Meghan Tonjes Instagram – some notable passages:
Joan Didion has praised the kind of home in which “you can close the door and cry until dinner,” which is to say, an architecture not so enamored by openness that it has failed to involve rooms. I kept this in mind as my husband and I were house shopping a few years ago. “Is this a house I can cry alone in?” I asked over and over. There was a house we rather liked. “But I don’t know,” my husband said, genuinely concerned. “Is there a room for crying?”
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How much of the burden is in the way we watch ourselves? In the early years of the twenty-first century, everyone is amassing digital information but no one knows how to sort through it. Closets are stacked with old computers. It would be better, of course, to go through all of one’s photos and keep only those worth keeping, but the thought of this induces paralyzing exhaustion. This would involve decision-making, which is cognitively taxing. This would involve delving deep into our personal histories, our pasts, which may involve feelings we don’t feel like feeling.
It’s best to just take another photograph. Keep building up the database. Throw it into the cloud, whatever that is. It’s slightly stressful to know that one’s personal database is bloated and disorganized, but you can’t see my cloud. It’s my burden to bear, my weight to carry.
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We want to believe we exist in what we choose to say, but this overstates our autonomy; we are at least as realized in our connections to other people. “A man,” wrote sociologist Charles Cooley in 1901, “may be regarded as the point of intersection of an indefinite number of circles.” To make themselves real, children invent imaginary friends.
It’s too late, of course; you are already known, though the you that is known is not the you that you are. Willingly you have surrendered many bits of information that, taken together, form a sclerotic social identity with a strange relation to the real. Surveillance finds truths, and surveillance serves the creation of elaborate untruths.
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(continued in comments) | Posted on 27/Apr/2024 01:48:05
