Words for 2020
Thinking about 4 terms that I learned and 4 terms I'm still looking for as a result of this chaotic, complicated year.
Looking back on a whole entire year is always hard, it’s hard to project yourself back to January, to remember all the events that happened in between, to reflect on where you went wrong and where you went right and wonder about the forked paths you went down and where the other one led. This year, like with everything, it feels harder.
The losses have been staggering, and the trauma is still incomplete. In some ways, I feel like everyone has been mentally in a “survival mode,” where we are all just trying to make it through, some people literally for their livelihoods. I think whenever it is that the pandemic actually ends (I’m definitely not expecting this to be in the first half of 2021), there’s going to be this collective release, where we all realize and start to really feel all the grief and the pain and the mental health toll this year had. And I hope that everyone will be able to find space and time to process that, but I’m also concerned that at a societal level we won’t provide that space, especially for healthcare workers, public health officials, teachers, and other essential workers.
2020 somehow provided way too much to look back on and also a weirdly low ratio of new memories formed to old memories lost that makes time feel like Jeremy Bearimy. There are lots of round-ups, top 10/20/50/100 lists, tips on how to keep your new year’s resolutions, and whatnot, I’m not trying to do that here. I kind of tried last week, with My Year in Content. To be clear, I am hopeful 2021 will be a good year. But we have to help make it good and realize how much of “normal” is what led us to catastrophe, and needs to be changed.
Ed Yong concluded his last 2020 pandemic piece like this:
The choice between those options is now before us, as the coronavirus pandemic enters its second full year. As Americans get vaccinated, they must decide whether to remember the people who sacrificed to keep stores open and hospitals afloat, the president who lied to them throughout 2020 and consigned them to disaster, the families still grieving, the long-haulers still suffering, the weaknesses of the old normal, and the costs of reaching the new one. They must decide whether to resist the decay of memory and the elision of history—whether to forget, or to join the many who will never be able to.
We’re in the midst of the decisions on what to forget and learn from and prioritize, personally and societally. Maybe the rest of the 2020s will be roaring in the partying/dancing sense, but hopefully they also bring lots of positive cultural change and policy reform! Hopefully! Please!
I’ll also drop here some ~positivity~ that I appreciated. Oftentimes individual “good news” is underpinned by systemic bad news, like “Wow! Man is able to pay his medical bills from GoFundMe donations [because our healthcare system is insane]!” But these are Internet things that actually made me feel a little better.
The New York Times The Daily podcast - “The Year in Good News” where they asked listeners to call in and share their good news
Popular Information’s year in review of how their accountability journalism has actually made a difference
The Energy Institute at Haas (Berkeley)’s list of good things that happened for environmental progress
Delia Cai’s Deez Links newsletter did a round-up of wisdom from Q&As she did this year
NPR Code Switch podcast - “The Fire Still Burning” on James Baldwin, which is less about the end of the year and more about how we keep going
2020 Trolley Problem meme roundup by MEL Magazine, this is less positive but I think trolley problem memes are hilarious and often clever while also sad
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I’ve been thinking about words that I learned this year and words I’m still looking for to describe certain things. I know that not everything needs language, and perhaps the ineffability of certain experiences is partially what makes them valuable. But I want something to google, I guess.
One of my favorite feelings, which I think you can attain consuming many different forms of media, is the sense of feeling seen, and related to, of having a writer put into words exactly what you’ve been feeling and putting it all together for you, or of seeing your experience captured on-screen, and feeling like a part of something broader. As my friend Kimberly put it regarding Lulu Wang’s wonderful 2019 movie The Farewell, “Seeing The Farewell as a young Asian-American person is emotional because first you realize you’re being seen fully, and so you want to cry, and then you realize you’ve never been fully seen before, and so you want to cry even more.” That feeling is beautiful, and it is often amplified by its scarcity. The words below are ones that are helping me better contemplate the issues they are describing, and I’m really trying to not be too hopeless. No more downer endings.
On that note, if you have good terms for any of the words I’m about to tell you I need, please let me know! If you’re a subscriber, you can reply straight to this email. Otherwise, comment below or reach out to me because I think I personally know almost everyone currently subscribed lol. As always, extremely open to discussion, thoughts, links, etc.
Words I found this year
“functional inconvenience”
While I’ve never been a fan of small talk, I have missed the small, interesting interactions I used to have with people I didn’t know too well. There are people I would never think to text individually (probably don’t even have their phone number), but I definitely enjoy talking to. We haven’t been really able to ~run into~ people recently, and I think that’s done some interesting things to my conception of myself and my world personally. Like in September, when I moved to London and had to start meeting new people again, it felt strange to realize how much context and background new people I meet do not have for me. It feels like a lot of explanation for someone to get to know you. I’d just spent the last six months mostly interacting with people who have known me for at least three years. Getting to know people this term has been hard, partially because there’s not much casual interaction. In the UK there was also the “rule of six” where you could only gather in up to six people, resulting in awkward scrambles in Whatsapp groups to snag a spot in an outdoor gathering, but then six is a weird number of people to hold an interesting conversation with, especially when you don’t know everyone too well. I’ve also personally become increasingly averse to gathering at all as COVID cases rose in the UK.
Anyways, enough about the intersection of COVID with my social anxieties, basically the word I found to articulate how the built environment / social conventions normally creates space for small interactions that build to connection is functional inconvenience. I actually found it in an Atlantic article about office spaces and working from home by Amanda Mull.
The social by-products of going to work aren’t found only in shared projects or mentoring—many are baked into the physical spaces we inhabit. Break rooms, communal kitchens, and even well-trafficked hallways help create what experts call functional inconvenience. “We have these interdisciplinary connections because people have to take the stairs, or the bathroom is on a different floor,” says Peter Berg, the director of the School of Human Resources and Labor Relations at Michigan State University. “Moving through that space in an inconvenient way is really important to connection.” People end up talking to their co-workers—complimenting a new haircut, asking how the kids are—when they’re corralled together waiting for the elevator or washing their hands next to each other in the bathroom. Over time, those quick encounters build a sense of belonging and warmth that makes spending so much of your life at work a little more bearable.
The term itself is interesting because it sounds negative—inconvenience seems undesirable. In a way, I like that it acknowledges that on paper it would seem like an inconvenience, but as human beings we do appreciate the social interaction that results. There is no functional inconvenience on the Internet, where most of our lives have been run this year, everything is about personalization and convenience. You cannot run into people really. You follow the people you want to follow, see the ads the algorithm decided were for you, talk in the group chats you made and the Zooms you’re invited to. If you were already left out of friend groups or forgotten, I think this year certainly exacerbated that because people couldn’t even walk past you and casually invite you if you’re not exactly at the center of a given group.
I think it is also a reminder to be more specific with your wording when you say you miss the office, or articulating what you miss about being able to go about your normal day, which Anne Helen Petersen pointed out in an op-ed on remote work last week. In 2021, I will try to cherish functional inconvenience instead of desperately fleeing from casual conversation with strangers. Upon reflection I think in the past I’ve been pretty avoidant or just kind of skeptical of the benefits of acquaintances and weak ties, but oh man, I miss it now.
“informed exceptionalism”
This is one I still need to sit with a bit, and a recent discovery. Haley Nahman, in her newsletter Maybe Baby, wrote about her reaction to Emily Ratajkowski’s very important piece in The Cut a while back about how her image has been exploited by various individuals and the industries of modeling, photography, and art. I definitely recommend reading Ratajkowski’s original piece. Essentially, Nahman’s critique is not an attack on Emily Ratajkowski or a denial of her victimhood in the situations she recounts. Rather, it’s about the kind of posturing and version of feminism and activism where calling attention to a problem that affects you is enough, and where you can call out the malicious forces of an industry or culture while still continuing to actively profit and benefit from it, and then call it a day. It’s about making individual empowerment the center of the conversation. Nahman does qualify this and acknowledge that when you critique a culture, you’re always also a part of the culture so it’s hard to fully just opt out, but the point she raised that I appreciated and felt is true about myself is the idea of informed exceptionalism: “the effort to write oneself out of corrupted alignments by conscientiously demonstrating an ability to comprehend them.”
It’s about thinking that your self-awareness about your complicity in the system somehow frees you of the responsibility and reality that you are still buying in and also may still be reaping benefits from it. That’s a thought that is certainly important when we evaluate ourselves and activism and politics at large. I didn’t love Nahman’s conclusion which was basically proposing a revolution of values. Thanks, but how? Where do I sign up? She did provide this term though, to start introspecting personally on how I kind of act like simmering in an existential crisis makes me a little better than people who aren’t, even if we are both doing nothing to improve the conditions and culture. Aside from the solution of doing something, I guess it’s also about distancing yourself from that kind of girlboss-esque feminism/activism where your individual success playing in the same broken system is lauded as “radical” and “powerful” despite the system still being… broken. We spend a lot of time fixated on trying to change the system within the system, but obviously there are limits to that and reasons for the limits, and sometimes we need a paradigm shift and that can be hard to remember and also feel realistic about.
“the mental load”
My friends who don’t want to open my many links to long articles (I know you), this one comes from a comic! It’s about the idea of the mental load, in reference to the mental burden that women often bear in heterosexual couple households when it comes to project managing domestic chores. Even if the husbands do 50% of the actual tasks, in many cases it appears that the wives are still the ones asking or assigning these tasks to them, which is its own job. This is more pronounced in the US because we lack universal childcare, parental leave, and other resources to support women and families. As sociologist Jessica Calarco put it, “Other countries have social safety nets; the U.S. has women.” The pandemic has worsened this. On average, women are reporting doing 15 hours more domestic labor per week than men. I am hoping that as our generation enters (I guess we’ve already done this, just not me lol) marriage age, this unequal sharing of tasks is reduced. But honestly, I’m not that sure about this.
This is also easily expanded outside the household, although the household context alone really worries me a lot. When I think about the planning of social events or trips, there is also always a person or a group of people who tend to take on the mental load of figuring out scheduling, who has to be where when, who should bring what, etc. This person is not always a woman, but it often is and also generally it’s a certain set of people and there are other people I associate with being the ones to show up and have fun. I have heard this organizing person called “the Cruise Director” or “Vacation Mom.” It is worth contemplating how this mental load falls on certain people and why other people don’t take it on. Like I know everyone is capable of planning these types of things because there are definitely parts of their work or personal lives where they have to do it for themselves. Yet when it’s not a personal priority, some people dodge it more easily than others. I’ve definitely been in silent logistical standoffs where I know if I start taking the initiative I’ll be stuck with managing everything and so I refuse.
Hopefully, acknowledging the mental load and having a term for it is the start of working on spreading it more evenly. We are relatively explicit about it in the workplace (although women still tend to be asked to and/or volunteer to take on secretarial tasks when they are not secretaries), yet we ignore it in the rest of our lives. Personally, I am trying to be more conscious now of appreciating when others do it for me and more aware of when to take and not take it on. We shouldn’t be assuming that other people are responsible because we’re leaving them lowkey resentful at the end (anecdotal sources confirm).
“minor feelings”
I mentioned Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong last week, and the title is also a phrase that seemed novel but articulated something I already did experience. In the author’s words, minor feelings are “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.”
Recently, I’ve been thinking about the mental burden that women bear (see: mental load) and that marginalized groups bear, even if individuals are relatively affluent and privileged, there is a certain level of stress simmering under the surface. Minor feelings are about racism, but we shouldn’t forget how sexism, transphobia, homophobia, etc. compound on that. It’s about having to think about your racial identity all the time, about people generalizing you to represent an entire group of people. And it’s also about being minimized or dismissed, being told that you should stop fussing over microaggressions, that discrimination isn’t real anymore. For Asian-Americans, it also comes in being told that anti-Asian discrimination is not relevant or important because it’s not as bad as other racism. This summer, the George Floyd protests were a reminder of how I (and much of America) have ignored/neglected the minor feelings of Black Americans and other racial minorities (along with the MAJOR wrongs happening all the time in police brutality, in medicine, in basically every facet of life) and a reminder of how white people don’t have to experience minor feelings at all and are often not entirely conscious of how they benefit from whiteness and cause harm to people of color. While I’m a little hesitant on how “minor” seems to minimize these feelings, I like that having a term ties together many different experiences related to lacking belongingness, feeling gaslit about your experiences, and sometimes just being entirely ignored.
Words I’m still looking for
wanting to be wrong
A word I need - wanting so desperately to be wrong but knowing you probably won’t be, like Ed Yong writing in The Atlantic about how the pandemic will spiral and how it will end, and being so right and seemingly clairvoyant. It’s how I have felt with a lot of my pessimism about the year, like when I had a conversation with a friend in April where he was sure the pandemic would be functionally over by September. I was pretty convinced but really wish I wasn’t. It is how I would guess public health experts and healthcare workers feel warning about holiday spikes and travel and gatherings and winter and feeling ignored and then watching COVID cases rise. I want the experts to be wrong and everything to be good and solved, but…
I think this is somewhat related to Cassandra’s Curse, in reference to the Greek mythological character Cassandra, who was cursed by Apollo to be able to accurately forecast the future but never be listened to or believed.
the tension between being invested and being detached re big issues
A word I need - wanting to not know / not care but knowing that it is important to know and to care but also knowing it will cause Bad Mental Health. This has really been a… tiring year for reading the news. Although it always kind of is. Sometimes you just don’t want to know what’s going on because it will be sad and it will make you feel powerless and it doesn’t help you. I feel that. Yet also depending on the scale with which I have seen people enact this, it is sometimes an infuriating display of privilege when people feel they can ignore politics and the news. I have a lot of trouble finding the balance between reading about and learning about important things and wanting to know more and then also knowing that the details will just leave me despondent.
the bias of not noticing when things don’t happen
A word I need - This one may have been coined but I’ve not found it so please let me know. In behavioral science, there’s the idea of survivorship bias, the systematic error of focusing on people or things that have succeeded and overlooking those that have failed. The term “survivorship” refers to the fact that we are fixated on the items or people that are remaining or “survived.” The non-viable options will have “died” or left already, leading us to draw potentially false conclusions based on the biased sample in our heads. For example, we might incorrectly assume that certain traits shared among successful parties must explain their success, like drawing the conclusion that dropping out of college leads to success in Silicon Valley based on Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs. We don’t see and can’t conceptualize all the people who dropped out of college to found startups and failed, though there are surely many more of them than there are tech billionaires.
The word or bias I’m looking for is kind of the opposite of that, or maybe just a less noted part of it? The bias where we fail to notice or fully internalize when something doesn’t happen to us (usually negative). The lack of an issue doesn’t invite notice. You don’t get out of the car at the end of every trip and think, “Wow! I didn’t get into any car accidents.” I think this is partially what makes consistent gratitude challenging, because we habituate to the status quo.
Public health suffers a lot from the consequences of this idea, in that if public health is excellent and working, then ideally nothing should be happening—your water is clean, your waste is disposed of, there aren’t pandemics going on, etc. and because normal and stable isn’t quite salient, we don’t attribute the success to the hard work of public health. It doesn’t stand out the way that getting a medical treatment to address a problem does. Then we slowly defund our public health departments and then… what do we do when there’s a pandemic? Hmm. Seems rough. I wonder… Also, if you have always had clean water, healthy food available, a house to live in, you don’t easily realize how essential they are and what it would be like to live without them. It’s hard to project yourself into that situation. I think it’s a mix of projection bias (hard to imagine yourself in different emotional states), identifiable victim effect (it’s more salient when there’s specific victims), optimism bias (“It’s happening to other people, but it won’t happen to me.”), availability heuristic (when you can come up with more examples, you correlate that to frequency, like people think that airplane crashes and murders kill more people because those make the news more than car accidents or common diseases), etc. but I think it needs a term! Maybe I’ll tweet at some behavioral scientists and see if it’s just lurking somewhere.
fraught relationship to the united states
A word I need - the complicated reality that what I value about the US and want America to be is for many people not the same, also wanting to leave America so I could stop thinking about all these terrible problems, but realizing that I am American and cannot extricate that from my identity fully. I felt this the most when all the reports of anti-Asian-American attacks in the US rolled in, as well as while waiting for the presidential election results. It’s definitely, for me, adjacent to the Asian-American feeling of never being Asian enough for Asia and never being American enough for many Americans (see also: minor feelings). But I think the first part was felt by many people in the aftermath of the election, as people started trying to dispute election results, and we really realized that 74 million Americans want Trump to still be President..
Another time I have felt this has been while being in the UK and being asked if I plan to stay in the UK. I’m planning on thinking more about this on this newsletter at a later date, but basically at one point I was very in favor of the idea of yeeting myself out of the US for the long run and you know, not needing to worry about affording healthcare or being killed in a shooting. On the flip side, and where I stand right now, is the fact that my family and my cat and my friends live in the US. My mom moved thousands of miles away from her home and her family to give me a better life, and I have seen the struggles and loneliness and lack of social support that come with that. I don’t think I have the strength or motivation she had for me to try to do that. And I am most familiar with and care a lot about America. I want to help fix it, but it often feels staggering and impossible and lots of people actively or passively will never even consider someone like me (Asian-American) as American. Like I said, it’s complicated. I’m going to leave you with this picture of my cat.