Vol. 38 of Thursday Third Things
Instructions for handling the next four years
This is my backyard and if I HAVE to ride out four terrible years of this next presidency, there are worse places to do it.
So…how about that news cycle this week, eh? Let’s just say headlines were pretty grim, morales were pretty low, and I didn’t read a ton that I’m feeling particularly excited to share with you all.
What I have for you instead are some readings and recommendations for how to make the next four years not feel so suffocating. Some parts of this Trump administration are definitely going to affect our day-to-day lives, while others might just seem like they’re affecting us simply because we’re taking in too much information.
If I learned one thing from the last Trump administration (god, I just threw up a little in my mouth admitting we’re here again), it’s that there is such a thing as being too informed. And being too informed mainly stems from being too online.
We have to take breaks. Scrolling is not going to be restful (it never was, but even more so now). And we’re going to need a whole lot more art, poetry, and music than we are people glued to the 24/7 news cycle trying to out-compete each other on who can consume the most shit before getting terminally ill.
Knowledge of American politics does not magically grant us some kind of moral superiority. So let’s set those phones down, touch some grass, and remember that power is not won in the comments.
Stop Documenting Everything For Public Consumption
Last night, I bopped back onto Instagram for the first time since June so that I could officially deactivate my account. I decided to take one last scroll down memory lane, looking through all my posts from the past couple of years and…it made me feel decidedly NOT good. A lot of stuff felt pretty cringey and I found myself wishing I just had a private, physical photo album to look through instead.
It’s not that I don’t think we should share our lives with each other in the form of words and photos (I mean, I’m still here on Substack, right?) it’s just that I definitely knew A LOT of those photos were posted not because I wanted to share my life, but because I wanted to perform my life. Too many photos felt so cringey not because anything was wrong with them, but because I KNEW what headspace I was in when I posted them. I wanted my friends and followers to consume my life. It was all about everyone else and nothing about me.
I know I’m not alone in this. Documenting everything for public consumption is a way of saying, “Hey, I’m here! And I matter!” But there are other, better ways to demonstrate (and better feel) that we belong in the world.
“I think if this generation is on track to regret anything it will be the time we wasted documenting and editing and filtering and marketing ourselves for social media. Time we will never get back. My bet is we won’t look back at our hundreds of thousands of Instagram Stories and Snapchats and Boomerangs with fondness that we filmed these moments, but with aching regret that we didn’t fully feel them.”
How to Put Your Phone Down and Read a Book
I’m embarrassed this article needs to exist — but I know I’m also part of the problem. I absolutely had a better capacity for reading books a decade ago before my phone had its tight, dopamine grip on me. I’m starting to break that habit, but it’s taking months (and months, and months) and I still don’t feel like my brain has returned to its 2014 self yet. (And I’m a little worried it never will).
However, reading books (and even magazines, and articles, and things that generally take longer than .5 seconds to consume and contain enough nuance that they can’t possibly be compressed into a “caption”) is another way of staying sane these next four years. You don’t need to be informed about the day-to-day shitstorm that is about to become the American government. But you also don’t have to hop to the other end of that spectrum and disengage entirely.
Take in what you can, at a speed that feels sustainable, and let that be that. If that means you read just one book a month instead of 4,000 posts, stories, headlines, and “if you don’t share this right now you’re a bigot who deserves to rot in hell,” type posts well, I think you’re probably a more thoughtful person than half these nut sacks on the internet.
How to Have Hobbies
A previous therapist regularly told me I was “doing too much” and that I needed to start cutting some things out of my life if I wanted to bring the anxiety down. I don’t think she was wrong per se, but I’d leave those sessions livid at the thought of cutting activities out of my life that brought me joy. Because those were really the only things I could cut. I couldn’t cut my hours at work and I still had to cook food and do laundry, which meant the other things on the chopping block were dancing, painting, writing, biking, volunteer time, and anything else I did with my life outside of work and household chores that brought me a tiny modicum of joy.
This year, I’ve decided that hobbies are top priorities and everything else comes second. This means that I don’t always give work my best effort, my house isn’t always clean, and dinner is sometimes a frozen pizza. I do whatever I have to to keep burnout and overwhelm at bay without just scratching all my hobbies off the to-do list.
I think this is also how we get through the next four years. Be mediocre at your job (because god knows the Trump admin will be), be mediocre with your home, and be wildly in love with what you actually love.
“At the peak of the dahlia bloom this summer, I realized I was edging close to “the wrong kind of busy” — and also knew that the easiest way to restore equilibrium was to cut something out. The easiest thing to cut would’ve been….my hobbies. Which is exactly what I’ve seen so many women do: cut out the things they want to do in order to do everything else for everyone else. So instead of pulling back on the thing I loved the most, I recentered and reprioritized. I reminded myself that “doing it all” should not be mistaken for fullness or satisfaction. And that reminder has become a sort of daily practice, as I stare at the deck that could really use a power wash: your hobby is so much more worthy of you than this ridiculous deck shame.
So I want to be very clear here: I’m not telling you that you should be doing all of those things well and also have a cool hobby. I’m saying you should spend some time figuring out what you actually like doing — and then figure out what you can safely be shitty at in order to give that thing more space.”
The Trap of Being Busy
The most painful part of this article is that it was written 12 years ago and the busyness trap has only gotten worse. During the last Trump administration, I told myself this story that so long as I was super busy with work, and always thinking about work (we were fighting Trump!) then my life had meaning and no one could tell me I wasn’t doing enough.
“Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.”
I am guessing this is why so many of my coworkers and so many others working in the nonprofit industrial complex work so many hours, are in so many meetings, and never stop talking about work and how underwater they are. But I’ve learned since then that if work is the only thing you’ve got…it might be a sign that you’ve actually made your own life trivial and meaningless.
“More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.”
Everyone is Fleeing X
I don’t think ditching one social media platform and hopping right onto another is the BEST thing you could do right now, but god, nothing makes me happier than seeing social media platforms collapsing. I will not be satiated until every last one of these dumb platforms sit in a crumbling heap of their own hubris. If we get one shining star out of these next four years, I hope it is the death of social media.
Things I’ve Read Recently That Felt More Helpful Than Harmful
Okay, now there are SOME things I’ve read recently related to the dumpster fire that is America that have actually felt helpful. And if you’re feeling up for it (it’s okay if you’re not) you can find those listed below. (You’ll notice it’s A LOT from The Atlantic, and I apologize that puts it behind a paywall, but it is one of the few outlets I would highly recommend paying for).
— Voters Wanted Lower Prices at Any Cost
— Where Does This Leave Democrats?
— What the Left Keeps Getting Wrong
— Why Democrats Are Losing The Culture War
— The HR-ification of the Democratic Party
Such good advice here, Anja. Thinking of you.