I have had the good fortune to be in a period of bad luck in my life. This has afforded me what feels like endless hours of reflection. But, figuring out what the hell I want is only half the struggle. The other half, which is arguably more daunting, is discovering the ways in which I can actually achieve those goals.
There are some things that still feel impossibly out of reach, there are some dreams that I feel I’ve aged out of or born in the wrong body, or place, or time, to actually achieve. This, as I’m sure you can relate, causes a state of full-body paralysis. In order to do the things I want, I must work harder, achieve more, and win at capitalism— and then, and only then, I can enjoy the fruits of my labors.
I read a short story, “The Story of the Mexican Fisherman” by Courtney Carver which stuck with me recently. The story comments on the relationship Americans have with this idea of hustle culture. It is circuitous in nature, the idea of working to live, when realistically if you simply stop for a moment, you can realize that the things you actually want are all around you. It is the pursuit of this that often causes an artificial dissatisfaction.
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I took myself to the beach today. I do this from time to time. I like to wear my tiniest bathing suit and have a look at the seashells. Sometimes I bring myself a peanut butter sandwich. Just recently I have been using raspberry jelly. I used to hate the way it squished out the sides and warmed up in the sun. I’d yell at my mom for not remembering that I hated this, "It is easier,” I thought, “to just not add the jelly.” After all, it’s one less step. Now I love the jelly—love its bite of sweet and how it gets stuck in the hairs of my mustache. I lay here for hours, I write the beginnings of poems in a waterlogged spiral-bound notebook I keep in a cross-body bag. I walk myself along the water's edge with a book in my hand. I am alone in the ocean, but I am not.
💻 Oh my God! The internet is amazing!
Sometimes I will listen to the podcast, “How to Know What’s Real” by The Atlantic, just to feel like I still have a brain. However, like a Ouija board itself, it is entirely impossible to know if this is true or not. We just don’t have the science necessary to prove it!
Hosts Megan Garber and Andrea Valdez discuss a wide range of topics, specifically focused on the ways in which new tech obfuscates our ability to discern what is real anymore. This particular episode stopped me dead in my tracks, which in this case means: caused me to pause for an extra few moments on the toilet. Podcasts are funny like that, you can be listening to the most thoroughly researched piece of investigative journalism you’ve ever heard and simultaneously eating nachos out of the garbage. Not that that is said from experience of course.
I am, like every other person on the internet right now, feeling increasingly dissatisfied and quite frankly unsafe every time I make a post. We are all being instructed to opt out of AI using our Instagram posts for data, while new advancements integrate this technology directly into our camera rolls. It would seem that any semblance of choice is purely illusory. The powers that be have set us on this course, and there is very little we can do to change this, short of living a truly nomadic life out in Saskatchewan.
This specific podcast episode, “How to be Immortal Online,” discussing the interesting interplay between tech and theology. What the hosts comment on is the many, many ways in which the two have become intrinsically linked. Phrases like “the powers that be,” “eternity,” and “immortality” themselves have always been part of a theological understanding, and yet it has now become part of the tech lexicon just as much as terms like “gigabyte” or “router.”
Morality, a concept which used to be specific to religious ideology, has crept into all sorts of conversations of new tech— especially so with our own attempt at playing god: AI. Sometimes quite literally and baldly with creations like the text-based “God in a Box.” The podcasters make special note of this application, as it is clearly an exercise in human hubris— not only have we “created God” but we can also keep him in our pocket, thus elevating us even higher than God himself. Meanwhile we look to these platforms and to the internet as a whole as an oracle service. Something to make sense of the world around us. Tell us the answer to everything.
In this way, we both need tech to be our God but we also need to claim dominion over it.
The point the podcast ends on, which you should listen to if I haven’t already said that, is the idea of our right to be forgotten. As a writer this concept resonated greatly. We all have things on the internet we have grown past, changed from, or no longer feel are a great reflection of our current states. But the internet has an amazing way of keeping things in stasis. This was after all one of its greatest selling features. The internet never forgets! But what happens when the data we give these oracle services like “God in a Box” follows us forever? There is no concept of penance on the internet, no way to wash your sins away after confession— and really isn’t that what most of us are doing on here anyways?
If we can never meaningfully remove these aspects of ourself from the internet then they perhaps will become our legacy. And immortality has always come with a price.
🥽 The future looks bright: Eddy Burback tries the Apple Vision Pros
“The dawn of unconditional care is here,” says the robot inside of Eddy Burback’s $3500 Apple Vision Pro glasses. These glasses are yet another piece of tech purporting to connect us more than ever before, and yet, as I watch this video essay, all I can feel is a crushing sense of isolation and loneliness.
There is no question anymore, we are living through a loneliness epidemic. It seems as though nearly every connection we once had has been replaced by either tech, a payment service, or some combination of the two. As an example, in the before times, say a pre-Katy Perry world, when you felt sad or stressed or anxious you would simply talk to a friend. Maybe the two of you would go to the Cheesecake Factory and laugh at the behemoth of a booklet, pay upwards of $30 for a plate of something called a “Skinnylicious Tuscan Alfredo” and go home happily sorted through. Sure, your friend isn’t a trained professional, but that’s not exactly what this is anyways. You just need to be cared for, and heard, and to occupy physical space with someone who loves you.
In the years since, everyone has gotten a therapist. It’s so easy now, you just use any number of affiliate links and subscribe to an online model where a faceless therapist will sit and listen to you for an hour and then bill your insurance company $100 or so. Because you pay them, they have to care, and isn’t that great? Sure, this may be a bit impersonal, but what are you going to do, just not have a therapist? Friends are now encouraged to draw strict lines in the sand, “this is above my pay grade” we say, whenever met with a friend in crisis, or perhaps yet, a friend who just wants to talk to another living person.
Tech companies, the vultures of society heralded as gods in Allbirds, prey on this schism and have created yet another way to socialize without the pesky presence of anyone else. Instead of paying a trained therapist to talk through your problems—you can simply converse with one of their deepfake chat bots. Why have a real relationship when you can participate (at least one sidedly) in a virtual one. And these models are highly tuned, Eddy Burback remarks that after a while, the conversations he had with the virtual assistant through his Vision Pros truly felt like a real one. His brain it would seem, completely forgot he was talking to a robot. And in this case, it was the perfect companion, never tiring of talking to you, always there, always on, and always happy to receive your conversation and a glut of data.
In this way too we have stripped ourselves of our own essential essence. In this way, we have turned ourselves into the virtual. Not simply meaning “immaterial” but also “facsimile.”
I have already noticed this transactional relationship creep into my real life interactions as well. Friends who assume they have access to you at all hours of the day, who text you like you are ChatGPT, who are looking for unconditional care—which yes they deserve— but is not altogether entirely realistic 24/7. And what happens when you, a real life person with thoughts and feelings and problems and a million other things that get in the way of your ability to be “on-call” so to speak? You will forever fall short to these AI bots, you can never offer as much dopamine as the instant satisfaction on offer by these algorithms. And so, in this way too you become obsolete. Humanity becomes outdated tech in a world hellbent on numbing our brains to any form of pain or inconvenience.
Eddy Burback ends his video essay, alone in his bedroom, plugged in to his dystopian Apple Vision Pros with the chilling word, “If your brain feels like it’s the real thing why go through the bother of ever feeling the real thing again.” I suppose I don’t have an answer for this. I suppose AI and virtual reality are no different from any other numbing agent we’ve all accepted as commonplace in our lives at this point. And yet still, I can’t help but wonder if this dawn of “unconditional care” brings with it the last vestiges of authentic and meaningful care as well?
Are we so determined to irradicate loneliness that we have made support, connection, and that intangible and magical thing of human interaction just another product?
🎭 Connection as a form of comedy and comedy as a form of connection: Natalie Rotter-Laitman at the Rockwell Theater
Writing about comedy is very often an exercise in futility. How can one hope to convey the humor of a stand-up set without themselves copying the jokes? Sure, you can say that the stand-up hour of Natalie Rotter-Laitman was one of the best shows I’ve ever been to, but what does that really mean anyways? And besides, who is to say I even have good taste about these things. After all, I unironically listen to the music of Sofia Grace…so I am not sure that I can be the expert on these things.
When I saw Natalie Rotter-Laitman post about her show to her Instagram story—what is essentially the 2024 version of a handwritten letter— I snapped up tickets immediately. Then I did the single most vulnerable thing a person can do, I invited a friend to the show.Inviting someone to a comedy show is something like a humiliation ritual. You are putting so much trust into the comedian and hoping against all hope that they do not flop, or worse, say something cancellable thus causing you to be guilty by association. Humor is one of those fantastic traits that seems to be non-transferable. It’s like trying to guess someone’s blood type and doing a blood transfusion yourself after watching a single YouTube video.
It’s true what they say, live theater, there’s nothing like it. And if no one has said that before, I claim it. As we crowded into The Rockwell theater, we were surrounded by the genre of person I didn’t think actually existed in Boston. Just wall to wall cool kids, a Masters thesis in post-ironic mustaches and interesting bangs. Maybe the room was primed to have a good time, which is to say, perhaps everyone had already taken a 5mg edible. But there was an air of crackling sparking electricity throughout the show which opener, Indigo Asim used to to her advantage, working the crowd to tears.
By the time Natalie stepped out we were ready. I was still partially nervous and hoping that my friend, who I was trying hard to impress, would enjoy the show. Did I mention she also had bangs? As soon as Natalie started any fear disappeared. Throughout the show my friend continued to turn to me and say that this too was the best show she’d ever been to. Then something weird started to happen. The girl next to me, who had the cutest blonde bob I’d ever seen (a power move to be sure, but no bangs) turned to me and echoed my friends sentiments. Then the people on the other side of my friend told her the same thing. Before long I started to notice the room was full of heads turning to one another in approval.
So you might not trust my judgment, but what, are you going to say everyone was wrong? Sounds pretty anti-woman to me.
That’s the thing about live theater, something I didn’t realize I was sorely missing. Experiencing art together heightens the effect. Being vulnerable enough to share it with someone, especially someone you hold in high regard actually makes it all the more enjoyable. Maybe we have all been feeling siloed into our lives, just mindless little work machines who get home only to login to our 5-9 job at the scrolling factory. But in the moments we share with one another, a slice of pizza, a couple good laughs from the deepest part of our stomachs, and a walk home together with someone you love—that makes life worth living.
AND…
For more of my writing, check out the first chapter of the book I’m working on. The feedback has been so fulfilling already and I am excited to get more of my thoughts out on the page. Chapter one, Spark Plugs, follows the story of Rory as he self-medicates and crumbles under the pressures of his University writing program, causing him to move out of the city and into what feels like the end of his life. (Sound familiar?) Read it here.
Read more from CHERRYPICKING:
🐆CHERRYPICKING #001 | 👽CHERRYPICKING #002 | 🐑CHERRYPICKING #003