Category Archives: Culture

Getting our Religion: When relationships are like cults, and other mysteries

Last relationship article for Industry, just found as I dust off this blog. The original had more explicit details about said religion, but had to pull back. Ah, culture reporting, how I’ll miss you?

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getting our religionI saw a play recently, a solo performance about one woman’s time in a certain popular and celebrity-focused religion—one that has been much in the news over the past year. The performance was manic, self-effacing, and very funny. At one point she mentioned, almost in passing, that she’d been drawn to the church after a series of personal setbacks, including the breakup of a relationship. Well, of course. The salient detail leapt out of the surrounding scene and established itself as a vaguely formed question: Why do people get religion just when they are the most disappointed by life?

Was it simply a consolation for loss, or does the upset applecart of expectations serve some useful purpose—do setbacks motivate us to something greater than ourselves and our piddling desires? Perhaps in the dashed hopes of material success (which either falls flat or doesn’t do what you thought it would) spiritual rewards are all that are left.

relationships not so different

For some relentless (or so they think) rationalists, religions and cults are as good as synonyms. Similarly, good relationships and dramatic trainwrecks are of the same species.

Religion’s significance in people’s lives has decreased in modern life, so maybe now weird cults and idolized relationships are replacing them.

The former often have brutal indoctrination techniques using techniques of sensory deprivation, for example, to create malleable subjects. A charismatic guru type puffs up and then flattens young recruits’ self-importance, often tangling romantically with devotees.

relationships like cults

There’s…

  • Indoctrination from early ages
  • Possibilities for isolation, you-and-me-against-the-world thinking
  • Potentially controlling dynamics, both aggressive and under the surface
  • Resistance to learning how relationships work to learn how to “do” them better, and instead a reliance on emotion, instinct and magical thinking
  • Unrealistic expectations
  • A certain smug condescension toward outsiders

The proof is not just a guess. Looking through the average ladymag, incredibly heavy marketing techniques surround love, religion, inner peace, etc. Ecology: Save the World! Business: Get Rich Today! Cosmo: Find your Soulmate!

Lastly, similar to cults, relationships are easy to get into, and hard to get out of. When we do leave a dominating relationship, we find we have all this extra free time and energy (and sometimes money). Our focus, now free from obsession, can be self-directed, motivated towards something personally meaningful.

cults natural/temporary

We both crave and fear this kind of total devotion in love and life that relationship brings. We want the greater meaning but dread having to own up to the process. Likewise, the difference between the awe we feel for the state of love and for god is so slim at times as to make their objects indistinguishable. In early country songs, religious songs were always about love and love songs were usually about murder.

As for any expectation of rescue, we can’t help a little pining for Love or God, periodically.

Most of the rewards of life are to be had on more solid ground, in the details, where we live. Everyday needs and challenges are met, and we get closer to each other like a fabric worked over time.

But one day again, it’s not enough; we want something of greater significance. Challenge and conflict over comfort and stability. Lofty goals are hard not to want, but age tempers the impulse, brings them down to earth. Maybe old-fashioned religion (the sudden call to God when, “I never do this!”)  and the tendency to fall crazy in love is the balloon we try to float off on, to keep things moving.

The disillusionment of material success (gained or lost) provokes bouts of spiritual or emotional growth, however crazy their tactics may seem.

Originally posted in Industry magazine’s September 2016 issue.

 

Do We Touch Enough?

Do We Touch Enough? | Industry New Jersey | September/October 2015 | On the Science and Visceral Thrills of Making Contact

 

From the article, excerptified:

I was reading somewhere that societies in which people touch each other socially are happier than those in which social touching is more shunned. It is an idea that makes intuitive sense, because of my knowledge of the inherent niceness of touching.

University of California at Berkeley researcher Dacher Keltner writes about pioneering 60s study by Sidney Jourard. “[He] studied the conversations of friends in different parts of the world as they sat in a café together. He observed these conversations for the same amount of time in each of the different countries. What did he find? In England, the two friends touched each other zero times. In the United States, in bursts of enthusiasm, we touched each other twice.” Meanwhile, in France, people touched each other 110 times, and in Puerto Rico, friends touched 180 times.

Touching communicates things often more quickly than other means. Dr. Keltner (and Dr. Matthew Hertenstein) conducted a study in which people touching through barriers, trying to convey in one second an emotion. The responder then had to guess at what the person touching was trying to convey: among them anger, fear, happiness, sadness, embarrassment, love, and gratitude. People touched through squeezes, pokes, taps, tickles and strokes. The easiest feeling to convey to someone by touch alone was compassion.

Studies have also found that athletic teams do better when they are socially bonded through touching, like high fives and chest bumps, and that babies grow more slowly when isolated from touch in incubators.

We have a taboo against social touching, although it could be called a pillar of social development.

Since I’ve learned about this I’ve noticed the phenomenon of touching more, and automatically became more touchy with people.

Read on…

Truth and Consequences

Truth and Consequences header

In the March/April 2014 issue of Industry I look at some of the effects that social media has on our social lives. Truth and Consequences: How to find a balance between honing a productive social media identity, and attention-hungry cyber lurking

Social media does alter our experience of ourselves as social beings, especially when it replaces part or all of our social life. Sometimes I use it mostly logistically, i.e. to see what’s going on with friends in town. But occasionally it gets more distant, going into browsing, as when I check out the page of someone I just met, wondering if they’re doing the same. I feel sudden self-conscious doing this. Usually people aren’t up on the latest privacy snafu of facebook’s, and so even if you’re not friends you can just watch people as they live. Right there online. Or at least, get a flavor of their life, leaving room for doubt, obviously.

Self-consciousness is something I used to think I outgrew in my 20s, but its reemergence in the context of my online persona is fitting, as I’m literally allowing people to spectate at me, to know about, instead of know. Can we help creating a strange publicized hybrids of ourselves? One day maybe we’ll all know what celebrities must feel like, even down to having your (not to mention other people’s) livelihood depend solely on your online popularity.

From the article:

I’ve never really thought of myself as a private person. Ask me a question, the more personal the better. I’ve always erred on the side of too much information. Over the years, though, I’ve learned that many times people prefer to be lied to sweetly, to be let down gently than told the ugly truth. I’m more discerning now about what I share, not only to preserve my privacy but also, the mystery. This goes against the tide of social media and on-line dating–realms in which we are compelled to give more and more information and about ourselves to a more general audience.

Read more here: Truth and Consequences

 

the fucking mystery, right?

After writing this I realized that now, when I share something with someone in person, or even on the phone in a one-on-one conversation, it feels very intimate. It’s only in contrast to social media, where everything feels flatter and less risky in a real way. But that’s kind of cool as an unexpected outcome.

The Long Mile: How did a car come to mean so much?

Screen Shot 2014-04-07 at 10.47.28 AMFor the Jan/Feb 2014 issue of Industry, I contrast two moments in my life: buying my first car and, years later, my potential second.  The Long Mile: What our shifting desires can tell us about where we are on our own journey.

 

 

Recently, I drove a big, smooth, sleek, insulated ride–a Ford crossover called the Edge. My reliable little Corolla was in the shop. Whenever anything happened to it (this time a hit-and-run while it was parked) I thought back to the good old days when I had just three things total to worry about…days when I opened my mail monthly.

…I had to admit that despite its size, its gas mileage, its flashiness, I liked living in the Edge. It was comfortably a level up–sleek, self-announcing, not remotely soccer mommy. It seemed made for me, and it made me want to fill in its promise, whether with children or camping gear and a dog.

Read more here: The Long Mile

How about you? Have you had an experience with a purchase that gained an outsize significance in your life?

Motion & Heart

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I wrote about dancing—why I stopped, why I started again, how it was different—in my latest column for Industry.

This is dedicated to an ex with whom I rediscovered dancing. To my aunt who’s from the 80s. And to Late Bar, where I’ve had lots of fun escapades.

I’m still serious. I have to check in with myself sometimes. Maybe I’m feeling more “library” than “club” tonight. Did I just let my friends drag me out because I don’t want to be that silly loser alone on a Saturday night?

Or am I feeling circumspect? Maybe someone here will engage in a good, fleshy philosophical debate with me. About parties, pickups, or hookups, or hookahs, or high-tops, or highballs.

I still notice how others react to me. Maybe it’s a foible of being a girl, or maybe it’s just human. I’ve never been a particularly fine dancer, but it turns out that it doesn’t matter. It only matters that you mean it. The attitude is already half a put-on, winking, oversold to sell–to be appreciated but not awed.

Read the rest here.

Inside Game of Thrones

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Yes I know everyone’s obsessed with Breaking Bad right now, what can I say? Print waits for no show. In my latest article for Industry, I look at the themes of Game of Thrones, which offers a case study of personal politics and the rules of cause and effect, if we are paying attention. HBO shows do not kowtow to our hero myths, and one could argue that they’ve influenced mainstream entertainment away from the old watered down, picture-postcard universe of blockbuster fantasy (we won’t talk about Sex and the City right now). That’s why we love them (Sopranos, Enlightened, GoT) and why they are better than most TV, even most really good TV.  Plus, GoT has a lot of awesome female characters (looking at you, Breaking Bad, but I love you anyway!).

It is always interesting to think of why a certain trend happens at a certain time. And as little as I want to overstretch some tenuous pop cultural connection, it does seem strange that we are lapping up HBO’s Game of Thrones series’ political intrigue, lax morality, and wanton disregard for others’ personal freedom with an almost sociopathic appetite.

Read more here.

Ryuichi Sakamoto at the Vic

I went to see Ryuichi in Chicago recently and wrote a review for Radio Free Chicago. His unobtrusive yet challenging melodic experiments sat alongside the more accessible, climactic soundtrack themes he has composed over the years. The highlights: zen-like glacial melt; the chunky chords and ballast of The Last Emperor; gentle loops.