this new year, create your own narrative
the motto is, "pics or it didn't happen"
there’s nothing to fear but fear itself
we are in the middle of a new dawn. at the midpoint of what has been an incredibly chaotic, and unfortunately, historic, decade. i say unfortunately because it’s not always fun to live in interesting times. the english believed that the chinese believed that living in interesting times meant to be cursed. regardless of who believed it first, i tend to disagree.
i received a newsletter this past weekend from the art magazine frieze. it was titled, “our magazine’s mission in dark times.” a valiant and befitting mission for an enduring publication. the only beef i have, if i have any, with such a benevolent title is that it speaks to the heightened collective anxiety we find ourselves in yet offers no words of encouragement, except the written confirmation that the magazine will continue to fight the good fight, to its audience. the title and continued short message leaned into the prevailing narrative as opposed to presenting its own. and this isn’t just a position contained to frieze, so please don’t think i’m giving them a hard time. i rather like the publication.
it’s just that frieze, and a litany of media publications and platforms have taken to aiding and abetting in the spread of our collective anxiety through their well intentioned action of informing their audience about the “interesting times” we live in. and it’s not just frieze (again, i’m not picking on them; they just happen to be an apt example), many publications and people with large, and small, platforms are taking the time to consistently report on what’s wrong in the world and the country; what’s to fear with the upcoming administration; and sharing their critiques on society as a whole. so, it’s not just frieze. everyone’s in on it. as is their right. their platform, their choice.
that said, i’d like to posit that in these times, these dark and grey and volatile and blazing times, perhaps our focus should not be on hyperfixating on our fear, but on finding, and creating, moments where our fear can be subverted into faith.
after all, there’s nothing to fear but fear itself.
tell the truth and shame the devil
my solution to you, in these times, is to become your own witness. your own historian. your own archivist. why? it has something to do with a tree…
the tree that falls with no on around to take note. if you’re confused, i’m referring to that one philosophical question; the one that asks, “if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
a long time ago, i read a book about a veteran’s reconciliation of a war he had fought in. the tension in the novel was that the main character, the soldier, couldn't be trusted. he was what literary critics call an unreliable narrator because he often mistook the truth for reality and reality for the truth. so it goes.
us, much like that veteran, are liable to do the same.
should we track the quality of our lives, of our society, based off of the media we consume, it would be clear we’re all living in hell: the city of angels is engulfed in a sea of fire; wars rage on as powerful men flirt with neo-imperialistic expansion1; and the long-quiet scandal of the vast exploitation of vulnerable children2 has entered the collective consciousness driving key stakeholders to point the finger at one another. by all accounts, our collective reality is one of a hellspace.
but the thing about reality is that it’s subjective. whereas the truth has the misfortune of being objective.
or is it?
nietzsche said that, “all things are subject to interpretation. whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”
this is why, as people with the power to do so have shifted and subverted definitions, the signified meaning of those words have changed even though their signifier has not.
we saw this expertly with the senate confirmation of justice jackson. during her hearing, she told senator marsha blackburn that she’s not a biologist and therefore could not provide the definition of the word “woman.” this is because the signified meaning of that word has changed, or is being debated. what senator blackburn was trying to do with her question to justice jackson, in my interpretation, was showcase that the meaning, the definition and the objective truth of what constitutes, by way of natural persons, a woman, has been shifted and been changed by those with the cultural power to do so: the progressive left. justice jackson, not wanting any smoke on either side, sidestepped that question.
before i get too far into this rabbit hole, what i’m trying to present is that there is really no such thing as objective truth in the context of our current media. because, if nietzsche is to be believed, whatever is the prevailing notion in the zeitgeist is a function of who has cultural power, not the actual truth behind that notion.
as i wrote about in a previous essay, the progressive left won the culture wars. therefore, certain definitions were altered (or expanded, if you prefer) to be more inclusive. this is all good and well. yet, a supreme court justice cannot provide the definition of “woman” as a result of this cultural shift because she’s not a “biologist.” i wonder how that will play out…
anyways, in understanding, or at the very least accepting, that there is no such thing as objective truth in media, we can then begin to structure our media consumption, and our reactions to what we consume, in ways that help, not harm.
meaning, we can understand that everyone is functioning off of their own interpretation that is, indeed, informed by whatever is the prevailing notion at the moment.
but as i’ve argued in this essay, the prevailing notion as of current is that we’re all living in hell. and the question i have for you is this: do you legitimately believe we are living in hell? do you believe this to be both true and real? or just true? or just real? neither?
it’s important to understand what’s going on in the world around you. i have continuously advocated for situational awareness as a learned habit.
but when it comes to consuming media, that, whether intentioned or not, is only serving to add to the collective heightened anxiety we all feel, you’re not practicing situational awareness. you’re practicing learning how to fear. you’re perfecting your fear.
and so, to combat this, i recommend that you do not miss the forest for the trees: that as these platforms and publications document what’s wrong in the world, you document what’s right, or at the very least, what’s going, in your own world. when you focus on your own world, you’ll begin to live in the moment. in the circumstances you find yourself in. and even if these circumstances are not to your liking, in documenting what you like about your life as of current in a journal or planner or some type of enduring document, you’ll slowly begin to weather out the rough parts of your reality in favor of one that is whole and full of light.
it’s just like how water shapes stones the more it streams over it. you can alter your reality by shaping your perspective. instead of basing it in the prevailing notion, that society is literally self-destructing, base it on the fact that despite that, you’ll continue on. and you’ll remind yourself of this as you reflect on the week and note what went well, what didn’t; your favorite moments; your not-so-favorite moments. it’s a benign habit, but taken together, it forces you away from the noise of the world and into the tranquility of your own.
and like i said, you could be going through a season of trials. that’s ok. keep fighting. as you do so, document it. because by the time you’ll be out of that season, you won’t even notice you’re out. time has a subtle quality to it. it changes little by little, and then all at once.
so, to aid father time, take photos of yourself if you’re having a good hair day. take photos of the weekly meal prep you successfully executed. of the spontaneous and planned times you spent with friends. and be sure to save all these photos in the weekly reflection section of your planner or journal. in these quotidian pursuits, and the intentional preserving of them in a document you can revisit, you’re shaping your reality and your truth to what i believe will be one of wholeness, lightness, and intentional living.
the devil’s in the details
now that we understand the importance of being our own witness, historian, and archivist, and how to maintain this habit and identity weekly, the question that remains is what are we to do with the surrounding world and the media we consume in order to understand that world.
for starters, my recommendation is for you to investigate the content you read and avoid blindly consuming it.
i don’t think you should approach media with the mindset that’s everyone’s lying, that’s unhealthy and will lead you down unnecessary conspiracist corners of the internet. but i do think getting into the habit of finding and searching for the source material of the media you’re consuming is a skill worth refining.
for example, ecclesiastes 1:9 states that, “what has been will be again; what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”3 and this is true for content, both literary and otherwise. one of my favorite moments in one of my favorite courses while at harvard was the semester i spent learning about toni morrison’s work and literary inspirations. it turns out her novels are quite shakespearean in nature. and in reading through a short story she wrote where she deconstructed shakespeare’s othello and rewrote it from the perspective of desdemona, we also read through othello and then read through passages of the source material shakespeare based both othello and the “moor-killer”4 off of. this investigative approach to literature, especially toni morrison’s work (who remains one of my great inspirations), was thrilling for me. one, because i love shakespeare, and like i said toni’s writing style anchors itself with a shakespearean orientation, and two, because i love getting to the heart of things. beyond the bone marrow where you’re practically looking at the atoms that make up the material reality.
this is the approach i want you to take with content. do not be a blind consumer of it. instead investigate. investigate. investigate. until you get to the bottom of what piqued your interest most.
this approach will not only make your incredibly educated in topics of interest to you, if you care about that sort of thing, but also allow you to spot, almost instantly, when content has been created and distributed to merely get a raise out of you. to make you emotional in some way. to channel your energy, the very thing you need to live out your life and execute your vision, away from you and onto the platform for greater profit and market share.
being an investigator stops you from being getting caught in the post-information age web of social media hysteria. which i posit, has become so benign (almost normcore if you will) that people don’t even realize they’re being hysterical. hence my comment about frieze at the beginning of this essay.
take the sentiment around artificial intelligence as example.
my argument against critics of ai is two-fold: one, i have leveraged chat gpt to learn skills that if i had utilized a private tutor (or even textbooks), would have cost me hundreds if not thousands of dollars. the fact that anyone with access to the internet, wifi, a laptop or desktop can learn anything about any topic or skill they’re interested in by leveraging chatgpt is, on all counts, revolutionary. i have disdain for the tech bro ceos, who are increasingly making themselves our techno-feudalist lords5 in this post-information age hellspace we live in as much as anyone else does. but to consider the educational benefits children, young people, and anyone with the willingness to learn the tool can yield from utilizing chatgpt and other artificial intelligence programs like it, those tech bro ceos (and their army of machine learning engineers) have earned their billions.
two, i actually am in favor of artificial intelligence because the time saving capabilities and the ways in which we can use the technology to our mental and emotional benefit are bar none. but more than productive or utilitarian arguments, i’m most in favor of artificial intelligence because it underscores what i have always known to be true: the human spirit is undeniable, uncanny, and irreplicable. meaning, you know when a piece of writing was made by artificial intelligence because it’s missing that je ne sais quoi that humans have when we’re really on a creative streak. like toni morrison when she wrote the bluest eye. no artificial intelligence, no matter how extensive the dataset it was trained on, can even begin to replicate the magic of the bluest eye. the words? sure. the magic? no.
and as artificial intelligence will become increasingly widely utilized in our society, especially within our labor market, i believe the natural result will be a resurgence of the humanities, mainly reading-based, researched-focused disciplines. this, in my opinion, is a net positive for society as a whole because an increase in the widespread education, if not valorization, of the humanities as machines increasingly take on data-entry and programmatic tasks (like coding or software engineering), will result in a population (and labor force) that is literate in how to read media of all forms (books, films, novellas, art, historical documents). a population that is knowledgable of literary criticism. aka a population that can read for ideology.
so in becoming a humanities-focused society, which is my hope, we’ll maintain our differentiation from machines which will only continue to become hallmarks within human life. also, one should remember that it’s through the dark times that the importance of the humanities shines through. after all, how did we survive covid isolation if not for the books we read, music we listened to, and films we watched?
circling back to being investigators of content: an investigative approach to content requires a willingness to follow your interests, or any piece of media that truly piques your interest, down whatever rabbit hole it may lead you as this habit will only serve you in these times. as platforms and publications choose to speak primarily to the prevailing notion, you can speak to your core spirit by the way you handle the content that is presented to you.
furthermore, in this technologically-abled society we live in, one where money is digital and everyone is increasingly living their lives online, you can remain “analog in a digital world” as i’m fond of saying: by going deeper than anyone else is willing to go in understanding the media given to you; by investigating your interests, or disinterests, until your satisfied with the answer; and, most importantly, by choosing to be your own witness, historian, and archivist by documenting those ephemeral, quotidian moments that make life worth living.6
and when life becomes too much, and the world begins to scare you, remind yourself that you are your own reality maker. and root yourself in those sweet moments of light, wholeness, and intentional living by going through your archive and witnessing yourself, your joy, and remembering the memories your saved and your reflections on why they were so important to you.
so, don’t consume. investigate. and don’t just live. document it in your own personal archive.
sweet dreams,
a diouana woman
p.s. truth or dare
you know how in your diary, you write something down then rip it out and place it in the tiny makeup bag you keep in your purse as a manifestation method? yeah, these p.s. truth or dares are the digital versions of my little ripped off notes.
truth: choosing the route most suited for the long-term as opposed to staying the course befitting the short-term.
dare: not speaking up. that’s an excellent way to not get what you want.
originally i had written “plot” instead of “flirt with.” the reason for the change is that i believe he’s saying it in gist. he likes to speak in hyperbolic terms. that said, anything can happen as a result of any reason. hence, “flirt with” not “plot.”
in this interview, author ayaan hirsi ali is featured. it was through reading her book in 2021 that i first heard about the “grooming gangs.” her book would later come up as a topic during a featured speaker’s presentation in professor orlando patterson’s course on human trafficking and modern slavery that i took while at harvard.
in the context of the phrase “there is nothing new under the sun,” it’s incredible just how much of passing idioms are references to the bible. have you considered how often you unknowingly quote the bible? like I said, the bible is a grimoire.
iago remains one of my favorite shakespearean villains because of his quote, “how poor are they that they have not patience!” and “we work by wit, not witchcraft.”
this will be it’s own essay. i need to better articulate what i mean by this.
albert camus said “the literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself.” as far as he’s concerned, you’re doing great babe!