Writer's Diary
12/11/24
Activism is the Zoomer ethics—they lack a notion of personal ethics (honor codes). Young activists can be anyone they want IRL, act any way they want, have any kind of personal relationships that they want, as long as they perform the right activist rituals, condemn the right things, celebrate the right things, do the rain dance, clear their conscience, develop moral clout.
Love is like a game of hide-and-go-seek where you hide so well that after a while you begin to worry that everybody has given up and stopped playing and gone home and that you're still out there totally alone.
Happiness is not comparing yourself to anybody else, or to anything else.
I wonder: is the generation that grew up with Instagram, or generations growing up with phones and iPads in the crib, going to be capable of any happiness whatsoever? Because every moment of their lives, every era of their lives, is posted and commented on and refracted and compared, sifted and aggregated…
How can anything be romantic or timely or exciting when it's always going to be less than? When it's always going to be offered up to the marketplace of possible lives? When everything is image; when nothing has a core, except what can be extracted?
The constant comparison and marketization of social media life make care of the soul impossible.
It makes having a soul feel like an unnecessary burden.1