culture stuff that sucks right now
on small and big injustices around us that should piss you off
1. no longer a curator of our lives
i hate what the digital rewiring of our lives and our brains is doing to one of our most innate human acts of collecting (helps romanticise this more if you picture a penguin collecting pebbles for its loved ones).
In the digital era, when everything seems to be a single click away, it’s easy to forget that we have long had physical relationships with the pieces of culture we consume. We store books on bookshelves, mount art on our living-room walls, and keep stacks of vinyl records. When we want to experience something, we seek it out, finding a book by its spine, pulling an album from its case, or opening an app.
it’s been books for me. collecting them has never just been about a utilitarian act of buying a book in order to merely read it. no. collecting books is about aspiration, about who you want to be, and also about posturing to the world (but more importantly, to yourself) about who you already are. mood of the month, organisation of the month - sometimes by color, sometimes by genre, never by author ofcourse. my kindle library isn’t nearly as evocative, ugh.
In the era of algorithmic feeds, it’s as if the bookshelves have started changing shape on their own in real time, shuffling some material to the front and downplaying the rest like a sleight-of-hand magician trying to make you pick a specific card — even as they let you believe it’s your own choice. And this lack of agency is undermining our connections to the culture that we love.
2. extra labor of living multiple lives
i hate that this is a universal indian family experience and while the extent to which one does this may vary based on how healthy their relationship with their family is, everyone is still playing some game of keep up. the normalisation of daily turmoil and conflict is bizarre1, and it’s fun and games to mock ‘desi’ parent trauma on social media but the emotional costs are heavy with real-world tragic implications.
Like my family and everyone else I knew, I was wearing multiple masks all the time, alienated from myself and largely unaware of it. If ‘all the world’s a stage and each man in his time plays many a part’, as Shakespeare believed, Indians are prolific actors performing constantly for their families and loved ones. This may seem to be free work, but there is a cognitive payment for these double and triple lives. Hiding your sexuality, partner(s), true desires, careers, and lifestyle at home or work is not easy. There is a ‘constant feeling of having to choose between distinct versions…each feeling like a betrayal’
this is a solid excerpt from a newly published book (will read soon!)
CLICK HERE: Indians Live Double Lives Hiding from their Families
3. still fighting for primetime women’s tennis
i hate that the sport that has been the frontrunner in the conversation on equality and equal pay between men’s and women’s sports (props where it’s due!) continues to still have blindspots with tired arguments around ‘business sense’2 and the women in leadership choosing to disappoint the very systems they benefited from.
you know it’s a really glaring problem when even players who’ve typically stayed mum about “women’s issues” (both my queens Iga and Saby) also think the scheduling of women’s matches at the french open can do better…
“There was a lot of great battles, a lot of great matches, which would be cool to see as, like, night session—just more people in the stands watching these incredible battles,” Sabalenka said of women’s tennis. “And just to show ourselves to more people. So, yeah, I definitely agree that we deserve to be put in a bigger stage, better timing, more people watching.”
shoutout to Ons (tunisian, top-ranked arab woman) for continuing to be the most vocal. time and again, it’s always those in minority that we repeatedly task with holding the baton for all of women’s tennis & progress. uncool. but Ons, real cool. what a post by her.
4. is this the end of critical thinking?
i hate what chatgpt (placeholder for any and all genai/llm chatbots) is doing to our ability to think for ourselves, and fine that may perhaps be a luddite-like take on human creativity and the ‘future of jobs’ but can we please talk about the absolute crap it feeds people and validates all nonsense blindly? have you seen what chatgpt says to a narcissitic person about their worst thoughts and belief patterns? can you imagine what it tells someone in delusion about an alternate reality and the real-world actions it can actually advise someone to undertake? unchecked chatgpt is a total nightmare for any hope we had for inner work and self-reflection. excited for the future of conspiracy-theorists.
The machine is not causing the mania, but if the mania is latent, it is easy to see why a reinforcing, praising, meaning-making machine would exacerbate existing patterns, would give someone already experiencing mental distress validation in ways that were deeply unhelpful for their wellbeing. To have a mind already making connections where there are none, then powered by a search engine that can find connections anywhere and everywhere – the options for spiraling are both endless and engineered.
terrific, and terrifying essay, this one.
5. can we stop obsessing over men
i hate how much women center men in their lives, and it sucks that you think you’re better than that bt you realise you’re just at a different train station of the same loopy circuit of madness3. it is actually much deeper than just saying that women are obsessed with men, and significantly smarter feminists have written reams about how patriarchy incentivises centering of male fantasies and pitts women against one another and the idea of being unpartnered (and therefore deemed unworthy by the male authority) is deplorable.
this is a really solid essay, and it tugs at a familiar frustration that my “feminist friends” feel too, that there is more to life, and more to women.
I don’t remember the last time I met up with one of my girlfriends and didn’t talk about their boy problems. I think about the time my friend decided to sleep with that one guy who had a girlfriend, because he was giving her a lot of attention just when she needed it. She said she wanted a man to want her, but she was so distraught by how he treated her that she ended up going to therapy afterwards. I think about my friend who, whilst getting a college degree abroad, was begging her high school graduate boyfriend who had no dreams or aspirations to get some language courses so they could at least live abroad together. She once told me her biggest wish was to have an interesting conversation with him, because he never told her anything she didn’t already know. I think about my friend who confessed only after she broke up with her emotionally unavailable boyfriend that he refused to call her any pet names because they were ‘too serious’ (even though they had been dating for years), and that he treated her like shit during sex.
the ol’ classic from Little Women, basically
until next time & new reads!
🌻
~ rufus
i may have spent too much time at my parents’ place this past month and is it showing in that i wrote an entire essay on just hating on shit? i’m good thanks and you?
the best of 3 vs 5 sets argument is so belaboured that perhaps someday i’ll wake up with enough angst to do a full post just lambasting all the frustrating and illogical things we continue to pose as arguments for why women don’t deserve equal pay or primetime slots
been there, done that, will likely do it again?