All the links on my Instagram bio are about a consumption profile. My sense of self – to the extent I am willing to make it known – is expressed through a declaration of taste. It is something safe and easy to be proud of; people have really awful tastes. How does one fulfil personhood? A very European thing I have come to like is putting things on your calendar; you know what you will be doing quite a way into the future. An existential crisis or two can be averted by pulling your calendar up. You can pack it up to never leave room for an unwelcome thought. You can refer to it when someone tries make a spontaneous plan. A crutch, and a potent one. It remains difficult to describe a sense of self even to myself without informing it to some measure of consumption. If nothing under the Sun is new, then there is nothing novel to my particular brand of consumption. I think I grew up in a society as alienated from production as is physically possible. Almost everything that populated the country’s supermarkets came from abroad, and as far as we were concerned, produce grew in the produce aisle. I used to joke with my mother that I arrived as a ten-year-old and never put her through the ordeal of raising a baby, mostly because she has never stopped complaining about what an ordeal it was. It’s the same with consumption, there was no pausing to consider how something got made; it just appeared on the aisles. I still like going to places where things appear on the aisle. Mass production, intercontinental supply chains, whatever it takes to separate me from the productive process and allow me to exist as simply a consumer. And then I strive to make the consumption niche. The more esoteric my taste, the more evolved my sense of self. To speak a few more languages than others, have a wider palette of books and cinema, try and know everything about everything, my attempt to acquire personhood is not far off from that of a large language model.
I saw tweet once that said the emotion to really eschew is ennui because we are equipped to deal with everything else. Ennui is easy to descend into. I’ve tweeted before, and felt several times that they should invent something to look forward to. Someone replied once saying it exists and is called ‘tomorrow’. But there’s always tomorrow, even when it is tomorrow.
