Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

One year, a troupe of Christian bodybuilders regularly appeared at chapel to rip apart phone books as a demonstration of the strength we could acquire through Jesus.

At Halloween, the church put on a “Judgment House,” a walk-through haunted-house play in which the main character drank beer at a party and ...

It’s hard to draw the line between taking pleasure in God’s purpose and aligning God’s purpose with what I take pleasure in, I wrote, between entries where I tried to understand if it was inherently wrong to get drunk. (At my school, you could be expelled for character-based spiritual offenses such as partying, being gay, or getting pregnant.) I stood between both sides of my life, holding the lines that led to them, trying to engage with a tension that I stopped being able to feel. Eventually, almost without realizing it, I let one side go.

Like many people before me, I found religion and drugs appealing for similar reasons.

Both provide a path toward transcendence—a way of accessing an extrahuman world of rapture and pardon that, in both cases, is as real as it feels.

sixteen extended and agonizing visions of God, which she collected later in a book called Revelations of Divine Love. “And our Lord’s next showing was a supreme spiritual pleasure in my soul,” she writes. “In this pleasure I was filled with eternal certainty….This feeling was so joyful to me and so full of goodness that I felt completely peaceful, easy and at rest, as though there were nothing on earth that could hurt me.” The high is then followed by a comedown: “This only lasted for a while, and then my feeling was reversed and I was left oppressed, weary of myself, and so disgusted with my life that I could hardly bear to live.”

But it could easily pass as a series of transcripts from Erowid, the nonprofit website based in Northern California that catalogs people’s experiences with psychoactive substances.

One rape survivor on ecstasy reports “exceptional presence—a vibrancy and change of color, an expansive quality rather than a fearful, contracted quality—and with a beaming sort of aura. I felt expansive, physically exhausted but full of love and a deep feeling of peace.”

And unlike other drugs that provoke extraordinary interpersonal euphoria—mushrooms or acid—it does not confuse the user about what is occurring. You maintain a sense of control over your experience; your awareness of self and of basic reality is unchanged. It’s because of this grounded state that ecstasy can provide a sense of salvation

Ecstasy can and generally does make you feel like the best version of the person you would be if you were able to let your lifelong psychological burdens go.

In the fifties, a participant in a legal MDA trial had died after being given 450 milligrams of the substance; at least eight people died after taking MDMA from 1977 to 1981.

(For context, about ninety thousand people die every year in the U.S. from excessive consumption of alcohol, and nearly five hundred thousand people die each year from smoking cigarettes. Ecstasy is in no way a casual drug, but if the substance was legal, its death rate would be dwarfed by that of tobacco or alcohol.)

Dealer adulteration is now the main thing that makes ecstasy risky—for

In the seventies, researchers believed that MDMA treatment would be discrete and limited—that once you got the message, as they put it, you could hang up the phone. You would be better for having listened. You would be changed. They don’t say this about religion, but they should.

debt ballooned to over $1.5 trillion in 2018. But there’s one major difference between housing debt and education debt: at least for now, if you hope to improve your life in America, you can’t quite turn away from a diploma the way you can a white picket fence.

In the years following the recession, I kept hearing the little factoid that people my age would change careers an average of four times in our first decade out of college. Stories about how millennials “prefer” to freelance still abound. The desired takeaway seems to be: Millennials are free spirits! We’re flexible! We’ll work anywhere with a Ping-Pong table! We are up for anything and ready to connect! But a generation doesn’t start living a definitively mercurial work trajectory for reasons of personality. It’s just easier, as Malcolm Harris argues in his book Kids These Days, to think millennials float from gig to gig because we’re shiftless or spoiled or in love with the “hustle” than to consider the fact that the labor market—for people of every generation—is punitively unstable and growing more so every day.

In the current economy, for most students, colleges couldn’t possibly deliver on providing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of anything. Wages aren’t budging, even though corporate profits have soared.

The average CEO now makes 271 times the salary of the average American worker, whereas in 1965, the ratio was twenty-to-one.

Healthcare costs are staggering—per capita health spending has increased twenty-nine times over the past four decades—and childcare costs are rising like college tuition, even as the frontline workers in both healthcare and childcare often receive pove...

And still, colleges sell themselves as the crucible through which every young person must pass to stand a chance of succeeding.

The most successful millennial is surely thirty-five-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, whose net worth fluctuates around the upper eleven digits.

He is the eighth-richest person in the world. As the founder of Facebook, he effectively controls a nation-state: with a quarter of the world’s population using his website on a monthly basis, he can sway elections, and change the way we relate to one another, and control broad social definitions of what is acceptable and true.

He was bored, he wrote on his blog, and he needed to take his mind off his “little bitch” of an ex.

The Kirkland dormitory facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.

Zuckerberg created a site called Facemash, which put photos of Harvard undergrads side by side and asked you to vote between

Zuckerberg, understanding that he could build in a month what would take Harvard much longer, launched the first version of Facebook the next February. Four thousand people signed up within the next two weeks.

When I got Facebook (or “thefacebook”) at the end of my senior year of high school, I felt like I had stepped into a wonderful, narcissistic dream. At the time, I was at a peak of self-interest, extremely invested in figuring out who I would become when no longer confined to an environment of Republicans and daily Bible class.

The concept was entrancing from the beginning: a bona fide, aesthetically unembarrassing website, seemingly devoted to a better version of you.

Even if Zuckerberg didn’t set out to consciously scam the people who signed up for Facebook, everyone who signed up—all two and a quarter billion monthly users (and counting)—has been had nonetheless. It’s our attention being sold to advertisers. It’s our personal data being sold to market research firms, our loose political animus being purchased by special interest groups.

reportedly inflated viewer statistics for its videos by up to 900 percent,

2016 election, Facebook claimed that there had been no significant Russian interference on Facebook, despite the fact that an internal Facebook committee devoted to investigating the subject had already found evidence of this interference.

Facebook has allowed other companies, like Netflix and Spotify, to view its users’ private messages.

Even if you distance yourself from Facebook, you still live in the world that Facebook is shaping. Facebook, using our native narcissism and our desire to connect with other people, captured our attention and our behavioral data; it used this attention and data to manipulate our behavior, to the point that nearly half of America began relying on Facebook for the news.

Then, with the media both reliant on Facebook as a way of reaching readers and powerless against the platform’s ability to suck up digital advertising revenue—it was like a paperboy who pocketed all the subscription money—Facebook bent the media’s economic model to match its own practices: publications needed

to capture attention quickly and consistently trigger high emotional respo...

What began as a way for Zuckerberg to harness collegiate misogyny and self-interest has become the fuel for our whole contemporary nightmare, for a world that fundamentally and systematically misrepresents human needs. At a basic level, Facebook, like most other forms of social media, runs on doublespeak—advertising connection but creating isolation, promising happiness but inculcating dread.

We see the madness of privatized healthcare in the forced positivity of a stranger’s chemotherapy GoFundMe campaign.

survival. Instead of fair wages and benefits, we have our personalities and stories and relationships, and we’d better learn to package them well for the internet in case we ever get in an accident while uninsured. More than any other entity, Facebook has solidified the idea that selfhood exists in the shape of a well-performing public avatar.

Trumps and the Kardashians—have risen to the top of the food chain because of their keen understanding of how little substance is required to package the self as an endlessly monetizable asset.

On the wings of market-friendly feminism, the idea that personal advancement is a subversive form of political progress has been accepted as gospel.

The problem is that a feminism that prioritizes the individual will always, at its core, be at odds with a feminism that prioritizes the collective.

Amazon is an octopus: nimble, fluid, tentacled, brilliant, poisonous, appealing, flexible enough to squeeze enormous bulk through tiny loopholes. Amazon has chewed up brick-and-mortar retail: an estimated 8,600 stores closed in 2017, a significant increase from the 6,200 stores that closed in 2008, at the peak of the recession. The company has decimated office-supply stores, toy stores, electronics stores, and sporting goods stores, and now that it owns Whole Foods, grocery stores will likely be next.

use Amazon—which I did regularly for years, with full knowledge of its labor practices—is to accept and embrace a world in which everything is worth as little as possible, even, and maybe particularly, people. Its corporate culture is notoriously hellish.

They enter through metal detectors and spend the day strapped to Amazon-patented monitoring equipment, speed-walking in circles around an enormous, airless, fluorescent-lit warehouse, expected to pack and complete new packages every thirty seconds. (The new Amazon trackers even vibrate to warn workers that they’re moving too slow.)

The final, definitive scam for the millennial generation is the election of an open con artist to the presidency in 2016. Donald Trump is a lifelong scammer, out and proud and seemingly unstoppable.

For decades before he entered politics, he peddled a magnificently fraudulent narrative about himself as a straight-talking, self-made, vaguely populist billionaire, and the fact that the lie was always in plain sight became a central part of his appeal. In his

In 1992, he made a cameo in Home Alone 2, giving Macaulay Culkin directions while standing in the Plaza Hotel lobby, surrounded by marble columns and crystal chandeliers. (This was a condition of filming at a Trump hotel: you were required to write him a walk-on part.) That same year, he went bankrupt for the second time.

In 2004, the year of his third bankruptcy, he started hosting The Apprentice, in which he, the brilliant businessman, got to fire people on TV. It was a gigantic hit.

abuse. In the seventies, he was sued by Richard Nixon’s Department of Justice after crafting policies to keep black people out of his housing projects. In 1980, he hired two hundred undocumented Polish immigrants to clear the ground for Trump Tower, putting them to work without gloves or hard hats, and sometimes having them sleep on-site. In 1981, he bought a building on Central Park South, hoping to convert rent-controlled apartments into luxury condos; when the tenants wouldn’t leave, he issued illegal eviction notices, cut off their heat and hot water, and placed newspaper ads offering to house the homeless in the building.

He spent tens of thousands of dollars buying his own books to inflate sales numbers.