The Endlessly Resupplied Now

Hey hi hello. I have nothing groundbreaking to share with you this Monday because I was hosting family over the weekend and struggling to keep up with work and my study schedule. Some weeks are just like that. So, I offer you two recommendations. One will probably make you feel bad and one will make you feel good, should you choose to engage with it.

First, the bad. I finally read something that perfectly encapsulates how I have been feeling lately. Of course it comes from my favorite writer Jia Tolentino for The New Yorker. She recently wrote about how her brain is breaking in myriad ways, and I hear my own complaints echoing when she writes that her phone is ”a device that makes me feel like I am strapped flat to the board of an unreal present: the past has vanished, the future is inconceivable, and my eyes are clamped open to view the endlessly resupplied now. More than a decade of complaining about this situation has done nothing to change my compulsion to induce dissociation anew each day. And, though there was once a time when my physical surroundings felt more concrete than whatever I was looking at on my phone, this year has marked a turning point.”

In terms of politics in the third aesthetic wave of American fascism, the events of each day are “seeming inconceivable as they materialize in headlines and then are swiftly carried to the purgatorial cognitive landfill of things that have not been fully absorbed or processed or fought against but have been pressed into reality, where they will remain as the fading backdrop of each day’s new, grotesque parade.”

And in terms of AI, “ChatGPT will reify the problems that it purports to solve, and thus make itself essential: encouraging users to rely less and less on inner resources and personal capacity at a time when most of us are already losing the equipment—our will, our instincts, our sense of purchase—with which we handle the task of being alive…the only worthwhile parts of my mind are those which have resisted or eluded the incentives of the internet.”

Pretty bleak, right? But it feels good, like scratching an itch, to have someone acknowledge the acceleration of time and the way it’s reshaping our brains and how we become complacent in our grim realities. If you have also felt any of this, read the piece in its entirety right here.

Now for the good. I did an amazing hike on Sunday, and if you are in the LA area, I highly recommend taking a morning or afternoon to wander in the San Gabriels. It’s called Trail Canyon Falls and you can find more information, including the trailhead location, right here on AllTrails. Being outside, in nature, feels like perhaps the only real antidote left to all of the shit on offer at the swipe of a screen nearest you. At the end of the trail, you will find a sturdy rope you can use to rappel a short distance down some rocks (no previous experience or extra equipment necessary) and arrive at a beautiful waterfall.