It is a calm and clean Sunday night in this small town in New Jersey. You can hear the cicadas slowing down and if you pay attention enough, you will see fireflies in the deep azure distance. Strain your ear for a second and you will hear families in the neighboring houses, chattering over dinner, a car pulling up in the garage, the quotidian rush of routine retiring for the day. In upsetting contrast, Los Angeles has always felt like self-inflicted anxiety.
It rained in New Jersey this afternoon. I spent time with loved ones inside the house, trying out different board games, eventually settling with Lincoln logs on the rug as the old retriever snored nearby. There is something meditative about putting one log over the other, creating a fort or barracks or simply a home while you sit by people you love and feel honored to be with.
The last Substack post elicited varying types of feedback (mostly through direct emails and messages sent to my Instagram account @mehreenkasana). It was amusing. The charged response is understandable as public morality—which I intend to keep discussing no matter how offended readers become—can be an upsetting subject as it cuts to the bone of the decisions we make and how these choices affect the people around us, including the more vulnerable demographics.
We like to imagine ourselves as conscientious people who follow the right kind of social media accounts, the right kind of hashtags, the right kind of posts and tweets. We slap hearts on catchy content about politics and culture not because we care about social order and stability but because we care about signaling to our peers how supposedly woke we are—no matter the societal cost. It’s one thing if a zoomer does this; the extremely online Gen Z is extremely politically engaged, after all. But it’s another issue if you’re an aging millennial reaching your late 30s and early 40s who is unwilling to admit that the current dominant ideology—which you passionately espouse under the auspices of progressivism—doesn’t exactly lead to cultural homeostasis. Quite the opposite.
More than anything, current discussions concerned with public virtue are difficult because a reluctant and decadent public is forced to face an unrelenting and unflattering mirror. I am lucky enough to have left the news industry as now I can openly share my apprehensions about where society is headed in my understanding. As opposed to pretending everything is fine.
For this Substack round, I’m pointing you to other places. I’m sharing some e-treats: tweets, quotes, and articles of interest.
Cormac McCarthy is one of my favorite writers. This isn’t his Twitter account but it reads like an ongoing and highly entertaining death threat to his publicist “Terry.”
I appreciate this lament from 2020: “And now we have 30 percent of Gen Z women claiming to be sexually uninterested in men. There is nothing remotely normal about that number. It is a sign of a deeply decadent culture—that is, a culture that lacks the wherewithal to survive. The most important thing that a generation can do is produce the next generation. No families, no children, no future.” Of course, there are multiple contributing factors at play here but one of them seems to be Gen Z women’s growing disdain for sex positivity, which was initially and heavily proselytized by artists and educators (as it often happens to be these two groups) from the Center for Sex and Culture in San Francisco and the Center for Sex Positive Culture (previously known as the “Wet Spot”) in Seattle several decades ago. One zoomer interviewee explained, “We all really embraced third-wave feminism and sex positivity, and it impacted us so negatively. Being told that you should be having sex with people you don’t have any relationship with really put it in our minds that sex doesn’t matter. I feel like we all just kinda got fucked over.” Personally, I welcome this backlash against sex positivity and its adherents who tend to be in the arts and academic scenes. The next task is to teach the increasingly nihilist zoomers (who, to be fair, have legitimate reason to feel despondent) that healthy family-making is possible, if not noble and needed.
Culture wars are always long wars. And if you hate them, blame the liberals.
Michel Houellebecq is that ugly because he took it upon himself to physically embody the rot and misery of modernity in his very own flesh. He is also controversial. And brilliant. And taken for granted as brilliant things frequently are. As Ben Sixsmith writes, “Houellebecq’s characters are miserably adrift on waves of marketization and desacralization.” He gets it. The hideous French sage gets it.
That’s it for this week. In the meantime, take care of yourself and your surroundings. Try not to call for taxes on the unvaccinated, “porn for children” as one of the high priestesses of libidinal excess unfortunately said, or the removal of sex as a legal designation on birth certificates. It seems to be a lot to ask of each other nowadays but try being stable.
"Try being normal." Haha.
I'm probably gonna get my ass kicked for saying this, but I think a big problem around the dearth of normalcy online is the heavy saturation of autistic people among the "extremely online." Gender weirdness and black-and-white thinking are rampant among people with autism. And I say this as someone who has been diagnosed with autism and has grappled with both of those things. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on this.
As for being normal, I find it refreshing and illuminating when I go out and about among "normal" friends and realize how detached from the rest of the world the online world is in many, many ways.