The personal project as aesthetic as everything
How we lost the forest for the self
The DEI critics are correct in their accusation that such efforts often make white people feel guilty. Where they miss the mark, though, is that it is a guilt of complicity and not the weight of a history they did not directly participate in. It is the same guilt that Matthew Desmond wrests in his book, Poverty, by America—a guilt for our complicit involvement in and, in fact, support for a system which benefits the rest of us and contributes to the ongoing poverty of 38 million of our fellow citizens. It is the same guilt that Ta-Nehisi Coates identifies when he drills down to read the investigative journalism, the real stories, that led to the #MeToo movement. Moving down depths past the chatter in the media, “the activist and academic jargon—all the talk of ‘patriarchy’ and ‘rape culture’ and ‘male privilege’—became solid and embodied [through reading the actual cases of abuse] in a way that did not just leave me convinced but implicated me.”
We are implicated. The fact is that those of us not affected by social injustice often benefit from the structural scaffolding that upholds it. While unconscious bias is an important personal exercise in self-awareness, a training which leaves the work there offers no acknowledgement of the many ways in which society is unjustly imbalanced, nor does it offer actionable steps towards a system-wide remedy. What is missing in much DEI programming is that it does very little to address the plight of these injustices themselves. The burden remains on people of color or women or the poor or the otherwise marginalized to fix the injustices inflicted upon them. As Glenn Loury explains in a recent piece titled, “Is That All There Is to a Black Guy?”:
When the Black Lives Matter movement seized the discourse on race, and when riots broke out following George Floyd’s death in 2020, people needed to hear black critical voices telling them that looking askance at it all didn’t amount to racism. The same went for affirmative action, DEI, and any number of other programs that, while wrapped in the garb of antiracism, did nothing or worse to address the real problems of African Americans.
But it’s been years now. How many times can a guy get on his soapbox and decry the deleterious effects of racial quotas? At some point, it seemed that whenever the latest instance of progressive overreach broke in the news, I was expected to call it out, even if I had just called out a nearly identical incident the week before. That kind of expectation can have a subtly dehumanizing effect, as though my sole purpose in life is to amble out on stage, scold the woke mob, and then sit quietly and wait for the next infraction. There are worse gigs, to be sure, but as the song goes, “Is that all there is?”
There is, contrary to popular belief, action-oriented work and complex thought going on in much of the DEI world. I would know—I work in it. But the DEI buzzword that the media has picked up and the taped-on, look-what-good-we-are-doing efforts in some places not only undermine the deeper work being done elsewhere, but are most often efforts built by those already privileged for these same privileged and, in the end—as they exist most fundamentally as virtue signals— they are strategically designed to quickly absolve them of guilt. If many of those implementing such efforts genuinely care about the virtues embedded in the words—diversity, equity, and inclusion—then what went wrong?
The liberal left, as Arun Kundnani explains in his book What is Antiracism? And Why It Means Anticapitalism, treats “racism as an individual malady operating through the unconscious” and has come to define anti-racism as an individual project that can be solved through proper edification. However, just as misinformation cannot be countered by presenting individuals who believe in particular distortions of reality with the actual facts, inequities cannot be undone on an individual basis. In fact, a society can be made up of an overwhelming proportion of individuals who are not racist in their personal interactions whilst the structures of racism embedded in that society still persist.
It seems there are two main failures. First is the treatment of large, interconnected social challenges through individual IVs of edification. This is about as logical a solution as trying to solve a housing shortage at a hypothetical college solely through information blasts. Awareness is important, of course, but awareness doesn’t address system-wide problems. Second, awareness or edification-based DEI is more aesthetic than work. Such programs seek to assuage those internally and to demonstrate moral goodness to those externally.
There has been considerable research on the functional and productive benefits of diverse teams in workplace settings and on the improved learning outcomes through exposure to new perspectives and dissenting information in educational settings. Similarly, the inclusivity sought in DEI approaches is well-documented to be effective. Psychological safety—which is a crucial tenet to any robust DEI effort—has been pinpointed by Google’s Project Aristotle and Harvard Business School’s Amy Edmondson as the single most important factor in building successful teams, far more important than well-defined goals or complementary skill sets. Diversity is crucial and works; inclusion is crucial and works. It is the equity piece of DEI—central to mission statements, but so often lacking in practice and application. Getting to equity requires letting go of the idea that problems can be solved on a person by person basis. Getting to equity requires the vision of a collective where some parties will have to release their hold on what they claim as theirs. Getting to equity asks for the most from those who are safe and comfortable and requires the most taking apart of what is here right now.
Desmond quotes from James Baldwin’s collected essays in The Price of a Ticket, writing of the fear generated by societal upheaval necessary to abolish poverty, racism, or classism:
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or thought one knew; to what one possessed or dreamed that one possessed.
The inclination to tear it all down is tempting, as the American far-right and now nearly half of the American populace communicated through their votes in our recent presidential election. This is perhaps one point on which the radical right and radical social justice activists might actually agree.
But what exactly would we be tearing down? And do the people who claim to want that actually want the consequences of that social annihilation? What new vision would we build? While critics like Kundnani point toward equity as a goal, even this remains more of an aspiration than a concrete vision. The questions of 'what next?' often get lost in the easier work of critique. Perhaps this is why Kim Messick suggests in her recent article in Salon that the separation of rationality from political engagement and decision-making has resulted in both the loss of shared visions, and also the loss of personal dignity. Why, she posits, did two groups—people of color and whites—who are experiencing many of the same economic woes vote overwhelmingly for different candidates in the last election. Her hypothesis is that:
Nonwhites mostly see themselves as oppressed by corporate power and racial bigotry, and they see the government as the only institution of sufficient scale to stand against these forces. Whites mostly see themselves as oppressed by corporate power and elite derision, and they see the government as complicit in both. Their only hope for dignity, they think, lies in an outsider, a strong man (and yes, it has to be a man), a smasher who will destroy a rotten system and resurrect the industrial glory of their fathers and grandfathers. The smokestacks will reignite, The Other will be tamed, and life, and America, will be great again.
Destruction is posed not as the process, but as the solution. What comes after is…well, an afterthought.
Where is the vision? Perhaps it has gone to the same dodo-extinction grave as our agency. As our capacity for intentional action diminishes, attention itself has become a more intense preoccupation. While it has always been central to human experience, we now focus obsessively on its loss—both our declining ability to sustain it and its commodification by an attention economy designed to profit from our distraction As Chris Hayes has pointed out in his myriad interviews promoting his new book, The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource:
we’re also being constantly pulled toward things that are the most attentionally salient, which is just a distinct category from what we think is important. I cannot stress this enough. Attention is not a moral faculty.
As with most things—the public…which public?...the media…which media?...the elite…which elite?---it is important to distinguish between kinds of attention—alertness, distraction, curiosity, for example—and to emphasize that it is the former two at the expense of curiosity that are exploited and commodified through our current attention economy. As attentional regimes compete through our media to win our frictionless alertness, our curiosity diminishes and worse, reactivity in the aggregate is selected for. And while curiosity might guide us toward what matters, reactive attention pulls us only toward what provokes. It’s more interesting, titillating, lurid to watch or listen to criticism, outrage, or controversy and, over time, the affective has taken precedence over the informational and the analytical in our attentional choices and also, sadly, in our relational interactions. Though stagnation or inertia are often thought of as the opposite of agency, one could make a strong argument for reactivity as well. When our cultural milieu is dominated by reactive subjects and, in turn, we respond with further reactivity, the collective public becomes instead merely a crowd of individuals wherein “mass participation is accompanied by shallowness of interaction.” As Paulo Gerbaudo explains in his 2022 article, “Theorizing Reactive Democracy”:
Key in the functioning of the social media public sphere is the role of “reactions” of the most different kinds: Facebook likes, hahas, wows, and shares; Twitter retweets and loves; YouTube likes and comments. Reactions can be described as zero-degree or low-intensity interactions, micro-behaviors that require very little effort beyond pressing a button. They are simplified and instantaneous responses to different contents, be they a post, a comment to a post, a picture, or a video, that has become a key way in which the preferences of users are both expressed and measured. Individual reactions of different users to any kind of content are aggregated collectively and come to measure the popularity of given content; further, they also feed into social media algorithms, determining the visibility of different contents and, therefore, ultimately also their influence. Absorbing the logic of social media reactions, it is democracy itself that seems to have become “reactive.” Online discussions have become an ongoing micro-referendum on the most disparate issues, often in response to specific incidents that have attracted public attention (for example, the declarations of politicians, news of police killings, or acts of war—crises of any kind), with factions positioning themselves in favor or against a given event, issue, or statement. In this context, reactions acquire the semblance of an ongoing public vote on various issues, on their relevance and urgency, and whether they deserve visibility and support.
Ronald Reagan commonly receives credit for having said: “if you’re explaining, you’re losing”—a maxim that frames intellectual explanation as politically inferior to emotional inspiration.. Explaining is also a defensive stance. This defensive explaining dominates online discourse, which has become the primary arena of public debate. You take a side and assert it, sometimes repeatedly, or just repost it, and then, if challenged, you explain why it is right. The methodical reasoning techniques of Socrates and Aristotle, where claims were examined through evidence, logic, and consideration of counterarguments, have given way to simply taking positions and clinging to them. In the rapid world of social media interactions which bleed into our real life relationality, conclusions are stated in rapid fire without the well-formed argumentative structure that used to accompany them, because that would require long hours, even days of uncertainty, of withholding an opinion, and committed (unbiased and verifiable) research into the legitimate truth of what we hear. Not only should we be troubled by the speed with which we jump into hardened positions, but we should also examine the how and the why of the defensive stance that so many of us end up in. For the purposes of this post, let’s consider the consequences of that stance.
The Gottman Institute locates defensiveness as the third of their Four Horsemen—communication styles that signal the probable end of a relationship—and define it as “self-protection in the form of righteous indignation or innocent victimhood in an attempt to ward off a perceived attack. Many people become defensive when they are being criticized, but the problem is that its perceived effect is blame. It is usually a counterattack to a complaint, which is not criticism.” Geez, I feel like the entirety of our current polarization just broke open for me. Rather than enablers of discussion, we become position-stakers. And the more we respond defensively, the more we enter the next conversation presuming an incoming attack. We are constantly on guard. And we jump to defend again. Or, we hear something that resonates with our lived experience and our out-of-shape agency exerts itself in our position-taking; we then spend our energy fortifying these pre-selected stances. From these entrenched roots, no actual solution can be worked towards, no openness, curiosity or compassion exists, and the conflict remains and deepens as each side feels blamed and no one takes responsibility. We dig into soil to hold onto something in a chaotic world, but the ensuing growth only deepens us into that spot and we are surprised when branches fail to germinate.
There are so often kernels of truth at the core of misinformation and wild narratives can easily spin from our emotional reactions to something that feels “right.” But our aching desire to be agents in the world asserts itself through opinions we fail to verify, or even to see as opinions, and the public discourse devolves into stupidity. I am far from the only one noticing this trend. After drafting this piece, I happened upon two editorials whose authors noted similar wide-spread tendencies. David Brooks aligns stupidity with lack of vision as he explains he views “stupidity as behaving in a way that ignores the question: What would happen next?” In the article, he lays out six principles of stupidity. Principle 5 is
Stupidity is nearly impossible to oppose. Bonhoeffer notes, “Against stupidity we are defenseless.” Because stupid actions do not make sense, they invariably come as a surprise. Reasonable arguments fall on deaf ears. Counter-evidence is brushed aside. Facts are deemed irrelevant. Bonhoeffer continues, “In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.
Stupidity rises with reactivity. It also seems to rise with hyper-masculinity, at least according to Frank Bruni. As he argues, “the denigration of knowledge, contempt for erudition, rejection of expertise and celebration of gut instinct” in the political sphere “overlaps with the fresh fixation on retro masculinity—with Josh Hawley’s “Manhood,” with cave man diets, with the fetishization of firepower—it travels beyond that, to a belief that extensive thinking equals overthinking; that reasoning with opponents is no nobler (and more time-consuming) than bullying them; and that sweeping, simplistic solutions beat targeted, considered ones.” And yet, one could also argue that the ascendance of hyper-masculinity is at least in part, if not primarily, an ascendance of performative masculinity which is not to say there aren’t real push-ups or jiu-jitsu belts behind the scenes. Is the goal truly the physical discipline itself—which knows no gender—or is it the performance of a masculinity that is simultaneously novel and retro where “real”men challenge each other to duels, profess a “warrior ethos,” and perform extreme feats of strength? Where there is chatter that a war with Mexico might be warranted, not on strategic, military, or political grounds, but because “if we [men] don’t have a war, nobody’s going to have anything to do or shape us”?
It's no wonder in this environment of "lost boys" that we see an often male-oriented rise of self-optimization and personal improvement. The narrowing of identity to performative masculinity mirrors the broader reduction of human potential to metrics and optimization. How do we square this paradox of extreme reactivity—of abdication of responsibility—with hyper-focused agency? Perhaps it isn't a paradox at all. The kind of agency that dominates in these projects of one is that of a narcissistic self, rather than an agency oriented towards the betterment of a shared collective.
As our attention increasingly spotlights on reactivity, thereby triggering our own, we become far more passive subjects not only in democracy, but in our personal relationships. This lack of proactive agency—this sense that we are not making choices and acting upon them—creates a desperate desire to advance our personal agency in some other mode. Thus people self-optimize, try to get 10% happier, obsessively track their behaviors and bodily functions, dive down rabbit-holes of their own increased longevity. In “The Anti-Social Century,” Derek Thompson references an article by Andrew Taggart which first coined the phrase “secular monks” to identify a new form of muscular masculinity in which men, according to Taggart:
inherit from Calvinism the veiling of the transcendent—in their case, the veiling of the very possibility that the transcendent could ever disclose itself. They inhabit an epistemically uncertain world and suffer existential anxiety and loneliness. Above all, they commit to work—to working on themselves and on the world—as the key to salvation. Practitioners submit themselves to ever more rigorous, monitored forms of ascetic self-control: among them, cold showers, intermittent fasting, data-driven health optimization, and meditation boot camps.
Yet the work “on the world” that they commit to is, as Taggart identifies, of the “life design” sort promoted by Tim Ferriss where, despite its impossibility, “human perfectibility is a worthy and attainable goal. Why else experiment with a wide range of life-optimization tools? The goal is the optimization of ourselves according to a personal notion of success, the nearest we may ever get to perfection.”
What is a secular monk? Once you remove the religious aspect, once you remove the commitment to a transcendent principle, once you remove the shared rules and practices of the monastic community, what you are left with is the austere asceticism and the aesthetic of worth. In reducing identity to optimized metrics and personal achievement, these secular monks mirror the broader cultural tendency to narrow human potential to a single framework—whether that's masculinity, productivity, or self-improvement. This constriction echoes in the limited narratives we create of ourselves for others, or of complex issues for ourselves, reducing our idea of success to self-salvation or bust.
If the faith of secular monks is reshaped into a personalized definition of commitment, success, of good and bad, of purpose itself, then the only form of salvation these secular monks can attain is one they also solely determine. You save yourself from the harm you yourself define. It’s a never-ending closed loop of individuation, divorced from the consensus necessary to establish any kind of morality, separated from the building of a foundation for meaningful social cohesion. This kind of hyper-individuation is one we should also recognize in ourselves—in how none of us are seeing the same thing ever on any day through the endlessly infinite informational sources we consume to reflect any original event. When there is no public collective, shared understanding, or established premises, when all the world and its millions of reflections reveal total chaos, it naturally follows that people pigeonhole their focus into the personal project.
I do not want to dehistoricize. The personal project has long been a way of being in the world. Charles Dickens or Edgar Allen Poe wandered through the streets of London or Baltimore and thought and obviously that thinking was in their own heads. Indeed, as walking time was thinking time, it can be argued, as G.K. Chesterton did in Charles Dickens: A Critical Study, that the solo walking became his unique voice:
Herein is the whole secret of that eerie realism with which Dickens could always vitalize some dark or dull corner of London. There are details in the Dickens descriptions—a window, or a railing, or the keyhole of a door—which he endows with demoniac life. The things seem more actual than things really are. Indeed, that degree of realism does not exist in reality: it is the unbearable realism of a dream. And this kind of realism can only be gained by walking dreamily in a place; it cannot be gained by walking observantly.
A further example. Marx wasn't content just to write his hypotheses in The Communist Manifesto but had to end it with pages of refutations, preemptively arguing his points with everybody else’s. In each of these, original thoughts and personal determination were paramount. Since the Industrial Revolution, the personal project has grown to become the predominant way of being in the world. But perhaps what has now flipped is that being in the world has predominantly become the personal project. In other words, self-improvement, the project of one’s self dominates over all else and, even when there is a vague suggestion of beneficial byproducts in the world to one’s choice to commit to Buddhist practices or data-optimize one’s health, the external—the ‘in the world’—is often not satisfactorily identified. It can even become so secondary to the personal project that its goals are hardly addressed at all.
In Jia Tolentino’s 2020 New Yorker article about the new minimalism which so often winds up not as a principled way of being in the world, but as a pet project of the wealthy, she describes how
Last April, Kim Kardashian West appeared in a Vogue video walking through her sixty-million-dollar California mansion, a stark, blank, monochromatic palace that she described as a “minimal monastery.” Less is more attractive when you’ve got a lot of money, and minimalism is easily transformed from a philosophy of intentional restraint into an aesthetic language through which to assert a form of walled-off luxury—a self-centered and competitive impulse that is not so different from the acquisitive attitude that minimalism purports to reject.
Tolentino’s observation captures a pattern that extends far beyond minimalism—the transformation of principles into mere aesthetics. Just as minimalism can transition from a philosophy of intentional restraint into a surface-level exhibition of curated emptiness, other forms of self-improvement morph from genuine pursuits into performative displays. The secular monk’s austere practices, the DEI trainee’s proclamation of awareness, the self-optimizer’s tracker metrics—all risk becoming more about the appearance of transformation than actual change. The philosophies that could lead to meaningful change instead become aesthetic markers of belonging or status.
I have been working on this piece for a few weeks. In and out of being sick (just wait for a future post on illness), being a mom, and holding down my day job, I’ve been trying to find the words for what I have been digging into. In an interview with Stanford University psychiatrist and author of Dopamine Nation, Anna Lembke theorizes that our struggles with addiction (including dopamine addiction) come down to a struggle with
endemic narcissism, where our culture is demanding that we focus on ourselves so much that what it’s creating is this deep need to escape ourselves. And I think that is what is driving much of our pursuit of intoxicants as a way to just not have to think about ourselves for a blessed, you know, hour or two. And it’s not, like, the whole explanation, because obviously the whole point of “Dopamine Nation” is that we also live in this world of abundance with constant access, and access alone is a risk factor. But although I think access is important, and supply is more important than we have given it credit for, we do have to focus on the demand part of this equation. What is it about our lives now that make us so desperate to essentially be intoxicated in one form or another? And I do think it is this obsessive self-focus.
According to Thompson, much of our inner conflict comes from the dopamine pull being at cross-purposes with our inherently social natures. Indeed, those who swear off the technologies focusing us more deeply on ourselves and promoting reactivity tend to have a clearer vision of what those same technologies create. One of the creators of The Luddite Club (a Brooklyn high school club established in 2022), Logan Lane has continued her commitment to make conscious choices about media consumption. Recently, she spoke at a symposium: “For the youth of today,” she said in closing, “the developmental experience has been polluted; it’s been cheapened. ‘Who am I?’ becomes ‘How do I appear?’” In other words, it’s the aesthetic, stupid.
The emphasis on individual transformation makes secondary the work of (and need for) structural change. The paradox is as collective agency decreases, obsession with personal agency increases. Simultaneously, as life becomes more frictionless in the personal convenience-heavy economy, the need for each other reduces. But we can certainly continue being comfortable in our dopamine-stimulating homes, as Derek Thompson describes:
Our homes are so much more comfortable than they used to be, they are so much more diverting than they used to be with their television sets and their smartphones and their speaker systems and their streaming and their cable…there is so much that is interesting that we can do just staying at home. So I think many people just do. Now I’m not here to say the television is evil. I am trying to say that the invention of television was akin to the discovery of this element of human nature that fundamentally wants to turn ourselves into passive audience members. So we invented this technology that seems to elicit from us this aspect of ourselves that just wants to lie back, open our eyes, and be awash in novel visual stimuli.
Is this the cause of our reduced empathy? Or the result of it? Either way, empathy has not just declined overall, it has become a weakness to be attacked. As Katie Jgln writes in her Substack piece, “Why the War on Empathy Is Really A War on Humanity Itself”:
Nothing made this more painfully clear than the reactions to the viral inauguration sermon delivered by Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, in which she urged the new president to show mercy toward immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community. In response to her heartfelt plea, Budde was labelled a ‘woke leftie,’ a ‘lunatic,’ ‘hysterical,’ and an ‘unhinged nut job.’ Some, including President Trump himself, even demanded that the bishop issue a formal apology.
All of this for the simple act of ‘daring’ to suggest that we need to care about other fellow human beings.
But if you’ve been paying attention in recent years, this should hardly come as a surprise.
From articles by evangelical Christians declaring empathy a ‘sin’ (yes, really) to the global rise of populist extremists who thrive on ‘Us versus Them’ rhetoric and the widespread grievances that the world needs more ruthless, self-serving ‘masculine’ energy, it’s evident that empathy is being increasingly seen as a weakness rather than a strength. As something that hinders progress and renders people — especially men — pathetic, ‘neutered,’ and, above all, ‘woke’ (whatever that even means anymore).
Unfortunately, this Orwellian rebranding of having an awareness of the emotions of others, along with compassion and kindness — which is, in no small part, due to their association with the inherently inferior notion of ‘femininity’ — seems to have taken hold. Empathy has indeed been in decline, and for quite a while now. A 2011 landmark study of American college students found that they were, on average, 40% less empathetic than their peers in the 1980s, with the steepest drop occurring after 2000. More recently, a 2022 survey revealed that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe empathy has declined in recent years. A similar trend has been observed in the UK, where most Britons feel that empathy has been on the wane lately.
If our culture of endemic narcissism drives us toward personal projects, and these projects become so performative that we seek escape through reactive discourse, we lose sight of a fundamental truth: identity only fully develops in concert with others. There is much to praise about our pleasure-filled, technologically-easy society, but one of the costs may be an unconscious reliance on the status quo. This is certainly the case in relationships where, as Robyn Pashby explains in an article about the relationship upheaval that can be caused by weight-loss drugs:
In couples, “there’s such a drive to keep things the same,” says Robyn Pashby, a clinical psychologist who specializes in issues related to weight loss or gain. “When one person changes, it changes the system. It does break that unspoken contract.”
“Supremacy is safety.” I heard this in an interview that Fareed Zakaria had with Peter Beinart centered on his new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. Beinart made this comment in reference to Israeli Jews and their imbalanced relationship with Palestinians, but it struck a chord with me, vibrating on top of the many privileged positions that still exist in our society—whiteness, maleness, able-ness, educational attainment, wealth—and our deep resistance to disrupting entrenched status quos. The fight for supremacy is as old as conflict itself. But what is more disturbing in this particular moment is our tendency to narrow our public-facing identities to single dominant frameworks—whether that's performative masculinity, optimization, political ideology, or performative self of any kind. Each framework promises safety through certainty while constraining our capacity for growth. This narrowing manifests most perversely in attacks on knowledge and hard-won expertise. Perhaps the origin of these fights to be on top is partly this need for agency, this need to be right about something somewhere in the world—as being right has come to trump doing right—and the need to undermine anything that might stand above you in authority or expertise, even knowledge itself. We are conclusions in search of evidence; passive audiences to performative politics, cash-cows, and reality TV; and isolated actors increasingly more interested in one-time acts of destruction than the shared analysis of and coordination towards sustainable structures.
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” It seems we are unable to hold even one idea in the collective mind, let alone two oppositional ones. As we give away our agency and hone our shrunken future visions on the project of self, the cost may well be that competing narratives comfortably free us from complicity in any shared challenge and yet imprison us in the very smallness of our screaming voices that broadcast our personal legacies repeatedly, “I was here!” Indeed you were. Meanwhile, the forest you were once a part of has burned to the ground.
In the forest trying to grow,
Katie