Critical Condition

So many things are smooth now, and I am very bored. Desperate times call for desperate measures, but our desperation seems to have exhausted our capacity for big thinking. Whatever anyone wants to do is fine, from writing breakup notes with AI to injecting gray-market peptides, and you should let people enjoy things. “Let them” is our new mantra for moral slouchiness. Polite permissiveness creates value for corporate shareholders and provides relief from the arduous task of thinking for yourself; hence, the smoothing out of the American body, face, and mind. 

My conversations are smoothing out. I’m having fewer debates about AI. Is it just my IF YOU TALK TO ME ABOUT AI I WILL KILL MYSELF T-shirt? I worry that it’s because people have so thoroughly integrated AI into their lives that they don’t think about it anymore. The other day, I bitched about how AI makes every sentence eerily boring, and an acquaintance admitted to me, sheepishly, that they use it to write emails. Writing skills, which are being slowly strangled by subservient chatbots, enable us to recognize the banalities that get shoved down our throats. For example, “Like it or not, everyone is going to use AI eventually!” Every bad thing is not inevitable, even if it feels that way lately.

The mind reels to witness tech oligarchs replacing our thinking with aggregation, at the same time as they gut our intellectual infrastructure. The governor of Oklahoma just eliminated tenure at the state’s public colleges, meaning that professors who foster critical thinking skills and don’t toe the right-wing line will be axed. As I write this, Jeff Bezos’ personal newspaper, the Washington Post, has laid off a third of its workforce, including the books section. The Associated Press ended its weekly book reviews last September, and eventually, the only place to read a book review will be on the Amazon-owned Goodreads, where a reader will rate a novel 2.5 stars because they didn’t relate to the characters.

What will the new WaPo cover? Wellness. In a note to staff, Executive Editor Matt Murray said that the paper would focus on “journalism that empowers people to take action, from advice to wellness.” I can only imagine this means clickables like “How to Engage Your Core While Licking Boots.” Wellness means product tie-ins, which I guess is the only way journalism stays afloat — if you can click out of it to buy something.

It’s a shame that the Washington Post is pivoting to wellness content because I can already find that everywhere else. Even if I threw my phone on the subway tracks, upon boarding the train I’d still be greeted by an ad with Serena Williams, perhaps the greatest athlete of all time, suggesting that I, too, could get a body like hers by injecting myself with GLP-1s. Admittedly, I have been averse to the ways that people delude themselves into thinking health is completely in their control since the first time someone suggested green juicing after I was diagnosed with cancer. I long for the local charm of Dr. Zizmor’s dorky dermatology ads — now the streets are glutted with millennial-coded medispas, and I cannot avoid conversations about how good facelifts are getting. Would you get one? Would you?? Botox is kid shit at this point — we’re going full Chien Andalou! 

Fascism is both a death cult and a wellness cult, and most of us engage in doomed efforts to buy ourselves some happiness under its regime — supplements, many-step skin routines, a little work here and there. The vibe is “no ethical consumption under capitalism, babe, so let’s buy ourselves treats until we’re dead.” It’s like everyone got so bored with arguing over whether plastic surgery was feminist that we settled for an anodyne cop-out: Anyone can do whatever they want because to judge another woman for her choices is not feminist. Even the clicky thinky pieces in The Cut about whether pilates is patriarchy or whether “forever-35 face” is for you all end with an air of mild defeat, as if there can be no ethical conclusions under capitalism either, only nods to both sides and affiliate links. 

I worry we are all at risk of developing face-orthorexia-by-proxy, though I’m heartened by how many people shared father_karine’s anti-cosmetic surgery Substack essay recently. Her point is that even though facelifts are now sold to us by individual influencers celebrating their own right to choose a blepharoplasty, the billion-dollar beauty industry is still in charge, still the correct bête noir for feminists, and sells homogeny, homogeny, as far as the post-bleph eye can see! Choice feminism used to actually proffer false choices (have a career or a kid, be a brunette or a blonde), but now it’s not a question of whether or not to do something to your face; it’s what you will eventually choose to do to your face. As with AI, the people who are selling it to us want us to believe their product is inevitable.

Beauty matters to me, as does judgment (I am a Libra), and what’s being sold to me as beauty, in my judgment, isn’t. As famous Libra André Leon Talley lamented, “It’s been bleak street over here in America…It’s a famine of beauty, honey. My eyes are starving for beauty!” I don’t think it’s more virtuous to leave your face alone (unless it’s to leave off looksmaxxing your way to Aryan perfection). I just miss cragginess, emotion crinkling around the eyes! And I miss loud, bad taste sneering in the face of supposed “natural beauty,” like Divine in her polyester hauteur! Those Vanity Fair pictures of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s lip punctures were ugly, not because lip filler is aesthetically or morally ugly, or even because Leavitt’s soul is ugly. Those little holes mark where the woman has capitulated to a beauty standard that prizes exaggerated whiteness, ostentatious wealth, and regressive gender norms. (Which is why it is not a gotcha to call Mar-a-Lago face procedures gender-affirming surgery or drag for the right.)  

If beauty matters to you, whether the beauty of a face or a sentence, then you have your own carefully honed criteria for what makes something pleasing to the eye, what makes you recoil, and what makes you shrug in indifference. Judgment requires spontaneity of imagination and a fucking moral compass. If we can’t form complex, critical thoughts about books, beauty, or AI, we are regressing toward some biblical absolutism, wherein the only one who may judge is God, or Jeff Bezos. But I don’t believe in that. I recognize no higher power, whether it’s Christ or the benefits of taking magnesium before bed. We are indeed in desperate times, and everywhere, I see people wanting to know what to do, how to live. People still do want to know how to articulate themselves, want to hear a good argument. Thinking a thought for yourself instead of aggregating what’s already been said involves synthesis — taking disparate ideas and producing something new from the friction of their encounter. It doesn’t go down smooth. Think of it as a daily supplement that works.

Natalie Adler is an editor at Lux. Her debut novel, Waiting on a Friend, is out in May.