The Worst Case Scenario

My boyfriend is not a psychic, Instagram is not the problem, mortal is not what we know how to be.

Dear reader,

Today’s newsletter features audio and a written transcription of me thinking out loud. It also closes with a round-up of five linked things I’m thinking about. Please note that the pull quotes included at the beginning and throughout this letter are all from the beloved British author, Oliver Burkeman. The quotes are in the audio file too, so if you can, please rest and enjoy this warm, cochlear chai.

hi

To listen to me think out loud, click below:

“Even if you quit Facebook or ban yourself from social media during the work day or exile yourself to a cabin in the mountains, you'll probably still find it unpleasantly constraining to focus on what matters. So you'll find some way to relieve the pain by distracting yourself by daydreaming, taking an unnecessary nap, or the preferred option of the productivity geek, redesigning your to do list and reorganizing your desk. The overarching point is that what we think of as distractions aren't the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They're just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation.” -Oliver Burkeman

I'm listening to this book by Oliver Burkeman called Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, and a lot of stuff is coming up. Namely, I'm thinking about how I haven't been on Instagram for two weeks as of today. It feels like a lot longer. In that time, I've been devouring more long form media: more film, more books. And what's interesting to me about this is that I don't actually have more time, I just have more space, more attention — more devoted attention.

What's also interesting about not being on Instagram right now is what Burkeman talks about in his book, which is that Instagram isn't actually the problem. The inevitable reality of our situation as mortals with finite time here, in free-fall, in uncertain free-fall, is the problem.

Instagram is one of the dubious ways that we cope with that existential problem. It's one of the more seductive and addictive ways we cope because it's designed to be that way, by people with millions of dollars to hire the best scientists and researchers and psychologists, in the same way that alcohol and tobacco companies hire people to make their products appealing.

So thinking about that I've been like, okay, if Instagram is just a coping mechanism for the discomfort of sitting with the existential reality that we all share, then without Instagram, what am I reaching for? What coping mechanism is taking its place?

I can say with confidence that I have been eating a lot more sugar than usual. Is this because I'm not on Instagram, or because I'm addicted to sugar? Maybe both. I think it's a really good thing for me to be off social media, and yet there's a very real possibility that social media is not the problem, and that we will continue to always reach for something else, something that could be just as “damaging” in different ways.

Me eating sugar all day long probably has more invisible or long-term effects, whereas it's easy for me to see the effects of using social media pretty rapidly. My attention feels totally shot, I often feel incredibly overwhelmed, occasionally resentful. There's all kinds of things that present themselves, usually while I'm on it, if not day of, day after. And if I'm on it regularly, without moderation, these are states of being that I kind of carry with me — they're like a current that runs through me.

I am off of Instagram right now, and being off it is helping me recognize that it does rob a state of calm from my life. But I kind of feel like that state of calm is…while it's more noticeable without being on Instagram right now, I sort of think it's a lie. And I guess Oliver Burkeman would kind of agree with me, that there's always this existential crisis of our mortality running through us that causes feelings, and a confusion, and a dissonance in us. And as a result, we're always…we're kind of bound to reach for various coping mechanisms.

“We're told that there's a war for our attention with Silicon Valley as the invading force working. But if that's true, our role on the battlefield is often that of collaborators with the enemy…It's true that killing time on the internet often doesn't feel especially fun these days. But it doesn't need to feel fun. In order to dull the pain of finitude, it just needs to make you feel unconstrained. This also makes it easier to see why the strategies generally recommended for defeating distraction, like digital detoxes, personal rules about when you'll allow yourself to check your inbox and so forth, rarely work or at least not for long. They involve limiting your access to the things you use to assuage your urge toward distraction, and in the case of the most addictive forms of technology, that's surely a sensible idea, but they don't address the urge itself.” -OB

And so that's why his argument is that, you know, it's not really Instagram. Instagram might be a harsh choice for our coping mechanism — there might be better ones (I think sugar is having a better impact on my life, in the immediate sense). But it's interesting to think about putting less pressure on the coping mechanism itself (scrolling, social media, texting), and to recognize that because of our given situation as mortal humans, it is in our nature to seek out coping mechanisms, and that if it weren't for Instagram, it would be something else.

I don't know why Instagram has this chokehold on us. I don't remember feeling secure using it, or like my life had any more certainty. In fact, I think it was the opposite. But maybe that's the crux of coping mechanisms: they're what we reach to because we think they're going to help. But oftentimes they make it worse, right? Alcohol doesn't actually give you more certainty, but in the moment might seem like it does. So we reach for it, instead of just being in free-fall.

“Boredom can strike in wildly different contexts...but they all have one characteristic in common: they demand that you face your finitude. You're obliged to deal with how your experience is unfolding in this moment, to resign yourself to the reality that this is it.” -OB

I'm getting better at naming feelings and not getting carried away by them, and that feels pretty cool. On Sunday, I woke up with T. and immediately headed to my meditation bench, which is in the middle of the room. I started burning some incense and he asked me hopefully, “Oh, you're gonna meditate now?" And I just turned to him and said, “No, I woke up with a crippling sense of dread and anxiety. And I can't name it, but it's there.”

So, the loving partner that he is, T. presented me with two options. He said, “Well, I don't know what you want, but I could leave you alone or we could take a drive and go thrifting.” I didn't want to do either of those things, and I named that too — I could tell that neither of those things were going to make me feel better.

I took a moment to recognize that it's okay to just make a choice and to do something, and to be aware that it's not going to make you feel better, and that you don't have to find the answer to what's going to make you feel better right away. You don't have to know why you don't feel good, actually. There may not be a way to know why.

Maybe I didn't get enough sleep, maybe I ate too much sugar, maybe I was slightly triggered by something he’d said two days ago — who knows?! What we do know, what I do know, is that the feeling is temporary. And that the more seriously I take it, the more I put it under a microscope and cling to it and force it to give me answers and stare at it until it goes away, is exhausting me. It's work I don't want to do. If I make that my work, that will be my only work. If I make inspecting every single feeling and emotion my work, I will never be free to do other things.

I understand where the impulse comes from, you know? If it's a bad feeling, you're trying to get rid of it, trying to figure out where it came from, trying to prevent it from happening again. But that's just not how it works. There's always going to be a new feeling.

So I went thrifting. I hardly said a word all day, and that felt kind of nice, too. I just didn't have it in me. Didn't have it in me to fight my feelings away, so I accepted them. Didn't have it in me to come up with a solution for them or a plan for the day, so I accepted somebody else's. I really just sort of surrendered.

Sort of.

At one point, we had just parked the car outside of the Goodwill when I decided it would be a great opportunity to ask my partner if he had the ability to look into both mine and his futures and assure me of how they will look, of what will or will not happen. We were looking out over a park, I was watching the children play on a Sunday morning. I asked him if he thought that he was going to change his mind about wanting kids.

For context, neither of us want kids and never really have. It's something that we don't really talk about because we've only been together for eight months, but it's still something that's been addressed because, you know, at our age you should talk about it, right?

I told him that life was long, that we change our minds about things when we never thought we would. I asked him if he thought he might change his mind about kids by the time it would be too late for me to give them to him. I asked him if he would therefore leave me for another, younger woman who could give him children, and if he would one day parade her around town with her big, pregnant fecundity in front of me, old and barren.

This seems like a fun Sunday morning activity together. Hey, wanna hear a worst case scenario that I'm rolling over and over in my head right now? Same.

In this hypothetical worst case scenario, I am so desperate to keep this person in my life that this future version of me is sad and would have children to please another person. Terrible, terrible way to go about having a family. Please don't go; I don't want children, but I will have them with you in the future/sooner than you thought you would want them. I don't want them ever, but, yeah.

Honestly, I can't make this shit up. As the words were coming out of my mouth, I was like, are you okay? And for the love of God, bless T. for not making me feel completely insane, although I think he had every right to while we sat outside of the Goodwill and I asked him to look into his crystal fucking ball of Will you or won't you abandon me and in which method?

It’s all so that I can control the uncertainty of everything, including my relationship and the certainty that it is finite — it won't be forever, for whatever reason, and how uncomfortable that is.

“Whenever we succumb to distraction, we're attempting to flee a painful encounter with our finitude, with the human predicament of having limited time, and more especially in the case of distraction, limited control over that time, which makes it impossible to feel certain about how things will turn out — except, that is, for the deeply unpleasant certainty that one day, death will bring it all to an end. When you try to focus on something you deem important, you're forced to face your limits, an experience that feels especially uncomfortable precisely because the task at hand is one you value so much.” -OB

I didn't really think much of this fun activity in the car, like where it came from or why I felt the need to literally say any of it out loud to anyone besides my therapist. But a few days later, I'm listening to this book and he's talking about control, and the goddamn free-fall that is life, and how boring and uncomfortable it is to meet over and over and over again. All day long, we meet our finite mortality, our aging body, and the fact that we do not know when we will die, but we will.

Listening to him talk about this, I saw my little Sunday sermon with T. in a different light. In the past, I would have just been like, that's my Inner Child Fear of Abandonment Baby Girl coming out and being like, I would like to just remind you that I am still trying to control not being abandoned and will do anything to avoid it! And it is definitely a little bit of that. But I think it's also just me facing my mortality and projecting it on the person who happens to be sitting next to me at the time. It's me facing my aging body that will at one point not give me children anymore. It's me facing one of those big decisions, day in and day out: do I reproduce or not?

I guess what I mean to say is, this week I've been seeing my overall relationship anxiety in a different light, thanks to this book. It sort of takes the me out of it, my personal relationship to a person out of the picture for a minute, and it makes my anxiety feel more universal, more shared.

Even if all of you are not sitting in your boyfriend's car, asking him about the likelihood of the worst case scenario that you've crafted (I hope you are not doing that), I think our existential crisis manifests for all of us in different ways. I'm thinking about everything as a coping mechanism, in a sense for the same problem — which isn't really a problem at all — it's an absolute fucking gift. It is an absolute fucking gift to be me, in free-fall.

So yeah, that's where I'm at.

I love you guys.

1. Oliver Burkeman’s wonderful newsletter, The Imperfectionist.

2. My beautiful friend Nydia Gonzalez and her album released this week. Everyone at the ranch has been listening to the seven perfect songs on repeat, especially the one below. More of Nydia here.

3. This incredible 40-minute ASMR video of Devendra Banhart getting some TLC.

4. The book The Eden Project: The Search for the Magical Other by James Hollis that reiterated everything I already know but still somehow changed my life, a re-cognizing, if you will. I’m inspired to write about it. A great summary:

   “A timely and thought-provoking corrective to the generalized fantasies about relationships that permeate Western culture. Here is a challenge to greater personal responsibility, a call for individual growth as opposed to the search for rescue by others.”

5. My solo exhibition of original drawings opens May 20th, 2023 at Cruise Control Cambria in Cambria, California. In the meantime, please peruse my online shop for prints and posters. Every sale is so meaningful to me, especially while I’m away from Instagram.