Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Pt. 1
Are "analog politics" a thing? A series of essays about political over- and under-engagement in the Information Age.
Cover image is called The Mosaic Floor by Ralph Heimens, 1995
We had just boarded the whaler with a dozen or so bags of leftover groceries, film props, two cats, and a week’s worth of laundry. I hastily pulled over the bumper and it slapped, wet and cold, onto my sunburned leg. Pushing off from the island dock, B and the actor started to talk about current events, ie, the current president that was unpopular in our circles. I snuck a look at the sound guy, who had been stuck on this island with us for the last five days as we shot J’s short film. I couldn’t tell if he was quietly reflecting on the creative experience, or this conversation was the last straw and he was going to bail out and swim home.
As the boat picked up speed, I stuck my hand inside the cat carrier. We had just adopted kittens and moved to a new part of the state where we didn’t have a reliable catsitter. We weren’t going to leave them home alone for a week, and leaving them with anyone else while they were so young seemed traumatic. Somehow, it didn’t occur to us that, similarly, the boat ride might leave them irrevocably scarred.
The actor was in his early seventies, around the same age as B—a family friend who’s island we had been shooting on. Two true salty dogs, it was great to see them scrap—the conversation oscillating wildly between movies, Appalachia in the 80s, and construction. B’s Johnny Cash impression made my heart flutter.
When the conversation shifted inevitably to politics, I prepared for the mood to darken, raising my guardrails with the practiced precision that only comes from growing up in a conservative, Baptist family. But it did not. B and the actor discussed the impending “crackdowns” on immigration by, apparently, any means necessary, with a shocking sincerity. Not a lick of the nihilism that I’d grown so accustomed to in my political circles. “That makes me so sad,” B said, and the actor tipped his head, and in the middle of Western Penobscot bay we shared an unspoken moment of silence under the hum of the outboard, broken only by a small mew which emanated from the cat carrier.
Was that it? Was it acceptable to just declare that news was sad, and not feel obligated to provide a suitable suggestion of an alternative? Being an Aussie, I was curious if the sound guy would chime in, but he, as I, seemed rendered mute by the authenticity of these two men sharing their hearts. Weren’t they embarrassed to be so earnest? Hadn’t they learned by now not to expect any better? That the world was run by billionaires, and their capacity for evil was endless? How could they sustain such optimism, given, well, everything? And why did this reaction feel so… refreshing?
My surprise may have had something to do with the my age; I was seventeen and a half on the eve of the 2016 presidential election. In my most hopeful, optimistic state, a newly progressive young person from a conservative family on the cusp of adulthood, America entered the first Trump presidency. My entire political consciousness has been a series of losses—a slew of lifetime appointees to the supreme court that hate women (and apparently, people in general), the BLM uprising and subsequent failure for any meaningful police reform, the overturning of Roe v. Wade and countless other social programs and safety nets, and just a general descent into fascist leadership.
It only recently occurred to me that all of this was exacerbated by (if not directly caused by) the fact that I, and most Americans, have been doing politics exclusively through our phones for the last decade. Sure, I attended demonstrations, read a few long-form journalistic and political books, and voted every year, but the majority of my information emanated from the feed, and most of my political discourse was happening in DMs.
Taking it all in from behind the black mirror, it is easy to disassociate. How could one person absorb it all? I don’t have time to sit and meditate on every little tragedy that happens around the globe—but I could post about them. On the internet, it is generally unacceptable to take a grieving period.1 No, almost as soon as something happens, you must have an answer, a diagnosis, an aesthetic infographic! Take action, they say. What action? You may ask. We’re not sure, but reposting that infographic, that black square, that watermelon emoji, is good enough for now.
It is an admirable thing to feel the desire to do something when the inspiration strikes, in fact, capitalizing on momentum is absolutely critical to creating lasting change. But in a world where the 24/7 news cycle delivers us terrible news almost every minute, flipping tables and storming the streets whenever you see something outraging would get old fast. The alternatives, though, are either to engage in a kind of either total disassociation in which you’re so out of touch with what’s happening that you seem entirely unprincipled, or to be so politically hyperactive on socials, bouncing rapidly between local, national and international injustices, that you potentially spread misinformation in the wreckage of your derailed train of thought.2 Living like this, as a super-online social justice warrior with constant “political awareness” left me exhausted, pessimistic, and paralyzed.
Everything starts with good intentions. I have a degree in sociology with a focus on social justice, so I too, love to run current events through the flow-chart of various schools of critical thought. I dogmatically believe in C. Wright Mills’ philosophical legacy of illuminating connections between private life and public issues. Too often, however, these are conceptual gymnastics that distract me from meaningfully grappling with human reality.
I recently read this note about Barack Obama’s handwritten letters. I was touched by the explanation, apparently told to the journalist Doris Kearns Goodwin, that had to do with attention. The idea that you cannot process something, really understand the gravity of something, without taking time to attend3 to it. Obama did this through hand-writing.
the physical act of pressing the pen against the paper compelled a quality of attention that simply typing could not replicate, a philosophy rooted in his years as a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago from 1992 to 2004, where he developed the conviction that democracy only functions when its leaders remain genuinely, uncomfortably close to the specific gravity of individual human suffering rather than processing it from the insulating distance of institutions and screens. (Emphasis mine)
(If only that humanistic perspective had applied to the hundreds of civilian casualties of his vastly expanded drone strike program, which I can’t help but feel haunts any mention of his legacy.)
I have a neighbor who says, and seems to genuinely believe, that school shootings are a Hollywood production, ie, hoax. When I first heard this, it was less shocking than enlightening to me: is this the darkest place we go to when public and personal grieving is skipped? When we are, as a culture, so deeply uncomfortable and ill-equipped to grapple with suffering that we go to abstract, even conspiratorial lengths to distract from, or deny painful realities? How about when we aestheticize them?4
I want to be clear that this is not about discouraging critical thinking about systems and patterns, it’s about ceasing to play philosopher, and not treating real human experiences as intellectual puzzles to solve; our interpretation and subsequent cerebral refining and compartmentalizing of current events as emotionless as if navigating them were our full time jobs (and we were counting down the days to retirement).
Life in the Information Age is synonymous with information overload. It makes sense that we would be forced to develop strict boundaries with reality through conceptualization. Zen thinking has something to say about this. “Zen is not necessarily against words,” writes Daisetz T. Suzuki in Zen and Japanese Culture, “but it is well aware of the fact that they are always liable to detach themselves from realities and turn into conceptions. And this conceptualization is what Zen is against… Zen insists on handling the thing itself and not an empty abstraction.”
When B said that the horrors of the current immigration policy “made him sad,” my gut reaction to scoff at his sentimentality was a blatant warning that I too, was headed down the road towards “empty abstractions,” or, total disassociation. I was in my mid-twenties, already way too late in life to learn that to treat human suffering as an intellectual diversion was arrogant indeed. That I found it naive, or out of touch to publicly grieve was a wake up call. B was handling the thing itself. Which, even if just for a moment, is the first step to everything that comes next.
Actually, I’m sure there was a viral Tiktok trend around the election of girls crying into their front-facing cameras.
This is a nonpartisan archetype, for the record.
Attend as a verb form for the act of paying attention is borrowed from Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement
No spoilers, but this is in reference to a certain 2026 dramatic film.
Such a treat to read this today. Your writing is always illuminating. So proud to call you my friend. -xo, Kelly