Aleynah

Today, everyone and everything is always available, and there’s nothing less sexy than that. There’s no chase. Our phones don’t allow us time to dwell, and they don’t allow us time to yearn. Why force yourself to daydream about the guy you’re seeing when you can easily look at dozens of photographs of him online? Why walk into a store in Soho and... See more

Eliminate the bad. In other words, don’t suck. The most basic thing you need to do at any job is simply be competent. This isn’t very hard to achieve, because it’s based on not under-achieving. To get where you’re going, you need to start the car in park, not in reverse. Your boss mostly wants to know that when they tell you to do something, you do... See more

We need to allow ourselves to be restless and bored, to be less preoccupied with the opinions of others, and to look honestly within ourselves. We need to get off of our phones and hear the gravel crunching under our feet. Our phones promise us something eternal and infinite, but we should be extremely skeptical of anything that claims it can go on... See more

love isn't a performance to be optimized or a test to be passed — it's a private language spoken between two people who choose, again and again, to keep showing up for each other, phones down, cameras off, no audience required.

the film’s body horror is an effective metaphor for the torture traps of contemporary feminism and beauty culture, where superficial body positive marketing doesn’t square with an ever-expanding suite of digital and surgical tools for beauty optimization and modification.