Anya D.C.
@anyadc3
Anya D.C.
“an essay is a personal experiment to discover truth through writing”
what I fear they’ll miss is not literature’s beauty but its resistance. The way it trains the mind to slow down, to reflect, to tolerate ambiguity. To reside in the discomfort of the interstitial and be ok with it. The way it sharpens perception by refusing to simplify. The world they are entering is freighted with superficiality and false... See more
Ultra-Processed Minds: The End of Deep Reading and What It Costs Us
All I want to tell you today, really, is not to do that. Not to move into that world where you’re alone with yourself and your tree. I want to tell you to live in the messy world, throw yourself into the convulsion of the world.
I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m... See more
I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m... See more
The ‘Lost’ Words of Joan Didion
self deception and motivation
When I scroll through social media my brain is bombarded with real-time images of wars, cat videos, politics, shoe ads, medication ads, and parties I wasn’t invited to all in the space of ten minutes and I feel paralyzed. Meaning escapes me then. How does someone create their own meaning when they can hardly leave their bed? And why would anyone... See more
Is this lack of agency just a feature of youth? A few years ago I may have sympathized with this, but now I find this sentiment a bit self-infantilizing. Perhaps we just lacked mentors for how to navigate this experience, so it takes a bit longer to contend with. Still, I don’t think it’s an experience that has to be so defeating.
All of the side effects of his society have become mainstays and defining features of our own. Jokes are made sarcastically, advertisements mock themselves, digital identities carry more weight than physical ones, podcasts pose as honest, real conversations, and paranoia sits at the root of news consumption. Nothing feels real. Sincerity is a... See more
The Prophecy of David Foster Wallace
Agency intersects with civic duty!
To lose this habit at a societal scale is not a small thing. It is to unmoor ourselves from the slow, accretive processes that form character, judgment, and self-knowledge. A culture that stops reading deeply does not merely lose its stories, it risks losing the very tools by which it interprets them. Reflection, nuance, ambiguity, these are not... See more