I’m old enough to know that New Year’s Resolutions are for suckers.  Sure, blank slates offer motivation, but never as much as we hope.  We’re lazy and it’s cold.  And that’s fair.  But I have been trying each Jan. 1 to pick a bit of a north star for the year.  Just a kind of experience that I want to say yes to.  I don’t rush to change any habits; I just keep this thing in mind.

This year I found that north star in the basement of an Irish pub.  A kind of experience made up of three ingredients – third places, loose ties and third things – which I’ve come to see as a holy trinity of good times for humans. 

I ruminate quite a bit over our hyper-digitized lives.  But I also think a lot about gender.  I can’t help it.  I’m a 48-year-old woman, a separated mother of two boys, ages 11 and 8.  And I’ve joked before that if you tried to draw a Venn diagram illustrating the overlapping interests of middle-aged women and school-aged boys, you wouldn’t have a Venn diagram.  

But I’ve come to see a connection my boys and I share through a basic aspect of being who we are in the world that we’re in:  it’s a lack of representation, of positive images of what it can look like and mean to grow up in their case, and to age in mine.

There are limits to the usefulness of naming things.  Especially when it involves shiny new coinages fueled by the hungry ghost of the internet.  When words get too sticky and our use of them sloppy, we become incurious and, worse, self-righteous, convinced that we understand things just cause we can pin words on them.

 There’s a lot to be said about being able to feel that something is done.  Finished.  Over.  Last call.  Go home. 

In Oliver Burkeman’s newsletter “The Imperfectionist,” he recently touted the importance of being able to call it a day.  There’s real comfort in knowing your day is done; and the fact that feelings of finitude seem so elusive to us now, doesn’t mean we need them any less. 

In the absence of imposed endings, I must explain to myself why I’m choosing to stop.  And as a friend of mine liked to quote Harry Dean Stanton saying in Fire Walk With Me well, that’s “just like…  more shit I gotta do now”

I haven’t been on an airplane in a long time.  I can only imagine how hellish it’s become; a microcosm of how well we’re generally faring being around one another.

That we spend so much time in virtual landscapes obviously means we spend so much less in real ones.  A lot has been said about our notable drift away from third spaces – those places that aren’t work or home, but afford an opportunity to be out in the world, to practice being human around other humans. 

If we don’t get enough exposure to witnessing ourselves in context, our egos only grow and our tolerance for shared anything contracts.

The activity of the internet has been described as a “race to the bottom of the brain stem.”   Much of what we encounter online appeals to our most primal impulses.  Cause if you can access that shit, you can sell yours.

It makes sense in an attention economy, that the fiercer the competition for people’s attention, the wilier and more wicked the tactics for getting it have gotten.  That others are capitalizing on our achilles’ heels is just par for the course now.  And learned helplessness is often the feeling that results.  Followed by the one I’m fighting through in this episode:  shame.

Last episode, I focused on online dating to consider how we’re becoming increasingly accustomed to a version of presence that is so half-assed it might as well be absence.  I’m enjoying being off the apps, by the way.

 A feature of the internet we’ve long metabolized is how it facilitates identity doubling.  The fact that we have online versions of ourselves is a splintering that’s easy to forget.  We are at ease expressing ourselves, to ourselves and to others, in the forms and flavours of someone else’s design; and we have become immersed so deeply in a system and its symbols, we’ve internalized its language as our own.

Dating apps are built on a business model that ushers users through a revolving door of disgust and desire.  Hopeful romantics ping reliably between two poles: “That’s it, I quit” and “Oh god, the crushing loneliness.”  

Users are jaded and tired.  Dating apps, once exciting and fun, are scrambling to save themselves from drowning in all the meh.  I think it’s all connected to a broader crisis we’re experiencing in how we relate to being present these days:  we don’t want to miss out on anything, but we don’t really want to show up for it either. 

Increasingly, self-checkouts are being recognized as a failed experiment.  More and more stores are removing them.  They of course cite theft and over-estimated savings in staff costs for the surprising reversal, but businesses are also having to admit that they are implicated in the social fabric, and they play a role in people’s well-being and their sense of connection.  Surely an odd concession for capitalists.

In this episode, I reflect on how the general experience of the self-checkout, the feelings it provokes, and the impulse that led to it in the first place, are being seen elsewhere.  I hope that the backlash against self-checkouts can serve as a lesson applicable beyond themselves.

This first episode looks at a theme that will certainly come up a lot:  real things disappearing from our world, virtual things taking their place.   

I think it’s important to notice when we’ve attached to objects simply because they are important to us, our own biographical timeframe.   A nostalgia that is sweet but narcissistic too, a longing for objects that were symbols in one’s own life to matter more than they seem to.  A stab at continued relevance.   ‘Back in my day’ insistence.  For me, the distinction comes with objects that are linked to pro-sociality.  It is the disappearance of these objects, that I feel should give us pause.