Sitting next to each other (metaphorically), looking at a third thing
I try to explain why I'm doing this, but I can't stop thinking about how the Internet made everyone want to develop a personal brand and shout into the void
I’m pretty bad at naming things, much better at describing them usually (but don’t hold me accountable for that claim quite yet). The title “Third Thing” is extremely broad and for me comes from an essay about BoJack Horseman (one of my all-time favorite TV shows that I could go on forever about), in which the author notes,
“Watching is the format of friendship in BoJack. Rather than face-to-face, friendship's geometry is triangular: you and another person sit next to each other, looking at a third thing. Sitting next to each other offers vulnerability-averse characters like BoJack a means to relate to someone obliquely, without the pressures of head-on confrontation. It's the "this" that lets him say, "this is nice," and keep being together when saying anything else becomes impossible, as Cushman and Foote discuss.”
I’ve been thinking about this triangular idea of friendship, as a recent grad in the midst of a pandemic, living several thousands of miles away from most of my friends. And in general I’ve been thinking and overthinking a lot, which is on brand for me. So this is an attempt to slightly more formally organize and explain my thoughts instead of me irregularly ranting to people and barraging them with links to articles with no real sense of resolution. Part of me does feel like I am the vulnerability-averse character trying to relate to someone obliquely.
There’s something special about seeing people informally and day-to-day that gives you insight into the shape of their lives and allows space for more meaningful conversations, whereas when you are semi-regularly in touch it can kind of end up with a lot of monologuing life updates where you’re talking past each other / regurgitating the same couple of anecdotes you’ve pre-packaged. At least that’s been an issue for me.
So then my attempt at offering a Third Thing that probably ends up being “look at this article deep-diving into something we kind of were aware about and exposing how it’s tied to late-stage capitalism and climate change and the end of humanity,” which is not the most uplifting approach. Generally, the Third Thing is too often COVID-19 these days or its companion crises. I can’t really offer novel Third Things but I can offer unnecessary meta-analysis regarding how we look at Third Things. If I’m honest, at least for right now my plan for writing here is to talk about ~how we think about~ Big Crises, since many smarter people (who I will often link to / recommend reading probably) are working on how we solve them policy-wise. “Big” is relative. So is “Crises.” Basically I made this as vague and unclear as possible. I really do enjoy thinking about and trying to understand why people behave the way they do, even though it often depresses and baffles me anyways. And then maybe if I allocate some of my existential crisis energy here, I can try being a functional friend in ~my real life~ which also exists on the Internet now.
Expressing my opinion on the Internet in a public format has made me irrationally nervous since I was in middle school and for some reason decided to comment that I wasn’t the biggest fan of a Selena Gomez song on her music video and got hate messages on YouTube for a good three years after. Hopefully that doesn’t happen again!
Anyways, my name is Anson, I grew up in a suburb of Chicago, went to Rice University in Houston, and now I’m in London, trying to not lose my mind in the middle of a pandemic (and also get a master’s degree). I care about… lots of things, I swear, but the ones that come up the most are probably healthcare / social determinants of health, behavioral science, Chinese-American identity, feminism, the Internet, and my endless admiration for John Mulaney and Jia Tolentino. I’m pretty convinced nobody is going to read this, but we’ll see! I’m not even sure I want people to read this!
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