It’s been an absurd, tragic, and deflating week and month and years okay. You know it, I know it, my eyes glaze over a little bit when I see the intro paragraph of links and setup explaining the state of the world. I’ve been thinking about the advice I sometimes see that you need to pick a few issues and stay focused and not be overwhelmed by the Trump Administration’s strategy of flooding the zone. While I understand where it’s coming from, I can’t manage to do it because I’m a top tier “BUT EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED!!!” girl, and even though I admittedly don’t track many important things closely, the news… is hard to look away from.
But I don’t have control of the CDC, the NIH, or the FAA, or Senate confirmation hearings, or fire policies, or immigration, nor can I vote on them right now nor can I even exactly donate to their causes (to varying degrees depending on issue). I’m fed up with people posting what seem to be essentially subtweets about feeling like other people aren’t doing enough to help themselves feel like they are doing “enough” and I’m fed up with people posting about “joy as resistance” in a way that seems to justify not doing other resisting and then I’m fed up with myself because though I post neither of those things, I’m afraid of “not doing enough” and I’m afraid of not having enough “joy as resistance” and I’m afraid of pretending I’m doing “joy as resistance” but really excusing myself. I’m sad because it feels like protests and calling your representatives barely does anything, not to suggest it does nothing. I’m mad at other people who want to point blame and I’m pointing blame at people who point blame and then I’m trying to have compassion and then I’m wanting to change peoples’ minds and then I’m remembering people are hard to convince and that we need community but where is the community without church and local neighborhood stuff we associate with old people now and and and and
You get the vibe. And I do not want to veer into “self-care” and individualism and introspection too hard but something I have been contemplating that I think is both something to evaluate in myself and something to fight everywhere is what I’ve come to call “ROI brainworms.”
ROI as in return on investment, a corporate phrase that has leaked into the everyday vocabulary of people I know including myself and whose underpinning logic feels like a part of many problems we face. It’s not inherently bad, it makes sense for businesses to want to estimate what profits they receive in return for their initial investment. Like most concepts, it becomes bad when taken to an extreme and taken as the end all consideration. It’s bad when you wake up one day and every decision you make is heavily shaped by “trying to get your money’s worth.” Obviously a cousin of our obsession with optimization, I find ROI disease much more insidious because it fuels a lot of what we choose not to do at all whereas I associate optimization with a lot of consumption behaviors like beauty regimens, life hacks, buying everything that Wirecutter recommends, etc. Two sides of a coin! Probably blurrier than that.
This has worsened due to high cost of living. I think about this whenever I see people framing choosing to stay in every weekend as “enjoying my rent.” No hate to making your space yours or not going out (I am not even a partier), but like committing too hard to the label of introvert, I worry that it’s a covert normalization of isolation, loneliness, and not hanging out with friends because of the perceived lack of ROI. The feeling of having to spend money to be a person outside of your living space does feel very acute these days! Weigh that against the blobby, hard to quantify appeal of socializing and it can be a tough call, made even worse if you throw in how much you’re paying for rent as a consideration. You might not even have the best night out, so why bother? Sometimes I am groping for “practical” reasons to not see people because it makes me sad when I’m walking in a group of people and conversations happen to separate out in such a way where I’m walking alone, or because it makes me sad when people flake last minute, or because it makes me sad that a lot of my hangouts with certain people now are just each of us recounting what’s been up recently (which is not the most optimistic of topics these days) and then leaving after 2 hours. I can save myself the immediate sad by staying home, where I know I will experience a safe neutral amount of enjoyment watching television and crocheting. Again, sometimes that’s the right call, but it’s dangerous to let this impulse win out too often. So much of community-building and relationship-building is about showing up, even when you don’t completely want to or aren’t entirely sure, and the payoff is not guaranteed nor will it take the same shape every time.
An issue with ROI, which is also an issue with applying pretty much any corporate logic too intensely to the real world, is that it prioritizes what can be quantified in discrete units and easily forecasted. A lot of social potentiality is incalculable. What if tonight is the night you meet the love of your life, etc.? You can never leave your house knowing it’s going to be the best night of your life; that would actually ruin it.
Personally, this is a reason that I find myself pretty incapable of actively trying to date. While in theory I would like to be in a relationship and am aware that it takes work and “putting myself out there” and whatnot, I absolutely despise the fact that I could go on 100 dates and it might yield what I perceive as nothing if I don’t meet the right person under the right circumstances. I could spend all those hours on any hobby or even watching movies I’ve been meaning to see and I would feel like I accomplished something. The complete lack of correlation between effort in and results out irks me, perhaps because there’s been little in my life I would say feels quite like that.
ROI has plagued us for a long time. In high school, I remember being shown “ROI calculations” of various college majors based on average salary versus tuition costs. While a valid consideration (again, especially because of rising costs), following that kind of logic too intensely is how we end up with a glut of investment bankers, consultants, and software engineers and a shortage of nurses, teachers, and social workers. It’s a part of how we end up in an aggressively preprofessional version of college, and how the humanities become thoroughly devalued and dismantled.
I suspect that ROI brainworms are also a part of the pressure on children these days, not because parents are cold, calculating overseers of their children/investments, but because it’s just become such a pervasive underlying logic that it feels like what makes sense. The more we know about how pertinent childhood is for development and how good children are at learning languages and whatever, the more valuable that time becomes for putting them into controlled environments to improve return on investment. The ROI of exploratory, free play is probably actually quite high, but it’s far more fuzzy and less measured than putting your child in a bunch of structured classes and activities. Independence, self-confidence, autonomy, and other squishy takeaways are important but not as clearly available in any “If you put X time and money in, you get Y out” situation.
ROI brainworms shape my consumption habits. I don’t want to spend several hours watching a movie that’s going to be mediocre. I don’t want to go to a restaurant and spend too much money on food that doesn’t feel worth it. Luckily everything is rated on an easy 5-star scale by everyone else. I’m mentally preparing to rate it on a 5-star scale as I consume it. The weird decision paralysis that I land in here is honestly embarrassing sometimes. It would be much more fun and memorable and honestly informative sometimes to just pop into a random place to eat. I’m afraid of feeling stupid and like I wasted time/money/etc. The same applies to starting hobbies!
The obsession and constant barrage of and demand for clean narratives, whether it’s influencer social media branding, the way we are taught history, most memoirs, or our own beliefs about the story of our lives, does not help. In hindsight, ROI can be written in after the fact; of course you did A, B, and C and so now you’re at point Z (sorry I love the alphabet). I think of the stories where someone moves across or out of the country or breaks rank from familial expectations and turns out wildly successful enough for me to be hearing their tale, of activists who took a stand and are now constantly referenced and revered for their moral backbone. Now it looks obvious that the big risk was a great decision, that that was always what they should have done and knew to do and look at how it all worked out! But clearly when you live that life it had to be terrifying in the moment, had to have taken a lot of courage and a willingness to fail and be wrong and embarrassed and even destitute. If you had attempted to calculate the ROI or expected value or anything like that, you simply wouldn’t have had enough information, and you literally never will.
In this particularly turbulent point in time, it’s so understandable to crave control. It’s so easy to turn inward. I think that explains a lot of behaviors in myself and others. But we lose so much capacity for taking even small risks when we get to used to it, partly because more and more things become perceived as risks rather than just things you do. The inertia only gets stronger over time, and so too do the perceived costs and risks. I find it annoying when people tell me that anything (besides real muscles) are muscles, but I fear I feel my own capacity for doing things with highly uncertain outcomes atrophying over time. Several of the best decisions I’ve ever made involved fewer pro/con lists and ROI calculations than I’d whip out now, and the ineffability of certain human experiences is actually inherent to their so-called worth.
if anyone is in the chicago area and wants to do like… fun creative portraits… i’m oddly itching to do more!
i genuinely believe one piece of building our brighter future is people READING MORE thnx
nobody knows what a journalist is anymore and that is a huge problem
big aidan zamiri fan (you might recognize his work with charli xcx, billie eilish, and wallows recently) so i enjoyed this interview
the future of fire cannot look like its present
profile of a top male onlyfans creator and the sort of unreality of his life
who gets shipped (in a fanfiction context), really cool visual presentation of this too!
this essay was a reminder that we are living in the echoes of the 1980s
cute little profile of macaulay culkin and brenda song!!!
rayne fisher-quann on writing, actually writing and the thinking that it requires
the internet is worse than a brainwashing machine; it offers you justification
title says it all “i hired someone to watch all my friends’ instagram stories for a week”
i love when people point out the vibes of millennial aesthetics
no more startups with tech solutions to solve fundamentally human issues pls
really fascinating breakdown of the podcasting manosphere
haven’t read this book yet but this interview helped it rise on my to-read list: american bulk by emily mester
other forms of media <3
the truth about child influencing (podcast ep)
democrats are losing the war for attention very very badly (podcast ep) like so badly i saw the former social media person for wendy’s posting on bluesky offering cory booker their services pro bono
snl’s future of healthcare is promising, perhaps unfortunately lol
re books: i read detransition, baby by torrey peters after owning a copy for literally over 3 years and i loved it. also i read rejection by tony tulathimutte and it was disturbing in the best possible way, absolutely insane. pre-order sucker punch by scaachi koul if you, like me, love a divorce memoir btw!
re movies: recently saw nickel boys and it was beautiful but also devastating because it’s about boys growing up at a jim crow era reform school, adapted from the colson whitehead novel. it’s shot in first-person which is such an interesting choice!
bovine excision music video save me samia third album save me
himbo dome patrons rise up for the mj lenderman tiny desk
re tv: all i can say is if you don’t watch severance i have little to say these days. was here before the recent hype and will be here until they drag me out
5/5 total ROI reading this
Another banger (do people still use this slang term nowadays? Slang evolves so fast lolol) post! Once again aaaaaaaaa you so beautifully articulate stuff that I wholly resonate with and have experienced! Like I don't even know where to begin to describe all these messy feelings, and reading your newsletter honestly rly helps me process/think/etc about these things. Thanks for writing, as always!