Am I Jealous Of Ballerina Farm?
Amanda Montell, author of CULTISH, delivers her verdict
In many ways, this newsletter is about the strange balancing act between performance of self (as a mother, as an online presence, as a woman) and the pursuit of a life that feels meaningful, joyful, and real in a culture that wants you to focus more on consumption than on living.
As our lives become increasingly isolated; overwhelmed with input, decisions, and stimuli; designed for self-optimization; and primed for content sharing, it’s easy to emotionally check out and say fuck it. We compartmentalize because we must. For me, this looks like online window shopping for the perfect pair of jeans even though the perfect pair of jeans won’t solve the problems of intractable echo chambers, slippery truths, and existential exhaustion. We glibly reference hellscapes because it’s easier than trying to make the hellscape less hellish. We buy “grounding mats” rather than go through the effort to silence the noise in our heads in order to feel the earth beneath our feet.
In her new (bestselling!) book, The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality,
, the author of Cultish and Wordslut, and the host of Sounds Like a Cult, dives into the cognitive biases informing life in the information age as a way to soothe her own harried brain. The result is not a clean book full of tidy answers, but a funny, personal, deeply researched book that engages with the mess and ends up unearthing hope, insight, and energy. And yes, even a little clarity.
Sara
So I’m a huge fan of Koa Beck and her book White Feminism - I cited her all over the place in Momfluenced. In your new book, you write that Koa told you she’s “noticed a very hot crucible of white women calling out other white women and that seems to carry some currency in these social spheres. There are incentives now when you critique someone's racial literacy, transphobia, or classism.”
And I was like, shit. There have been times when my cultural criticism of Ballerina Farm (for example) has led people to accuse me of being like, personally obsessed with her, or jealous, or whatever. But, especially for someone like me, who has a significant amount of white privilege, class privilege, and thin privilege, to draw attention to this stuff, it’s relatively safe for me to do this. Whereas it’s less safe for others, you know? Ultimately, though, I wonder - is it me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me? Am I (to quote every Bachelor contestant worth their salt) doing this for the right reasons?