I was drawn to Trick Mirror by its subtitle, "Reflections on Self-Delusion," and sold on it by this part of the introduction:
When I feel confused about something, I write about it until I turn into the person who shows up on paper: a person who is plausibly trustworthy, intuitive, and clear. It's exactly this habit – or compulsion – that makes me suspect that I am fooling myself. If I were, in fact, the calm person who shows up on paper, why would I always need to hammer out a narrative that gets me there?
Trick Mirror is a collection of essays that circle around the idea that our self images are stories we tell ourselves, just as our public personas are stories we project to others, and that society dictates the range of available stories. The specific subjects and arguments are familiar ones – how the Internet substitutes "virtue signaling" for action, the seven scams that define the millennial generation, religion and drugs as paths to ecstatic experience, rape culture on college campuses, the wedding industrial complex – but Tolentino covers them with a smidgen more insight and a more personal touch than your typical magazine article.
For example, when talking about the gig economy, Tolentino notes that popular opinion is that millennials prefer the freedom of freelancing because "it's just easier to be think millennials float from gig to gig because we're shiftless or spoiled or in love with the 'hustle' than to consider the fact that the labor market is punitively unstable and growing more so every day." She follows this point with a story about her own professional life.
No comments:
Post a Comment