If you want to understand what it’s like to live your life on the internet right now, there are few writers better equipped to help you than Jia Tolentino.
Tolentino came up on the women’s news sites the Hairpin and Jezebel and is now a staff writer for the New Yorker, where she takes a scalpel to concepts beloved of the Extremely Online, such as begging for celebrities to run you over with a truck and joking about Wife Guys. Her first book, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, expands on that theme. It’s a collection of essays on trying to survive the 21st century that are so incisive and elegantly constructed that as I read, I found myself wanting to underline particularly beautiful sentences again and again, until every page was black with ink.
“I have always accommodated everything I wish I were opposed to,” Tolentino writes toward the end of Trick Mirror. It’s this ambivalence that is at the center of the book: We live in a society that makes it easy and pleasurable to roll along with systems we know to be corrupt — like capitalism and sexism and racism — while also difficult and unpleasant to opt out of them, and almost impossible to oppose them in any meaningful way. So then, what can we do? How do we survive?
That question animates “The I in Internet,” which examines the way the internet teaches us to treat forming and expressing an opinion as a meaningful action while simultaneously stealing the time we might use to actually enact change. At the same time, it’s about how Tolentino herself, who built her career writing opinion-based essays on the internet, has benefited from the opinion-based economy that the internet created.
The same question also pushes through “Always Be Optimizing,” which delves into the aesthetics of the modern woman’s “ideal life”: sweating it out at Pure Barre on your lunch break, then refueling at Sweetgreen with a salad designed to be eaten in 10 minutes flat, wearing athleisure the whole time, all the better to discipline oneself to efficiently perform office work while also efficiently adhering to contemporary beauty standards. All of these are routines Tolentino describes as degrading and dehumanizing, but routines with which she is intimately familiar.
“It’s very easy, under conditions of artificial but continually escalating obligation,” Tolentino writes in “Always Be Optimizing, “to find yourself organizing your life around practices you find ridiculous and possibly indefensible. Women have known this intimately for a long time.”
This inescapable trap, she concludes in “The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams,” is the con at the center of millennial life, in which “success is a lottery — just as survival today can look like a lottery too.” Maybe you personally opt out of participating in all these corrupt systems: You choose not to use Amazon because you don’t agree with its labor practices, and you opt out of ride-hailing apps for the same reason. But you will continue to exist in a society that will ask you to scam to survive, that has no social safety net that can help you live your life in a way that Tolentino would consider ethically pure. And how do you survive within that world without scamming, without buying your products from a company that mistreats its workers so that you can get what you need quickly and cheaply, or without working for a company that mistreats its consumers so you can afford not to buy from those other bad companies?
“The choice of this era,” Tolentino concludes, “is to be destroyed or to morally compromise ourselves in order to be functional — to be wrecked, or to be functional for reasons that contribute to the wreck.”
Amid the deep moral outrage that pulsates throughout Trick Mirror, there are moments of transcendence. In “Reality Me,” Tolentino describes swimming through a bioluminescent bay as a teenager, during a rare off-camera moment that came while she was shooting a forgotten reality show in Puerto Rico: “There were no cameras, and they couldn’t have captured it, anyway,” Tolentino writes. “I told myself, Don’t forget, don’t forget.”
And in the collection’s most lyrical essay, “Ecstasy,” she links her childhood in a megachurch she calls the Repentagon to the Houston hip-hop she grew up on and her use of drugs like ecstasy, all of which offered, at various moments of her life, the possibility of transcending the moral wasteland of the rest of the world. Both religion and drugs, she writes, “provide a path toward transcendence — a way of accessing an extrahuman world of rapture and pardon that, in both cases, is as real as it feels.” It’s within that state of ecstasy that we can be our most empathetic — and, Tolentino fears, our most heedless and blank, too.
What makes ecstasy (the state) valuable here is that it offers a way of surviving in a world that asks us to do impossible things. It’s because it’s impossible to survive without compromise in the world of the con that we need ecstasy, which “provide[s] an unbreakable link,” Tolentino writes, “between virtue and vice.”
But ecstatic moments in Trick Mirror remain few and far between. Most of what defines this collection is a feeling of profound horror at a terrible realization: Tolentino is smart enough to see the problems with what’s happening in the world, the way those problems warp our minds and souls; she can diagnose them for us. But she doesn’t have any prescriptions or solutions. You can’t think your way out of capitalism.
So, Trick Mirror demands despairingly, then what? Once you realize that the world you live in is terrible and corrosive and inescapable, how do you even survive?
Tolentino has no answers to offer. Instead, she gives us a catalog. She names the traps and the scams inherent to being alive in America at this moment in time, and she labels them so precisely that every time she does it, I felt a little thrill of recognition: “Yes,” I would think, underlining emphatically, “this is it, this is what it is, this is exactly the problem that I have felt myself so many times and have never been able to put into words.”
What Trick Mirror has to offer doesn’t feel like a solution. But it does feel like a map. And maybe that’s enough for now.