“Part of the reason so few of us have a healthy relationship with pleasure is because a small minority of our species hoards the excess of resources, creating a false scarcity and then trying to sell us joy, sell us back to ourselves.

On a broad level, white people, and men have been the primary recipients of this delusion, the belief that they deserve to have excess, while the majority of others don’t have enough… or further, that the majority of the world exists in some way to please them.” (Pleasure Activism)

Whew.

As someone who has benefitted from the system as it exists, I need to still understand (and disentangle) how my own relationship with pleasure has been broken as a result of this delusion. How have I bought into and perpetuated this system for my continued benefit? And how can I begin to seek a healthier approach to pleasure?

"We learn to love by loving."

A short line from an essay in a book I am revisiting (started a while back and got sidetracked). It's an idea that resonates deeply with me. Many years ago I remember seeing a collection of short films and one of them contained this idea of a man who reinvested his time to care for his dying wife; despite planning on leaving the marriage before finding out she was sick. The film ended with this line, "by choosing to be a man in love, he became a man in love once again."

Now, I don't want to oversimplify this; there are all sorts of considerations when dealing with relationships like this. But the thing I want to come back to is this idea that love is learned through practice. Specifically, I want to highlight the spirit that the author of the above quote is coming from. Love, not just in a romantic sense but as a revolutionary act, is something that needs to be practiced. Self-love, self-less love, self-giving love—these aren't things that you can feel your way into. You can only learn them by doing them.

I've been thinking quite a bit about how we discover and engage with media over the last few days (see my previous thoughts on this here), and it got me reflecting about my personal collection of books that is scattered, with varying degrees of intentionality, around my home. I'm pretty sure every room contains a small (or large) assortment of books in some corner, cabinet, shelf, or carefully stacked atop surfaces to catch the interest of someone sitting nearby. As I took some time to pay attention to these piles, I realized just how strange my book collection really has become.

There's the shelf in my bedroom that holds everything from fantasy series to Russian classics to short story anthologies to folklore. There's the pile on my subwoofer of deep dives into specific albums I like (including one on Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love). There's a bookshelf in my living room with bird and animal studies, oral histories, essay collections, and bordering on what might be considered too many books on mushrooms and foraging. My office (which is only about the size of a large closet) contains all my so-called higher interest books (read: boring), ranging from history, theology, sociology, tech-criticism, economics, urbanism, design, and more. There's even a small collection of various editions/translations of The Hobbit sitting above my record player.

My tastes in books are wide and eccentric, and they have arrived here in all manner of ways. I have haphazardly picked up books from places I have visited and deliberately tracked down certain books because they piqued my interest at a certain time. Friends and family members have gifted me books they thought seemed like something I'd like. Other books hold sentimental value in some way (like a couple I was given from a professor who made an impact on me).

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't think an algorithm can ever really capture this sort of collecting. While it can distill all of this into suggestions for me to buy something else, it can never replicate the various motivations behind the acquiring of those books. It can't replace human thoughtfulness.

Was listening to the Big Ideas Podcast while making breakfast/lunch for my kids this morning. It was an episode on data privacy and it had a really important takeaway to it that I don't often hear enough of in these conversations; that protecting your data is both a personal responsibility and a systemic one. Usually, I only hear this framed around the individual steps that you can do to keep yourself safe online: use a password manager, use 2FA, manage your privacy settings, etc... Rarely do I hear it said that all of this is simply not enough to keep you safe and that if we want protection, it requires regulations from the government.

"We need reform that reflects community expectations of privacy, that understands that privacy choices you make are not necessarily the choices about your privacy that are made, that others make them for you. This is a collective responsibility that needs to be regulated at a societal level, not something that we can offload to individuals. Unless we do that, companies and governments will continue to exploit this moment of sophisticated technology..." (Lizzie O'Shea, Founder & Chair of Digital Rights Watch)

It's just so important that we keep in mind that these big tech companies continue to spend significant amounts of money to lobby the government to stay out of their way. We should also maintain a healthy skepticism towards content amplified on their platforms that criticizes the governments that do challenge them. Oversight has been successfully rebranded as 'red tape' by the Libertarians and we need to be asking what we're giving up when we let Big Tech (and Big Business) have unimpeded access to our lives.

Is the digital town hall a dying dream?

This morning I'm reading this article on some of the shifts taking place in social media, particularly the way the bigger, centralized platforms have been splintering into multiple decentralized, politically homogenous platforms. The general framing is that users are increasingly moving to platforms that align with their political beliefs rather than staying in spaces that attempt to adhere to a more neutral set of community standards.

“It was once novel features, like Facebook’s photo tagging or Twitter’s quote tweets, that drew users to social media sites. Now, it’s frequently ideological alignment that seduces users. People are decamping to platforms that they believe match their norms and values — and, in an increasingly polarized America, there is a chasm between the two sides.”

It's all very interesting, but it's also touching on something I've been thinking about a lot over the last few years: the relationship between diversity and working towards a common good. It's also a thought process that is still very unformed in my head. So as always, we'll see where this goes...

One of the markers of the post-modern turn was the deconstruction of a the (Western) idea that a singular experience/truth/viewpoint that was somehow more right or true than others. You might say we are now living in the post-post-modern turn. It's sort of like a tube of toothpaste that has been emptied; there are a lot of people invested in trying to put that toothpaste back, but it's kind of too late. It's all over the counter already.

This all ties back to my question around seeking a common good amidst an increasingly diverse society. The old, dominant narrative took us there via eliminating difference. It's sort of like that melting pot vision of America; one leaves behind where they came from in order to become something new—an American(†). But this is where the toothpaste comes in. That narrative has been cracked wide open and shown to be shallow, reductive, and (frankly) racist. There are lots of reasons to point to in order to understand the extreme polarization of everything right now, but I think this is a part of it. This relationship between diversity and finding a shared life together. It's playing out in more extreme ways online because the internet reduces us to our opinions/ideologies/alignments In a way, these homogenous online communities are a way for us to feel like the toothpaste is still in the tube.

As I said, I'm still working through this question but I think we need to explore other postures for how to form community if we have any hope of finding a way forward. Off the top of my head, I'm advocating for models built around cooperation and hospitality. I'm open to hearing about others though.

† Just want to be clear that this is not an American problem only. The American melting pot analogy is just a very clear picture of the problem.