Fake Accounts Quotes

“The internet is always on, interaction always available, but it could not guarantee I would be able to interact with someone I liked and understood, or who (I thought) liked and understood me. I’d gotten used to using people I’d never met, or met a few times, to muffle the sound of time passing without transcendence or joy or any of the good emotions I wanted to experience during my life, and I knew the feeling was mutual, and that was the comfort in it. It was compared to white noise so often for a reason: so many people, talking, mumbling, murmuring, muttering, suggesting, gently reminding, chiming in, jumping in, just wanting to add, just reminding, just asking, just wondering, just letting that sink in, just telling, just saying, just wanting to say, just screaming, just *whispering*, in all lowercase letters, in all caps, with punctuation, with no punctuation, with photos, with GIFs, with related links, Pay attention to me!”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“In life, most people say they want to fall in love. By that they mean a few things, none of which is actually part of the emotion. What people mean (ticking off on fingers): 1) They want to find someone who solves—or makes otherwise irrelevant through the delirious happiness they inspire—the umbrella problem of life: What is the meaning of it?; 2) They want to find someone who makes them want no one else, someone they feel totally confident that they are in love with, with no doubts; 3) They want to find someone who they feel totally confident is in love with them, so that instead of going through the painful process of looking deep inside themselves for worth they can outsource the task of identifying it; 4) Later, when such things become worrisome, pangs in the night, at the grocery store, while cooking, countless sad dinners for one, they want someone who will take care of them when they die.

This vision of love is totally unrealistic, it just doesn’t happen, but there’s always the sense that it could, and that imagined possibility drives the whole system of despair and broken dreams that has everyone settling for that guy from high school, or whatever, he concluded.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“People often say my generation values authenticity. Reluctantly I will admit to being a member of my generation. If we value authenticity it’s because we’ve been bombarded since our impressionable preteen years with fakery”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“don’t think positivity works, not least because it’s alienating, but then again so is being a bitch.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“I had been lured into an intellectual trap and had only myself to blame.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“I resented my mother and online feminism for making me paranoid.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“Throughout my childhood, I had been warned that I would spend a significant portion of my time doing something I could barely stand, but I had been lead to believe I would be paid for it.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“There were so many people in bad moods at any given time; all we had to do was find each other. We could pretend something good, connection, had come of our turning to technology to deal with boredom, loneliness, rejection, heartbreak, irrational rage, Weltschmerz, ennui, frustration with the writing process. We were all self-centered together, supporting each other up as we propped up the social media companies.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“It's not very rigorous to seek out, and prize, relatability. But it can calm you down. And like expensive beef jerky, this was something I thought I'd earned.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“If it seemed like he was selling something it was because his enjoyment of that thing depended on a diversity of people participating. The number of available sexual partners for the Relationship Anarchist is probably limited, and assuming one of the draws of Relationship Anarchy is weird sex with a variety of people, that limitation may cripple the point. There are social obstacles to doing things differently: People get mad at you. They worry you’re judging them and suspect deep down you might be right; they become stubborn and defensive. You need backup, reassurance, affinity. You’d have to be a real believer to keep going, is what I’m saying, so I thought maybe my rush to characterize him as a charlatan was unfair. Though this is also the rationale of multilevel marketing schemes.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“I was one of only two people on staff who knew how semicolons worked.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“Anyway, the message I got in the yoga class was that everyone was going to the protest.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“It was certainly possible that knowing what was happening produced no good - I never did anything about it - and in fact caused harm by making me feel like I was helpless and manipulated, which made me continue to do nothing because I felt, rightly or wrongly but mainly conveniently, that there was nothing I could do. Holding on tightly to the sense that at any moment the governments on whose economies I was dependent could collapse meant that the rest of my days would be lived out in cycles of paranoia and despair followed by shaky you-only-live-once justifications and self-harm. Why keep doing this? Surely someone would tell you before the draft, or the shelter-in-place, or whatever, was about to happen, especially if you were constantly bragging about the richness of a life spent not reading the news.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“I’m told I don’t have to try to justify love, which contains at least a small percentage of unsolvable mystery, but I just can’t stand the thought of seeming irrationally carried away by emotion and unable to freestyle my way back to the calm waters of reason. I believe it hurts the feminist cause. And, worse, makes me personally look bad.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“In the weeks since Trump had been elected there had been a quick proliferation of vocabulary: authoritarian, strongman, autocracy, kleptocracy.... It was as if everyone had taken Introduction to Political Philosophy and wanted to impress the hot professor, who had grown up in the Soviet Union.... but as it was the language felt wrong, ripped from the past and pasted on the present, its rough edges visible and curling, though I couldn't find a way to pin down getting educated as a bad thing.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“American is the sound of someone stepping on a plastic crate and cracking it and it never stops”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“She told me studies show that people who talk about their goals are less likely to accomplish them than people who are humble and quiet, because talking about plans makes you feel like you have done something and then you feel less like you need to do something.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“BEGINNING CONSENSUS WAS THE WORLD WAS ENDING, OR WOULD BEGIN TO end soon, if not by exponential environmental catastrophe then by some combination of nuclear war, the American two-party system, patriarchy, white supremacy, gentrification, globalization, data breaches, and social media. People looked sad, on the subway, in the bars; decisions were questioned, opinions rearranged. The same grave epiphany was dragged around everywhere: we were transitioning from an only retrospectively easy past to an inarguably more difficult future; we were, it could no longer be denied, unstoppably bad.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“Consensus was the world was ending, or would begin to end soon, if not by exponential environmental catastrophe then by some combination of nuclear war, the American two-party system, patriarchy, white supremacy, gentrification, globalization, data breaches, and social media. People looked sad on the subway, in the bars; decisions were questioned, opinions rearranged. The same grave epiphany was dragged around everywhere: We were transitioning from an only retrospectively easy past to an inarguably more difficult future; we were, it could no longer be denied, unstoppably bad. Although the death of any hope for humanity had surely been decades in the making, the result of many intersecting systems described forbiddingly well, it was only that short period—between the election of a new president and his holding up a hand to swear to serve the people—that made clear what had happened, and showed that we were too late.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“Donald Trump was the dumbest person on earth and there was nothing I could do about it. The dumbness of any one person, regardless of their influence on the world, had nothing to do with me, except that it could maybe make me look good in certain company, but at the same time this fixation, on news, on other people, on gossip, on distillations and opinions, was nothing if not a reminder of how much one could know without actually knowing anything.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“pediatric dentist’s office, and was ashamed. I had”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“A question, both entirely reasonable, and sweetly quixotic. A word I learned when it appeared on the dropdown menu of possible moods to assign yourself on Livejournal, the blogging platform I used in middle school.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“For a few months, the political catastrophe seemed so dire that one's music and movie preferences were no longer considered the ultimate markers of one's moral fitness to fight fascism. Which became, incredibly, a buzzword.

Though we could always 'do more' or 'do better', there was a sense that our embarrassment of privileges could be set aside to focus on the task at hand. Though what that task was, I wasn't really sure.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“Nell smiled. “Exactly. I just don’t find that fear is serving me. I have all the right opinions. I know what’s bad and what’s good. I just didn’t feel like it was making me better. Like my ex boyfriend. Ha ha. I’ve been doing a lot of baking.”

I said I’d heard vanilla extract was hard to find here.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“Already the project was requiring more research than I’d anticipated. I’d thought I knew a fair amount about astrology, particularly for someone who didn’t believe in it, but the only signature traits I could really recite if pressed corresponded to my own sign. It turned out to be incredibly boring to learn about the made-up characteristics of other people.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“I knew anything I said to the chuckling men at this point would be used to taunt me, that they would support each other’s claims in order to push me closer toward humiliation, alternately patronizing me with exaggerated agreement and through more traditional teasing. But at the same time I hated them and wanted them to know. What would Ursula K. Le Guin do?”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“At the march itself I realized after seeing several signs featuring Princess Leia that despite the term’s historical usage in political theory and activism the resistance arose because it was a feature of Star Wars, and Carrie Fisher had just died. You could argue that its usage in Star Wars comes from political theory and activism, but even so the real significance is muted. If you don’t know something is a reference you don’t fully understand it; this is the great humiliation of allusion.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“A
drunk coworker had once let me know that I’d established myself as a somewhat
retrograde cynic, a toxic presence in the office but ultimately safe from
firing because, among other skills, I was one of only two people on staff who
knew how semicolons worked; my leaving was a wash.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“The internet is always on, interaction always available, but it could not guarantee I would be able to interact with someone I liked and understood, or who (I thought) liked and understood me. I’d gotten used to using people I’d never met, or met a few times, to muffle the sound of time passing without transcendence or joy or any of the good emotions I wanted to experience during my life, and I knew the feeling was mutual, and that was the comfort in it.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“I asked him how it worked.

It’s about letting other people flow through you, he said, undulating in his seat to demonstrate. You may or may not flow through them, depending on how porous and willing they are. (His words.) Their porousness and willingness, however, is fundamentally and critically not your problem, he said; your problem is you and your own porousness and willingness. Or at least that’s how he interpreted it; the great thing about Relationship Anarchy was that there was no blueprint you had to follow.

This didn’t really answer my question, but I didn’t know how to respond. How porous and willing was I? It wasn’t something I’d ever considered.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts