Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

It is nearly impossible, today, to separate engagement from magnification.

Facebook’s goal of showing people only what they were interested in seeing resulted, within a decade, in the effective end of shared civic reality.

it is essential that social media is mostly unsatisfying. That is what keeps us scrolling, scrolling, pressing our lever over and over in the hopes of getting some fleeting sensation—some momentary rush of recognition, flattery, or rage.

There was no limit to the amount of misfortune a person could take in via the internet, I wrote, and there was no way to calibrate this information correctly—no guidebook for how to expand our hearts to accommodate these simultaneous scales of human experience, no way to teach ourselves to separate the banal from the profound.

I was learning

that in the twenty-first century it would sometimes be impossible to differentiate between the pretext for an experience, the record of that experience, and the experience itself.

In children’s literature, young female characters are self-evidently important, and their traumas, whatever they may be, are secondary. In adult fiction, if a girl is important to the narrative, trauma often comes first.

My hesitation, as an adult, to find myself within the heroine universe has been rooted in a suspicion that that identification would never be truly reciprocal: I would see myself in Jo March, but the world’s Jo Marches would rarely, if ever, be expected or able to see themselves in me.

“Decreation,” finally, is a word that comes from Simone Weil—her term for the process of moving toward a love so unadulterated that it makes you leave yourself behind.

The sense of something is not its substance.

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.

Rewriting a woman’s story inevitably means engaging with the male rules that previously defined it.

The problem seemed deeper—rooted in the fact that women have to slog through so many obstacles to become successful that their success is forever refracted through those obstacles. The problem seemed related to the way that the lives of famous women are constantly interpreted

as crucial referenda on what we have to overcome to be women at all.

We have taught people who don’t even care about feminism how to do this—how to analyze women and analyze the way people react to women, how to endlessly read and interpret the signs.

Underneath the confectionary spectacle of the wedding is a case study in how inequality bestows outsize affirmation on women as compensation for making us disappear.

I don’t want to be diminished, and I do want to be glorified—not in one shining moment, but whenever I want.