Jia Tolentino: The 1% of Life that Makes It All Worth It
June 27, 2023
Glennon Doyle:
Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. We have a big day. Huge. And that is because we have the Jia Tolentino here today. Before I read her bio, I need to tell Jia one of my favorite Jia Tolentino stories, which Jia and I have many, many funny stories together, which is interesting since we’ve never met and most of our experiences have been extremely one-sided. But I have a few groups, you know how we all have those groups of women that we have on text or on Zoom, where when shit happens, we just check in with each other. So there’s this one group of smart people who, we check in with each other whenever shit hits the fan in the world. So a lot of times.
Amanda Doyle:
Which is happening with some regularity. Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
And there is this one recurring thing that people often say, which is like a, “What would Jesus do?” situation, which you’ll know from your… We both have evangelical pasts.
Jia Tolentino:
We certainly do.
Glennon Doyle:
We certainly do. But ours is more like, “What did Jia write?”
Jia Tolentino:
Oh, my God.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s real. Somebody will say it. “What would Jia write?” And it works because you can say Jia-sus, so it goes, “Jia-sus.” Yeah, which I know you’re going to really love, but if we have one complaint, it’s that we often have to wait a long time for a Jia-sus take, and we’re mad now. So we’ll have to wait for a New Yorker piece to come out, or sometimes we get lucky and you’re on a podcast. But it takes a while, and that’s annoying. And so one time, one of the women in the group said, “Well, what did Jia-sus write?” And I was thinking for a while and I thought, “You guys, what if Jia-sus is trying to tell us something? What if we’re supposed to think hard and do research?”
Jia Tolentino:
What if you’re your own personal Jia?
Glennon Doyle:
What if I… Well, I, too, have a Jia-sus inside of me who can stay calm and cool and collected and think hard and keep an open mind and open heart and interview people, and then come to a nuanced conclusion a month later. And one of my favorite group, they thought for a while, and my friend said, “Fuck that. We don’t have time. I’m mad now. What do we tweet?”
Jia Tolentino:
Oh, I’m so moved by that, and I’m sure we’ll talk about childcare and child raising, but something happened to my brain in 2020, and that something was the pandemic and having a baby and all of that. And I was like, “I am not calm. My brain is not good. I have nothing to …” That thing that I had always relied on my job being, and writing being this process, the only way through which there’s ever any thought in my brain, it really… My shit got rocked by 2020 and the years afterwards. But I think I’ll be back on the blogging train, but I got so sick of myself.
Glennon Doyle:
I know. It’s a good example, Jia, it’s an excellent example. The proof is in the writing. It might have been an accident, but you were showing us the way. So now I’m going to read your bio and then we’re going to jump in.
Glennon Doyle:
Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at the New Yorker, a screenwriter, and the author of the New York Times bestseller Trick Mirror, which everyone just needs to get right now if you haven’t already read it.
Glennon Doyle:
In 2020 she received a Whiting Award as well as the Jeannette Haien Ballard Prize, and has most recently won a National Magazine Award for three pieces about the repeal of Roe v. Wade, which I’m sure that everyone in this pod squad has already read. But if you haven’t, please do.
Glennon Doyle:
Trick Mirror was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the Penn Award, and was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Public Library, the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, NPR, the Chicago Tribune, GQ, and the Paris Review. Okay? Jia lives in Brooklyn. Welcome, Jia-sus.
Jia Tolentino:
I am so happy to be here. Truly, it’s an honor to be here. Thank you for having me.
Amanda Doyle:
Jia, we actually, you and I, also have a relationship you don’t know about.
Jia Tolentino:
Through Virginia?
Amanda Doyle:
Yes. So you graduated from UVA undergrad the year that I graduated from Virginia Law, and I was there before you.
Jia Tolentino:
Whoa.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah. And we were both double majors, including political social thought, and we were both Pi Phis.
Jia Tolentino:
No way, oh my God.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes. And so I think that that leads very naturally to this question of paradox, which is that, so I was, for example, going to hoes and bros parties on Saturday night and was a women’s study major, was doing absurdly politically upsetting now things, and then going on Sunday to the prison to meet with women who had killed their abusers. Can you talk to us about paradox?
Jia Tolentino:
Well, I think we’ve all lived our… It’s like I want to hear so much more about that than I am interested in my own. But I do remember, it’s so funny, it’s also we were both there during the last gasp of Bush era conservatism, even aesthetically, the popped collar era. It wasn’t that long ago, but culturally, thank God, it feels like a long time ago, but I remember so many things in my life I started doing as kind of a bit or a proto-repertorial curiosity.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Jia Tolentino:
And rush was one of them. And of course combined with, I was 17 and I wanted to be cool. So there was a little bit of that. But mostly I spent all of sorority rush getting super high and just seeing how much I could lie to people. You have these things where there’s 35 women all kneeling at your feet and you have 45 allotted seconds to talk to everyone. And they’d be like, “Oh, I’m from Boston.” I’d be like, “Oh my God, I am from Boston.”
Amanda Doyle:
Oh my God.
Jia Tolentino:
And the rotation, the little dollhouse rotation would happen faster than anyone could catch me in my thousands of lies. And I thought it was really funny. And then, of course, I did think the Pi Phis are very special and I ended up doing it. But I think the feeling of being in and out in something to inhabit it, but because it was the only way I could possibly learn about it, and whatever other confusing ulterior motives of ego and conventional socialization were at play as well. But I went to frat parties my first year, but after that I was the one sending the rude emails.
Jia Tolentino:
Do you remember that thing? Oh my God, this is so UVA. There was some sort of competition where one frat would have all the sororities compete.
Amanda Doyle:
Oh, God, yes.
Jia Tolentino:
Yeah. And so I would just be sending fake schedules being like, “Okay, blow job competition is at 10:00 AM tomorrow.” And I couldn’t really tease out my motivations. But so much of growing up evangelical also felt like an education in paradox. It’s the horniest culture and the most sex suppressive one. It is super homoerotic and it’s also so suppressive of any admission of any sort of non-straight love. It’s so violent and it’s so outwardly focused on peace. And I feel like that leading into the UVA mid-aughts experience, it felt quite natural, right?
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Jia Tolentino:
Can I tell a funny story about Pi Phi?
Glennon Doyle:
Tell all the funny stories.
Jia Tolentino:
Speaking of being stoned all the time, I gained so much weight my first year because I just turned into an all day stoner. And I felt great about it, honestly.
Jia Tolentino:
My best friend and I, we’d have this joke that we were smoking weed in the graveyard every morning. And he gained zero pounds but his GPA was a 2.7, and I gained 20 but mine remained at a 4.0. But we really learned about ourselves that year. But I remember the little sorority composites when everyone’s in their weird little turtlenecks and everyone’s like this. And the proofs of those photographs got sent to my parents’ house in Texas. And my mom called me and she was like, “Jia, I just got all of these pictures from the dentist’s office. You’ve just had major dental surgery, you didn’t tell me.”
Jia Tolentino:
And I was like, “What?”
Jia Tolentino:
And she was like, “You’re wearing a black turtleneck. Your face is so… Are you okay? Did they break your jaw?”
Jia Tolentino:
And I was like, “Oh no, Mom, that’s what I look like now.”
Amanda Doyle:
“Good thing you saw it before I came home for Thanksgiving.”
Jia Tolentino:
“I was just eating a lot of bacon, egg, and cheeseburgers.”
Glennon Doyle:
Jia, I was in a sorority, James Madison-
Jia Tolentino:
Which one?
Glennon Doyle:
Sigma Kappa. That’s what I am, Sigma Kap born and Sigma Kap bred, and when I die I’ll be Sigma Kap dead. Okay? So I kept getting arrested accidentally in college because I was an alcoholic. Yes, but only in retrospect, understood I was an alcoholic. I just thought it was a really good time. Okay?
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Jia Tolentino:
I’m sure you were.
Amanda Doyle:
You just had a lot of bad luck.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, just always in the wrong place at the wrong time in handcuffs. And I’m seriously five times, okay? I got arrested five times probably. And at one sorority meeting, the sorority president stood up and she said, “So, you guys, just one last order of business. If you get arrested and you have to go to court, could you not wear your letters?”
Abby Wambach:
Oh, shit.
Glennon Doyle:
And it was given as a general guideline.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah, “This is for everyone, to no one in particular.”
Glennon Doyle:
But I was the only one that kept getting arrested and it was the only sweatshirt I could find.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. Just a quick Q., what do you mean by the letters?
Glennon Doyle:
So they’re these sweatshirts that you wear to show what sorority you’re in.
Amanda Doyle:
The Greek letters.
Abby Wambach:
Oh, it’s like your uniform?
Glennon Doyle:
It’s like your costume. It’s like your soccer uniform.
Abby Wambach:
Oh, my gosh.
Jia Tolentino:
Yes, it’s your costume.
Abby Wambach:
Do you just wear it all the time?
Amanda Doyle:
Only to jail.
Glennon Doyle:
And you also wear it to show that you belong somewhere.
Abby Wambach:
Got it. Cool, I never knew that.
Jia Tolentino:
That’s a good sort of movie poster, actually. Like a Sigma Kappa mugshot kind of thing. I’ll file that away for it later reference.
Glennon Doyle:
Please, it’s yours.
Jia Tolentino:
Yeah, yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s yours. I have some issues with the whole thing.
Amanda Doyle:
About that paradox though, I’m interested in this idea. You said that you looked down at people at the time who didn’t have the sense to have shame about it.
Glennon Doyle:
That was me. I didn’t know.
Jia Tolentino:
I did actually, you’re right. I 100% did.
Glennon Doyle:
That was me.
Amanda Doyle:
Which I get. It’s like you’re the captain of the cheerleading squad in high school. You’re the Pi Phi at UVA. But I have the sense to have shame and know that there’s something inherently complicated and bad about this.
Jia Tolentino:
Well, this is also possibly another evangelical holdover that I have never… When I was at Jezebel, I always wanted to write a piece called Shame is Good. It’s a troll title. And I obviously think the way that shame is allocated in our world, all of the people that should be feeling it feel none.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Jia Tolentino:
And all the people that don’t need to feel it for a second in their lives are devastated by constant unearned, unwarranted shame. However-
Abby Wambach:
So good.
Jia Tolentino:
… I am a believer that, I don’t know, I think it’s right and appropriate to feel ashamed of your participation in mechanisms that you’re continuing to participate in. But I think that there’s something about baseline American emotional ideology. It’s an unwanted side effect of the emotional work that has been happening in the culture for the last however many years that I think so many people think that they should be living a life where they feel great about everything they do, and that’s some version of what happiness is or something. And I’m always a little dissatisfied or more with most of what I do. And to me, that doesn’t get in the way. That seems conducive to honesty and change. And yeah, I was like, “We should be ashamed of all of this, guys. What are we doing?”
Abby Wambach:
So good.
Glennon Doyle:
What are some of the things that you’re involved with now that you feel shame about that you’re still… Because the coolest thing about you that we talk about all the time is your holding of the paradox of everything.
Jia Tolentino:
I feel ashamed when I order things online. There’s this huge union fight going on at UPS right now. I feel actively bad about my participation in labor chains that are exploitative. And I have plenty of points of participation in that, and that’s the one that seems the most intractable. I’m not going to stop buying out of season fruit at the grocery store. I’m just going to keep doing that. I feel shame about participation in the childcare market. We found out yesterday, when I enrolled, my kid started going to daycare when she was one. And the only question I asked at the interview was, “Do the teachers get full benefits?” And the childcare director said, “Yes, it’s a great place to work, blah, blah, blah.” And then I found out a year and a half later after we’d already transferred her that she had been lying and the teachers don’t get benefits.
Jia Tolentino:
And I recently found out that at our current daycare, the teachers don’t get benefits. And I feel so much shame about that, I feel so much… And to me the solution to this is obvious, is that there needs to be federally funded universal childcare, and that’s literally the only way out of it. There have been so many pieces this year on how impossible the numbers are. We need to view childcare as a public good. But that’s currently on my mind. Those are the big ones, I would say. They’re mostly involving labor right now.
Amanda Doyle:
Glennon, yours is watching Real Housewives.
Glennon Doyle:
I wasn’t going to tell Jia Tolentino that, sister. Shit.
Jia Tolentino:
Do you guys watch Real Housewives?
Glennon Doyle:
Occasionally.
Jia Tolentino:
I can’t… Luckily my brain, it’s like football, award shows, and reality TV. You put it in front of me and it looks like static noise and the Charlie Brown sound. Just nothing, no signals communicate. And so luckily my cognitive problems have blocked that from entering my life, because otherwise I’m sure I would just watch it all the time.
Glennon Doyle:
Do you have a strategy to turn off your humanity, though? Because for me, I’ve lived very close to this lake of despair and purple black swirliness of despair, right?
Jia Tolentino:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Which I think is also beauty. I think that’s the tension, is I’m supposed to stay close to that and it’s like the ache of being human, it’s how beautiful and brutal everything is. And reality TV takes me so far from that. It has nothing to do with any beauty, with any truth. It’s like the way of turning off the realness of life.
Abby Wambach:
Isn’t that beauty and truth though too?
Glennon Doyle:
It’s like the opposite of poetry.
Jia Tolentino:
Yeah.
Abby Wambach:
I know. But I think that that’s where beauty can also live in the turning off of the insanity of some of it.
Jia Tolentino:
I also think that you couldn’t live by that lake if you didn’t have reality TV or the equivalent of it.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Jia Tolentino:
I’ve thought about this a lot writing about anytime I’ve written about abortion or activism where I’m trying to look for these emotional management tool, ways to manage my own feel stupid little feelings of overwhelm and sadness that we’re all trying to do all the time. And it sometimes feels like you can spend your entire life just figuring out how to emotionally balance yourself.
Jia Tolentino:
And then I talk to people who are really in the trenches, and I’m reminded there’s a toolkit for this that activists have been practicing for decades, that women that are manning the helplines, that abortion funds in Texas, even rowing a little canoe across that lake of despair since 2011, and they can’t be in it. They can’t be face deep every second of the day in the literally life or death stakes and the existential and emotional, the intensity of all that. I get overwhelmed even writing about it sometimes, and I’m like, “How do I manage?” And then I remember that these women, I think they watch plenty of Real Housewives. So I think you have to go to a dry kind of neon lit kind of synthetic place for a little bit sometimes in order to get back on the shores of the lake and really feel it all.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. This, too, is humanity. The neon too is humanity.
Jia Tolentino:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s not always escape from it. It’s a coping mechanism to get back to the lake.
Amanda Doyle:
I think that that’s right. And I also think that there’s an exceptionalism piece to this that I’m really interested in, which is that I’m not a regular sorority girl. I’m not a regular Real Housewives watcher. I have to distinguish myself from that by showing that I am a feminist and an activist and a whatever, as opposed to being actually, if we don’t try to prove our own exceptionalism, then we could just all lean into this idea that everything is a paradox. And when you do, when you say that there are feminist sorority girls, you have to acknowledge your place in this shameful structure and you have to critique it.
Amanda Doyle:
But can you not do that better when you’re leaning into the paradox and saying, “Maybe I’m just a person who likes Real Housewives and maybe there isn’t something that you can automatically say about me because I am? Maybe I am a sorority girl and I am changing that from within instead of making myself exceptional from it.”
Jia Tolentino:
Right. I do think there’s this need to be like, “Oh, I’m only doing this because we need to justify.” But one of the ways that I find myself chafing around this issue now and wondering to what extent that sense of almost like juvenile exceptionalism may still be at play is the fact that I live a pretty conventional heteronormative life, right? I got married so I could get WGA health insurance because they don’t let unmarried partners do it. And I never thought I would get married. I really didn’t want to. But I am married and I have a kid and I’m seven months pregnant with my second, and I’m so conventional in so many ways, and I always have been. But maybe all, as Glennon as your whole work has surfaced within this community of women, I’m certainly not alone in my resistance to the strictures and the expectations of conventional socialization, right?
Jia Tolentino:
But I still think that the act of feeling emotionally resistant to certain aspects of it, to certain expectations of it, the ways in which that feels differently important around let’s say domestic labor and child-rearing and stuff like that, that’s my own version of it right now where I’m like, “Yeah, I’m a mom, but my partner’s the primary parent, okay?”
Amanda Doyle:
Yes, exactly. That’s what I mean.
Jia Tolentino:
And it’s like, “I spent Mother’s Day at a fucking hotel by myself, bitch!”
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Jia Tolentino:
And I wonder, I haven’t fully untangled to what extent I’m trying to say something about myself. I’m still untangling my thoughts about all of that.
Amanda Doyle:
I just love it because I think we compartmentalize so much, and compartmentalizing is the defense against paradox. But if we take all those compartmentalizations away and just say, this is what it all is, it’s a big stew of us participating in these horrible structures that are violence against people, and we’re just as much a part of it, even though we think we’re special like, “I’m a baseball mom, asterisk. I’m also a radical feminist.” We try to make ourselves different than that, but we actually are all the things.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, but, for example, what scares me about myself is I did not know. When I was in a sorority, I was like, “Yep, this is what I’m doing. 100%.” I would sing songs about women that I cannot repeat on this podcast with fraternity, but awful things on their shoulders. And I was like, “I am the shit. This is what I’ve been working towards.”
Abby Wambach:
Here’s the thing, I think that we all have this vision of what a good feminist is supposed to be thinking and doing and saying.
Glennon Doyle:
Well, it’s not that.
Abby Wambach:
I know, but here’s my point. You had to have that experience. We all have to actually be living in our lives to experience shit and to be like, “Oh, that actually didn’t feel that good,” or when you look back and you’re thinking about what you did, you’re like, “Actually, that’s not the kind of person I want to be now,” and we’re always fucking ever-changing.
Abby Wambach:
I think that sometimes we get so stuck on thinking and the person we want to become prevents us from be acknowledging the story and the life that we have needed to live to eventually become the people that we want to be like. And we’re never going to fucking figure it out. The world is ever-changing, so anyway…
Glennon Doyle:
But it takes different kinds of people, because Jia was in the sorority meetings in rush going, “This is hilarious. She thinks I’m from Boston.”
Glennon Doyle:
And I was like, “Oh my God, am I doing good? Am I going to make it into the sorority?” It’s a different consciousness.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Jia Tolentino:
I will say that there have been a lot of random, almost like fairy godmothers, people who have planted ideas in my head at various times where when I got to college and I was 16 and thought I was a political moderate and was like, “Maybe I’m a libertarian.”
Jia Tolentino:
And some girl was like, “Read a little bit more, I don’t think those exist.”
Jia Tolentino:
Just instantly disabused me of some deep false narrative I had about something or other. I have needed people who have been rude or abrasive about certain conventions at random points in my life to shake me out of them. And I am glad if my bad attitude could have brought that to someone else’s life in any helpful way at any point in this, I would be happy to serve that role. But what Abby was saying, I also think there’s no greater way to navigate any of the paradoxes of contemporary living other than to be in them. There’s no point even thinking about them. It’s like you have to just do your way through it to see what you’re actually fucking talking about.
Abby Wambach:
Yes. And I totally relate because I played for our national team for 15 years. And when I was in it, I needed that paycheck, I needed my health insurance, I was fucking all in like red, white, and blue bled through my pores.
Abby Wambach:
And now, having stepped away from it, I’m so proud of the time that I spent playing on the national team, but I’m also very aware, educated, and conscious of how complicated our country is and how confusing and how evil we can be at times, right? And so I think that we have to be able to, at the very least, look back and analyze and go over what we’ve done and figure out maybe our next steps from some of our successes and our failures.
Glennon Doyle:
What is your thinking about the Internet these days? Speaking of-
Jia Tolentino:
I don’t understand it anymore, a little bit.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Jia Tolentino:
So I had written about the Internet, always, because this was a thing that one could be authoritative about when I was 22 and not getting paid to write anything and had no experience or authority about anything, but young people are good at writing about the Internet. And it was the research I could do for free from my home in grad school in Michigan, not knowing anyone in New York. And so I started writing about it and I found that the bad things about my brain cleaved well to the pace of the Internet. I liked that it was frantic. I found that I could navigate that, I was interested in it, I found it really fun. Part of it was that I had been in the Peace Corps with no Internet for a while. So when I came back, it seemed like the magical…
Jia Tolentino:
And this was 2012, so it was kind of pre-algorithmic consolidation. It could still be like all four of us could get on the Internet right now, and we’d probably see pretty much the same stuff, whereas in 2012, not at all, right? There was this consolidation. And I always wrote about it, and I always participated in it really heavily and it was one of the reasons I was able to have a career kind of with no connections and not living in New York until I did. And yet, there was some period, it was right around when I started writing my book, which was 2017, and it was like, “How did the Internet seem so good to me 10 years ago and now suddenly I can feel my brain kind of leaking out my ears, I can feel this sort of existential dullness and dissatisfaction? And it promised connection,” and it feels like people are mostly getting more and more alienated. I started thinking about these things and then I started writing about them for my book and maybe for other things.
Jia Tolentino:
And I was like, “Well, I’ll just stay on it as long as I’m getting more from it than I’m giving. And as long as it’s still funny. For a while, it was just on the Internet because it was funny. I was like this… As long as I started pissing my pants, laughing at some meme on Twitter at least once a day, then I was like, “Fine, I can deal with everything else.”
Glennon Doyle:
It’s a small price to pay.
Jia Tolentino:
It’s honestly a small price to pay if someone can-
Glennon Doyle:
Soul crushing.
Jia Tolentino:
… if a meme about a frog on a unicycle can make me laugh that hard. And I truly believe that.
Jia Tolentino:
But then something happened, it was around my book came out in 2019. By then, I had started thinking about the Internet and the entire model of surveillance capitalism as deeply destructive. Like an entire economic model that treats our souls and our interests and our desires and our connections, our most essential human desires to be seen and to be loved, and to connect one another and treated it the way that colonial mining companies treated land in East Africa. This was the last territory left to be mined to all hell. And so that a little profit could come to us in the form of whatever it comes, but all of the profit is really getting sucked upwards. And we are the raw material for this economic model of the Internet. And I’d written a lot about the commodification of identity and the commodification of our souls, really.
Jia Tolentino:
And then my book came out and all of the things I’d written about in critique, I got swallowed in.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Jia Tolentino:
I instantly was like, “Oh, by publishing this book, which is, in part, about this, I’ve made myself so useful to the commodification of the self.” And I got very alarmed and I was like, “What am I doing on the Internet?” And pretty soon after that, 2020 happened.
Jia Tolentino:
And another thing I’d always told myself about the Internet too, was that as long as my real life was just self-evidently bigger than the Internet, then the Internet could occupy probably an outsized place in my life. I could spend five hours a day on my phone, whatever.
Jia Tolentino:
And then in the pandemic, my real life was so small, it was just a room and my partner and my dog and whatever dinner we were cooking that night, and the Internet ballooned in this outsized way. So I was like, “Okay, I need to shrink the Internet so it’s smaller than my life.” And I was just like, “I need to keep that propo…” And also, the memes got bad.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Jia Tolentino:
I don’t know if I’m just getting older, but the-
Amanda Doyle:
Also, I haven’t seen a frog on a tricycle in years.
Jia Tolentino:
Yeah, the only meme that was funny to me in 2020 was the Gossip Girl Go Piss Girl meme. Nothing else really did it for me. So I tried to shrink my involvement with the Internet. I use a program called Self-Control on my laptop and a program called Freedom on my phone, super Orwellian.
Jia Tolentino:
And then I had a kid in August of that year, and I was like, “I don’t want to be up at 3:00 AM looking at fucking Twitter.” And so I got off of Twitter.
Jia Tolentino:
My relationship to the Internet, I’m still on it a lot for work, for reporting, and stuff. I’m back on Twitter to look at what anti-abortion groups are saying all the time and whatever. But it’s changed a lot. There came a point where I was like, “I can’t keep writing about how something is bad and then throwing myself fully at it and benefiting from it so much.” So I’ve been experimenting with being less online.
Amanda Doyle:
I feel like we get the message, “Don’t be on as much,” but there’s not really a concrete way that you can measure what as much is. But when you just say, “I needed my real life to be bigger than my online life,” that’s actually something concrete. How do you measure that? And how do you measure the bigness of your offline life to ensure that it is outsizing the Internet?
Jia Tolentino:
Yeah. Well, it’s tough because if our work is disseminated primarily on the Internet and you can’t get around work, that complicates it significantly. But I think I could just feel it. I think it’s just something that I think most people can feel. I don’t ever want to find myself in the real physical world thinking about something that doesn’t exist there.
Jia Tolentino:
And the pandemic really enshrined for me something that I think I had understood maybe more subconsciously that the moments in life where I feel actually human and actually like myself, they’re all unmediated, they’re all unsurveilled. It’s like going out dancing, being with my friends, doing acid, at a show, having sex, or whatever, like physical presence and nothing in between and no one recording.
Jia Tolentino:
And many of those things were so hard to come by during the pandemic. And there was something about even just texting my friends for four hours a day, which I did, that I was just like, “I just want to be in front of your fleshy face and have a conversation that there will be no record of ever.” And then I guess having a kid reinforce that, right? I think I just wanted as much of my experience to be of no monetary use to anyone but me.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s how you know you’re human, you’re being human.
Jia Tolentino:
Yeah, and I’m actually like, “Maybe it worked.” I’m thinking in real time, “Maybe it worked better than I thought.”
Glennon Doyle:
I just had this meeting with my therapist yesterday and I was talking to her about how I went to this festival this weekend and that I felt these feelings in my body that I think are joy and I was around other bodies. So much of what you’re talking about, human-to-human, there are bodies involved.
Jia Tolentino:
Right.
Glennon Doyle:
And the Internet is disembodied, I am working on becoming more embodied and being fully human, which seems to be easy for other people.
Abby Wambach:
It’s not.
Glennon Doyle:
And then I’m realizing, “Oh, I have created an entire career and world out of a completely disembodied community.” I love humanity, but not other human beings, like a way on the Internet to connect?
Glennon Doyle:
How do we really connect when we’re not body to body? And when you say, “I want to be with my friends’ fleshy faces,” it feels so simple but that’s it. We have been sold this idea that we can connect on the Internet, but I don’t know if any of that is real.
Jia Tolentino:
Oh, I think it totally is. There’s something different when if you’re a writer, this is a profession that has always been mediated, right? And the work that you do, there’s no way that you can have one on… I also think I’ve tried to not be kind of an unequivocal alarmist. I do recognize that the Internet is magic and that we get to meet this from our living rooms, and that’s a fucking gift. I owe my entire career, my ability to write, the entire democratization of the media industry is due to the sudden horizontal smushing of hierarchy that the Internet allows for. I think there are still so many kind of radically wonderful benefits of it. I guess those have always seemed so obvious to me, or those have always been much easier for me, or it was for a while to get caught up in all the parts of it that were freeing and were good, and did allow for things that couldn’t be done otherwise that I was like, “I have to keep my eye on the part that is corrosive.”
Jia Tolentino:
But I think the fact that people can hear your voice in their ear when they’re going about a day that they kind of, at the moment, have no choice but to be alone within their day, and they’re not alone listening to you. I think that the disembodied nature of that… I think something like a podcast is different.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s different.
Jia Tolentino:
Yeah, and writing. It is the best we can do with the tools that we’re given and it does matter. It is connection. I think it’s the kind of false connection, the false disembodied connection of the Internet, I think of that is the connections that are involuntary. There’s something about choosing to read a book or choosing to enter into the parasocial relationship that I have with various… Those vectors still feel pretty human to me and pretty kind of unadulterated, at least in my experience. The stuff that is freaky is the stuff that’s being pushed on us by algorithm for other people’s benefit, not the stuff that we’re actively choosing to change our life, right? And I also think that’s why I hunger for physical presence so often is because, for whatever reason, my life has led me to mostly be working alone behind a screen.
Glennon Doyle:
Is there three realms? This is what I’m trying to figure out because I’ve changed my relationship to the Internet and social media completely over the last two years.
Jia Tolentino:
How has it changed for you?
Glennon Doyle:
Well, I heard you on a podcast say that you read Jenny Odell’s book.
Jia Tolentino:
Oh, isn’t it so good?
Glennon Doyle:
… I just… It fucked me up completely like I just-
Jia Tolentino:
Absolutely, same. I was like, “I have to change my whole life.”
Glennon Doyle:
Me too. I changed a whole lot.
Jia Tolentino:
Everyone read that book.
Glennon Doyle:
And then I changed it brilliantly by getting off social media and starting a podcast, which then takes me 12 hours a day. I just didn’t do it right, I don’t think.
Glennon Doyle:
But it’s different. I love this podcast. I love this podcast, because podcasts can be the same as a book, can be the same as a painting, can be the same as… But there’s a difference between I think of my real life, which are the people in my day, in my neighborhood, and then there’s the art that I’m making, that I’m pushing to people because they’re choosing it. But then there’s this other realm of performing on social media that is different.
Jia Tolentino:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s the one… I don’t know how to explain it yet. I don’t really have language for it, but when I am making something, I am purposely thinking about that thing. And then I am making something new for people, and then I’m trying to create something beautiful, and then I’m putting it out to them and they’re opting in. That’s like writing a book. But there’s something about if I stop my day and take a picture of myself or something, or my kid, and then I put that out, that feels totally different. And that second realm is what I’m trying to get rid of.
Jia Tolentino:
Yeah. I have also stopped doing that as much and started feeling weirder about it when I do, which I think is probably good. I think-
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Shame, ambient shame.
Jia Tolentino:
… that shame, whatever ambient shame I might feel about. And it’s actually like shame isn’t the demotivating factor there. It’s more just like a I don’t feel like a spark with doing it anymore. I feel much less attraction to showing myself online than I once did. I think the simple miracle of in your early twenties being like, “Wow, I can be seen as the person I think I am,” that can carry you through a lot of life phases. Now I’m like, “I don’t care about being seen.”
Glennon Doyle:
Right.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s an evolution of that.
Jia Tolentino:
Yeah. And I feel like I try to follow a spirit of pleasure into as much of my life as I can. And it’s like maybe thinking about it so much has sucked some of the pleasure out of interacting with that last realm for me. And I think one thing that brought my interactions with the Internet down and this probably has to do with Jenny’s book too, is like what is giving me real kind of animal pleasure in the day? And it is more and more not anything having to do with my phone, work-excepted, right?
Amanda Doyle:
Talk more about animal pleasure. What is minimal pleasure and what are examples for you?
Jia Tolentino:
Well, I think I run on instinct more than many writers do. It was another thing that I realized during the pandemic that I couldn’t really write about anything if my life was contained within one room, because I really rely on being able to go to a march, go to a situation, and feel what’s happening in my body. I have no intellect that exists outside of my body. I think so many writers have that cerebral capacity. I don’t have it at all. It was an interesting thing to realize.
Jia Tolentino:
And I think I do have kind of a little thing worrying. It’s like, “Is this thing that I’m doing next going to make me feel more like myself or less? And is it going to make me feel more present within the world or less?” And I think of the fact of feeling more present as the kind of purest animal pleasure that they exist exactly where they are with the stuff of their moment and their environment and whoever’s around them. And I’m feeling like a cumulative X many years of acid trips just kind of seep out through my mouth right now.
Glennon Doyle:
Can you talk to us about that? Talk to us about acid trips. Just say stuff about it.
Jia Tolentino:
Any of you guys a fan?
Glennon Doyle:
Well, I’ve only done shrooms. I’ve done shrooms many times, but it was just always in a fraternity basement. It was never a great experience. It was better than not being on shrooms.
Jia Tolentino:
Yeah. Would you ever experiment?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. And I actually am very seriously considering doing medicinal, because it’s really supposed to be helpful for eating disorders. And I just have some lingering concern that I’m working out with my therapist, et cetera because of my sobriety and all of those things.
Jia Tolentino:
Of course.
Glennon Doyle:
But yes, I’m very curious.
Jia Tolentino:
I wrote about this in one essay in my book, but I think one holdover from my evangelical upbringing is that I really desire a sense of transcendence and of smallness and of sort of ego death in some sort of divine, even though I no longer believe in God, certainly not in the way that I was taught to growing up. And I think I’ve relied ever since, probably college-ish years on an annual…
Jia Tolentino:
I actually think acid is way better than shrooms because I get so emotional on shrooms. I was afraid of it for a long time because obviously it’s scary. You’re like, “I’m going to lose control of the steering wheel of my consciousness for nine hours straight,” like yikes. But I’ve kind of relied on a now annual at best kind of moment like that to what feels like spring-cleaning. It feels like a reminder of this actual stakes of life. And it has been my greatest reconnector to that sense of scale and transcendence that was felt to me like one of the most valuable things about growing up in the church and of kind of worshipful, but not to anyone in particular, but to the fact of being alive.
Jia Tolentino:
And I love that feeling. And I need the intensity of it in the acid format, I think I do, to carry a little bit of it around with me for the rest of the year. Yeah, I-
Glennon Doyle:
I last felt that this weekends-
Jia Tolentino:
If you have to tell me, yeah… Well, if you ever do-
Glennon Doyle:
… at the music festival.
Jia Tolentino:
… let know…
Glennon Doyle:
No, I will tell you.
Jia Tolentino:
… how it goes, yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
But that feeling of smallness, of transcendence, of worshiping something bigger, that’s not something particular, I think the closest I’m getting to that these days is live music.
Jia Tolentino:
Yeah, exactly.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. It’s like, “Oh, this is what I was trying to get at church.” That’s what I said to my daughter this weekend. “This is what I was going for.”
Jia Tolentino:
100%.
Glennon Doyle:
I heard you say recently that you write about motherhood more in terms of, you’ve been talking about it today, policy and how we can make things fairer and that you keep a journal about your personal experiences with motherhood. And you said that you don’t see motherhood written about in ways that you are actually experiencing it. Can you talk about that? What do you mean? And do you have language around that yet?
Jia Tolentino:
I don’t know if I do, which is one of the reasons I haven’t written about it except to myself. And I also feel like I’m still so new into it. I feel that it must be annoying to people who have raised children for much longer to hear someone with a two-year-old being like, “Well, what I know about motherhood,” I’m like, “What the fuck do I know? I’ve been doing this for literally two and a half years. What the fuck do I know?”
Jia Tolentino:
But talk about animal pleasure, I think so much of the aspects of motherhood that have really stuck in my throat and that have stuck in my brain have been things that elude the kind of emotional vocabulary with which it’s often written about. Even though the moment of birth, I didn’t experience it in terms of love, I experienced it in terms of revelation and then like not love.
Jia Tolentino:
There was so much love, but it’s these shades of existential experience that I don’t feel like I have a handle on. If I don’t have a handle on it in my thought, then I can’t get a handle on it in writing yet. And maybe it’s about that lake you were talking about. It’s like the way that motherhood is often spoken about, certainly, and written about, is this sort of sweet filigreed net that’s hovering, unspoken over a giant lake of existential fear and instability. And that’s the thing that’s making it so beautiful.
Jia Tolentino:
But that lake is the thing that gives it’s meaning. It’s not the love, it’s not the snuggles. It is the vast glimpse of life and death that you’re getting constantly around all of it, right?
Abby Wambach:
Oh my God.
Jia Tolentino:
It’s hard to write about. It’s hard to think about. It’s hard to hold it in your head all at once.
Glennon Doyle:
And it’s like the ultimate paradox, right?
Jia Tolentino:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Because I’m looking at my kid and I don’t know whether to be like, “You’re welcome,” or like, “Sorry for doing this to you”
Jia Tolentino:
Right. You’re fucking alive. Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
I’m not sure yet whether this is all worth it or not. I’m not sure whether it was a great idea. And how do you talk about that? I understand what you’re saying.
Jia Tolentino:
Well, and yeah. And even that, I feel some sort of shame. I don’t know if shame’s exactly the right word for it, but I feel some sort of moral trouble about having knowingly birthed an upper middle class consumer that will be probably as bad for the planet as I have been. Even just despite all of my best efforts, like the cloth diapers and the compost, I’m still a drag on the… And I try not to hamster wheel about that too much because, in a way, that’s not useful. But yeah, even stuff like that. And last night, oh my God, I had what felt a kind of wonderful and terrible milestone where I’m entering the weepy phase of third trimester, which is unusual for me because I’m not a crier, but I’m truly entering the weepy phase, which is kind of great, because I get to experience what it’s like to have tears at the ready, but it’s also terrifying to me.
Jia Tolentino:
But anyway, my kid has started to go going to bed at 9:00, which is too late for a three-year-old.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Jia Tolentino:
But she was resisting bed, and it was 9:00, and I was so tired, and I just started crying, and she comforted me in the most unbelievably mature… She started singing Daniel Tiger songs to me and was like, “Take a deep breath and count to four,” and counted.
Jia Tolentino:
And I was like, “Oh, fuck.” I was like, “This is the first time that you have felt emotionally responsible for someone else’s life.” And I was like, “I’m so proud of you for doing that so well.” See? I’m getting teary right now thinking about it. I was like, “I’m so proud of you for doing that so well, and I’m so sorry that this is your first taste of the responsibility that you will feel as a girl, as a woman,” or whatever, TBD. But I was just like, “Oh, I have just ushered you into an adult experience.” And I was like, “Thank you, and I’m so sorry.”
Amanda Doyle:
Which is also the paradox, right?
Jia Tolentino:
Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s like, to be a human in this world and to be deeply connected and aware of that connection is the most beautiful thing-
Jia Tolentino:
And most devastating.
Amanda Doyle:
… and most devastating thing. And that’s the bridge over the lake, right?
Jia Tolentino:
Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s only beautiful because it’s terrifying. And it’s only terrifying because it’s beautiful.
Jia Tolentino:
Yes, absolutely.
Glennon Doyle:
And it’s like they’re this little proof if I’m doing the math, which if I’m doing the math of like, “Is this shit worth it at all?”
Glennon Doyle:
What I like about the kid’s existence is it’s like, “I guess it’s just a little percentage. It’s proof that I really believe that it’s like 51% worth it. I must truly believe that or you wouldn’t exist. I would not have done this.” So it’s a reminder to me of the extra 1% of all of this that the you’re welcome is just a little bit bigger than that sorry.
Jia Tolentino:
Yeah. It feels really disrespectful to think about this quote in the context of my own life, which is so charmed in so many ways. But I always think about Simone Weil, the French philosopher. At some point during World War II, she wrote something like how wonderful it is to be alive when we’ve lost everything or something like that. I still do come down instinctively, physically to the idea that being here is a gift. And it’s a malleable one and that malleability is the most important part of it. And I haven’t doubted that, but yeah, you do. Like last night, I was like, “Maybe it is 4951.”
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
You said that motherhood has also been steering you towards the unvaluable values.
Jia Tolentino:
Yeah. There’s no kind of labor less economically valued and more universally important than caregiving in general, but of the elderly of spaces of land, whatever, but of children specifically. And it’s this enormous glaring truism of our world that the things that are most economically valued are often the things that are the most destructive, just openly, spiritually, materially in every way. And I’ve always been afraid of wasting time of not doing as much as I can with my stupid little time in this world, whatever the things that…
Amanda Doyle:
I think that a Jefferson scholar…
Jia Tolentino:
Well, the things that… And that’s what those experiences we were talking about, live music or an acid trip or being with your friends where the things that remove me from the desire to be productive in some outwardly manifesting way are the things that have taught me how I actually want to live. And I think my whole life will be a slow process of just trying to live by those values more.
Jia Tolentino:
And having a kid, yeah, “I’m just staring at you. I’m not doing anything other than staring at you and cleaning up poop.” And we’re just going to lay here. And this time is so actively devalued by everyone that I don’t even have paid maternity leave. And yet, it is obviously immeasurably precious, and I think it made me more comfortable with doing things that, as per how to do nothing, life-changing book, that it is those times of doing what ostensibly seems to be nothing that feel the most valuable of all.
Jia Tolentino:
So yeah, since then, it’s been like, how can I do work that is lucrative enough in less time that will give me plenty enough time to do nothing with my kid?
Amanda Doyle:
And has it extended beyond your kid, Jia? Because I feel like that is still somewhat valorized and I feel like mothers are shamed often for like, “Why are you on your phone in the park and why aren’t you getting one on time staring at-
Jia Tolentino:
Oh, I love to be on my phone in the park, yes.
Glennon Doyle:
… Yeah. What the hell else would you do in a park?
Amanda Doyle:
It has the unvaluable time, have you taken it also for yourself? Is that opening it?
Jia Tolentino:
Yeah, to the extent that it’s like you have this realization just as non-useful time has become much harder to come by. But I think the way in which I thought of this very specifically is outside my child was I think a lot of people feel, if they’re lucky enough to be able to, this forced expansion of capacity in early parenthood where you’re like, “Oh,” suddenly you realize how you’re just going to fit it all in. You feel this great expansion of your caregiving capacity and your ability to stretch yourself past an emotional limit you thought you had and really give a lot more of yourself than you would have previously. And I think that’s a pretty near universal experience.
Jia Tolentino:
And I was like, I want to make sure that doesn’t only apply to my daughter. It’s one of the ways that I chafe against whatever the nuclear family ideal is, right? That all of our ideas of safety and flourishing and love, I always feared that that would get directed too much inward with marriage or children. And that was a fear that I’ve had for a long time.
Jia Tolentino:
It was like, I don’t want to grow up and tend my little walled garden. That seemed very scary and bad to me in many ways, that idea of that as the good life. I had always thought about relationships, romantic relationships, that should make your world bigger, not smaller, but it seemed like a lot of the visions of romantic relationships were like, now you have a cute, tight little unit. And I was so scared of that.
Jia Tolentino:
And I think with kids, I definitely started to… I was like, “I’m going to volunteer with much more dedication and frequency than I did beforehand, and I’m going to make it work somehow to remind myself that this expansion of capacity doesn’t only need to be directed towards my biological child.” I sort of needed to physically do it to remind myself that that expansion of capacity and interest in doing kind of non-valued work, non non-paid work, basically, that I just didn’t want it all to go to her, because it would be a waste of this sudden compulsion and capacity that I felt.
Abby Wambach:
Wow.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. Jia. Jia-sus has spoken.
Abby Wambach:
Jia-sus has spoken.
Jia Tolentino:
What should I write about next, though? If you wanna chat and let me know.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, I will.
Jia Tolentino:
I’ll do it.
Glennon Doyle:
You’re wonderful. I just hope you get lots of time to do nothing and-
Jia Tolentino:
I hope so too.
Glennon Doyle:
I just think that you’re such a gift to the world and thank you for this hour.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s been absolutely wonderful for us.
Jia Tolentino:
Thank you, guys. So it’s good to meet you. Yeah, truly. We should be glad for the Internet because it allowed for this.
Glennon Doyle:
51%.
Jia Tolentino:
Right now.
Glennon Doyle:
51%.
Jia Tolentino:
We’re on that one.
Amanda Doyle:
I love it.
Glennon Doyle:
Thanks, pod squad.
Amanda Doyle:
Thank you, Jia.
Glennon Doyle:
We’ll see you next time. Bye.
Jia Tolentino:
Bye.
Glennon Doyle:
If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us if you’d be willing to take 30 seconds to do each or all of these three things. First, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things? Following the pod helps you because you’ll never miss an episode and it helps us because you’ll never miss an episode.
Glennon Doyle:
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