Self-righteous

I’ve been writing this newsletter for a year now (a little more but started regularly about a year ago) and am grateful to all of you for reading it. I had been in a dry spell for years. I couldn’t finish any writing. Everything I wrote was bad. I got brutally ghosted by a literary agent. I was sensitive and defensive about it. So instead I worked a lot, I read a lot, I went out a lot, I met someone I thought I would fall in love with. I attribute my writing energy to the heartbreak but I think in reality, it just comes and goes. Sometimes you simply have nothing to say.

I’ve been feeling like I’ve run out of things to say. Maybe it’s just the time of year: busy, stressful, too many holiday parties, limping towards the New Year. Maybe it’s just the utter and total darkness of the world.

In material ways, my life changed a lot this year. I sold a lot of writing, I started making money off this newsletter, I left my job which I had been at for a long time which felt incredibly entangled with my identity. Leaving made me feel kind of rootless. Everyone I met would tell me how glamorous and fun it seemed, how much I seemed to love it. It seems like your job is just being a cool girl, someone I went out with told me. You were described to me as the one with the sexy job, a friend’s boyfriend told me upon meeting me. In reality, despite the glamor, it gave me severe anxiety. Congratulations, you’re in a cult, someone I met at a party told me recently.

Work won’t love you back, as Sarah Jaffe says, as I kept telling everyone around me. The slippage between labor and self-branding feels particularly intense now with the profound crisis in traditional media. It encourages confusion about what is work. For my first few years in the workforce, I always thought of work as simply labor. My boss made a dollar, I made a dime. Later on, it seemed more nebulous. My boss still made a dollar, I still made a dime, but I could make up the rest in social capital. That I could monetize into other kinds of opportunities or alchemize into friendships, romances, admiration.

This is obviously the way the internet works and the low stakes kind of impression of influence it offers. What threw me off about it was that my job, which hinged heavily on likability, was by every other measure conventional labor. I finally made New York’s living wage (maybe outdated by now) by the time I left. The perks of a two martini lunch job don’t pay rent but they look fun and desirable.

I wanted to write about self-righteousness which I’ve been thinking a lot about. But I told my family, who I’m staying with for the holidays, and everyone accused me of hypocrisy. I am apparently the most self-righteous of anyone, mainly about never using rideshares and never getting food delivered and rarely buying clothing new—annoying maybe but also low stakes and possibly something more people should be self-righteous about. It can be hard to distinguish different types of self-righteousness when so many of our moral systems are fundamentally constructed around injustice. Many people see our court and prison systems as a process of justice although they are deeply unjust. Many more, although increasingly fewer, see the US military as a kind of avengers force, defending democracy around the world, although our military has overthrown countless democracies and waged wars of aggression around the world. Many defend our labor system although, like I said, your boss generally makes a dollar. Sometimes, it’s more like a billion dollars to the dime. In a data visualization for which she won a Pulitzer, journalist Mona Chalabi estimated that in order to accumulate Jeff Bezos’s level of wealth on their current salaries, the average Amazon employee would have had to start working in the Pliocene epoch—4.5 million years ago.

Okay, so being able to distinguish the good from the bad sometimes requires a full shift of your worldview. I sometimes think of my time in graduate school, where we read a whole curriculum of marxist literature, much of it about the history of translantic slavery, as a kind of process of pavlovian conditioning to be disgusted by the world. Following the news right now feels similarly. Everything inspires disgust.

But on a more granular level, there are other kinds of self-righteousness about extremely low grade sins that feel newer, maybe in response to changing mores. I may be annoyingly rigid, judgmental, priggish, didactic, but a lot of other people I meet are also incredibly self-righteous and for much less. When I told someone I knew about the demise of a messy romance I was crying over, she responded that she would never let herself be treated like an option. Even the fuckboys are self-righteous these days. They’re sex positive, they’re protecting their peace, they have childhood trauma which messed up their attachment style. If there no good rom coms anymore, it’s not just because romance is dead but also because the players aren’t fun anymore. They’re too busy rationalizing their behavior.

The obvious counterpoint to this is that there is currently a backlash against casual sex, which some attribute to the encroaching morality of the Christian right, and others attribute to the sex negativity of #MeToo, and still others attribute to the internet and its isolating forces. But the existence of a critique should not automatically prompt defensiveness, and the existence of an unreasonable critique should not forestall all criticism. Addiction is also stigmatized, underresourced, and treated like a moral failing. Being self-righteous about doing a lot of coke at parties is still weird.

This is small stakes, the kind of interpersonal behavior that leads to other people complaining about you behind your back (or maybe to your face). But the seepage of this attitude, a kind of radical individualism borrowing the language of liberal identity politics, can also be applied to genuinely bad behavior. Conservative writers on this platform are always accusing their critics of hurting their feelings, plenty of men who believe in their right to sexually harass their employees at work accuse their critics of being mean, politicians whose constituents voice their displeasure have an ugly tendency to complain that they are bullied. The standard format for a public apology, which everyone from random Instagram users to celebrities to heads of state now see fit to issue, basically runs through an admission of guilt to an immediate defense framed like an explanation. The kind of apology you get when someone is like, sorry your feelings got hurt.

Social media, where everyone mingles sort of freely, further confuses all of this by collapsing distinctions. When Kristen Stewart cheated on her then-boyfriend Robert Pattinson with then married Rupert Sanders, she issued a public apology for “the hurt and embarrassment” to those around her. The statement was for the fans though, who were deeply, unhealthily invested in the Twilight couple’s relationship, and who saw it as a personal betrayal of their fandom. Or else as a model of bad behavior from someone who by virtue of being in the public eye is expected to model good behavior. Ariana Grande similarly came under fire recently for cheating on her husband with a married man who had recently had a baby, which obviously isn’t a particularly nice thing to do, but is fundamentally a private interpersonal problem. Ariana may have a platform and a lot of money and a lot of followers and therefore a type of power, but cheating isn’t really an abuse of power. Wage theft is an abuse of power, sexual assault is an abuse of power, financial fraud by an elected politician is an abuse of power, your insurance company denying you coverage is an abuse of power, a celebrity participating in some kind of structural discrimination (like violating BDS) is an abuse of power. Persuading someone to leave their wife is not.

What’s strange about this misplaced morality is that it often is substituted for anger about real, serious problems that everyone has a right or a moral obligation to be involved in. Rather than an excess of self-righteous indignation, a lot of people simply have the wrong kind. In a TikTok where people describe how they met their partner in an unexpected place, one man described meeting his now girlfriend on Yelp—a website that terrifies me. They bonded over the scathing reviews they had both left about a grocery store in their neighborhood where the owner’s child often worked after school shifts. They found him disorganized and annoyingly slow. Love in a hopeless place was written for them.

In an essay for Dirt about internet etiquette, Mariah Kreutter suggests that social media incentivizes extreme defensiveness, partly by encouraging us “to think of every thought we have as interesting.” It’s true that people are rude and critical and prone to outrage but it is also true that you could simply keep your opinions to yourself. Someone on the internet who I don’t know accused me recently of not being a girl’s girl and tried to ostracize me from her online community. I wanted to tell her I didn’t know her, wasn’t in her community to begin with. I was day drinking, I felt briefly defensive. Then I mostly forgot about it. I could also keep my opinions to myself.

A friend of mine, writing about ‘posting single’, ran through all the strange and underhanded ways in which some people try to conceal their relationship status. Like all the other pointless things people get self-righteous about, “There is plausible deniability for this, which makes it the lamest kind of deceit.” Demanding someone repost your Instagram story is insane and humiliating, consistently refusing to repost your partner’s Instagram story (unless you never post) is strange. The etiquette is stressful and obsessing over it can have unfortunate consequences. Someone I know once dated a guy who never posted. His previous girlfriend had demanded that he post a picture of them on Instagram so he had one post, a couple’s launch. The new girlfriend existed in the shadow of this relationship, the only thing on her boyfriend’s grid. She demanded her own post. He obliged. One launch after another like a public record of breakups. A solid argument against posting.

Ultimately, I think it is fine to behave a little bit badly some of the time, with the understanding that it may damage your interpersonal relationships or alienate people. It is inevitable regardless. Sometimes there are complex and meaningful explanations underlying people’s bad behavior, sometimes they just felt like it. It doesn’t really make any difference. Everyone is going through something. No need to be self-righteous about it.

Things I’m often unnecessarily self-righteous about include being chronically late, walking everywhere (related to the first), never making the first move, having no email folders in my inbox, never wearing ugly shoes (converse, crocs, arguably birkenstocks), beefing at work, beefing at home, never leaving New York, not knowing how to drive, cleaning, what books are good, how nightlife in New York is really bad, monogamy, retinol.

For all of it, I am sorry. I will try to do better. Either way the world will go on.