hi again (and for the last time),

throughout the course of this newsletter, i’ve asked my brother Patrick a couple of times if he would write something for me to send out. he’s an editor and a writer, and i run pretty much all of my writing and ideas past him. but he’s turned me down every time (probably because he didn’t want to do my work for me). i asked him again today, and to my surprise, he said yes! he wrote this in about an hour, and it almost made me throw my phone in the water as soon as i read it because i don’t want to waste any more time on social media. he immediately said that’s not his point. but i think you should read it for yourself. it comes highly recommended by yours truly. no images for this one, just words:


lily asked me to write a guest post about my general philosophy of the web. i don't think that's possible for a number of reasons. one being that i don't have one. two, i think she's on a fairly strict deadline and i have about an hour. so instead i've written something amounting to a personal manifesto:

tomorrow marks my 27th year on earth, and for the past one or two, i’ve been thinking a lot about how i'm going to die. about how my youth has just about come and gone, how time does actually pass, how i'm going to keep getting older and older and bit by bit parts of my body are going to wear down and i'll never do so many of the things i'd thought i would do and then one day i'll die. and that's honestly the best case, everything goes well scenario.

which is dismal. cliché even. but so it goes.

when i think about dying, i usually also think about how reluctant we are to recognize the fact of it. it's the one undeniable human truth. or maybe the two -- that we'll die and that we'll refuse to acknowledge as much. that negation runs through just about everything in the good ol us of a. consider skincare and plastic surgery. consider a public bathroom, a garbage dump, the process by which your chicken caesar arrived in front of you, and where exactly it's all going to go from here. consider even the inoperable fireplace that ornaments your dorm room, or how quickly the scene of a car crash is cleansed. (once in my life, i saw, actually saw, a person physically injured in a crash, lying in the road bleeding, in lebanon)

there's a distinctly american repression lying beneath the surface of all of these things. i think essentially it comes down to this idea that acknowledging the full cycle of life would mean acknowledging the futility of the american drive (to maximize profit, to accumulate possessions), let alone the utility of the various carrots and sticks.

all of this to say that we don't like to acknowledge, collectively, as a people, that things must always come to an end, be it lives, companies, governments, countries. so while there are many things that 'the internet' has folded into itself, it's not surprising to find among them this pretension that your attention is not being held captive, that time is not passing, that you are not in the process of dying as you read this.

and yet... time is always passing, our attention is always held by what it's given to, we are always dying (and living). there are ways in which we can slow down time, and ways in which we can speed it up. we control what we give our attention to. 'the internet' -- the attention economy -- wants your attention, will do everything it can to seize your attention and once it's in hand, to speed up your time.

it feeds on addiction and operates like any abusive relationship. [pick a social media app] appears at first as a relief, a benign distraction from the cruel realities of the world, a means to get away, a means to express yourself, a means to avoid the anxiety and fear of being human. it reassures you. it allows you a space to withdraw. you return to the world. the world hasn't changed. nvm, you return to [app]. it reassures you. you re-enter the world. you enter the fetal position. you return to [app]. it reassures you. you kind of stop having real conversations. you start to develop anxieties about how you appear on [app], whether you should've posted that [content], whether people actually like your digital persona. you fear being alone. you spend more time on [app]. you learn how to be liked (on [app]).

and so it goes, with [app] having inserted itself as the sole means to a very shallow reassurance, one to which you will continue to return because your anxieties and fears have been warped into its image, and one which is false, for you are not its end but an insignificant means to its own disparate financial ends.

it's true that whatever you consume will inevitably alter what you see. but this is not inevitably for the worse. the process of reading, for example, is always a process of learning and re-learning how to read, and a good book succeeds in so far as it teaches you how to read its pages. even if you don't realize it's happening, the author is always telling you where to look, directing your gaze, and flagging what you should be paying attention to. and often, when you close this book, and return to the physical world around you, their guidance remains with you, drawing your attention to realities you wouldn't have otherwise noticed. something inside of you has shifted in how you pay your attention.

this transference can occur through any media -- through books, concerts, whatever. for me, it's what defines true art. in a very real sense, it is immanence: it's the difference between using you as a means to an end and treating you as the end for which it exists.

if you're reading this, you have the opportunity to choose what you pay attention to. nothing could be more important in a world where just about everything you interact with online has been optimized to capture your attention and convert it into currency. as jenny odell writes in how to do nothing, "in a time of shrinking margins, when not only students but everyone else has 'put the medal to the metal,' and cannot afford other kinds of refusal, attention may be the last resource we have left to withdraw."

this is where we are. time, i'm realizing, is not infinite. i want to spend it well. i want to pay attention to things that will improve me and the world around me. things that i can learn from. things that i can act upon. things that will bring me closer to the earth and a natural life upon it. i don't know why lily asked me to write this. i don't know if she'll include it. i don't know if anyone will read it. but i think it was worth spending time on.

lily again
thank you for reading so far.
my brother’s name is Patrick Canfield if you’re like related to a publisher or something and they wanna hire or publish him. lmk.

anyway. until we meet again --

all my best,

        lily