Jia Tolentino Wants You To Be More Chill Online

Every so often, a book makes a splash online. You'll see its cover on the Instagram grids of your most together friends, and reviews being excitedly shared by readers looking for new perspectives as it leaks out of literary and critical circles and into the wider cultural consciousness.

Right now, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by the American essayist and journalist Jia Tolentino is the Book of the Moment. Best known for her thoughtful, funny and sharp elucidations of complex cultural phenomena in the United States (everything from "large adult sons" to anti-abortion propaganda), in Trick Mirror Tolentino presents a collection of essays about all the ways we kid ourselves in our current moment: the internet, religion, athleisure.

It's rare that the book suggests clear cut answers to the issues it highlights, but it feels like an important step forward in cultural discourse because of its recognition of nuance (something frequently missing on the internet), of imperfection and of the truth that we are all shaped by the systems we live in, no matter whether or not we disapprove of them.

I met up with Jia recently to talk about all of these things, and also the fact that the internet would probably be better if we all just chilled out a bit.

VICE: Hi, Jia. You've just written a book called Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion. Let’s talk about that.
Jia Tolentino: It's amazing to me that people are reading it – it's so dense, and thorny. There’s not an obvious point to it.

In the age of the internet we know that black and white doesn’t really work, so the fact there aren’t necessarily any obvious answers given in your book is probably welcome. I wondered if that was your experience as a reader too?
Yeah, in general there are some things I write to fulfil an assignment, but mostly I write to figure things out for myself. I'm much more interested in things that are open ended and non-prescriptive that let the reader figure out what they want to do. But it's hard, because I think it's in the nature of a writer to want to wrap things up. I was trying to figure out how to be clear and not be certain. Because I don’t feel certain about anything ever.

You prove time and again throughout the book that self-delusion is the theme around which our lives are now organised. You talk a lot about your own personal experiences of feeling that way, and I wondered if – because it was so prescient in your own life – you were spotting those patterns everywhere?
Yeah, certainly. I think most of this book isn’t anything new – I was just trying to articulate things that are running under the surface. Also, as a writer, I think one of the things I was aware of ever since I was a kid is that I could be very persuasive, and it’s something that was intrinsic to the thing I loved doing most, which was writing. It also seemed very clear to me that this was a way I was probably actively bullshitting myself as well. It's the line between making sense of something and convincing yourself of a palatable narrative. There are a lot of things in life which supply you with ideas of yourself which are not exactly true, and one of those things is, like, maybe yourself.

I think in the generation that we belong to, as our adulthoods progress that’s kind of the environment that we are living in.
I think that some degree of self-delusion is really necessary. The question of whether or not we should be living as though we’re in constant crisis is an open one. I can’t be thinking about how fast the polar ice caps are melting. I have to delude myself that there's a palatable future. We need to believe that there’s hope. I think a lot of the systems that we live in are so unsustainable that the basic self-delusion of wanting to be hopeful and being alive is, in itself, a bit of a deception – and we need it.

One of the things I particularly admire about Trick Mirror is the way that you constantly copped to the fact that you too are embroiled in our collective self-delusion. It was refreshing, because particularly online, people like to position themselves as outside the things they’re criticising. But actually we need our writers to say, "Yeah, we're living in these conditions, but we also can critique them." Is it uncomfortable to acknowledge these truths yourself?
Not at all. I mean, I think what's uncomfortable is understanding what to do – how best to live. I think the internet can encourage people to find self-exculpatory narratives. I think I was trying to write myself into an understanding that complicity is a precondition, being implicated is a precondition. I think we work around this. For example, I agree that my desires and actions have been shaped by a male power – that's just fundamental to how I live, and it's OK. It’s not right, but it’s OK. I want that to mean something different – to be something that actually we can wear lightly. It just takes a bit of reckoning with. It’s no skin off my back to admit that I'm implicated.

Also, our individual lives – they’re really important to us, but it’s OK to say that we’re shaped and corroded by our surroundings. I think the internet is really conducive to an underlying desire to reach for blamelessness.

To speak about the internet in more basic terms, do you think there’s a chance that we can still wield it for good?
I still like the internet. Even though it is systematically a nightmare, I think it's endlessly redeemable. Or, not redeemable, but there are little flares of people just trying to be good on there. I don’t think that an economy built around attention can be ethical, but at the same time it's the only thing that I make my living on. I think the internet will require a real restructuring – it could get a lot better if the US had GDPR regulations, or if there was a requirement that the YouTube algorithm would work differently, all these things.

The internet is one of the few places where I think individual effort matters. One of my greatest dreams is that people would try to be chill on the internet.

If you could be the president.
It's my number one law! Try to be chill. A lot of the book is about identity performance, that we try to do in real life, but I don’t really think it’s harmful in real life. I think it’s inevitable and good. I think it’s good that we try to be nice for each other, good to each other. We need that. But on the internet people try to be as hyper-lovable and therefore as super annoying as possible. Good can still come of the internet if people just tried to be a little cooler – actually cooler. Try not to make the bad tweet. If you don’t want to see people talk about it, don’t talk about it. People could be a lot cooler on the internet.

Do you think the problem with the internet is ourselves? Would it be better if we took all the "I"s off the internet?
I think it incentivises behaviours and ways of being that aren’t natural, and that we don’t actually want. There are a ton of people in the States that just make 600-tweet threads about Trump and they get book deals about it. The internet does monetise really annoying ways of being. I think it’s also no coincidence that there are just fewer and fewer paths to financial stability, and the internet is providing this personal brand safety at the same time that structure and safety nets are being swept away from people. So I think as long as the internet is so intertwined with a lot of people’s professional lives, it’s inevitable that people take the bait.

I'm fascinated by the individualism that is encouraged by things like the internet and reality television, and by having a personal brand. In the UK especially – and certainly in the US too – that individualism is also encouraged by our politics. We’re not encouraged to want to support one another. I know you say you’re interested in keeping things open-ended and allowing the reader to decide where they want to go next, but one of the things you signpost in Trick Mirror, in a number of the conclusions you come to, is about how we can sort of lean on each other.
Yeah, totally. I’m so glad that it came off that way, because that’s what I was going for. In the Jenny Odell book How to Do Nothing she writes about this really movingly – this idea that so many structures in our world are trying to deny interdependence. But it’s literally the only way we will ever survive. It’s going to be through a full recognition of interdependence at a global scale. Even with climate change we can't just silo country by country. "Oh, you live in a country where drought has ravaged everything? Well, sorry!"

Two of your essays – "Pure Heroine", about women in fiction, and "Always Be Optimizing", where you talk about the expectations put upon women – are about women, and both suggest interdependence as a "way out". I think there's something about the generosity of women that is really important and intrinsic to how we'll move forward. I suppose women’s way of relating with each other has been a little bit stifled by the internet, because of the way we’re meant to present ourselves.
I think that’s why the super monetised feminism drives me nuts. Women have modelled examples of collective support and organising for centuries; you can look at 12th century communities of women who were just taking care of each other in a supportive community that wasn’t run on these structures.

Women have had informal networks of support without the government for so long. Even Toni Morrison was part of a writing group where they would literally just provide childcare for each other. There is a strain of feminism that says, "Now that we are coming upon the freedoms that have been available to men for forever, we should take advantage of them to be as individually successful as we possibly can." No. This is our chance to resist that. The question of, "At what point do you stop and start redistributing your own resources?" is a different one for everyone. What’s incumbent upon us is to take this power and stop the movement of feminism towards a success-based ecosystem prioritising top down, to prioritising bottom up.

It's been a real mind-fuck talking about this book in the UK – all I think about is how we can have the term "SheEO" in the States and not have federally mandated childcare? It just seems like there’s so much hypocrisy in the kind of feminism that’s been so ascendant in the States especially. We don’t even have healthcare or family leave, and it’s wild to me. What we could have is a world where comfort doesn’t come at the expense of so many people.

Fundamentally, these are essays about late capitalism – which is referenced as a set of conditions and not just "how things are" – and its effect on humans.
There’s so much wealth. There’s a scarcity mindset which leads to hyper-individualism. But there’s so much fucking wealth. If we just taxed the fuck out of the richest people in the States, all of this would be fine. I think no one should be a billionaire. If the choice is between people being able to live and people having over a billion dollars, we have to take people being able to live.

Thanks, Jia.

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion is available now.

@hiyalauren