in which personal history informs their perception of/relationship to their present position (and vice versa) without being afflicted by the tendency that so many other artists have where they mine the past and only emerge with aphorism and hollow aspirational cliches
“Crucial to maintaining the culture of overwork and 24/ 7 temporality is the pervasive insecurity embedded in the belief that we are in unceasing competition with every other member of humanity. This feeling of unease is omnipresent, structuring our emotions and relationships outside of the workplace. Gilles Deleuze writes that “the corporation is a spirit, a gas,” meaning that people no longer experience coercive control as masses within the walls of physical enclosures (schools, factories, prisons), but that today we are controlled outside of and in between these enclosures, through the competitive logic of the corporation. In a postindustrial world, this gaseous form of control becomes ever more necessary as production becomes increasingly untethered to physical locations of containment and workforces become more diffuse and workers more flexible.”
— Miya Tokumitsu, Do What You Love & Other Lies About Success and Happiness
Escapist fantasies have changed venues since the peak of Entourage: The posh life has migrated from the relative remove of TV shows and glossy celebrity lifestyle magazines to the intimacy of Instagram accounts. A window into the unimaginable lifestyles of the super-rich now lives in our pockets. Luxury feels more immediate and more attainable than it ever has before—and this makes it all the more unnerving.
There is also less acknlowdgement that these glimpses into rarefied worlds constitute escapist indulgences. No longer framed as guilty pleasures aimed at distracting ya momentarily, the luxury of Instagram is so integrated into our lives that it’s hard not to experience a regular, low-level sensation of injustice from it. Instagram feels designed to incite dissatisfaction. But not only that: We all feel like we deserve luxury now.
—Heather Havrilesky, “Running On Empty” from What If This Were Enough?: Essays
When it comes to my own writing, if I insist that there is a persona or a performativity at work, I don’t mean to say that I’m not myself in my writing, or that my writing somehow isn’t me. I’m with Eileen Myles—“ My dirty secret has always been that it’s of course about me.” Lately, however, I have felt myself awash in a fresh irony. After a lifetime of experimenting with the personal made public, each day that passes I watch myself grow more alienated from social media, the most rampant arena for such activity. Instantaneous, noncalibrated, digital self-revelation is one of my greatest nightmares. I feel quite certain that my character is too weak to withstand the temptations and pressures that would come with hoisting it onto the stage of Facebook, and truly amazed by the fact that so many others—or all others, so it sometimes seems—bear it so easily.
What would my teachers say if they knew I was a writer now? Who would’ve guessed it? I wasn’t a very bright student. I didn’t much like school, because we moved so much and I was always new and funny looking. In my fifth-grade report card I have nothing but an avalanche of Cs and Ds, but I don’t remember being that stupid. I was good at art, and I read plenty of books, and Kiki laughed at all my jokes. At home I was fine, but at school I never opened my mouth except when the teacher called on me. When I think of how I see myself, it would have to be at age eleven. I know I’m thirty-two on the outside, but inside I’m eleven. I’m the girl in the picture with skinny arms and a crumpled skirt and crooked hair. I didn’t like school because all they saw was the outside me. School was lots of rules and sitting with your hands folded and being afraid all the time. I liked looking out the window and thinking. I liked staring at the girl across the way writing her name over and over again in red ink, or the boy in front of me who wore the same dim shirt every day. I imagined their lives and the houses they went home to each evening, wondering if their world was happy or sad.
