Best of: Jia Tolentino on what happens when life is an endless performance

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Politics, News, Society & Culture, News Commentary, Philosophy

4.5 • 11.1K Ratings

🗓️ 3 August 2020

⏱️ 101 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The introduction to Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, hit me hard. In her investigation of how American politics and culture had collapsed into “an unbearable supernova of perpetually escalating conflict,” she became obsessed with five intersecting problems: “First, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity; second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our understanding of solidarity; and, finally, how it destroys our sense of scale." Yeah, me too. My conversation with Tolentino was one of my favorites of last year -- and it has become all the more relevant in the midst of a pandemic that has collapsed most human communication into Zoom calls, Twitter feeds, and Instagram stories. This is a conversation about what happens when technology combines with the most powerful forces of human psychology to transform the nature of human interaction itself. It’s about how we construct and express our core sense of self, and what that’s doing to who we really are. References: The art of attention (with Jenny Odell) Book Recommendations: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas. New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere) Credits: Producer/Editor - Jeff Geld Researcher in chief - Roge Karma Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Any time that we are interacting with another person, we are putting on a performance for
0:06.0	them and we are constructing an idea of ourself in context of this performance.
0:14.0	Hello and welcome to the Ezra Klein Show on the Vox Media podcast network where I just
0:27.0	read Jonathan Hickman's X-Men reboot because one of you suggested it to me in our email
0:31.0	inbox and you're right it was totally great I really enjoyed that thank you.
0:35.0	Okay this is a re-air episode it's with New Yorker writer Geaton Tino who is the author of the book Trick
0:41.1	Mirror and I chose this episode right now for a reason I had listened to it recently myself
0:46.6	because I'm struggling with something that we sort of explore in a pre-pandemic way here.
0:52.2	I really wonder what the very common human experience of quarantine was like.
0:57.0	Before the internet made it possible to shelter in place but remain connected every second
1:01.9	and some was more connected even at least to certain parts of the human nervous system than we
1:07.1	were before. I mean it seems it seems like what we have now would be better zoom in social
1:13.3	media and all the rest of it we can be inside but outside all at the same time but I am am I the
1:18.6	only person I don't think I'm the only person who finds the digital simulacroms of the life I had
1:25.1	more exhausting more disparaging than not trying to recreate the life I had through a screen.
1:32.0	I don't think I'm alone in thinking it may be even be better not to be able to get second to second
1:37.3	more than second to second there's more than you can read coming out every second updates on the
1:42.2	pandemic. I am not sure being this connected is making it better I think many of us are getting the
1:47.4	anxieties of connection without the nourishment of it and at the same time we are not getting the
1:53.0	few constellations of actual disconnection. I think Tolentino explores and captures this sort of
1:59.8	weird emotional experiential dimension of digital life better than anyone she's very attuned
2:04.7	to the ways that when we replace something physical with what seems like the same thing digitally
	...

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