Jia Tolentino: The 1% of Life that Makes It All Worth It (Best Of)

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Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.

We have a big day, Huge.

And that is because we have the Gia Tolentino here today.

Before I read her bio, I need to tell Gia one of my favorite Gia Tolentino stories, which Gia and I have many, many funny stories together, which is interesting since we've never met and most of our experiences have been extremely one-sided.

I have a group.

I have a few groups.

You know how we all have those groups of women that we have on text or on Zoom where when shit happens, we just kind of check in with each other.

So there's this one group of smart people who we check in with each other whenever hits the fan in the world.

So a lot of times.

Which is happening with some regularity.

Yes.

And there is this one recurring thing that people often say, which is kind of like a what would Jesus do situation, which you'll know from your we both have evangelical pasts.

You certainly do.

We certainly do.

But ours is more more like, what did Gia write?

Oh my gosh.

And it's real.

It's real.

Somebody will say it.

What would Gia write?

And it kind of works because you can say, like, Giazus.

So it goes,

yeah, which I know you're going to really love.

But if we have one complaint, it's that we often have to wait a long time for a Giazus take.

And

we're mad now.

Okay.

So like, we'll have to wait for a New Yorker piece to come out, or sometimes we get lucky and you're on a podcast, but it takes a while and that's annoying.

And so one time one of the women in the group said, well, what did Geasus write?

And I was thinking for a while and I thought, you guys, what if

Jesus is trying to tell us something?

Like, what if?

What if we're supposed to think hard and do research?

What if you're your own personal Gia?

What if I,

what if I have, I too have a geas inside of me who can stay calm and cool and collected and like think hard and keep an open mind and open heart and interview people and then come to a nuanced conclusion a month later.

And one of my favorite group, they thought for a while and my friend said, fuck that.

We don't have time.

I'm mad now.

What do we tweet?

Oh, I'm so, that's so, I'm so moved by that.

And I'm sure we'll talk about child care and child raising, but, you know, something happened to my brain in 2020.

And I mean, and that something was the pandemic and having a baby and all of that.

And I was like, I am not calm.

My brain is not good.

I have nothing to, you know, that thing that I had always relied on, my job being and this kind of writing being this process through the only way through which there's any, ever any thought in my brain.

It really, you know, my shit got rocked by 2020 and the years afterwards, but I think I'll be back on the, on the blogging train, but I got so sick of myself.

You know, I know.

It's a good example, Gia.

It's an excellent example.

The proof is in the writing.

It might have been an accident, but you were showing us the way.

So now I'm going to read your bio and then we're going to jump in.

Gia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker, a screenwriter, and the author of the New York Times bestseller Trick Mirror, which everyone just needs to get right now if you haven't already read it.

In 2020, she received a Whiting Award as well as the Jeanette Hayen Ballard Prize and has most recently won a National Magazine Award for three pieces about the repeal of Roe v.

Wade, which I'm sure that everyone in this pod squad has already read, but if you haven't, please do.

Trick Mirror was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle's John Leonard Prize and the Penn Award and was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Public Library, the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, NPR, the Chicago Tribune, GQ,

and the Paris Review.

Okay?

Gia lives in Brooklyn.

Welcome, Jesus.

I am so happy to be here.

Truly, it's an honor to be here.

Thank you for having me.

Gia, we actually, you and I, also have a relationship you don't know about.

Through Virginia?

Yes.

So you graduated from UVA undergrad the year that I graduated from Virginia Law.

And I was there before you.

Yeah.

And

we were both double majors, including political social thought, and we were both pi-fis.

No way.

Yes.

And so I think that that leads very naturally to this question of paradox, which is that so I was, for example, going to hose and bros parties on Saturday night and was a women's study major,

was

doing absurdly

politically

upsetting now things,

and then going on Sunday to the prison to meet with women who had killed their abusers.

Can you talk to us about paradox?

Well, I think we've all lived our, it's like, I want to hear so much more about that than I am interested in my own, but I do remember, it's so funny.

It's also, we were both there during the sort of last gasp of Bush era conservatism, you know, even aesthetically, like the popped collar era.

It wasn't that long ago, but culturally, it's, I mean, thank God, it feels like

a long time ago.

But I remember so many things in my life I started doing as kind of a.

a bit or like a proto-repertorial curiosity, you know, and rush was one of them.

And of course, combined with I was 17 and I wanted to to be cool, right?

So there was a little bit of that, but mostly I spent all of sorority rush getting super high and just seeing how much I could lie to people, you know, like you, you have these things where there's 35 women all kind of kneeling at your feet and you have 45 allotted seconds to talk to everyone.

And they'd be like, oh, I'm from Boston.

I'd be like, oh my God, I'm from Boston.

My God.

And the rotation, you know, the little like dollhouse rotation would happen.

faster than anyone could catch me in my thousands of lies.

And, you know, and I thought it was really funny.

And then, of course, I did think the five-fives are very special and I ended up doing it.

But I remember that feeling of being, I think the feeling of being in and out, it like in something to inhabit it, but because it was the only way I could possibly learn about it.

And, you know, whatever other confusing ulterior motives of sort of ego and conventional socialization were at play as well.

But I went to frat parties my first year, but after that, I was, you know, I was the one sending like the rude emails.

Like, do you remember that that thing?

Um, oh my God, this is so UVA.

There was some sort of competition where one frat would have all the sororities compete.

Oh, God, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so I would, I would just be like, you know, sending fake schedules, being like, okay, like, below job competition is at 10 a.m.

tomorrow.

And I,

I think I was still,

I couldn't really tease out my motivations, but, but so much of, I mean, so much of growing up evangelical also felt like an education and paradox, right it's the horniest culture and the most sex suppressive one it is like super um homo erotic and it's also so suppressive of any admission of any sort of non-straight love it's so violent and it's so um outwardly focused on peace you know and i i feel like that leading into the uva kind of mid-aughts experience it felt like quite natural right

well can i tell you a funny story about about Pi Pi?

Tell all the funny stories.

Speaking of being stoned all the time, I, you know, I gained so much weight my first year because I like just turned into an all day, an all-day stoner.

And I felt great about it, honestly.

My best friend and I, we have this joke that, you know, we were smoking weed in the graveyard like every morning.

And he like his, he gained zero pounds, but his GPA was a 2.7.

And I gained 20, but mine remained at a 4.0.

You know, like we really learned about ourselves that year, you know.

But I remember, you know, the little sorority composites when everyone's in their weird little turtlenecks and like, everyone's like this.

And the proofs of those photographs got sent to my house in my parents' house in Texas.

And my mom called me and she was like, Gia, I just got all of these pictures from the dentist's office.

You've just had major dental surgery.

You didn't tell me.

And I was like, what?

And she was like, you're wearing a black turtleneck.

Like your face is

so like, are you okay?

Did they break your jaw?

And I was like, oh, no, mom.

that's what I look like now.

Good thing you saw it before I came home for Thanksgiving.

I'm eating a lot of bacon, egg, and cheeseburgers.

Yeah, I was in a sorority at James Madison.

Which one?

Sigma Kappa.

That's what I am.

Sigma cat born and sigma cat bred.

And when I die, I'll be Sigma Cap dead.

Okay.

So

I kept getting arrested accidentally in college because I was an alcoholic.

Yes.

But only in retrospect understood I was an alcoholic.

I just thought it it was a really good time.

Okay.

You just, you just had a lot of bad luck.

I was

just always in the wrong place at the wrong time in handcuffs.

Okay.

And I'm seriously five times.

Okay.

I got arrested five times.

And one, at one sorority meeting, the sorority president stood up and she said,

So, you guys, just one last order of business.

If you get arrested and you have to go to court, could you not wear your letters?

Oh,

and it was like given as a general

guideline.

To everyone, everyone to no one in particular.

But I was the only one that kept getting arrested.

And it was the only sweatshirt I could find.

Yeah, just quick cue.

What do you mean by the letters?

So they're like these sweatshirts that you wear to show what's the Greek letters.

Oh, it's like your uniform?

It's like your costume.

It's like your soccer uniform.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah, soccer costume.

Do you just wear it all the time?

Only to jail.

And you also wear it to show that you belong somewhere.

Got it.

It's like.

Cool.

I never knew that.

That's a good sort of movie poster, actually, like a Sigma Kappa mugshot kind of thing.

I'll file that away for later reference.

Please, it's yours.

Yeah,

it's yours.

I have some issues with the whole thing.

About that paradox, though, I'm interested in this idea.

You said that you looked down at people at the time

who didn't have the sense to have shame about it.

That was me.

I didn't know.

I did, actually.

You're right.

I 100% did.

That was me.

Which I get.

It's like, you know, you're the captain of the cheerleading squad in high school.

You're the pie fi at UVA, but I have the sense to have shame and know that there's something inherently complicated and bad about this.

Well, this is, this is also possibly another evangelical holdover that I have never, when I was at Jezebel, I always wanted to write a piece called Shame is Good.

It's a troll title.

And I obviously think the way that shame is allocated in our world, all of the people that should be feeling it feel none.

And all the people that don't need to feel it for a second in their lives are devastated by constant unearned, unwarranted shame.

However,

I am a believer that,

I don't know, I think it's kind of right and appropriate to feel ashamed of your participation in mechanisms that you're continuing to participate in.

But I sort of think that there's something about kind of

baseline American emotional like ideology.

It's kind of an unwanted side effect of of the sort of emotional work that has been happening in the culture for the last however many years that I think so people think that they should be living a life where they feel great about everything they do.

And that's kind of some version of what happiness is or something.

And I think it's, I'm always a little dissatisfied or more with most of what I do.

And to me, that doesn't get in the way that seems conducive to like honesty and change.

And

yeah, it's like we should be ashamed of all of this, guys.

Yeah.

What are we doing?

So,

what are some of the things that you're involved with now that you feel shame about?

Shame about.

That you're still, because the coolest thing about you that we talk about all the time is that you're holding of the paradox of everything.

I feel ashamed when I order things online.

Like there's this huge union fight going on at UPS right now.

I feel actively bad about my participation in labor chains that are exploitative.

And I have plenty of points of participation in that.

And that's the one that seems the most intractable.

Like, I'm not going to stop buying out-of-season fruit at the grocery store.

I'm just going to keep doing that.

I feel shame about participation in the childcare market.

Like, we found out yesterday, you know, when I enrolled,

my kid started going to daycare when she was one.

And the only question I asked at the interview was, you know, do the teachers get full benefits?

And the child care director said, Yes, you know, there's a great place to work, blah, blah, blah.

And then I found out a year and a half later, after we'd already transferred her, that she had been lying and the teachers don't get benefits.

And I recently found out that at our current daycare, the teachers don't get benefits.

And I feel so much shame about that.

I feel so much.

And to me, the solution to this is obvious is that there needs to be like federally funded universal childcare.

And that's literally the only way out of it.

There have been so many pieces this year on how impossible the numbers are.

Like we need to view childcare as a public good.

But that's currently on my mind.

Those are the big ones I would say.

They're mostly involving like labor right now.

Glennon's yours is like watching real housewives.

I wasn't gonna tell Gia Tolatino that, sister.

Shit.

Do you guys watch Real Housewives?

Occasionally.

I can't.

Luckily, like there's like my brain, if I, it's like football award shows and reality TV.

If you put it in front of me and it looks like static noise and like the Charlie Brown sound, like it just nothing, no signals communicate.

And so luckily, my cognitive problems have blocked that from entering my life because otherwise I'm sure I would just watch it all the time.

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Do you have a strategy to turn off your humanity though?

Because like for me, I've lived very close to like this, this

lake of despair and like purple black swirliness of despair, right?

So, which I think is also beauty.

I think that's kind of the tension is I'm supposed to stay close to that.

And

it's like the ache of being human.

It's, it's like how beautiful and brutal everything is and reality TV takes me so far from that.

It has nothing to do with any beauty with any truth.

It's like the way of turning off the realness of life.

Isn't that beauty and truth though?

It's like the opposite of poetry.

Yeah, I know, but I think that like that's where

beauty can also live in the

turning off of like the insanity of some of it.

I also think that you couldn't live by that lake if you didn't have reality TV or the equivalent of it, right?

Like, I've thought about this a lot, writing about anytime I've written about abortion or activism, where, you know, I'm trying to look for these emotional management tools, like ways to manage my own, like, stupid little feelings of overwhelm and sadness that we're all trying to do all the time.

And it sometimes feels like you can spend your entire life just figuring out how to like emotionally balance yourself.

And then I talk to people who are, you know, really in the trenches, and I'm reminded there is a toolkit for this that activists have been practicing for decades that, you know, like women that are manning the helplines at abortion funds in Texas, they've been rowing a little canoe across that lake of despair since 2011.

And they can't be in it.

They can't be, they can't be face deep every second of the day in the literally life or death stakes, you know, the existential and emotional, the intensity of all that.

I mean, because I get overwhelmed even writing about it sometimes.

And I'm like, how do I manage?

And then I remember that these people, these women, you know, I think they watch plenty of Real Housewives.

I think they, you have to go to like a dry kind of neon-lit,

kind of synthetic place for a little bit sometimes

in order to get back on the shores of the lake and really feel it all.

Yes, this too is humanity.

The neon too is humanity.

It's not always an escape from it.

It's a coping mechanism to get back to the lake.

I think that that's right.

And I also think that there's an exceptionalism piece to this that I'm really interested in, which is is that like, I'm not like a regular sorority girl.

I'm not a regular real housewives watcher.

I have to distinguish myself from that by showing that I am a feminist and an activist and a whatever, as opposed to being like,

actually, if we don't try

to prove our own exceptionalism, then we could just all lean into this idea

that everything is a paradox.

And when you do, when you say that there are feminist sorority girls, you know, like you have to acknowledge your place in this like shameful structure and you have to critique it.

But can you not do that better when you're leaning into the paradox and saying, maybe I'm just a person who likes your housewives and maybe there isn't something that you can automatically say about me because I am.

Maybe I am a sorority girl and I am changing that from within instead of making myself exceptional from it.

Right.

Right.

I do think there's this need to be like, oh, I'm only doing this because,

you know, that we need to justify.

But one of the ways that I find myself chafing around this issue now and wondering if, to what extent that sense of almost like juvenile exceptionalism may still be at play is the fact that, you know, I live a pretty conventional heteronormative life, right?

I got married so I could get WGA health insurance because they don't let unmarried partners do it.

And I never thought I would get married.

I really didn't want to, but I am married and I have a kid and I'm seven months pregnant with my second.

And I'm so conventional in so many ways.

And I always have been.

But, you know, like many,

maybe most, maybe all, as, you know, as Glenn and as your whole work has surfaced within this community of women, I'm certainly not alone in my resistance to the strictures and the expectations of conventional socialization, right?

But I still think that the act of

feeling emotionally resistant to certain aspects of it, to certain expectations of it, like the ways in which that feels differently important around, let's say, like domestic labor and child rearing and stuff like that, like that's my own version of it right now.

Yes.

Where I'm like, yeah, I'm a mom, but like, you know, my partner is the primary parent.

Okay.

You know, yes, exactly.

Exactly.

That's you know, and it's like, I spent Mother's Day in a fucking hotel by myself, bitch.

Like, you know,

and I wonder, I haven't fully untangled to what extent

I'm trying to say something about myself.

I'm still untangling my thoughts about all that.

I just love it because I think

we compartmentalize so much, and compartmentalizing is the defense against paradox.

But if we take all those compartmentalizations away and just say, like, this is what it all is, it's a big stew of us participating in these horrible structures that are violence against people.

And we're just as much a part of it, even though we think we're special.

Like, you know, I'm a baseball mom, asterisks.

I'm also a radical feminist.

We try to like make ourselves different than that, but we actually are all the things.

Yeah.

But, and I think, but

like, for example, what scares me about myself is I did not know when I was in a sorority, I was like, yep, this is what I'm doing 100%.

I mean, I would sing songs about women that I could not repeat on this podcast with fraternity,

like awful things.

I would on their shoulders.

I know, but, and I was like, I am the shit.

Yeah, but I think this is what I've been working towards.

Here's the thing.

I think that we all have this vision of what a good feminist is supposed to be thinking and doing and saying.

Well, it's not that.

I know that.

I know.

But here's my point.

You had to have that experience.

We all have to actually be living in our lives to experience shit and to be like, oh, that actually didn't feel that good.

Or like when you look back and you're, you're thinking about what you did, you're like, actually, that's not the kind of person I want to be now.

And we're always fucking ever changing.

I think that sometimes we get so stuck on thinking and the person we want to become prevents us from acknowledging like the story and the life that we have needed to live to eventually become the people that we want to be like and we're never going to fucking figure it out the world is ever changing so and i it takes different kinds of people because gia was in the sorority meetings in rush going this is hilarious i'm she thinks i'm from boston and i was like oh my god am i doing good am i going to make it into the sorority like it's a different consciousness

i will say that i have like a lot of there have been a lot of kind of random almost like fairy godmothers people who have planted planted ideas in my head at various times.

Where, you know, when I got to college and I was 16 and thought I was a political moderate and was like, maybe I'm a libertarian, and some girl was like, read a little bit more.

I don't think those exist.

You know,

you know, she instantly disabused me of some deep false narrative I had about something or other.

Like, I have needed people who have been rude or abrasive about like certain conventions at random points in my life to shake me out of them.

Yeah,

and I am, you know, glad if my bad attitude could have brought that to someone else's life in any helpful way at any point in this.

Yes.

I would be happy to serve that role.

But what Abby was saying, like, I also think, you know, there's no, there's no greater way to navigate any of the paradoxes of contemporary living other than to be in them.

There's no point even thinking about them.

It's, it's like you have to just.

do your way through it to see like what you're actually fucking talking about.

Yes.

And I mean, I totally relate because I played for our national team for 15 years.

And when I was in it, I needed that paycheck.

I needed my health insurance.

I was fucking all in.

Like red, white, and blue bled through my, through my pores.

And now having stepped away from it, I'm so proud of the time that I spent playing on the national team, but I'm also very aware, educated, and conscious of how complicated

our country is and how confusing and how evil we can be at times.

Right.

And so I think that, you know, we have to be able to at least, at the very least, look back and kind of analyze and go over what we've done and figure out maybe our next steps from some of our successes and our failures.

What is your thinking about the internet these days?

Speaking of, I don't understand it anymore a little bit.

Yeah.

So I had written about the internet always because this was a thing that one could be authoritative about when I was 22 and not getting paid, like not getting paid to write anything and had no experience or authority about anything.

But, you know, young people are good at writing about the internet.

And it was research I could do for free from my home in grad school in Michigan, you know, not knowing anyone in New York.

And so I started writing about it.

And I, I found that the bad things about my brain cleaved well to the pace of the internet.

I liked that it was frantic.

I found that I could navigate that.

I was interested in it.

I found it really fun.

Part of it was that I had been in the Peace Corps with no internet for a while.

So when I came back, it seemed like the magical.

and this was 2012.

And so it was, it was kind of pre-algorithmic consolidation.

It could still be like, you know, all four of us could get on the internet right now and we'd probably see pretty much the same stuff.

Whereas in 2012, not at all, right?

There was this like

consolidation.

And

I always wrote about it.

And I always participated in it really heavily.

And it was one of the reasons I was able to have a career kind of with no connections and not living in New York until I did.

And

yet, there was some period.

I mean, it was right around when I started writing my book, which was 2017, and it was like, how did the internet seem so good to me 10 years ago?

And now suddenly, like, I can feel my brain kind of leaking out my ears.

I can feel this sort of existential dullness and dissatisfaction.

And,

you know, it promised connection.

And it feels like people are mostly getting more and more alienated.

I started thinking about these things.

And then I started writing about them

for my book and for maybe for other things.

And

I was like, well, I'll just stay on it as long as I'm getting more from it than I'm giving and as long as it's still funny, you know, for a while I was just on the internet because it was funny.

Funny.

I was like, funny.

You know, as long as I started like.

pissing my pants laughing at some meme on Twitter like at least once a day, then I was like, fine, I can, I can deal with everything else.

You know, it's a small price to pay.

It's honestly a small price to pay if someone can, you know, if like a meme about a frog frog on a unicycle can make me laugh that hard, you know?

And I truly believe that.

But then, you know, something, something happened.

It was around my book came out 2019.

By then, I had started thinking about the internet as, and the entire model of surveillance capitalism is like deeply, deeply destructive, like an entire economic model that treats our souls and our interests and our desires and our connections, our most essential human desires to be seen and to be loved and to connect one another another, and treated it the way that

colonial mining companies treated land in East Africa.

Like, this was the last territory left to be mined to all hell.

And so that, you know, a little profit could

come to us in the form of whatever it comes, but all of the profit is really getting sucked upwards.

And we are the raw material for this economic model of the internet.

And I'd written a lot about, you know, the commodification of identity, right?

And the commodification of

our souls, really.

And

then my book came out and all of the things I'd written about in critique, I got swallowed in.

Yeah.

Like I instantly, like, I was like, oh, by publishing this book, which is in part about this, I've made myself so useful to.

the commodification of the self.

And I got very alarmed, you know, and I was like, what am I doing on the internet?

And pretty soon after that, 2020 happened.

And another thing I'd always told myself about the internet too was that as long as my real life was, was bigger, was just self-evidently bigger than the internet, then the internet could occupy probably an outsized place in my life.

I could spend five hours a day on my phone, whatever.

And then in the pandemic, my real life was so small.

It was just a room and my partner and my dog and whatever dinner we were cooking that night.

And the internet ballooned in this outsized way.

And so I was like, okay, I need to shrink the internet so it's smaller than my life.

Oh,

you know, because and i was just like i need to keep keep that proportion and i also like the memes got bad like i don't know but

also i haven't seen a frog on a tricycle in years Yeah, like the only meme that was good, funny to me in 2020 was the gossip girl, go piss girl meme.

Like nothing else really did it for me.

So I tried to shrink my involvement with the internet.

I have to use, I always say like, I use a program called Self-Control on my laptop and a program called Freedom on my phone, like super Orwellian.

Yes.

And then I had a kid in August of that year.

And I was like, I just, I don't want to be up at 3 a.m.

looking at fucking Twitter, you know?

And so I got off of Twitter.

My relationship to the internet, I'm still on it a lot for work, for reporting and stuff.

I'm back on Twitter to like look at what

anti-abortion groups are saying all the time and whatever.

But it's changed a lot.

Like there came a point where I was like, I can't keep writing about how something is bad and then like throwing myself fully at it it and benefiting from it so much.

So, I've been experimenting with being less

online.

I feel like we get the message: don't be on as much, but there's not really a concrete way that you can measure what as much is.

But when you just say, I needed my real life

to be bigger

than

my online life, that's actually

something concrete.

How do you measure that?

And

how do you measure the bigness of your offline life to ensure that it is outsizing the internet?

Yeah, well, it's tough, right?

Because if our work is disseminated primarily on the internet and you can't get around work, like that's, that's, you know, that complicates it significantly.

But I think I could just feel it, you know?

I think it's just something that I think most people can feel.

I don't ever want to find myself in the real real physical world thinking about something that doesn't exist there.

And it was the pandemic was, it really enshrined for me something

that I think I had understood maybe more subconsciously that the moments in life where I feel like actually human and actually like myself, they're all unmediated.

They're all unsurveilled.

You know, it's like going out dancing, being with my friends, like.

doing acid at a show, sex or whatever, like physical presence and nothing in between between and no one, no one recording.

And many of those things were so hard to come by during the pandemic.

And, you know, even like, there was something about even just texting my friends for four hours a day, which I did, that I was just like, I just want to be in front of your fleshy face, you know, and have a conversation that there will be no record of ever.

And then I guess having a kid.

reinforced that, right?

I think I just wanted as much of my experience to be of no monetary use to anyone but me.

That's how you know being human.

You're being human.

Yeah, yeah.

And I'm actually like,

maybe it worked.

Maybe it worked.

I'm like thinking in real time, maybe it worked, worked better than I thought.

Yeah.

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I just had this meeting with my therapist yesterday and I was talking to her about how I went to this festival this weekend and that I felt these feelings in my body that I think are joy.

And I was like around other bodies.

So much of what you're talking about, human to human, it's the, there are bodies involved.

Right.

Right.

And the internet is like disembodied.

Like I am working on becoming more embodied and like being fully human, which seems to be easy for other people.

And

the, and then I'm realizing, oh, I have created an entire career and world out of a completely disembodied community.

Like, I love humanity, but not other human beings, like a way on the internet to like

connect.

How do we really connect when we're not body to body?

And when you say, I want to be with my friends' fleshy faces,

it feels so simple, but that's it.

We have been sold this idea that we can connect on the internet, but I don't know if any of that is real.

Oh, I think it totally is.

There's something different when, you know, if you're a writer, this is a profession that has always been mediated, right?

Like, and the work that you do, there's no way that you can have one on, you know.

I also think I've tried to not be kind of an unequivocal alarmist.

Like, it's like, I do recognize that the internet is magic and that we get to meet like this from our living rooms.

And that's a fucking gift, you know and you know my entire i owe my entire career my ability to write the the entire democratization of the media industry is is due to kind of the the sudden like horizontal smushing of hierarchy that the internet allows for i think there are still so many

kind of radically wonderful benefits of it i just i guess those have always seemed so obvious to me or like those have always been so um it's it's much easier for me or it was for a while to get caught up in all the parts of it that were freeing and were good and did allow for things that couldn't be done otherwise.

That I, I was like, I have to keep my eye on the part that is corrosive.

But, you know, I think

the fact that people can hear your voice in their ear when they're going about a day that they kind of at the moment have no choice but to be alone within their day and they're not alone listening to you.

I think that the disembodied nature of that, I think, something like a podcast is different.

Like, it's different.

Yeah.

And writing, like, it is the best we can do with the tools that we're given.

And it does matter.

It is connection.

I think it's the kind of false connection, the false disembodied connection of the internet.

I think of that as the connections that are involuntary.

There is something about choosing to read a book or choosing to enter, you know, into like the parasocial relationship that I have with like various that it's, it's not

like those

vectors still feel pretty human to me and like pretty kind of unadulterated and at least in my experience the stuff that is freaky is the stuff that's being pushed on us by algorithm for other people's benefit not the stuff that we're actively choosing

to change our life right and i also think that's why i hunger for physical presence so often is because

for whatever reason my life has led me to mostly be working alone behind a screen.

Is there three realms?

This is what I'm trying to figure out because I've changed my relationship to the internet and social media completely over the last two years.

How has it changed for you?

Well, I just, I heard you on a podcast say that you read Jenny Odell's book.

Oh, isn't that so good?

I just, it fucked me up completely.

Like I just absolutely

was like, I have to change my whole life.

Me too.

I changed my whole life.

Everyone read that book.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then and then I changed it brilliantly by getting off social media and starting a podcast, which then took takes me 12 hours a day of like i just didn't do it right i don't think but it's different i love this podcast like i love

this podcast because podcasts can be the same as a book can be the same as a painting can be the same as but there's a difference right between like i think of my real life which are the people in my day in my neighborhood and then there's like the art that I'm making that I'm pushing to people because they're choosing it.

But then there's this other realm of like like performing on social media that is different.

Yeah.

That's the one, I don't know how to explain it yet.

I don't really have language for it.

But when I am making something, I am purposely thinking about that thing.

And then I am making something new for people.

And then I'm trying to create something beautiful.

And then I'm putting it out to them.

And they're opting in.

That's like writing a book.

But there's something about like, if I stop my day and take a picture of myself or something or my kid or my, and then I put that out, that feels totally different.

And that second realm is what I'm trying to get rid of.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I have also stopped doing that as much and started feeling weirder about it when I do, which I think is probably good.

Like, I think,

you know, whatever shame, that shame, you know, whatever ambient shame I might feel about, and it's actually like shame isn't the demotivating factor there.

It's more just like a, I don't feel like a spark with doing it anymore.

Like, I feel much less attraction to showing myself online than I once did.

I think the like simple miracle of in your early 20s being like, wow, I can be seen as the person I think I am, you know, that that can carry you through a lot of life phases.

And now I'm like, I don't care about being seen.

Right.

And it's an evolution of that.

Yeah.

And I feel like I try to follow like a spirit of pleasure into as much of my life as I can.

And it's like, I

maybe thinking about it so much has sucked some of the pleasure out of interacting with that last realm for me.

And I just, I think one thing that brought my interactions with the internet down, and maybe this probably has to do with Jenny's book too, is like, what is giving me like real kind of animal pleasure in the day?

And it is more and more not anything having to do with my phone,

like work

accepted, right?

Talk more about animal pleasure.

What is animal pleasure?

And what are examples for you?

Well, I think I've,

I run on instinct more than many writers do.

Like, I think it was another thing that I realized during the pandemic that I couldn't really write about anything if my life was contained within one room because I really rely on, you know, being able to like go to a march, go to a situation and feel

what's happening in my body.

You know, I have no intellect that exists outside of my body.

I think so many writers have that cerebral capacity.

I don't have it at all.

It was an interesting thing to realize.

And

I think I do have kind of a little thing worrying.

It's like,

is this thing that I'm doing next going to make me feel more like myself or less?

And is it going to make me feel more

like present within the world or less?

And I think of the fact of feeling more present as the kind of purest animal pleasure, that they exist exactly where they are with the stuff of their moment and their environment and whoever's around them.

And

I'm feeling like a cumulative X many years of acid trips just kind of seep out through my mouth right now.

But

can you talk to us about that?

Talk to us about acid trips.

Just

stuff about it.

Well, I've only done shrooms.

I've done shrooms many, many times, but it was just always in a fraternity basement.

Like it was never a great experience.

I mean, it was better than not being on shrooms.

Yeah, yeah.

Would you ever experiment?

Would you?

Yeah.

So, and I actually am

very seriously considering doing medicinal

because it's really supposed to be helpful for eating disorders.

And I just have some like lingering concern that I'm working out with my therapist, et cetera, because of my sobriety and all of that.

Of course.

But yes, I'm very curious.

I wrote about this in one essay in my book, but I think one holdover from my evangelical upbringing is that I

really desire a sense of transcendence

and of smallness, you know, and of sort of like ego death

in some sort of divine, even though I no longer believe in God, certainly not in the way that I was taught to growing up.

And I think I like, I have relied ever since probably college-ish years to like on an annual, I actually think acid is way better than shrooms because I get so emotional on shrooms.

Like acid, I was afraid of it for a long time because obviously it's scary.

You're like, I'm going to lose,

lose control of, you know, the steering wheel of my consciousness for nine hours straight, like yikes, you know,

but

I've kind of relied on an annual or now annual at best

kind of

moment like that to, which feels like spring cleaning.

It feels like a reminder of

this actual stakes of life.

And it's been my greatest reconnector to that sense of scale and transcendence that was felt to me like one of the most valuable things about growing up in the church and of kind of worshipfulness, but not to anyone in particular, but to the fact of being alive, right?

And I, and I love that feeling and I, and I need the intensity of it in the acid format to carry a little bit of, I think I do, to carry a little bit of it around me, around with me for the rest of the year.

Yeah.

I last felt that at you have to tell me.

Yeah, well, if you ever do.

Let me tell you.

I will tell you how it goes.

Yeah.

But that feeling of smallness, of transcendence, of worshiping something bigger that's not something particular, I think the closest I'm getting to that these days is live music.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like, oh, this is what I was trying to get at church.

That's what I said to my daughter this weekend.

Like, this is what I was going for.

100%.

I heard you say recently that you write about motherhood more in terms of like.

You've been talking about it today, policy and like how we can make things fairer, and that you keep a journal about like your personal experiences with motherhood.

And you said that you don't see motherhood written about in ways that you are actually experiencing it.

Can you talk about that?

Like, what do you mean?

And do you have language around that yet?

I don't know if I do, which is one of the reasons I haven't written about it except to myself.

And I also feel like I'm still so new into it.

I feel that it must be annoying to people who have raised children for much longer to hear someone, you know, with a two-year-old being like, well, what do do I know about motherhood?

Like, I'm like, what the fuck do I know?

I've been doing this for literally like two and a half years.

Like, what the fuck do I know?

But talk about animal pleasure.

Like, I think

so much of the aspects of motherhood that have really stuck in my throat and that have stuck in my brain have been

things that elude the kind of emotional vocabulary with which it's often written about.

Like even the way

the moment of birth, I didn't experience it in terms of love.

I experienced it in terms of revelation and, like, not love.

There was so much love, but it's these shades of

existential experience that I don't feel like I have a handle on.

If I don't have a handle on it in my thought, then I like can't get a handle on it in writing yet.

And maybe it's about that lake you were talking about.

It's like the way that motherhood is often spoken about, certainly, and written about,

is

this sort of sweet filigreed net that's hovering unspoken over a giant lake of existential fear and

instability.

And that's the thing that's making it so beautiful.

But that

lake is the thing that gives it its meaning.

It's not the love.

It's not the snuggles.

It is the vast glimpse of life and death that you're getting constantly around all of it, right?

Like

and that,

I guess that's hard.

I mean, it's hard to write about.

It's hard to think about.

It's hard to hold it in your head all at once.

Yeah.

And it's like the ultimate paradox, right?

Cause I like,

I'm like looking at my kid and I don't know whether to be like,

you're welcome or like, sorry,

right.

For doing this.

Yeah.

I'm not sure yet whether this is all worth it or not.

Like, I'm not sure whether it was a great idea.

And how do you talk about that?

I just, I understand what you're saying.

Well, and yeah, and even that, I feel some sort of shame.

I mean, I don't know if shame is exactly the right word for it, but I feel some sort of moral trouble about having knowingly birthed an upper middle class consumer that will be probably as bad for the planet as I have been, you know, even just like despite all of my best efforts, like the cloth diapers and the compost, I'm still a fucking drag on the, you know, like I am, and I try not to hamster wheel about that too much because that, like in a way, that's not useful.

But, but yeah, even stuff like that.

And last night I had the, oh my God, I had.

what felt like a kind of wonderful and terrible milestone where I'm entering the weepy phase of third trimester, which is unusual for me because I'm not a crier, but I'm truly entering the like, the weepy phase, which is kind of great because I get to experience what it's like to have tears at the ready, but it's also terrifying to me.

But anyway, my kid has started going to bed at nine, which is too late for a three-year-old, but she was resisting bed and it was nine o'clock and I was so tired and I just started crying.

And she comforted me in the most unbelievably mature, you know, she started singing Daniel Tiger songs to me and was like, take a deep breath and count to four and counted.

And I was like, oh, fuck.

I was like, this is the first time that you have felt emotionally responsible for, for someone else's life.

And I was like,

I'm so proud of you for doing that so well.

See, I'm like getting teary right now thinking about it.

Like, I was like, I'm, I'm so proud of you for doing that so well.

And I'm so sorry that this is your first taste of the responsibility that you will feel as a girl, as a woman, you know, or whatever, you know, TBD.

But I was just like, oh, I have just ushered you into an adult experience you know and i was like thank you and i'm so sorry you know

which is also the paradox right yeah it's like to be a human in this world and to be deeply connected and aware of that connection right is the most beautiful thing and most devastating yeah and most devastating thing yes

and that's the bridge over the lake yeah right it's only beautiful because it's terrifying and it's only terrifying because it's beautiful like like and it's like this little proof they're this little proof if i'm doing the math which i'm doing the math i'm like is this worth it at all

what i like about the kids existence is it's like

i guess it's just a little percentage it's proof that i really believe

that it's like 51% worth it.

Yeah.

I must truly believe that

or you wouldn't exist.

I would not have done this.

So it's a reminder to me of the like extra 1%

of all of this

that you're welcome is just a little bit bigger than the sorry.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It feels really disrespectful to think about this quote in the context of like my own life, which is so charmed in so many ways.

But I always think about Simone Vay, the French philosopher.

She wrote at some point during World War II, she wrote something like how wonderful it is to be alive when we've lost everything,

or something like that.

I still do come down instinctively, physically, to the idea that

being here is being here is a gift and it's a malleable one, and that malleability is the most important part of it.

And I haven't doubted that, but yeah, you do.

Like last night, I was like, maybe it is 49.51.

You said that motherhood has also

been steering you towards the unvaluable values.

Yeah.

There's no kind of labor less economically valued and more universally important than caregiving in general, but, you know, of the elderly, of spaces, of land, whatever, but of children specifically.

And

it's this enormous, glaring truism of our world that the things that are most economically valued are often the things that are the most destructive, just openly, spiritually, materially, in every way.

And I've always been afraid of wasting time, of not doing as much as I can with my stupid little time in this world, you know, whatever, the things that, um,

I think that a Jefferson scholar.

Well, the things that like, you know, and that's what those experiences we were talking about, like live music or an acid trip or being with your friends, where the things that remove me from the desire to be productive in some outwardly manifesting way are the things that have taught me like how I actually want to live.

And, you know, I think my whole life will be a slow process of just trying to live by those values more.

And having a kid, I mean, yeah, I'm just staring at you.

I'm not doing anything other than staring at you and cleaning up poop, you know, and we're just going to lay here.

And this time is so actively devalued by everyone that I don't even have fucking paid maternity leave.

And yet this is like, it is obviously immeasurably precious.

And I think it made me more comfortable with doing things that, you know, as per how to do nothing, life-changing book, that it is those times of doing what ostensibly seems to be nothing that feel the most valuable of all.

And so, yeah, since then it's been like, how can I do work that is lucrative enough in less time that will give me plenty of time to do nothing with my kid?

And has it extended beyond your kid, Gia?

Because

I feel like that is still somewhat valorized.

And I feel like mothers are shamed often for like, why are you on your phone in the park?

And why aren't you getting one?

Oh, I love to be on my phone in the park.

Yeah, what the hell am I staring at?

But has the unvaluable time,

have you taken it also for yourself?

Like, is that opening it?

Yeah, to the extent that, you know, it's like you have, you have this realization just as like

non-useful time has become much harder to come by.

But I I think, I mean, the way in which I thought of this very specifically as outside my child was,

I think a lot of people feel

if they are lucky enough to be able to, like this forced expansion of capacity in early parenthood, where you're like, oh, you know, suddenly you realize how you're just going to fit it all in.

You feel this great expansion of your of your caregiving capacity and your ability to stretch yourself past an emotional limit you thought you had and really give a lot more of yourself than you would have have previously and i think that's a pretty you know like a near universal experience and i was like i want to make sure that doesn't only apply to my daughter like it's one of the ways that i chafe against whatever the nuclear family ideal right is that like all of our ideas of safety and flourishing and

and love

um i always feared that that would get directed too much inward with marriage or children.

And that was like a fear that I've had for a long time.

It was like, I don't want to grow up and tend my little walled garden.

That seemed very scary and bad to me in many ways, that that idea of that as the good life, you know, because I had always thought about relationships.

I was like, romantic relationships, that should make your world bigger, not smaller.

But it seemed like a lot of the visions of romantic relationships were like, now you have a cute little, tight little

unit, you know, and I was so scared of that.

And I think with kids, I like I definitely started to, I was like, I'm going to volunteer with much more dedication and frequency than I did beforehand.

And I'm going to make it work somehow to remind myself that this expansion of capacity doesn't only need to be directed towards my biological child, you know?

Like, I sort of needed to physically do it to remind myself that that expansion of capacity and interest in doing kind of non-valued work,

non-paid work, basically,

that I just didn't want it all to go to her because it would be a waste of this like sudden compulsion and capacity that I felt.

Wow.

Yeah.

Gia.

Giazus has spoken.

Giazia has spoken.

What should I write about next, though?

We will.

We will.

We will.

You're wonderful.

I just hope you get lots of time to do nothing.

And

so too.

I just think that you're such a gift to the world.

And thank you for this hour.

It's been absolutely wonderful for us.

Thank you guys.

It's so, it's so, so good to meet you.

Yeah, truly.

We should be glad for the internet because it allowed for this.

So

51%.

51%.

We're on that one.

I love it.

Thanks, Pod Squad.

We'll see you next time.

Bye.

Bye.

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