It’s a Beautiful Life
It’s been almost two years since I deactivated my instagram, deleted my tiktok, and generally distanced myself from engaging in social media.
I’m not interested in distilling any personal virtues or glorifying my own self-discipline. This is not a perfect story of “touching grass” and throwing away all my digital and internet based activities. I still very much live and work connected to and around the world-wide web.
However, despite my occasional reddit posts, pinterest pinning session, or facebook marketplace browsing (rip craigslist); since November 2024, my relationship with social media has changed. As I'm sure most of you have experienced, not unlike the climate change, the internet of my youth is forever changed, not all at once, but slowly. Almost undetectably, the spaces built as “social” have turned into a noxious, poisonous space.
Yesterday the air in Chicago reached Hazardous levels of in some reported areas over 1000 AQI. The sky was filled with barely visible, yet completely overwhelming particles of toxic chemicals and metals. But it’s not just the sky, or the new regular advent of extreme forest fires. It’s in everything. It’s the agro comment threads under images of burned children that oscillate between outrage and anti-semitic memes, proliferated by bots, spread by the algorithm. It’s the anti-empathetic right wing christian nationalist hate speech using white Jesus to justify the actions of sex trafficking billionaires. It’s the way that constant inundation of bad, terrible, and downright evil corporate interest steals the future of entire generations through the illusion of exponential growth. I’m not here to tell you it’s not bad, it is. The things that are happening to you, to your families, your neighbors, your friends, to countless people across the globe. They’re real, they’re connected. They’re consequential.
So what’s the point? As fascism becomes the cultural norm, as hate and anger become the only language of the public square, that’s when joy becomes radical. When kindness becomes a weapon.
These days I spend a lot of time watching people on the street. Noticing the diversity, not just in background or culture but in how human beings express themselves. We’re silly little creatures. We’ve built this whole world around ourselves and forget that we can control it. No human being deserves more dignity and joy than another. No human being is more beautiful, or more worthy of attention and love. We hold hands! And then we forget we can do that, we forget that human bodies need other human bodies. We let the misguided engrained dogmas of tribalism, sexism, racism, ableism, define everything based on what it is not, as if there’s some kind of innate human standard we’re all a deviation away from.
These structures are real, the barriers have been built long before any of us were born, but our responsibility is not to uphold a standard that benefits the strength of greedy men.
It takes courage to imagine a world where we build a future for all human beings to live and thrive in dignity. It takes courage to imagine a world where you deserve to take up spaces where you have been rejected. To hear the message of the fascist, racist, sexist, ableist ruling billionaire bastards and say “NO. You cannot take my joy.”
I know I speak from a place of privilege, that my proximity to power creates a protective bubble. Just as I can protect myself inside with my air purifier during wildfire smoke, I can choose to log out and disengage from the collective cultural pollution. I can look at the love I have in my life, the beauty I have surrounding me, the wonder I experience in the silly small ways that people build relationships and tend their literal and figurative gardens.
So, as this particular smoke clears, what can offer is that small perspective. A reminder to pause, to look for the beauty. To meet the unfamiliar with curiosity. To pursue understanding, and patience. It’s a reminder that the things that are good for us are the things that connect us. It’s obvious, until it isn’t. So if you’re feeling lost in the smog, you’re not alone. If you need a hug, I’ve got two arms and a soft place to land.
Stay close, stay grounded, cultivate joy.
