There are things you can't resolve
Lent and black ash
Every Lent, I give up social media. What this looks like in practice is:
Accidentally going on Instagram three times a day (I close it immediately, though not before I see how many in-app messages I have waiting for me on Easter).
Deciding that, actually, Substack Notes doesn’t count as social media because it’s part of my writing practice
Getting a little too into the NYT Games app
Every year, it does not reduce my overall screen time. It does not make me happier. It does not improve my focus. Why do I do it? The fuzziest of reasons. Such is tradition.
The war in Iran has made it particularly hard to avoid social media. I could call this impulse “wanting to be informed,” but you and I know what it really is: I want other people to make me mad, and then I want to write something to make other people mad. This is how we do politics.
And there’s another thing. I have a great need to be on the record, for posterity, even though I know it’s futile. This war is disgusting; it has already resulted in unacceptable, monstrous horrors, and for what? I could point out that the new leader of Iran is likely more hardline than his father and more likely to pursue a nuclear bomb—but was that the point of this war, really? Does Trump—sounding so old these days, have you noticed—even care about that?
Let me quote Sam Kriss, linked above:
Four years after the last American troops left Afghanistan under Taliban guard, war critic JD Vance was on the TV, saying that while he understood why people were put off by the last round of wars in the Middle East, ‘the difference is that back then we had dumb presidents, and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives.’ The dumb presidents, the ones who blundered around getting America into quagmires, still always held back from directly attacking Iran. The smart president is Donald Trump.
So yes, I want it to be on the record that I was disgusted. I want to repost a million convincing infographics (I assume people are doing that right now, and I am missing out on whatever tasteless but well-meaning message is making its way from one actor’s Instagram stories to the next). But everything feels inadequate. My Lenten resolution has, at least, saved me from feeling insufficient and impotent, over and over and over again.
I learned recently that the word Lent is actually from the same root as “lengthen”—the word refers not to any specific doctrine, but to the dawning of spring, to the days getting longer. Here in New York City, it is warm and sunny. In Tehran, the sky is black with oil. And I am so tired of the sentimentality of the American, whose country is bombing another country, saying, “Yes, terrible things are happening, but look, the sky is blue again, the birds are making nests, the crocuses are peeking out, and life is beautiful despite all the horrors.”
Sometimes it is good to feel ashamed.