How To Create A Culture Shift: Jia Tolentino

Paria @ Labyrinth of Collage

Jia Tolentino, Journalist, Editor and Author of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion makes a case for optimism

These are heavy days. Anxiety crackles through the atmosphere; fear and exhaustion form the base-level fog. Wheels of regression are pulverising abortion rights and democratic freedoms; the planet is warming to uninhabitability; inequality grinds the majority into the ground. And we process it all through machines in our hands that our hearts and heads depend on – devices that numb our minds in the tsunami of information, that alienate us through connection itself. What can be done? How can we alter the conditions that bind us? How do we process the fact that collective problems cannot be solved individually, even as individual actions are all we have?

It’s enough to make anyone shrivel. But we can’t – we can’t accept this world as a final answer. To remind myself of this, I have to continually unravel one set of instincts and solidify another. This cultural moment, and this stage of capitalism, says gratification should be instant, that efficiency is a moral good, and everything should be as cheap and easy as possible. But nothing worthwhile comes like this: easily, instantly, cheaply. Nothing we really want will leave us exempt from discomfort or difficulty. Lasting transformation requires a process that is slow and full of conflict, that implicates and imbricates us. Labour rights, civil rights, abortion protections, environmental regulations – these things were won after decades of messy collective effort, and are only undone via a zealous long game, too. The society so many of us want – one marked by justice, cooperation, dignity, progress, freedom – will not materialise by default; as activists know, the change you push for may not come in your lifetime, or at all. But we can find our way to the path that leads there. And that journey towards change feels so different than what our culture offers. It feels deeper, more human, more complicated, more real and fleshly and beautiful than anything else.

If I can offer what I’ve learned on my own ordinary path toward a vision of transformation, it’s this. Change means moving toward what’s uncomfortable, rather than drawing away. It means putting something real on the line: money, time, advantage. It means making yourself accountable to more people, not fewer. For me, it means committing to the idea that I’ll keep changing, that my actions in the past will always seem inadequate to the person I’m becoming. It means focusing on whoever’s closest to the ground of any given problem. It means remembering that the uncertainty of motion always feels better than the numbness of paralysis. It means trusting that there are always people to learn from, people who built the toolkits we can use to do the work. It means listening to my body in periods of overwhelm, forgiving my insufficiencies while seeing them clearly – but it also means understanding that consumption and escape may relieve but will never dismantle ‘burnout’ and ennui. It means rejecting the dominant cultural premise that a good life is one of isolated domestic comfort and singular individual triumph. It means locating what restores and rewards me within the process of change itself.

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These days it’s hard, often, not to feel hopeless. But we have to learn to separate the feeling from the standpoint – to allow the former to pass over us like a shadow, while firmly refusing to allow the latter to take hold. As Mariame Kaba put it: hope is a discipline. As Antonio Gramsci put it: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. As far as I see it, I don’t have the right to give up the dream of a better future. Not when workers are striking for a living wage, and grandmothers in villages in the Global South are fighting back against oil companies, and children are going to bed knowing that many of the animals they read about will be extinct by the end of the century, but are all the more determined to do what they can to make a better world. It’s a necessity to walk alongside each other in transformation – an opportunity, a solace and a thrill.

This article appears in ELLE's September 2022 issue, on sale on July 28.