Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

by Jia Tolentino

The last few years have taught me to suspend my desire for a conclusion, to assume that nothing is static and that renegotiation will be perpetual, to hope primarily that little truths will keep emerging in time.

Where we had once been free to be ourselves online, we were now chained to ourselves online, and this made us self-conscious.

Online reward mechanisms beg to substitute for offline ones, and then overtake them. This is why everyone tries to look so hot and well-traveled on Instagram; this is why everyone seems so smug and triumphant on Facebook; this is why, on Twitter, making a righteous political statement has come to seem, for many people, like a political good in itself.

our world—digitally mediated, utterly consumed by capitalism—makes communication about morality very easy but makes actual moral living very hard.

lately I’ve been wondering how everything got so intimately terrible, and why, exactly, we keep playing along. How did a huge number of people begin spending the bulk of our disappearing free time in an openly torturous environment?

I’ve been thinking about five intersecting problems: first, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity;

how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions;

how it maximizes our sense of...

how it cheapens our understanding of solidarity; and, finally, how it destr...

To communicate an identity requires some degree of self-delusion.

A friend sitting across from you at dinner, called to play therapist for your trivial romantic hang-ups, has to pretend to herself that she wouldn’t rather just go home and get in bed to read Barbara Pym.

No audience has to be physically present for a performer to engage in this sort of selective concealment: a woman, home alone for the weekend, might scrub the baseboards and watch nature documentaries even though she’d rather trash the place, buy an eight ball, and have a Craigslist orgy.

Goffman observed that we need both an audience to witness our performances as well as a backstage area where we can relax, often in the company of “teammates” who had been performing alongside us. Think

“But this imputation—this self—is a product of a scene that comes off, and is not a cause of it,”

People who maintain a public internet profile are building a self that can be viewed simultaneously by their mom, their boss, their potential future bosses, their eleven-year-old nephew, their past and future sex partners, their relatives who loathe their politics, as well as anyone who cares to look for any possible reason.

Identity, according to Goffman, is a series of claims and promises.

the assumption that speech has an impact, that it’s something like action; the assumption that it’s fine or helpful or even ideal to be constantly writing down what you think.

There is less time these days for anything other than economic survival. The internet has moved seamlessly into the interstices of this situation, redistributing our minimum free time into unsatisfying micro-installments, spread throughout the day.

it’s designed to encourage us to create certain impressions rather than allowing these impressions to arise “as an incidental by-product of [our] activity.”

Rather than work toward other forms of self-actualization—or attempt to make themselves genuinely desirable, in the same way that women have been socialized to do at great expense and with great sincerity for all time—they established a group identity that centered on anti-woman virulence, on telling women who happened to stumble across 4chan that “the only interesting thing about you is your naked body. tl;dr: tits or GET THE FUCK OUT.”

This is what the online expression of solidarity sometimes feels like—a manner of listening so extreme and performative that it often turns into the show.

Rats will eventually stop pressing the lever if their device dispenses food regularly or not at all. But if the lever’s rewards are rare and irregular, the rats will never stop pressing it. In other words, it is essential that social media is mostly unsatisfying.

Distraction is a “life-and-death matter,” Jenny Odell writes in How to Do Nothing. “A social body that can’t concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can’t think and act.”

Capitalism has no land left to cultivate but the self. Everything is being cannibalized—not just goods and labor, but personality and relationships and attention.

The ideal woman has always been conceptually overworked, an inorganic thing engineered to look natural.

But the psychological parasite of the ideal woman has evolved to survive in an ecosystem that pretends to resist her.

Feminism has not eradicated the tyranny of the ideal woman but, rather, has entrenched it and made it trickier.

She can believe—reasonably enough, and with the full encouragement of feminism—that she herself is the architect of the exquisite, constant, and often pleasurable type of power that this image holds over her time, her money, her decisions, her selfhood, and her soul.

Figuring out how to “get better” at being a woman is a ridiculous and often amoral project—a subset of the larger, equally ridiculous, equally amoral project of learning to get better at life under accelerated capitalism.

In these pursuits, most pleasures end up being traps, and every public-facing demand escalates in perpetuity. Satisfaction remains, under the terms...

But the worse things get, the more a person is compe...

He feels a physical need for this twelve-dollar salad, as it’s the most reliable and convenient way to build up a vitamin barrier against the general malfunction that comes with his salad-requiring-and-enabling job.

(In 1958, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote, “It can no longer be assumed that welfare is greater at an all-around higher level of production than a lower one

higher level of production has, merely, a higher level of want creation necessitating a higher level of want satisfaction.”)

It’s very easy, under conditions of artificial but continually escalating obligation, to find yourself organizing your life around practices you find ridiculous and possibly indefensible. Women have known this intimately for a long time.

When you are a woman, the things you like get used against you.

Or, alternatively, the things that get used against you have all been prefigured as things you should like. Sexual availability falls into this category. So does basic kindness, and generosity. Wanting to look good—taking pleasure in trying to look good—does, too.

I like trying to look good, but it’s hard to say how much you can genuinely, independently lik...

beauty requirements have escalated as women’s subjugation has decreased. It’s as if our culture has mustered an immune-system response to contin...

One waste of time had been traded for another, Wolf wrote.

2018 book, Perfect Me, the philosopher Heather Widdows argues persuasively that the beauty ideal has more recently taken on an ethical dimension.

The default assumption tends to be that it is politically important to designate everyone as beautiful, that it is a meaningful project to make sure that everyone can become, and feel, increasingly beautiful. We have hardly tried to imagine what it might look like if our culture could do the opposite—de-escalate the situation, make beauty matter less.

choice does not “make an unjust or exploitative practice or act, somehow, magically, just or non-exploitative.”

Old requirements, instead of being overthrown, are rebranded. Beauty work is labeled “self-care” to make it sound progressive.

“Self-exposure and self-policing meet in a feedback loop,” Weigel wrote. “Because these pants only ‘work’ on a certain kind of body, wearing them reminds you to go out and get that body. They encourage you to produce yourself as the body that they ideally display.”

The historian Susan G. Cole wrote that the best way to instill social values is to eroticize them.

We pay too much for the things we think are precious, but we also start to believe things are precious if someone makes us pay too much. This mechanism is clearest in the wedding industry,

We were lucky, I thought, dissociating, to even be able to indulge these awful priorities, to have the economic capital to be able to accrue more social capital via our looks.

striving to look carefree and happy can interfere with your ability to feel so.

2017 movie Ingrid Goes West