Good afternoon gorgeous readers. This is an unusual post of mine. Although on my page you typically see think-pieces, those that mingle around the topic of writing, culture and whatnot, I have decided to begin a new monthly series where you, the reader, get an insight of my favorite reading material for the previous month. Ranging from fiction to nonfiction and even other Substack pieces, I will discuss what I have thoroughly enjoyed during the month.

JULY, MY LOVE! For the first of this series I will share my top four reads from the month, and as it was a scorching month full of hope and heat, I only hope that the reading recommendations reflect that.

1. Seascraper by Benjamin Wood

   

I came across this book as it was written by a professor at my university and it had also won the Nero book award and I thought hmm why not? With full honesty my interest in reading it also came from a desire to interview him for my university’s paper. But although the incentive to pick it up was quite a means to an end, I did enjoy it!

I did not think I would like it, but the prose that it had was slightly gloomy and extremely poetic and the depiction of the characters was quite human and compelling.

To briefly explain, the novel follows the story of Thomas Fleet, a twenty year old shrimp fisher in a northern English town who lives with his mother and seems quite unhappy with his mundane life. That is until an eccentric and hard to trust American filmmaker offers him a life changing opportunity.

I totally recommend this book to anyone who likes books that feel uncertain and whose protagonists are trying to find themselves. It’s quite a pithy book but it kept me hooked throughout the entire time.

2. “Why are we digging up through our grandparent’s things?” by

This is a wildly underrated piece I stumbled across on substack about the nature of vintage artifacts in relation to past generations, filial relationships and luxury. It’s a great anecdotal meditation where Natalia, the author, meditates on how nostalgia and its aestheticization is a constant navigating force in our lives.

Reading the piece made me think of Joan Didion’s quote “we tell each other stories in order to live” simply because old relics and artefacts that we like keeping in it themselves tell a story—and as nostalgic people we somehow need that to live. This piece makes one realize that aestheticizing the past and old artefacts helps us craft a reality of a past we never got to experience.

I won’t spoil it further so you should most definitely read the piece for yourself by clicking here!

3. “How the Elite see Rome”

This is an interesting piece I read that was published in The Atlantic which explores a travel agency founded by Italian art historian Fulvio De Bonis. The travel agency ‘Imago Artis Travel’ created for wealthy individuals allows them to explore hidden or secret parts of Rome or alternatively visit them during quiet times, when all the tourists are not present. For instance, individuals who book with this agency have the opportunity to step into the private gardens of the Vatican or get a hold of private collections by Italian artists.

As someone who feels strongly about class inequality and yet still finds the lives of the wealthy quite interesting, it was quite a fascinating read. Also who doesn’t love Rome! or would yearn to visit Rome? especially if you are a lover of culture and the arts. And who wouldn’t totally yearn to get hold of private places, those which are not crowded or brimming with tons of tourists trying to take a picture at the same place?

Go read the piece for yourself at the Atlantic’s homepage.

4. The World According to Joan Didion

To anyone who loves Didion and who looks up to her for being the queen B of sharp and journalistic prose, this book is the perfect summer read. It gives the reader a really good insight into her life in periodic chapters. Each chapter of the book is named after a particular noun that is related to her life, ranging from ‘snake’ to ‘girl’ it goes in depth into small and larger aspects of her life in a nuanced manner.

The author does a great job at looking at her life from the inside and without having to compare it to another female writer. It also does the job of looking at her life in a transparent manner and in an apolitical manner despite including discussions about Didion’s own political landscape.

I think after reading the famous nonfiction book read by all the so-called ‘it-girls’ called ‘Didion and Babitz’ I was put off by any biography of Didion, or to be more specific I was wary of picking another biography. But I still yearned for one that really gave me the bits and flakes of her own life in a way that wasn’t done half-assed or with a tone of animosity, and this one quite did it!

I got this book secondhand for six quid so I am positive you could get it for a similar price too!

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I hope you get to get a hold of any of these recommendations and that you are able to lay down your thoughts with me if that is the case!

For now, get into your book, comment down below what you’ve read recently and until next week!

I am incredibly sorry you are reading this. I apologize for your eyes having to meet the pixels of the screen, so bright, monotonous, and robotic that all of its uniqueness, or what can be called ‘uniqueness’ cannot be seen.

Although you cannot know these words without me mentioning it, I wrote these words on paper. In my hardbound notebook with ivory coloured pages. A notebook that has Klimt’s ‘The Kiss’ as the face of the cover. The notebook has idiosyncrasy —personality—history and sensorial aspects to it.

The notebook has all of this in a way that a google docs, scribble or any technological application for writing doesn’t.

And this is not a defense of paper simply because it is traditional or old. Not at all. One of the reasons this is a defense of paper is because it can restore what technology has eroded in our psychology.

I mean, writers and readers alike have had their ears flooded with the idea that AI will steal and get rid of that one thing they love the most: words. Or at least authentic words, written by humans.

That repeated idea that it will happen has in some way or another instilled some fear into us –writers—creators–creatives. And that fear isn’t unfounded. With the oversaturation of Artificially generated content all over platforms, especially Substack where one is now forced to be incredibly cautious to enjoy any piece in case you are reading a machine’s syntax, and not the stream of consciousness of a writer. Their artistic anatomy–their authentic ideas that came to them in the most random, unexpected and untargeted moments. In the shower, on the commute home or in the loo.

And what a shame, that as I started writing this, I felt the devouring urge to declare, like goods at the airport that the emdashes I have used, are not a result of artificially generated writing. But rather are a result of my authentic style of writing—my stream of consciousness that is not only used by me, but by tons of other writers who are authentic to their craft.

This has led me to have a gut feeling that in some way or another the next generation of writers –the ones whose works will define the next literary movement will feel a need to constantly apologize and explain the thought process behind their work. Or even more so, begin to reject perfection in their syntax, or grammar.

This is a tentative prediction of mine, that the next literary movement—straying away from the current contemporary one will be defined by nothing but imperfection.

This thought came to me specifically as I was having a conversation in an academic circle. where in preparation for an essay based examination a girl present said that she not only records both her screen as she writes and herself during the process, but she makes sure to deliberately leave a grammar mistake or an extra long sentence to ensure that the markers would be convinced her writing is hers and not AI.

Although this only occurred in an academic setting, I’d argue, this is both foreshadowing for the future of creatives and a microscope for how creatives feel.

Yet, this only proves that AI, no matter how evil it can be in the world of a creative, has given us a chance to start a revolution. To say no to technology in our writing process and reconnect with the holy page. Of course this is not to say that this revolution MUST be extremely radical to the extent that all technology cannot be used anymore. What can be done and should be done is limiting that technology in our process.

I have always found the blank screen of a computer or a word/google docs slightly engulfing–sort of daunting and limiting. The screen stares back at the writer with the limiting eyes of expectation. Hissing with judgement, it reflects all of the worst fears and mannerisms of perfectionism that any creative can have.

And the screen is all of this. Whilst AI generates perfect content that is robotic and almost eerie (as well as inhuman of course) the page seeks imperfection. As cliché as it sounds, the page invites messiness: the spilled quill of your fountain pen, scribbling doodles on the corner of the page as you are thinking, even the spilled stains of the writer’s drink.

Even when you write something you did not want to, the page gives you no option but to scratch the words over with ink. And that in itself leaves a mark. A mark which I now see as a sign of rebellion. A rebellion which I believe we will start seeing more often.

It also must be acknowledged that the relationship between the writer and the page is a sacred one. Like that between the Christian disciple and the word.

It restores the soul and nourishes the intellect of the writer and their creativity.

Not only can you express your style in terms of handwriting more freely than in a computer, but as a pen flows smoothly so do ideas. A page does not necessarily welcome a finished draft or a finished thought, it welcomes cursive handwriting whose flowiness is mirrored in the mind of those who are writing.

Start writing on paper and you’ll see your words and thoughts flowing smoother and clearer than before. Only now, in the last twenty years have writers begun to get a hold on technological devices to accompany them during their writing time.

The best writers of all time, Charles Dickens’s, Didion (before the 2010s) Shelley, Susan Sontag, Shakespeare, Donna Tartt, Kurt Vonnegut, Ernest Hemingway, Plath, Dostoyevsky… among many others have all written their excellent, canonical works on paper.

Even contemporary writers such as Stephen King and George R.R Martins have ditched the screen for the pen.

And after it all, like the woman, the writer must free themselves from the societal prescribed high heeled shoe. Sure, the sound of the clanking in the pavement, like fingers on the keyboard, sounds smooth. You feel confident at once, and powerful. But you stumble, your toe fingers begin getting blisters, you ask the person you are strutting with if they can slow down for you. Like the woman, the writer must say no to the high heeled shoe. No to the pain of expectation, no to the arduous nature of it all. No to the slow process of an uncomfortable and artificially made shoe.

Instead, the writer must embrace walking in nature, bare-footed in a comfortable position in which they are able to walk, strut, and run comfortably. And if they wish to stop and ponder in their midst of their own walking, let it be out of their own will and not because their mode of walking has forced them to.

So it is not only me saying it, how the revolution starts on paper. But it’s your finger too, telling you to ditch the clanking sound of the keyboard for the softness of the pen. Your brain telling you to ditch brightness for the son of a tree trunk—and your creative legacy whispering to you all the unleashed lines and points you could make if you trusted the ink more instead of the keyboard.

Until next week xx

Doomscrolling? During the Roman Empire? the age of grandiose elegance and civilisation? Before this 21st century age of technology, where the thumb is materially made for the malady of screen kissing?

Nonsense!

But before the high pitched voice inside of you allows you to render this as the pinnacle of historical inaccuracy, make yourself some tea because you are going to be subject to either intellectual blitzkrieg, or perhaps the most obscure observation made from the tiny tabs of my hag-like typewriter.

Amid the release of the (rather nauseating) Epstein files, the normalised hegemonic reign of the high screen times, and Trump’s blasphemous AI picture of himself as Christ, I have come to the thought that doomscrolling is not exclusive to this century. Nor was it birthed during it. All of this time, we have gotten the concept of doomscrolling wrong. Both spatially and contextually. And this is the exact reason as to why we have failed to become judicious doctors and find its cure.

Before we thank the wondrous Roman emperor Augustus for fracturing our thumbs with the curse of requesting quick morsels for entertainment, it is wise to first look at what we understand under the umbrella of ‘doomscrolling’ and the symptoms that can be identified under it.

To the modern audience, doomscrolling is as simple as the consumption of quick snappy content that if it were more than 35 seconds long, it would be sacrilege to the religion of their short attention spans.

But, like the content that is being consumed, it would be superficial to terminate its definition right there.

64 percent of Americans and 81 percent of Gen Z doomscroll, but the root-cause of the patient’s sickness is rarely identified. The appropriate word to begin this exploration would be the greek word ‘epithymetikon’ which in english translates to “appetitive” or “desirable.” Plato utilised this term to describe the lowest part of the human soul, one which is filled with animalistic and tribal desires that are widely physical.

Plato would call us weak, knowing that when we doomscroll, the addiction feels so strong as though our sickly damned fingers have been spiked by our silly little portable telephonic boxes. And although to anyone who doomscrolls (like a nauseated dog in bed amidst that wrestle of your mind telling your body to stop and stand up but you continue anyway) it is admittable that nothing ever feels so strong as that magnetic pull.

But, if our eyes have the capability of paying enough attention for more than five seconds, by the Platonian logic of ‘epithymetikon’, the root-cause of doomscrolling is also the root cause for the human lust of banal things. Among those, of course, entertainment.

Entertainment (cinema, concerts, video games, the sight of the life of others) is regarded as the vehicle which sustains this animalistic appetite. But then, to think of it as something exclusive to doomscrolling is certainly very 21st century-centered. It would be to ignore the patterns of how humans have long lived in an inquisition for emotional stimuli and spectacle.

So, given that this appetite that drives our doomscrolling precedes the screen, it isn’t foolish to say that the origins lead back to Rome.

Gladiatorial Games as the Origin, (and yes, I yearn for them)

To a modern, virtue signalling mind, the spectacle of gladiatorial shows could never have any kinship with scrolling social media without ceasing. The crimson blood, the spectacle of the armours, the vestment, the cheering and disgust could never lack that much physical detriment as sitting in the corner of your bedroom and being married off to the screen. But, close your eyes and think this for a second: imagine sitting in the circus maximus or the colosseum and seeing two gladiators combat each other, you rooting for one participant, your blood pressure is up and the sight of each move gives you more dopamine than the other. In its effect and psychological manner, that is no different than clickbait on youtube, a video on Tiktok telling you a conspiracy theory about the Epstein files and missing children such as Madeleine McCann oscillating between videos of ring-wing and left-wing protestors clashing on the street.

Except, Romans had their legs hooked by a rational leash and had to move them, whether they liked it or not, to receive entertainment. They needed human proximity to even receive their version of a dopamine hit.

In sensorial terms, their doomscrolling was the same, but structurally? Good luck babe trying to argue it is the same.

In Rome (where it all started arguably and where it all leads to) the individual had breaks in between the spectacles, making it all finite. The bodies of both the gladiators, the emperors and the attendees wore out, and of course, the sun set, making the crowd disperse.

What I am trying to say is that the appetite had its space and time.

And goodness gracious, you can call me naive for yearning for this type of entertainment, but there is certainly a type of uneasiness in you knowing that our version of doomscrolling encounters absolutely no friction. And by friction I mean a bump in its road, a separation that does not make that said entertainment absolutely endless and constantly accessible.

If Plato is right and our soul is indeed divided in three parts: reason (logistikon) spirit (thymoeides) and appetite (epithymetikon) for the Roman population, there was a limit imposed on the appetite of their soul, that prevented it from exacerbating completely. But us? Despite being offered slight bumps that place a limit on our appetite, like the sight of a park, or a book, or even the notion of a friend being in town, we often reject it by continuing the quest of our doomscrolling.

A study made by the Journal of Consumer Research disclosed that Americans look at their phones 205 times a day and as a whole spend 4 hours and 30 minutes per day on their devices.

Romans, by comparison, had their games restricted by Augustus to only two per year. Of course this did not mean that there were no other spectacles occurring during this time, but the difference in time and accessibility of entertainment was limited.

This exact comparison, is why there’s a yearning within me for the type of roman entertainment, or doomscrolling if you wish to stick to the name, which by now contains connotations that boil the surface of my skin and remind me of all the days, possibly accumulated years of my life I have lost.

Amid this intellectual blitzkrieg, if you could even call it that, I’ve come to think we are both the gladiators (except you’d tend to think those are the celebrities and influences) and also the crowd. Of course what we will never be are the emperors. Those are too at the top, and too cleverly in power for us to ever relate to them.

Take the famous Syrian gladiator Flamma as an example for our interchangeable nature between the gladiator and the crowd. He, being a captured soldier, became incredibly famous for his 21 victories in the span of 34 fights, but he refused what Romans called rudis (freedom) about four times.

Ponder not of his success, but think rather of his refusal to be extricated from the entire gruesome dynamic. You probably deemed him a body without brains, or deem his brain as splattered across the sandy pavement of the colosseum for denying something as desirable as freedom. But making a mockery of him would be like reviling Judas while working on earning a doctorate on sinning. (Like all of us do)

If you were not at the zenith of cancel culture back when X was still twitter in 2020, this would not remind you of anything. But since I was, it reminded me of when Selena Gomez was vocal about her toxic relationship with social media, announcing a “break” to being seen weeks later posting selfies in her bathroom. Goodness it’s like the screen has narcotics in it. And let us not pretend it is only celebrities that are like this. If anything we are worse. To entertain, celebrities do not even have to post. With the several employees, assistants and individuals that they have, they don’t even have to doomscroll to entertain. They can be entertaining all they wish while sunbathing and reading a book.

What all types of entertainment do have in common though, is the fact that disturbingly and I suppose obvious to many, we will never be the emperors, the presidents, the ones in charge who conduct all of this panem et circenses. And if we listen to Aristotle and accept that through the god-given feature of our logos, we are political animals by nature, and if we listen to Plato, advising us to become the philosopher King we’d have to learn how to gallop the horses of our reason and our moral character.

Yet, with the oversaturation of content we consume daily, even while we attempt to get in touch with organic ways of entertainment—ones that nourish our intellect and make our brains flourish: nature, books, giving to the poor, engaging in eloquent conversation, keeping a journal, we simply are too enthralled and too interrupted by what is going on in our phones and around us for it all to have a real effect on our intellect.

An article published by the BBC argues that individuals with smartphone addiction (in other words, all of us) struggle to deal with emotions and respond adequately to stress.

so Plato was right. As long as our souls are appetite-ridden, we will never reach that state of sagacious leadership, both in our personal lives and in politics.

—

As I think of Flamma’s ending: dying at the age of thirty, I began wondering if we are going to face the same fate. Death, perhaps not of our bodies, but the time and years of our lives, parts of our soul looking at Epstein conspiracy theories, foolish AI pictures generated by the president of the United States alongside memetic warfare of Charlie Kirk pictures. But this year is the year of the horse, so maybe if we put our minds and spirit to it, and throw away our phones, in a Serena van der Woodsen style, we’ll perhaps sign our divorce papers with doomscrolling, and get our souls to work for good.

Until next week

xx

I Despise writing. In fact, I see what I am doing now as a chore. An obligation by birthright, and a mission settled by some internal desire. At 10 I started writing stories on paper. At 13 I started writing poems. And at 15 I settled that this was going to be my identity by profession and passionate recreation.

But this somehow feels like not being able to eat and wanting to—having to force feed the words out of your mouth. I wonder if this is how 21st century housewives feel. Choosing to embody a role, without any force, in that role having an assumed love for it, and yet it feeling like a chore. I suppose too, there’s some air of dominance in my assumption that modern housewives dislike the rundown of their duties.

I suppose that’s a poor simile. In some way or another, the mimetic duty of my authorship to convey truth even through beautiful words fails tremendously. But there lay no other way to describe this conflict as a writer. Or I had rather found no one at all that could capture this sentiment as a writer themselves.

That is, until one insignificant afternoon, I stumbled upon a rather interesting video as I doomscrolled on my cellular device:

It showed American literary sensation Joan Didion in the year 1977, after her first public reading uttering controversial words in front of an audience that quite possibly revered her sharp literary hand.

Without any sort of public shame or substantial hesitation she stated the following:

“I like writing but I think it’s a lot of fun. I mean when you’re writing a book you’re writing it in a kind of…dread…that it is not going to be as good as you hoped it would be. There’s a kind of joy that takes over at the end but its too…its right in the edge of not being joy”

When I heard these words, I felt a relief that towered over me, almost kissed me.

I had finally found someone that understood my literary hole of doom and dread. And it was not some cheap aspiring writer in a café that said it. It was an accomplished, pioneering woman. Surprisingly one of my biggest inspirations.

But still, these words felt quite jarring. As a reality to either Didion’s life or mine.

They were almost counterintuitive—especially because the constitution of a writer’s identity consists—or should consist of the constant movement of hand and mind to wield words together.

But what is truly a writer? can you place the profession–the body that embodies the identity into a boxing definition? I tentatively suppose that a writer is just an individual who uses written words in different writing styles, genres, and techniques to communicate ideas, to inspire feelings or to entertain.

It never includes the words “joy,” “enjoyment,” or “happiness.” And yet, it is inferred. Deeply so. It is assumed, in the subtext, and in the undertones of the definition that enjoyment is part of the identity. There was choice in the creation of that active vocation, therefore there must be some active passion in it.

Individuals, the 9-5 daughters and sons to the hamster wheels of capitalism desperately yearn on quitting their job —escaping the diabolical “matrix” to thread words by candlelight.

But the reality is that being in the suit of a writer, and calling yourself an author—having the bones of authorship can be defined as being a teacher—assigning yourself homework while simultaneously being a student. I’m having homework assigned by myself to myself. Therefore, it is feeling like having this life duty, a birthright to fulfill, and then you die. Your words then, your art, takes your place on this earth.

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During this time of perpetual homework, you then have some hope that your words climb to a summit where everyone else can read, validate or squeeze the value out of them–take something away.

However, this is never verbalized, at least not loud enough on platforms for everyone to hear. And yet, one of the most prolific writers of the literary canon was not afraid to utter it.

The exact moment she stated that it is right on the edge of “joy” but “not quite,” that perfectly captured my relationship to writing.

Toward the end, when a writing project approaches its sunset, when the words are engraved, pretty-sounding and I read them, that is exactly where I find the joy of writing to be at. I suppose in some way or another, as I am writing this, I am enjoying the way the words meet themselves in order to generate the semantic meaning and reach the metaphorical beauty that is envisioned for them. But still, there is a tingling anxiety on my fingertips and the outside layer of my skin that the words will reach the people I want, or that they will live in vain.

But there’s too, a diabolical literary anxiety found in wanting your words to be read and heard.

Especially with the widespread idea that if you write something for no one else to read it does not matter and there is no point. And that is somewhat, if not entirely true. Writing for no one to read, feels as though you conduct a conversation with the wall. Purposeless. Vainful. foolish.

It’s not at all like that one famous phrase “dance like no one’s watching.” That does not apply. You want to write and let everyone (or rather, the right audience) watch. You crave, yearn and wish for it. All unless you write for mere enjoyment by pen and paper in a journal.

Some months back I wrote a piece titled ‘Babe, you’re not just a writer, you’re a finance bro…’ where I discussed the mere impossibility of the modern writer being able to just be a writer. In this economy, the literary influencer one, as a writer, if you wish to succeed, you have to be acquainted with the rules of social media, of marketing and of numbers.

So, I guess that’s where some of my hatred and preoccupation with writing stems from, where to me, it becomes a herculean task. Its arduous nature of having to build your own literary empire from scratch, and lonesomely, learning from crumbs here and there from the internet about its procedure.

And, to call the act of having to write as ‘having homework’ would be inaccurate too. For even in the four thin and dull walls of schools, homework comes with the sound of community and mentorship to the side. Writing does not have that, at least not inherently.

But homework comes with a duty anyway. And the mission of a scholar, a student, an individual going through a period of learning, or that has a specific duty never has enjoyment as part of it all. (At least as an imperative.)

What Would Aristotle Think of Hating Writing as a Writer?

Aristotle, the Greek philosopher who wrote ‘poetics,’ the earliest surviving work of Greek dramatic theory did not have enjoyment in the end goal of the writer.

Surely, he advocated for what is called ‘eudamonia’ but this is not simply mere enjoyment or pleasure. It meant achieving that through virtuous action, through and cultivation. I suppose carrying the act of writing with these actions is what Aristotle envisioned in his Telos of the writer.

But still, I cannot just ignore the fact that perhaps it’s easier to reach this end goal—this telos with some privilege to the side. Prolific female writers like Didion and Plath, had the privilege (although rather ironic to say this) to have married other writers who served as their editors. (For having one in this economy is only for the wealthy or the well-off.)

But others, like Woolf, despite stating that women need time and a room of their own, also had a husband—Leonard Woolf, as a mentor and editor of her work.

I have this supposition, now that if I did not have to be a teacher while also being a student—if I had some writing community, some editor to guide my ideas by a leash, then perhaps I wouldn’t have this preoccupation, this dread when writing.

Joan Didion had her editors, her husband and her circle of literary excellence, and yet she felt the same way. So perhaps it is not about this. It is about learning how to love writing the way it is. For to love something enough, to have sufficient passion for it, would be to love it raw. With its imperfections and annoyances and its burdens. To love it without any additives, botox, or decorations.

So I do not know. I hate writing, but I suppose it is not about enjoyment but about mission. And to simply not write is not an option, for it would be to let myself be a statue and let paint be chipped off my face for the rest of eternity.

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Thank you for reading!

Blue. Maroon. Navy. Deep coral: the colours associated with the two extremities in the spectrum of human sentiments: passion and despair.

Our veins, our blood and arteries that connect our bodies hold the colour of love. Of a chord—of chords, threads, small ropes, that remind us of the state of attachment. I mean, without philosophizing on it too much, the body holds itself with threads emblematic of passion, that it is almost as if we were handcrafted with the inherent clay of attachment. Eve naturally bound to Adam and Adam naturally bound to Eve. As if we were perpetually designed to crave and yearn for human connection that we cannot help but love every person in our lives too deeply to not want to let them go.

Each vein in the human body makes me think that these were predetermined threads for our current attachments:

Your favorite ex who cannot seem to leave you alone. Your best friend. Your grandmother. Your wife. Your dearest group of friends. Your girlfriend. Your friend whom you consider a brother.

And my goodness, attachment does not even solely constitute interpersonal relationships. To think of them that way would be to expel a holistic perception.

Attachments can be as elusive and intangible as a job, future plans. Your favorite idea. Your favorite song, film, the idea of something in relation to its future potency.

Of course we do not think of our attachments in relation to our body vessels when we are commuting and living our daily routines. We just simply feel them. And, if we strip the bandage of honesty, no one is ever thinking of this. (unless you are a philosopher-theorizer-thinker.)

We frankly wake up and use our bodies without giving an inkling to what constitutes them. Wake up and think of your problems. Think of what happened yesterday night at the reunion with your friends. Think being late to school, university, a meeting, a job, an errand. What you have to cook for tonight. How you are going to impress that person. How much you miss-love-despise an individual.

Titular characters do not think of anything else other than the constituting threads of their life plot.

so, while we are walking through streets, though, or sitting down wherever it might be— when we breathe, we hand-wash our eyeballs with the soap of sickly desperate yearning. Hence, why we cannot think of anything else, our sight and perception being stuck in this four-squared lovelorn painting of attachment.

Scrub the soap in one eyeball: Oh but how I need this job and how I hope I never lose this person. I can’t ever lose my bestfriend, or my partner.

Put a few ounces of water to counter balance the soap and you begin feeling the revolving door in your stomach aching to see that person today, desiring that their sentiments are drowning in the thought of you. Maybe that desperate yearning is not even associated with any specific face, but the idea of a face: to touch and to be touched.

We have singlehandedly become soapmarkers. My goodness when you enter a store, even the cornerstore—the soap of attachment is all that is bought. And our routines are dedicatedly and subconsciously catered to be that yearning-attached denizen.

The singlehanded creation of playlists consisting of “love” songs that caress our feelings of being lovelorn. Songs that whisper into the ear of attachment saying that it was not created to be as solitary as Frankenstein’s monster.

Spotify states that you listened to music a total of 76.357 minutes alone this year. Cool! 80% of those minutes, you spent thinking about the state of your human connections and existed without the phonetic awareness of the street sounds, or the conversation of the individual next to you on the public transport.

We spend hours doomscrolling on social media platforms such as Tiktok, expecting the videos in it to satisfy our doubts and our anxieties over our personal connections.

We spend our time shortly before the clock hits 12:00 on New Years curating vision boards to `manifest´ a particular lifestyle, a particular someone, a particular experience which we so desperately want and believe we need.

We even resort to the showbiz of devilish lies that prey on our emotional desperation such as horoscopes and tarot cards to validate or deny the state of our attachments.

An article published by titled “Why crushes are killing your creativity,” verbalises another side of this pretty well. She argues that the time we spend yearning, idealizing and thinking about a crush consumes the time we could actually be spending on our creative thinking and projects.

So, essentially, all of this accumulates to constitute what I call the `yearning-man economy.` because although we live by the currency of money, time is another currency which we take for granted. And certainly, it is perpetually stolen by our interpersonal attachments and the Aristotelian potency of our aspirations.

I came face to face with this said economy which has surreptitiously hidden itself under our skin and the pavement floors when I was commuting. And frankly I could not tell you where I was commuting, or when this was. Back then I had Coldplay’s album “Parachute” blasting through my ear, exacerbating my personal yearning and romanticism. My sight simultaneously fixating on the trickling raindrops of the doubledecker’s window and my mind bathing in the fears of my hand being cut away from anything in my life.

In the distant background though, I could hear a small sound infiltrating the world of my yearning, slowly seeping itself into the bonds of my physiological anatomy—my veins. I thought it was a product of my frenzy, but it continued, whispering on and on.

My curiosity led my hands then, to remove the musical apparatus from my ears and mentally fight, perhaps with internal diatribe, whatever was disturbing my yearning time—my self-absorbed flaneuring.

I began then, hearing a loud Bell ringing, sort of robotically in the back. And it almost hit me wrongly as I guided my sight upwards to get a better grasp on the sound.

And God! It was the cathedral’s bell! I had unbelievably been taking the same route for months now, and I had never realized that St. Paul’s Cathedral let its golden bell scream in a vehement cadence the birth of every hour.

It was as if the sound had rubbed my cataractic eyes and granted me sight of the city’s face. The individuals next to me, the sight of the streets from upwards, its backbone, the sun rays illuminating the statues that preceded my birth by thousands of years.

I then decided to descend the public transport and exit to the underbelly of the city, and I felt myself elevating into a feeling of smallness, and of Sonder: the realization that everyone has a life of their own.

The neoclassical and Victorian Architecture of England’s capital city embraced me by each side, reminding me of the greatest figures whose feet kissed the same ground I was in: Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Shakespeare. I felt small, but small with the perfume of intense possibility.

I looked right, left, north, south east and looked at each street with wonder. Wondering how my day–my week–my life might change if I walk down a specific route. The individuals that I might meet, new windows that I might peek into, the new ideas that might emerge if I see a different facet, different page of a book.

I looked upwards and felt the city pulsate with a mixture of exhilaration, siren sounds that remind you of the privilege of being alive.

And the vastness of faces in a city itself, like books in a library, remind you that if you lose someone, that is not the end of your story, no matter how excruciating it might feel. There are just so many other people that you could meet, so many other jobs, places and faces that could open a door to a new life—turn things around.

But what about Towns or small cities?

When I stood in the heart of the city, I realized that towns and small cities are the serpentine exacerbators of the yearning man economy. After all, the anatomy of a town consists of three veins: the sight of the same bodies everyday, the same spoken language and thinnest walls that separate rumour, thought and faces. Towns are inherently designed to be an Orwellian limitation to the idea of endless possibilities. In relationships, friendships, careers, futures, experiences, places, objects, subjects.

The town is and lives in opposition to the fig tree analogy curated by Plath. The analogy utilises the fruits of a fig tree “branching out” with endless hypothetical possibilities for the narrator’s life.

Although Plath has more of an absolutist attitude toward the lives that each fig represents—insinuating that if you pick one, no other can be picked, in a town, there’s no fertile land to plant a fig tree at all. And while in some areas there might be some fertile land to indeed plant them, the tree would only grow a couple figs. Contrastingly, In a vast city—a capital one there are not merely ‘fig trees,’ there are endless backyards and woods brimming with fig trees that branch out into the sky.

Think about it for a second. If you reside in a city like Wyoming with around 587,618 citizens, or Strasbourg in France with around 294.000 denizens there is just a limited amount on what you can do, whom you can meet, the places that can allow you to forget a specific experience you have already lived.

Your partner that broke up with you last week? there’s just so many places you can go, so many faces in between that can allow you to not see that person.

Living in a town is tightening your internal threads and convincing you that there is not, by far, a world out there of eight billion people and over millions of stories to hear from.

A small city or town relies on small crowds and a relative silence, and the whispers of the same old reheated food of what has been already experienced and what is already known. That can be the same circle of friends and same cafes, same cadence in voice, same accent and cuisine. A town is somewhat of a stylized repetition of familiarity, resulting in the belief that what you have already experienced and the individuals you already know are all that there is.

On the contrary, if you reside in a city like New York or London, both with over 8 million individuals residing in them, if it is not planned, you will rarely cross paths with people that you do not wish to see. People that have constituted your yearning in the past history of your life, or that worsen any attachment. What you will come across are the vast, statuesque buildings enclosing you, people like colonies of ants, each with a different story, giving you the opportunity to mend your life, or start again–anew, everyday.

Combined, cities like London and New York have over 10.000 places (social, cultural, gastronomical) to visit. In London alone there are 4,200 new places operating each year, reminding of the sleeplessness that is so inherent to it, the machinations in it. To look upwards and feel the city pulsate with a mixture of exhilaration, siren sounds that remind you of the privilege of being alive. To look to the right and catch a glimpse of not one, or two not three but thousands upon thousands of people that scream to you the endless possibilities of people you can meet, people you can form a life with, that have the potency to show you to others, to an array of places.

Cities are a fast and yet an enduring cure to attachment. If you participate in the market of the yearning man economy—if you feel your body long for specific people, things, ideas, faces and it all burns–burns in the mouth of your stomach and you want it all to end, to feel emotions in a normal manner then ship yourself off to one of Big cities.

Of course, this is not to say that if the thread between you and your best friend of decades broke, or you lost your lifeline partner, a city would automatically solve the pain or attachment . But, it would give you perspective, alleviate it and loosen the emotional bound throughout time, and faster than anywhere else.

And, unlike the mental doomscrolling that constitutes yearning, akin to doomscrolling on social media platforms such as Tiktok, cities naturally induce you into the art of acquaintance. Of going somewhere and hearing an anecdote from someone and that changing your perspective on something, making you feel small, elusive, vulnerable and yet knowing you hold the seeds to plant the fig tree of opportunity. The city, after all, teaches you the art of making it your muse, of letting the music of its street become your object of inspiration, of endless perspective-shifting.

Like every attached individual, when I was born, my veins were created with a deep pious devotion to all the others in my system. They were crafted deliberately thicker and more attached than the usual, with a deep red and blue that would concern any medical eye. But when I gave my first scream and the oxygen of the world first traveled through my nostrils, I knew I was bred to live in the columns of a big city.

So perhaps it is us, in our interwoven threads— Us, in our desperate yearning for the same old people, things and places, scorching with the same old desire that are meant to be loosened by the city. By its bells, by the myriad of car honks, memories, faces, people, pavement, anecdotes and preceding history to remind us that there is so much more to life than the passionate veins in our bodies, and the relationships that precede us.

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I bet you can’t. And yet, you somehow should. We should begin to acclimatise ourselves to such mental picture. Pure visual assininity. I say this with authority, perhaps a tentative authority, because although Virginia Woolf or Charles Dickens have never felt the hard-rock surface of a technological device, the next generation of writers that will contribute to the literary canon will. And unfortunately, with arsenic stained hands, they already have.

It would be extremely impossible not to expect the face of technology to have left an imprint on the literary world and its neighbours—and yet, the proliferation of content online on how to grow your writing career financially and algorithmically is quite disturbing.

In the past year, at least 40 videos were published on youtube with at least 10k views on how to strategically grow your Substack account. Each published piece online–mostly on this platform relies on jargonistic buzzwords that are meant to shoot an arrow straight at the emotions and curiosity of the reader, instead of shooting straight at what society so desperately needs to hear, to be fixed.

It is not a lie to say that readers are backed in a corner between Sabrina Carpenter/ Taylor Swift self-proclaimed `thinkpieces,’ clickbaiting headlines and novels with the same old repetitive romance tropes.

On August 6 2025, just two months ago, Substack launched the “A/B testing for headlines” a feature on the app that allows writers to test different titles and subtitles to see which one performs better.

Apart from this, the pressure to monetize your content on Substack becomes incredibly worse by the minute. Writers juggle between finding a “niche” to be perceived accordingly on the app, and writing about what authentically moves their world.

And do not get me started on the literary influencer economy being shoved down the throats of even the most uninterested.

Tiktok screams “a day in the life of a writer” as it is opened. Writers run to win the race of engagement as they ponder on how to make their sentences succinct enough, relatable enough, and polished enough—all at the same time.

If thus far it has not remained clear, in this literary, economic and political climate writers cannot merely appeal to the intellect, they must appeal to the visual senses.

And auditory, of course: when you film yourself writing so aesthetically beside the candle-light on your typewriter. When you make a slideshow on social media with excerpts of your writing to generate an audience. Becoming a writer and succeeding at it in this financially lustful century is composed of becoming a corporation and a marketing agent first. Juggling with the literature itself, arrives at second place. Now, the time that should be spent on mastering plot structure, rewriting sentences until the syntax is both coherent and unique in a Didionic style, is consumed by the time spent thinking about the engagement of the audience.

What this means, is that for the writer, it is not enough to just be a writer. That is simply an identity of a bygone era. And boy, if you chose to be a writer because you found out in sixth grade that the structure of your brain repelled a comprehensive understanding of numbers and brand strategy, my sincere apologies in advance…I have nightmarish news.

All of this began to be of incredible attention to me, as I first noticed myself drowning in the puddle of peer-pressure of literary strategy, transforming from a writer into a multi-armed octopus—owner of a corporation who had to deal with branding strategies, numbers and viral worthy aestheticization of an online persona.

As a writer, I sensed myself falling behind and having to browse not the oxford dictionary but the urban dictionary to search the definition of what a writer actually is. Each time my finger committed the mistake of opening social media and tapping into the platforms that promoted anything related to the literary realm (Booktok and Substack) I sighed so audibly as I figured out the following:

You CANNOT put the writer to bed. Not in the morning, afternoon or night. Naps are prohibited, they are the most deadly. Thoughts flow in the afternoon, when you have the time to be a flaneur. Cryptic plotting is of utmost importance. And of course, the thought that writing—unlike a corporate 9—5 is not akin to being a hamster in a wheel is just simply believed by those who have not been there.

This is clear when we position our magnifying glasses to examine the emerging writers of the current generation. But if we do examine them though,we would not be able to get too close. The horrifying strench of virality, fabricated aesthetics and influencer-esqueism would be too strong for our noses and eyes. The verb “striving” has been injected across their veins like heroin on a train station alleyway.

Dakota Warren is the perfect example of this. She is an Australian poet living in London who gained popularity by posting videos of her writing in an aestheticised light, slowly becoming an artistic persona characterised by wearing Mary Janes, having foxes as metaphors in her work and painting herself as Camilla from Tartt’s The Secret History.

And despite her having over 100k followers on instagram, and having been a finalist for the goodreads choice best poetry book of 2022, most of her following knows her for her visuals, not her poetic substance.

It is true that she has far much more flair and is much more interesting than contemporary writers such as Rupi Kaur. One can simply not compare. However, it is doubtful that her emergence throughout the internet would have been successful without her building the brand of her artistic personality and promoting it accordingly.

FORGET THE “QUIT YOUR JOB TO WRITE FANTASY”

Although the ubiquitous fantasy of writers quitting their job to exercise their craft for a living appears as the most exquisite plate on the menu of literary ambitions, it is in fact a dangerous fantasy. Unless one were to win the lottery, have a trust fund, marry that desirable rich man, have enough savings to not worry about finances or come from generational wealth, quitting one’s job for the sake of a literary career can only be done at the cost of scrapping authenticity off your story with a shiny coin.

Writers would then be forced to create a masterplan—much like a financial business strategy of a company that strives to create the most audience and revenue.

The democratic state of the world burns with the phosphorescent colours of concern? cool, but not engagement worthy.

the economy worsens and people are struggling? saddening but, do people want to read about that?

There’s a human flaw alarmingly seeping itself in the tapestry of our society? mhm maybe, but not really pen-worthy!

This is somewhat how the literary world currency operates: focused on entertaining the Platonian appetite of our souls. Not inhaling content that ameliorates our intellect, or adds a valuable thread in the tapestry of the world of literature. It instead, places its focus on feeding our lust for mere entertainment without any critical value.

It is simply everywhere, even in the work of the artists you nail on the wall of your sickest favoritism. And hereby lays the reason why I, as a life-long Taylor Swift fan, her 12th studio album The Life Of a Showgirl veered my artistic instincts to the cliff of quasi-suicidal disappointment. An array of aesthetics that promises avant-garde jazzy tunes, experimental tunes akin to a Moulin Rouge experience while the reality were radio tunes adjacent to that of Ava Max.

And the saddest of it all, is that, Swift with her monumental fame, has the ability to create the most niche and experimental tunes of all artists out there, given her army of fans who would listen and inhale anything she ever produces. She has the ability to do this—Unlike an emerging artist, who has to create something that is objectively good (or at least close to it.) She does not have to worry about selling or appealing to audiences, given her established credibility.

Similarly, Booktok, the section of TikTok that discusses literature and has been trending since 2020, is a fast food restaurant of cardboxes instead of silver platters. A buffet of tropes and “dark romance” plots aiming to feed some obscene sexual fantasies instead of adding intellectual value to a desperately oxidised world.

And interestingly, the product of the author itself is placed on a pedestal in the modern context of literature. Why are we obsessed with the persona behind the words, the visuals that they present?

Why do we seem to have a quasi fetishisation of aesthetic quality instead of linguistic quality?

French Essayist and philosopher Roland Barthes argues in his essay “The Death of The Author” that there has been a peculiar importance placed to the personhood that is “the writer”

He laments the fact that we do not take the words in the literature as they are anymore. We do not let them speak for themselves. We are desperate for the face behind the words. He further argues that this is a product of capitalistic endeavours, in which the author is akin to that of private property—solidifying writing not as a collective cultural subject, but as a self-fulfilling one.

What does this mean for the modern emerging author?

In the struggle to get her writing published, aspiring Author and Substack writer Liza Libes, argues that the greatest works of literature would not be published today.

This argument is not in its entirety untrue. She argues that arbitrary publishing rules are killing real literature. Big publishing houses require novels to be fewer than a 100.000 words and jump straight into action, without any previous description. Additionally, most of them do not value flowery writing and prioritize plot over anything. Not to mention that, the current publishing industry heavily relies on satiating the short attention spans of the current generation of readers.

It seems as if these indeed confirm that the works that constitute the literary canon would not be groundbreaking or appreciated today.

Could you imagine James Baldwin not having written Giovanni’s room?---a groundbreaking novel that was incredibly necessitated by the world in the midst of a monolithic 20th century, simply because it did not have the entertaining and capricious qualities that an unconcerned population wants?

Or if Virginia Woolf hadn’t bothered to write and pitch A room of one’s own, a trailblazing essay that advanced the feminist movement and the identity of women as writers simply because it was not as cheap and entertaining as the gothic novel that dripped with suspenseful romance?

However, to pretend that the writer being silently pushed to know the endless rules of artistic marketability is exclusive to this century would be naive. Because although, for the contemporary era it is a necessity to survive as a writer, for past centuries it was still an existing phenomenon.

PRE-DIGITAL LITERARY PROMOTION.

When American writer Washington Irving wanted to publish his book A History Of New York in 1809, he was unsure whether it would appeal to the masses, or sell at all. Instead of publishing it, and risking it remaining in dusty boxes of bookshops, he published it under a false name: Driedrich Knickerbocker, an alleged Dutch historian from lower Manhattan.

Irving fuelled the potential commotion that could be generated around this false historian by cleverly making him elusive and mysterious. He followed up by concocting an entire narrative: Knickerbocker had been an eccentric old man who had disappeared from his hotel room, leaving an unpaid bill behind. With that, he added that the owner of the hotel had found an abandoned manuscript in the old man’s belongings.

Clever, elusive, mysterious and perfectly baiting the curiosity of individuals.

One could surely argue that this is no different than curating an online persona and coupling it with an author’s writing to gain audience commotion—much like Dakota Warren has done.

However, the manner in which Irving created this whole narrative, was done within the stylistic confines of literature. It did not deviate from the arc of a story in itself. It wasn’t an additionally arbitrary form of promotion. It complemented his stories, which dealt with American folk tales and the mystery behind them. This form of promotion was not just a means to an end. It became an embedded symbol in his stories, an aspect which is now taken as a crucial element of his writing when his works are studied and discussed.

Essentially, Irving understood that to sell a story his marketing had to be immersed in the story. The promotion had to become the story in itself.

It was so successful within the confines of literature that it had an impact on the geographical linguistics of New York City.

Around the 20th century, the term “Knickerbocker”, arose as a regional definition of a New Yorker of Dutch descent. Additionally, it became a term to describe a style of pants for males—drawing from the style of garments Dutch settlers wore.

Irving’s marketing plan was far from an idle attempt at displaying his life as a writer, sitting in his stool, plotting his characters like the majority of writers–or dare I say literary influencers do in today’s age.

Despite there having been an absence of technological devices in the 17th century for writers to do a GRWM, it would be a lie to pretend that pre-digital literary promotion was not tied to the capitalistic demands of the market. Take one of the most renowned writers whose work constitutes the literary canon; Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

As he was in a deep debt due to his gambling addictions, he signed one of the contracts that would define the rest of his literary career. He agreed to have his novel finished in under a month or have the rights to his work stripped away. The results of this was The Gambler, one of his most renowned novels which was born out of financial coercion. And yet, through financial desperation, there was still an authentic ethos to this work. An ethos mostly found in the inspiration of his work, which was emotional turmoil. And the marketability of his work wasn’t fabricated, it threaded along with the desperation as he wrote.

And this was not the only case of authentic marketability. In the 20th century you had the existentialists: Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir engaging in social literary and philosophical circles where they shared thoughts about their work. You had Camus curating an image: his trench coat, slicked back, his half-lit cigarette and contemplative look.

And then the French literary salons, or Virginia Woolf Bloomsbury group where writers made themselves known among others while actively furthering cultural conversation on a collective level. However, even so, these literary strategies were a participatory engine for cultural enlightenment and the literary canon. They weren’t being performed on some additional social media platforms, or were part of a doom-scrolling culture feeding numerical and algorithmical appetite instead of rationale.Now, how do we deal with this marriage between the writer and the economy—which has tremendously shifted from a relational to a transactional one? The author, journalist, poet, hence even Substacker should remember that in a violent world, overridden with injustices, the role of a writer should be everlastingly designed to be one that creates a current against the unyielding tides of the status quo. It should not be one that calls it and attracts it to create an even bigger wave of an existing current.

It does not suggest that the work must be inherently political to be authentic, or roar violently against the government. But, what it should be is to detach its qualities to that of the economic market. Striving for truth and the phenomenological instead of aiming for societal likeability with the sounds of a cheering crowd.

Now, how do we deal with this marriage between the writer and the economy—which has tremendously shifted from a relational to a transactional one? The author, journalist, poet, hence even Substacker should remember that in a violent world, overridden with injustices, the role of a writer should be everlastingly designed to be one that creates a current against the unyielding tides of the status quo. It should not be one that calls it and attracts it to create an even bigger wave of an existing current.

Because we have let meaningful platforms like Substack become Linkedin. Where there is a lust for numbers and graphs that display reach, instead of words and the tongue of journalistic veracity. Our literary desperation to be seen as writers, is no different to that of a finance bro staring at his trading screen awaiting the next spike.

So let this be a reminder that our literary sphere was never meant to be about engagement, or numbers, but about authenticity and veracity. And the most important of all: patience.

Because, the most impactful literary works took their time to attract eyes and claps. Jayne Eyre was first published under a pseudonym, barely paid attention to. The Great Gatsby only sold 20.000 pieces during Fitzgerald’s life, and Sylvia Plath’s poetry only gained recognition posthumously.

In that regard, Toni Morrison was right when saying “Do not expect applause. Be prepared for silence. That is how real work happens.”

So yes babe, you’re not just a writer you’re a finance bro…. but you don’t have to be.

Thank you for reading!

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The conversation rose quickly to flames. You’d have to picture though, on the one end a 47 year old technically divorced woman who has faced countless romantic accidents, which if she were to be in the public eye she’d face the same scrutiny as Taylor Swift by an online manosphere. And on the other end, a 19 year old, hopeless romantic and victim of countless situationships who solely strives to kiss, sleep and die with one person. 

To be clear, I didn't think we talked about it as much as we embodied it. It was me, the vehement advocate of oppression and purity culture, and my mother the quasi-supporter of casual relationships. 

It started as I committed the mistake of lightly mentioning how I wanted to save myself for marriage. How I only wanted one person, and one person only.  Laughter broke off. For a sudden moment I felt like an alien. My Mother looked at me like I was an odd creature and I briefly teletransported back to middle school. Like the world had suddenly told my five year old self that princesses were utterly asinine, and I would never get to be one. 

“But what if you don’t like him in bed! Just try as many men as you can, while you can! waiting for marriage? that is never going to work out!” 

I knew my mother shared some radical post-modern views of not seeking marriage and dating without the majority of traditions being a part of the picture. However, I felt as if I was being utterly pranked. In what universe and in which messed up temperature does a mother— the ultimate figure of authority, the female trunk of a family -- discourage her daughter from traditional courtship and being two countries away from casual sex?

I kept fixating my gaze on this giant map of the earth she had plastered across her wall and kept asking when did its colours and values inflate, switch, and metamorphose from what they once were. Suddenly I realized how the map had been upside down this entire time. 

I became angry at the sexual revolution for a minute, but not as angry at the manner in which the phrases “purity culture” and “hookup culture” not only define our society, but are thrown around like accusatory candies—-as if  everyone held a P.h.D in definitions. 

Like Socrates would have wanted me to, I am going to put on the dress of a dictionary to clarify that, hookup culture is a social environment that encourages relationships, one night stands and a lack of commitment. 

It is NOT the act of dipping one's feet into the pool of dating to see what works out for you as an individual. Nor is it having an innocent hallway crush at school or the workplace. It is rather an embedded culture that  surreptitiously seeps into our subconscious. One that viciously celebrates, normalizes and brands non-committed relationships as liberating from the supposed subjugations of traditions. It sells it in a way that labels exclusive relationships as oppressive and caging. 

On the flip-side, purity culture in actuality, refers to a christian cultural movement launched in the 1980s where gender-based stereotypes were reinforced and as a result women were COLLECTIVELY shamed in case of not being sexless before marriage.

it is NOT an individual wishing to abstain from any sexual interactions before marriage due to spiritual or psychological reasons, independent from societal pressure. Nor is it believing that pornography and/or sex work is inherently and societally harmful. 

As a follower of Christ I can confidently say that in the context of christianity, purity culture is detrimental for both the spiritual health of someone and for women as a gender. Because what purity culture essentially does is create an idol out of women remaining ‘clean’ and ‘detached from sexual connotations’ as if we lived in the Handmaid's Tale, or in some form of deeper 18th century dystopia. It does all of this instead of striving for healthy God honouring relationships where a commitment is kept and a genuine bond is built before any sexual interactions.

Real purity culture is built on the bricks of shame, slutbranding women without holding men accountable and being blunt on the fact that they too, before anyone, should abstain from being lustful creatures. 

The issue however,  is that the minute an individual mentions their PERSONAL choice of waiting until marriage—not wishing to engage in trysts they get bashed for being a pawn of purity culture. 

Wondering if this had been a 21st century issue, or if my mother felt the same way back then, led me to stumble upon Louise Perry's “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.” 

A small portion of this book argues that casual sex always existed throughout history, even during times in which it was far from the norm. 

For instance, during the medieval times, there were annual festivals before the period of lent, where sexual licentiousness was not only rampant, but normalized during this small period. 

European bohemian circles during the 19th century rejected bourgeois values, often engaging in reckless love affairs in the context of artistic freedom and liberation. 

However, sexual interactions have never been as easily sold, commodified and delivered by social media to our subconscious as it is during the 21st century. Never before, have we existed as babies in our seats with corporations, television shows and advertisements, delivering lustful content to our mouths like compote. They are served in a banquette, wrapped in a bow and gifted to us without having ever disclosed that this ‘gift’ has an interest rate. A rather very high one.

Love Island. Sydney’s Sweenies bathwater. Tinder. Dark romance books. Clubbing. Rice purity tests. Hot girl Summer. Bonnie blue. 

Interestingly,  my mother agrees with this conclusion. In that kitchen conversation, she had made it clear that although she opposes my fantasies of being oppressed by my dating ideals, her frustrations with modern dating lie in how social media and corporations had shifted traditional ways of dating. She mentioned how no marriage or couple is ever immune to infidelity, but social media scrolling and globalisation has made the act of betraying your partner as easy as ordering an amazon package to your house. As technology began evolving, the world began finding new ways of being unfaithful. The choices and capabilities of cheating began multiplying like a kaleidoscope—silently eroding the decent and traditional mode of dating from the inside out. 

 The idle and lazy can cheat without even standing from their beds. Apart from that, the beauty standards and perceptions of people have morphed into something unexplainable for not only Gen Z, but Millenials.

All throughout social media, it is believed that the average “beautiful”  individual looks like a 2003 Abercrombie & Fitch model or a Victoria Secret angel. 

Over the last months, males on the internet have made claims that Tate McCrae is somehow “mid looking.” I  won’t even further comment on this. I will let it speak for itself. 

Even more recently, the leading actress of Amazon Prime’s trending show ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’, has been receiving online comments claiming that she “looks chubby.” 

And contrary to popular belief, a lot of male celebrities too, get picked apart and scrutinized. Harry Styles and Evan Peters have been just one of the few. 

As the conversation continued, with the cinnamon and toasted scent fighting to be the protagonists, my mother also mentioned that the man she had been seeing blamed feminism for the downfall of successful relationships. 

Sigh. And somehow I was the crazy one for wanting to wait until marriage. Somehow MY standards of dating were laughable and were going to cause my relationships to not ‘work.’

Of course it is easy to blame feminism, it's the simplistic route to take, one that evidently repels nuance. Even more so as a man. This is because feminism has positively taught women not to settle and that automatically makes men work harder to obtain, please or appeal to a woman. 

Independently from men, feminism also helped extricate society from the idolisation of purity. Despite casual sex and its normalization being extremely detrimental on both a personal and societal level, it is also detrimental to believe that an individual who engages in it loses worth. They do not become a slut. Nor tainted, ‘ran through,’ or less than a woman/man. 

And in the context of those who subscribe to Christianity, the same thing follows. The only thing that occurs is that they get separated from Christ, damaging the relationships between him and the person. Hence, if anyone here loses any worth, it is simply the act of intimacy and romance that gets devalued and pays the ultimate prize.

The act of intimacy becomes so worthless that it gets ridiculed, getting a similar treatment than myself at the kitchen table.  

It is clear: my mothers laughter acted as a mere mirror to the vulnerability of women under the chains of hookup culture. Because no matter how you try to spin it, as a woman, sleeping with many individuals is simply not empowering. While the participants should not be a subject of mockery neither should it be glamorized or encouraged. 

Through her book, Louise Perry also presents us with the psychological concept of sociosexuality, which is the degree to which people are comfortable pursuing uncommitted sexual relations.

Research shows that on average men are much more sociosexually unrestricted, meaning  that they are naturally more inclined to pursue casual sexual relations.

For women, it's the complete opposite. They are on average more sociosexually restricted and therefore less inclined to engage in uncommitted sexual acts. 

For many people however, this is almost impossible to admit, especially for gender non-essentialists. But the hard truth is, women and men are biologically different. Not in worth and not ALWAYS in capabilities, but simply biologically. 

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Like it or not, there is both emotional and biological asymmetry between the two genders. Women run the risk of pregnancy while men can have the privilege of walking away. Women experience post-coitus hormones differently, which makes them harder to detach. 

What society has done is rebranded oppression and wrapped it in the colours of liberation, but I must admit, it played its cards well. Like a populist politician seeking to rise to power through profiting from the major problems of the time. 

Now, instead of making women go into early motherhood and responsibility, they are slowly coerced into not getting romantically attached to men. Into suppressing their emotions and having fun outings with men because it's somehow liberating. And yet it is not. It’s simply the old and nefarious charade of oppression sneaking itself into the 21st century as something beautiful; and worth striving for. 

The food on the stove still burns, but I am quite unsure whether I am right in my stance. Maybe I should have bit my tongue of certainty and asked my mother why she thought that my romantic aspirations wouldn't work. Why she thinks marriage doesn't work, or why waiting for it is ridiculous. But do the eldest, the ones with the most experience always hold the marker of certainty?

It sounds cruel, but I never bit my tongue of certainty simply because I am unable to take my mother’s advice seriously. Not only because our expectations and beliefs differ, but because I believe she isn’t qualified for it—at least in the subject of marriage.

Perhaps I am wrong, naive, young, embroidered by the self-explanatory phrase “when you are young you know nothing,” like a knitted sweater. But do you ask a broken beggar man for financial advice? Do you go to the PE teacher for the roots of the equation? the second place medallist of a competition, how to win?

Valuable advice isn't always found in the limiting circle of success, sometimes it's hidden in the shadows of broken glass and burned papers. And yet, when it comes to wanting to win and end at the summit; it is.

Through it all though, I am somewhat glad that my mother is not a strict prude, nor a woman who reinforces her romantic beliefs onto me, despite disagreeing. I am glad that I was raised by a Lorelai Gilmore and not a Mrs. Kim. Sometimes I catch myself being upset at the fact that she looks down on me for wanting to marry relatively young, for strictly wanting to share my body and date one individual. And yet, when I catch myself being upset at my mother for that, I sense myself betraying all my female ancestors who had to hide their choice, had none, or were murdered for it.

My grandmother, my great-grandmother. Jane Austen. Elizabeth I. Hypatia of Alexandria. Sappho. Sarah Benhardt. 

Their lingering ghosts would pay a price, any prize, perhaps the highest prize to me in my position. Because ultimately, the coin of a choice weights heavier than the coin of disagreement. 

I might surely face some assertive echoes here and there claiming that I am going to face the gut punch of disappointment and regret by marrying young. I am surely going to find myself in the struggle to find individuals who share my view, and men who are not possessed by the spirit of lust enough to want to wait for marriage. But I am never going to be ostracised, exiled from this earth or sidelined for it—and believing otherwise is simply foolish. 

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The stench of burnt zucchini and sprinkled cinnamon is going to take the four seasons and at least two generations to expire. The walls will talk by then. They will shout and remind me how my mother too, was a nineteen-year old with vehement convictions and aspirations.

 But by then, the stench of the zucchini will have overpowered the cinnamon, leaving nothing but the reality of the acridness behind to fight with. 

Until next week xx

Yesterday I began deep cleaning my room. Getting rid of things which did not serve me anymore. Donating clothes, saying goodbye to the constellation of filth in the back of my closet and packing my belongings to move abroad for university. As I opened one of the drawers in my room I came across a staple of journals which I had bathed in ink during my early to mid teenage years.

With my fingers browsing on the pages written by my 8th grade self, I came across some interesting quotes:

“i am a museum full of art but you had your eyes shut”

“depression is silent you never hear it coming and suddenly it’s the loudest voice in your head”

“you’re everywhere except right here and it hurts” 

“to be soft is to be powerful”

With enough self deprecation and a stench of doom and despair to fill the room, reading these really made me squirm enough to want to chew on wood like a dog with sharp teeth.

Now, I cannot lie. I really wish everything I said was really true.  I really wish the 8th grade, and prepubescent version of me had written all of those quotes and that they would be safely dusted away for no one to see.

Instead, these quotes lie on the pages of a book which lives between the most known  bookstores in the world and the New York Times bestseller list. 

For those of you unacquainted with the modern, ancient, and evolving world of poetry as well as its genre, the book which is protagonizing this piece is Milk and Honey by Indian-Canadian author Rupi Kaur. 

A book which unfortunately has spent 77 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list and granted the author the goodreads award for best poetry. 

A book which according to Andrews Mcmeel publishing, has sold over 6 million copies. 

What a loud sigh I just left off. My neighbours are about to knock on my door to check on my literary dread.  

But the loudness of my sigh is justifiable. That is more than what Ocean Vuong's, and Sylvia Plath’s poetry collection has sold in the last decade.

Although my heightened pulse and borderline elitism can be felt through the screen, I am aware of the subjectivity that dominates the field of poetry—making it difficult to ever reach full consensus on what makes a good poem. 

However, according to the Oxford English dictionary poetry is a “Literary art form where language is used to create a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience, using carefully chosen and arranged words to evoke specific emotional responses through meaning, sound, and rhythm.” 

Exactly. Concentrated imaginative awareness of experience. Meaning that the poet typically focuses on an image, or a set of images based on semantics to create a micro narrative.

This of course does not involve a single phrase such as “to be soft is to be powerful” whose imaginative awareness of experience involves the fantasy of a mic drop.

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Besides that, anyone that has paid a quarter of attention in english class knows the definition above further includes the utilisation of figurative language. Largely involving non-literal phrases with techniques that often do not correlate and/or oppose each other, with variations differing according to style.

I won’t linger that much longer on the concept of definitions, other than expressing the fact that I wouldn’t  be putting on the performance of a liar, if I said that the 21st century and its encompassing society loves to look down on definitions. They are labeled as a product of strict institutionalism and mainstream domination. That is not the truth as much as it is a half truth. 

Literary customs and traditions prominent within the 19th century and beyond, were rooted in ideas of decorum and elegance, often sidelining other forms of poetic narratives. The customs which were most prominent and preferred previous to the modernist movement were odes, elegies, villanelles and euphemisms—all a product of a society which worshiped poise, grace, grandeur and high culture.

This also included poems with a certain rhyme scheme and a meter.

Think of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18

Or think of William Blake’s “Tyger”

Stereotypically when the average individual pictures the genre of poetry some of these pieces are what they imagine. At least in terms of their style and meter.

However, it is not entirely like that though, because definitionally, “sound and rhythm” is where a substantial amount of poetry, especially contemporary/20th century strays away from. As political movements such as the civil rights and feminist upheavals began, many post-modernists writers started rejecting many of the customs which were once revered. Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, Dylan Thomas, Maya Angelou, Adrienne Rich all, mid-career, were stylistically rebellious to a degree where free verse was all they employed in terms of sound and flow. 

Unfortunately, that’s where my criticism of Kaur tends to fail. When we bash her, and many contemporary—often labeled “instagram”  poets of the contemporary generation, we are disregarding the fact that she and they are not so different from the 20th century poets we all love. 

Or are they?

If we take a look at this untitled poem of hers we see that there is a disregard to grammatical rules through a lack of capitalisation. It isn't a crime as much as it is a stylistic mode of expression that caters to a rebellion against literary customs. 

This reminds me of Allen Ginsberg’s narrative poem “Howl” which completely disregards any punctuation rule and further disregards the utilisation of stanzas. 

Of course, this is just an extract of the long piece, but as it can be seen through this poem he creates a neo-elegy, creating a metaphorical version of what would be a typical elegy. This evidently serves as a rebellion against literary customs which in some shape or another were in compliance with societal mores that prioritized a predominantly white and rich demographic. This means that his rebellion was carried out with purpose, to both challenge and shift the status quo of his time. 

While Kaur attempts to rebel by branding her collection “Milk and Honey” as “abstract fiction” and “non-fiction poetry” that is where her so-called stylistic rebellion ends. It seems as though she strives to appear somewhat rebellious and somewhat esoteric through the word “abstract” and its etymological roots.

Unlike Ginsberg's, which is backed up by having experienced social and political injustice by the hands of a greedy and capitalist America during the cold war, hers seems purposeless. She’s not attempting to rebel against anyone or anything other than perhaps her inability to craft compelling imagery and juxtapositions.

The above poem, which I am unable to name because her laziness infiltrated the moldy bathroom of her creativity so deep that even a title she could not come up with—instead of reading like a proper poem sounds like prose broken down into lines for the sole purpose of naming it a poem. Hence, her arbitrary line breaks are as unserious as her commitment to craft images and play with language in a careful, considerate, and sophisticated manner. 

Alongside everything, if we are being serious, in poetry more than in any other genre, line breaks are a careful craft, done with the intention to let the weight of the lines sink in, giving the readers room for an emotional impact.

American writer and literary critic Susan Sontag advocated for the decentralisation of hyper- intellectualisation in literature and in artworks. She argues that while analysing a work of art or a text is crucial, it is in fact the picking and pulling apart of the works content and meaning which drives away from its inherent purpose. Controversially and provocatively, she stated:

“art is seduction not rape.” 

This phrase is crucial for understanding how it is paramount as an audience to allow the sensorial aspects of a piece of art to influence you, instead of merely picking apart the meaning of a text and/or work.

However, it is still the duty of the artist to have enough creative exactitude and artistic excellence to provide that experience for an audience, and Rupi Kaur just does not have it.

Apart from the definitions surrounding qualitative poetry, which I’ve got to admit is at times reductive, what makes a poem a good poem, is enough ambiguity to allow for discourse. 

Interestingly enough, I wasn't the first one to come up with this idea. In an interview with John Berger in 1983, Susan Sontag argued that there was a sort of ambiguity in storytelling, insinuating that a good form of storytelling involved enough ambivalence to let a reader ponder and wonder.

The truth is, Rupi Kaur has neither been able to bring enough complexity into her work to allow for an emotional impact on her audience, nor has she been able to carry out her stories in awe-inducing manners.

Instead in her poems you find lines which are painfully direct, as if she wore her heart on her sleeve and endeavoured to translate the exactitudes, longitudes and coordinates of her heart. It isn’t exactly wrong or out of place to carry your heart on your sleeve as a writer, in fact to a certain extent you must. There is that viscerality and vulnerability that is imperative as a writer. Audiences ultimately seek that emotional sincerity. However, that visceral aspect must be carried out with an elegance—a sort of stylistic strut which feels familiar but is simultaneously scented with enough mysteriousness. If you cry and babble about your trauma do so elegantly, with style and in a unique manner. Your readers will be interested in all of it, but first MAKE THEM interested in all of it.

One could make the argument that in some way or another she makes poetry more accessible and digestible to the masses–perhaps in some way or another contributing to the fight against anti-intellectualism. 

To make that statement feels foolish, but it is not a lie that the widespread lack of understanding toward the humanities, especially literature, language, philosophy and sociology contributes to the rise of anti-intellectualism. This lack of understanding is fueled by a significant scarcity of resources in the humanities such as libraries, digital tools, teachers, lectures and assistants not only as a whole but to those who cannot afford it. This of course leads to fewer job prospects, thus creating the widespread sentiment that the field is not worth pursuing or never had any worth to begin with. 

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A study made by the Williams Record in 2023 found that the number of STEM majors has doubled since 1993, while the number of language and arts majors has declined since.

Another research made by Daedalus online journal concluded that  “as of 2020, the humanities were conferring less than 10 percent of all bachelor’s degrees, the lowest level on record”

While these studies encompass mostly data of the U.S population, this phenomena is occurring all around the world. 

Recently, The New York Times published an article titled “Fewer People Are Reading For Fun, Study Finds” stating that From 2003 to 2023, the share of Americans who read for pleasure fell by 40 percent.

Interestingly, Kaur essentially made poetry mainstream again, targeting those who aren’t concerned with reading the genre by utilising a sieve and distilling the intrinsic characteristics of it. Because what she is doing is not fighting anti-intellectualism. One simply cannot fight the enemy by catering to it and making it like you when what you are showing them is a version of you specifically molded for their hateful and ignorant palette. It is like a woman endeavouring to fight misogyny by transforming herself into what society says a woman of worth is like. 

If we simplify the humanities—literature, books or any sort of material that requires you to ponder and reflect, by stripping down their substance then I fear there would be no point in concerning ourselves with them anymore. There would be absolutely no point in fighting for funding the humanities, or even studying them if we transform a five course—5 Michelin star dinner into a fast food meal to cater to a society brimming with picky eaters. Thus, instead of making a subject matter intrinsically easier to consume, we must train the minds of our newly merging generations to see the beauty in the ambiguous. To see the beauty in the tricky and in the difficult. I say this with even more seriousness, given that our society has turned into one where the answers are given in the snaps on our fingers and philosophizing is obscured by the oversaturation of technology. 

So Rupi Kaur, you might have made teenage girls and the general public open their eyes to see you as a museum full of art for a fleeting moment. And yet, you certainly won't save our literacy rates, and less than anything contribute to our fight against anti-intellectualism.

Undoubtedly, this shifts after the first heartbreak the human encounters. Now, the experience which was once free of scrutiny, shifts into a question.

Is love a mere sentiment, or the fashionable and conscious accumulation of actions?

This question, which has been fried on a pan, turning from bright to a calcined black has lived many lives. Now individuals do not ask this question as much—especially women. Now they are tired of asking and philosophizing—romaniticising. it has turned them into spiteful bashers and into gleeful convictors of the phrase “if he wanted to he would”

It is rather abundantly clear: when you find yourself at any gathering, sitting at a table—brimming with the female gender, each seat occupied with a distinct catalog of ages, birthmarks and skin blemishes, the usual subject of conversation is how abysmal the dating scene is. The subject of men and their disappointing handling of the steering wheel is thrown around like a scorching pan. And it bubbles. It simmers atop the tongue of all the women in the circle:

Criminal infidelity. The phobia of commitment epidemic. Emasculation that turned him into a princess-like mermaid. Men whose lust shapeshifts them into brainless cannibals. Envious dandies. Men who deem communications and literature as useless degrees. Those who are lovers of the winter. Each experience–each archetype a popping bubble, making the boiling potion of modern dating a living hell. Giving the female gender more hissing tongues to spit on the opposite side.

“My fiancé cheated on me last month with his cleaning lady” a woman on the opposite end of the table stated, breaking the silence while twirling her wine glass around her hand. 

“With the cleaning lady? Oh that’s horrible isn’t it? I’m so sorry. My ex-boyfriend left me stranded, said he wasn’t ready for that type of commitment” another young woman replied, adding to the circle of experiences.

“Oh talk about mine, he did not want to introduce me to his stuck up family. He made it clear I wasn’t what they expected for him.” Another blonde woman with craggy skin added. 

“What an asshole, I can totally relate. My last situationship hid me around like I was some illegal, I obviously dumped him. Could not deal with being treated like a secondhand plate” A woman close to my seat sardonically added. 

The circle continued with each woman adding their own crashes and discontents. I sat there, endeavoring to hide how uncomfortable I was. Bonding over their dilapidated romantic bones seemed like the only thread they had left in their lives–their last resort of hope. 

“What about you?” they all asked, pointing their eyes and faces toward me, almost in cultish unison. For a quick glimpse, they appeared like zealous bunnies, who had been hunted down for so long—-been drawn blood for so long, that they were bloodthirsty for some reassurance that the male gender was terribly wrong and worth hunting down.

I stuttered for a second, wondering if I should have lied, remained truthful, or kept my mask of victimhood. 

I took a deep breath while peeling my skin layers, reaching muscle and bone. “I am actually cheating on the two things I love the most. I don’t know I can’t help it, I love them but I am most definitely incapable of showing it. I can’t be the only one who loves like this right? I mean-” I said while shrugging, incapable of mobilisation or justification. Their eyes were glued on me with an expression of horror painted on their faces—perfectly crafted by Edvard Munch. 

I was met with hollering and screaming—halfway inquisition and a disposal of my presence from the dinner like I was some fly trying to pester about my unethical and manly ways of loving. Clearly though, I was for them the living strike-out of their vivid theory “if they wanted to they would.”

Naively, I wore my honesty to the dinner because it was clearly the Godly decision—shining brighter and causing more scandal than any other slutty dress I could have worn. And now I write boldly, honestly and with the topping of shameful asininity to try and crawl back to the subjects I have cheated on—the ones I say I love most: God and my writing. 

This atypical  form of cheating might seem odd to a reader. Especially when it conforms to a form of infidelity toward two subjects which are as intangible as the air that oxygenates them. 

And yet it is far worse than the typical cheating. For the subjects I cheat on largely involve the core of who I am—my face and my identity. For God, it is the spiritual portion of my body. My leadership, my metaphysical existence, my spiritual salvation, the guidance of my behavior. For my writing, and my identity as a crafter of words it conforms to my intellect. The way I articulate myself.  How I stand in the face of society, and my foundation of an artistic legacy in this world.

Before I came up with the idea for this essay, my fingers and brain were focused on building the foundation of another one. 

Sitting in a train, I had the juiciest title, the most hooking introduction. Bathing in my brain, all of it weighed just far enough for bits of ideas to spill, but not enough to overboard  and land on my keyboard.

So I just stared at the screen. Writing one word every five minutes. Which led to picking up my phone. Mindlessly scrolling on social media, peeping on the boring lives of others, wondering when I would hit it off as an artist.

Clearly, anything else in the world was more interesting than writing my piece.

The trees perpendicularly lined outside, the men in the train, the Bob Dylan song blasting through my headphones. 

Difficult to conceptualize, It’s like my brain and my fingers are in complete disagreement. I can neither pray nor write in the right way, consistently, or at the designated times. When my brain thinks, fantasises and longs for prayer time, my fingers just cannot do it, will not move or even do what I want. 

In my head, I have already written a multitude of books and projects. I am in fact, a New York Times Best selling author. A performing poetess. A Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. I have written essays when brushing my teeth, when showering, when I am spending time with my loved ones, on the commute on the way home, in my sleep. But in reality my computer screen remains blank. It’s truly all crickets and flies.

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Similarly, my mind is married to Jesus. I think, and breathe the Bible, Gregorian chants, the nature of the gospel, Old Testament history. Yet I cannot spend time reading the word, inhaling it, or even properly embody it everyday.

Instead of reading the psalms and painting them across my life, I read the latest New York Times article on Vogue using AI models and computer science majors struggling to find a job.

Instead of closing my eyes and speaking to God, I get steered toward the impurities of my own skin. The chit chat that is on television, the messages on my phone and thoughts about past, present, future.

I am also embarrassingly unable to nurture my love and productivity for God or my writing when my loved ones are around. Praying and Writing are sacred, so I must always hide and exile myself to an island to properly give them the attention that they deserve. 

The last guy I dated, while putting his arms around me and lusting over the sight of my lips blatantly said to my face: “Just so you know, I'm not introducing you to my family.” When he said that, it stung me. But in retrospect, I am not allowed to get upset in any way or form, because that is exactly the way I love. I embody the noun without being the verb, while flirting with the idealised thought of my duties.

That is exactly what loving wrong means. Parading a flirtatious attitude with labelling who you are without knowing the terms and conditions of sacrifice and investment.

You are a girlfriend, boyfriend, partner, husband, wife, daughter, son, doctor, writer, actor, singer, teacher but the identity simply ends at the linguistic distinction. 

In all seriousness though, what is the formula behind men not knowing how to love, and what do we do when inaction far overpowers love?

The Christian philosopher Aquinas makes the argument that the spirit and the body are two separate entities that encompass a human. Although this is not necessarily a revolutionary argument, the core of this gets at the idea that the fleshly desires that are corrupted lead you away from the things of the spirit you know you want or are meant to do. 

Similarly, the ancient philosopher Plato came up with the idea of the “tripartite theory of the soul” in which it conceptualised the notion that humans were divided into three parts: the rational, spirited, and appetitive.

He further argued that some individuals were governed by appetite (meaning corrupted desires) more than spirit or rationale.

In my subtle defence though, I am not like any other man who cheats or does not love right.  As a result of my unfaithful acts, I am constantly overridden by a guilt that hums me out of sleep and buzzes when I wash dishes to make them glisten. And unlike your average tinder man and your seventeen year old chad boyfriend with no ID, my infidelity is not guided by a banal lust for fifteen minutes of pleasure.

I mean, in the English language cheating is a broad term and with its many faces it is quite the insignificant word. We could frankly utilise so many other descriptions that capture such a degree of betrayal.

In its metaphorical significance, or in the way we colloquially refer to infidelity—I see it as visually equal to a chameleon’s skin shifting colours, and bunnies skipping through designated hoops in competitions. Silly, asinine, and unserious. 

 Socially we take it seriously. I mean with dragon flamed quips and phrases I got thrown out of a dinner for it. However, linguistically we are quite lazy in its inconsequential and playful description.

The word cheating in itself, creates the unserious visual image of a child not caring for the rules in the playground. A woman wrongly braiding hair. An illegal placement of a chess piece all to scream “checkmate!”.

During the 19th century, the romantics were much more serious in their description of cheating in romantic relationships. Apart from occasional quirky euphemisms bathed in prudish perfumes, “Adultery” and “infidelity” were the typical words you’d find. Phonetically they are much more stark. And in their origins they are associated with corruption, decay and moral erosion.

It is as simple as the fact that the way in which we label subjects, and concepts  through language reflects the manner in which we behave toward them and internalise them. As much as cheating is a lazy word, it is a mirror of how we approach and perceive relationships nowadays. Not that cheating suddenly spawned around the 20th century and usurped the 21st century, but in all those bygone eras relationships were considered a covenant. Now, they are the latest trendy sport. 

The word cheating is so embarrassingly lazy and it does not even have anglo-saxon roots. It is in fact borrowed from the French term Escheat which meant the action of the government taking property away from a deceased if they did not possess any children. As I came upon this discovery, I audibly sighed and rolled my eyes. Cheating is far from the mere unfairness of property disownment. Cheating is not only the unscrupulous betrayal of your partner's vows, but of your own identity, the one you said you’d be and embody.

It is as simple yet complicated as this: the moment our society began to allow the importance of language and its accuracy to become a mere fly in the wall, was the moment our attitudes began to erode even more.

French thinker Michel Foucault argued that language and words had more power than we gave them credit for. They did not just exist in themselves, they bore the weight and responsibility of shifting thoughts, behaviours and shaping the internalisation of actions. George Orwell’s 1984, took this to a fictional level, in which Newspeak—a narrowed and lazy form of language became a political tool to control individuals and their attitudes.

So if the concept of infidelity gets narrowed down to the word “cheating” which is phonetically as unserious as a reckless teenager  forgetting to study for a test and endeavouring to play it smart, then two things are going to occur. First, as a society we are doomed to get accustomed to infidelity where we stop seeing its moral weight–consequently leading the ones being cheated on to perceive it as a normal occurrence. Secondly, the ones with the inclination to be unfaithful, or with the thought to do so will picture it as an asinine thing that lacks moral weight. 

However, I do believe this could perhaps be an error of the English language and the lack of figurative language that we attribute to our daily communication. In my country, we have an idiom to describe infidelity: “poner los cachos”—translating to “putting the horn on someone.” Unlike the term “cheating” This phrase surely creates a visual imagery that is devilish. You’re putting the horns on someone, actively making them look foolish and devilish. Again, a distortion of their identity and who they thought they were. 

I wish I could have bonded over this with all the women in the dinner. Giving me no time to even defend myself, I could have let them know that in actuality I do not love like a man, nor do I cheat in romantic relationships, and the thought of such actually disembowels my stomach and makes me the epitome of a nauseated bitch. The things I need to love right, and that love me right, in all the tender ways such as God and my writing I do not.

Unfortunately in romantic relationships I am a devout nun in the limbo between a sacrificial figure and a teenager with limerence. I stand between a pathetic yearner and a bolter. 

I have the privilege to write and laugh about this because I do not have the right to complain about how I have been a Shakespearean figure of tragedy in romantic relationships. Especially when in shapes and forms I do the same that has been done to me. 

After being wronged by the pitiable and skinny teenage boys I have dated with no ID or remote thought of who they even are, I threw kicks, recriminated them with blazing poems, screamed at them and announced in speeches at parties how they loved so poorly and left me romantically malnourished.  

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They had to face me pointing at their romantic incompetence. I, on the other hand, am very lucky that the subjects I supposedly love the most are intangible and therefore unable to hold me accountable. My writing cannot scream at me, and for the exception of when I am deceased, I cannot face God like I would face a typical individual.

I suppose with my overtly-selective attitude when it concerns the menu of romantic and interpersonal horizons, I am the least to tell any individual to settle for less than what they want or deserve. And yet, there is nothing I wish more than to  go back to that dinner, converse with those women and in a nuanced manner inform them of the ongoing and perpetual war that is occurring: the war of opposite magnetism.

The war where our mind and our bodies are in constant battle. Where we become disparaged and what we want to do according to our identity gets striked out by the banalities of the flesh, the insecurities of the mind and the tempests of the self. And of course, through this cultural belief, the famous quasi-expectation  “if they wanted to they would” gets totally disproved.

Thank you for reading this week’s piece after being absent for almost a month. The formality of Wednesday/Sunday pieces are back next week!

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The picture had a myriad of shots of the richest man in the world. Sitting at a table, gazing on whatever season there was outside: the blazing summer sun, the deciduous autumn leaves, the April born tulips or the barren winter cold. He sits in a grey leather divan. While he ponders, philosophises, crafts metaphors out of the reflecting light, the funny lines on his hands he gets served water. Whiskey. Cola. Coffee. Maybe a rancid apple juice he takes a sip of and slightly discards. He sits and breathes. Not heavily, not exasperatedly because he eradicated to-do lists from his home. He does not mindlessly scroll on instagram because he clearly has won the war against the infiltration of technology too. He just owns a telephone, appearing to sit and stare. For a moment his gaze, almost adamant wants to scream to his maid "get me something to do, i'm bored!" but he stops himself.

He stops himself because he remembers that he must let the moment soak in and ponder on the nature of his life. He must be a historian on the past and present and philosopher of the future. He possesses the intangible luxury of feeling the movement of his body, and perhaps, looking for the next intellectual discovery of the day. Or perhaps not.

I scowled and sighed at the picture. I thought to myself what a peasant I am, perpetually living between a hamster wheel of striving and a boxing ring where with one hand I punch my to-do lists and with the other I fight time.

In an age where boredom is clearly repelled and screams of "I'm so bored I do not know what to do!" are the new morning coffee, it has become clear that I fail to relate to anyone these days. With the slight exception being the earth; constantly rotating, relentlessly moving. Not being an adjective or a noun but becoming a verb—a disturbing transcendence of identity.

And as an ambitious insomniac, I am estranged from bonding with the only subject–the only thing that resonates with me. And that same thing cannot bond with me either. The earth cannot let me hold its motherly hands because if we both stop and breathe; we detonate.

Although I am not completely estranged from bonding with my best friend, I tragically cannot relate to her either. Facetime at 10 pm she existentially complains about her summer days being characterised by a hollow boredom. She rolls her eyes and consistently asks me what to do. When I see her across the 7 inch screen, I begin to believe that If it were not for the glimmer of her university classes, her routine would all equal to the whiteness of backrooms.

I laugh and brag about how I can never be bored. How I am glad that I am walked down the city with a leash by to-do lists. How I can never sit and breathe in the air and be scented by whatever stench is around. I guess I perceive myself to be lucky that I do not get to breathe the air, who is off-springed by the obnoxious pollution of fast-fashion shoppers and AI users. I guess I hold myself lucky that I cannot be bored enough to breathe the own air I pollute. I suppose the earth is glad it cannot bond with me after all.

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I also suppose she was overridden by some simmering desire to have a daily mission. Perhaps she envied me—envied that I did not have the ability to sit and stare at the white ceiling and at my own presence. "I wish!" she tells me. The earth still orbits, but peripherally and in a pervasive world where the bourgeoisie wants to become the proletariat. My rich best friend wants to become a peasant. Maybe the earth orbited wrong, for the status quo to be this odd.

the 'I detest boredom' epidemic settles it: we all want to become, and we do not want to be. And when you see the richest man in the world, he never wants to become, he loves being. Being still, being in the moment, being a man drinking coffee, reading words on paper printed by a machine whose origins traces back to the printing press made in the 15th century. The richest man in the world is himself enough, sits in his own presence enough to contemplate on this.

I am a peasant in that aspect too. When time is the currency I have none of it. When I read my books—the books I want to read, one of the activities I love the most, I can never seem to just sit on the pages. I can never just hold the piece of dead trunk and ponder on which tree was cut down to produce this. I can never be aware on the nature of reading. I can never feel its material enough to remind myself that the habitat of foxes–of animals died for this. That if someones home was butchered for this; it deserves a piece of my brain. My eyes. My time. But to-do lists are the new dogma, We necessitate them without questioning them, their effect—that it subconsciously undermines the value of stasis.

Apps such as Goodreads are instruments to this violence against boredom. Launched in 2006, it is a want-to-be twitter, a literary version of letterbox, where you can rank, review, and state which are your current reads. It popularised in recent years for its annual "reading challenge," where users can set the amount of books they wish to read in a year. Most users on social media brag on their speedy ability to shove a hundred books per year down their throat—or their brain. My somewhat fond reminiscence on my fourteen year on this planet, lies mostly in the fact that I too, was one of these individuals. But I was never being a reader during that year, I was an individual, a young teen who wanted to become the one who had read the most books in a year. And the memory of the flesh of those books in my brain was never there. Some of them I remember. Their message, their ethos, their characters. But only because I paid them a visit again–sitting in their presence, being the richest man in the world for some running seconds.

When I looked at that picture I also knew that some version of the richest man in the world perhaps also sat in his own presence because he already had become the very self he had strived to be. To sit here and flaunt on him without recognising that boredom is somewhat the prize of financial extrication would be a poorly done job. Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Gates, although I am sure that they do not sit in boredom because their diligent greed asks for more, they still have the commodity to sit in whatever position they please and inhale at a human pace.

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And yet, not to preach about becoming, but they still have to meet themselves at the end, in the now, where they become the richest men in the world.

In the world of peasants, boredom is collectively dodged. Hated. Because it is the meditative practice where one is hyperaware of the perishability of our skin. Where the silence is too loud for the travels of our blood to be heard. It is where Sylvia Plath's fig tree analogy is abolished. Where we are a myriad of things at once. Where we look outwards and we are philosophers. Where we are believers and have a chance–some silence to connect with God and the spiritual. Where we become psychologists, looking inward at our flaws, mistakes of past and present—our traumas. It is where we are poets, crafting a metaphor out of the light and the surroundings we are able to grasp.

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Now, I can assure you, that you were racing through this essay, fighting time like I am daily that you failed to notice how I utilized the word becoming 12 times

Becoming. Becoming. Becoming. Eight letters, three syllables, tracing back to old english "becuman" which translates to "come about."

I have already begun detesting the concept of becoming. The word sounds odd too. But its rapid intonation reminds me of how I race through my days, trying to become more. It reminds me too of Marx. Maybe I should have spent less time becoming a professional contrarian to his ideas and sat on them, realizing that he, if anything, had a point.

Thank you for reading this piece! until next week!

Posing with bold delineated eyes, surrounded by a world of neon colours and a hue of bright yellow, her debut album released on June 6th clearly pays homage to the playfulness of the early 2000s

But seriously, five years ago who would have even thought that half a decade later the 19-year old influencer–a subject of constant online mockery would receive pervasive comparisons to Britney Spears. Yes, Spears, the renowned American singer rendered the "princess of Pop"—the iconic face of the early 21st century, the voice behind Toxic and Oops I did it again 

This comparison has social media users and culture commentators splattered and raging in controversy—though not even a bit close to the regurgitative dilemma of Sabrina Carpenter's new album.

Although the parallels begin at their physical resemblance: soft gaze, blondish hair, youthful eyes and expressive smile, it certainly extends beyond that. Their shared curation of an almost hyper-feminine persona, one that presents itself with soft glamour and a carefree attitude reflects the substance of their art. Tracks which encapsulate the feeling of what it means to be a young woman navigating her life, dealing with both the glittery and the shadowy. The highs and the lows. 

Track 8 of Rae's album In The Rain is somewhat reminiscent of Spears Lucky in which they both hide their vulnerability under upbeat tunes. However, unlike Spears, Rae is a kind of daydreamer, almost like Lana Del Rey–romanticising life and wrapping herself in affirmations.

I could certainly continue concocting and presenting arguments that draw their similarities and differences further. How Spears was a trailblazer—an artistic leader of her generation, rising to fame organically—influencing the pop culture canon. And Rae a revivalist who managed to reinvent herself through cutting magazine images from 2003 teen Vogue and plastering them across her body.

I could also continue debunking comments on social media platforms ranging from "very disrespectful for a star like Britney to be compared to a TikToker" to "Addison Rae is the reincarnation of Britney Spears."

But doing so would be steering away from the core of this dilemma. Because, this is not about whether Addison Rae is some rattling rebirth of Spears, but at its essence this gets down to a sentimental and wishful longing for the past. It gets down to the collective consciousness of society—its Geist which looks toward the past and not the future, nor the present.

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At its core this is about Nostalgia. Hence those who deem Rae an inauthentic artist—a baseless mime, copying the shadow of the 2000s -- must not get upset at her, nor at those who claim that she is this generation's Britney Spears. 

Rather, if there is anyone to villainize or get upset over is the current political climate—a capitalistic, fear mongering status quo that teeters over the brink of a nuclear war.

Cultural critic and thinker Frederic Jameson argued how postmodern art heavily relying on nostalgia is a product of late-stage capitalism. Rooted in marxist thinking, he disputed that the present was too fast-paced, too globalised, too technological for artists to get a grip onto, thus the reliance on the past. However, to be frank, it is not only a matter of the status quo itself being elusive, but it is a matter of escapism, of wanting to experience an age that appears golden, more simple, more polished than what we have.

So no, Addison Rae is not this generation's Britney Spears. She is rather an encapsulation of the zeitgeist of the 2000s, a commodified perfume that with a splash gives a quick scent of a time that appears more bubbly and less induced with doom. She's a childhood picture that reminds of tuning into the VMAS on a Saturday night with no recollection of past negativity or existential concerns. For those that were not alive or grown up during that era, she is a painting that appears perfect, inducing longing for a perfected past time that somehow they were 'unlucky' to not have experienced.

And yet, the aestheticization of the 2000s overshadows the fact that the beginnings of the 21st century were in fact not simpler, or 'golden'. Although there was an absence of incessant doom scrolling and it was not plagued by the rise of Artificial intelligence, I'd go as far to say that it was not any better than the present. We forget that the 2000s were faced with the 2008 market crash, raging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, 9/11, and natural disasters in Asia and the United States. 

This is exactly what Jameson is endeavouring to encapsulate with his philosophy. In late stage capitalism, art and pop culture consistently reference past eras and time periods, without tackling the reality of the historical conditions. Hence, becoming a superficial form of homage that serves as an instrument for escapism. Merely a romanticised remembrance of the past. 

However, it is naive to say that this phenomenon in art is only limited to the former Tiktok star. It seems as if the present has no spirit and the only one that it has is one borrowed from the past. Collectively, Pop-culture relies on artistic pastiche, where everything appears as a reference, and novelty is abolished.

Sabrina Carpenter recently referenced Marilyn Monroe in the latest version of her album Man’s Best Friend.

In her Guts album photoshoot, Olivia Rodrigo referenced Hole's 1994 "Live through this."

The Weeknd consistently alludes to David Lynch and Kubrick in his music videos. Even as a franchise, Disney is failing to generate new films or cartoons that capture the essence of the present. Instead they insist on remaking their classic films, distorting their original ethos—one which captures the status quo and struggles of the time in which they took place. A quintessential example is the latest lazy 'feminist' rendition of Snow White starring Rachel Ziegler and Gal Gadot. 

Even Taylor Swift's grammy-awarded pop album 1989 heavily aestheticizes the 80's without really engaging with the status quo of that era. However, that fact is not something to be utterly indignant about. Artists, especially those within the pop-mainstream genre are known for relying on visuals for entertainment and audience palatability without depth. Interestingly though, Swift's album, just like Addison's, knew how deeply ingrained nostalgia is within the masses. They knew how to cater their album's curated visuals well. In fact well enough that the polaroid camera saw a resurgence, seeing a 30% increase in sales in 2014. Ironically, Swifts synth pop album which was sonically borrowed from the 80s, is now characteristic of what we call the 2010s pop—an era we now too, long to go back to. 

"2024 is the new 2014"  these were the words that permeated social media last year, reminding us that not only is society constantly endeavoring to escape the present, but that authenticity in popular culture is now non-existent.

Culture is fan fiction, where everything is built on top of another. Culture has failed to learn from Nara Smith where everything is built organically, and instead it has learned to emulate pillow-faced influencers that love to repel naturalness.

Arguably, pop culture has always relied on nostalgia, but the peak of its reliance hits most when the world senses itself to be on its final stages—rumours of war, death, doom and decadence. When the world saw itself in a troublesome pandemic five years ago social media saw the resurgence of the "indie aesthetic" an attempt to once again emulate the vivacious spirit of the 2000s .

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Now with a US attack on Iran's military bases, death in Gaza and speculations of nuclear attacks on the world, Addison Raes debut album entraps Gen Z into a whimsical bubble of hyper-femininity and personal affirmations of success. 

Nonetheless, if you look close enough, beneath the superficiality of Addison's whimsy, high heels, rhinestones and upbeat tracks, you notice that in actuality she is not only a product of nostalgia, but she herself seems to be brimming with that same sentiment which makes her appealing. 

The 10th track of her album Times Like These is a dreamy tune which opens with a sentimental keyboard chord that feels almost familiar—something your older cousin would play in her 2005 monitor. A tune that captures the feeling of sunset fading into dawn, so wistful it could perfectly fit into the soundtrack of The Devil Wears Prada, Sex and the City or Pretty Little Liars. 

"I'm so confused / My life moves faster than me Can't feel the ground beneath my feet / No matter what I try to do In times like these, it's how it has to be /It's not my fate in the end Let go of all that could've been"

Her oscillation between looking at the past with longing and doom-fully accepting her present circumstances displays how she herself brims with nostalgia. A Nostalgia that is both timeless and specific to the 2020s. Frederic Jameson's description of society under late stage capitalism is starkly reflected in her lyrics.

"My life moves faster than me”. Society is too accelerated, too fast paced for her to grasp, on both a personal and collective level. 

This track caught my attention as soon as it met my ears. Primarily because it displays her authenticity. It is visceral, honest and also highly reminiscent of Nelly Furtado's 2006 track "All Good Things (Come to an End)," a song my mother would play on her ipod on car rides when I was younger. 

Addison knew well how to cater to my yearning for the past. What a coincidence that her most nostalgic track was the one that was going to be the one most loved by me. It reminds me how I am nostalgia's favourite victim—deployed daily to fight at the frontline of a war against it. 

Whether Addison is this Generation's Britney Spears or not holds little to no relevance. What is deserving of a headline, perhaps a little thought, or two is the way in which her art reflects the manner we cope with the status quo. 

Between her upbeat tracks such as "Summer Forever," touching on a fearless summer romance, "Aquamarine," a tune of personal confidence and "Headphones On" a track about coping with inner despair—it is clear that they capture the extremities of emotions. Not only such but the over-saturation of experiences, feelings and content—which makes up who we are.  

Addison might be performative, not the most authentic out there, but what she certainly does well is acting as both an escape and a mirror. And we must look at the mirror to see how well she reflects our attitudes and fears toward an uncertain and unprecedented world which feels unyielding and more frightening by the minute. 

Thank you for reading! let me know your thoughts!

It is set in stone: my publication will publish new pieces every Wednesday/Sunday depending on the climate surrounding my calendar. I will oscillate between posting a cultural/literary/political think piece and personal refections such as this one.

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Looking back at last autumn, the image of this random, unwonted day lingers in my head: waking up and putting my feet on the floor. Feeling steady, unwavering, almost unconquerable. 

I use the word unwonted, because it's horribly fitting. Waking up overpowered by that spirit was a case of one in a thousand. Mornings always treated me bitterly. They have really led me to know what "insufferable' really means. 

To put it in a better manner: I've known mornings as a relentless shadow, always throwing its scorching black coffee at me, screaming to get it together, to put on my perfectionist suit, to walk with a straight posture, to write more–with more passion more productively.

But this time the morning was whispering, almost like the voice of God—my first instinct was thinking: 

This means something, so you have to get going and do something about it. 

My plan was to own the day. Not that I didn't feel as though I needed to do so everyday, but as a senior in highschool, endeavouring to embody Barbie who does everything and is everyone, defying time and gravity—I'd be sinning as a liar if I didn't say that sometimes I get weighed down. 

I can already begin outlining the fact that the timeline and my actions during this day divorced my memory, almost completely. I'll only spit out instances and vague images, because yes, the loveliest, most benevolent of them all, the wind took off these memories with it. And yes it is guilty. I'll soon get into the reasonings—the why. But only steadily. I vowed not to be like the wind. Restless, fast and thief-like.

Anyway.

I remember opening my closet. The high brown boots—my favourites, the Nancy Sinatra ones. They called me in, begging to be worn. Their soft interior and smooth material, paired well with my plaited chestnut skirt, with its burgundy spikes. And my gold stud earrings, with my black long sleeve, cross necklace and my tights. Of course, the cherry on top had to be my black coat, reminiscent of academic attire. 

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I felt good! clothed to the brim like a glove around a hand who was accompanied by a jewelry store, and what harm was there in that? 

As I walked to the everyday building that I call school, with my perfectly blown out hair and my lips married to lip gloss and lip liner I started to feel the wind gust. At first it was steady, almost refreshing, barely touching the strands of my eyelashes. But later I began to feel its velocity, and it surely double crossed me. It was clearly more difficult to walk and conduct myself

It was difficult not to lash out at the wind but it was silly wasn't it? endeavouring to begin an argument with something intangible. Something that does not speak back, only pushes. 

But then it blew my hair around as it pleased. My bangs took a trip to the east and my perfectly blown out ends traveled to the south, meeting my bedazzled glossed lips. 

And I thought: my carefully crafted strands, my hair. My lips, my pearls. I felt the wind was taking my beauty and my composure, because I simply began throwing diatribes to the wind in my head. 

A dinner table with differing political and religious views had nothing on me.

"I HATE THE WIND" I yelled boldly enough in my head for my thirteen year old self to hear.

"YOU WILL NOT CONTROL ME" how funny–how asinine, my diatribe just did not cease, and I can imagine God was probably just lovingly laughing at me.

My anger and silly insults grew more as I started thinking of my bestfriend's boyfriend, how he was a recent graduate of Business and management in London and could not find a fucking job, after applying for hundreds of them. I thought: the wind, the busiest of them all, rustling and rustling, unfazed by the tariffs, the abysmal job market. IT DOES NOT EVEN HAVE TO MAKE RIDICULOUS CONNECTION ON LINKEDIN, it does not even know the definition of unemployment.

I even started thinking of all the candles placed out there, wavering at the force of the wind, whose flames turn off. I thought about how unapologetic the wind is.

Later as I got to the building I made my swift way to the bathroom, almost concealing myself stealthily throughout the hallways. As I looked at myself in the mirror I remember seeing my strands barely having moved away. My hair did not look intact, but neither did it look like it had tasted the lips of a tornado. Sure, the ends of my hair-some of them had been varnished with a tad of lipgloss, but nothing too tragic, really. 

Of course in that exact moment in front of the mirror I didn't realise how this wasn't a subject of big deal. I instead picked my hair comb from my handbag and started rearranging my hair, reapplying lip gloss and making sure my eyelashes bathed in mascara were polished. Endeavouring to replicate the picture I had crafted of myself—the one with potency, which I flawlessly tried to be, or better said, to imitate. 

Now, upon retrospect I realise that this was not a matter of whether the flame of my candle had been turned off by the wind, but whether my flame appeared tall, statuesque, strong, immovable, unfazed. Meaning it was about control, and how the eyes of others perceived me. And control ultimately came down to performativity. And let’s face it: there is a ridiculous abundance of that nowadays. And performativity  wasn’t limited to itself, it came with a sister called competence.

Can the image, the persona I put on each day appear better than yours? be more aesthetically pleasing than yours? Be more polished, be more intellectually developed than all of the others out there?

Frankly, I did not hate the wind, I hated the way it had power me. Over my vain robes and ornaments, over my image. If I had been at the beach–bare faced with nothing but the companion of granulated sand on my countenance, and my curly hair, borderline naked, I would have ached for the wind. Asking, where is it?

I suppose this hatred of the wind was a result of consuming too much "brains and beauty" content. Though, I was horribly aware of their connection and effects until now. 

 For those foreign to it, the content, primarily catered toward women, places emphasis on maintaining intellectual ambition while taking care of their appearance and curating a visual aesthetic. It can be seen permeated throughout several social media platforms such as TikTok and instagram.

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I don't deem it as propaganda, not entirely, nor do I oppose it. I actually deem it a beneficial tactic to oppose the brutish stereotype of certain women only being beautiful ( "dumb blondes") and others being exclusively nerdy and smart. Additionally, I deem it a reminder for young women to value their education and be reminded that it is a privilege. But the problem lay in the fact that I had been almost indoctrinated by it—by the mere idea that maintaining my beauty, my flare was the cherry on top to my intelligence. Almost as if the companion of those two were a desperate necessity for the completion each other. As if the typical woman who is worth something must contain those two: a gold brain and a gold face. It controlled me, and my instantaneous anger toward the wind ruining my hair and my lipgloss confirmed it.

This had controlled me so much, and it was shown in my anger. I was so upset at the wind that I came home and crafted a pose poem that read like a hyperbolic recriminating statement. 

Yes you can laugh, I even called it "my public denunciation of the wind" 

In these moments of retrospect I think of Simone de Beavouir, and her theory on the mystification of women. How there are societal and cultural constraints as well as structures that limit us—specifically our freedom. However, she refers to the term "Mystification" more closely to the treatment of the oppressor towards the oppressed. How the former treats the latter as a subject of convenience to the extent that the oppressed begins seeing themselves that way too. 

I'd confidently say that our desire to control is shaped by these trends—it mystifies us.

Because yes, women should strive to be beautiful and value their education and the opportunities it provides to be ambitious. But all this does is box us like ants on a marked circle. It all leads down to performativity: striving to appear composed, poised, like a machine that makes no mistakes. Like one of those tiny ballerinas that stand in the center of those jewellery boxes—twirling perfectly when we are opened and watched. 

Women should not only place their identity on brains and beauty, which can quickly climb to subjects like vanity and pride. Women, and frankly individuals as a whole can be more than that, and they should. We should strive to be empathetic, discerning, kind, and compassionate. We should strive to listen and care for others, especially those we disagree with. We should be aiming for all of this, especially in a world whose flirtation with fascistic tendencies and political extremism proliferates more everyday. 

It also comes down to a lustful desire for wanting to be unconquerable and be the masters of our own fate. And although it begins with something as small and almost insignificant as our image and the way we present ourselves, it affects the way we respond to failures and abrupt shifts in our lives. 

I've come face to face with the realisation that on a micro level, the wind simply trains us to accept the unprecedented and sudden changes in the world, the changes that occur to us, the abrupt, the bitter, the distasteful ones. The wind trains us to have metaphysical humility, because no matter how much our desire to shape our fate extends beyond rivers and skin—the simple truth is that our abilities to create and control are limited. 

I used to think humility, especially an overarching humility that was not just limited to our relative perception to others, but a metaphysical humility meant conformism and weakness. 

As if acknowledging that as humans we are created with certain limitations is a shrinkage of our existence and worth. 

But in actuality, endeavouring to ignore and control the way we are shaped, is deliberately—or perhaps unconsciously rusting and wasting energy for other areas of our life that we can actually control. Like the options we decide to take. Planning our day. How we spend our time with our loved ones. How we decide to react to matters. Taking action towards our creativity and our goals.

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"The Humble man will never fall because he does not elevate himself." 

These were words I heard from my favourite christian podcast "Saved not Soft" which aided me to remain grounded in my faith. Those words reverberated in my brain, because that was exactly it. I despised the wind because it had the ability to strip me off my pedestal, my stance, my strength. 

Of course, as an overly ambitious individual—almost to a Frankenstenian level it was hard to realise it,  internalize it, let alone accept it with my entire fibres. 

Looking back again to my experience at The School of the New York Times last summer—a two week journalism program, I remember there was this one girl, who when presenting the final project, made it clear that she had no experience with writing or the field of reporting. Shamelessly, but with sprinkles of reverence she admitted that she felt intimidated by the wolvish, almost cannibalistic ambition and knowledge that everyone in the course radiated. Simultaneously, she also admitted that she hadn't allowed that to demotivate her or intimidate her, because in her words there was no point, there was someone that was “always going to be better and perform better than you"

I still don’t love the wind. I still hold a hidden animosity that simmers beneath the surface of my skin. But the mere thought of her, and her words, the truth that it entails, reverberating “there’s always going to be someone better than you” makes me love the wind a bit more, makes me stop and see its face and see it for its worth. I think she loved the wind—perhaps she was enamoured by it, and you should too. 

Thank you for reading! I would love to hear your thoughts.

The question  dominates every theological and philosophical discussion and it is almost imbued in our nature to want to know why evil resides among us, lurking in the shadows, especially if through the existence of a deity we believe that our existence is purposeful and not contingent. 

It has not been only us though, theologians and philosophers have also thrown their cerebrums and eyeballs at the impenetrable pool of this question. Their organs swim to seek a unanimous answer. They have solely lived in a perpetual state of seeking a proper response, and through that, they have forgotten that the question's irony is not the mere point worthy of discourse. Nor is it the existential hatred and borderline suicidal nature of those who incessantly ask it.

 The focal point of the question, lies simply in the idea, that it speaks on almost begs for the existence of a false utopia, where the human eye instead of swimming in the pool of moral questions that ignite fiery discourse, would stare at paintbrushes in artworks of banal landscapes in golden and violet colors. Their mouths reciting frivolous, unrhythmic, and shallow poems of love and hugging a brother. A brother you’re not sure you feel a genuine passion for because you have never chased them around the kitchen with a knife or thrown a child-like tantrum about the splitting of a cake being unequal.

Reading, seeing art and navigating this platform has me thinking that if I implored God to remove evilness from the world it would strip me, and you, and everyone of their artistic identity and call for a worldwide declaration of art as superfluous.

Humans have, through it all, forgotten that varnishing evil in the world actively asks for the obliteration of stories with comedic relief. Most works of art are centered around a conflict that involves the infliction of pain, or the major shift of events in a character's life. Even focused on a historical event such as the death of Socrates as depicted by French artist Jacques Louis David in 1787. Even when a character is portrayed as anguished or despairing, certain segments of a writer's own pain and remaining scars are sprinkled all over the storyline–making it less fictional, more autobiographical, and therefore realistic.

It is indeed, the artist that should pay an ode to the small, but close family that has allowed them to produce generations of good art. The family consists of evilness and sin as the birth givers and comedic relief as the offspring. 

I say that the parent of comedic relief is evilness because, once conflict and a tense atmosphere arise in a story, it automatically begs for comedic relief to take the stage. Believe it or not, those two are mutually inclusive, they feed off one another. 

Frankly, if evilness did not exist, it would have certainly spared Shakespeare both lines and time, of writing his tragedies as he would never have thought of even crafting that scene where Desdemona converses with a clown in Othello. Or in King Lear, where alongside the appearance of the Fool, witty, and snarky bite-backs from characters are splattered throughout the crimson-blooded storyline.

Ironically, it would have spared him the time and the accomplishment of writing both critically acclaimed plays, as they would have never existed at all. Would Shakespeare even have his wizard suit of entertainment in such a world? Embracing his name rightfully behind the stage?

Frankly, in a world without evilness which people often beg for, my eyes see Iago’s ‘honesty’ as honest, without deception or implications, and I see King Lear and his daughters being foreign to the idea of precarious father-daughter bonds. But I also see myself in such a utopia not being able to write the word "deception,” as its concept would be in theory reasonable but nonexistent in reality. The world that has been begged to varnish, with its scars and burning calamities would have never known Shakespeare as he is, with his sharp pen and mind for tragedies, but rather as a perishing playwright, his muddy hand on the street, begging for the day's meals.  

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While we flirt with our utopian fantasies and risk the extinction of our creative drive, we are simultaneously committed to the idea that the outcome of vanishing evil would be favourable. Our mind believes that putting wickedness into exile would equal a flowery field of orchids and a warm bed of clouds. However, that’s a failed step, a gap in our faithful critical judgment.  Believing that the vanishing of evil is a well-rounded solution is just like interpreting a story and believing that our own interpretation is the sole one which conforms to truth; just as a dogmatic suit of comfort.  Yet, when the intricacies, and implications begin lurking in after posing the question, realization blows its horn at you,  blurring the concept of a utopia with what we know as its antonym: a dystopia. I’m convinced that without evilness, anguish, brutality, and all of the synonymous concepts of pain, the world would have never seen the birth of a qualitative work of art.

Do not misinterpret my words, just like the implications of that initial and overused question have been overlooked.

Although I believe that memorable artists are those who question the status quo, I do not plan to undercredit writers who focus on expressing pure happiness, or their unconditional love towards a lover or artists who feel as if there is nothing to critique or satirize about society. 

And it is true, art that derives from pain or deals with pain doesn’t necessarily scream quality, but often it is the most visceral, and visceral art touches people. That is a thought that has come to me as I have navigated this platform. Sometimes the best pieces are not the ones married off to the highest degree of intellectual quality, but they are the ones that are raw and honest.

And yes, let us not ignore that maybe there are writers out there who spill their words in a poem speaking about the falling leaves in their garden, capturing the mere beauty of a hydrangea. Maybe they want to encompass the contentment they felt in the crowded bus, on a commune on the way home. 

Yet it is paramount to note that the contentment that artists express in their art would not be as appreciated by audiences if the opposite sentiment did not exist. When the subject of a piece of art is purely rooted in hope or contentment, the creator of such art must have at one instance in their lives faced the bloodiest of wars to celebrate or depict a genuine form of that positive sentiment. Or at least one that feels appreciative enough.

I have faced a war, and now I'm facing peace and solace, and I'm showing you how one feels, now that the surface of my skin, my toxins, my eyesight has experienced them both. 

I have felt the anguish that comes with a lack of romantic interaction in my life. Now that I have a lover, my art captures this celebration authentically—because I have felt the pain of not having this. 

For instance, the famous lines seen and heard in pop culture “I am the master of my fate and captain of my own soul” derive from William Ernest Henley’s poem Invictus which despite focusing on a light-hearted feeling such as hopefulness, that exact feeling encapsulated by the poet could have not come to life as it is rooted in other despairing sentiments.

This quintessential form of expression is portrayed perfectly through Shakespeare’s humoristic potion, served to his audience specifically through his comedies like The Tempest and As You Like It, which often have sprinkled sprouts of humor that feel distasteful and anti-climatic. Exactly like a five-course meal, with false promises to bring a laugh but rather leaving one with an empty stomach, wondering when the nourishment will fill you from the inside in.

Although when it comes to serving comedic relief, and not humor itself, it kicks in unexpectedly, almost serendipitous, like a served dish whose sweetness balances the saltiness of it, leaving the audience with genuine satiation.

Is it merely a coincidence that the human body begs for a sweet treat straight after polishing a savory plate? Would the buds in the human tongue relish on their creme brulee, and label it as their most beloved if it were not for their previous tasting of a savory appetizer? 

Having said all that, it is essentially difficult for Individuals who live off telling stories through any medium to experience life in a way that is only limited to rationalism. While the human feeling might tend to be unreliable and is at times ostracized for its deceptiveness it nevertheless opens the door for artists to craft narratives that can be relatable for a demographic.

Can you be a good artist and have no raw story to tell? Have some personal war or adversity somewhere hidden in your art? — The quick and simple answer is no, hence that is why rationality is not a long-term viable tool for artists.  I have tugged with this philosophy myself but the raw conclusion is that an artist worth remembering for generations cannot confide in their four static walls, not even if they resided in an opulent palazzo, a chateau, or a villa that has endless walls of history and picturesque bronze wallpapers—sights to medieval gardens.

Truthfully and at its core, a crafter worth remembering for decades by the world must stand on a highway and let themselves be run over. They must linger in between alleyways of impoverished crimes and let themselves feel the knife in their flesh just to let their limbs hang afterward and express the exact sensations through brushes, allegories, film scripts, poems, and novels. They must essentially feel the storm of the status quo, stand at the equator of the universe, and feel its scorching sun, all to then oppose the status quo and its unyielding nature. 

After the artist has successfully experienced such anguish, then they can let rationalism storm through the door of their crafting room, their room of their own.  Plato’s avid hatred towards art, although worthy of critique, is not entirely carried out in vain. He hated art because it is all cemented in sentiments that fall short of rationality. Excellent art must be in a sense theatrical, and dramatic, and have certain elements of hyperbolism while resonating with the internal dichotomies of an individual –this contradicts then those three elements that rationalists tend to have a preference for.

Frankly, out of all the emotions that make humans more and more irrational, the two extremes win the race: pain and love. After hours of bashing Plato as a proud artist that I am, it now clicks perfectly in my head why he loathes art more than anything. If anything, Plato’s authority and credibility as a pure rationalist would remarkably lose consistency if he were not to despise art. 

Throughout the navigation of this question, I began imagining Plato and Sylvia Plath speaking to one another.

 The poet would ask:

“How can you deem art a distortion of reality when it has allowed me to lay down my very own thoughts and made me discover the core of my own anguish?” 

And then Plato would attempt to come up with an unpredictable answer, but ultimately he would say, “It has allowed you to unravel your deepest sentiments and they translated into creative outbursts, but was any of it rational? Your poems are from a particular lens, and they do not communicate the grand picture of your circumstances. Perhaps you could have reconciled with your husband and your mental toil if you had created art not on how you felt, but on how it truthfully was."

Assertively,  I think Plath would say , “Art does not require objectivity, and despite it largely being fragmented, you could perceive my art as still fictional even through its confessional nature. My writing isn’t by any means objective; however, the pain sprinkled through the entirety of my work deeply resonates with an audience, which makes it more realistic despite being subjective.”

Frankly speaking I think I cackled writing this, but what I know is that they would surely dodge the core of each other's comments.

If I could step into the conversation, my tongue would ask them if it was God who then loved art the most or if it was Adam and Eve. For the sinless world before humanity rebelled against the Christian God was free from any evil curse, and spiritual death. However, according to scriptures it was God himself who granted humanity the gift of free will, opening with his right hand the road for the plantation of a human to butch another, and simultaneously with his left hand giving man pen, paper, and the curse of the writer's fragmented mind, faithfully allergic to objectivity. 

Nevertheless, I stand in no position to question the almighty whatsoever or say that any sentient individual is worth enduring psychologically altering pain to simply obtain stories and a portion of entertainment. However, I am in a firm position to defend the existence of what I like calling “the good pain” or to be more specific “the pain of the good artist's muse”. This type of pain refers to an anguish that is rather transformative, that grants you perspective, fills you with pain, and then polishes you up from the inside. 

Picture it this way: as morbid as it clings, wouldn't the act of peeling the surface of your skin, after having endured a sunburn at the equator of the universe appear rewarding if it is the very last product that polishes your art?

Although it is not only that shedding of the skin that acts as the final ingredient for a glimmering art piece, it surely acts as the polisher of our very own temples and our own characters.

At times, we tend to dust in our memories the fact that we are in connection with the animal kingdom much more than we acknowledge. We are very much serpentine-like in our nature. By this, I do not refer to the tendency of the individual to inflict suffering onto others, or be deceptive but I rather refer to the distinct phases that the self must undergo in order to transcend into a resilient individual.

We speak of an artist's art improving over time and overshadowing the fact that an individual's character strengthens over time in a similar process. An artist's material gets stronger in its style and substance, just as they feel the staggering dagger of despair and thus, obtain newer perspectives. An individual's character elevates to a stronger state once they are the witnesses of life-changing events that reconfigure their life. 

Pain is essentially all of that: bleeding, learning, elevating, shedding one's skin, and continuing in the storyline of one's life. As a society amid discourse of character development, we further forget that our lives, our bodies, are also works of art.

However, for artists, they operate as dual artists. Artists of their own temples, and artists of their art and artistic persona, as opposed to the regular individual who is only an artist of their life’s storyline.

Now, let’s rewind our thinking. Why is evil the stirring pot of our lives, why must it exist? Historians, anthropologists, and thinkers such as Nietzsche and Hobbes have dealt with this tracing back centuries ago. I feel like I have turned into one of them now, so allow me to grab my pen and say that it is simply due to the following: the two predominant roles that art has played have been offering the individual an escape from society’s calamities, together with challenging the mayhem around. Thus, without despair, art would become a side decoration, and superfluous would become its second name.

Ultimately, the issue with the wish to varnish evil from the world without considering its implications is that to be an artist, means to bleed, and many good creatives know this themselves. They know that it is the price to pay for outstanding talent and an abiding legacy. For writers blood transcripts to ink, for painters, it translates to stones and brushes in a Canva, for filmmakers it means having tears on a beautifully sculpted face on a screen.  

This is often preached by many artists themselves, however, many do not come to terms with it until they themselves are bleeding and wondering why the blood keeps reappearing in their lives.  Expanding, increasing–until they look up at the sky and wonder why they feel as if their soul has been cast to hell, their internal fibers in eternal damnation, their eyes gazing up to the sky begging God for a soothing tissue in their wounds, a stitch for their thousand cuts. 

I’ve felt this myself. After the finalization of my daily artistic performances, on a stage shared with Van Gogh, Plath, Woolf, Heath Ledger, Wilde, Baldwin, Frieda Kahlo, and all the greatest names out there,  I've felt crimson spilling out of my core, I’ve begged, cried, thrown punches and deemed the despair unfair. Yet I point to the crimson that spills all over the floor, redirecting everyone's eyes to the trace that narrows down a path. 

We as artists follow it, because our curious nature always seeks answers. We walk, and stroll the red-colored pavement embellished with our blood. The divine path that it creates leads to a verdant garden of lush bushes, a serendipitous garden wrapped by a warm dark sky, sprinkled with silver stars. 

Our eyes spot figures lurking around a monumental elm, with a serpent wrapped around the trunk like a suffocating scarf. And right  there lies one of the figure's hands, gripping a succulent-looking apple. The other—the female countenance simply admires the fruit, as if it were to find itself for the first time in a museum of art on a regular afternoon. 

Our gaze sticks to them, to the eyes that see that juicy poem in the apple that was warned not to devour. But Eve brings it to her mouth, and Adam is not innocent either as he recites to her the richest, most gut-wrenching poem. Perhaps it was one of Ginsberg, Plath, Yeats, or Dickinson. 

But now I know it has been them, the two bodies, the villainised couple by humanity, whose love for art has been greater than any other individual in the world. Them, with the hand on the apple and the tree have allowed me and you to be visceral, to be creative to capture the core of our sentiments. 

So as creatives we shouldn’t villanize our pain and ask God to remove evilness. It is our duty to embrace it. 

Would love to hear your thoughts and converse with you on this! my next piece will draw more on the personal, hope to see you next week.

I am Bella Devine, and welcome to my typewriter. 

This is where I will write loudly, rebelliously, and passionately about what haunts my sleep and what I see in the streets—the hidden personal and the political. This is where my ink will converse with an array of subjects: womanhood, literature, the status quo, the philosophical, and the theological. 

Although most of those around me know me for my poetry and my fiction, this is not where those pieces will be published. That is reserved for a quieter, more polished—more traditional place. The places where I have knocked a thousand times until they open the door. 

But this? This is where I allow myself to be more bold without putting on the scrutiny of a demanding editor.

I’m well aware that Substack can be a place where sometimes, the same topics run their rounds through everyone's essays, making it difficult to bring something fresh to the table. But frankly, I see it more as a cobweb of ideas, where everything is intertwined, synthesized, and what has been said before is accentuated. 

Expect annotations on margins, reflections on existence, on mine or yours, on politics, femininity, and anything I sense needs calling. By default I will publish a piece twice a month, but if it gets hectic and my typewriter runs out of ink, it will be once a month. 

I will challenge you with my gripping convictions, but challenge me back. After all, I write on a typewriter, not in a technological manuscript. 

Attempting to Face what you’ve been running from it’s like putting your finger to the flame and expecting not to scorch and burn.

A third time's a charm. But not when, in both my pen and typewriter, my ink has run out in an attempt to write a letter to the summer air. In an ablaze poem, I offer my oxidized apologies for not loving it, and all that remorse in cheap poets words is worth a bare trunk of last winter storm. I haven’t finished my verse, and Augustine already mocks me and says my "rancor for the humid wind is rather arbitrary."

And I blow back, blame summer for opening seas and letting me mourn in my rotten castle about all those ships that sailed. Augustine, my love for you has soared; it rusted with the blackbird who sang in the dead of night, and all I shall do is push my cheap chapters on you as court evidence or mundane proof.No, summer's not rotten; I am because I ache to put my sonnets in the candlelight just to watch the ashes fall and find my next line. My next rhyme, my sixteenth minute of fame, my next victim blame.

 I’d obliterate summer from the annual calendar, and with it, my literary passport disappears, I am not hemorrhagic anymore, and my scars varnish, but then it says, "You are no writer any more." Summer laughs and says I am “chained” to her; I don't get the privilege to swiftly bolt like all of them.