#4. More Spacious Days, Please.
If technology is a double-edged sword, must we swallow it whole? Could we occasionally have a slice of No Thanks, and be free for a while? Also: Lactation, Maurice Sendak, Tom Hodgkinson, Orwell.
The middle-class families celebrated by Kipling whose sons officered the army and navy and swarmed all over the waste places of earth from the Yukon to the Irrawaddy, were dwindling before 1914. The thing that had killed them was the telegraph… there was every year, less room for individual imperitive… By 1920, nearly every inch was in the grip of Whitehall. Well-meaning, over-civilised men, in dark suits and black felt hats, were imposing their constitipated view of life on Malaya and Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay… In the early twenties one could see all over the empire, the older officials, who had known more spacious days, writhing impotently under the changes that were happening… Instead of going out to trade adventurously in the Indies, they now went to an office stool in Bombay or Singapore.”
- George Orwell 'The Lion and The Unicorn', 1940.
This is not a post about politics. Or tech. Or sword swallowing. I'm no expert. Also: I'm not a robot. CAPTCHA that. This post is about my ‘one wild and precious life’ - and yours - under The Social (Media) Contract. I’ve been wondering why even those of us who don’t have to, still give up such vast swathes of our freedom. For whom? White Hall? How come we sit so obediently on an office stool with YouTube down our throats when we could be swashbuckling in the forests of our creativity IRL? Who’s all the pâté for? Better be for someone good, considering we are paying for it with our livers!
Apart from the obvious creepiness of reading such immediate-sounding prose from Orwell when the British still lorded it over India and no one knew yet if Hitler would win or the other guy, what jumped out at me is this sentence: “The thing that killed them was the telegraph”. The telegraph! And now, here we are, at the edge of the Apocalypse, cuddling up to Ai “Art” and ChatGPT, eyes still full of stars at our species’ brilliance and ingenuity, still enmeshed in our bad romance with Tech, still slaves to The Grind in a trend that began with the Spinning Jenny! *Sigh*.
Some may say the ‘constipated view of life’, began (fittingly) with wheat. It tied us down, gave us wings, flew us straight to the heart of the sun unto grotesque wealth, grotesque poverty, free time, anxiety, ennui, and Art. Look, I am not complaining. I get it. Pandora’s delights have been Unboxed all over the internet. I’m not a complete Luddite. Some parts are still missing, and I’m self-aware enough to know they’re made in China. I’m not suggesting we crawl back to the cave. I’m saying we could embrace the stuffed crust pizza before us, and make it gluten-free. A thin, crispy marinara, and postmodern. To paraphrase the great Angelou: now that we know better, should we not do better?
Reading Orwell’s vision for the future of England and the rest of the world during WW2 in 2023 is utterly cringe. Could not even a few of us have found a way to improve our short, brutish little lives under Surveillance Capitalism in all this time? Even those of us who escaped poverty torment ourselves with notions of ‘productivity’ and ‘self-worth’, and squander our lives on absurd ‘content’. Like zombies, we let Them eat our brains for profit.
We no longer sing and dance. We don't know how to. Instead, we watch other people sing and dance on the television screen.
- Tom Hodgkinson, The Idler
Once upon a time in 2011, I met Them myself. Having nursed my one-year-old until he passed out milk-drunk and having read Where The Wild Things Are to my three-year-old on repeat, I sat down at my computer to write. Drowning out the “sleep when the babies sleep” recording in my head with Marcus Aurelius’s nobler: “… is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”, I soon found myself typing these words into my search bar: How to be free.
This is how I discovered Tom Hodgkinson, ordered the book, swallowed it whole, and began to flush out the impacted turd I had only just realised I had been harbouring. What caused my constipation? Could it be the post-post-colonial, post-feminist, post-modern, over-educated, under-employed unease I felt as an urban Indian woman who had benefitted so much from the struggles of the Women’s Liberation Movement and the sacrifices of her refugee grandparents but had chosen a life of near-bovine domesticity?
To be clear, I subscribe wholeheartedly to Attachment as a parenting style - we are primates, nothing more, nothing less - and I love cows (they’re just big dogs). I make no apologies for the years of my life spent gestating and nursing my children, waiting at bus stops, or just watching them sleep. I think the ‘freedom’ I was looking for in that Google search was from the voice in my head that demanded of me, even with two kids under three, to be more useful.
I had just made two human beings one after the other from scratch by growing a temporary organ in my body, who once born, I kept nourished on food I manufactured in that self-same body, sleeping maybe four hours at a stretch for years on end while also having the DHA literally sucked out of my brain. How much more productive did I feel the need to be? Surely even Marcus Aurelius would have been impressed?
Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands? You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you.”
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations.
If I knew then what I know now I would have realised that the ‘job’ at hand was to understand ‘what [my] nature demands’. I was not a Roman Emperor. I was a mother. When did that stop being enough? When did we get laid off?
I think the traditional 'feminine' arts of homemaking or dressmaking or whatever are shamefully undervalued. They’re doing what I’m doing: making a space for another person to be in. Creating an architecture for life.
- Zadie Smith.
This post isn’t about Motherhood. Or Feminism. Or Stoicism. Or Anarchy, or Neo-Luddism. (All great things.) It’s about taking a commercial break. To read long-form. To sing, to write, to gaze into the distance. To support The Arts. To make art. To be a human being.
This is what I have gathered: by nature, we are each the universe expressing itself in a loose association of 30 trillion cells for a smidgeon of Time. It follows then that if we find ourselves at any point in our lives tormented by invisible masters that know when we are sleeping, know when we’re awake, know when we are bad or good, and is asking us to be good (Obey) for goodness sakes, we have a problem that even a perfunctory delve would reveal has its historical roots in Calvinism, Colonialism, Capitalism, and heck, maybe even Slavery.
So what if They tell us we must “dance like no one is watching, but text, post, and email like it will be read in court one day”?
Still, we must dance.
© Tara Sahgal
Achtung! For offerings, insights, and unsolicited opinions that inspired (or that I was reminded of while creating) this edition of Wit’s End, please scroll all the way down. At the very end of this post, you will find a poll - please vote!
“Social media is turning you into an asshole.” - Jaron Lanier
“For reasons that are known only to God, for a couple weeks I reflexively watched Facebook Reels videos. It’s something like the bottom of the barrel for internet video, attached to a notoriously uncool social network that has devolved for almost everyone into a never-ending stream of spam, memes, viral bilge, and people that you don’t remotely know. Facebook still boasts a vast user base, but the level of engagement of those users is disputed and the network has become famously unattractive to the youth. Billions use it, including me, but it feels like the dying Rust Belt city of the internet. Facebook makes me feel the way I feel when I’m in a hospital.”- From The Bitter End of "Content", Freddie DeBoer
“If peradventure, Reader, it has been thy lot to waste the golden years of thy life–thy shining youth–in the irksome confinement of an office; to have thy prison days prolonged through middle age down to decrepitude and silver hairs, without hope of release or respite; to have lived to forget that there are such things as holidays, or to remember them but as the prerogatives of childhood; then, and then only, will you be able to appreciate my deliverance.” - From The Superannuated Man, Charles Lamb.
"Stories about men are universal stories about the human condition. Women are expected to be able to sympathize with male characters while men can find women impenetrable or uninteresting. No woman would skip a book that centers on a boy’s coming of age or marriage from a man’s point of view, yet stories about a young woman’s first romance or a struggling mother become women’s fiction, a thing apart… It’s frustrating that women who want to read literary fiction end up ignoring many of the stories that reflect and explore their own experience… but if we pay attention to how we talk about female writers and their work, we can let go of the idea that “stupid” wears lipstick and “smart” has a beard." - From Why We Can’t Make Up Our Minds About Sally Rooney, by Carrie V. Mullins
“We think of social media, and media culture in general, as the ultimate manifestation of “me culture” but Dang actually gets the bull by the horns, that it is in fact the immolation of the self for most users, who serve as spectators or micro-producers in the grip and service of bigger personalities. The din of modern media, though we assume it is about vanity, due to the presumed reality and amateur bent, serves as a surrendering of one’s inner life to the aggregated shout, and the morass that follows the flood, drowning out one’s own identity.” - From Herb Sundays 70: Ami Dang on Herb Sundays
The story of Babel is the best metaphor I’ve found for making sense of the momentous sociological, cultural, and epistemological changes that occurred in many nations in the early 2010s, which gave us the chaos, fragmentation, and outrage that began to set in by the mid-2010s. There are many causes of the transformation, but I believe that the largest single cause was the rapid conversion, after 2009, of the early “social networking systems,” which made it easy for people to communicate with others, into “social media platforms,” upon which people stand and perform in pursuit of publicly quantified prestige and influence. There was a sudden increase in shouting and a decline in listening. There was a loss of shared stories, shared meanings, and human relationships. - From After Babel, Jonathan Haidt.
“The man who invests his savings in a concern that goes bankrupt is, therefore, injuring others as well as himself. If he spent his money, say, in giving parties for his friends, they (we may hope) would get pleasure, and so would all those on whom he spent money, such as the butcher, the baker, and the bootlegger. But if he spends it (let us say) upon laying down rails for surface cars in some place where surface cars turn out to be not wanted, he has diverted a mass of labor into channels where it gives pleasure to no one. Nevertheless, when he becomes poor through the failure of his investment he will be regarded as a victim of undeserved misfortune, whereas the gay spendthrift, who has spent his money philanthropically, will be despised as a fool and a frivolous person.” - From In Prasie of Idleness, Bertrand Russel.
“Yes, the world is crap and filled with the worst quality of produce imaginable. So ignore it and create a joyful world of high-quality produce.” - From How to Be Free, Tom Hodgkinson.
To read Part 1 of my short story ‘The Resurrection’, please see the archives.
For a few lighthearted poems on the Heart of Darkness, please see my collection, Capitalipstick.
Oh, The Places You Can Go On the Internet Other than FaceBook and Instagram, The Evening Scroll.
Real experiences, involving interactions in and with the real world, have always trumped aquisition and/or avoidance . You have the right end of the stick in your hand. Wield it well!
awesome as usual. read it while taking an afternoon break. have been troubled by the same things of late.