Your Monthly Momecdote, Issue 22: February, 2026

This blog post was originally published in my February newsletter. Subscribe to receive next month's essay along with book and music recommendations.

Where to begin? I have a feeling I’ll have a hard time making this coherent. I’m writing from a place of sadness and frustration. I’m writing from a place of disappointment and shame. I think the hardest thing about pretty much everything right now is the sense that there is no longer an objective reality—the means by which we organize ourselves, the way we share and receive news, is generally owned by one of a handful of profit-driven agendas. And the way we think—certainly the way I think—is now colored by my awareness that few people will take what I have to say in good faith.

So I’ve come to assign value to my eyeballs, which is to say, I’m now treating my attention as the prize that it is. Every monetized thing on the internet is vying for it, they’re counting on it, they’re selling me out to get more of it. Back when Twitter was less of a cesspool, did you ever look at what your algorithm thought your interests were? It determined it based on how long your eyeballs looked at a certain subject, and wow, its interpretation was a strange and flummoxing mirror. In any case, sometimes it feels like the greatest resistance I have, an extension of my beliefs and my willingness to act: to decide where my eyeballs will land.

I don’t mean this in the virtuous/problematic binary that seems to define the overarching metric for social good. I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about this before—certainly many people have, if you’re in my corners of the internet—but the problem with the idea of “ethical consumption” (the idea that the individual buys things that reflect their values, meaning that society will become more ethical if individuals change their personal behaviors; an extension of the free market and Adam Smith’s invisible hand) is that it shifts the blame of institutional wrongdoing to the individual, which is nonsense, particularly under the oligarchy that currently determines the extent of our access. Most people cannot afford to act according to their values; it is also not possible or reasonable to expect everyone to have perfect information about what they consume. The information that is, yes, available, is heavily combated by access, which is, again, determined by the present oligarchical regime. I am not saying: only put your eyeballs where it is virtuous to do so. That’s actually fucking impossible if you want to reach a large number of people. What I am saying is: your eyeballs are valuable. Don’t play fast and loose with what holds your attention, because right now, that’s exactly what makes you what you are.

I cannot understate the significance of solidarity. I’m afraid for and proud of our cities where people are coming together and calling to abolish ICE, even at the cost of their own safety, their very lives. Every day I carry a heaviness around with me, a sadness I don’t really know how to process. I do know this: anti-immigration sentiment cannot be forced on us by the fucking dweebs that are temporarily in charge. I said this last month, but worth remembering is that most people do not like these actions, this violence, this apathy toward suffering. It helps to remember that there are more of us than there are of them, and therefore we must treat our solidarity as the weapon that it is. We must not give an inch.

I’ve written a lot about community, my fears about losing it, my difficulty identifying it as something I can have. But these moments, dark as they are, are about witnessing community in action. I’m going to segue now, perhaps not very neatly, to an idea Kathryn Jezer-Morton wrote about at the beginning of the year of “friction-maxxing,” which is similar to something I’ve been thinking about (and talking about, seemingly endlessly) myself.

You will know instinctively the sensation that Jezer-Morton calls “friction”: “Reading is boring; talking is awkward; moving is tiring; leaving the house is daunting. Thinking is hard. Interacting with strangers is scary. Risking an unexpected reaction from someone isn’t worth it. Speaking at all — overrated.” It’s the same doctrine behind “self-care” that calls for cutting out all the people whose presence doesn’t serve you, or foregoing vaccines on the assumption that the decisions of others to “risk” their own children will keep yours safe. It’s something that has lived in the center of almost everything we’ve been sold ideologically since the rise of the Zuckerverse, the far-right, the hyperconvenience of Amazon Prime: everything should accommodate your personal tolerance for discomfort. You should never, for a second, have to wait, settle, compromise, or be inconvenienced at all.

Except it is a compromise, because that tolerance for difficulty atrophies the less that you engage it. Like all abilities: use it or lose it. The more you avoid phone calls, the less you can handle them. The more you put off a task, the harder it seems. The more you cut out friends who upset you or irritate you, the less you can handle an important fact of life, which is that sometimes, people you know and love will be hurtful or annoying. I’m not talking about people who cause you trauma—I’m talking about people who cause you friction, which is more like tension or fatigue. Has someone in your life ever slipped away and then you realized there’s an empty space where they used to be? Yeah. Sometimes an element of friction is being the one to text first, or text back, or talk at all.

What I’m getting at here is that the idea underwriting community is, like the friction-causing people in your life that I’m currently invoking, simple, important, and sometimes kind of annoying: it’s the fact that you can do hard things. You the collective and you the individual can do, and will be probably called upon to do, hard things.

All of this is inevitably coming around to fucking ChatGPT. A couple of women in my life, bless their hearts, have had to deal with me being insufferable in response to them telling me they use it to plan recipes, to which they then have to hear me do my best impression of a calm, sane person as I reply that I actually love to use my brain. Look, we don’t all have the time to lecture people in our lives; not everyone is ready or willing at 9am to hear about how the program they’re casually using is an indefensible drain on the environment that’s undermining the value of human workers across industries as another means of exploitation and is also stealing from LITERALLY ME. I get it. But what I do feel I can say is girl, use your brain or lose it. I get it, being a mom is hard! I feel like all I ever do is think about what I’m making for dinner! And if I’m not doing that, then I’m making dinner again! Sometimes it’s like, fuck, am I ever not making dinner!! Nobody understands more than me—a person who is also too angry at the exploitation of gig workers to order takeout and manages a household that doesn’t have pre-prepared snacks because, quite frankly, I love to eat and believe in making food for myself and my loved ones on hard mode for the Sisyphean gamble that is a 4 year old’s theoretical enjoyment—you do not have to tell me about the strain of providing food. I wrote GIRL DINNER, for fuck’s sake! But who will you be once you’ve given all your powers of culinary creativity to ChatGPT? When you’ve done this for weeks, months, years, will you even be able to think of anything on your own? Will you have lost this one simple aspect of your humanity because you traded it for efficiency? For the freedom to think less? When Sam Altman has ten yachts and buys the next catatonic US president, will it have been worth the time it took to think hey, what about chicken pot pie? (Sorry, rant took a turn at the end there, but you can’t totally say that I’m wrong. And if you do want chicken pot pie, I recommend Alison Roman’s recipe in Something from Nothing. See! Why ask ChatGPT when you could ask me!)

Caveat: I’m a writer, which means I think for a living. I think so much it’s already been diagnosed as a problem. I started playing tennis with some friends recently, and all the instructor can tell me is a variation on “stop thinking so much,” which is also what my boxing coach tells me, so there’s that. I do quite possibly love to think more than the average person. But listen, it took a long time to like my brain. It took inconceivable amounts of work and time to learn to love it. I’m certainly not going to sacrifice it now, nor am I looking to make life easier just so that one day, I can be alone with my efficiently managed tasks. I want to live, damn it! It’s all any of us want. It’s why people came to this country in the first place—to live. “Give me your tired, your poor, huddled masses yearning to be free—”

And for god’s sake, value your eyeballs. They might be all that we have left.