I've always been ahead of the curve!
Cultural constipation is at an all-time high. I'm not an influencer because I am prone to gatekeeping.
A whole season has come and gone. I would apologize for the absence but that would assume some expectations for in this space, and I abandoned those awhile back. This piece beleaguered my psyche for weeks on end and wouldn’t let up, which created a back-log of my other priorities. I wanted to prioritize and write. I battle this compulsion to share with the more defeatist thoughts of ‘why bother?’ and ‘why am I writing and sharing here?’ on the daily.
I intended to finish writing and publishing this piece about a month and a half ago, but then I just kept opening the draft, writing a few sentences, and then closing the browser and repeating this cycle for weeks on end until now. I was gonna lie and say I’m OK with this process. I’m not, really. It’s more of a defiant acceptance because what else is there. The process is really just procrastination at play; I say this as someone with a staggering number of Substack drafts built up over the past several months (83). A low-grade working towards an ideal (perfectionism) and general dissatisfaction with the clunkiness of language tends to set off my own procrastination with writing. Why I choose to protect and defend this procrastination and this pseudo-process it all costs is what I’m trying to sort out. Largely speaking, I can’t help it. But I’m trying to give her a good talking to. I’ve been giving myself a good talking to. I don’t know. We’ll see.
And in any case, it’s Substack! If we had to draw some comparisons, the rest of substack is the large crowd inside the party, full of grifters and successful people, shouting over one another, aggressively and hungrily, making their presence known, holding court or surrounding others known for holding court. And at this part, there are your other guests. The folks out on the roof or patio, off to the side smoking. You don’t know quite what they do or who they are, and they are more than okay with that. My Substack is this smoking area.
I normally do not wait with bated breath for spring. It often arrives too abruptly, demanding, all at once, to shed layers and thrust ourselves into its sudden bloom and sunshine. I refute this accelerated welcome and resist until the last possible minute. Around this time, I’m typically like a zombie waking up, still shaking off all the debris from months past, waking up to the changes, a winter gone. In 2023 I fell into a stupor. I was unrecognizable to myself in a strange way and my everyday adapted a stasis I couldn’t make out or shake loose. I could not for the life of me shake it —- and my life really did depend on the shaking. This stasis consumed me and dragged me along as I fought and kicked and screamed against it. I eventually gave way and acquiesced to the nothingness. The nothingness was far from a blank slate and more subtle than a void; it was a third thing. Something I could not quite pin down and only at the time recognize as nothingness. This nothingness was substantial in many ways. Inevitably, it opened a portal. Nothingness as a portal. There’s a reframe for you.
This cycle is a bit different. I am diving head-first into a new chapter, a new start. I dust off and step into my birthday season, Aries season with real zest and energy that I have been fortunate and blessed enough to be born with in spades. My energy is my currency, in more ways than one. Sure, I am still crying, often, but at least I am in motion. I am back in a place of movement, and this has made me all the more wide-eyed and hopeful, starving off my despair and its company for the time being.
So, I’m here. Alongside the true start of 2024 and any other new year, springtime.
Happy Aries season.
I am knee-deep in the expectant, almost restless energy Aries beckons.
I am simultaneously crawling and pushing out and clinging to the womb of (un)becoming.
The body as womb. The earthly experience as womb.
Excrement as renewed life force,
Gorging on placenta of new life, past lives and wisdom for nutriment, nourishment.
We have arrived, again. We continue to arrive, again and again.
First fire season, first sign the of zodiac year.
Time to burn.
…so please, for the love of God, move out the way. I am making room for my vast inner life to be UNLEASHED…
What follows is my regurgitation of insights in response to what I would like to call cultural constipation. It probably needs an editor or two this is Substack not Vanity Fair or The Paris Review. In other words, it’s free.
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Like many, I am bored by the nature of and culture of being online these days. Even an Instagram hiatus/exit can somehow still leave behind a stench of the self-referential doom storm of words and writing online because everything (and everyone) is everywhere all at once. We can’t escape it even when we make pointed attempts. When I meet someone new and they ask for my Instagram and I say I’m ‘off’, like an addict in recovery would say, I’m met with almost instantaneous praise and congratulations. ‘Good for you,’ they say. ‘You’re probably better for it,’ they say. We get it, we get it. Social media is the drug, the CEOs the pimps, and we’re all at various stages on the usage-to-recovery-and-then-back-again spectrum, somewhere between being strung out and egging each other on, miserably and anxiously because that’s all we know now. I can no longer wear my stupid badge of honor for not being on Tiktok because Youtube Shorts exists, and damn, I kind of want to make that chili scallion pasta dish? Not unlike an aggressive form of cancer, a boom occurs and the cells multiply and spread. We are the hosts that distraction feeds off.
We pledge this fact by heart now: Everything is tirelessly influenced by the algorithm. ALGORITHM, SHE IS THE MOMENT. The chronically online amongst us keep running around the fire screaming fire!!! The same handful of topics run rampant across all platforms: HOW TO NAVIGATE THE GIRLHOOD NOSTALGIA-TO-RELUCTANT WOMANHOOD PIPELINE, MILLENNIALS V. GEN Z LINGUISTIC & CULTURAL CLASH, MUSHY TIK TOK BRAINS, EVERYONE’S A NARCISSIST, A DOOMED PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION CYCLE IN AMERICA, THE EARTH IS BURNING AND WE CAN’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT SO BUCKLE UP—OR OFF YOURSELF, STRAIGHT WHITE PRIVILEGED WOMEN DIVORCING THEIR HUSBANDS TO PURSUE THEIR AUTHOR DREAMS OR LIVE OUT THEIR BEST LIVES AS LESBIANS, and like round-the-clock “features” about some actor’s personal awakening or decontextualizing a celebrity moment du jour based on cryptic Instagram captions, a tired book-to-screen adaptation, or like 4 stunt-paparrazi photos.
Like I said, I started writing this post about a month and a half ago and in that span of that time, I’ve already stumbled across no fewer than seven or so other Substack posts commiserating over this exact issue I raise, complete with math-lady-meme explanations and stark infographics and diagrams. I read everything or at the very least, skim a lot, because I am a sleuth for the culture and like to know how the sauce is made. But it becomes a weird Truman-show experience to realize you’re not only reading the same content over and over again but also the reading offline mirrors the online. That is, traditional publications are now echoing and dissecting online discourse as a way to stay relevant and in-the-know and garner page views and clicks. Where do we go to escape it all? Obviously, this isn’t new. Just take a look at how late night television shows like Kimmel and Fallon heavily pivoted (and now almost rely on) to Twitter-inspired segments and social media gags. The issue lies not in the level of coverage these traditional media outlets give to online discourse but in the lack of ingenuity concerned with them discovering and proposing any stories new or even offbeat— novelty is out, baby. Let’s give the people what they know and want. Where do ideas come from now? The internet, of course. The cultural constipation of our moment is real and chronic.
Would The Cut exist without @ Deuxmoi? The ‘It-Girl’ panopticon? The indie sleaze detectives and stans arguing in the comments section about Cobrasnake’s ethics or a play-by-play on what sold at Chloe Sevingy’s closet sale? TikTok core aesthetic breakdowns? Deep-dives into your banal, run-of-the-mill celebrity sighting? Some niche internet drama exclusive to even only certain enclaves of the internet? Even the internet is sectioned off into milieus designed to keep certain cultural knowledge and affiliation in check. And this online behavior is reflected in real time too. The chokehold the white intelligentsia, both of the coastal elite and European variety, likes to think it alone possesses this cultural currency and capital is fraught with insecurity, adapting a lowly, dismissive mob mentality that flies under the radar as suave and ‘chill’ when it’s really just your traditional gate-keeping for fear of being outed as banal. There’s an almost knee-jerk reaction from this mob to reject any Black artist or creative that threatens this assumed status, encroaching upon their territory without some institutional tokenism or cultural sign-off associated with proximity to whiteness or a partiucular scene for approval. One time while working at my day job in hospitality, I asked a white customer about their work as a professor, and they mentioned they lecture in the English department at Queen Mary University in London. I chimed in that I read
It’s like mass media and the identity of many publications today like The Cut now service the fickle obsessions in our parasocial times with a personal essay thrown into the mix every now and then about the capricious nature of ‘motherhood’. And yeah, obviously, I still read all this stuff. Because whether it’s original or not, it’s functioning as journalism does or I guess, should? Capturing and commenting on the pulse. To make a generation boomer point even though I’m not a boomer: there was a point when journalism established the pulse. And if that pulse is weak or watered down because that’s what the culture is serving, well, then, what’s really good?? Gossip presented as news for the everyman? I’d argue the gossip isn’t even sexy or even remotely salacious anymore. Everybody is saying whatever they want out the side of their mouth and the children are eating it up calling it based or coded or core when it’s actually just…sameness. Now, anybody even remotely ‘in the spotlight’ is ‘One To Watch.’ Why? Well, because, look, there they are! They’re there. THEY ARE THERE. So surely, that must mean something? They must be someone meant to be there. It’s nothing new that NYC remains a fixture in the global imagination as the epicenter of all things relevant and cool, but now the geographical landscapes of NYC extends beyond the city itself, and all cities experience the same effect (I live in London and can confirm this), giving itself over to the armies of Instagram and Tik Tok, where culture is defined, ripped apart, devoured, and regurgitated into a diluted format prime for easy consumption and disposal. We swim in our creations of lingo and references to affirm our status and identities.

It’s a sign of the times when we are at the zenith of nonsensical, celebrity-laden, navel-gazing, ‘me me me’ coverage everywhere. A cynical take could be that a lot of this writing comes off as tone-deaf, but I actually think the tone strikes a chord with the zeitgeist as it stands. Of course I am pessimistic about all this, but I am more intensely keen about sifting through the elements, these themes and what they mean for how we live and relate to each other and the world. Let’s be real: We are starved for this calorifically empty diet of nothingness, in part, because it helps to soothe, a spiritual nothingness that now pervades our culture, inciting both a monotone hysteria and malaise. We know we are drowning in it but when we might even try to swim upwards for air, another current comes pulls us in further, deeper.
We want to quit but we just can’t. Jia Tolentino spelled this phenomenon in one of her New Yorker essays a few years back (sorry, I can’t link the article because I tried finding it and came up short) — how our celebrity-as-centerpiece of culture comes from a desperate attempt to replace the status of religion and deities of yesteryears in 20th and 21st centuries. We are no longer a culture that reveres religious beliefs and values as a part of public life and restoration of soul but instead, place said belief and faith in figureheads, zany tech lords, political charlatans, self-important artists, clout-chasers and so forth — whether we’ve elected them or not. Since the political systems with defunct superpowers can’t save us nor the power of democracy (as we’ve come to understand it), we elect ourselves as the Governing Body of Life to help us navigate the murky waters of building a ‘good life’ or something along those lines that feels OK. We become our own influencers, at once ingesting and spoon-feeding our own dribble as the Socratic Knowledge for A New Age. And yeah, I recognize the irony of referencing Jia Tolentino here.
The collective brain is on fire. We’ve leaned all the way in, and now, we’re just a bit stuck in the making of our own shit. We can’t get up. But do we want to? It’s not our sole fault to carry (insert quip about tech companies being evil) but we’d be absolutely doomed to think that anyone will get us out of this situation but ourselves. And to be honest, I’m not sure if we need to quickly jump ship. A true moment of destruction calls on what is most basic in us to respond, and maybe with this, we can simplify the matter with thinking about what we want and what need in place of what already exists. No high horse or moral preaching here. Just voicing what I’m coming to figure out for myself. I’m talking about living and creating with a sense of deliberateness. A simultaneous reclamation and abandonment of both new and old. Could it be that some of the wreckage of left behind life offline, abandoned for the shiny terrains of online life is salvageable? That we take pieces, broken and tattered, with us into the new because they still hold some sort of value? Some knowledge about who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going? We’re both naive and shrewd enough to recognize that the virtue of newness is often a short-lived illusion. And the internet is a factory farm, churning out one illusion after another.
A large chunk of “content” serves more as a distraction than entertainment, siphoning off the last of our attention to just clicks and scrolls — we’re post-engagement era, baby. Just vibes, mostly junk food vibes. Sites like Substacks and even my PI.FYI, where I’ve also turned to recently for a new but nostalgic online experience, position themselves as alternatives but ultimately require a level of investment and attention that feeds off of high input time for arguably, small payoff and move us further away from those innocent desires and intentions to just share, grow, and connect. I started my Substack in June 2021 when no one I knew had one and all the internet and literary darlings (and curmudgeons) were still trapped in the pscyho cycle of Twitter (i’m not calling it X).
At the time, Substack felt like an underground society of folks who’d been curious about online life outside of the usual platforms; a return to a place where long-form content matched a sincerity of the digital world in the early aughts. I’m just going to go ahead and say it: I have this unique skill of being ahead of things before they land in culture’s psyche and takeoff. It’s been a thing since I was like a teen, when 13 year-old-me would obsess over sites The Satorialist or like, the beginning days of Into The Gloss with 4 employees. A friend of mine used to make fun of me relentlessly for wearing the now goated New Balance Larry David sneakers back in 2014. I mean, of course. They were your Grade-A orthopedic shoes for mostly older man before they were imbued with the ultimate tap of cool, making them the most coveted and worn shoes by aspiring fashion core normies everywhere—these and the adidas sabas. I first stumbled across a little known website back in the day called IntotheGloss.com, when it was just the founder, Emily Weiss maybe a staff of three plus an intern. Today ITG is more famously known as the launching pad for the cult beauty brand and distruptor, Glossier. I remember stumbling upon Julia Fox’s downtown exhibition of photographs in like 2015 or 2016(?) and thought, hmmm, I bet this won’t be the last time I see her. When news dropped that the Safdie brothers had found their muse and star in Fox (they were downtown friends beforehand and followed Fox around to write the script with her in mind for the role) for her now claim-to-fame, Uncut Gems, I thought, hey, I remember her.
I say all this to gloat a little, yes, ha, but moreso to name my uncanny talent for honing in on what (and who) is about to pop off. This pattern has always been my curious north star in following my hunches and inadvertently, getting a lay of the culture and world as it evolves. I grew up alongside the blossoming of the internet, thinking my interests were incredibly niche, which led me down fascinating, obscure rabbit holes even to this day. Landing on Substack was only a matter of time, and the timing aligned with my desperate need to carve out more space to write and express online beyond the confines of Instagram’s grid and story features (I was inactive on Twitter for years only to accidentally delete it in 2022). The year was 2021 and I was filming my first ever professional acting job and craving an outlet to write and document all the downloads of ideas that I was receiving. It was a testy time for me. I tried to trust that Substack could really exist as just my own personal studio and playground to flex my writing and hone in on what I would like to share and craft. I can’t remember when, but at some point not far from launching my own Substack, I could sense the tide was turning. And in what felt like an inevitable but robust overnight turn-of-events, Substack became the gold mine for all those X folks and even TikTok devotees to take their followings to a new platform and yet again, cash out in some elusive, big way. Elite (though there is an argument that Substack is pivoting from this category, a tad) acceptance in a largely respected online literary space could mean…BOOK DEALS! Mainly, more clout. And with more clout, more followings and so on.
Substack knows the game because it designed it— no matter how harmless or wholesome their marketing wording and “community” initiatives might feel. It’s a space for writers, yes, but it’s more so a space for writers who write with the intent on being visible. It’s no coincidence that a humble feature on the Substack weekend newsletter could usher in troves of new followers for your Substack and more or less overnight, could open up new avenues and revenue for your work. You can sniff out this adept understanding and intention in almost all the new Substacks popping up lately. I’m sorry to say it, but you can’t start a Substack in 2024 in earnest, really. I mean, you can, and you can say “it’s just for fun,” but you’ll need some ammo for sure—if not to join the ranks of soldiers here battling, at least to shield yourself from the ubiquitous influence of commodifying and growing just for growth’s sake.
Everyone here, on Substack, has already showed up fully decked out with their gear and strategy. It’s the same as being on Instagram and saying you don’t care—the app itself is designed for you to care and exploit your attention or care, no matter how minimal, to trigger your response to engage. And even if you swear you don’t care and opt out of playing the game, your mind is still aware that there is some game happening around you, and thus, the psychological warfare of being a social media user and observer persists. It’s not your own little plot of land you’re cultivating because the entire lot has been purchased and paid for in full well in advance. Such is the ecosystem of being online. The jig is UP.
I jumped to sign up for PI.FYI’s platform when it launched a few months back because I like their eponymous newsletter, which just highlights 4-5 recommendations based on anything the featured person, usually an artist or creative person of some kind, is digging at the moment. Harmless and random! A familiar internet moment. Originally positioned as an earnest foray into a “sincere” online experience, the app site allows anyone who signs up to create a profile where they can share and recommend what they’re into, known as a ‘rec’ amongst PI.FYI users. Similar to Tom on Myspace or Dorsey on Twitter, the site’s founder, Tyler, regularly joins in on the conversation, adding his recommendations and comments to the mix, in a genuine and relaxed practice. My dopamine and I were off to the races, recommending everything low-brow and high-brow and scrolling the site ‘starring’, bookmarking other recs, and like with all Internet sleuthing seeing who’s who. This initial enthusiasm appeared shared and genuine, and still does, but I can’t help but notice a slow shift towards visibility-at-all-costs, a classic signs (and pitfall) of most social media.
Though, several weeks in, the site founders revealed a new feature called ‘SPOTLIGHT’ highlighting ‘standout’ users and showcasing them on the homepage, signaling to other users— these are the ones to-watch and to- follow. I know because I have spent time on the app that the users featured are heavily active and engaged. They might be authors of some of the most starred — favorited button — recommendations but above all, they are very present on the site. The spotlight feature is no less a gold star system for active participation that encourages users to ramp up their communications and engagement on the app, in turn, to help push the app’s growth and brand, ultimately, following suit with one of social media’s goal posts: to become your own kind of celebrity. Anyone can be a celebrity of their own making if they stay online, stay visible, and stay heard. Clout is clout! Let’s not pretend to ignore the mechanisms of how clout works to alter our motives and desires to attain a certain kind of model or version of a ‘good life’—nefarious fuel for chasing God knows what. This whole user-app relationship is tit-for-tat, sure, but nonetheless antithetical to a site like PI.FYI’s original intention to return to the sincere and wholesome ways of a pre-historic internet we all find ourselves desperately pining for. There is no going back to an Internet Before Time though — we know this, right? Come on now.

I’m not saying everything is fucked, per se. Is it a bummer? Yes. Does it reflect a larger cultural shift? Naturally, yes. A reframing can offer an opportunity for serious critical thinking. There’s a level of inquiry and honesty calling on us to clarify just what our desires might be for engaging online, and if, they are as pure and innocent as we claim or intend. Turning the magnifying glass back on us, the users: Are we using these platforms in earnest? To share and parse out ideas? To engage with others and foster a sense of communality that has been lost to the grip of everyone’s favorite, late-stage capitalism and an overwhelming desire to be somebody that matters, to do something that makes a dent or a splash? Do we care to explore different modes of self-expression just for the sake of creativity and living as a human being? I think it’s okay to play the game—so long as we know why and for whom we’re playing it.
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There’s a separate and larger framework to address this trend in culture and it trickles down to our patterns of consumption as consumers, both in the material and immaterial sense. I picked up Post-Growth Living: An Alternative Hedonism by British philosopher Kate Soper on a whim last week and just a couple of chapters in, Soper’s work has affirmed my reflections and recent mental pondering and questions about how we locate and resuscitate pleasure and well-being in the midst of a crumbling natural world, a growing tech-oriented reality.
I’m new to Soper’s work, but the now 80 years-old seems to have dedicated her life to addressing the dissonance between both pleasure (embodied and abstract ) and modern living. Not far off from the thesis of the now Instagram-famous, Pleasure Activism by adrienne marie brown or Saving Time by Jenny Odell, Soper argues in the book that our economic and consumptive patterns geared towards a growth-at-all-costs model short-circuits our pathways to true desire and pleasure because we’ve become detached from our ‘why.’ I know I should insert a pull or block quote here, but I haven’t done enough close-text analysis with the book to choose the right one. It’s a dense and rigorous read, though its intent, I suspect, is to rest in the realm of accessibility and nonchalance to contrast other contemporary, jargon-laden texts of its kind. To summarize and maybe even flatten Soper’s work for the sake of what I’ve written thus far: Without a reason or clear purpose, the ceiling for desire is uncapped, leaving us perpetually unsatisfied and yearning for more.
Personally, I care less about avoiding all these new fidgety channels that muffle out novelty and enhance collective noise with short-form content. I take long hiatuses not as a way to test-drive being offline forever but more so to recalibrate and regroup about what I’m trying to do and why I’m even trying to do it. It’s dumb to think of abstinence of social media as some moral or intellectual win. Whatever choice we make speaks to a larger web of questioning and reflecting on where our true desires and needs lie. Is this something I’d like to pay attention to? Is this how I want to invest some or most of my time? Do I want this do the bedrock of how I shape and extract pleasure in life? What do we know about The Good Life? Beyond the matrix of the internet? It’s impossible to decipher this when submersed in the noise of it all.
The discernment here is both not that deep but also crucial to moving closer towards living a life that we recognize as influenced by what we actually want instead of what is constructed predominantly by the external stimuli and influences around us. It’s grown-up shit! And anyway, in the end, destiny will always greet us with a little wink. Because unlike the evil men and women and robots in Montecito would like us to believe, we’re not really responsible for any of this. We took the bait— bait specifically suited to our biological makeup and human behavioral patterns, no less. Go figure. There will always be a puppeteer of some kind, but fundamentally, a puppeteer needs a puppet, severed from its instinct and embodied knowledge, a lifeless toy, to carry out its vision. When we accept this dynamic, maybe then we can get constructive and let it all fly loose with alternatives on how we might adapt or shape-shift to this moment, as puppets of our own designs.
I could go on with writing about this but I want to wrap this up and get on with the rest of life. I don’t care to know or focus on hard-and-fast solutions because they usually dismiss the fertile space to conjure alternative ways forward. We need friction to survive, to generate and evolve. Death to our culture of obviousness. There can’t really be any solutions to an on-going phenomenon that transfigures more complexly each day. We ourselves are constantly becoming and un(becoming), if we are lucky and dare to care. And all the better if we can locate our true desires and befriend them as guide maps leading us to a richer, stranger and more nuanced and expansive human, spiritual, and connected existence — whether online or not.

FURTHER RELATED & READING
*bullet points are very ugly sometimes. I need some cute graphics, stat.
by P.E. Moskowitz
Breaking the Tyranny of Obviousnessby terry nguyen
Girl Blogby safy
by Jessa Crispin
Why I Deleted My Instagram Accountliterally any piece that references the vibe shift today aka vibe shift 2.0 not that vibe shift
by Jia Tolentino
The Personal Essay Boom Is Over
(since I couldn’t find the other one I referenced): Published in 2017by
And lastly, an excerpt from a poem that resonates with the arrival of spring and another birthday:
Wait by Galway Kinnell
Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. The desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.
Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a little and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.
This was a great deep dive. Would you consider recording yourself reading it and future long forms? I'd love to let it play while cooking or getting ready for bed ^_^
This was a great read.
I appreciated the reminder that "getting off" social media won't solve the problem I've been having of being overestimulated by other people's thoughtsopinionshottakes.
*I've been off for 2 weeks 🫠
Also, your opening section reminded me of Lucille Clifton's poem, "I am running into a new year."