What About Our Curated Living Experience?
Mon Ami(e),
I really wanted to title today’s letter, “Obsessed with Death and Other Stories”. This is me writing at 12 am on Thursday morning because this tinyletter means a lot to me, you mean a lot me. (Also, I can’t sleep).
I wanted to talk about my obsession with death because on Tuesday, a random memory came to me as I passed by an old man’s obituary: I’ve been obsessed with reading obituaries since I was a child. I loved to read them in newspapers, and stare at funeral pamphlets, reading the biographies of strangers and staring at their blurry photos. It’s always been a way to gleam into their lives—to reimagine what their lives were like, what or who they’ve left behind. (As a child, it was one of my earliest conscious encounters with empathy.)
This curiosity permeated my work, so that I’ve always written about death from different perspectives. When my grandmother died in 2012–the closest kind of death I’ve experienced till date—she died at home, she’d lived with us all our lives—I wrote all kinds of things to honor and preserve her memory. I still write in honor of her today.
Is our living experience curated? The answer might be HELL YES, but hear me out. I started thinking about this when I read this essay on the change in Instagram’s aesthetics. Reading it made me wonder how we decide what to post on social media. Thanks (or no thanks) to algorithms, influencers and so much more, we don’t have to think too much; these decisions have been influenced, albeit to our ignorance.
In Alain de Botton’s 2010 tedtalk, this is emphasized from a different angle: “Our ideas about what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They’re sucked in from other people. And we also suck in messages from everything, from the television to advertising to marketing.” Again, our living experience is curated by forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves.
Matthew Salesses corroborates this in his longreads essay about grief; as a child he became good at math because he was told that ‘real Asians’ were supposed to be good at math. So, yes stereotypes, cultural and gender stereotypes. We tell girls to dress this way, and boys to dress that way, to like certain things—blue for boys, pink for girls—and to behave in certain ways.
Does money come in somewhere? YES. According to Hugh MacLeod, the more you need money, the more people will tell you what to do. The less control you will have. The more bullshit you will have to swallow. The less joy it will bring.
With religion, it’s even more complicated. Free will? Let’s not go there. [shudders]
I think the point of this rather long epistle is to remind us to take risks, which is another thing I’ve been thinking about all week: how can I live my best life? If our existence is planned by God and/or other forces, shouldn’t it follow that we try to live our best lives? That life is too short to be playing it safe (in this link, a woman takes a career step down, a risk she didn’t regret). Take a trip once a month? Make a new friend amongst the elderly? Read a classic? Learn a new language? Adopt a pet? Organise a protest? If you share some things on your [bucket] list, some risks you’ve taken and are willing to take, I’m happy to share them with everyone in my next letter, anonymously if you like. This list and this list are good starting points if you have zero clues.
In Ope’s life, nothing new is happening. Two of my plants are dying, I bought a new phone, and my glasses broke over the weekend. I read very good essays too. Sulaiman Addonai wrote about ‘black beauty’ and it was breathtaking—the best I read all week. And here, ‘finding yourself’ is considered a sort of adventure. New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason in this essay. On cultivating patience, Jeanna Kadlec writes about not publishing a book by the age of 30. Side-eyeing writers in ‘the house’.
This week, I’ll be thinking about smiles, and how smiles can save lives.
“The essential, most often, has no weight. The essential there, was apparently nothing but a smile. A smile is often the essential. One is paid with a smile. One is rewarded by a smile. And the quality of a smile might make one die.”
Note to new subscribers: there’s no formula to these letters. It’s random thoughts, random photos, feminism, essays etc. Importantly, I like to hear back from you. Thank you for subscribing. Here’s a smile to brighten your weekend:
Au revoir.