On Trick Mirror and the Delusions of Self-Reflection

Whenever I come across a Brooklynite millennial writer, I can’t help but feel like I’m catching a glimpse of an alternate Jesse in a Sliding-Doors-like parallel timeline in which I opted for the Northeast-school-NYC-journalism path instead of the state-school-babies-marketing-career path — either one eerily just as plausible as the other, simply a matter of missing one train (or breaking up with my high school bf) and getting another.

Over the years I’ve told myself I chose the better path because I have the leisure time to write what I really want to — Substack newsletters! overlong IG posts! — and my experience has given me more interesting material than life as a coastal urbanite would have (ahem, Ben Lerner).

But as we enter the 2020s, something interesting has happened: the gap between the content writer and the culture writer has largely closed, their purposes now fundamentally the same: to drive traffic and build brands.

There’s been talk about Jia Tolentino as “the Joan Didion of our generation,” to which I say LOL. JT is not anything like Didion — who was a prose stylist and a moral voice of her times. Tolentino is a talented writer for sure, but her style seems indistinguishable from the conventional mode of the Age of Content—intelligent and informed, carefully self-apologetic while also flaunting shortcomings for the sake of authenticity, interweaving funny and entertaining wisps of personal anecdote for engagement, signaling virtue, equating writing itself with civic activism, and reeking of political bias. 

There’s a performative nature to it all, a curation of personal experiences and opinions reminiscent of the way people choose to magnify certain aspects of their lives on social media in the act of self-branding.

In the Age of Content after all, writers are haunted by two specters: 1) the Twitter mob ready to obliterate anyone who lands in its pit; and 2) the Algorithm, which has turned the essay into a commodity — something designed to attract eyeballs and generate engagement and, more subtly, to sell certain ideologies in order to perpetuate itself.

JT painstakingly paints our world, “digitally mediated, utterly consumed by capitalism” which “makes communication about morality very easy but makes actual moral living very hard.”  Yet, as aware as she is of her complicity in it all, Tolentino nonetheless negates the power of individual choice. This negation of the individual seems to be the reigning ethos of the twenty-first century — and it’s a dangerous one indeed.

Compare this to Didion’s essay “Self-Respect”: “Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”

Didion is a writer one reads to understand oneself better, for her sense of moral truth, which transcends her times. One reads JT to understand what the hell goes through the minds of millennials. Personally, I prefer an essayist who can serve as a medium not for Information but for Truth.

As someone who is apolitical and, other than this book blog and LinkedIn for bizness, stays far away from social media, I can’t stand most made-for-internet writing. Several times while reading Trick Mirror I had the urge to literally X out of my paperback as if it were a browser — an uncanny feeling indeed! 

But JT’s plays for likeability are not for naught. The pages radiate the charm of your favorite influencer’s feed. And she’s quotable AF; so many 280-character chunks of her essays stand dazzlingly on their own like viral Tweets. Just remember, if you choose to read this book, that you’re reading content produced by an incredibly savvy twenty-first-century digital writer, with the ability to cast a spell as stupefying and morally ambiguous as the internet itself.