Itâs easy to lose yourself in Los Angeles. Maybe itâs easy in any new city, the yet undiscovered friendships, the yet unfulfilled possibilities. Maybe itâs just easy. After all, there are false idols everywhere. In my mind, itâs particularly easy in LA. Thereâs something at once enticing and repulsive about this cityâ like the haunting fragrance of flowers dying, reminiscent of glory and suggestive of rot, the kind of beauty that shouldnât be studied too closely.
In the sparkling chaos of the past few weeks (decompressing from Burning Man, getting engaged, planning an engagement party for 40 friends), Iâve felt uncharacteristically unrooted; algae adrift in the aftermath of a roiling, unfamiliar set. I found myself worried about trivialities, trying to please everyone around me, spending time with people who say things they donât mean, who have shown me values that I donât agree with, or character that I donât respect. For a moment, I lost my footing; I forgot where I was standing, what I stood forâwho I was.
Botoxâ˘ď¸ FOMO
Los Angeles is a place for wanting, for strivingâfor becoming as close to an ideal as you can in this lifetime. As Jia Tolentino wrote in her Trick Mirror essay, Always Be Optimizing, women, in particular, are trapped in a system of exchange with the market, one in which they obediently evolves into the gazeâs idealââgood looks, the impression of indefinitely extended youth, advanced skills in self-presentation and self-surveillance.â Successful evolution is rewarded with more gaze. In turn, they consume the marketâs selection of celebrity-created smoothies (Iâm looking at you, Hailey âwhat-nose/brow/chin surgery?-now-buy-my-skincare-lineâ Bieber), exercise classes, and fillersâand their appetites remain voracious. This race is a variation on the rat race; instead of success, the status sought is beauty. The shrine is different, but it is still a pilgrimage, and it is still towards a mirage.
One day, I looked around, and almost every woman I knew was getting regular injections of some kind. A couple months ago, I consulted an aesthetician about Botoxâ˘ď¸. She told me to wait until I was in my late-20s or early-30s. Rather than resting on the laurels of that reassurance, I became restless, convinced that everyone else was âgetting ahead,â and that one day, my face would spontaneously combust becauseâironicallyâI hadnât infused my epidermis with toxins. I had Botoxâ˘ď¸ FOMO.
As Tolentino writes, â[s]atisfaction remains, under the terms of the system, necessarily out of reach.â As long as thereâs money to be made from dissatisfaction, satisfaction can only be short-lived. And there is always money to be madeâjust look at the proliferation of trademarks in our daily life. By design, the default setting must be dissatisfaction; itâs a feature, not a bug.
our new religion of self-care
In this city, we worship at the church of self-optimization; our Sunday offerings are paid to aestheticians and surgeons. The self-care practices we engage in are morally neutral at best, and yet kindle a religious devotion and fervor. In the early aughts, CrossFitâ˘ď¸ was considered âcultish.â Itâs not uncommon for run clubs to be the entirety of a social life. Yoga teacher training facilitators are likened to mothers. Arguably, narcissistically watching yourself run the treadmill in the eerie glow of the Red Roomâ˘ď¸ while a member of the Barryâs Bootcampâ˘ď¸ âfamilyâ threatens to drop-kick you if you donât hit 11 is Manson-Family-adjacent. Dive clubs have an initiation process, during which youâre asked to prove yourself by swimming in the Pacific Ocean without a wetsuit. The price of acceptance into each of these âcommunitiesââaccompanying the $35 per classâis your devotion. Unsurprisingly, like reality television stars, fitness instructors regularly become celebrities. In their skin-tight sets, they preach the gospel that if you show up religiously, you, too, can look like them. And yes, Iâm an eager participant in most of these practices.
Thereâs a heart-wrenching disconnect between our personal actions and the devastation happening around us. Tolentino writes of the investment that we, individually and collectively, devote to physical optimization. We have witnessed optimization âexponentially expanding in all beauty-related capacities â think of the extended Kardashian experiments in body modification, or the young models whose plastic surgeons have given them entirely new faces,â while everything elseâour crumbling infrastructure, economic recession, a vicious healthcare system, global unrestâhas become untenable. Embracing willful ignorance, we turn our backs on this âeverything elseââon our realityâso that we can fine-tune our Instagram post without distractions. Imagine an alternative in which even a fraction of the resources devoted to self-optimization were re-directed to solving any of the innumerable existential crises confronting civilization.
Weâre not meant to be timeless, or perfectâand what hubris it is to believe ourselves capable of accomplishing either. Our willingness to brute-force it, through body hacks and surgical interventions, is emblematic of our individual and collective delusion. Our readiness to do so at the expense of a planet that has been here long before us, and should have been here long after us, is emblematic of our increasingly single-minded worship of the material, the superficial, the artificial.
After a year in Los Angeles, Iâm already finding myself less of who I used to beâsomeone who lives for the pleasures of the mind and heartâand increasingly exhibiting the values that this city callously advertises and implicitly reveres. If youâre surrounded by people who treasure status, money, success, and beauty, the worth and the weight of authenticity, integrity, kindness, equanimity become less apparent. Intangible values are inherently disadvantaged, both because of their abstract nature and the difficulty of embodying them consistently. Placed next to ostensible trophies of multi-millionaire dollar homes and faces that age backwards, they gently and inevitably lose their luster. (Itâs possible, I believe, to have bothâbut itâs delicate; thatâs an essay for another time.)
I worry that the future thatâs beginning to take shapeâthat may already be formed, looming behind the fog of the presentâis heartbreaking. Like Jenny Odell, I contemplate a future in which those âwho perceive life to be more than an instrument and therefore something that cannot be optimizedâ is in the minority; and those who âlive for the pleasures of the mindâŚthe writer, the thinker, the dreamer, the poet, the metaphysician, the observerâ no longer have anything in common with mainstream society. Theyâll retreat further into self, into safety and seclusion. The restâtumbleweeds drifting down the beach, frivolous and flighty, or FrankenInfluencers each trying to glitter, each trying to shine, brighter and ghastlier than the nextâshall inherit this scorched earth.
attention renders reality. thoughts become motivations.
To find myself again, I spent this past week with my people in LAâthe ones that ground me rather than scatter meârunning and gossiping, doing yoga nidra and getting Night+Market takeout, pretending to surf and laughing over Malibu Farmsâs hot salad shakshuka. I donât know what the right answer to all of this is; I only know that the right people, moving my body, and writing, are my center.
For now, Iâm contemplating that, first, reality is based on what we choose to give our attention to:
âOne thing I have learned about attention is that certain forms of it are contagious. When you spend enough time with someone who pays close attention to something, you inevitably start to pay attention to some of the same things. Iâve also learned that patterns of attentionâwhat we choose to notice and what we do notâare how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time. These aspects, taken together, suggest to me the revolutionary potential of taking back our attentionâŚ
...In short, [a life of sustained attention] leads to awareness, not only of how lucky I am to be alive, but to ongoing patterns of cultural and ecological devastation around meâand the inescapable part that I play in it, should I choose to recognize it or not. In other words, simple awareness is the seed of responsibility.â
â Jenny Odell, How To Do Nothing
And second, that âthoughts become motivations,â an aphorism that my friend, Afton, heard on her recent trip to India. It seems obvious, doesnât it? If our thoughts are saturated by the âfruits of achievementâ or the âcyborgianâ Instagram Face, we become motivated towards themâto acquire a certain lifestyle, to achieve âporeless skin and plump, high cheekbones...âA face that looks like itâs made out of clay.ââ
I want to take back my attentionâmute the endless noise surrounding me, curate the sources I consume. I want to be careful of the thoughts, the ideas, the wants that infiltrate my psyche. I want to be intentional about the influences I invite into my life.
And so, I return to the inner world that always awaits me, to the values that have always been fiercely true. I forget those who want something from me, who always want something from someoneâwho always want. I remember the friends who make all this bearable, even joyful. I give my attention to the people who always show up, when I most need it and when I least expect it; the people who watch out for me, laughing as they tow me through the waves of the Pacific Ocean.
I remember Tom and Wally and our love and our life, holding hands in the eye of the storm. I remember that Tom, like my grandfather before him, is my oak tree, my mountainous roots, that there is something invincible about himâthat I feel limitless when Iâm with him. I remember that I have never been happier than this momentâdespite the tragedy that refuses to relent, despite all there is to mourn and all the grief that awaits us.
Life feels warm and full of possibility. To be here, now, is a thing of bliss.
Time moves on. Dusk is spreading its fingertips, inking treetops with the indigo of dreams. The day is old now. Finally, Iâm realizing that, despite it all, tragedy or comedy or horror, this is really a love story.