The Rigged Ouroboros of Discourse
Plus: Dancing is better for you than SSRIS [LINK DROP]
I’ve been thinking a lot about personal agency recently. I think that’s largely because the world feels particularly bad right now, and so it gives me a bit of hope to look around and figure out “what can I actually change in my life?” Like the serenity prayer.
Quitting DoorDash, severely limiting my time on social media—these are obviously individual acts. They do not really help anyone else but myself. But in practicing discipline in two areas of my life I wish I had more of it (doom scrolling and eating expensive, bad food while alone), I think I’ve come to the conclusion that we’ve convinced ourselves, or been convinced, that we don’t have personal agency, and, thus, that we can do little to make our lives better on an individual or collective level.
In believing the issues we face are systemic (true), and that there are no individual solutions to systemic issues (mostly true), we’ve jumped the gun to the point that it feels like any display of personal agency is viewed as pointless, or not-enough, or besides-the-point, or even downright impossible to actualize. We’ve (rightly) reacted to capitalism’s pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality by saying that only collective change will change the world, but then, perhaps, gone too far into believing that means nothing we do individually really matters. Which, I think, is actually a sign of the way the internet has infected our brains.
Nowhere is this better evidenced than in the continuing debate over loneliness. People are arguing ad nauseam, saying, “no it’s not phones, it’s the fact that the world is more expensive.” On YouTube and TikTok, the idea of third places is now common fodder for discourse—we are lonely because there’s nowhere to hang out. (As I’ve argued, these things are part and parcel: society has become more hostile to public life and phones and the internet are enablers of that hostility). But, I think our discourse around these issues is a sign of our hostility toward the idea of personal agency, and the idea that the world is changeable.
It’s as if we’re collectively reinforcing the idea that nothing matters, that no individual action can help remedy our lonely world, by trapping ourselves in an online ouroboros of argumentation, waiting to discover the perfect solution to loneliness before anyone actually does anything about it. It’s like that perennial, “someone should open a queer cafe” meme. At some point, you just need to go to a Barnes and Noble and hang out with some queer people or whatever.
This ouroboric (cool adjective alert) conversation is not entirely our faults, instead I think it is a symptom of the things we are arguing about: it is a symptom of a society that wants us to feel agency-less, unable to interact in public, and leave us trapped in the profit-generating discourse spaces of social media. In other words, the very way we talk about agency is actually primed by corporations to lead us to dead ends that make us feel like we have none of it. Social media companies have to figure out ways to keep us within their ecosystems, and what better way to do that than to convince everyone that we can discourse our way out of a problem; that if we argue enough about the cause of our depression and loneliness and despair, we can find the ultimate cause of and solution to everything.