Rebecca Martinez
@beccam724
Rebecca Martinez
What is the “local self” in today’s world?
I don’t know that it even has much of a meaning anymore. Where does culture end, and when does it become suffocation? Is it possible to exist within today’s culture and not have a lingering sensation in the back of your mind that you’re being brainwashed?
We live in a culture of watchers and appearers, of watchers and approvers , a culture where it feels distinctively hard to be a real human being. It’s like some sort of Orwellian nightmare, but worse, since we are being watched, but we have also employed ourselves as the watchers, as big brother, looking in at a projected image of everyone’s life,... See more
Tommy Dixon • How to end your extremely online era
There was a Jesuit preacher, Anthony de Mello, who said if you’re suffering but not willing to do anything about it, you need to suffer more. Suffer until you get sick of your suffering. Which sounds harsh, but it’s true. The transformative moments in my life only came when the pain of staying the same finally became greater than the pain of... See more
Tommy Dixon • How to end your extremely online era
We are drowning in a river of short-form video. Where the allure isn’t even the content but the abundance, the infinitude of the flow. As the cultural conversation is dominated by what is fast and loud and immediately engaging, because those are the qualities screens reward, we lose the capacity to think in paragraphs, to think hard about the same... See more
Tommy Dixon • How to end your extremely online era
The faster things go, the more immersed we are in the flow, addicted to the speed, unwilling to grapple with the slowness of the real world around us, the more we forget to feed the part of ourselves that likes quiet, that can live in quiet. That deprivation makes itself felt in the body as a kind of dread.
Tommy Dixon • How to end your extremely online era
Now I’m trying really hard to slow down. Pay complete attention. Lately I’ve internalized there’s something so sacred about focus, rather than constantly deliberating between monitor screens and plans and side hustles. Depth rather than breadth. In a world that is increasingly accelerating — social media eyeballs and immediate gratification and a
... See morein praise of slowing down
I think often of Toni Morrison’s views on “writer’s block” and how it’s so antithetical to everything we’re taught. For Morrison, writer’s block isn’t something to be pushed or worked through. It’s a message that we’re not meant to be writing right now; and that that’s okay.
“It’s blocked because it ought to be... See more
Gloria Alamrewsubstack.comLoving any kind of music is great, but the cultural implications about said music always change dynamically. A couple of years ago, I read
Ted Gioia’s “Music: A Subversive History,” in which he promotes an idea of an institutionalization cycle that music experiences – an idea that has stuck with me ever since.
Essentially, it implies that all
... See more