It has been a long, grey, and dreary winter. While the weather wasn’t harsh, the dullness was totalitarian. It was soviet. But the weather is changing and the Vitamin D is returning to my system. I’m ready to quit my dead-end job and my university with its broken and hopeless servants and kafkaesque bureaucracy.
Life hasn’t been the same since post-cancellation Balenciaga and the new release of Chat-GPT isn’t hitting the same way. My instagram is a collection of awful ads, reels, and chubby midwesterners I haven’t seen half a decade (since high school). Content is an awful word - reminds me of stomach contents. My twitter is a doomscroll. Groomers. Putin. Ukrainian Nazis. Infrastructure collapse. Energy Crisis. Dollar Devaluation. China x Russia collab. Mushroom cloud in Ohio. The seed oils are killing you. Microplastics and birth control in the water supply is making you and the frogs gay!
There was a tire plant on fire in Bedford, Ohio, a mile from my parents house, in which they had no idea. I knew. I knew because of twitter. They’re not on twitter. I had to tell them. My mom subscribes to Apple News and listens to Joe Rogan. My father gets his “I support the current thing” programming from late night television. My father is a deep state apologist. Ironic coming from a soviet ex-patriot. I love them nevertheless - at a distance. At one point in America, everyone becomes an orphan. And America is the only place you can kill your father and become one to yourself.
This winter showed me that there is a war on the well-adjusted. In 2015/2016 when I was in my “yay Hillary is going to be the next super awesome girl boss president era,” the Buzzfeed YouTube channel psyoped me into thinking that “normal” was bad, where normalcy is rooted in historical system modes of oppression Bla Bla bla. It was aspirational to be a quirked up polyamorous bisexual millennial “try guy” and that your parents were the root of all your suffering. I won't go too far in to what else they were saying for the purpose of avoiding culture war clichés. Yet, this type is everywhere and pervasive. I’ve even met zoomers who present as millennial. In hindsight, the Buzzfeed phenomenon was a representation of the inner psychic turmoil of the 25-35 year-olds of that time. I get shivers just thinking about it.
I’d say that in some ways this generation remade parts of America and the media landscape in their own image, but really they made in reflection of their own shortcomings, i.e. resentments. Compare with the Gen x’ers before them, they lived in the shadow of the boomers who actually did remake America in their own image so they’re more reserved because of it.
Culturally this winter was dreadful. I deleted Tik Tok. It feeds on your insecurities, drains your dopamine, and spikes your cortisol. Now culture is downstream from tik tok. So in that way I have aged. But these are all positive growing pains.
This winter I learned that energy vampires are real! They exist in many forms. They are the coworker who has to litigate the happenstance of every novel minutiae that occurs in the office cause his brain has ossified from 20 years of working the same job, for example. They are the company-wide newsletters (they should really be abolished). They are cannabis, which was pushed upon the American public overnight to make us complacent and complicit. They are your Notification Center. They are compliance officers. They are bureaucrats. They are school marms. They are people who say, “you can’t do that.” These energy vampires are part and parcel of what some call The Longhouse.
“It refers at once to our increasingly degraded mode of technocratic governance; but also to wokeness, to the “progressive,” “liberal,” and “secular” values that pervade all major institutions. More fundamentally, the Longhouse is a metonym for the disequilibrium afflicting the contemporary social imaginary.”
These are puffed up words referring to a mode of communication, governance, and policing that ossify everyday life and culture. You can’t make jokes. You can’t be assertive. You must speak in exhaustive hushed tones articulating and rephrasing the same thing you just said to me in a way that insults my intelligence. Current modes of communication within the corporation and within the university are condescending. Longhouse.
What this immune-compromised and vitamin deficient winter taught me was you must protect your vitality. Health is wealth. One must adopt an abundance mindset as opposed to a scarcity mindset. Yes eggs are expensive now but you always steal more. The job you don’t like, you can quit - get another. You don’t like Boston. You can move. There are infinite resources. More is to come. Enjoy the process and bear witness to the season of regrowth. Opportunities and new adventures are coming.
I will be going to Barcelona Wine Bar a lot more. I’m exercising a lot more. I’m living in the present a lot more because they only thing we will only ever have is the present and nothing is promised. You make plans but God laughs, so laugh with Him!
I’ve also finally accepted that people don’t care for beauty and you can’t teach them to either. I once asked a friend before the pandemic what he thought was the most beautiful work of art of the past decade and he said it was the Weeknd’s After Hours album. This as interesting because perhaps our visually oversaturated society has moved from a visual to audial society, which is a prehistoric tribal mode. This sense-perception change proffers a revaluation of what cultural artifacts we thought were once important. Soup is thrown on paintings. Would you date a podcast bro? Fashion houses are embracing quiet luxury, which is an aesthetics of recession. An aesthetics of the mundane and the banal. The advertisements on the screens and the subway try to renegotiate what “normal” is.
In regards to the eyeball as opposed to the ear, Instagram influencers and gay-adjacent posters, e-girls, e-boys, e-thems, and pop-stars really push the visual culture forward. My friends worship gay-adjacent pop stars like eunuchs paying homage to a vestal virgin. Hollywood isn’t in the business of cinema at the moment. Marvel isn’t cinema and most movies are edited like tik toks now. Pay attention to Martin Scorsese’s comments.
Two notable excepts were Blonde and Tàr which were truly dissenting master works that blue check critics couldn’t wrap their head around. The idiocy around the response to Tàr was that some believed Tàr was a biopic on a real person. Critics couldn’t understand the great artistic maneuverings of the story where the current moment was reflected back at them with nuance and how visionary excellence and greatness is squandered by the Longhouse. It was so on the nose that people that the conductor of the story was real. And I think that’s beautiful.
But I had the realization that I shouldn’t apologize for my interests because the context of my current habitation doesn’t appreciate it. What is important is that I appreciate it. I listen to Rachmaninoff. I like Proust. I like Kandinsky. I like Warhol. I love Norman Mailer. So I won’t apologize. Because of where I currently live, I spent a lot of energy despairing about the lack of discourse around my interests but I can’t fault the people around me and can’t fault my friends. I love my friends. I’m adopting an abundance mindset. I’m a well of potential and knowledge and that is important to cultivate. I used to despair about how my insanely rich and deep inner life hasn’t yet correlated with my economic station but eventually it will pay off. The weather is changing and I’m moving a way from a mode of scarcity to that of abundance. It’s important to distance yourself from people who hate themselves who are overflowing with self-criticism. You have to be a friend to yourself and can’t let the daily agitation of modern-life suck your energy and push you to being too conservative with your decisions and boxing you in.
I’m trying to be more present for my long-distance friendships and I’ll continue in making my futile plans. Since the start of the pandem, I’ve lost the ability to make long-term plans or even be able to look a month to two months in advance from my housing to my career. This reality is the state of affairs for a twenty-something in the 2020’s. We’re are living in the Chinese curse and proverb, “May you live in interesting times.”