Hi friend.
I am, once again, thinking a lot about social media.
This morning, as I did dishes post-breakfast, I listened to the excellent video essay convenience culture is killing our creative impulses by Anna Howard. In it, she argues that art—creating art, consuming art—is inherently inconvenient, sometimes hard, and often unrewarding. The routine of showing up to your art every day is a slog, and in our hyper-gratified, instant-reward culture, we are becoming intolerant to slog. We are losing the ability to sit with the discomfort of it.
This essay tickled at a recurring though I’ve been having lately, but have (ironically!!!) been struggling to write about: the idea that we need to learn how to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. It’s ironic because this newsletter is a source of discomfort to me in a lot of ways: I’ve dropped down my publishing schedule to every two weeks and feel guilty about it; I often don’t feel like I have anything of substance to say, which makes me feel like I’m wasting my time and yours; I don’t know what it is that I am trying to achieve here. Those concerns hold me back from writing, and then I feel guilty, which makes it even harder to write. Ad nauseam.
And when I am in this spiral of guilt and discomfort, I reach for my phone and open TikTok or Instagram, and let myself get sucked into an algorithmic vortex where I can, mercifully, relinquish all control. It’s only when I finally wrench my brain out of it that the guilt sets back in.
So here I am: trying to sit with the discomfort. Trying to get comfortable with being uncomfortable in the uncertainty that is creating anything.
I think that this struggle is emblematic of a lot of shit in our world right now. Like Anna Howard said, we’re in a culture of convenience where reward is expected to be instantaneous. We’ve become trained to avoid all discomfort at all costs and worse, to believe that are owed comfort at all costs. It becomes an affront, even an attack, when our comfort is threatened.
I think we’ve gotten too used to things being too easy.
I feel that for clarity, I should point out that I don’t mean this in the way of kids these days have it too damn easy—actually, it kind of is that. But not in a moralistic sense—we should want the generation after us to have it better than we had it, because otherwise what is the point of, like, the entire human history?
But what I’m trying to say is more so around what happens when we remove every impediment, every ounce of friction from daily existence. It’s how we lose our ability to handle challenge or, fuck it, even the hint of challenge. A minor inconvenience. A small annoyance. We believe ourselves above it. We lose our human stubbornness. We become complacent.
I think we’re seeing this manifest in a number of ways. One big way is socially. This ongoing internet conversation of “you don’t owe anyone anything!!!” ripping apart the very fabric of what it means to be a community. The weaponisation of therapy speak to relieve us of our obligations to each other, to get us out of the reality that sometimes we must inconvenience ourselves for our friends and community, because that is what creates friends and community.
But no—in this hyper-individualistic world, where the preeminent Me is all-important, where nothing is more highly valued than my own personal comfort, community falls to the wayside to be replaced by the false sense of connection offered by apps owned by billionaires. Art falls to the wayside, handed off to AI models to generate because why should I be expected to toil? Why should I be expected to learn? Why should I put myself in a place to fail?
So. Where to go from here?
Maybe it’s about showing up to discomfort every day—putting yourself in a position to be uncomfortable every day. Taking small risks, putting your neck out for art or community or friends. For me, it’s meant once again strictly limiting my social media, removing that crutch that lets me shut my brain off so I can sit with boredom and angst and let it ferment into something. Anything! And it might be ugly or pointless or dull but it will exist, and the toil will have been worth it.
Until next time,
Amelia 🤍
