vanya

Yoshiko is offered a different position than she interviewed for, a contract position rather than permanent. This job is in ‘Staff Support’. When she questions what her role will involve, she is only told ‘support’. She joins what is casually called the ‘Shredder Squad’ ‘at the end of the corridor’ where her role will be to destroy documents using an industrial shredding machine for three to seven and a half hours a day. The name of this position gives a much more favourable (and vague) impression than the actual role itself. It is clear that she is being given an inferior position involving pretty mindless work.

this spoke to how i’ve been feeling about social media and a longing to connect to people.

i would like to be in the position to delete all social media platforms and simply exist in ‘reality’ - whatever that really means - however i do believe there is joy in sharing experiences on the internet. i’m lucky enough to go through substack today and find writings about similar experiences to mine and to find comfort in this, and inspiration to write something in response.

could this also be found through books? absolutely, and i still have every intention to seek the same things through books and through conversations with others, but it is lovely how these moments and writings can be documented and returned to such as on this platform, allowing curiosity to grow, and something to potentially be created at the end of this delving into things.

but i suppose that is more about research and writing as opposed to the initially intended use of social media to keep in touch with friends and family. to be quite honest, places like instagram make me feel a sense of indebtedness to keep following people i’m not particularly really friends with. i need to show an interest in their lives because we had some arbitrary shared experience such as attending the same university, although we never really connected with each other in any other way than digitally, and also although what they are sharing is not even their actually lives, it’s simply a snippet of what they are choosing to post.

i reckon i could genuinely delete instagram. i would really like to. it would be very interesting to try doing this.

i don’t want to just delude myself though that moving over to substack and using sublime is not at all social media. it isn’t but there are still similar elements. if all of my friends began using substack then i would probably feel a similar sense of duty to keep up to date with whatever it was they were writing. although perhaps writing is different. i don’t know yet

We learn that the city in which our protagonist lives is ‘walled in by mountains’ - everywhere except the factory, which we can assume is by contrast in a flat area.

Ominously, the factory lies separate from the natural environment visible in the city. The people are residing in a place closer to nature, but working in an unnatural place that is surrounded not by earthly bodies but by the idea of ‘something larger’ and ‘more distant’. It is not a comforting presence, despite this idea perhaps also bringing to mind the idea of a God or higher power, one of the few things people might consider ‘larger’ and ‘more distant’ than nature itself.