Polly Levi-Black

I used to hate Duran Duran because of their flouncy, social-setting, international pastelising of the world. But I don’t mind them now. Age is mellowing my rancor and my passion for all forms of pop has ascended.

But mellowness is not my universal state and I have not mellowed on all things. I hold an abiding rancor for the populist new wave of narcissism and the narcissistic concepts of mindfulness and our authentic selves.

In 2016 the aspirational, middle-class, English-speaking, western world fell in love with itself sick & hit a zenith of pathologising the following:  mild-mannered awkwardness, normal yelling at the world (and our families) and sensible embitteredness. On the flipside we normalised its antidote: narcissism.

Now in talking about narcissism I am not referring a narcissism that helps shape well-rounded and complex individuality and helps us negotiate the world around us. It is a narcissism that compartmentalises us into bits – body, breath, digestion…like colour-coordination. It is narcissism masquerading as a form of mindfulness; a mindfulness that makes us the new-wave robots of the new millennium. Robots for whom five deep breaths are never enough.

The 2016 version of narcissism had mindfulness training us to focus on the minutiae of our individuality. Quite frankly it’s disturbing that we could find ourselves quite so interesting… to ourselves. Mindfulness training us to stop, consider, reflect on our bodies, our tastes, our consumption our breathing. Some of the things we thought deeeeeeply about, that we mindfuled, included (as I’ve hinted at above) sleeping, digesting, protein selection, colouring in, sitting, holidaying, juicing and (yes) breathing. 2016 trained us to look so far into ourselves so very often it was like yelling into an abyss of Kardashians: vacant, useless, unsustainable, boring and futile. But mindfulness also meant that we could be quite clean, highly stylized and perfect fodder for snapchat/instagram/facebook/twitter/tumblr/wordpress blah blah as we celebrated our mindfulness minutiae…all the bloody time. In 2016 we became conceited and dull new-wave robots of the new millennium (for whom five deep breaths are still never enough).

Social media is a key social structure and a cultural touchstone of the new millennium. Through it we are bombarded with information that instructs us to be mindful at all times. Social media, although a ubiquitous and important institution, appeared to me to be offer something that was at once immersive but still one dimensional…and I saw that it captured so little of its subjects, users and objects. But social media is not merely a symptom of our times: it is a perpetuation of culture. So while it captures so little of who we are, it does not need to capture us so much of our time. In our current state, we are to be mindful at the merest twitch of uncertainty or the race of a pulse or a churlish alternative opinion.  And we see this fed back to us online; all the time.

Surely a quest for mindful authenticity is paved with bloated media outlets and marketing companies and self-helpers waddling upon the rubble of our complex and messy identities; the rubble of who we once were and what we could once cope with…before it was more important to curate our feeds (not in a fun feasting way either) than do multiple things at once and be multiple things at once.

Enough! Let’s not versions of our identity be limited to skin, body, protein and colouring-in.

In 2017 life does not need an antidote and narcissism can return to its non-mindful, less self-obsessed state.

In order to tone down the 2016 version of narcissism that tempts us and threatens to drown us at this same time, in 2017 we can let go of some of the all-consuming introspection and culturally sanctioned calming techniques.  Why don’t we have a crack a putting down that adult colouring in book. Stop focusing on our breathing all the time and see if five deep ones can cut it. Untwine that yoga pose every now and again. Dispense with protein and return to meat / bean / legumes. De-compartmentalise facets of identity. Get a bit sloppy: a bit messy. Let bits of yourself blur with other bits of yourself and with bits and pieces of others around you. Get used to your heart racing and face blushing without 1) engaging in conscious physical activity 2) looking at a fit bit 3) quietly focusing on your breathing.

Let’s just deal with awkward moments: like that overcompensating talk we do during those hellish social conversations when the other person doesn’t utter a word. Cope with pregnant pauses of elephant-gestational proportions that happen all the time all over the planet. Don’t throw yourself into a mindful trance at the slightest raise of voice/counterpoint of view/spill of milk; even if they happen at the same time. Do more things at once. Be a bit useless, a bit fabulous, a bit embarrassing, a bit tedious, a bit poorly dressed, a bit nervous, a bit funny, a bit good at stuff, a bit rubbish at other stuff  and a bit loud…all at the same time. Resist the urge to yell into the abyss quite so much and yell (infrequently) at our most loved instead. At least they will actually hear and respond and (if we’re lucky) take the piss out of us.

I am Polly Levi-Black : a  very lazy writer, essayist, and critical theorist. I pretty much focus on popular culture, labor theory, art history and intersections with politics, music, street culture, cook books and feminism.  I am a sook and a scaredee-cat so have limited forays into social media and publishing of any kind. This blog is part of my my vanity exercise for 2017 which also involves dressing more normal, getting my hair cut, leaving my shack more often and giving social media a red-hot-mediocre-go.

I am yet to be accepted for a PhD at any reputable university (aside from Trump University in the late 1990’s) but I have been  working on four disparate works: “The Old Fisherman’s End”, “Pop’s Underbelly”, “Get Stuffed”, “Australian Gothic” which, as a body of work, are proving far too unwieldy.