Kindle Notes & Highlights
She was missing the performance of other lives. And thus the gap between that performance and the lives themselves.
When a fresh subculture grew up, you wanted it to have an edge. Like the punks or hippies. But the young subcultures on social seemed to be void of ideology. Beyond naming and shaming each other for perceived identity bias. If they had an ideology, it contained no ideas.
Pure narcissism. The point was not to be but to seem. Prettier, cooler, righter.
She knew relief, scrolling through those feeds. A relief that felt like affection—the surprising luck of finding good company.
The images suggested their authors had a sense of scale. That it was possible for the photo boxes to be windows instead of mirrors.
The love she felt for him was so piercing she almost wished it away. Not the love itself, only its urgent quality. She might blunt that, if she could. To make it easier to bear.
“Listen, Liza,” he said. “Is history for losers?” “Extremely. It’s like, a million details of how we trashed the world and killed off the people who didn’t have as many guns. Then tried to pass it off as the best idea ever. Which maybe you already know, as a Stanford graduate?
“Oh, fuck. It better not be a kid of color,” said Saul. “That would be so fucked.” “We couldn’t call him on it.” “Then we’d be the gay racists.”
But stories seemed more and more useless. The sound of fiddling while Rome burned.
What he wanted was for the world to stay. But it was going away. All of it leaving: animals, plants, forests, the polar ice. While people told stories. And ran around building their résumés. Wanting to look like winners. Beneath the falling sky.
Any day now the privacy paradigm would flip. Security experts already knew it. Safety would beat out autonomy, in the eyes of the helicopter parents. Hands down. Find My iPhone without the iPhone—Foucault’s panopticon in action. Asymmetrical surveillance. Inserted neatly into those plump baby arms. As smoothly as the removal of a foreskin at a bris.
He wouldn’t have caught it. If it wasn’t well-digitized and easily searchable, anyway. He didn’t read words printed on wood pulp—never entered a library. It was a personal creed. They were nothing but cemeteries, full of monuments to the dead.
If he’d asked her advice, which he never did, she would have said, It’s easy. Just don’t cross your arms or jiggle your knee. Those are called tells. The consultants had him dead to rights. He was compelled to admit it: equity was the goal. Urban planning might be the task at hand, but the larger goal was equity. The mouth moved. It said, Go equity! Equity onboarding! But so did the knee. And it said, This is such bullshit.
The way she stretches out a scene
Because if you multiplied that prescription, for acceptance and accommodation, and made it into policy, you’d have systemic failure. On the macro level, acceptance of the normal would mean death. It had started to seem to her that, as she counseled her patients on how to live better within that new normal—or the abnormality that passed for normal—she was delivering therapeutic euthanasia.
There was someone. A kid. Well, a young man. His bleakness was persuasive. The fear, he said, was common sense.
“You were a golden boy.” He smiled. “No. I just had a golden life.” “But, somehow, you’re not a golden man.”
