Signs of Life

“I’m thinking about starting a Substack.” This phrase is tough for me to say. Pretty much everything about being yet another white guy spouting his opinions—at length, in uninterrupted and overstyled prose—feels highly unasked-for. To make matters worse, it occurs to me that apologies such as this one have probably kicked off many a white man’s first Substack. I guess one of the things that the Substack-varietal white man has going for him is that he’s at least somewhat self-aware—though, if we know better, you gotta wonder why we don’t just stop while we’re ahead.

But getting on Substack is not about spouting my point of view. Actually, the “my POV” part is what I find so uncomfortable. For a long time, I’ve been pulled by the digital riptide to an increasingly anesthetized way of living—buried in my best friend, my phone, who trustily provides me with an endless stream of content to while away my short hours on this earth. I estimate that I’m hooked to a steady backing track of the stuff for anywhere from 60-100% of almost every day.

I feel compelled to note: I try to keep it relatively high-quality. Like any good Substack-varietal white man, I’m staying up to date with my Thoughtful Interviews (Sam Fragoso’s “Talk Easy” and Her Highness Terry Gross’s evergreen “Fresh Air”); Female-Forward Forums (Amy Poehler’s “Good Hang,” true to its name, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s always-illuminating “Wiser Than Me”); talked-about HBO (“The Pitt” and “The Last of Us”), talked-about Netflix (“The Diplomat,” “Great British Bake Off”), and talked-about Apple TV (“Severance,” “The Studio”). Listing all of that instantly makes me self-conscious of just how many hours I’ve passed in passive consumption mode, as well as how many other things I’ve excluded which you can bet I’ve guzzled as hungrily as I did the better stuff. Point is, I’m at least as much of a foie gras goose as you are—reality tv excepted, which (I blushingly brag) is where I have successfully imposed some self-restraint.

The effect of this anesthesia, and the reason why I feel the pull here, is precisely that I have less and less clarity on what I really think and feel. In her February essay how it is from her thot pudding Substack, Sarah Thankam Mathews argued:

Living as a subject of authoritarianism, in the long term, for most people, is like having termites slowly take up residence in your mind. The seductive promise of fascism, many intellectuals have observed, is you do not have to think about other people. Everyone who you’re not concerned with or dislike gets to be NPC.

Mathews is speaking directly on the subject of real, imminent authoritarianism, yes, but I read it in an extrapolated translation for how I live my days, a lab rat sweating in anticipation of the next hit. We cradle the regime in our grubby little hands. It coaxes us to distance us from ourselves. We swipe to the next reel and, very quickly, make ourselves the other people who we don’t have to think about. We become the NPC.

Substack seems to be one of the few alcoves of the internet where long-form reflective thought survives. (Reddit is also a wonderland, when used right.) In the last few days, I’ve dipped in and out of essays on music streaming by Gabriel Kahane; a lyrical play-by-play of a US Open match by Brandon Taylor; a haunting little fiction exercise by Laurie Stone; and that essay (more a bulleted list) on American politics by Mathews, quoted and linked above.

I don’t have time for this right now, nor do I really feel authorized to opine on this, but I will just briefly note that for a while I was looking to the New York Times, The Atlantic, and others for this kind of clarity. The Atlantic’s feverish (and baseless) fearmongering over Zohran Mamdani’s antisemitism demonstrated that, insofar as honest reflection goes, I might need to look elsewhere. This is not to suggest that I’m sliding down the slippery slope into I-Do-My-Own-Research Land. I highly value the traditional newsroom with all the trimmings. But Substack is refreshing because it seems to be a place where people report—via essays, humor, fiction, music, art—from the field of their own minds and hearts, having trained themselves to be the backstop against their tendencies to judge. It’s up to one’s own discernment, both as reader and writer, to separate insight from misdirection.

Unfortunately, shoddy discernment is why we as a culture and nation are where we are. But I also think it’s the only way out. The time it’s taken me to gather these thoughts is the least distracted I’ve been all day, and while I’ll probably backslide into some gabby entertainment to wind down tonight, I will at least have taken a small step toward sensitive critical thought—or, at least, the patient organization of straw-grasping through grammar and syntax.

There’s a little torture chamber next to my heart of hearts where I nurture a belief that I’ve got an above-average head sitting on my shoulders. I often throw myself into projects through which I attempt to prove this to the world in one grand swoop—always falling short, incapacitated by selfishness, panic, impatience, you name it. The marquee achievements of my life so far have been (a) a generally decent level of cello playing and (b) an arts nonprofit organization for which I work as Executive and Artistic Director. Both meaningfully represent me, and have taken shape through years of a hell of a lot of slow work, help, and mistakes. The compliment I most enjoy hearing is not, “you’re amazing” but “you’ve gotten better.”

I hope joining Substack might help me climb out of my stupor and train myself to think a little more sensitively and critically, if not all the time, at least a narrow majority of it. I will try to post regularly but infrequently enough to allow space for thoughtful revision. Maybe at some point later someone will tell me I’ve gotten better. Maybe that someone will be me.

Sarah Thankam Mathews’s essay concludes with: “The best way to convince our shared enemies, and yourself, that you’re not NPC, is to play.”