When in doubt, compartmentalize
The rumors are true: the one good thing about being at rock bottom is that you can only go up from here. Yes I’m not doing that great. But I’m also here, on my desk, blank Substack page open, writing. So, win-win? At this point, my appearance on Substack may very well be the new recession indicator — if not economic then at least emotional recession.
Jokes aside, it really is weird that the decline of my general wellbeing(?) seems to have instilled in me a certain kind of creative hunger. In lieu of substance abuse or shaving off my hair, rock bottom has me publishing a new Substack newsletter.
Last Friday, I published the first post in a newsletter I call Average Consumer. I’ve written many versions of its description over the past three weeks, trying to feel at home in this new intention, to little success.
I guess I’ve been increasingly drawn to the idea of paying closer attention to the physical places and experiences that I navigate daily. A pretty basic desire, really, you’d think it’s second nature. Well, it isn’t. Not with the pull of aspirational realities on my screen feeding me the constant illusion that my life is bigger than this one I’m living. (It is a big life, but no amount of Day In My Lifes is going to put my reality on pause). In some ways, that has always been implied in my writing here on Slouching. Writing about the desire to own a car or a house are nothing but attempts at capturing how it feels to be in this city. But in many ways, I’ve also always shied away from outright saying that I write about Jakarta, or admit that was even my intention. Ickk, just typing that makes me nauseous.
Saying that I write about Jakarta feels like a huge undertaking. It comes with the burden of being correct, even more than other things in my life that I’m obsessed with getting right. There’s also the fear that, because of the nature of my writing (aka because I’m a sentimental piece of shit), I might be inclined to gloss over the uglier experiences, effectively creating the very tired over-romanticized representation of a place that is often far from romantic. But! To quote Addison Rae: I’m not a little bitch. So I will soldier on.
As of today, I describe Average Consumer as a newsletter about Jakarta through the lens of consumption. I mean that literally — because what are we if not consumers in a city where nothing is free — but also kind of in retaliation to that very notion. I feel like so much of the content by publications that cover Jakarta are centered around building hype for the ventures, and not enough are interested about the consumers’ experience and the needs, desires, complex internal battles that drive the way we consume. We contain multitudes, etc.
Average Consumer is excited about the latest brand of colorful insulated water bottles as much as it is interested in not having to spend. It’s excited about going out as much as it is about staying in. On a personal level, I want to be right and I want to be a romantic. Indulge in the pockets of joy that keep us going as much as distill the awareness even the most “tasteful” of us can’t shake that we are all just average consumers being clowned into scanning QRs to pay for things we don’t actually need. I hope that in the process of putting out this new newsletter I get to better capture the cocktail that is thrill, guilty, pleasure, rage brewing beneath the surface of our (let’s be real, my) existence.
Right now, my plan is to publish a little weekly list where I dump news and observations about things happening in the city, the first of which I sent out last Friday. In the future… I have ideas but I’d rather not get into that, lest I distract myself from actually writing, haha.
I’m not leaving this space entirely though. I think I’ll be here for the more personal writings, dump my media consumption list, and generally write about me. Maybe I can finally write about writing without feeling shitty. This compartmentalization feels kind of nice. I have a feeling I’ll be back here a little more, now that my brain is slightly more organized.
On a more technical note, unfortunately I haven’t succeeded in importing my subscriber list from this newsletter to the new one. So if you’d like to be in the loop, I hope you don’t mind going through the trouble of doing so manually here:
Wish me luck!