Being, not doing
Billie Holiday, a worship playlist, and many words on the app we love to hate
The last month has been an exercise in being. Not doing. Being. I think our modern American culture confuses the two, and I’ve spent the last few weeks unintentionally detangling that.
When I left NYC at the end of May, I intended to take a break, but as I look back, I see how that perception of a break still involved a lot of doing. A lot of reading, a lot of writing, a lot of applying to jobs. While some of all that did happen, the month away from the city ended up looking more like a lot of being. A lot of sitting - on the porch, in the car. A lot of reflection on the past. A lot of seeds planted, with no idea what the garden will look like in bloom.
What follows in this post are some of the seeds. Part of being OK with just being is being OK with myself, and I’m trying to stop with the endless caveats about everything I do. So this is absolutely not a caveat that just about everything I discuss here is from a source I’ve already referenced a million times. To me, it feels more like interesting evidence of the fact that, even outside my normal routine and surroundings, I return to the same voices for inspiration. Some kind of proof that I know myself better than I sometimes think I do.
Two from Haley Nahman: “What’s up with Instagram?” and “Who gets to be beautiful?”
Ok, I must admit I actually haven’t read her essay on beauty in full, but the podcast episode, linked above, is 100% worth the listen if you’re interested in a discussion on modern beauty culture and standards. It gave me so much to think about, especially in terms of what we think we’re doing “for ourselves” vs. what are ingrained societal expectations, and how we use products to aid our bodies’ natural healing mechanisms vs. to cover up what we think are imperfections. (Also noting that you can only access the podcast if you are a paid subscriber, but it’s well worth $5 even just for a month to check out this episode!).
But I’m going to focus primarily on her Instagram essay, linked above, and its accompanying podcast here; the podcast in particular put forth some ideas that resonated deeply with me, and asked some questions that still rattle in my brain.
Her thesis is that Instagram is terrible not because it isn’t “authentic” to our lived reality, but because we ever thought it could be a place for authenticity. There’s no way a photo-sharing app could ever reflect the fullness of our real lives. She argues for a fundamental reconsideration:
Maybe our biggest mistake was to assume that authenticity online was our biggest problem. I think it’s led us down a path of denial about what these platforms can really do for us, or express about ourselves. At least, it has for me. What I’ve been wondering is: How bad is inauthenticity, really? I’m inauthentic all the time: When I feign confidence at a new job; when someone sends me a meme I’ve already seen or gives me a gift I don’t want; when I get up instead of (my true passion) lay down. Performance is part of life. In its best moments, it can be an act of self-creation. “Fake it ‘till you make it” is a cliche because it works. But what most of us understand about offline performance is that it can also inhibit genuine connection—that a life subsumed by it would be an empty one. This may offer us a hint as to why online spaces remain, on balance, uncanny and draining, no matter how hard we try to make them otherwise.
Yet the podcast covers a lot more ground. Haley talks to her friend Michelle Uranowitz, an actress and teacher, and much like the other episodes of hers that I have shared, I love it because it’s not a conversation between experts but between two smart normal people (who, I should add, I assume have white/middle class/media-centric/urban perspectives not worlds away from my own).
I was off my personal Instagram (i.e., my @plandsem account where I follow people I actually know; I made a finsta to follow some people I didn’t know + news accounts) for all of 2020. I deleted the app on New Year’s Eve of 2019, knowing that if I opened it, I’d only get jealous of other peoples’ vacations and parties, all while I was sitting in my apartment with a handful of people I really did know and love. I figured it’d last a week or so, but after a while, I stopped missing it or even really thinking about it. Eventually, though, I did start to miss some of the updates, but it was less about FOMO and more about accepting that, despite my own conflicted feelings about the app, it’s where people were, especially during the pandemic when in-person contact was still limited. I couldn’t expect even some good friends to text me every life update just because I was choosing not to use Instagram.
But that time away did shift my ideas about what I wanted to consume and share. On the podcast, Michelle talked about her own Instagram fasts, and how much better she feels when she’s not on the app - not just because of the personal comparison game, but because she’s forced to seek out information and opportunities, rather than just opening Instagram and mindlessly scrolling whatever news, memes, and photos the algorithm deems worthy.
I think about this a lot. Obviously, I can’t seek out every piece of news and information in a way that’s fully organic and bias-free; even if you’re reading a print newspaper, you’re subject to someone else’s editorial judgment through the way they’ve placed the stories on the page. But what I’m after is a more intentional act of seeking. At its most basic, to me, that means subscribing to a news outlet’s email newsletter, and setting my inbox filters to make sure it lands in a place where I know I’ll see it. And then opening it and reading more than just the headlines. Or even setting bookmarks on a web browser and going directly to each site for a few minutes a day. Beyond the news, I want to be better about actually texting a friend to ask what they’ve been up to, or to check in on something they had coming up, rather than resorting to “Oh, I saw on Instagram that you…” whenever I see them next.
In the vein of her original essay’s argument, they also talked about the implications of accepting Instagram as a “pinhole” that reflects only a small part of ourselves - rather than trying to force it into an authentic representation of our truest, fullest selves at all times. And in what I see as a corollary, they questioned whether it’s healthy or productive to give in to the expectation to self-flagellate for not opening up all the worst parts of yourself.
I keep thinking about something Haley said toward the end of the episode, as they discussed how unfulfilling it is to “perform” life for social media (also I promised not to caveat, but I will say this has a totally different context in my life because I have nowhere near the sort of following/semi-influencer status she does):
I really want to focus on my little world...I really want to invest in my life, and just hang out with my friends, and write my little newsletter and clean my house and walk around New York. I want to invest in that life. And sometimes I feel like investing in my online presence is in competition with my life. And it’s really distracting to see how everyone else is doing their life.
Amen to that.
Other random interesting/joyful things from the last month
Quintessential Marc Maron phrasing in his interview with Helen Hunt. After she espouses the benefits of meditation for her life, he tells her he’s been trying to develop the practice: “But where am I supposed to get?!”
“Oh, you poor thing,” she responds.
Two particular takeaways from two wonderful days visiting Miranda in LA:
1) The Yoshitomo Nara exhibit at LACMA. I had never heard of him before, but loved the work and seeing his artistic evolution - particularly how his style changed after the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster that struck Japan in 2011, and how it’s changing again after Covid.
2) The amazing worship playlist Miranda has curated over the last year. It has become a staple of my mornings.
Before Hope’s wedding in Kansas, Timmy and I spent a couple days in Kansas City, and we visited the American Jazz Museum and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, which are housed in the same building there. A Smithsonian exhibit of Billie Holiday photos was on view in the entrance hall. Holiday granted the photographer Jerry Dantzic rare, exclusive access to her during a weeklong run of shows at Newark’s Sugar Hill club in 1957. I was in awe of these. They captured such dynamism, such a personal side of someone known mainly for her voice. And interspersed with the educational panels were quotes from a 2017 Zadie Smith essay in which she wrote from Holiday’s perspective. It got me.
See the photos for yourself; there doesn’t seem to be a page dedicated specifically to this exhibit, but I did find this PDF that looks to be an information packet for prospective venues.
Ending on a pic I took from the plane yesterday as we flew over Lower Manhattan. I hardly ever seem to fly into NYC from a route that affords skyline views, or if I do, it’s never in daylight. I’m unspeakably thankful for a month away, but I am happy to be home.
I deleted Instagram at the beginning of covid. I have not missed it except I do miss some (not all) of the life updates I used to get from friends. My decision was weighing the con of supporting a company that doesn’t give a damn about the society and it’s well-being with the pro of sometimes useful life updates from friends that are just usually flexs (but that’s okay). There is a movement now to build products that is in the interest of the user, instead of the user being the product (ie neeva instead of google). There’s a great opportunity to build a social product with this in mind, tell me about my friends lives, the good bad and ugly, and don’t try to sell me a Nissan at the same time.