Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

because I am always confused, because I can never be sure of anything, and because I am drawn to any mechanism that directs me away from that truth.

Writing is either a way to shed my self-delusions or a way to develop them.

2016 election—an event that strongly suggested that the worst things about the internet were now determining, rather than reflecting, the worst things about offline life.

selfhood has become capitalism’s last natural resource,

I’ve been thinking about five intersecting problems: first, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity; second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our understanding of solidarity; and, finally, how it destroys our sense of scale.

The self is not a fixed, organic thing, but a dramatic effect that emerges from a performance. This effect can be believed or disbelieved at will.

The political philosopher Sally Scholz separates solidarity into three categories. There’s social solidarity, which is based on common experience; civic solidarity, which is based on moral obligation to a community; and political solidarity, which is based on a shared commitment to a cause.

The internet was dramatically increasing our ability to know about things, while our ability to change things stayed the same, or possibly shrank right in front of us.

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.

“That we must continually strive for beauty is part of the logic of beauty as an ethical ideal—as it is for other successful ethical ideals,”

In 1844, “optimize” was used as a verb for the first time, meaning “to act like an optimist.” In 1857, it was used for the first time in the way we currently use it—“to make the most of.”

“There is no good answer to being a woman; the art may instead lie in how we refuse the question.”

“We are given a single story line about what makes a good life, even though not a few who follow that story line have bad lives,” she writes. “We speak as though there is one good plot with one happy outcome, while the myriad forms a life can take flower—and wither—all around us.”

“existence, relation and attention,”

“and in eyes no sight and drumming / fills ears”: and cold sweat holds me and shaking grips me all, greener than grass I am and dead—or almost I seem to me.

“May I disappear in order that those things that I see may become perfect in their beauty from the very fact that they are no longer things that I see.”

When you love something so much that you dream of emptying yourself out for it, you’d be forgiven for wanting to let your love finish the job.

this revelation I seem ready to have forever in degraded forms.”

But most of all, it’s the table, the crystalline pyrotechnics of its shattering. That’s the place where the narrative strains hardest against realism, wanting to move into another register altogether.”

BuzzFeed titled “Being Winona in a World Made for Gwyneths.”

In truth, I’ve felt married to you for a long time.