A very shy …. hi !
In a dependable fashion, I submit to you some of the things I consumed in 2022, a mere 10 days late. But, as with every chronic late person, I, of course, have an excuse to explain myself — but I’ll get to that later.
But first, fun. Here’s some stuff I liked this year:
A reading list
‘Failure to Cope “Under Capitalism”’ + ‘What Do We Mean When We Call Art Necessary’
These two essays complement each other nicely something I’ve thought about a lot in the past year: how our cultural discourse is often loaded with the burden of the political, and how this constrains our view of how politics and social change actually function outside of internet discourse.
The first essay touches on the expanded scope of the “personal is political” discourse and how personal struggle can largely be blamed on anything but the personal. As Coffey writes:
“For a certain kind of person, personal problems, anxieties, and dissatisfactions are illegible or illegitimate unless described as political problems.”
Oyler’s article, a few years older, captures a driving force of this phenomenon, perfectly:
“Yet the internet — the same force that has increased awareness of social-justice movements — has hyperbolized all entreaties to our fragmented attention spans.”
Anything Haley Nahman wrote
Always considered and insightful writing about modern life and pop culture that feeds my brain in a way that is nourishing and stimulating. My 2022 MVP.
Conversations on Love & All About Love (and honourable mention to Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, an extended essay on the limits of consent-focused sexual politics, which I read at the tail end of 2022).
Really enjoyed these non-fiction texts that posed general challenges, if not explored the underbelly of the traditional narratives that place heteronormative romantic love on a pedestal. Shon Faye piece’s ‘The Future of Heterosexuality’ is another interesting exploration of this topic.
Great fiction - What Belongs to You, Heartburn & Girls They Write Songs About.
I do not naturally gravitate toward fiction. It’s a hangover from school induced productivity complex that I’m more predisposed to try and pick up non-fiction over fiction. But the latter two in particular were a joy — think well-paced, sometimes emotionally-complex prose delivered through witty dialogue/narrator’s voice that conveys a strong sense of place.
A listening list
Podcasts
‘Timeless wisdom for leading a life of love, friendship & learning’ - The Ezra Klein Show.
I loved this episode. I’ve returned to it multiple times this year and consistently found it soothing and grounding, particularly when my neuroticism starts to flap and drown out the level-headed Bella part of my brain. And it paraphrases this quote from Middlemarch, which I’ll very objectively say, is the best book the English language will ever be gifted:
“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
No I’m not crying, you are!!!!!!!!!
Music
In no particular order, the class of 2022 includes:
Jockstrap’s I Love You Jennifer B, Prince’s The Hits / B Sides, Kelela, Erika de Casier’s Sensational, Ojerime, Moin’s Paste, Little Simz’s Sometimes I Might Be An Introvert, Dry Cleaning’s Stumpwork, Duval Timothy’s Meeting with a Judas Tree, Coby Sey’s Conduit, Florence & The Machine’s Dance Fever and literally anything synth-pop.
Naomi Asa’s NTS Radio show - particularly this episode - kept me sane and soothed, opening my ears to music that I don’t usually gravitate towards. A mix of modern classical, spiritual jazz and folk in the aforementioned episode was a dreamy soundtrack to a rainy day in bed.
As promised, I wanted to add a few notes about why this took me such a long time to publish.
To be exact, the first iteration of the post was actually drafted in October 2022 and was intended to be the second recommendations post … two months after I started this Substack, in which I so feebly thought posting recommendations would be the easiest, or most tenable aspect of keeping up this space (lol Bella).
To share a list of things I consumed and enjoyed was, at first glance, easy. Easy in the sense of it would be a simple list, a mere act of transcribing. But unlike the comfort of list-making, the act of publishing recommendations came to feel increasingly torturous. Ask me in person, and I could babble on about any of the above with ease—but to write it, to share it on the internet, made me acutely self-conscious.
I’ve long felt discomfort about ‘being online’. Way back in Internet 1.0, around age 13/14, I tried to ‘do’ Tumblr but stumbled over a similar self-consciousness. It felt inauthentic, even embarrassing, to try and carve out an image online—even though I craved it. In part, this was due to my slightly one-dimensional thinking. I didn’t think of ‘image’ as an active concept, but rather something static and effortless: an effortlessness that I did not possess. Coupled with that thinking was an age-old adolescent right of passage: crippling self-doubt. That residual insecurity still sits with me today: that I am not cool, that my judgments are bad, and that to share the things I like in this very public way is, well, just a bit cringe.
But beyond that personal insecurity, is a deeper unwillingness to invest in social networks.
Consumption is not merely entertainment: as a 2021 psychology study found, we are aesthetic selves: “central aspects of our identity are constituted by cultural and art-related preferences.” But in an attention economy where revenue is driven by consumer attention, that taste is monetised as we, as Jia Tolentino writes, “continually capture one another’s lucrative attention by performing some version of who we think we are.”
So in a world drowning in information, why contribute? Why produce more information and invest in a social landscape that is ultimately hollow and that doesn’t serve me? Social media makes it close to impossible to like yourself. As Haley Nahman points out in a Maybe Baby essay, research has found that whilst liking your public self could improve your self-esteem in the short term, it didn’t actually correlate to the experience of meaning. Social media makes it impossible to like yourself not only because they present an unlimited breadth and depth of ideals, but because the opportunity to perform your ‘ideal self’ is practically baked into the premise. No matter how casual your approach is, being perceived online widens the gap between your private, ‘real’ self and that public self you create.
I guess my question here is ultimately this: why do we share online and can it be as genuine and meaningful as building social connections in person? I’m unsure.
But if you are wondering what the hell I am doing here then, I do think that platforms like Substack have the potential to offer an alternative. So let’s see.
Sorry for the mild existentialist ambush but welcome back?
The fear of being 'just a bit cringe' is crippling but i'm glad you bravely moved through it... Looking forward to more shy opinions!!