The last session I had with Kento Spanos, my friend and also someone I do bodywork with, made me feel insane in a good way. As I lay on his table, I could feel different emotions in different parts of my body as Kento pushed his weight into them, or gently held them. One half of my body—the right side specifically—“felt blue”—something I thought repeatedly during the session and told Kento afterwards but still have no clue what it means. But it still feels true; as if my mental traumas and grief had coalesced in my right arm and shoulder and Kento had found them there hiding, cowering as if they’d just robbed a bank and hoping no one would shine a flashlight on them.

I used to think most body-based stuff—meditation, acupuncture, massage—was kind of useless for mental health. But then it started working. Almost a decade ago I was struggling with persistent PTSD symptoms. I did therapy. I took medications. But it was really acupuncture and massage that finally made my nervous system calm down. Fast forward to about a year ago, I thought I was mostly “cured.” I’d stopped going to yoga, I’d mostly stopped meditating. Probably not coincidentally, I had started having more panic attacks.

And then I met Kento at a party and he told me to come in for a session at his massage studio. Boy was I wrong about being healed!

Kento is a somatic bodywork specialist, which means he does massages that aren’t just about working on pain or issues within your body, but also your mind (but really these two things are not separate at all, as Kento and I discuss below).

After most sessions with Kento, I’d feel grief, like things long-buried had been surfaced. Sometimes I’d even have a panic attack on the table. It felt as if Kento was literally touching my traumas through my skin, or at least showing me where they were.

It’s always a struggle for me to balance my interest in “woo woo” things with wanting to remain critical of any modality of healing. But I’ve come to believe, at least for me, that these things are deeply effective. And, really, why wouldn’t they be? The mind and body are not two separate entities. It is a relatively recent phenomenon that we think of them as such.

I wanted to talk to Kento about his practice, about the politics of bodies, and how we all can stop shoving our traumas and discomforts into vaults or caves inside our body—and how that might lead to our personal and/or societal liberation.

[This interview has been edited and condensed]

Last time I came to a session with you, what exactly was happening on your end? Because on my end, I felt so many weird sensations in my body. I felt almost like a darkness on the right side of my body. It was such a strange sensation. Were you feeling any of that?

Yeah, I mean that session was informed by a few different things, including the fact that we were resuming this work together that we’d done in some depth last year. I think what I picked up on was what I was able to sense in your muscles—how you were holding them, where they were tense or had more resistance. And that’s tied to the nervous system. Your muscles can be sore from working out, or stiff from certain movements or from injuries, but I think the majority of the tension in our body is connected to our thoughts and mind. And so when I linger in certain places, like during last session, it’s an invitation partly for you to join me in holding that muscle, focusing on it, and observe what’s happening with it, and then connect it to something that might be coming up for you mentally.

I feel like the the connection between the story in our conscious mind that we always carry with us, versus what the body is telling us, the body’s story, those two things are often separate—and this is an opportunity to have them converge in this really novel way that we don’t often get the space to do.

I guess what I’m asking is: are you feeling the same things I’m feeling when you’re touching me?

Well, I’m definitely not a mind reader. I can’t intuit your thoughts. But I can intuit shifts. Like really subtle shifts in the body. And so if I see a shift in breathing for example, or if I see a shift where your shoulders might be from one moment to the next, those are the kinds of cues for me to ask questions or check in with you, because that shift is happening often because something is coming up for you.

It’s not the case in every session but in some sessions I notice that I might be really focused on a muscle or working on a stagnation of release somewhere specific, and then I start to have certain emotions come up for me that relate to my own life. When that comes up out of nowhere, especially while I’m working, I know that’s a cue that maybe that feeling isn’t exactly mine, or that there might be this unfolding or sharing of a feeling that’s coming up for the person I’m working with. It’s always a cue for me to be incisive and allow people to notice what might be happening in the moment.

When you do notice these things—a shift in muscle or a sign of tension in the body—what, exactly, does that signal for you?

Sometimes I like to use this metaphor that this type of body work feels kind of like excavating, or climbing, or exploring, an internal cave. And my hands aren’t doing that for you, but my hands or the pressure I’m applying is kind of a headlamp that points out something that might have been previously in the dark to your conscious mind.

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Recently, the White House proposed raiding federal funds set aside for people living in poverty to create $9,000-per-child bonuses for couples in which one person stays home to take care of the kids. Like everything done by this current White House, it wasn’t only a stupid and evil proposal, but one based in a very specific form of stupidity and evil.

The Tradwife Bonuses are from a long line of Trump-era policy and propaganda that encourage people to understand America’s past as an internetified version of something that never really existed in the first place, something they claim is old and natural and prelapsarian—before we became the complicated and diverse country we are now.

The tradwife is one of the best tools through which to propagandize about this supposedly-better America, because the image it’s based on—the housewife—is ubiquitous and feels like an achievable ideal, one harks back to an age-old Americanism, one more stable and prosperous than what we have now.

Which is funny, because the housewife is only a generation old. Or at least the specific image of housewifery that tradwives and their boosters base their image of tradwifery on is.

Upon further inspection, the tradwife ideal, like much right-wing bullshit, makes no sense.

Basing your life on the image of a 1950s-esque housewife with apron on and bread in the oven and children running around while her husband is off at work makes as much sense as basing your white supremacy on the inclusion of Italians and the Irish. Seventy years ago you would’ve undoubtedly stormed out of your anti-integration meetups had Giuseppe shown his face.

Women, of course, have been oppressed and encouraged to stay confined to the home for millennia, but the housewife as she is popularly imagined is a modern invention. Or, really, not an invention at all but a symptom; a by-product of the real invention I want to talk about, which was material and industrial in scale and policy-based.

The 1950s housewife could not exist without the suburbs, and the suburbs could not exist without post-war housing and infrastructure policy.

Betty Sue or Sandra Dee or whoever only needed a Valium and a gin and tonic and maybe a lobotomy because a few years prior a few powerful men had decided to move everyone like her out of cities to the middle of nowhere, give them nothing to escape with, and propagandize them into thinking theirs was the ideal, or only-extant, life.

Which is to say: much of culture, much of the way we think (or don’t think), is far, far downstream from the structure of the worlds created by the powerful. And certain worlds are structured specifically to help us not think, or at least not think in a way that might endanger the status quo. And we are constantly encouraged to join these kinds of worlds.

In post-War America, the idea of the suburbs was essentially invented by the federal government and influential home building corporations from whole cloth. Most Americans at that point lived in urban areas much closer to where they worked. It took convincing to get people to move farther away to more isolated environs.

Hollywood movies like Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream Home—in which Cary Grant plays an ad executive who is sick of New York City and moves to the suburbs—were partially financed by GE and other home furnishing companies. Magazines advertised buying a suburban home as a patriotic duty once men returned from war. Herbert Hoover’s famous line “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage” is often remembered as a promise, but it was more of a strong suggestion. The suburbs were the new American dream, and you better go follow it.

Of course, most of the goading was financial: The federal government financed one-third of all private housing in the 1950s; it built a massive highway system to funnel people out of the cities and to these new neighborhoods; it worked with banks to give people historically cheap mortgages.

And much of this maneuvering was explicitly political in its intent: William J. Levitt, of the eponymous, quintessential Long Island suburb Levittown, said in 1948 that, “no man who owns his house and lot can become a communist. He has too much to do.” Before Joseph McCarthy became infamous for his anti-communist witch-hunts in Hollywood, he was busy making the case that multifamily housing and public housing were “breeding grounds for communists,” and advocating for them to be destroyed.

As I wrote in my first book How to Kill a City:

“The 1940s were precarious times for ideological conservatives in the United States. While World War II had solved the economic problems of the Great Depression, culture and politics were in upheaval. Women were working more than ever and becoming increasingly independent of men both politically and economically. There was a brewing gay movement in many major cities, particularly San Francisco and New York. Union membership was high. The United States seemed to be heading toward liberalism. The suburbs became a way to reestablish conservative values. The suburbanization of the United States pushed whites into a privatized, anti-communal form of living, encouraged more traditional gender roles (women as housewives, men as breadwinners), and reified racial boundaries—keeping white people separate from black people, Latinos, and other ethnic groups.”

In other words: the image we have of the housewife in the 1950s only exists because the ultra-powerful wanted it to. Secure inside her detached abode, fed a constant stream of idealized imagery of her own life through her new television, America’s elite could rest assured that white women wouldn’t get any funny ideas from their neighbors or coworkers about silly things like liberation. Because there were no neighbors or coworkers.

It took billions of dollars and several years to achieve this revanchist fantasy—subsidizing cheap mortgages, building expensive highways, instituting racist housing policy. And her existence (and the existence of her goody two shoes husband who dutifully went to work and did not complain to anyone but his wife) was a political success: pushing white people out to the suburbs, tying them to mortgages, dismantling communities (largely communities of color within cities), making it hard for people to physically congregate because they were separated by miles of concrete and asphalt, all made the US a more conservative, less intellectual country; one that was less open to rebellion.

At least for a time.

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The suburbs are no longer nearly all-white. And they are more politically diverse than they ever have been. And yet the need has persisted for the ultra-powerful to keep us docile and separate distracted enough to not inflict damage upon their system.

And so: you can and should view the lobotomized culture of today, your own fealty to it, and your resultant distractedness and stupidity, as the result of a successful infrastructure project carried out by the wealthy. This may just feel like the water in which you swim, but the lake is man-made, and you were trucked in, little fish.

The powers that be have suburbanized your mind. They’ve turned your psyche from a place that once was much more like a city—filled with frictive potential, contact between disparate ideas and modalities of seeing the world, diversity, and the possibility of political activation—into a sterile box built on a plain far away from anything else where danger(ous ideas) might lurk; a box that feels amenable to live within only because of the even smaller box inside it, the entertainment apparatus that delivers you little shocks of dopamine so that your psyche does not totally vegetate into nothingness and remains convinced it is still alive even if in most senses it is not. Were this entertainment apparatus in your psychic McMansion to suddenly disappear, perhaps you would realize you are trapped in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do and few people to talk to.

The powerful no longer need to build billions of dollars of highways and subsidize billions of dollars of housing to achieve this goal of psychic devitalization. But make no mistake that there is an equally if not more powerful infrastructure project being conducted with the express goal of creating country-wide complacence.

The internet, after all, was created by the same powers that built the suburbs: the federal government took a military tool known as ARPANET and then in the 1990s handed it over to corporations to do the rest of the work for them. Social media remains largely unregulated because the same people who want your psyche to remain dormant are some of the largest donors to our politicians who control the creation and proliferation of our infrastructure.

This only sounds conspiratorial if you think of this process as the result of a few men in a backroom somewhere scheming. But it is just the logic of capitalism: privatized infrastructure helps private interests. And private interests can only continue if we allow them to. And we will only allow them to if we are sufficiently distracted or stupefied or convinced that those interests are also our own interests.

But the people who own that infrastructure are, indeed, a few men. And they don’t even have to hide in backrooms anymore; they can now proudly parade on an inauguration stage and flaunt their influence over our own minds. They are the ones who control our algorithms and the flow of information to our eyeballs. And of course they would decide that a mind less capable of encountering or producing information that would be bad for their own interests would be ideal.

You may be queer or a city-dweller or a leftist or whatever, but I think you are more like a housewife than you know. There you sit, incapable of friction, incapable of leaving the little safe box that has been created for you, and addicted to the ameliorants within it. (What is the equivalent of a housewife’s Valium prescription and her daily dose of her favorite soap operas today? That would be a fun question for you to ask yourself).

All of which is to say that Marshall McLuhan, the media scholar who in the 1960s wrote that “the medium is the message,” was right. McLuhan’s point was that the content of what we ingest matters less than the form. The television itself, more than anything on it, created an image-based culture in which people were convinced to listen to and follow whoever and whatever the box told them was best (you can’t keep up with the Jonses if the Joneses don’t know to buy a GE washing machine in the first place).

And the same could be said of the internet. It is less about what we see on it, and more about how it restructures and restricts our own psyches, de-skilling us so that we cannot think critically or write critically, preventing us from finding adequate socialization, and ensuring our thinking relies more and more on the information generated by a handful of corporations.

“The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb,” McLuhan argued. “The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinion or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.”

As the great thinker on technology L.M. Sacasas wrote recently, AI is simply the latest and most realized version of this mind-bending infrastructure. It is not a tool, but, “an environment which envelops the user and works on us from the inside out while we naively think that we remain unchanged by our use so long as we are using it carefully and intentionally.”

Crucially, McLuhan wrote that most of us have not clue this is even happening as it happens. The infrastructure becomes totalizing until it feels like it has not only no escape, but that there is nothing to escape to. “We don’t know who discovered water, but we’re pretty sure it wasn’t a fish” McLuhan was fond of saying. And so too you in your man-made pond swim, unaware it is man-made, or that it is a pond.

Today, those born and raised in the suburbs may think of them as quintessentially American things, but also somehow natural and perennial and just there. They may feel lonely and disengaged but not really know why.

Today, those born and raised on the internet may not know that being here was a choice, not made primarily by us, but by those who wished to make us isolated and disengaged and stupid, and left not knowing why, or that there may be an alternative.

A few days ago I made the once-every-few-months mistake of opening “X.” I was immediately inundated with people yelling at each other about any and everything. It was not (only) the content of what they were saying that was stupid, but the fact of them thinking it was necessary to say at all. (I think they were talking about something at a socialism conference and Ozempic. Does it matter? Will it matter in a few weeks? Or do you just want the dopamine hit of participating?).

My brief foray back onto the platform was a reminder that we all have been goaded over the years into thinking in small soundbites that don’t really serve the purpose of convincing another of one’s cause (do you really think your posts will change someone’s mind?), but of profiting one evil billionaire, and, more importantly, of restructuring our psyches so that they become amenable to that billionaire’s desires. A populace that thinks in soundbites cannot form rational political thought nor convince anyone of that thought. It does not matter if the internet users are saying things that are “right” or “wrong.“ The posts only exist because they are both profitable for, and nonthreatening or actively beneficial to, the infrastructural order that brought these prognosticators to the platform in the first place.

Screaming into your box in the middle of a barren plain, convinced this is something other than what it is, which is nothing.

Thankfully, these purpose-built, infrastructural worlds always have a way of cracking.

Eventually, someone looks around their empty box and goes, “wait a minute, isn’t there more to life than this?”

The recent death of Gloria Steinem made me remember that the past isn’t that far past, and that capitalist-created, lobotomy-causing infrastructure, while often totalizing, is always temporary. It was only one generation ago that white, suburban women were expected to stay in their little boxes and do the dishes and take care of their kids. Until a few women, and then many, said, “enough of this.”

Capitalists created the suburbs to keep people docile, but in doing so also bred a movement against not only it, but them. Now they’ve created the internet. Who will be the first Friedan or Steinem of the internet age to stand up and say “enough”?

Gabe Bullard is a journalist living in Basel, Switzerland. His new book Against Convenience: Embracing Friction in an Age of Endless Ease poses the question: if we have so many technologies that are supposed to make our lives easier now, why aren’t our lives easier?! As Bullard writes in his introduction, the book isn’t about him wanting life to be harder, but about how we’ve become convinced digital tech adds anything useful to our lives in the first place, and who (or what corporations) benefit from that. “Convenience is relative,” he writes, “but costs are absolute.”

As the environment is increasingly poisoned by the manufacturing of personal tech and AI infrastructure, as we grow ever-more isolated from each other, as we forget how to do things like talk to our neighbors or even read a book, Bullard wants to slow down our inevitable-feeling march into tech oblivion.

He was nice enough to talk to me about his book and about how recent backlash to tech like protests against data centers and Flock cameras is giving him hope.

[This interview has been edited and condensed].

The book is both hopeful and depressing. The first thing it made me think about was, weirdly, my first book on gentrification—walking around the neighborhood in New York that I grew up in and seeing all these closed shops, and the ones that are still open are chains. And people live in their doorman buildings and order everything with DoorDash. It’s like there’s no friction in the real world. Everything has been made seamless, and seamlessness feels kinda like deadness. Those feel like the real stakes. It’s not just “the phones.” It’s something bigger.

That was sort of the beginnings of the book for me too: it came from living and working as a reporter in Washington D.C., with the local newsroom at the public radio station. And I was talking about a big trend at the time—this was almost 10 years ago now— which was restaurants not taking reservations, and so all these big lines would form. And my friend and I were talking about how a lot of the people in the front of the line were being paid to be there—gig workers—and then people would arrive to relieve them so they could eat at the restaurant and they would arrive in a rideshare. This was at the same time that Airbnb was shifting the conversation about where people stayed when they came to D.C., and what and who businesses would be catering to.

I started thinking about how these apps and services and technologies were changing the world around us.

I’d always been interested in urbanism and city issues and design, and I felt like I was starting to see the city change around this idea of being connected to these technologies rather than interacting with their actual, physical environment.

Getting your needs met increasingly meant having a phone—whether that was to get to places around town instead of using public transit, or to use a service to rent an apartment instead of a hotel, or using a QR code to see a menu or pay. It was this big shift in what a neighborhood meant, driven by technology.

So when you walk around a city now, do you just feel kinda endlessly depressed? Like seeing everyone on their phones on the train with their headphones in; or seeing restaurants becoming ghost kitchens or whatever? How do you feel on a day-to-day basis as someone who has noticed these things and written about them?

I see less of it now because I now live in Basel, Switzerland. And there still seems to be a really big culture around people here—sitting outside, enjoying a coffee or beer or wine, that sort of thing. So I see a lot of that, but I still see a few things that I was just seeing everywhere in the US: package delivery, rentable bikes and scooters. But being back in the US is where I really see it. When I was visiting family there, it was bleak to see that for many of my friends and family, it’d be really hard to get your basic needs met without a car or a phone, or without using some e-commerce platform to order things.

It feels kind of isolating. I was really lonely walking around my hometown in Illinois. And it feels lonelier every time I go back.

It’s not surprising that it’s worse in the US, but I’m wondering what exactly accounts for the difference you see here vs. somewhere like Switzerland? Is it just that the US has, like, more unrestrained capitalism or something?

I think part of it is a business regulation thing. There’s a lot more regulation on tech in Europe. It’s not even clear that the new version of Siri will be available in Europe because of privacy concerns. There’s data protection rules around photographing or shooting video of people in public. And I could see that that will become a source of more and more friction here between these laws and emerging technologies.

I’d propose that part of it is that the US is more bought-into this notion of technological progress than other places. Even before the smartphone, this was the land of the American Dream—and part of that was the idea that technology and using it effectively, whether industrial technology or now digital technology—would help you achieve that dream.

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In or around the year 1849, Princess Alexandra Amelie of Bavaria walked down the corridors of her palace slowly and sideways, like a crab, gingerly crossing through doorways as if she was nearly too big to fit through them. Those around her wondered what was afoot.

Alexandra told them there was a problem: she’d swallowed a grand piano made completely of glass as a child and it was still inside her. If she bumped into something, the piano, and thus her body, would shatter.

These days, both experts and internet commentators mostly assume that Alexandra had what we’d now call Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. She’s the inspiration for popular threads on Reddit and Instagram Reels and TikToks, with people both making fun of her and relating to her, comparing their more modern and humdrum fears of contamination or fragility or other supposed symptoms of OCD to her more fantastical ones.

Many people online say her story is proof that while we did not have words for disorders like OCD hundreds of years ago, the same disorders obviously existed, just undiagnosed and dismissed as garden-variety craziness.

Which is crazy. Because, obviously, there is no such thing as OCD. I mean, there is, in the sense that DSM disorders sometimes semi-accurately describe a grouping of symptoms that some people share. But these disorders are real only in the way that we’ve decided to call food with meat and/or cheese and/or vegetables and/or whatever other toppings, as long as it involves bread, a sandwich; a category as made-up as any other, which invites constant confusion as to whether the thing is even definable, hence the raging debate over whether a hot dog is a sandwich.

All DSM diagnoses are hot dogs then—groupings of personality traits and reactions to the world and responses to our traumas and inborn characteristics (the fillings of the sandwich, if you will) that we’ve deemed the same thing for ease of reference, as long as they share something in common (compulsiveness in the case of OCD; the bread, if you will).

But, much like the sandwich question, the diagnosis question often limits us more than expands our understanding of what is in front of us. To obsess over whether a hot dog is a sandwich is to ignore much more interesting questions such as: what the fuck is in that hot dog? Is it good for you or bad for you? Who made it? How did it come to be? Why do we enjoy something so disgusting? Diagnosis can act as a similarly limiting question. To categorize something as OCD or ADHD or whatever else is often to exclude much more interesting frameworks of understanding of the self.

In the case of Princess Alexandra Amelie of Bavaria, saying she had OCD allows us to elide more generative ways of thinking about her beliefs.

In a very good BBC radio story about the princess, psychoanalyst Susie Orbach wonders if what Alexandra was attempting to say through her insistence of having swallowed a piano was that there was something within her that, “could not be heard, that is very fragile, but something that if it could be played would have a lot of notes.”

Perhaps she was afraid of her own sexuality, of taking up space, of not being the feminine and delicate thing that people expected a princess to be. Or Alexandra’s symptoms might be about class—about feeling fragile because you have been removed from society by your wealth, or because you are threatened by the tension brewing outside your window.

“Symptoms are of use, or can be of use,” Orbach says. “They’re creative acts.”

Seeing the “glass delusion” as not simply a symptom of OCD but as a sociopolitical pathway of understanding helps explain why believing you were made of glass was a relatively common phenomenon documented through the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Several royals professed to be made of glass or other materials common in construction at the time.

As technology transformed, so too did people’s delusions about it. Today the delusional amongst us more often worry about things like surveillance technology—that people and cameras and microphones are watching them wherever they go. Which, of course, they are right about in some sense—we are all constantly being surveilled. It is only in their level of paranoia that we consider them ill.

By diagnosing these people as solely delusional or OCD or schizophrenic, we ignore the more important things their delusions are telling us about panopticon-ificaiton of social life. Instead of acknowledging that their delusions are signifiers of something worth paying attention to, much as Princess Alexandra’s was, we place the structure and problems of society within their own brains, individualizing what is a systemic that all of us should be concerned about.

Which is not to say there is necessarily a wrong way to look at one’s own symptomology. It can be helpful to identify with a DSM diagnosis so that you can find care, or medication, or sympathy, or community. But it is wrong to only look at your symptomology through one “correct” lens. This is how we end up where we are—a world in which we gaslight ourselves into thinking that our collective repression and oppression is actually all within our own individual heads and brain chemistries and thus solvable at the individual level.

If we want not just management of our symptoms but liberation from them, we must understand what our own glass pianos signify. We must place multiple lenses on our issues—individual, collective, systemic—in order to accurately place ourselves within the world, and accurately place the world within us.

****

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[The title of this piece is a reference to the Smashing Pumpkins, in case you didn’t get it].

What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? is the title of philosopher and bioethicist Hanna Pickard’s recently-published book, and also a question I can’t stop thinking about (I would probably do a lot of cocaine).

The title comes from experiments scientists ran in the 1980s in which they placed rats in cages with a lever that would immediately inject them with rat-sized portions of cocaine. And they found that the rats would start going for the cocaine lever more than the levers for food or water, over and over again, to the point of exhaustion, starvation and death.

The studies became part of the basis for our current understanding of addiction as a kind of disease of irrationality—the drugs take you over, and you start acting against your own best interests because of your biochemical predisposition to their power, and the chemical dependency they cause.

But Pickard’s book poses a very interesting question: what if addiction is less about the cocaine, and more about the the cage? Because, she posits (to vastly oversimplify the argument of her very good and thorough book): all of us would probably start doing a lot of cocaine if we were left trapped, unsocialized, and unstimulated.

And that’s what Pickard’s book is about: what if we all (to greater and lesser extents) are stuck in some sort of cage of mental anguish caused by our surroundings? What if some drug users, like the rats, are under-stimulated and under-socialized and generally not having their other needs met?

Pickard argues that we need to change how we think about drug addiction to consider not just the individual or the drug, but their surrounding environments and circumstances. Only then—when everyone is out of the cage—will we be able to solve the problem of destructive drug use.

Pickard was nice enough to talk to me about addiction, rats and (to paraphrase Marianne Williamson) how to completely change everything about human civilization.

I highly recommend checking out her book.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

I wanted to start with the first paragraph of your book, which poses the question of the title: What do you think rats would do alone in a cage with nothing but cocaine? And you basically say, it’s probably not very surprising that the rats ended up doing a lot of cocaine! I loved starting here because it kind of makes obvious what, in my opinion, should already be obvious: that addiction and drug use is contextual. It’s not just about chemicals, it’s about external factors. If any of us were left alone in a cage with nothing but cocaine, we’d probably become addicted to cocaine. Can you talk a little about that—the context of addiction?

I think we have a false narrative, or false ideology, around our thinking about addiction, and I think pretty much everyone would know that if they just stopped and thought about it for a second. But we’re kind of stuck in it, so the really interesting question to me is why are we stuck in it.

The science of animal models can be such a powerful antidote to our false narratives and ideology. The rats are an image that people interpret as meaning the disease model of addiction is true—that addiction is really and fully explained by the power of drugs to compel use alone. But somehow, we don’t see in that image something else: that the rats are alone in a cage with nothing but cocaine. And if you do the imagined work of putting yourself in that context, I think most of us, if we were honest, would say, “Well I would take a lot of cocaine, not because my brain was hijacked by drugs, but because of the suffering and misery inherent in that experience of living permanently in isolation.”

I think the study is kind of a lovely hook because on the one hand it helps us see the power the story of the disease model has over us, but also actually undermines it—it makes us think wait hang on, what about the experiment itself, what about the circumstances.

Two decades later, Serge H. Ahmed, who I’ve collaborated with, did this brilliant work where he simply engineered an experimental chamber to give rats a choice. And what he found is that even when they showed every indication of addiction, when they were given the choice between a drug and an alternative reward—he started with saccharine water—they took it. And so that really vindicated this idea that it wasn’t just the cocaine, it was being alone in a cage with nothing but cocaine.

Right, as you say in the book: the rats were taking the best of a bad set of options. Which is a very concise way to frame their behavior, and probably all of our behavior too.

I think we have this false idea that when people do things that are really bad for them, it’s always expressive of a kind of irrationality or pathology in them, and sometimes that’s just false. We can all be in positions where we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. And I really think many cases of addiction ought to be seen that way. It’s not necessarily pathological or irrational. The problem really has to do with the the alternatives available to a person, as opposed to something intrinsically being wrong with them.

One of the other rat studies you cite shows that when you give rats an alternative, like hanging out with other rats, it seems to prevent them from becoming addicted to cocaine.

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Good news! The rural upstate New York school district that spent almost $60,000 to bring “Sally,” an AI-powered human-esque robot, to its classrooms, has paused its plans. The school board had partnered with an AI startup called Realbotix to introduce the bot in order to theoretically teach kids about technology. But the plans hit a snag when the New York State teacher’s union pointed out that Realbotix’s sister company was a hyperrealistic sex doll manufacturer.

The union also voiced concerns that the bot would be the first step in replacing real-life teachers with further iterations of humanoid AI machines. Which, parents and community members said, is the last thing kids needed in an era of falling-apart schools and overcrowded classrooms. “They just need to hire more people who are willing to put in the effort for the children,” one community member said. “They need more interaction with the children than having some robot raise our kids.”

The controversy over Sally makes sense, of course. But, in some ways, nixing Sally is kind of shooting the messenger (thankfully one that can’t feel). Or, really, it’s like trying to deal with the knotweed in my yard that attempts to destroy everything else: I can pull out the leaves and stems as much as I want, but it’ll always grow back unless I kill the roots.

The real problem here is not one robot threatening a teacher’s union; it’s that we have completely devalued the education system—and the very idea of thinking—in this country. And at the same time, not by coincidence, placed way more value in technologies of automation.

If we think of any system—the education system, our political system, systems like AI and robotics—as technologies (like, in the Foucaultian sense), then what we’ve been doing as a society for way longer than the current AI boom is privileging technologies that enrich the already-rich and devaluing ones that are more socialist and that thus help foster equality (public schools, for example).

A real blind-spot, in my opinion, in anti-AI discourse is that AI is not really a distinct thing. Whether you use ChatGPT or Claude or refuse to use any of them, you are likely already using AI when you interact with any piece of personal tech these days. Your feeds are governed by AI-assisted algorithms. Your web search is too. Your doctor is probably using it to help diagnose you (more than 80 percent of doctors use AI regularly).

The problems with these technologies is not that they’re somehow vastly different and worse than, say, the technology of the iPhone or the technology of Facebook and Instagram. The internet was never good. It was invented by war profiteers back in the 90’s. The difference is just that generative AI is the latest and furthest node on a spectrum of industrial technologies that have an explicit (but most-often unstated) purpose of destroying the cohesion and and quality and equality of our society—making us lonelier, more depressed, less educated—in order to enrich a select few people.

In the post-war era of the West, other technologies were considered more important for the continuance of capitalist society—the technology of education to train people’s brains to be effective workers in an increasingly knowledge-based economy; the technology of offices to house workers while they worked; the technology of parks and subways and so on, so that the people in those offices could get to and from them, and not kill themselves from ennui after exiting them each day.

But those things are increasingly unnecessary for capitalism to function these days. And if they’re less useful to the goings-on of capitalism, then they’re going to increasingly be considered too expensive for the capitalists to maintain.

So, it’s not that AI is a direct threat to education, it’s that the rise of AI and the fall of education are two sides of the same coin. In the same way that rural communities were devalued and destroyed by the rise of the technology of the factory once it became more profitable to make things out of metal than it did to grow food, we can see the devaluation of education as a much broader devaluing of the service-based, knowledge-based economy of the post-war era.

Which is headlines like the following ones keep cropping up:

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This is part five (the final part, I think) of a series on fostering your own agency. You can read part one here, and part two here, and part three here, and part four here. Go forth and prosper or whatever!!!!

In 2023, I spent a few days as a reporter on the campaign trail with Marianne Williamson, Oprah’s former self-help guru who had decided to run for president on a relatively leftist platform, one similar to Bernie Sanders’s but also infused with a new-age spiritualism. Though it was clear to me that Williamson had no chance of winning her primary, it was also clear that she was dead-serious about her intent—to make people believe that change was possible again.

“I know a lot of people in the world today, in America today, particularly our young people, are feeling very helpless,” Williamson said at one campaign stop. “And I think one of the reasons I’m running for president is because that’s really dangerous.”

Her message seemed to be resonating. Everywhere we went, her supporters would cry and thank her for making them feel hope again.

I asked her: in this age of paralytic ennui and cynicism about our political system, how can we move forward towards a better future?

I expected her to tell me something about becoming emotionally aligned with oneself, or using your angst as fuel for something good. Instead, she basically told me, and everyone else of my generation, to stop complaining so much.

“I wanna say, ‘Toughen up, buttercups—boo hoo,’” she said. “You think it wasn’t hard for the abolitionists? You think they got what they wanted in just a couple of election cycles? Do you think it wasn’t hard for the women suffragettes who were thrown in prison for the crime of marching for suffrage? Don’t you think they were a little traumatized and anxious? You think the people who walked across the bridge at Selma weren’t scared? We are too soft for this revolution.”

But, she said, both things can be true: you can have all these emotions, and act.

“There’s a lot of hours in the day,” she said. “You have to give yourself the hour to cry, and then at a certain point you gotta take a shower and get out there.”

Williamson’s word have stuck with me since. There are still days or weeks or even months in which I feel I cannot do shit—cannot work sufficiently or help others sufficiently or dream a better world sufficiently—because I am too dispirited and feel too worn down; days in which all I can do is process my emotions about, say, the sky being orange from global-warming-accelerated wildfires thousands of miles away. And this emotional processing is important. But, I’ve realized, it is also important to push. Give yourself the hour to cry, and then get out there.

Eventually you need to do the work.

Eventually you need to leave the relationship that’s hurting you.

Eventually you need to make a choice.

***

When I was 15, over a period of a few months, I stole several thousand dollars from my family to buy cocaine for me and my friends.

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This is part four of a series on fostering your own agency. You can read part one here, and part two here, and part three here. Go forth and prosper or whatever!!!!

I remember peeing in a gender-neutral bathroom of the science building at my hippy-dippy college and seeing a poster on one of the stall’s walls that said something like you can be whatever gender you want to be, you can have whatever pronouns—he/him, she/her, xe/xir—you want. There was an illustration of a person with a beard wearing a dress on it.

At this point, I was a gay guy, and not very into my gayness. It all seemed antithetical to doing what I wanted to do in life, which was to find a career and settle down. I considered my sexuality superfluous. Which didn’t mean I didn’t want to have sex, but that I had no desire to participate in some kind of “community” or “culture.” What was the point of it all? What did any of that have to do with me becoming a journalist, or getting married, or buying a house. And I didn’t even know about gender. I’d heard the word trans before, but that was basically it.

I paid the poster little mind, filed it away to my subconscious. And then its message began expanding, seeping into every crevice of my mind until my entire brain felt occupied by it.

I’d be sitting in a sociology class and staring at the whiteboard and the poster would suddenly appear in my mind’s eye. I would shoo it away. It would come back with force. I would overhear a conversation in the dining hall and realize the people were talking about something similar—gender, queerness. Eventually, I could not ignore it.

A little stupid poster made me trans.

Which is to say that information that trans people existed and could exist made me trans.

Which is to say that there is no way to be anything without knowing that that thing can exist and has existed.

In the late 2000s, when I was in college, transness was not really in the wider cultural imaginary. I rarely heard it talked about, even in the ultra-liberal enclaves of New York and Western Massachusetts I spent my time in.

It was by whoever made that poster sharing the existence of trans people, of trans history, of trans memory, that I found my own future.

Which is to say that the transmission of information from person to person and generation to generation undergirds all humanity, all progress, your and our entire futures.

My survival and eventual happiness, of course, were not just a result of the poster. They were too the result of talking to older queer and trans people, about reading and seeing the history of the crises people like me had already faced and managed to overcome, and (perhaps more importantly) their joys too. Books like Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues changed my life not because they showed me how to live it, but because they showed me my life had already been lived. There was a path cut through the dense woods of ignorance and repression that I could now follow.

Being queer at one point felt paralyzingly daunting. It was only by connecting myself to a history purposefully hidden from me by dominant culture that I was able to move forward. And this is true of all of us, whether queer or not: we can only become what we know is possible. And as of now, with our histories devalued and purposefully suppressed, we have a very narrow understanding of what is possible.

As Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed write in If Memory Serves, their book about remembering and forgetting queer history and the AIDS crisis:

“Memories enable more than survival; they are imaginative ways to disrupt and transform conditions that make survival necessary. Like utopias, memories craft a world that stands as a counterreality to the lacking or painful present, creating narratives of “the past” so as to challenge the inevitability of dominant constructions of “reality.’”

History is not just history, and not just the present, but also every possible future. Without it, we become trapped.

***

Do you, like me, feel as if everything is stuck in an inescapable present these days?

Our culture is one of ever-increasing nowness. We see an endless slew of information, but the vast majority of that information is about our current moment—even if it is good or smart or true information, it is about what currently exists, what is currently being thought of, what is currently controversial or deemed worthy of discourse or of praise. News.

We are living in a dehistoricized society.

And this dehistoricization creates depression and desperation.

When everything feels unprecedented—wars and economic malaise and rising fascism—then it also feels inescapable. We cannot logically or methodically or successfully react to these things, whether emotionally or materially, because we cannot see their patterns, and thus cannot enact the counter-patterns generations before us did to escape or survive or solve them. The world was bad before too. But we are uniquely convinced it is now uniquely bad, and thus unresolvably so.

This is much like a depressed person thinks. One of the main features of depression is a seeming never-endingness. When you are in a mental health crisis, you often cannot see forward or backward into the future or past. You feel the now is how it has always been and how it always will be. If you do think about the future, all you can do is project the present onto it, foreclosing on the possibility of something better by painting over it with the crushingness of your current mental state. And thus depression becomes a self-perpetuating system of stasis. You make your own future worse by assuming it will be as it is now.

Our society works similarly: we are paralyzed into inaction because we can only see what is directly in front of us, and thus cannot understand what action means, because action requires temporality—it requires a movement of and change over time. And if we do not understand a time beyond the now, there is now way to have hope. All we can do is project the present onto the future, creating that self-perpetuating system of stasis. The genocides will get worse. Global warming will kill us all. What’s the point of working when the world outside is burning, as the pandemic-era meme went.

Well, because, it’s not necessarily true that the world outside is burning. Or, though it may be partially burning, that doesn’t mean our current lives are pointless; that doesn’t mean we can’t do anything about the fires. We simply must figure out what we can do.

You are what you repeat. And you repeat what you know. If you do not know something, you cannot repeat it.

Freud proposed that we were all guided by a “repetition compulsion“—repeating stressful or traumatic events of our pasts in order to better understand them, or complete them or master them. This is the reason we all become our parents (or work very hard not to), and/or our surroundings and/or our culture—because we are encoded by our histories. This is why people with PTSD have flashbacks and feel as if they’re reliving their traumas. This is why people develop compulsions around drug use or gambling—it is not (just) that these things are enjoyable or self-soothing, but that they are known.

But while the repetition compulsion may be inevitable, it doesn’t always have to be negative. If we are destined to carry forward our history whether we like it or not, then the very least we can do is know what that history is.

Perhaps if you are feeling stuck, the solution is not to try to stop repeating your history (impossible), but to find new information to encode into yourself that a future you can then repeat.

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Rebecca Armendariz is a clinical social worker and psychotherapy provider in Baltimore, MD.

In early May, Michael Hobbes, the researcher and co-host of the popular podcast If Books Could Kill, proclaimed (via Bluesky posts) that Bessel van der Kolk, MD, the psychiatrist and author of The Body Keeps the Score—a record-breaking best-seller that has become the de facto guide for understanding trauma and PTSD—is a “hack,” “insane,” and “an obvious crank.” Hobbes’s posts alerted me to his plan to analyze the book on the podcast, wherein he and lawyer Peter Shamshiri critique and ridicule bestsellers and pundits through a discussion of their arguments and the research behind them.

I’ve listened to many of the episodes since its launch in November 2022 and have enjoyed the act of comparing notes, indulging in my own sense of moral and intellectual rightness along with theirs. They’re smart media critics.

But as a psychotherapy provider maintaining certification in Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR), one of the more modern modalities van der Kolk champions in The Body Keeps the Score, trauma is the turf of my expertise, and the smug commentary of these co-hosts contributes nothing productive to the discourse. Not only are they not equipped to tackle such a complex topic, they’re feeding into a larger trend of people using scientific claims to foreclose endless unknowns and limit curiosity about our existence in the universe. It’s one thing to be skeptical of what we take as fact, it’s another to convince people that anything currently unprovable is therefore bunk.

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This is part three of a series on fostering your own agency. You can read part one here, and part two here. Go forth and prosper or whatever!!!!

A few years ago, a friend who likes to have fun and be gay went on a trip to Maine with some highly-educated 30-something straight people. They played Scrabble. They cooked locally-sourced food. They talked about possible future pregnancies. They had one or two glasses of natural wine in the evenings and then went to bed around 10pm.

My friend came back from the trip deeply depressed.

We landed on a term for this experience: Maine Death Syndrome—ennui, or something even deeper than it, stemming from the sensed expiration of one’s future; a knowledge that while life might continue to exist, it will likely do so ever-more demurely, without spark, without oomph.

After the bravado of your teens and the exciting and confusing life-figuring-outness of your twenties (not always fun but always full of energy), this syndrome, it seems, happens to many people: they stall. They think that all that might await them is death. Not quite a midlife crisis—which could, maybe, in a way, feel better; a crisis is something you have to fix. Stalling out, treading water—that can continue forever.

In my twenties, I frequently heard tell of this kind of thing, tales passed down by my elders of their friends who had become unbelievably boring and normal. Ghost stories.

But I never really worried about them. Because, for a while, it felt as if my friends and I had all escaped this curse.

Queerness offered an alternative vision to a life of empty pleasantries and soul-crushing ennui—go out, party, do drugs, fuck lots of people, get into complicated formations of relationships. This worked swimmingly for about five years, for me at least. Why would I need to answer the bigger questions about life and my purpose in this world if I was having fun, if I felt supported by my friends, if there was always something new on the horizon? The perpendicularity of my life to the straight world felt in and of itself like activism, or at least a personal protest—I was showing how people might live if they removed all the internal walls they’d built up inside them to keep them on the straight and narrow. Life could feel free. Even if its material circumstances were increasingly not.

There would be no Scrabble playing in my future.

And then I hit the wall.

I became rather sick of partying. I became rather desirous of stability. Juggling all the complex relationship formations felt increasingly like a chore, not a privilege. But most of all, it all just stopped working—things, even really fun things, stop being fun when you do them too much and for too long.

To the outside observer, or really to my own conscience, my life appeared vastly different, and perhaps better, than those who “settled down.”

But really what is the difference between two glasses of wine and a 10pm bed time and two lines of ketamine and a 10am one? The next day is still the same. The world around you is still the same. The front page of the New York Times still bleeds red whether it’s read in Bushwick or Brunswick.

I’d confused defense mechanism for solution.

And after the defense mechanism stopped working, I found myself facing the very thing I believed I could skip right past. I wasn’t in Maine, I wasn’t playing Scrabble, but there I sat, bored in my apartment, unsure if this was all life had to offer.

It had been easy to make fun of those people in Maine, but in many ways they were further along in their enlightenment than me—giving into the inevitability of adult life, which is often boring and filled with the quiet restlessness of doubt: is this all there is?

I was now a step behind them in answering that question for myself.

This, I believe, is where many of us find ourselves—in an era of unending defense mechanisms to prevent our own versions of Maine Death Syndrome. A punting of existential dread into our futures.

What is our world these days if not one big distraction from ennui?

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While Elizabeth F.S. Roberts, an anthropologist and a professor at the University of Michigan, was doing fieldwork in Mexico City, studying the effects of chemical exposure, she happened upon a viewpoint that shook her world. In the working-class neighborhoods she was studying, addiction to drugs and alcohol wasn’t viewed as an inherently bad thing. After a lifetime in the US, where Roberts’s tendency to binge eat, and her sister’s dependencies on benzos and alcohol were surrounded by shame and subsequent isolation, she found this new perspective liberating. And so she switched the focus of her work to better understand this very un-American, un-Protestant view of dependency.

In In Praise of Addiction, Roberts uses her anthropological skills to uncover alternate views on drug use and dependence writ large. She found that in some neighborhoods of Mexico City, addiction was often viewed positively—as something that connects people together; and something that was considered very different than vice—a dependence that isolates people from each other.

“My grandchildren, my daughter, we were so relaxed. I can’t live without alcohol, you know? We have our drinks. Our beers. Our cubas. But not [my husband],” one woman in Mexico City who Roberts lived with during her research trips, told Roberts, explaining the difference between good and bad dependence. “There are good alcoholics who can live together, be convivial. Social! But [my husband] has one drink. Then he drinks alone for fifteen days.”

Roberts writes that for many people she interviewed in Mexico, addictions were “pleasurable, repetitive, compulsive devotions. These devotions were twofold—both to the object or activity, and to the people with whom they shared that object or activity. In fact, addiction to substances in communion with others was a sign of social maturity.”

The argument—that other populations see addiction in a much less harsh light than we do in the white, Western world—is no doubt a controversial one, but it’s also one based in historical fact.

In her book, Roberts dives deep into the history of capitalism and Protestantism in the Western world to argue that we too once saw addiction much more positively, or at least neutrally. It wasn’t that dependence on substances in the West changed, Roberts argues, it’s that under the rubric of industrial capitalism, complete individual control and sovereignty began to be valued above all else, and thus addiction went from a societal fact to an individual pathology.

The book is fascinating, and Roberts was kind enough to talk to me about it for Mental Hellth.

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This is part two of a series on fostering your own agency. You can read part one here. There’ll be more parts to come.

My first visit to Dia Beacon was 15 years ago. I went alone on a random weekday. The museum is located in a semi-rural town in upstate New York on the Hudson River. When it opened in 2003, it was one of the first museums to make use of the cavernous space of a shuttered factory—in this case a former Nabisco cookie and biscuit box-printing facility. Brick, steel and concrete, turned into something else. Raw materials repurposed.

There, I saw two exhibits that stuck with me: Richard Serra’s massive sculptures of metal twisted into relatively simple shapes (but shapes you don’t usually see metal formed into), and Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographs. Beginning in the 1950s, the husband-and-wife duo traversed Germany taking pictures of industrial stuff—grain elevators, oil refineries, coke ovens. They’d display the photos in grids.

And, for some reason, sitting in a large room alone with these photographs at Dia Beacon that day, they made me cry.

Looking back, I think it’s because these photographs (and, to a lesser extent, the Serra sculptures) made me feel like transformation was possible. These massive and often ugly objects, the building blocks of our violent capitalistic world—steel, brick, concrete—turned into something maybe beautiful. Or sometimes beautiful and sometimes not. But that’s not the point. I wouldn’t describe the Becher’s photographs as beautiful. Their point is just the transformation. To take something overwhelming (which is to say: the objects and tools of capitalism) and turn it into something overwhelmingly different. I thought that was cool. Hopeful, even.

Anyway…to understand what an inner life free from the shackles of capitalism might look like, one in which you are subject not to the whims of your bosses and the systems they create but only, or mostly, to your own desires (whether those desires are only yours as an individual or imbued in you through some kind of idealistic community structure) it might first be helpful to understand what an inner life might look like in which you are most subject to the whims of your bosses and their systems—one in which you are the perfect participant who wouldn’t dare interfere with the machine’s functioning, one in which you are a very well-greased cog; a tiny piece of metal fashioned into a shape that can help this big hulking machine produce nothing of particular use (say, a colorful biscuit box that helps advertise something unhealthy to children) through incredible violence.

One-hundred of 50 or maybe even 20 years ago, to be a well-greased cog was to be the ideal subject of capitalism. You go to work and do not question its societal use; you accept what your boss tells you; you defend the idea that it is good for him to make so much more money than you; you go home and do not make a fuss and do not talk to your fellow man about your shared struggles. That was the proverbial cog.

But we do not live in the cog era of capitalism. Our economic systems have largely done away with the need for our well-oiled workmanship. The machine can now go along without us. Prognosticators love to predict that AI will put us all out of jobs in a decade or so, but in many ways, especially the internal ones, the destruction of our usefulness has already come. To be a cog was not good or fun, but it was at least a use of a human psyche and body, a use that increasingly is unnecessary.

If today’s capitalism can function relatively well whether we participate in it or not, then what we must be taught by our capitalist culture is no longer (just) that we are good boys and girls and theys who must work hard to make a living, but that we might also simply be nothing. There’s no need to beat our souls into the shape of a cog. Capitalism might just prefer that we be dust—a former cog now ground up on the factory floor; steel turned back into iron ore.

The machine—now upgraded and shinier and more automated than ever—has less use for us. And so if we are not one of a decreasing number of cogs needed for the machine (ones that now need 10 years experience and a master’s degree to just get into the machine in the first place), on the floor we sit, specks of dust clumped together and inert.

In the cog era of capitalism, there may have been questions about what one’s agency could be used for—should the cog stay put and just keep turning, or could the cog roll off to its own world and make its own machine, one that wasn’t designed just to produce profits for the factory owner (maybe the cog could join a union or community group and advocating for change)? But today, the idea that we have any power at all, even as little power as contained by one cog out of thousands, feels like wishful thinking.

Indeed, we have been so internally ground to dust that people watch YouTube videos and buy online courses (see: scams) to help turn themselves back into cogs. Maybe if you get a chiseled enough jaw or learn the stock market well enough, you can reenter the machine.

Those of us smarter than that should congratulate ourselves on our unwillingness to be duped back into this apparatus, but that has left us with a problem: What to do now?

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Gemma Correll is an illustrator and cartoonist whose work often focuses on anxiety. In 2018, Correll had an anxiety attack that would not end—it lasted for weeks and weeks. Eventually, she ended up in the emergency room, and then an outpatient mental health program in an attempt to deal with her constant panic. That became the basis for her new book-length comic Anxietyland, a graphic memoir about her attempts to conquer the mental health issues that had plagued her ever since she was a child.

Correll was kind enough to speak with me about her anxiety, the uses of art in helping herself and others deal with their mental health, and her two pugs.

[This interview has been edited and condensed]

Where did the idea for a book-length work about anxiety come from?

I’d been making comics for a few years about mental health, based around my own life and experiences, but they’d always been quite short-form. I’d always wanted to make a longer book, but I didn’t have the framework for it. And then I ended up going into hospital for my anxiety, and I realized I had more of a story arc to use at that point, and I finally just had the time to work on it, too.

What was the hospital like for you?

It was outpatient. I went to the emergency department and they referred me to this program, which was five days a week, 9 to 5. I’d never really found effective therapy until that point. I tried various types and nothing had particularly helped for my situation. I ended up going to the hospital because I was having such severe panic attacks. It was just one panic attack sparking another one, and it was just constant. I needed emergency help, and I needed to learn skills—things like CBT and DBT. In hospital, I learned all these different tools, almost like I was in school. And that, combined with medication, and being in a group with other people going through similar things, was really helpful.

Was part of what was helpful just meeting other people who’d gone through similar things to you?

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One of my favorite scenes in The Sopranos is in season three, when Carmela goes to a therapist for the first time. She’s attempting to figure out how to live with her husband’s misdeeds constantly on her mind; how to process the guilt and shame of her complicity, how to endure Tony’s constant violence, both towards other people and herself.

Carmela is, of course, a victim—the emotionally abused wife of a violent criminal. But she also over and over again convinces herself to stay with Tony, largely by convincing herself that it either would be morally wrong to leave (she’s a Catholic), or that it would simply be too hard to live a life independently.

In the scene, Carmela expects her old, Jewish, bespectacled therapist to empathize with her predicament. Instead, he tells her to take her kids and leave Tony. Carmela is shocked.

“I thought psychiatrists weren’t supposed to be judgmental,” she says.

“Many patients want to be excused for their current predicament because of events that occurred in their childhood,” the therapist says. “That’s what psychiatry has become in America. Visit any shopping mall or ethnic pride parade to witness the results.”

He continues: You’ll never be able to feel good about yourself, you’ll never not feel guilt and shame, if you’re Tony’s accomplice. Carmela tells him he’s wrong about her being an accomplice. He replies that maybe he should call her an enabler instead, then.

Carmela takes a moment to process this.

“So…you think I need to define my boundaries more clearly,” she finally replies. “Keep a certain distance. Not internalize —”

The therapist interrupts and hammers home his point. Leave! But it’s too late. “Boundaries.” “Not internalizing.” Carmela has used the language of therapy not to take accountability and change her life, but to keep it exactly the same.

The session ends. She stays with Tony for several more years.

It is very hard to be told that you have agency, and that you can use it. It is even harder to be told that you have agency and that you’ve used that agency to harm other people, or harm yourself, or create a clusterfuck within your relationships or community or career. And it’s perhaps ever-harder to do that these days, when so much of therapy, especially its most popular online iterations, is intent on telling you that you are always the victim and never the perpetrator.

Of course, this self-disempowerment makes economic sense, especially online. If advice is doled out not by what is best, but what has the highest probability of being shared and racking up views, then it stands to reason that videos that tell people their struggles are because of their innate neurodivergence, or because they grew up as the child of narcissistic parents, or because they’ve entered into a relationship with the wrong kind of attachment dynamic, are more popular than ones that tell you you might have been a dick, or that you’re the narcissistic partner or parent; more popular than ones that tell you that even if, yes, you grew up in unfavorable conditions which wrecked your attachment style or ability to consistently be there for others or yourself, that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook for perpetuating these same conditions for yourself and others; that it is more likely you will perpetuate those things if you are incapable of admitting they exist within you; that of course you are capable of those things because we all mimic and extend what was done to us; that you can be both victim and perpetrator; that, indeed, being a victim is often what leads you to being a perpetrator. We all are both.

I’ve never seen a Reel or TikTok that tells you that. Its emotional shape is incompatible with the ecosystem of the internet; a decagonal, spiky peg trying to make its way through a round series of interconnected tubes.

A world with only victims accusing everyone else of being the reason for their victimhood is a world destined to be fractured into billions of alienated beings. It is, in other words, the world in which we currently live. In relationships, it’s often said it takes two to tango. And if you cannot recognize yourself as a participant in that tango, then there you’ll be, right in the corner, dancing on your own.

So much of the new (or old, repurposed, misused) psychological vocabulary disseminated through the internet is the vocabulary of abdication. You did not have a complicated and mismatched relationship, you were being love-bombed by a narcissist (love-bombing is different than romantic gestures, experts say, because it’s an “attempt to influence another person with over-the-top displays of attention and affection”). Or maybe you aren’t being love-bombed, you’re just experiencing “love addiction” (a problem in which loving someone feels too intense, which is different than normal love, which is supposed to feel less intense(?)). You don’t need to work on your emotional regulation skills, or figure out a life in which your natural tendencies are more effective, or figure out why certain situations trigger you, you’re just a Highly Sensitive Person (aka HSP; a group of individuals, estimated to be at 15 to 20 percent of the population by certain experts, that “tend to process experiences deeply, react strongly to both positive and negative stimuli, and often feel emotions with great intensity,” (apparently, the other 80 to 85 percent of the world does not feel things with great intensity)). You don’t need to figure out if your job and the way you live your life are bad for you, your lack of ability to keep it all together is just ADHD, or a touch of autism, or whatever diagnosis du jour has made its way through the tubes and to your screen to give you a bit of dopamine with your DSM definition.

It’s difficult to parse this all out, to tell people they have agency without sounding like you’re a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps Republican, but, then, isn’t that sad—that the idea that you have agency and are not solely the victim of your biology and trauma and the people around you is now a right-wing-coded sentiment?

It’s also difficult to parse this all out because the underlying feelings people have when they begin to categorize themselves into agency-abdicating identities, or begin to rely on externalizing explanations, are really real! Life is hard, and getting harder. Of course you feel highly sensitive. There’s a lot to fucking complain about!

The grey area, or the secret-third-thing of it all, is that it’s not that these things either do or do not exist—your ex might’ve sucked, and so too might’ve your parents. It’s that the way we define these things then defines how we address them. To diagnose and externalize every problem is to decide that they are unchangeable except through very specific means, and nearly always individualistic ones: to leave people, to “focus on yourself,” to medicate away the signals in your brain telling you that something in your life might be in need of attention—a job change, a community change, better sex, more fun. It is not that any one tool is bad; it might very well be that the solution is to leave your friend or loved one or whatever, or to get on the meds you’ve been thinking about. But to assume everyone incompatible with you is a narcissist is to assume that you are better off alone, and also to assume that you are not one. It might very well be that SSRIs are right for you, but to assume that your problem is “depression” or being a “HSP” is to assume that your problems are internal and not rational responses to the (bad) world around you that you have the power to change.

Your problems are real; the way you’ve defined them are not. Or, rather, those definitions are not neutral. They are only as real as they are helpful. And, as we can see from how badly everyone is doing, they’re not particularly helpful.

Take, for example, two words that have become lenses through which nearly everything is perceived: anxiety and depression. In 2023 researchers analyzed 500 million words from psychology journal articles from 1970 to 2018 and found that there had been a meteoric rise in pathologizing these emotions as symptoms of disorders.

The researchers wrote:

“Whereas ‘anxiety’ and ‘depression’ can refer to ordinary affective states, rather than to clinical conditions, and—judging from the collocates [groupings of words]—largely did so in the 1970s and 1980s, the strong trend in both psychological and general discourse has been to place a clinical frame around them. That frame locates them in the context of diagnosis (‘disorder’ and ‘symptom’) rather than normal emotional distress and compounds them as linked pathological entities rather than as distinct experiences.”

In other words: people once thought of depression and anxiety as normal parts of life—emotions experienced because of what was happening to them. It has only been in the last few decades that these words have been usurped by psychiatry into something problematic that must be solved (namely with the tools of psychiatry itself; i.e. drugs).

A few years earlier, the same researchers found something different but related happening with the word trauma: not only had its use in diagnoses been expanded over the decades, it also began to refer to lesser and lesser intensities of human emotions. Researchers and clinicians weren’t only using the word more, they were using it to describe seemingly everything.

Trauma, depression, anxiety—these can be important lenses through which to see your life. But if more and more things are them, then less and less in your life is something else. If every problem can be explained away by trauma or clinical depression or anxiety or borderline personality disorder or bipolar disorder or narcissistic boyfriends or being HSP or whatever, then you have in effect chosen to stop seeing the world through any other lens, and thus you have given up larger and larger amounts of your own agency, sloughing off layer of layer with each attempt at externalized reasoning or internalized diagnosis (“sorry I struggle to call you back because of my ADHD,”; “I can’t be in a good relationship right now because I have insecure attachment issues stemming from parentification.”)

People do this—attempt to define, pathologize, categorize—because it gives them power. But power is not the same as agency. Power is something you wield over others. Foucault wrote of how institutions used categorization and diagnosis to maintain control over their populations. It makes sense now in the age of neoliberalism—in which all of our lives are as fractured as the institutions that once yielded (more) power over us (governments and their systems of economics and health care and punishment)—that we would instead now do this to each other and ourselves. Uberification but for emotions.

The ability of the government to control us via definition has been weakened, but the desire for control has not gone away. And so into that power vacuum all of us step, picking up the weapons left by those who formerly defined us and restarting the battle ourselves. En garde, narcissist! Touché, highly sensitive person!

And we do this because it makes us feel safe. To define someone (oneself or others) is to attempt to ensure that others do not affect you; it is to attempt to ensure you are not surprised; it is to attempt to ensure that you are not hurt. It is understandable in an era as dysregulated as ours. An attempt to control a world out of control. But all it does is leave you more and more alone, more distant and afraid of your fellow man than ever.

Agency is not about pulling on your bootstraps, it is about putting down those weapons. It is about realizing that once you stop attempting to categorize and define and pathologize yourself and others into positions of submission, you will be left standing there in the arena with nothing but yourself and others, and an infinite number of things to do together; things more beautiful and weird and wild and fun than the safety of domination and desolation through definition. Maybe you’ll go get into a messy relationship that hurts you but also changes you. Maybe you’ll decide that feeling overwhelmed and crying a bunch is a worthy price to pay for connection to community. Or maybe you’ll look around the arena, and be stronger than Carmela, and decide the first step towards the rest of your life is to just leave. The beautiful thing and the terrifying thing is that that’s up to you.

Hello!

How is everyone today? The world, as usual, seems bad. And it is perhaps our duty to figure out why, or at least to figure out how to survive its badness. But often when we attempt to do this, we’re starting too far ahead. We debate ideas about capitalism and politics and gender and all the rest, and it goes nowhere. We yell at each other on the internet, we protest, we organize, and the world keeps getting worse.

I think this is because none of us are on the same page. A lot of us aren’t even in the same book! There’s no hope of convincing people of your cause if they exist in a completely different reality. We’re not only separated by an infinite number of distinct, algorithmically-generated personal universes, we exist with highly variable abilities to see through those realities, to think about them critically.

If we want to have any hope of bettering the world, we first have to make sure people live in the same world. And a large part of the solution to this problem is to make sure people have the ability to understand the realities they live in. In short, we have to make people less stupid.

Fifty-four percent of Americans can’t read above a 6^th grade level. How do you convince those people that your side is right? How do you convince them that they deserve a better world if they cannot understand the world they live in, or their place in it?

That was the theme of a talk I gave a few weeks ago when I was invited by the French Embassy to speak at their cultural center, Villa Albertine. The theme of the night was Enlightenment—how do we carry forward ideas of democracy, creative expression, and freedom of speech in our current era? And my answer was: we can’t even begin to debate these things until we ensure the people around us are capable of understanding reality. You can watch the talk here.

And that’s also the theme of today’s Link Drop: if we want to make the world better, we have to start at Square One—strengthening our bonds to our fellow humans so that we live in the same reality, and ensuring they have the same resources and ability to understand that reality.

-I’ve been reading a lot about the fascinating and depressing history of a group of 200 chimpanzees in Uganda who for decades coexisted in peace, and then suddenly began a civil war. The chimps originally lived in three separate but overlapping bands. When each of the bands would encounter each other, they’d hang out—grooming each other, socializing, sometimes finding new mates. But then the killings began. So far, 24 chimps have been killed, including 17 infants. The chimps have become on-guard in their respective territories, showing nervousness if they even hear the sound of other chimps in the distance. Though the exact reason for the start of their war is unknown, scientists believe the war’s continuation and exacerbation is because the groups stopped communicating with each other. After a small conflict between a few chimps from different bands about a decade ago, and after the death of one particular chimp who was responsible for inter-group communication (he died during a respiratory epidemic), the bands stopped trusting each other, and started self-isolating in their own bubbles. The researchers suggested that the chimp civil war could shine light on human violence. Perhaps, they argue, religion, ethnicity and politics play less of a role in our constant conflict; perhaps the progenitor of our own wars is simply communication breakdowns. Living in separate bubbles not only makes our worlds smaller, it makes us fear anyone outside those bubbles. The Trump Administration, of course, has proposed cutting the funding to this group of researchers.

-If it is indeed true that separation from each other’s realities allows for constant violence, that could explain a lot of what we’re going through today in the U.S. The Cut has a story about “The Great Numbing Out”—looking into why people are so much less willing to protest and resist Trump this time around, as compared to the constant actions against his administration in 2016. The thesis of the piece is that we’re all overwhelmed, that our nervous systems have been strained so that we’re constantly in fight-or-flight and are constantly just trying to keep our heads down to survive. And while this is likely true, I again think there is a more base-level problem that leads to those things: disconnection from each other encourages us to feel overwhelmed and scared. Without community, we are left to deal with all this bullshit on our own, and our individual nervous systems cannot handle that. Perhaps the biggest difference between 2016 and 2026 isn’t the amount of overwhelm caused by our politics (though that too), but the fact that we are now much more isolated from each other, and thus unable to effectively communicate that overwhelm and weather the storm together. Let’s not forget that there was a pandemic in-between the first and second Trump terms that radically altered how people interacted with each other.

-But the numbing out we’re experiencing today isn’t unique. A new book by Ian Burma—Stay Alive—chronicles the lives of Berliners during the rise of Naziism and finds that they largely did the same thing we’re doing today to survive: they disconnected from the reality around them, either spatially by exiling themselves to other countries, or culturally and politically, by creating existences ever-more isolated from the violence around them. As Kevin Peraino writes in his review of the book: “Dictators, in reality, thrive not on love but on indifference.”

-I don’t think it’s conspiratorial to say that if I were a person with a vested interest in increasing the violence of the world—destroying its environment, sending people into lives of poverty and misery—and an interest in decreasing any form of resistance to my evil machinations, the first step I might take would be to encourage people to live in bubbles from which they cannot, or at least do not want to, escape. In other words: if you wanted to start a civil war, your first step might not be an act of violence, but of disconnection.

Perhaps that’s how we should view modern technology—as a tool of communal severance, encouraging us to be in our own warring factions. The internet, after all, was largely invented by the U.S. Department of War (née Defense).

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Khameer Kidia has a very impressive resumé. He’s a physician, an anthropologist working at Harvard Medical School, and a Rhodes Scholar. He was educated in the kinds of Western, elite institutions that are responsible for the world’s understanding of mental health as a problem treatable at an individual, and often chemical, level. But through his work with queer people in his home country of Zimbabwe, Kidia’s worldview began to crack.

He started to see mental health as a structural problem that had to be addressed at a communal level, not something that could be solved solely with medications and individual therapy. This revelation put Kidia’s views in direct conflict with those of the institutions that helped educate him.

And so he wrote a book about it, with the hopes of convincing others that our Western, individualist view of mental health is keeping people in distress much more than they need to be.

In Empire of Madness: Reimagining Western Mental Health Care for Everyone, Kidia delves into his personal and familial histories, reframing them as struggles in large part caused by trying to survive in a colonized world. And he delves into the history of medicine itself to show how the Western, capitalist version of medicine and medical thinking became so hegemonic.

[This interview has been edited and condensed]

In the book, you talk a lot about your parents’ struggles with mental health, and how those struggles were contextualized through this Western, individualist lens, when really they had a lot to do with their histories—facing racism, colonialism, trying to live under capitalism. Is that where the desire to write this book came from?

My parents’ stories are a large part of the framework of the book, but it wasn’t actually my family’s story that brought me to write it. It was actually my work more than a decade ago in Zimbabwe in the queer community there. I am a queer person and consider myself part of the community there, and I’d been working there for nearly 10 years on mental health research and advocacy. And a lot of queer people started to come up to me and asked me what we could be doing for queer people’s mental health in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is a country with extremely repressive laws, state sanctioned violence. It’s a very difficult place to live if you’re queer, and trans and intersex people especially have been suffering—there have been a lot of suicides, and they feel like they’re in a crisis.

A few years ago, I started to collaborate with some NGOs and different queer organizations to think through these things. But at this point I was mostly a researcher and so my goal was to do more research. I was working on an NIH grant to study queer people’s mental health in Zimbabwe, and spent a lot of time working with my mentors at Harvard on the grant. But after a while, it became clear to me that what my mentors at Harvard wanted me to do with this grant was not at all what queer people in Zimbabwe wanted. The people at Harvard wanted me to create an HIV-focused intervention that combined medical care with mental health care. But that’s not what queer people in Zimbabwe wanted. They told me they just wanted safe spaces, places where they could hang out.

I decided to stop writing the grant and start studying a lot more queer theory and LGBTQ literature. And eventually what had started as a project about queer mental health became about queering mental health—applying queer theory and queer life to a very cis, heteronormative patriarchal system of Western psychiatry. I wanted to know how to destabilize some of these normative concepts in Western medicine. I wanted to know how to privilege the perspectives and experiences of the people who were suffering, rather than just the opinions of the experts.

There was a group called the Harare Queers that were doing a lot of mutual aid, and so I started to explore how that functioned in relation to people’s mental health. I started writing essays about all this, and started developing a critical lens for the concept of trauma itself.

Did your experience in the queer community in Zimbabwe and your research into queer theory and history start conflicting with your very Western, traditional understanding of medicine, trauma, and mental health?

Yeah, absolutely. It was existentially unmooring. At first, I felt like a bit of a conspiracy theorist, seeing all these systems at work. I also felt as though I was going against everything that I’d been taught and acculturated to believe. And that was incredibly hard for me. It took a lot of unlearning and relearning and expanding my own vision to re-understand what mental health was for me, and writing the book was part of that. It wasn’t that I alone had all these fantastic ideas, it was that other people had these ideas, and they were teaching me about them, and I was learning to integrate them into my own life experience, and then deal with the repercussions of a changed world view.

What exactly was so hard about squaring those two ideologies or lenses on mental health?

Well, you know, they’re in a sense antithetical. The Western approach is focused on the individual. I was taught that the way to approach people’s mental health was to send them to therapy or prescribe them medications. I became really good at prescribing medications. And I did a lot of extra training in psychiatry, both as a medical student as an as an internal medicine resident.

But then in my experience in this queer community, and in my work as an anthropologist, I saw that for so many people, therapy, psychiatry, medications, were, at the very least, not enough. If you’re living under poverty or violence or racism or homophobia, the individualist treatments aren’t sufficient.

And so I started to think about the shifts we’ve had historically in psychiatry from what was once a sort of spiritual idea, and then became a biological idea, and then became a psychological idea. And I wondered if we could have another shift to make it more a social and political idea. I wondered if we could make things more collective, more structural, less individualistic, and start to address these problems not just at the clinic or hospital.

I feel like the “conspiracy theory” of it all that you mentioned is that once you start down this rabbit hole, you start realizing things like: if you were a very powerful person who wanted to create a society that causes massive amounts of trauma, it’d be very helpful to then blame individuals for experiencing that trauma, and make it their complete responsibility to heal from it, because then that kind of obfuscates the source, right?

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Let me put on my “I’ve been working in the media industry for 15 years” hat for a sec to break down how the trend cycle works in the news. And where better to start than with everyone’s favorite thing to love/hate: looksmaxxing.

Looksmaxxing discourse followed the same media coverage cycle of so many internet subcultures. After existing in relative obscurity for a few years, in late 2025 a video clip of Clavicular—the most popular of the looksmaxxers—possibly running over someone in his car went viral. The mainstream media found out about him and began writing profiles—first came Vice (hey, maybe they’re still trendsetters after all these years), then the New York Times (which in its typical fashion was neither first nor best), then GQ (which has been doing a lot of actually-great reporting on the toxicity and profiteering of the manosphere (and, which, full disclosure, I sometimes write for)). And then came the commentary, of which I was a part (sorry?). And finally, the death knell of a trend story: broadcast news finally gets around to it.

There’s nothing new about this kind of interest cycle—it’s just how the media works in the internet age. Trends filter up from the netherworlds of small TikTok or Reddit “communities,” then are algorithmically boosted—either by big accounts, or journalists, or profit-seeking actors within those communities who know how to game the algorithm for their own gain, and then they’re covered by bigger and bigger press outlets until people get sick of the discourse and turn to the next thing. In a year, there’ll be a Hulu documentary about Clavicular that is negatively reviewed, mildly popular, and totally forgotten about within a month.

The main problem with this media ecosystem is a lack of connective thinking.

Because the media covers trends in discrete cycles, the trends’ underlying context is often completely unexamined. Media outlets go from trend to trend to trend without revealing (or even themselves knowing) that they’re writing about the same thing over and over again. They’re economically incentivized to do this, because only giving people part of the story keeps them coming back. If they say: “here’s yet another story about how capitalism is ruining everything,” people would have little reason to keep returning. Once you connect the small things into one bigger thing then…poof, they disappear…like a game of Tetris with reversed incentives.

I say all this to say that as of late, it feels like every trend story is really the same trend story, and that story is—say it with me now: as capitalism produces diminishing returns for most people, it also produces a constant flow of new technologies of (supposed) competitive advantage, the sale of which helps capitalists profit by further emptying the coffers of consumers who, in an age of decaying empire, have little else to spend any disposable income on; and, much more importantly, helps distract those same people from the ever-increasing distance between their current position under capitalism and the temporal mirage they’ve created (or which has been created for them by the media) in which they imagine themselves to finally be happy conquerers of the same system currently exploiting them.

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Jason Gale is a senior Editor at Bloomberg News. He’s the author of the recently-released After Covid: The Health Impacts That Will Last Generations, a comprehensive look at how the Covid-19 pandemic unfolded, and the myriad issues we still face from it. I wanted to talk to him about why we as a society are still in denial of the Covid’s effects, including the effects it’s still having on millions of people’s bodies and brains.

[This interview has been edited and condensed]

Can you tell me a bit about why you wanted to write this book? It feels like mainstream discourse has totally moved on from Covid. Was there a gap in that discourse you wanted to fill?

I thought that there was definitely room to write a book that tried to trace how the pandemic unraveled, and its continuing consequences. And one of the reasons was that I could see that our memories and recollections of the event—which is in many ways still ongoing—are very prone to suggestion and manipulation and alternative narratives. So I really wanted to try to create a fairly honest, truthful record of what happened.

Do you feel like most people have memory-holed the pandemic and never think about it now?

I think that part of our resilience strategy is to put bad things behind us and move on. So I think it’s very understandable that we want to forget what happened and almost, in a way, make light of it. But it’s harder to do that in some places. If you’re in New York, you probably remember the morgue trucks parked on streets outside hospitals, the mass graves being dug on Hart Island off the Bronx. Some of those things were highly traumatic.

But I also think part of the reason it’s hard for some people to remember is that, as you write in your book, our memories of the pandemic can be used for different political goals, or manipulated.

Absolutely. I’ve seen a number of physicians and nurses on social media recently talking about how, really, there were no overwhelmed hospitals during the height of the pandemic. That that wasn’t happening. But that’s because the pandemic hit different places differently. Hospitals were overwhelmed in New York City and Boston and San Francisco and Los Angeles, but not everywhere. And that’s partially because our mitigation strategies were working. We have to remember there were certain measures put in place designed to prevent all hospitals from being overwhelmed. So that was kind of a success if your hospital wasn’t overwhelmed with Covid patients. But that’s being used now to claim that the pandemic was completely overblown and exaggerated, which I don’t think is correct.

There’s also debate about whether we’re still actually in a pandemic or not, right?

It’s interesting when you ask about whether the pandemic is ongoing. And there are certainly people who look back and think: well, in 2023 the World Health Organization and the U.S. government and other governments said that the emergency phase of the pandemic was over. That occurred in May 2023. But we know that SARS-CoV-2 is still evolving, still infecting people, still causing chronic illness and even deaths all around the world. So from that basis, the pandemic is still going.

I think that there is a debate going on about whether the pandemic is over or not. And I certainly see Covid-cautious people, especially people who have Long Covid who are very vulnerable to infection, being very frustrated at the lack of acknowledgement that SARS-CoV-2 is still circulating and evolving in societies.

When you talk to to scientists and researchers, were you surprised about just how many effects are still ongoing; how this really isn’t in the rearview mirror?

Yeah, so one of the earlier stories I wrote about the pandemic, which was really surprising to me, was in 2022. I interviewed Ziyad Al-Aly, an epidemiologist with the VA health system in St. Louis. And he reported in Nature Medicine that there was an increase in new diagnoses of diabetes after a SARS-CoV-2 infection. And I thought that that was really odd. I think we’re seeing now that the virus, particularly in the early days when people had no immunity from vaccines and no natural immunity, that it could be an accelerant of all kinds of different diseases, from kidney disease to heart disease. And now we’re seeing increasingly its association with with dementia, which is really concerning.

Something that always freaks me out is that it’s so hard to know what’s caused by Covid. Dementia, depression, any mental health issue, stuff with more nebulous symptoms like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome—it’s impossible to pick it all apart and know what’s been caused by the virus.

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I remember the moment in 11^th grade. My friend and I climbing out of the subway station on the Upper West Side near our school, discussing, as we so often did, the state of the world and our place in it, and her turning to me and asking: why do so many adults abandon their politics and become cogs in the machine? Is it that they know more than us, or that they have it beaten out of them?

I don’t know why, I told her. But I said I wasn’t worried. We were different. That would never happen to us.

At that point, both of us were as far left as two teens could be—anarcho-communists and anti-imperialists. We’d attend any and every protest for a leftist cause. My friend organized a school club inspired by Columbia’s SDS. That school year, I traveled with dozens of my classmates to Venezuela to tour the Bolivarian socialist revolution and take notes on how we could possibly foment something similar back home.

It was only a matter of time, I thought, before the United States turned into a socialist paradise. All we had to do was usher it along. And I was ready to do the ushering.

And then…things changed. Not my politics, really—I’m still an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. It’s more that, a few years ago, I realized my sense of possibility had dramatically decreased.

My Overton window hadn’t shifted; it’d developed a layer of grime that made possible futures seem hazier and less bright.

You cannot fight for what you cannot envision.

In short: I had become my (and my friend’s) worst fear: a cog.

Or maybe a frog.

Looking back at the last two decades of my life since that conversation in high school, I can see what happened to me. And my friend and I were both wrong—it’s not that adults have their idealism beaten out of them. And it’s not that we simply know more—that we are mature enough to be realists instead of idealists. It’s that the longer you exist in this world, the longer you spend in its psychosociopolitical milieu, and thus become increasingly infused with whatever is around you.

It’s easier to be a radical when you’re young not because you’re naive, but because you haven’t yet absorbed the messaging of the world that tells you good things are often impossible. And, crucially, all the people around you—your young peers—haven’t yet either.

When I was a teen at a semi-socialist educational institution, I existed within a positive feedback loop, my peers steeping me in their hopes and beliefs so that my hopes and beliefs did not feel unrealistic. You are what you read, you are what you eat, and, also, maybe, you are who you see.

But then, as you age, the people you see change. You get a job and your thoughts of revolution aren’t so much beat out of you as they are supplanted. You think of money and building a life and all the rest, and everyone else around you does too. As your milieu changes, so do you. And any kind of fantastical future gets hazier and hazier.

How, then, to recommit?

The first step, I believe, is to realize that you do indeed exist in a milieu in the first place; to not take for granted that you are influenced by what you consume and who you talk to and what you spend your time doing.

You do not need to attend a leftist public school to believe in a better future. But you do need to become aware of the water in which you sit. Perhaps for years you have marinated there, not realizing how far from what you once believed you’ve strayed. Perhaps you’ve normalized the lack of hope, or aggrievedness inside of you, because everything else around you feels the same. Perhaps the water has gotten slightly warmer over the years without you noticing. Perhaps now is the perfect opportunity to jump out.

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Anson Tong (she/her) is a writer, photographer, and behavioral scientist based in Chicago.

is a journalist reporting on influencer parents and their children. She is the author of Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online.

Family influencers are now a multi-billion dollar industry largely built on voyeurism and selling consumer goods. Family influencers are also a microcosm of what’s happening on the internet writ large these days—it’s just one of the ways in which people are monetizing loneliness and isolation, using parasocial relationships between digital families and real people to sell the promise of connection and relatability.

While we as a culture reckon with how child stars of the 2000s and 2010s were treated in the public eye, a more diffuse (and harder to regulate) cohort of child influencers are growing up surveilled and exploited. Influencer behavior online trickles down to people posting on their personal accounts, and also shapes the aspirations of children, many of whom now want to become professional content creators. Horror stories that make the news often elicit a sense that we should pull the plug and shut social media down, but the most dramatic stories also distract from the fact that this industry is about much more than a few extreme cases—it’s the milieu in which we now all live.

I was excited to talk to Fortesa about her book, parents posting their kids on social media, and who’s watching all this content.

[This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.]

I’d love it if you could tell me about how you ended up on this beat and how you define the child influencer, family influencer, the ecosystem.

When 16 and Pregnant came out on MTV, I was obsessed, and I just couldn’t get enough of it. I was watching it and I watched Teen Mom for all these years. I was like wow, these kids are becoming teenagers, they’re shaving their legs for the first time, they’re getting their learner’s permits on TV.

Then I would get on social media and all these kids are going through the same things as the Teen Mom kids where everything that they do is recorded and monetized and put online. It struck me as very similar but extremely different because the Teen Mom kids or other reality TV kids film a few days a month.

So I started looking around as any journalist who has a hunch does, and I found a young woman who was in her teens who had grown up on a family vlogging channel.

I asked her, “What would you say to your parents if you could say anything?” And she said, “Nothing they do now can take back the years of work I had to put in.”

There’s merch with her name on it. And there’s photos of her from baby to toddler to a kid to a tween to a teen, and I could just watch her grow up online and she was like, if it were up to me, none of those billions of hours of YouTube views would exist.

So I wrote that story. I published it, and I was really excited about it, but I had no idea that it would resonate the way it did, and that people would feel the way they did about it, and that it would become my beat and a book.

One of the mom influencers you interview says something along the lines of, “well, everyone has problems with their parents. If my kid is upset about me putting them online, I’ll deal with it.”

I make decisions for my daughter all the time that obviously she can’t consent to or that she hasn’t agreed with because she’s not even 2. That is the work of being a parent; and the work of being a child is reckoning with those decisions that your parents made for you. But like at least in almost every other circumstance, that reckoning happens privately and doesn’t have public implications, whereas this has public implications. The decisions I’m making for my daughter are private, although my husband likes to joke that she’s gonna hate me for not making her a YouTube star.

There’s so much money on the table that you’re leaving behind! Relatedly, what do you think has made family influencing such a huge industry?

I know I’m like, should I be a mom influencer? They’re making my yearly salary in one post. I think that family vloggers and mom influencers are so popular because American parenthood and specifically American motherhood is so lonely. In my postpartum period, my daughter would only sleep on top of me so I would just be sitting there for 8 hours a day, letting her sleep on me, and I would be on my phone watching these mom influencers and these family vloggers.

If we had better social safety nets and systems, like everyone says we need a village to raise a child. If we all had those villages, we would be much less tempted by these people.

Influencing is worldwide, but it seems to me a uniquely American pursuit because it’s the American dream. A regular person can become fabulously wealthy through their own efforts. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, start posting on YouTube, and who knows what could happen? In this time of economic precarity, it doesn’t surprise me that it’s getting more and more popular because women, especially women and moms, are looking around and they’re like, what am I gonna do?

Influencing and family vlogging is the only career on earth that I can think of where having a child is a benefit to your career. I love my daughter. I would do anything for her. But I love my work and she has not been a benefit to it.

Where do you think the line is between letting a kid do something because they want to, versus protecting them from these consequences they might not understand?

If my daughter had her way, she would only eat ketchup for every meal, but just because she wants to eat ketchup all the time doesn’t mean that she should or that it’s good for her. I think my job as a parent is saying, “Okay, you really like ketchup, but how much ketchup is actually okay for you and how much is too much?” And that’s kind of how I feel about social media.

I do think there can be a way for kids to have this form of expression and for parents to have this career and for kids to have this career without it being this terrible thing. God forbid, not every story is a Ruby Franke story. I don’t think that it’s black-and-white. I don’t think that if you post your kids online and monetize the content that you’re immoral and you’re evil and you’re a terrible parent. Personally, I’m not comfortable with it for my own family and in my own life, but I can see how people would make the trade-off.

So much of the family content is very ordinary. What do you think makes it so addictive to people when it’s so boring?

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