Our Smooth Brains Need A Reboot
Plus, Native representation and the democraticizing potential of slow television.
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Last week, I got into our cultural obsession with dissociation and numbing out. Ottessa Moshfegh captures the feeling nicely in My Year of Rest and Relaxation,
“Every time I lay down in that supply closet I went straight into black emptiness, an invite space of nothingness. I was neither scared nor elated in that space. I had no visions. I had no ideas. No insane conversation with myself. It was peaceful. There was no work to do, nothing I had to counteract or compensate for because there was nothing at all, period. And yet I was aware of the nothingness. I was awake in the sleep, somehow. I felt good. Almost happy.”
Amidst the collective trauma of COVID-19, those who have the time and money have escaped inward; become addicted to private comforts in the form of cozy loungewear, binging ambient TV and food delivery. The occasional JOMO night-in is now our every day because our brains have maxed out. The, what Kyle Chayka describes as, “fetish for dissociation” that was budding before the pandemic is now in full bloom. We flee to nostalgia by revisiting photos of old trips, text exchanges with exes and childhood shows, because it takes us to another place.
“Alongside so much tragedy and despair, mass quarantine has represented a final fulfillment of the pursuit of nothingness. Quarantine has been widely regarded as a radical break in our daily lives and the ways we interact with the world, but in truth it’s simply an overdose of the indulgences a certain segment of the population was dabbling in already. We’re a little like kids caught with a cigarette, forced to smoke a whole pack at once.” — Kyle Chayka.
But when does convenience and comfort become avoidance and denial? For years, I’ve avoided investing in anything that might set me up for unrealistic expectations and leave me disappointed; anything that might give me something to lose, but dissociating and avoiding my feelings didn’t protect me or provide fulfillment. When we deprive ourselves of the full range of emotions our current moment is offering us, we end up trapped in a fantasy of denial, obscuring “the root systems of pain lurking beneath the romances of memory,” as Leslie Jamison writes.
When we do this on a mass scale, we get an entire population content to avoid their country’s ugly truths. The protests last summer were, as Leslie Jamison writes, “a necessary corrective to any easy sense of collective nostalgia.” While Jamison is writing about being nostalgic for the Before Times in the context of racial justice, I think her critique of how nostalgia can be a “romance with one’s own fantasy” can be applied to our smooth brains too. Because amidst so much uncertainty about what the next phase looks like, I fear some of us have sunk into another form of sunken place.
So what do we do? Try ‘reflective’ rather than ‘restorative’ nostalgia. As Leslie Jamison writes, “restorative nostalgia wants to recreate an idealized past, reflective nostalgia interrogates the very image it longs for. Restorative nostalgia is drawn to monuments; reflective nostalgia to ruins.” Collectively, restorative nostalgia looks like mutual aid, which attempts to right historical wrongs by writing a better future. But on an individual level, restorative nostalgia might look like taking off the rose-tinted glasses and feeling all the feels. What are we so afraid of feeling?
I’m not saying we should constantly steep ourselves in the harsh realities of the world, but avoidance is only a temporary fix. Whether you’re maxing out on CBD gummies (like me) or binging The Bachelor, whatever is prompting that urge to self-sooth will catch up to you eventually. I’m willing to bet whatever you’re afraid of will become much less daunting once you start facing it.
Best,
Anna
Published 📝
Forbes - Wearing Your Therapy: This Necklace Wants You To Breathe Your Way To Better Mental Health
I’m not a big jewellery person. If I’m accessorizing, it’s usually to serve a purpose—either commemorative (wearing my mom’s ring) or functional (tracking my sleep). When I was in the hospital, I discovered a new functional piece that is so sleek I honestly would wear it as jewellery alone. A fellow patient always had her necklace in her mouth so I had to ask. She explained the pendant was a breathing tool, designed to relieve her anxiety.
That little pendant is the Komuso Shift. Having written about the overlooked significance of the breath before, naturally I loved interviewing Komuso CEO Todd Steinberg. Determined to “start a breathing revolution,” the founder hopes the necklace—modelled after the flute breathing practice of 17th century Japanese monks—will encourage people to develop a daily practice of deep breathing.
Reading 📖
💉 Photos of vaccinated life in the U.S. are filling me with envy.
🌑 What happens when we can finally exhale? Our world might be opening up but the trauma and grief of COVID-19 is only catching up now.
“People who endure long bouts of stress often collapse when they get a chance to be calm.” - Ed Yong.
"We don’t talk about loss. By and large, it’s all about consumption to help numb you out.” - Laura van Dernoot Lipsky.
☀️ But go ahead, fantasize about this summer.
🙋♀️ Just remember that for many people, especially those with disabilities, the world is not going “back to normal.”
“Sympathy and empathy are both forms of love, but the first one separates; the second unites. What I want the healthy to remember, back in the three-dimensional world, is what it felt like to live in two dimensions. If “hybrid” becomes a lasting way to work, let it also be a lasting form of friendship.” - Lisa Grunwald.
👵🏻 First the fear was being labelled cheugy, now it’s falling into the geriatric category—millennials can’t seem to catch a break.
🧘♀️ Consider evaluating your relationship to doing nothing.
“You’ve been raised in a world where blank space is a thing to be filled up, conquered, and then optimized. We no longer look at space as space, but as something wrong: a failure of optimization or even imagination.” - Yanyi.
🏋️♀️ What happens when wellness goes too far? Avoidance and restriction in the pursuit of a “better life” can easily turn into orthorexia and torturous perfectionism.
🤰 “Mom boss” culture is monetizing motherhood, giving women a false sense of female empowerment.
“The modern-day American devaluation of sectors like health care and education provide evidence that, culturally and economically, we value industry, not care.” -Amanda Montei.
✈️ Food and travel have become “Bourdainified”—we expect authenticity but not to the point of being uncomfortable.
“How do we respect that not everything is for our entertainment?” writes Joanna Fuertes. “It may be time to come to terms with the fact that we’re not the stars of our own edgy food travel show. We’re the antagonists.”
🇮🇹 Alicia Kennedy similarly dissects the food travel show by way of Stanley Tucci’s Searching for Italy—“Bourdain was good because he could be the Everyman. Are we not, as a culture, ready for the Everyone Else?”
👩🏿🌾 High on the Hog is the food travel show we’ve been missing (coming to Netflix May 26th). I’m so thrilled Stephen Satterfield is the host—not only was he a thoughtful editor to work with when I wrote for his magazine Whetstone, he’s a rigorous journalist and chef who is championing representation in the food media space.
“As a food-show host, Mr. Satterfield is as introspective as Stanley Tucci is effusive or Anthony Bourdain was bold.” - Kim Severson.
Watching 📺
When I moved on from I Know This Much Is True to Rutherford Falls, I immediately noticed the Native character in both shows is played by the same actor—Canadian Michael Greyeyes (from Saskatchewan!). While happy to see Native representation, his casting reminded me how few Native actors there are in Hollywood to choose from.
Hopefully Rutherford Falls will change that. Not only are several cast members Native, so too are five of the writers, making the show one of the largest Indigenous-staffed writers’ rooms around. And it shows, with nuanced and humanized depictions of Native life and intra-tribe differences. Being Native is treated as a contextual layer of the story rather than the point.
I loved Parks and Recreation and am into the small town vibe of Schitt’s Creek (Canadian actor Dustin Milligan who plays Ted is in this too!), so naturally I’ve fallen for this comedy from Mike Shur (also did The Good Place) and Sierra Teller Ornelas (alum of Superstore).
Like Parks, Rutherford Falls is a small-town civics comedy about the public common. But here, the debate is over the removal of a monument devoted to the town’s white founder (Ed Helms)—a timely story as we continue to reckon with colonization’s ugly truths. The story is complicated by his best friend being the lovable Native Reagan (Jana Schmieding), who is determined to expand the Native Cultural Center she runs in the local casino.
Where Rutherford Falls shines is in its ability to tackle both divisive issues—colonization, racism (without every feeling too pushy or performative)—and universal ones too—like friendship, family and identity.
“It manages to entertain while depicting a conflict that’s grounded in something akin to reality without oversimplifying the complexities of the themes it addresses or flattening the personalities of the parties involved. Rutherford Falls is a show about flawed Americans reckoning with the flaws in this country, but it offers those same flawed Americans grace and room for growth.” - Jen Chaney.
Listening 🎧
There’s ambient TV, the brain-numbing kind we’ve been binging in quarantine, and then there’s real ambient TV—television with no narrative at all, also known as ‘slow TV’. While our obsession with the former suggests we’re at peak laziness, the latter might offer a solution to rebooting our smooth brains by forcing us to become active viewers. Slow television looks like a 12 hour train ride with no plot or characters. In Northern European countries like Norway, they actually broadcast it on cable.
Instead of spoon-feeding us the story, the ambience creates the space for us to daydream and notice, almost like social meditation. Broadcast en masse, the weak narrativity might actually make entire populations more democratic. Media historian Fred Turner uses the video of the J.F.K’s funeral train as an example, “you can see so much in the image and decide what you want to do with it,” he says.
“It gives you the chance to exercise a couple democratic muscles: the first is slowing down and reasoning, the second is seeing yourself as a citizen equal to others, not as someone who has to take a stand on a fault line, but as someone who belongs to a whole.”
As you may have noticed, my newsletters have been taking a multi-part format lately. Typically I observe a trend in the first, and in the second, I offer solutions. While well-intentioned, I recognize the shortcomings of this—I, like most mainstream media, tend to suggest larger systemic problems can be easily managed with a simple checklist. In Haley Nahman’s critique of this, she recommends this episode of Citations Needed—Mental Health During A Pandemic: How US Media Spins Societal Failures Into Personal Self-Help Journeys.
Hosts Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson highlight how there are two media approaches to covering the pandemic mental health crisis:
1) an unbiased diagnosis of the problem.
2) self-help solutions in the forms of “hacks or tricks.”
We end up simply witnessing systemic inequalities, without ever challenging them—it’s another form of self-soothing avoidance, relieving anyone who has the ability to cultivate change of the responsibility to do so. Instead, they call for solutions that what would actually make a difference, like socialized medicine, childcare and student debt relief. Because unfortunately systemic problems can’t be cured with a bubble bath, as much as we wish it was that easy.
FANTASTIC, Anna. My generation's nostalgia is in the truths that were yearning to emerge, way back in the '60s. The teachers of those truths were assassinated, killed in combat elsewhere, or O.D.-ed. We wish that truth was allowed to live and be fulfilled. It would have changed the trajectory of our lives. Presently, we are living in a global pandemic. Old traditional PTSDing is now on steroids. Our traditional compliances, feigning ignorance, are not l a choice. Complicity will be the death of its complying cultures. Experiencing all of that, are those few individuals who grew to be courageous through enduring PTSDing, grieving, and other emotional traumas and survived it. Like you, ANNA, guiding those willing to read and see how traditional compliances historically, irreparably damaged our pre-pandemic cultures. All is hidden in the truths, and in memories, and restorative nostalgia. Thank you, Anna.