The Prettiest Boy in the World →
For even a moderately vain female, spending time with Pejic is like losing a race to someone who’s not even running: If he were not a man, he would be the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in the flesh—which, in his case, is flawless and poreless and has an English-rose luster. His mussed blond locks and the rounded width of his cheekbones bring to mind a young Brigitte Bardot. At 19 years old, he is six-foot-one, thin as the stroke of a paintbrush, and wears a women’s size 11 shoe, which he says is hard to find in couture but is sometimes carried at DSW. He is fey but not flamboyant. His only apparent physical imperfection is a pair of moles that hover gracefully over his lip on the right side of his slightly feline face. They are sometimes, albeit rarely, Photoshopped out.
[…]
In fact, to even describe his look as androgynous feels somewhat misleading; most strangers who encounter Pejic do not seem to doubt that he is a woman. He has only the faintest trace of an Adam’s apple. His jawline has remained delicate, and he shaves his legs but has no chest or facial hair to speak of. (“Feel my face,” he says at one point, grabbing my hand and bringing it up to his cheek, which indeed had only a light dusting of peach fuzz.) While I was with him, waitresses asked if we “ladies” needed anything else. People at shoots referred to him as “her.” “I don’t feel the need to explain myself,” says Pejic, who has nicknamed his androgyny and its concomitant confusion “the situation,” as in “they didn’t notice the situation” or “the Japanese just loved the whole situation” or “I like having a level of mystery to this whole situation.”
And though he may not exactly bristle at the gender distinctions made by others, he does question their underlying assumptions. “In this society, if a man is called a woman, that’s the biggest insult he could get.” He arches his eyebrows skeptically and asks, “Is that because women are considered something less?” Later, he tells me, “I know people want me to sort of defend myself, to sit here and be like, ‘I’m a boy, but I wear makeup sometimes.’ But, you know, to me, it doesn’t really matter. I don’t really have that sort of strong gender identity—I identify as what I am. The fact that people are using it for creative or marketing purposes, it’s just kind of like having a skill and using it to earn money.”
Androgyny has been a selling point in the fashion world at least since Coco Chanel jettisoned corsets in favor of sailor suits, but it’s always been a trickier, and more sexualized, endeavor with men. In the sixties, April Ashley’s career was destroyed when she was discovered to be a transsexual. Since then, there has generally been a level of campiness to men who modeled as women: Teri Toye, Connie Girl, and Candy Darling, Andy Warhol’s transgendered muse, all had a quality Pejic refers to as “We’re fabulous; fuck off” and which he views as less progressive because it drew attention to gender rather than moving beyond it. What he and others like the transsexual runway model Lea T are doing is sidestepping the gender issue altogether by not only passing as women but even managing to be a more ideal version of the impossibly hipless and curveless women the fashion industry fetishizes. Designers can use them and feel progressive without having to actually challenge the aesthetic norm. “I think it’s the first time that it’s becoming so mainstream…. “I don’t think it’s a shtick anymore. The white girl is dead—or at least she needs to amp it up a little bit.”
On growing up white trash →
We didn’t judge each other because we were poor. It would be like yelling at someone because it was raining. I just felt pretty and light headed when those boys were around. They thought I was a genius because I was the only kid from our circle who did really well at school.
When you’re a child, you become best friends with whoever lives across the street. But when I started high school, I was placed in all the advanced classes, and I joined extracurricular activities like the chess club. I started to make friends from different backgrounds. We had more in common, like books and alternative movies, and they opened up different worlds to me.
When I was fifteen, I was walking down the street with a boy I had recently made friends with and sort of liked. He was middle class and very nerdy. I had always wanted to be friends with a nerd. According to all the movies, they liked and accepted everyone. Out of nowhere, he said, “My mother says you’re not going to do anything with your life.”
“What, is the woman a fortune teller? How could she possibly know something like that?”
“She says you’re white trash, like the rest of your family.”
The boy said it as if it shouldn’t even bother me. He said it in the way that you tell a dog it can’t sit at the table because it is a dog. He said it as if everyone knew my place in the world, so I must know it, too. I just stood there on the sidewalk, not making eye contact. I suddenly realized that my new friends had been looking down on me.
I changed the way I dressed. I started making new friends who hadn’t known me when I was little. If they asked about my family, I would tell them things I had read in Edwardian novels about aristocrats. My father was a barrister. My mother played the clarinet for Prague’s People’s Community Orchestra. I would even lie about my dog. It was from Paris. Its mother was killed by a gendarme’s car.
I tried really, really hard. I went to university. I wanted to be a writer. I lost touch with everyone I knew from childhood. But I always felt as if I didn’t fit in and dreaded people finding out my history. Finally, I started dating someone with a different background. He hailed from the suburbs, from a two-storey house with wall-to-wall carpeting, prints of Renoir on the wall, and a plastic cover on the sofa. I thought dating him would mean that I was from another class, too.
We stayed together for years, but he had a nasty streak. He had a way of saying the meanest things possible out of the blue when we were alone. One day, I was flipping through a magazine, and I saw a photograph of children in a field filled with daisies. I asked him whether he saw us having a baby one day. He went quiet for a moment, and then he started looking angry. He said he couldn’t see himself having a child with someone from a white trash background.
I was startled. It didn’t matter to him that I was educated and had a respectable career. He seemed to believe white trash was in my blood. It was something I would pass on to my children. And who wants a baby with a mullet in a little acid-washed jumper?
By then, I had started writing the truth about my background. I wrote about how the basement walls of my building were covered in licence plates and hubcaps. I thought it was beautiful, like Aladdin’s cave. I wrote about eating pork chops while sitting on the sidewalk and watching a television plugged into an extension cord that ran through a window. I wrote how we collected bottles in a suitcase after festivals in the park. As I started telling the truth, beautiful things began to emerge. And I began to be proud of my heritage.
So my reaction was different this time. His insult changed how I regarded him. While he had once seemed educated and clever, he now looked unattractive, ignorant, and small minded. For all his supposed refinements, he didn’t understand that being white trash wasn’t a genetic disorder. It was a culture, just like his.
“You open your mouth… BOOM, expectations are lowered.”
Love your mom? Then fight for a world where your daughter can live as an equal.
—
(Source: twitter.com)
(Source: feminishblog, via wilwheaton)
I’m an Article About the Internet That You Repost on the Internet →
Hey, you—yes, you, scanning past me for celebrity news. Did you fail to notice what I’m about? The exact medium that you use to mass-distribute articles to friends, relatives, and people you’ve never met!
First, I take a sort of new angle on Facebook, which means you’ll post me on Facebook. My second half concerns itself with Twitter, so you’re powerless not to retweet me, perhaps with a pithy comment before the retweet, like “Long but worth checking out.” And I throw in a nod to Google+ or Circles or whatever the hell it’s called, which means I’ll be Added or Encircled or something. There’s nothing pandering about me whatsoever!
[…]
Hmm … What kind of ominous, doctored statistic can I make up? Did you know that twenty-four per cent of Facebook users have unwittingly divulged their credit-card information to third-party venders? Or that iPhone owners are more likely to suffer from thumb-stress-induced depression? Or that having an Android means you possess the gene for racism? True or not, you’ll post it, and fourteen of your friends will comment and repost it and feign concern about privacy issues and worry that they’re sad racists with carpal-tunnel syndrome, although they’ll stay online because they’re addicted and their lives are too humdrum for them to care about the protection thereof anyway.
Twitter! Users tend to [insert new thing]! Tweets! Hashtags! Bit.ly! Athletes! Celebrities! How things have changed in the past six months! Micro-celebrities! Minor-league athletes! Kony! [Insert another new thing]!
What will Mark Zuckerberg do next? Who cares! You do, in an involuntary, Pavlovian way, which is why you’re reading me when you should be outdoors, talking with a loved one, listening to live music, knitting, doing nearly anything else! Make a limp statement about your technocratic dictator that masquerades as wit, you enslaved peon, and pass me on!
Interesting article—I’m referring to myself—about the death of bookstores and print media you just posted. Way to stave off the inevitable end in a gesture whose irony you seem to be only vaguely aware of. Put it on the “I Know the Difference Between Irony and Sarcasm” fan page! Related: “Stop Using the Word ‘Random’ Incorrectly” group!
Heartwarming story (little ol’ me again) about a girl who used Twitter to raise five thousand dollars for her Scout troop, blah blah blah. Just post me and pretend like you personally did something good. When’s the last time you volunteered or even gave money to a homeless person? God, we’re doomed as a race, but, first, retweet me @ a few influential friends you think would really be into me and—oh, Jesus, I once had dreams of being a Pulitzer-winning series about Congo. How did I end up on the bullshit-tech-story beat?
Saccharine personal essay about how social networking is changing relationships between mothers and daughters! Between grandparents and grandchildren! Aunts and their dentists! Erstwhile Little League coaches and their former second basemen who are now grad students in neuroscience and can barely remember them so it’s kind of weird they were friended! Pets with Facebook pages and politicians’ Internet campaigns and etiquette for R.S.V.P.’ing to events and the best way to wish someone happy birthday without feeling like an exclamatory fool! Long quote we all agree with overlaid on a famous person’s picture; distraction-from-death meme that will burn itself out in four days.
It doesn’t matter what I say here [kumquats], you’ll still [my A.T.M. PIN is 5724] reproduce me [Eric Stoltz filmed a number of scenes in “Back to the Future” before being replaced by Michael J. Fox].
Share me! Share me “via” someone else! You can’t stop yourself! How did you survive before, without having read me and having made all your friends read me on the subject of everyone reading me?
Friendster! ♦
Gay on TV →
On “Glee” this spring, a transgender character named Unique is competing in a sing-off. On “Grey’s Anatomy,” Arizona and Callie are adjusting to married life, having been pronounced “wife and wife” last year.
On “Modern Family,” the nation’s most popular television show, Cameron and his partner Mitchell are trying to adopt a second child.
What’s missing? The outrage.
The cultural battlefield of television has changed markedly since the 1990s, when conservative groups and religious figures objected to Ellen DeGeneres coming out and “Will & Grace” coming on.
Today, it’s rare to hear a complaint about shows like “Modern Family” or the drama “Smash,” which has five openly gay characters, or the sitcom “Happy Endings,” which, against stereotype, has a husky and lazy gay male character.
[…]
At a time when gay rights are re-emerging as an election year issue — in part because of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s stated support for gay marriage on Sunday — activists and academics say that depictions of gay characters on television play a big role in making viewers more comfortable with their gay, lesbian and transgender neighbors.
“TV and movie representation matters,” said Edward Schiappa, a professor of communication studies at the University of Minnesota. In five separate studies, Mr. Schiappa and his colleagues have found that the presence of gay characters on television programs decreases prejudices among viewers of the programs. “These attitude changes are not huge — they don’t change bigots into saints. But they can snowball,” Mr. Schiappa said.
Mr. Biden apparently agrees. He said on Sunday that “Will & Grace,” which ran from 1998 to 2006, “probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody’s ever done so far.”
When that sitcom began on NBC, it was seen as controversial. Several conservative groups claimed that it and shows like it would make homosexuality seem desirable.
Some groups said the same about “Ellen,” the ABC sitcom starring Ellen DeGeneres, who came out as a lesbian on the show and in real life in 1997. Ms. DeGeneres threatened to quit a year later when ABC preceded an “Ellen” episode that showed her jokingly kissing a friend with a message that warned, “Due to adult content, parental discretion is advised.”
That warning would not appear today, as complaints about gay characters on shows like “Modern Family” and “Glee” barely ever bubble to the surface.
[…]
While campaigns against shows with gay characters are now rare, the pressure on networks to include them has grown. There was a fan outcry, for example, when the gay couple on “Modern Family” did not kiss in the sitcom’s first season. The producers insisted that the wait was intentional, and the second season included a story line about Cameron’s disdain for public displays of affection, as well as many kisses between the characters.
In an interview Mr. Levitan, who used to be an anchorman in Madison, Wis., cited a newsroom saying: “Don’t tell me how this law is affecting two million people, show me one family that it’s affecting and it’ll be more powerful.”
[…]
Some producers say they have marveled at how fast the opinions of television viewers have changed, even as gay rights activists have marveled at how voters across the country have shifted on gay marriage.
“What this is about, really, is how far America has come, not how far television has come,” said Christopher Lloyd, a co-creator of “Modern Family.”
Shonda Rhimes, the “Grey’s Anatomy” producer, recalled having to “go to the mattresses with broadcast standards and practices” at ABC in 2006 to insist on preserving a steamy shower sequence with three female doctors. That sequence was just a fantasy in the mind of one of the male characters — but now six years later, in the show’s version of reality, two female doctors are married. “Nobody even blinked” at the relationship, Ms. Rhimes said.
The only outcry she recalled came when one of the doctors, Arizona, flirted with a man. “It was from lesbians who said, ‘How dare she sleep with a man!’”
The benefits of smoking →
[–] wauter 658 points 12 hours ago* (+801|-145)
Allright, here we go. The many, many benefits of smoking (that you never hear mentioned explicitly) are:
Ok, so what we already have is that you constantly carry around a way to make (a subsection of) people instantly happy and grateful for 5 cents or so. Give a couple of bucks to a homeless guy and he’ll say thanks, offer him a smoke on top of it and he’ll flash a wonderful smile. Same with people you just met, or (in my country) offering a filter cigarette to a rolled tabaco smoker - filter cigarettes are like 5 times more expensive so considered a really nice ‘treat’.
Then there’s the fact that it not only gives you an excuse to escape from a noisy, crouded, overheated party (or a boring task at work) for some fresh air outside (yeah yeah bring on the irony here), or standing in the sunlight if it’s day time, but what you’ll typically find there are other people in ‘brief escape’ mode, happy to have a friendly chat. This is nice in any circumstance of course, but particularly when travelling where meeting new and local people can add so much to the experience. See point one to kick off that friendly chat with a friendly gesture right away.
There’s a certain ‘bonding’ effect in sharing a common weakness with somebody, people become less threatening and less worried about the first impression they should make to somebody, regardless of relative ‘rank’ or position or whatever if both already have one obvious, silly, visible flaw right there. This is most easily observed in professional settings, where sharing a smoke typically vanishes any form of ‘inequality’ because of position within the company, or different departments, etc… But it also plays a big role in what I related in my earlier comment, sharing a cigarette with a homeless guy without either feeling a very different ‘rank’ or anything. I have never heard anybody mention this about smoking, but am personally convinced it’s a very real effect.
It gives you a guilty-pleasure way of ‘celebrating’ tiny successes, like finishing a hard mental or physical task, an hour of studying, a long meeting or solving a hard technical problem.
Similarly, it gives you an excuse to ‘snooze’ something you’re not really feeling like doing for 5 more minutes.
In each of these cases, it has a very natural time limit to it (about 5 minutes or so), so it’s not that much of a threat for wasting too much time, and it’s not considered that antisocial to excuse yourself from the group to have a bit of me-time (which I do all the time), optionally enhanced by some mobile redditing or whatever.
It gives you something to do with your hands, which for a fidgety type like me is nice while on the phone or while explaining something, and I’m sure there’s something to be said about how you use your mouth for it too, freudian oral blabla, dunno. But yeah, the act itself is somehow fun.
While analyzing smoking together with a friend, he came to a really nice summary of all this: smoking is the closest you can come to doing absolutely nothing, without actually doing nothing.
**
[–] inn0vat3 226 points 11 hours ago (+242|-16)
For an introvert, smoking is a lifesaver at parties. You can escape to a place with just a few people, and it’s always easier to make conversation while having a smoke with someone.
The number of times I ditched the closed, drunken karaoke room for the balcony… For me, it was a way to get away from the crowd and just talk to one or two other people. In that context, small talk isn’t just small talk anymore, you know? And those moments of silence become socially acceptable for some reason. You don’t need to explain your idleness or isolation.
Don't regulate the internet - regulate your kids →
So what is the problem with internet pornography? It’s that too many parents (and by proxy MPs) think the solution is to regulate the internet, when the answer is to regulate the children – or better still the parents.
I write this as a parent with children of both sexes. Frankly, I’m amazed by the tales of parents who let their children have TVs or computers in their bedroom. First of all, it’s like telling them not to socialise with you; and it’s by socialisation that we work out what we do and don’t accept as sensual, and sexual, and pornographic (and where the line lies). Watching TV together means you can discuss what you’re watching. Having computers in shared spaces (effectively banning solitary use), using the filtering systems that they have built in – these are solutions that work.
They don’t need legislation; they don’t need complicated filters that will be routed around in a flash (try a search on “VPN filter evade”); they just need to be part of the family. You can’t turn off the internet, nor make its denizens respectable (ask Louise Mensch). You can, however, turn off the computer, or explain respectability to your child.
That of course is probably too much to ask. There will be louder calls for filters, even though applying it only to those who change contract will take decades to permeate through (only 5% of people change contract per quarter, and 5 million have never changed).
And even then, once the filters are in place, there will still be a site offering endless pictures of women in bikinis, or see-through dresses, or “hooker heels”, to tantalise salivating boys and offer a demeaning message for girls.
Many men who harass women say their intent is to compliment them, but why do they usually not “compliment” women who are accompanied by other men and often only do it when a woman is alone? Why do they tend to object to other men “complimenting” their female significant other (if applicable), female friends, or female family members? Why do some men grow hostile and violent when women do not thank them and act flattered? Why do they feel compelled to compliment women at all? Rarely are they expecting a date. Many times they do not even wait to see a woman’s reaction as they fly by in their car or as they turn to start harassing the next woman. They are doing it to exert their power, to entertain their friends, to relieve boredom, or to demonstrate that they can evaluate a complete stranger to her face, just because she is a woman.
—
Stop Street Harassment: Holly Kearl
Related: My Street, My Body, My Right
(Source: completelymoribund, via 7989)
The ever energetic, compellingly articulate, and staggeringly persuasive Russell Brand discusses the culture of celebrity and fame with Jeremy Paxman.
“Fame is seemingly accessible even when you live in areas where it’s miles and miles away from you.”
**
“Don’t you think, though, Jeremy, that art to some degree - if I may use that rather grandiose, little word - is about the personal and what other conduit experience have I got other than the personal? And, to tell you the truth, I maintain the intimate because there are countless feelings, thoughts and fears that aren’t shared in the pages.”
(Do you worry that it’s done something to you?)
“When I first became famous, Jonathan Ross said to me, “How are you coping with this?” And I sort of went, “Yeah…” but I must have looked all bruised and shattered like a man at the foothills of a mountain, staring up at the summit, and I said, “It’s a bit scary, isn’t it?” And he goes, “Yeah. You lose something and you never get it back.” And the thing to which he refers is of course that privacy, that sense of yourself, that ability to identify yourself with intimate things, to define your own narrative. Now I’ve become- there’s an extracted icon of me that’s used to splash over newspapers and used to represent what is convenient, again, for these narrative ideas. So it’s a huge compromise, it’s not what you think it’s going to be, if you are pursuing it for its own end, then that’s ridiculous. That’s ridiculous and unfulfilling. But if you have a deep love of singing, of dancing, of basket-weaving, then you should pursue that. But if you’re pursuing it because you think there might be some supplementary celebrity experience, then you are misinformed and you are due to experience great dissatisfaction.”
**
Paxman: “What we’ve been talking about is very, very, very interesting. It’s in this kind of terrain between the public validation and the internal validation of yourself. It’s the big issue of our time.”
The Flight from Conversation →
WE live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.
At home, families sit together, texting and reading e-mail. At work executives text during board meetings. We text (and shop and go on Facebook) during classes and when we’re on dates. My students tell me about an important new skill: it involves maintaining eye contact with someone while you text someone else; it’s hard, but it can be done.
Over the past 15 years, I’ve studied technologies of mobile connection and talked to hundreds of people of all ages and circumstances about their plugged-in lives. I’ve learned that the little devices most of us carry around are so powerful that they change not only what we do, but also who we are.
We’ve become accustomed to a new way of being “alone together.” Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention. We have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party.
[…]
In today’s workplace, young people who have grown up fearing conversation show up on the job wearing earphones. Walking through a college library or the campus of a high-tech start-up, one sees the same thing: we are together, but each of us is in our own bubble, furiously connected to keyboards and tiny touch screens. A senior partner at a Boston law firm describes a scene in his office. Young associates lay out their suite of technologies: laptops, iPods and multiple phones. And then they put their earphones on. “Big ones. Like pilots. They turn their desks into cockpits.” With the young lawyers in their cockpits, the office is quiet, a quiet that does not ask to be broken.
In the silence of connection, people are comforted by being in touch with a lot of people — carefully kept at bay. We can’t get enough of one another if we can use technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far, just right. I think of it as a Goldilocks effect.
Texting and e-mail and posting let us present the self we want to be. This means we can edit. And if we wish to, we can delete. Or retouch: the voice, the flesh, the face, the body. Not too much, not too little — just right.
Human relationships are rich; they’re messy and demanding. We have learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology. And the move from conversation to connection is part of this. But it’s a process in which we shortchange ourselves. Worse, it seems that over time we stop caring, we forget that there is a difference.
We are tempted to think that our little “sips” of online connection add up to a big gulp of real conversation. But they don’t. E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, all of these have their places — in politics, commerce, romance and friendship. But no matter how valuable, they do not substitute for conversation.
Connecting in sips may work for gathering discrete bits of information or for saying, “I am thinking about you.” Or even for saying, “I love you.” But connecting in sips doesn’t work as well when it comes to understanding and knowing one another. In conversation we tend to one another. (The word itself is kinetic; it’s derived from words that mean to move, together.) We can attend to tone and nuance. In conversation, we are called upon to see things from another’s point of view.
Face-to-face conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. When we communicate on our digital devices, we learn different habits. As we ramp up the volume and velocity of online connections, we start to expect faster answers. To get these, we ask one another simpler questions; we dumb down our communications, even on the most important matters. It is as though we have all put ourselves on cable news. Shakespeare might have said, “We are consum’d with that which we were nourish’d by.”
And we use conversation with others to learn to converse with ourselves. So our flight from conversation can mean diminished chances to learn skills of self-reflection. These days, social media continually asks us what’s “on our mind,” but we have little motivation to say something truly self-reflective. Self-reflection in conversation requires trust. It’s hard to do anything with 3,000 Facebook friends except connect.
As we get used to being shortchanged on conversation and to getting by with less, we seem almost willing to dispense with people altogether. Serious people muse about the future of computer programs as psychiatrists. A high school sophomore confides to me that he wishes he could talk to an artificial intelligence program instead of his dad about dating; he says the A.I. would have so much more in its database. Indeed, many people tell me they hope that as Siri, the digital assistant on Apple’s iPhone, becomes more advanced, “she” will be more and more like a best friend — one who will listen when others won’t.
During the years I have spent researching people and their relationships with technology, I have often heard the sentiment “No one is listening to me.” I believe this feeling helps explain why it is so appealing to have a Facebook page or a Twitter feed — each provides so many automatic listeners. And it helps explain why — against all reason — so many of us are willing to talk to machines that seem to care about us. Researchers around the world are busy inventing sociable robots, designed to be companions to the elderly, to children, to all of us.
One of the most haunting experiences during my research came when I brought one of these robots, designed in the shape of a baby seal, to an elder-care facility, and an older woman began to talk to it about the loss of her child. The robot seemed to be looking into her eyes. It seemed to be following the conversation. The woman was comforted.
And so many people found this amazing. […] this enthusiasm speaks to how much we have confused conversation with connection and collectively seem to have embraced a new kind of delusion that accepts the simulation of compassion as sufficient unto the day. And why would we want to talk about love and loss with a machine that has no experience of the arc of human life? Have we so lost confidence that we will be there for one another?
WE expect more from technology and less from one another and seem increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship. Always-on/always-on-you devices provide three powerful fantasies: that we will always be heard; that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; and that we never have to be alone. Indeed our new devices have turned being alone into a problem that can be solved.
When people are alone, even for a few moments, they fidget and reach for a device. Here connection works like a symptom, not a cure, and our constant, reflexive impulse to connect shapes a new way of being.
Think of it as “I share, therefore I am.” We use technology to define ourselves by sharing our thoughts and feelings as we’re having them. We used to think, “I have a feeling; I want to make a call.” Now our impulse is, “I want to have a feeling; I need to send a text.”
So, in order to feel more, and to feel more like ourselves, we connect. But in our rush to connect, we flee from solitude, our ability to be separate and gather ourselves. Lacking the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people but don’t experience them as they are. It is as though we use them, need them as spare parts to support our increasingly fragile selves.
We think constant connection will make us feel less lonely. The opposite is true. If we are unable to be alone, we are far more likely to be lonely. If we don’t teach our children to be alone, they will know only how to be lonely.
I am a partisan for conversation. To make room for it, I see some first, deliberate steps. At home, we can create sacred spaces: the kitchen, the dining room. We can make our cars “device-free zones.” We can demonstrate the value of conversation to our children. And we can do the same thing at work. There we are so busy communicating that we often don’t have time to talk to one another about what really matters. Employees asked for casual Fridays; perhaps managers should introduce conversational Thursdays. Most of all, we need to remember — in between texts and e-mails and Facebook posts — to listen to one another, even to the boring bits, because it is often in unedited moments, moments in which we hesitate and stutter and go silent, that we reveal ourselves to one another.
I spend the summers at a cottage on Cape Cod, and for decades I walked the same dunes that Thoreau once walked. Not too long ago, people walked with their heads up, looking at the water, the sky, the sand and at one another, talking. Now they often walk with their heads down, typing. Even when they are with friends, partners, children, everyone is on their own devices.
So I say, look up, look at one another, and let’s start the conversation.
8 weeks ago: temple run
7 weeks ago: cinnamon challenge
6 weeks ago: YOLO
5 weeks ago: Kony
4 weeks ago: Draw Something
3 weeks ago: The Hunger Games
2 weeks ago: Lotto
Last Week: Ridiculously Photogenic Guy
This week: Titanic
