Gabi Lardies reflects on a week of bleak reading.
There’s a pattern in this week’s most popular stories on The Spinoff. We’ve got Trump supporters in New Zealand, a harrowing new drama in Adolescence, the dark workings of Facebook and a billionaire’s attempted takeover of one of our biggest media organisations. The stories are a little more fascinating than the onslaught of bad, terrible, no good headlines plastered on international and local media, but they are still bleak. Each, in their own way, is about the dissemination of certain information, certain worldviews, who has power over them, and their eventual material effects. There’s something we’re trying to understand or process here, about what is happening to young men online. It’s important! But it does not fill up my fun bar.
Sometimes, I think about myself as if I were a Sim. For Sims, the six bar charts you want to keep green are bladder, hunger, energy, fun, social, and hygiene. If you don’t send your Sim to the toilet, the consequence is obvious, but there are also problems when other bars run low. When the fun bar drops, it affects others. A no-fun Sim will see their hygiene and hunger bars drop too, leading them into negative moodlets. Having a Sim in this state is no good.
I’ve found that fun tends to be the last bar I turn my attention to. There are so many other things that seem more important. Work, being healthy, keeping presentable via endless tasks like washing and brushing my teeth, endless cycles of bills, admin and responsibilities. Taking the trash out, vacuuming the lounge, seeing family. These feel like the essential structures that keep my life together. Fun feels like a decoration, a cherry on top that I hardly ever get to because there are so many things I should do that come before the things I want to do. This is no good. This makes life an endless drudgery.
The same is true, I think, of reading. We can feel obliged to read things we think are important: serious, smart, consequential etc, etc. There are so many. Wars, crime, poverty, inequities of power, the ever-present omnicrisis. Naturally, reading only these topics would make reading an endless drudgery, even if it was all penned by poets. And if putting all this information in your brain spirals you into a dark pit? Hello, I’m down here already. It is a perfectly good reaction to be moved by the suffering of others, which is why we should be careful about how much of it we take in. No, but really, we have a counsellor on record saying that tuning out of bad news doesn’t make you a bad person.
Before you close your browser, abandon all ties to society, find a plot of fertile land and start a commune, let me remind you there are plenty of fun things to read, especially on The Spinoff. Here is my invitation to sign up to The Weekend newsletter and browse our recommended reads, a feature we reserve for newsletter subscribers; spot your cherry, and eat it first.
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This week on Behind the Story
The war on woke continues as people march for gender-affirming care
On Sunday March 23, hundreds marched to parliament in support of gender-affirming care for youth. Meanwhile, Winston Peters declared a “war on woke” in his state of the nation address. Lyric Waiwiri-Smith wrapped the two together in a story we published earlier this week, calling the dichotomy “two visions of New Zealand”. She joins Gabi Lardies to talk about all the attention on trans healthcare and the so-called “woke mind virus”.
The stories Spinoff readers spent the most time with this week
Comments of the week
- On Why a proposal to change the laws governing protest should worry us all “I absolutely agree. I was involved in protest movements (sometimes as an organiser) all the way from Vietnam and anti-apartheid to the decriminalisation of homosexuality and everything in between.
Any achievements were hard fought, and I regularly encountered Police at the highest level who were unhelpful at best and openly hostile to the exercise of civil liberties at worst. What this initiative tells me is that there are still plenty of people in our society who think demonstrating and protesting are undesirable activities which need to be curbed as a matter of principle. Good on you Trev for drawing it to our attention.” - On Windbag: Why is it so hard to pedestrianise upper Cuba Street? “Agree with the sentiment of this blog. It is funny, however, that the author didn’t mention that the council HAS been pedestrianising upper Cuba. Every Sunday upper Cuba has been closed off from cars, with simple outdoor seating placed on the street, exactly as the author describes.”
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