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Relationships as work

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the spaces that people occupy in each other’s lives.

Relationships are hard work. This is true in that the most enduring ties are built on daily decisions to maintain them. The metaphor shouldn’t stretch to the point of relationships being toil, the work punishing and desperate, undertaken in fear of losing everything if you stop.

And that’s where I think I might have gotten lost, too nervous about the tenuous space that others have allowed me in their lives.

A couple of days ago, The Paris Review published a column from Sabrina Orah Mark that reflected on worth, job markets, crisis. Read broadly, it’s a sharp picture of capitalism as fiction, as a fantasy that asks us to take on roles where we are nothing but our functions — and therefore nothing without them.

The essay lingers in my head, mostly because of statements like this:

In fairy tales, form is your function and function is your form. If you don’t spin the straw into gold or inherit the kingdom or devour all the oxen or find the flour or get the professorship, you drop out of the fairy tale, and fall over its edge into an endless, blank forest where there is no other function for you, no alternative career. The future for the sons who don’t inherit the kingdom is banishment. What happens when your skills are no longer needed for the sake of the fairy tale? A great gust comes and carries you away.
Fuck the Bread. The Bread is Over. by Sabrina Orah Mark in The Paris Review

As trenchant a commentary as this might be when it comes to working life, I can’t help but stretch it to the anxieties of personal relationships, too. Isn’t our presence in people’s lives possible only through the role(s) we’ve taken in their stories?

What happens when those roles no longer fit us?

The simple answer is that change happens.

But that’s simple only if those roles are founded on something beyond functionality or happenstance. To put it plainly, change is less scary if the people involved go into it aiming to retain their places in each others’ lives, no matter how different the particulars might look on the other side.

How often are any of us completely assured of that?

There’s this chain of posts on Tumblr that I’ve seen several times over the years:

Tumblr getting too real these days.

I think about that tag a lot. It distills all the questions I was tiptoeing around earlier: change is less scary if you know that people still want you around despite everything, i.e., despite you having shed a lot of the functional roles you might have filled in their lives before.

The thing is, each of us decides that entirely on our own, and that means we have no power over whether other people will want to keep us around, too.¹

For any normal person, that would be enough reason to let it be. Anxious buggers with a perfectionist streak (i.e., me), though, could end up twisting that realization: It’s safest to assume that I will never be liked enough to be kept around, but people will allow me to linger a bit if I can be useful.

You can see the kind of internal pressure that creates.

This post will have a bit of an abrupt end, mostly because I’ve yet to untangle this chain of thoughts in any permanent way. The standard for being “useful” is so vague and amorphous that it’s impossible to live up to.²
In lieu of any neat conclusion, here’s a somewhat-related column from The New York Times circa 2016. Moira Weigel examines the evolution of dating practices to tease out how “[t]he economy shapes our feelings and values as well as our behaviors,” writing:

We constantly use economic metaphors to describe romantic and sexual relations. … We use this kind of language because the ways that people date — who contacts whom, where they meet and what happens next — have always been tied to the economy. Dating applies the logic of capitalism to courtship. On the dating market, everyone competes for him or herself.
Sexual Freelancing In The Gig Economy by Moira Weigel in The New York Times

It’s a little depressing to think that economics has seeped far enough into my psyche to shape my current neuroses, and so obviously at that. But it’s not just me, and it’s not just about dating, of course. The (false) comfort of a simple quid pro quo remains alluring to many people, no matter where along the wide range of interpersonal relationships we find ourselves. It gives people the illusion of a safety net: If I can’t trust sentiment and emotion³ then I will revert to the reliable logic of transactions. Conventions of exchange, at least, are things our bleak environment forces most of us to live by, regardless of how we feel.

2020-05-11
5.10.20 aesthetics game

Type your name + aesthetics in the Pinterest search bar and create a personal moodboard.

I’d say this came out well for how random it was.

2020-05-10
status 03 march 2020

Today is the killer week for the term. Internship and TA duties, 3 report deadlines and a final presentation, two interviews, and who knows what else will crop up. I just need to get out of this alive, and hopefully with enough to replenish my energy.

It occurs to me that I’ll need to inform my landlord soon if I want an extension of my rental. This probably won’t happen, in which case, I’ll need to fly out by the end of May. Saying goodbye is a long process, and I’m starting it now.

2020-03-03
“There are always other places.”

In the penultimate episode of the Korean drama Hotel del Luna, there’s a scene where the undying owner of the hotel, Jang Man-wol, looks back on her portraits from the hotel’s different eras.

There are no photos of any of her staff then. Koo Chan-sung, the current manager, tells her she should have taken some as proof of what the people around her were like through the years.

Man-wol replies:

Back then, I thought they were just passing me by and meant nothing to me.

I had to pause to consider that statement, which was at once piercing and foreign.

For the longest time, I’d felt like a perpetual passerby, hurtling along at a pace that resisted any meaningful participation in my own life.

I visited Jessica Zafra’s blog on a whim today. She describes her book club’s latest pick, The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, like this:

“[A] melancholy novel set on an island where things disappear and people are required to forget they ever existed.”

To me, it sounds like the universe laughing, somewhere in the distance.

Even my motives for running refused to be static. I’ve gone from escape to pursuit and back again. And in between, there have been long stretches when there was no motive so much as a visceral aversion to lingering — to settling.

Motion is easy, so it feels inevitable. It’s a convenient proxy for progress. Motion implies that you’re either outrunning an unbearable outcome or closing in on what you long for — that you are, in short, on the way to something better.

I admit that it’s an optimistic interpretation. More likely, there are no betters involved. Movement just happens to be easier than stopping to find that one bakery where you’ll get good bread every morning; to navigate the little quirks and frictions of long-term relationships; to do the work, that is, of making yourself a home.

Counterpoint:

It’s not all biased optimism. There’s a certain comfort in dismissing the finality from your situation. Whatever mistakes you make could be dealt with and left behind; you could go elsewhere, even if you still hadn’t figured out where “elsewhere” might be.

But an option like that is a tremendous privilege, and like many privileges, it lends itself easily to squander. Funny how motion can make somebody complacent in the end.

2020-02-09
Redefining media dynamics in the age of social media*

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Consider Social Media

https://twitter.com/WilliamsJon/status/1223502667823140864

In the days leading up to Brexit Day, Boris Johnson broke “with long-standing tradition” and chose to keep broadcasters from recording his message. Instead, as Jon Williams from Ireland’s national broadcasting service observed above, the PM used social media as his primary channel for sending the message out.

Now, Johnson hasn’t had the friendliest relationship with the UK media. He’s been vocal about changing policies related to the BBC’s funding, for example, and has been reported to have barred “left-wing or critical” journalists from briefings at Downing Street.

Commentators/critics have described this behavior as a way to bypass scrutiny, especially from outlets with rigorous journalistic standards. What’s interesting is that this antagonism towards mainstream media has become sustainable largely because social media has given figures like Johnson an alternative way to communicate with audiences.

It’s worth thinking about which figures or organizations seem to be using this fact as leverage to redefine their relationship with mainstream media.

I’m reminded of the Philippines’ President Duterte, for example, who has been threatening to block the broadcast franchise renewal for ABS-CBN Corporation. ABS-CBN is the country’s biggest media conglomerate and is half of what is essentially a duopoly in Philippine media. Shutting down ABS-CBN might have been too big a loss to consider for anybody with 100M+ citizens to reach, if not for the ubiquity of social media in the Philippines today.

*This is more of a half-baked idea that definitely needs more thought. Future posts in a similar vein will be tagged #jotter. Anyway, I posted this for our class discussion boards today and figured it’s worth saving here.

2020-02-04
The novel coronavirus and misinformation fears in PH social media
This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Consider Social Media

This term, one of our modules focuses on relationship management in the social media age. Part of the class requirements has been to post interesting cases or examples we come across on social media, and this has sparked some great discussions in the class forums.

One of the more recent posts was about Starbucks’ effective use of social media to cultivate trust in its customers amidst the panic over the novel coronavirus. My classmate asked for other examples of brands using social media to address the crisis, but I decided to talk about the intersection of social media, politics, and the coronavirus outbreak instead.

Here’s what I posted on the class discussion board:

This isn’t about a corporate brand, but the furor on Philippine social media about how the government is handling the novel coronavirus adds an interesting dimension to the discussion of social media use in crises like this.

To give a bit of background, social media has increasingly become the dominant venue for casual political discussions/commentary in the Philippines. Various mobile networks offer free data access to Facebook and Twitter, for example, which has made these convenient channels for citizens who have something to say about current events.

Recently, for example, the hashtag #OustDuterte trended on Twitter as citizens’ frustrations over the government’s perceived lack of response to the virus boiled over. One sore point for many of these people was the government’s initial refusal to impose travel restrictions, especially for those with recent travel history to/from China.

Since the hashtag trended, many “sympathetic stories regarding Chinese nationals” (as the Philippine Star, one of the country’s major broadsheets, puts it) have gone viral. What’s interesting is that many have pointed out eerie similarities among these stories, even if they were ostensibly posted by different accounts.

This has led to speculation that the government, or at least groups sympathetic to the current administration, has deployed “troll farms” to try and combat public sentiment regarding the government’s handling of the coronavirus issue, particularly the question of travel restrictions.

It’s unlikely that there will ever be any kind of definitive confirmation or debunking of these theories. It’s worth noting, though, that the use of social media trolls to shape Philippine political discourse is well-documented. Here’s a sampling of reports from the past few years:
Whatever the reality of the current situation on Philippine social media, it says a lot that such speculation even arose in the first place.

Social media can give brands or institutions a powerful channel to directly reach out to stakeholders, but for good or ill, it also presents opportunities to indirectly influence (perhaps even manipulate) stakeholders’ sentiments or perceptions.

In some instances, this can be a good thing: brands or institutions can have a ready proxy to push out “unbranded” messages that need to feel more personal or immediate, for example. But this option can be used in bad faith as well, and people’s growing recognition of this possibility means social media messages can spark distrust just as quickly, depending on the context.

As a side note, “Architects of Networked Disinformation,” a British Council-funded report mentioned in one of the articles above, raises another interesting point: a lot of misinformation sources try to target mainstream media to amplify their false content.

According to report, they do so by taking advantage of many media outlets’ increasing propensity to report topics that go viral on social media. This suggests another way to look at social media, i.e., as a means to gain exposure on more “credible” or “mainstream” channels, rather than as an end-platform in itself.

The study focused on the Philippine context, and from personal experience, I can attest to the fact that even broadsheets and leading news broadcasts now allot more and more space to whatever’s “trending” on social media.

Is this the case for everyone else’s home countries as well?

Has anyone else seen examples of groups or brands using social media to win more mainstream coverage?
2020-02-02