Oh Irina, thank you so much for this - I have so many thoughts. I will say that this space - Substack - reminds me of an older sort of social media, blogging (other have compared Substack to blogging plenty of times before, of course, this isn't an original take) and how this form of social media, unlike Twitter or Facebook, isn't an instant gratification machine. It is more like a conversation - sometimes a conversation a writer is having with themself, sometimes a conversation they're having with other people, but there's always a time delay, and there's usually not an endless amount to scroll through, even if someone were to go back and read each of your posts - they'd still be finite rather than this ongoing, endless scroll.
When I took a weeklong social media break a few months ago, in March, I found myself having the exact same predicament you describe about books - wanting to talk about them to someone. My partner isn't a huge novel reader, and even when he reads novels, they're for enjoyment and pleasure and not in the way that I read them - i.e. analytically when I'm a critic, or with a deep attention paid to language and pacing and character because as a writer I can't really turn those off anymore (although occasionally a book will sweep me along so fully that I will simply surrender to the story, which is always SUCH a pleasure). I relate so much also to what you wrote about having not felt the way you're describing - alone with your books and thoughts - since you were in college.
I think that reading is, in general, an emotion generating technology in some way, and as such I'm able to continue to feel my feelings via books, even when I'm incredibly numbed out or shut down because of the awful news or the endless envy of other writers and thinkers that makes me feel ashamed of myself and thus divorced from my body.
It's odd, isn't it, that professors of literature, even students of literature, don't get to talk about what they're reading all that often, isn't it? I mean, you might write for an article, or for a paper when you're a student in coursework, but the *talking* about it part... I mean, most of my close friends are readers but we're all always reading different things and recommending things to each other that, realistically, we won't read for years if ever because we all have our own endless to-read piles. And I do miss that, and social media does give me that, to an extent, but not nearly to the depth that I wish it would.
So much to say to this Ilana but first: thank you. I've also thought that substack was like blogging, then saw the observation made by many others. I'm trying to think what feels similar to me about it, and it's the intimacy and the fact that people comment on substack posts because they want to connect. (On social media, people share links to show off in some way -- either that they have the right kind of taste or that they have found fault with the piece.)
But weirdly Substack is also blogging just as blogging was becoming monetized... which makes it strange. Annoyingly commercial and intimate at once.
As to the other issue, talking about literature... I suspect what's at play is a certain detached pose, as though we were scientists observing insects under glass. (I don't know if this holds for creative writing, but it does for literary studies.) With the important difference that entomologists can express their enthusiasm for insects without anyone worrying about whether they are still scientists, whereas literary scholars have to cultivate their distance much more rigorously less someone suspect we are having fun.
Hi, Irina. Just this week I realised that I have been spending (to be read: losing) lots of time on social media and decided to cut it out slowly. I was surprised to realize that the platforms have absorbed the communication process in a way (usually on FB or DMs on Instagram, the topic has to be something already posted and rarely a new offfline one). I found myself feeling guilty for not being available to the friend group. But I am also experiencing the exiting of the numbness that you wrote about in the amazing post that I am commenting under. Apart from the sadness that comes with the reduction of conversations, I found myself so keen to hear and feel simple things (birds outside, cars on different type of pavements, shushing papers). I guess I am in the first phase - getting my glass full. It is good to know what I muight expect when I will feel the need to share the full glass with some other people. Thank you for this - it is very much appreciated. :)
Anișoara, thank you for writing -- if you feel like it, I'd love to hear how things develop for you (either here if you want it public or by direct email). I love this idea of filling the glass with sensations, embodiment. One thing I've been thinking about, that I might write about for this substack, is the sensation of being a disembodied brain that is so prevalent in academe anyway, and that has been massively worsened in the past few years.
I'm so torn on this topic. On the one hand, I share many of the feelings you report here. I used to read more books and more long-form articles with thoughtful analysis. I also used to write more both for myself and letters to distant friends. Scrolling social media fills that time in a much shallower, much less nuanced way, and those contacts with people become more frequent but also shallower.
On the other hand, social media, especially Twitter and, surprisingly, Ravelry, have been incredible assets to me professionally. I have never been good at networking in face to face conferences, but this is one use case for which social media feels slower and more expansive than the analog alternative.
I find myself looking for a middle path, a way to resist the addictiveness that social media designers have built in to the system while still using these tools to connect with distant colleagues and distant family. I have varying success.
Thank you for this comment, Kate. I've been reading a lot of Cal Newport's stuff (I know, I know), and I do think he has some good ways of thinking about this. Basically his point with the digital world (not just social media) is that we accept a lot of technologies in our lives because of some theoretical benefit, and then they wind up taking up a ton of our time and attention. But what we don't stop and do is sit and actually do the math: how many benefits did I get from technology X, and was it worth how much time I spent on it?
For me this would look like: If I counted all the hours I spent on, say, Twitter, and all the negative effects it has had on my life, would it be worth the maybe two or three pieces I've had commissioned from there? And might I have found other ways to pitch those pieces, or written different things in their stead, that would have had fewer drawbacks and taken less time?
So it's not that there's one answer, it's more like... how do we do this negotiation. As for me, I keep trying to find that middle path and yet I find FB especially so addictive that I don't really think I can. Other people seem to manage it just fine though.
Please tell me about Ravelry's role in your life! I love Ravelry, but I don't spend a lot of time on the boards. (I'm Atisheh on there, btw).
For me, the tradeoff is much harder to quantify. I haven't placed any writing or arranged any talks through Twitter. But Twitter has connected me to the innovators in my constellation of fields in ways that my dissertation committee was unable to do. I've learned a lot about analysis of race and gender in literature and film on Twitter, and those perspectives were not a significant part of my R1 PhD in 2010-2015.
Ravelry's ivory tower group has been the best source of professional development. Early on in my time as a student at an R1, I realized that this was not the future I wanted for myself, but I felt like the early career profs who were in charge of professional development there and then were only prepared to coach us in the path they had taken. On Ravelry, I'm part of an international, interdisciplinary, intergenerational (both in terms of age and career stage) collective. When I was widowed while ABD in 2013, it was Ravelry colleagues who helped keep me going.
I just added you as a friend on Ravelry, and my avatar there is a photo of hands knitting.
I had NO idea that there were Ravelry groups on topics beyond fibre arts, but that's probably because I do very little in the groups anyway. It does seem to me though that those discussions are structured around an older model -- one that has been around since bulletin board systems in fact. There absolutely can be interpersonal friction on a bulletin board, but at least you don't have an algorithm putting posts with negative content at the top of the feed.
I guess the thing is to keep in touch with your feelings, and maybe experiment with limits, pauses, etc. I know people who are brilliant at limiting the time they spend on, say, Facebook and using most of their time to read, write, cook, travel, spend time with kids, etc. I've just come to realise... that's not me. For me, FB and co. are simply too addictive. Even being logged off and having them off my phone is not barrier enough.
Gosh, I really enjoyed this piece. I've been off social media for a few months now, and feeling this sense of loneliness - trying to welcome it in and sit with it. Thanks.
If there is a feeling I've missed it's definitely the one I get while reading one of your essays. I read this one, no, devoured it like a starving man.
I think I can relate to quite a few things. I have begun steadily decreasing my use of social media with the ultimate goal of leaving it all behind.
Although I have to admit, my reasons are slightly more complicated than not liking what it does to me. Even though I don't like what it does to me as well.
Right now my social media use is down to the occasional Twitter foray (Twitter has a really strong hold over me), and three conversations on Instagram.
Most of all the thing I have been able to reclaim in this period has been quiet. There are no unread messages waiting on the periphery of my mind for whenever I finish whatever task is at hand. No conversations for me to worry that I'm missing out on. Nothing.
And for some reason that really surprised me. Not only how quiet it got, but how alien the feeling was. It's been far too long since I had this kind of quiet in my life.
Like you, I've been keeping up with responsibilities and all that, drowning in noise, so much so that I eventually acclimated to noise and forgot what a life without noise felt like.
I'm glad to have the quiet back, and I hope that it continues for long. Who knows, maybe I'll become one of those stereotypical science genius recluses and make some fascinating discoveries along the line. Maybe.
Thank you for writing. These essays always give me the opportunity to both read some really good writing, and reflect on my own life as well. And for that, I am grateful.
Thank you so much for this. I guess what I get from this is how common this experience is, and how many of us -- for various reasons -- are rethinking the role of noise in our lives. I am grateful for your time and attention too, you know.
O I read a great older book by Elisabeth Gille—the mirador— and I wished I could have shared it with you. The mother-daughter clashes between Irene Nemirovsky and her mom, and how it made me think of writers who clash with socialite moms.. and life in general. Miss you from the hell that is my state where abortion is officially illegal now. :)
Oh that is fascinating, putting Mirador on my used book shopping list. I was just eyeing the Nemirovskys on my shelf a week ago wondering if I had the strength to dive in. I love the idea of an invented memoir.
I miss your posts too, I'm sorry not to see them more often. I miss the US a little less every day though, for reasons you know.
Qué lindo es leerte. Le pones palabras a sensaciones en las que no había reparado, hasta que las nombras. Anoto tus recomendaciones de libros. Gracias :)
I find this all interesting. I do think social media is largely about numbing, in much the same way that going out to a bar might be (it's been so many years since I did that, I truly don't know). And it is always true when you stop doing those things the first thing you get to do is reckon with what you've been running from. I've recently had some friends go to silent meditation retreats and they speak of much the same. It's a challenge. i've always had a hard time being with feelings. Working on it.
Thanks, Irina. I also read the review of your collection in NYRB, thought “I must congratulate Irina”—and there was no Irina.
One of the things I argued in Distraction (2008) was that distraction is best understood in terms of value (not just physiology). We’re distractible creatures, not because we can be trained by slot machines, but because we can be wrong about what’s worthwhile for us—or right about it, but unable to gain or hold onto it. Perhaps Matisse’s dutifully bourgeois parents thought the paints they gave him were a distraction from his work at the notary’s. He was certainly bored and frustrated while recuperating from illness, and the paints certainly took him away from these feelings. But art gave him (and many appreciators of his colours) a richer life.
I ought to be preparing for my workday (my writing)—but here I am reading a newsletter… (someone else’s writing). I like to think I’m not distracted.
Oh that is funny, Damon -- though also has the core of something darker that I want to write about some day ("there was no Irina" -- how social media can make us feel like we don't exist if we're used to being on it and then stop).
There's probably a whole book in the other idea, why it is we can know quite clearly what is right for us and yet not do it.
I look forward to reading Distraction. But I must ask: you seem like someone who manages to balance a vigorous writing life with being online. How?!?
The short answer is that I’ve spent over a decade working on practices to maintain my attention (hence the book about it). The long answer is the same, but includes more doubt, failure, bafflement, regret, etc.
The book is more a manifesto than a guide. And if you do read it, remember that it’s very much a debut (and written on about three hours’ sleep a night--our firstborn wasn’t a sleeper).
This so moves me. I have spent the past weeks away from Social media, finding music that triggers sadness, sometimes deep, sometimes shallow but always accompanied by tears. I often cry at the beautiful but with age, the sense of loss, the fleeting memory of meaning, the deep promise of love, all of these have been submerged in a need for sorrow,. Your essay has done the same and I tank you for that. The world is changing and I shall miss the next brief moments of stability but for now I embrace the sadness of change and no one to share it with.
I feel like I could have written this myself. After more than a year of deactivate-reactivate-deactive-reactivate, I finally let my Twitter account go a few months ago. I always knew I'd forget to reactivate in time someday and it would be gone forever, but I thought I'd be a lot more upset when that day came. Instead, it felt like cutting a cord to something that has been draining my lifeblood for years. I experienced the return to reading, the spasms of wanting to share enthusiasms online, the slow rediscovery of what it's like to discuss things in person, and the loneliness of not having instant access to someone you enjoy discussing these things with. (For a while I couldn't read something without instantly sitting down to emulate it in my writing, to relieve the pressure of being alone with those thoughts.) Anyway, I'm glad you're re-experiencing the joys and satisfying melancholies of reclaiming headspace, and if you ever need a person to talk books with, hit me up.
You're not the first person to tell me that you accidentally let your Twitter account die and felt relief more than anything else. I'll send you an email re: books. Maybe we just need to work a little harder to build the kind of connections and exchanges that nurture rather than drain us.
Actually, can you just send me an email? (Reply to my substack, or it's on my website.) Mostly I'm dying to know what books you read that made you feel as I did. Or on here is fine too...
I think this is such an important thing to talk about, because we have spent a long time discussing feelings that might be difficult as necessarily 'bad'. There's a sort of desire to keep things like sadness or anger and arm's length because they are complex and heavy. I think a huge part of interacting with life is being willing to really feel these things. And I do think there is a lot to be said about the numbing quality of online drama in opposition to this. Anyway, now I must read Out of Egypt.
Your comment opens up a larger issue. I've been thinking a lot these past months, maybe longer, about "therapeutic culture." It's criticized, often, for various reasons: narcissism, luxury problems, demands for "safe spaces" and so on. But it seems to me that the therapeutic process is a distinctly uncomfortable one, one in which we are willing to face what is difficult and repressed in our lives, and that it involves self-questioning more than self-comfort. There's probably a piece in there, but one that I don't quite feel like writing.
There's a book that came out it has to be over ten years now called _The Shallows_ that you should read if you haven't already. Some of the stuff about concentration and the ways social media manipulate our ways of thinking is talked about there. I find it really hard to walk away because everyone, including my wife, are only available for me to engage with via social media right now thanks to the two-body problem.
Thank you for the recommendation -- it's one I've seen before but I'll read that book asap now.
Can I ask two questions? Are those people truly only available to engage with via social media, or is social media just the easiest way to find them? And do you find the engagement satisfying?
Jul 7, 2022·edited Jul 7, 2022Liked by Irina Dumitrescu
Sure thing. The answer varies depending on the person. For some of them it's the only means I have to stay in contact with them or it's the means that proves to be most cost-effective. For others, it's definitely a convenience thing. I really don't have people in my feeds that I haven't met in real life save for the kind of "outer ring." The few I do have on the more inner rings that I haven't met tend to be from pre-Facebook social media, when the Internet operated (arguably) by different rules. The people I _actually_ talk to on a regular basis I tend to speak to via messaging services, rather than the social media feed. That's perhaps a function of my being a product of the Before Times internet as well, I don't know. I've always been fairly online and I am more introverted than I think I come across on social media, so in that way it was a benefit. I avoid Twitter because I don't need to constantly try to affirm my bona fides or engage in knife fights, but by the same token my attempts to suggest that we revert to some kind of distributed message-board based model (so like here, but with the idea that the conversation would appear on my site as well) has gotten a lot of pushback from people who kind of want to set one thing up and forget about it.
In terms of the engagement being satisfying that again depends. There are some people I only talk to periodically, but there are others that I speak to every day -- again, mostly via messaging services. For people on that outer ring I can generally take or leave the conversation, which helps. My major issues are with algorithmic assumptions regarding what I would care about and the artificial brevity and forced extremity of Twitter as a serious medium for discussion.
Another thing -- the shutdown of AIM consolidated my online presence because the "natural" alternative was Facebook Messenger. Part of the way we could fix some of the problems with social media is by proliferating a series of interlocking services rather than pulling everything under a single umbrella. Then you could only use the services that work for you in a meaningful way, in only those ways that work, without feeling like you're missing out or being forced to change how you engage with people due to Zuckerberg et al.'s ideas of what human contact is like. I'm afraid that ship has sailed, though.
I have thoughts about how to make social media something that works for people instead of using people as its fuel, but I think the real problem is achieving some sort of critical mass.
ETA: One final thought: for a while there was a deliberate push to cast networking via social media (as opposed through more traditional channels -- including email listservs) as somehow more superior. I think this has only served as fuel for some of the acrimony we've seen over the last few years, as feelings about email or about social media became wrapped into the debates that were ongoing.
Oh Irina, thank you so much for this - I have so many thoughts. I will say that this space - Substack - reminds me of an older sort of social media, blogging (other have compared Substack to blogging plenty of times before, of course, this isn't an original take) and how this form of social media, unlike Twitter or Facebook, isn't an instant gratification machine. It is more like a conversation - sometimes a conversation a writer is having with themself, sometimes a conversation they're having with other people, but there's always a time delay, and there's usually not an endless amount to scroll through, even if someone were to go back and read each of your posts - they'd still be finite rather than this ongoing, endless scroll.
When I took a weeklong social media break a few months ago, in March, I found myself having the exact same predicament you describe about books - wanting to talk about them to someone. My partner isn't a huge novel reader, and even when he reads novels, they're for enjoyment and pleasure and not in the way that I read them - i.e. analytically when I'm a critic, or with a deep attention paid to language and pacing and character because as a writer I can't really turn those off anymore (although occasionally a book will sweep me along so fully that I will simply surrender to the story, which is always SUCH a pleasure). I relate so much also to what you wrote about having not felt the way you're describing - alone with your books and thoughts - since you were in college.
I think that reading is, in general, an emotion generating technology in some way, and as such I'm able to continue to feel my feelings via books, even when I'm incredibly numbed out or shut down because of the awful news or the endless envy of other writers and thinkers that makes me feel ashamed of myself and thus divorced from my body.
It's odd, isn't it, that professors of literature, even students of literature, don't get to talk about what they're reading all that often, isn't it? I mean, you might write for an article, or for a paper when you're a student in coursework, but the *talking* about it part... I mean, most of my close friends are readers but we're all always reading different things and recommending things to each other that, realistically, we won't read for years if ever because we all have our own endless to-read piles. And I do miss that, and social media does give me that, to an extent, but not nearly to the depth that I wish it would.
Thank you for writing this <3.
So much to say to this Ilana but first: thank you. I've also thought that substack was like blogging, then saw the observation made by many others. I'm trying to think what feels similar to me about it, and it's the intimacy and the fact that people comment on substack posts because they want to connect. (On social media, people share links to show off in some way -- either that they have the right kind of taste or that they have found fault with the piece.)
But weirdly Substack is also blogging just as blogging was becoming monetized... which makes it strange. Annoyingly commercial and intimate at once.
As to the other issue, talking about literature... I suspect what's at play is a certain detached pose, as though we were scientists observing insects under glass. (I don't know if this holds for creative writing, but it does for literary studies.) With the important difference that entomologists can express their enthusiasm for insects without anyone worrying about whether they are still scientists, whereas literary scholars have to cultivate their distance much more rigorously less someone suspect we are having fun.
Loved this, and always here to talk about books off of social media! xx
I'll take that seriously! Sending you a note.
Hi, Irina. Just this week I realised that I have been spending (to be read: losing) lots of time on social media and decided to cut it out slowly. I was surprised to realize that the platforms have absorbed the communication process in a way (usually on FB or DMs on Instagram, the topic has to be something already posted and rarely a new offfline one). I found myself feeling guilty for not being available to the friend group. But I am also experiencing the exiting of the numbness that you wrote about in the amazing post that I am commenting under. Apart from the sadness that comes with the reduction of conversations, I found myself so keen to hear and feel simple things (birds outside, cars on different type of pavements, shushing papers). I guess I am in the first phase - getting my glass full. It is good to know what I muight expect when I will feel the need to share the full glass with some other people. Thank you for this - it is very much appreciated. :)
Anișoara, thank you for writing -- if you feel like it, I'd love to hear how things develop for you (either here if you want it public or by direct email). I love this idea of filling the glass with sensations, embodiment. One thing I've been thinking about, that I might write about for this substack, is the sensation of being a disembodied brain that is so prevalent in academe anyway, and that has been massively worsened in the past few years.
I'm so torn on this topic. On the one hand, I share many of the feelings you report here. I used to read more books and more long-form articles with thoughtful analysis. I also used to write more both for myself and letters to distant friends. Scrolling social media fills that time in a much shallower, much less nuanced way, and those contacts with people become more frequent but also shallower.
On the other hand, social media, especially Twitter and, surprisingly, Ravelry, have been incredible assets to me professionally. I have never been good at networking in face to face conferences, but this is one use case for which social media feels slower and more expansive than the analog alternative.
I find myself looking for a middle path, a way to resist the addictiveness that social media designers have built in to the system while still using these tools to connect with distant colleagues and distant family. I have varying success.
Thanks for writing about it so honestly.
Thank you for this comment, Kate. I've been reading a lot of Cal Newport's stuff (I know, I know), and I do think he has some good ways of thinking about this. Basically his point with the digital world (not just social media) is that we accept a lot of technologies in our lives because of some theoretical benefit, and then they wind up taking up a ton of our time and attention. But what we don't stop and do is sit and actually do the math: how many benefits did I get from technology X, and was it worth how much time I spent on it?
For me this would look like: If I counted all the hours I spent on, say, Twitter, and all the negative effects it has had on my life, would it be worth the maybe two or three pieces I've had commissioned from there? And might I have found other ways to pitch those pieces, or written different things in their stead, that would have had fewer drawbacks and taken less time?
So it's not that there's one answer, it's more like... how do we do this negotiation. As for me, I keep trying to find that middle path and yet I find FB especially so addictive that I don't really think I can. Other people seem to manage it just fine though.
Please tell me about Ravelry's role in your life! I love Ravelry, but I don't spend a lot of time on the boards. (I'm Atisheh on there, btw).
For me, the tradeoff is much harder to quantify. I haven't placed any writing or arranged any talks through Twitter. But Twitter has connected me to the innovators in my constellation of fields in ways that my dissertation committee was unable to do. I've learned a lot about analysis of race and gender in literature and film on Twitter, and those perspectives were not a significant part of my R1 PhD in 2010-2015.
Ravelry's ivory tower group has been the best source of professional development. Early on in my time as a student at an R1, I realized that this was not the future I wanted for myself, but I felt like the early career profs who were in charge of professional development there and then were only prepared to coach us in the path they had taken. On Ravelry, I'm part of an international, interdisciplinary, intergenerational (both in terms of age and career stage) collective. When I was widowed while ABD in 2013, it was Ravelry colleagues who helped keep me going.
I just added you as a friend on Ravelry, and my avatar there is a photo of hands knitting.
I had NO idea that there were Ravelry groups on topics beyond fibre arts, but that's probably because I do very little in the groups anyway. It does seem to me though that those discussions are structured around an older model -- one that has been around since bulletin board systems in fact. There absolutely can be interpersonal friction on a bulletin board, but at least you don't have an algorithm putting posts with negative content at the top of the feed.
I guess the thing is to keep in touch with your feelings, and maybe experiment with limits, pauses, etc. I know people who are brilliant at limiting the time they spend on, say, Facebook and using most of their time to read, write, cook, travel, spend time with kids, etc. I've just come to realise... that's not me. For me, FB and co. are simply too addictive. Even being logged off and having them off my phone is not barrier enough.
It was as delicious to read this, as I think you must've enjoyed writing it!
Gosh, I really enjoyed this piece. I've been off social media for a few months now, and feeling this sense of loneliness - trying to welcome it in and sit with it. Thanks.
Thank you for reading, Tara, and I'm wishing you the best in this
If there is a feeling I've missed it's definitely the one I get while reading one of your essays. I read this one, no, devoured it like a starving man.
I think I can relate to quite a few things. I have begun steadily decreasing my use of social media with the ultimate goal of leaving it all behind.
Although I have to admit, my reasons are slightly more complicated than not liking what it does to me. Even though I don't like what it does to me as well.
Right now my social media use is down to the occasional Twitter foray (Twitter has a really strong hold over me), and three conversations on Instagram.
Most of all the thing I have been able to reclaim in this period has been quiet. There are no unread messages waiting on the periphery of my mind for whenever I finish whatever task is at hand. No conversations for me to worry that I'm missing out on. Nothing.
And for some reason that really surprised me. Not only how quiet it got, but how alien the feeling was. It's been far too long since I had this kind of quiet in my life.
Like you, I've been keeping up with responsibilities and all that, drowning in noise, so much so that I eventually acclimated to noise and forgot what a life without noise felt like.
I'm glad to have the quiet back, and I hope that it continues for long. Who knows, maybe I'll become one of those stereotypical science genius recluses and make some fascinating discoveries along the line. Maybe.
Thank you for writing. These essays always give me the opportunity to both read some really good writing, and reflect on my own life as well. And for that, I am grateful.
Thank you so much for this. I guess what I get from this is how common this experience is, and how many of us -- for various reasons -- are rethinking the role of noise in our lives. I am grateful for your time and attention too, you know.
O I read a great older book by Elisabeth Gille—the mirador— and I wished I could have shared it with you. The mother-daughter clashes between Irene Nemirovsky and her mom, and how it made me think of writers who clash with socialite moms.. and life in general. Miss you from the hell that is my state where abortion is officially illegal now. :)
Oh that is fascinating, putting Mirador on my used book shopping list. I was just eyeing the Nemirovskys on my shelf a week ago wondering if I had the strength to dive in. I love the idea of an invented memoir.
I miss your posts too, I'm sorry not to see them more often. I miss the US a little less every day though, for reasons you know.
Qué lindo es leerte. Le pones palabras a sensaciones en las que no había reparado, hasta que las nombras. Anoto tus recomendaciones de libros. Gracias :)
Y gracias a ti por leer mis cartas!
I find this all interesting. I do think social media is largely about numbing, in much the same way that going out to a bar might be (it's been so many years since I did that, I truly don't know). And it is always true when you stop doing those things the first thing you get to do is reckon with what you've been running from. I've recently had some friends go to silent meditation retreats and they speak of much the same. It's a challenge. i've always had a hard time being with feelings. Working on it.
Thank you for this, Karen. I'm not sure I'm quite ready for a silent meditation retreat! (though a bit more silence is never bad)
Thanks, Irina. I also read the review of your collection in NYRB, thought “I must congratulate Irina”—and there was no Irina.
One of the things I argued in Distraction (2008) was that distraction is best understood in terms of value (not just physiology). We’re distractible creatures, not because we can be trained by slot machines, but because we can be wrong about what’s worthwhile for us—or right about it, but unable to gain or hold onto it. Perhaps Matisse’s dutifully bourgeois parents thought the paints they gave him were a distraction from his work at the notary’s. He was certainly bored and frustrated while recuperating from illness, and the paints certainly took him away from these feelings. But art gave him (and many appreciators of his colours) a richer life.
I ought to be preparing for my workday (my writing)—but here I am reading a newsletter… (someone else’s writing). I like to think I’m not distracted.
All good wishes.
Oh that is funny, Damon -- though also has the core of something darker that I want to write about some day ("there was no Irina" -- how social media can make us feel like we don't exist if we're used to being on it and then stop).
There's probably a whole book in the other idea, why it is we can know quite clearly what is right for us and yet not do it.
I look forward to reading Distraction. But I must ask: you seem like someone who manages to balance a vigorous writing life with being online. How?!?
The short answer is that I’ve spent over a decade working on practices to maintain my attention (hence the book about it). The long answer is the same, but includes more doubt, failure, bafflement, regret, etc.
Ha! Are those practices in the book? Either way you have sold me on it...
The book is more a manifesto than a guide. And if you do read it, remember that it’s very much a debut (and written on about three hours’ sleep a night--our firstborn wasn’t a sleeper).
If you managed to write a book with a newborn in the house I shall extend you zero mercy!
Beautiful, Irina ❤️
Thank you, Leanne.
Irina,
This so moves me. I have spent the past weeks away from Social media, finding music that triggers sadness, sometimes deep, sometimes shallow but always accompanied by tears. I often cry at the beautiful but with age, the sense of loss, the fleeting memory of meaning, the deep promise of love, all of these have been submerged in a need for sorrow,. Your essay has done the same and I tank you for that. The world is changing and I shall miss the next brief moments of stability but for now I embrace the sadness of change and no one to share it with.
I feel like I could have written this myself. After more than a year of deactivate-reactivate-deactive-reactivate, I finally let my Twitter account go a few months ago. I always knew I'd forget to reactivate in time someday and it would be gone forever, but I thought I'd be a lot more upset when that day came. Instead, it felt like cutting a cord to something that has been draining my lifeblood for years. I experienced the return to reading, the spasms of wanting to share enthusiasms online, the slow rediscovery of what it's like to discuss things in person, and the loneliness of not having instant access to someone you enjoy discussing these things with. (For a while I couldn't read something without instantly sitting down to emulate it in my writing, to relieve the pressure of being alone with those thoughts.) Anyway, I'm glad you're re-experiencing the joys and satisfying melancholies of reclaiming headspace, and if you ever need a person to talk books with, hit me up.
You're not the first person to tell me that you accidentally let your Twitter account die and felt relief more than anything else. I'll send you an email re: books. Maybe we just need to work a little harder to build the kind of connections and exchanges that nurture rather than drain us.
Actually, can you just send me an email? (Reply to my substack, or it's on my website.) Mostly I'm dying to know what books you read that made you feel as I did. Or on here is fine too...
I think this is such an important thing to talk about, because we have spent a long time discussing feelings that might be difficult as necessarily 'bad'. There's a sort of desire to keep things like sadness or anger and arm's length because they are complex and heavy. I think a huge part of interacting with life is being willing to really feel these things. And I do think there is a lot to be said about the numbing quality of online drama in opposition to this. Anyway, now I must read Out of Egypt.
Your comment opens up a larger issue. I've been thinking a lot these past months, maybe longer, about "therapeutic culture." It's criticized, often, for various reasons: narcissism, luxury problems, demands for "safe spaces" and so on. But it seems to me that the therapeutic process is a distinctly uncomfortable one, one in which we are willing to face what is difficult and repressed in our lives, and that it involves self-questioning more than self-comfort. There's probably a piece in there, but one that I don't quite feel like writing.
There's a book that came out it has to be over ten years now called _The Shallows_ that you should read if you haven't already. Some of the stuff about concentration and the ways social media manipulate our ways of thinking is talked about there. I find it really hard to walk away because everyone, including my wife, are only available for me to engage with via social media right now thanks to the two-body problem.
Thank you for the recommendation -- it's one I've seen before but I'll read that book asap now.
Can I ask two questions? Are those people truly only available to engage with via social media, or is social media just the easiest way to find them? And do you find the engagement satisfying?
Sure thing. The answer varies depending on the person. For some of them it's the only means I have to stay in contact with them or it's the means that proves to be most cost-effective. For others, it's definitely a convenience thing. I really don't have people in my feeds that I haven't met in real life save for the kind of "outer ring." The few I do have on the more inner rings that I haven't met tend to be from pre-Facebook social media, when the Internet operated (arguably) by different rules. The people I _actually_ talk to on a regular basis I tend to speak to via messaging services, rather than the social media feed. That's perhaps a function of my being a product of the Before Times internet as well, I don't know. I've always been fairly online and I am more introverted than I think I come across on social media, so in that way it was a benefit. I avoid Twitter because I don't need to constantly try to affirm my bona fides or engage in knife fights, but by the same token my attempts to suggest that we revert to some kind of distributed message-board based model (so like here, but with the idea that the conversation would appear on my site as well) has gotten a lot of pushback from people who kind of want to set one thing up and forget about it.
In terms of the engagement being satisfying that again depends. There are some people I only talk to periodically, but there are others that I speak to every day -- again, mostly via messaging services. For people on that outer ring I can generally take or leave the conversation, which helps. My major issues are with algorithmic assumptions regarding what I would care about and the artificial brevity and forced extremity of Twitter as a serious medium for discussion.
Another thing -- the shutdown of AIM consolidated my online presence because the "natural" alternative was Facebook Messenger. Part of the way we could fix some of the problems with social media is by proliferating a series of interlocking services rather than pulling everything under a single umbrella. Then you could only use the services that work for you in a meaningful way, in only those ways that work, without feeling like you're missing out or being forced to change how you engage with people due to Zuckerberg et al.'s ideas of what human contact is like. I'm afraid that ship has sailed, though.
I have thoughts about how to make social media something that works for people instead of using people as its fuel, but I think the real problem is achieving some sort of critical mass.
ETA: One final thought: for a while there was a deliberate push to cast networking via social media (as opposed through more traditional channels -- including email listservs) as somehow more superior. I think this has only served as fuel for some of the acrimony we've seen over the last few years, as feelings about email or about social media became wrapped into the debates that were ongoing.