Thoughts I'm Bringing (2025)
some thoughts to round out the year
“In my 81 years of life, there’s never been a Christmas where peace on earth felt so distant,” says the trembling Quaker woman, poised for premonition at the microphone.
A grim feeling that palpatates through the meeting hall. It’s a solid fifteen minutes before the next congregant is compelled to speak, “Am I present to the sacred in the other?” Phrased as a question, the statement feels more useful, less nihilistic, though it could have easily been stated: we’ve gotten too far away from others. We’ve lost touch with the sacred: that ego-dissolving sensation that can only be found in confrontation.
The laws of physics prescribe that friction is needed to move us forward. Propulsion brings promise, but I can’t help but feel like I’m on the fastest train to nowhere. The future has never felt more distant.
And yet. So much has happened in one year. I graduated. I started to write more seriously. I began charting the waters of real life. I find myself drawn to spirituality (a rational mystic is the way I’m currently describing myself). But all of this change happens at a moment that feels crushingly hopeless. Often, I don’t feel myself going anywhere except inward. I imagine it’s the same for many with similar beliefs.
But these Quaker meetings, despite moments of solemnity, have been instrumental in taming my pessimism. In that designated hour of communal silence, I’ve felt the (nondenominational) spirit move through me, and experienced minutes of overwhelming clarity. Though everyone reflects silently, everybody in the room is being together, living the same present. There’s a transparency that arises, where you wonder if your individual thoughts are being read and felt by everyone else there. You upend and suspend yourself into a mass that is both of you and beyond you.
Sunday meetings have also helped retrain my attention, and as the year closes, it has served as a designated time to reflect on all the thoughts I’ve formed in the past year without the usual noise of my mind. So, for this installment of the Things I’m Bringing, I decided, instead of sharing things, I’d write about the thoughts that drew me to those things in the first place.
I can say decisively that I became an entirely different Gemma after reading Byung-Chul Han at the start of 2024. His contemporary philosophical arguments re-defined my relationship with the world, imbuing everyday phenomena with new relevancy and meaning. His philosophy is one of several reasons for the name behind my monthly series.
Han speaks on the genesis of the non-thing: a digital ephemera with no narrative binds. What many have taken to calling “digital slop.” Non-things have no sentimental value, no historicity, and will be lost during sleep as your mind works to filter out all junk useless to your daily functioning. Things, on the other hand, are points of stability that give life narrative continuity. The things I bring, therefore, are pieces of my monthly existence that I hold with me and apply to future things I engage with.
It’s not always easy distinguishing things from non-things. The discernment requires effortful observation. To know what you love, what matters, you need to fine-tune your attention. One could make the case (and the case has been made by many) that attention is synonymous with love and that attending is a radical act of care. When we love someone, it is because we love the ways they direct their attention.
I’ve attended to a lot this year. During my senior semesters in college, the thesis writing process taught me a tremendous amount about where my attention is compelled to settle. In 2024, I attended to the maladies (both personal and collective) of late capitalism (or, see, Technofeudalism). Though overwhelmingly cynical, a lesson has boiled over from this cauldron of despair: we can practice resistance through friction and mediation (not to be confused with meditation, though the proximity in spelling does make me think that meditation is simply a time you mediate with your plural and clashing self-conceptions).
What do friction and mediation entail? The way I see it (by way of Kornbluh and many others) is that we’ve gotten far too comfortable (at least in the global north) with the way things circulate. We no longer have to scrounge around for movies, music, or opinions; they are fed to us. Our ability to experience the friction of the encounter, the radical confrontation with otherness, is slowly being stripped away. We are tracked, reduced to figures, and sold back to ourselves. As predictable consumer units, we risk losing our freedom (of course, the risk is not equally distributed; it affects those already marginalized to a greater extent).
How can we collectively fight back?
However idealistic, I think the answer lies in taking the less easy route when given the option. When eleven am on Sunday rolls around, I could, technically, spend an hour “meditating” from the comfort of my home, but I set my alarm, get on the train, and go to the meeting house. The greater the effort, the greater the reward.
Hear what others have on their mind. Stop functioning as a self-sufficient unit. Pick up a book off the street. Look at some artwork you don’t like. Figure out what about it is not for you, what is. Choose your next book, movie, and pastime accordingly.
The name of the game is making connections that feel organic. Non-manufactured. Unpredictable connections that can’t be exploited or sold to you. Do your research, and dig your own rabbit holes. Like that movie? Watch the rest of the director’s work, the DP’s work, and the screenwriter’s work. Like that artist? Sign up for that gallery’s newsletter and go to their exhibits. Like that writer? Read other things published by that imprint. Watch interviews, and find the inspirations for your inspirations.
I’ve only just begun this practice: coaxing out the resonant frequencies that remain true and shining to me. It has required active militancy against corporate overlords trying to rob me of my attention.
If attention is love, I can’t help but feel that’s why the present world is acutely hateful. The deluge of misfortune funneled to us every day is overwhelming. I know I am more than guilty of wearing the cloak of desensitization. This distraction is purposeful, so my call to attention extends, of course, to national and global atrocities being perpetrated today and planned for tomorrow. Reading exclusively the headlines is not enough. Reading alone is not enough. More than ever, collective action is required. It will be hard. I’m already fatigued by all the fascist figures and the Trumpian terror. But they are counting on our resignation and our lack of attention. Lost sight for the few is lost life for the many.
The last thought I carry with me is a rather soppy one, so if earnestness is revolting to you, click out now. General Specialist started almost a year ago as a means of self-accountability, a format for expression, and a vehicle to etch my thoughts into a contained little divet of the internet. The fact that one hundred people are paying attention to my digital nook is beyond astounding to me.
Thank you endlessly for being here.
P.S.
I am writing this from a room (attic) of my own. Hope this work-in-progress space will make my writing more frequent and profound.
Be merry or be however the hell you feel like being. See you soon.
xx G
