I loved Sinéad O’Connor. Somehow, despite multiple moves, I still have her first album, The Lion and the Cobra, on vinyl. It was one of the first albums I bought when my taste matured beyond asinine pop music, and it remains one of my desert island discs. I won’t pretend that I followed her throughout her career, because I didn’t. But that first album of hers still has my heart. There was something about her, and that cover, which genuinely awed me when I was young. The juxtaposition between the fierceness she embodied, how delicate her voice was, the range she was able to cover, and the stories she told with her lyrics. I know every word and melody of every song on that album, and listening can easily transport me back to a self I’d rather not remember being. I did not like being a teenager at all, but that makes
Earlier this week, I was helping a woman with some basic calisthenics exercises in the park. She saw me doing some bar work and asked for help. She is eight years younger than me, and started exercising this year. She runs 4-5 times per week, including the park run, but she isn’t getting the results she wants, both in terms of how she looks and how she feels. Aside from the fact that she is running too much and needs to concentrate more on strength training to build muscle mass, the crazy thing is that she knows exactly why she is failing to meet her goal: her diet. She knows very well that you can’t out run a bad diet, but yet she still can’t stop herself eating loads of cake. (Her words.) Then she said that I must have good willpower. This really stuck with me as I don’t perceive
We have long reached peak performativity in society. Of course, there has always been an element of performance, and if I could control my reading to just Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, then I would likely give you a nice little overview of the work on this subject. I’m going to have to come back to that as I have a feeling this is going to become a series of posts. I think, if I were a different kind of person, I would be talking about “wokery” right now. I hate that word. I hated it when the self-righteously inclusive self-proclaimed themselves as “woke”, and I still hate it now those without broadly inclusive politics justifiably use it as an insult against those who proclaim broadly inclusive politics. Even as I type this, there is so much to unpack. What do I mean by “peak performativity”? What do I