You May Be Feeling

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 ab...

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...

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 ar...

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....

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...

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...

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 m...

 My name is Caitlin, and I’m an HSP.  HSP stands for highly sensitive person.  Cue the eye roll, I know.    Believe me, I appreciate how fucking precious it sounds to announce that you’re a highly sensitive person.  Right out of the gate even.  Like, wow.  Look at you . But, the truth is, after so many years, living my life, winding my way through the world, wondering why I always feel so porous a...