Make It Mean Something

An Essay By Elisa Albert

Author’s note: I wrote this piece in another lifetime, at the behest of Sara Lippmann and Seth Rogoff, editors of the forthcoming anthology SMASHING THE TABLETS. When I say “another lifetime,” I am talking about the year 2022. Not technically so long ago, but to me, a different world, life having split into a before and an after.

Which is to say that a lot of what I wrote in this piece is no longer true. My relationship to, with, and alongside (and over and under) social media has been shaken, stirred, intensified, clarified, destroyed, strengthened, and narrowed to a fine, fine, fine point.

Behold the naïve, idealistic stickler I used to be!

To publish one’s true thoughts and feelings in any given moment or era is to roll the dice. Hindsight renders us all a bit ridiculous even in the best of times. I thought I knew myself, thought I knew my milieu, thought I knew where I fit in. It’s humbling and strange to confront a lost or bygone self this way. I’m still idealistic and a stickler, just considerably less naïve.

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I spend a lot of time on Instagram. I’m not particularly proud of this, but I’m also not inclined to disparage myself too harshly for it. Whatever gets you through the night (and/or morning, afternoon, evening). I spend a lot of time on my “phone” in general. How about we start calling it what it is: Hand-Held Computer. HHC, for short.

I do the usual: text, read the news, gawk at people I find genuinely inspiring and admirable, gawk at people I find vaguely or severely dumb, obnoxious, triggering. Gawk long enough at anyone in the first category and they morph into the second. I make lists, deal with email, read recipes, buy train tickets. It’s nice to be “productive” in this way whilst, say, lying down. Or walking the dog, waiting in line, stuck on a boring phone call, half-assing yoga. My predilections are not unique. I use my HHC to avoid being alone with my dreadful thoughts. I use it to escape anxiety and uncertainty, to create and embroider community. I multitask like a motherfucker. I use it on the toilet. I use it when those around me are using theirs. I use it while waiting for food to be brought to me. I use it while eating alone. I use it to listen to music and audiobooks. I consult weather, and time, and maps. One screen at a time isn’t even enough for me anymore. Often, I’m watching a movie or something while dicking around on Instagram. If the movie is particularly good (or bad) I might try to find an artful way of instagramming it. None of this, in the harsh light of confessional essay, sounds great. Apologies to Jaron Lanier and Catharine Taylor and Jenny Odell and whatever other postmodern philosophers are currently urging us not to lose ourselves entirely to the supremacy of our HHCs. I had the cheerful and completely earnest thought, recently, at bedtime, about how when I woke up in the morning there would be a whole new Wordle to do. Ain’t life grand?

*

I am forty-four years old, and eighteen years into a love relationship. We have reared our offspring into young adulthood. Our job as parents now is to step back and hold space. This turns out to be much, much more difficult than I anticipated, especially given the fact that our young adult now lives a great deal of his life inside his HHC, which he acquired as a gift (from us) for his Bar Mitzvah. Today you are a man: here’s your HHC. We held out as long as we could. He claimed he was last among his friends. Godspeed and good luck, young man.

Is it okay to just leave him alone with all his screens all the time, as he seems to somewhat prefer? Apparently so, assuming he’s otherwise happy, healthy, and active, according to some excellent Instagram accounts about parenting teens.

Often, after dinner, each member of our family retreats to a different room to do different things on different screens. Blame the architecture of our 1872 row house, or blame the vagaries of adolescence, or blame the neuroscientists who sold out to the app designers. I don’t know. Blame Elon Musk, blame Jeff Bezos. Blame the Netflix honchos. Blame Congress for not acting fast enough to regulate social media. Blame the content creators. Blame the influencers. Blame myself. Blame each other.

Can’t we just be in the same room on different screens, I often find myself whining. And how about a digital Sabbath? Could we say that on the seventh day we will refrain from using our handheld computers? One day a week! The other six days we can burn out our eyeballs on our monkey-brained content! Could we try!? The answer, so far, for my family, seems to be… no.

In dealing with my confusion and consternation, I have two options: One, I can spiral into a panic about what’s happening to our minds, what’s being done to us, and how we’re complicit in our own psychic servitude and complacency. I can try to exert some fascist rule over our use of screens; or two, I can accept that life has changed irrevocably -- screens are just how we exist now -- and leave everyone to it, let everyone off the hook, myself included.

I vacillate. (Oh, but isn’t there a middle way? Sure, sure, sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.)

I’m lonely in my little dark corner of the house with my HHC. But I’m also inspired and delighted and engaged and interested and occupied. And bored. And exhausted. And outraged! And invigorated! And amused. Somehow all at once.

Yes, I could quit social media (ideally without announcing it on social media). Yes, I could change my display to grey scale, deprive my dopamine receptors of the delicious colors. Yes, I could go out to a (gasp!) movie theater. But I… don’t want to.

*

In the late nineteen-eighties, when I was a kid, my mother came home unexpectedly one day and found me watching TV. I wasn’t supposed to be watching TV on that particular day, or at that particular time. And probably the TV had been an ongoing source of parental anxiety and upset for quite some time.

Long story short, she lost her shit. Accounts vary, and memory is famously unreliable, but I do believe mom picked up a nearby chair and threw it into the television, smashing it spectacularly. I don’t have an image of which chair, or what happened afterwards (who cleaned it up?), but I can tell you that we were without a TV for the following several years, which is probably how I got quite so into books, so… Thanks, mom.

*

The story of the golden calf was given to me (to borrow framing from Clarissa Pinkola Estes) as a story about impatience, faithlessness, and idolatry.

When we tell our liberation story on Pesach, we don’t speak of the Israelites as “them”, our old-timey ancestors. The Israelites are “us”: We are the liberated slaves. We were taken out of bondage, and we crossed the parted sea, and we danced and sang all the way to the other side, where we watched the bad guys get swallowed up, and turned to face the rest of our lives as desert wanderers with a wary eye toward the Promised Land, freedom being just another word for nothing left to lose. “We” followed Moses out of familiar/terrible Egypt and into the vast unknown.

Were we stoic? We were not. Did we forge ahead without complaint? We did not. We were a whiny-ass bunch. We were nostalgic for slavery, for the predictability and “safety” of it. We hadn’t eaten well as slaves, but we had eaten reliably.

And poor Moses. Consider the extraordinary, impossible, toxic burden of leadership. (Keegan and Peele’s “Obama Anger Translator” comes to mind.) We need our belief in steadfast leaders like we need air and water. We need our human gods, our idols, our authorities. “Following” alleviates a lot of our anxiety, takes the onus off. We feel better putting ourselves in the hands of someone who seems like they really know what they’re doing, where they’re going. And it smells good when you’re cookin’, so whoever everyone else is following… has to be worth following, too, right? RIGHT!? Overheard recently in Manhattan: “Ooh, there’s a crowd of people in line for something; must be good, let’s go see!”

Followers aren’t a big riddle. Followers are a dime a dozen. But leaders? The real ones, the decent ones, the ones who don’t get high on their own supply? Fascinating, and impossible.

Beleaguered Moses needed a break from all our bellyaching. As any parent of young children who’s ever availed herself of, say, a three-day solo getaway will surely understand: Moses needed a breather. You’ve got to put on your own oxygen mask before you attend to your dependents’. Moses took leave of his irritating, clamorous followers and went up Mount Sinai to “talk to God”. A euphemism! Moses watched the Harry and Meghan docuseries on Netflix, ate a gummy or two, ordered room service, and tried a float tank (quite nice). And Moses concluded that Duchess Meghan was right: love absolutely does win.

For forty days and forty nights, Moses is off on his little “creative retreat”. He tells his therapist that Mount Sinai is “super restorative”. He probably misses his little tribe. He vows to have more patience for them. And he gets some solid work done! Two big, beautiful tablets, engraved by hand with ten basic precepts for living. A relaxed mind is a creative mind. Forty days and forty nights! They say it only takes thirty days to develop entirely new neuropathways and establish new habits.

Meanwhile, what of “us”? The frightened, all-too-human Israelites. Waiting, growing restless, going feral. At loose ends without our leader. Panicked he might not return. Cosmic Daddy figure, God-stand-in, do not forsake us! Yeah, he’s probably never coming back. We needed something to hold on to. We needed something to occupy our attention and energy. Something to distract us from the emptiness, the uncertainty, the enormity and exhaustion of our journey. Something to focus on when the unknown was too scary, too overwhelming. A way to pass the time. Something in front of our faces, to look at.

Thus, we built ourselves a placeholder. We melted down our jewelry and such and made ourselves a nice, shiny thing. An idol to dance around in heedless worship. Ahhhh, that’s better: Objectification! Much, much better. Tangibility! Everything’s going to be okay. What relief! We rejoiced. We partied. We gazed obsessively upon it before sleep and upon waking. We made a thing! Look how shiny. Lookie, look.

And lo, when Moses returned from his sojourn/retreat/quest and saw what we’d done, he got so angry he actually spiked those two excellent tablets, shattering them.

Moses has a little anger problem, don’t ya know, a recurrent failure to “regulate his emotions”, but this one’s not completely on him: apparently HaShem told Moses to destroy those tablets. Because we didn’t “deserve” them. There’s some interesting midrash about why Moses was so upset to see us partying with our idol. “God”having already warned him, and all. But to see it with his own eyes must have been “triggering”. Zombie Israelites, we of little faith, zoned out on our golden idol.

Relax, Moe. Take it easy, HaShem. It’s, like, decoration. It’s, like, art. It’s content, bros. Chill.

*

You don’t like how we attempt to entertain and enjoy ourselves and each other while we wait to find out how our individual and collective stories unfold? You don’t like how we pass our stupid fucking time? Distraction changes shape and scale. It evolves. We’re all on some weird trip together. But okay: You like rules? You want restrictions? You want limits and boundaries? Okay. All right. Rules can be very useful. Let’s make us some rules! But remember: Rules were made to be broken.

*

I have no real argument for why I prefer Instagram (an amusing bore) to Facebook (an idiotic bore) or Twitter (a sinister bore). Maybe I’m just too impossibly earnestly discerning when it comes to ideas and text, whereas images, colors, jokes, travelogues, memes, outfits, meals, products, and local events are easier to enjoy. More elemental. Less draining, somehow. FB and the Shwit don’t suit me. I’m not masochist enough or sadist enough or bored enough or desperate enough or hateful or self-aggrandizing enough for those. Let alone any one of the hundred others that have come to exist since I ceased giving a shit. Forget Tik Tok, which might be a concerted effort by the Chinese government to make us… dumber? To each their own. I like images, art, photography, memes, self-deprecation, targeted ads for shit I might want or “need”. Shopping! Sales and craft markets and local businesses and action items and social justice organizing and whatever. Instagram! Tell me who I am, show me what I want. Tell me what to want. Give me new ideas about what to want. Inspire me to continue on my path. What is my path? I’m so lost. Tell me the meaning of life. What’s it all for? Oh, cute baby. I’m so freaking lost. Also bored. And lonely. What does it all mean? Looking at other people. Thinking about how I want to be looked at. Hideous and… human.

I do curate ruthlessly, needless to say. Mute! Block! Unfollow! Mute, mute, mute. Nothing can make me endure a garbage feed, one that’s nakedly only about ego sans substance or self-awareness, a feed that is only about money or privilege or access. Nothing can make me entertain a feed that is banal or didactic or comprised of too many selfies. Or a feed that is simply reactionary. Or overly self-serving.

I don’t care if you once gave me a kidney; I won’t consume your bullshit unless I find it genuinely interesting on some level. I won’t look at a feed that is a blunt attempt at cult of personality. And nothing can make me endure a feed that is one-note or repetitive. Scrolling is still (somewhat) optional! A lot of the tone-deaf, self-righteous, vapid, uninformed, uninspired crap has to gooooo. All you perfectly decent folk who can’t take a decent photograph to save your lives: bye. All you perfectly fine folk who blather on and on about yourselves, openly self-aggrandize, leave nothing to the imagination? Sorry, thank you, next. Are you devoid of wit or grace or the power of suggestion? Do you regurgitate simplistic drivel? Love ya but gotta mute ya. Take this shit too seriously? Later, alligator. No hard feelings. There’s not enough time even in these here wastelands of time, even in veritable deserts of meandering lost time, even in purgatorial hours upon hours upon hours of time time time time tiiiiiiiime. It has to mean something. But you can’t try too hard to make it mean anything.

Don’t worry, though: there remain hundreds, if not thousands, if not tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, who may well adore your terrible feed. Live and be well. Pander and prosper. I only know how I feel, and what I want. When it bores or irritates me, it’s gone. From my feed, silly, not necessarily from my life. They aren’t the same (yet). I’ll still bring you soup when you’re sick, and I might very well still picnic with you in the park. I will return your calls and texts, I just don’t want your content. In the realm of the HHC, I am the almighty God of what I allow to parade before my own eyeballs, which might be the only true power left to me on this blighted rock.

*

Anyway, the wandering, the complaining, the vicissitudes of faith: What’s the takeaway? Grow up listening to midrash and you start to think in terms of takeaway. Which is funny, because there are infinite takeaways, which can also mean there is no such thing as a takeaway. Regardless, let’s try some on for size: We are malcontents by nature. We are often ungrateful. We are short-sighted and tend to prefer immediate gratification to long-game struggle and effort. When mired in messy uncertainty (which is… always), we are basically spoiled children incapable of tolerating frustration. We’d usually rather be cozy and oppressed than empowered and free. Change is haaaaaaaard. Something about patience. Something about the subversion of the personal and collective ego. Something about waiting.

Everything is itself and a metaphor, or any number of metaphors. And as Jews, to improve upon the way-too-frequently cited Didion line, we tell stories about stories in order to live. Yes, this is also called overthinking. Is there an entry for “Jew” in the DSMV yet? Shall we take pills to subdue it? Meditation is much too hard.

*

A few months ago, I deleted the app. I want my brain back, I said to a friend, then lasted one whole day (not even) before I downloaded it again, logged in again, and sheepishly posted something I “had” to post. You know, for my “career.”

Is it okay to spend an hour of your day looking at your feed? Is it okay to spend two hours a day looking at your feed? Who am I to say what’s okay? But what else are you doing with your time? What do the other 23 or 22 or 21 or 20 or 15 or 10 hours of your day look like? Do you still read books at all? Can you still read a book? If you can’t read a book, how on earth might you begin to contextualize what you see on your HHC? If you can’t read a book, how can you know how to properly curate your HHC?

Just be careful, I beg my darling teen. Be careful what you give your eyeballs to.

He grew up watching me lost on my fucking HHC.

I’m sorry, sweetie.

*

I bought a muffin with my coffee recently. In NYC on a brief getaway. Ever the flaneur. Not quite Moses on Mt Sinai for forty days/nights, but same general idea. Blueberry muffin. I needed immediate food because I’d slept late, it was pretty much lunchtime, and if I didn’t get caffeine and carbs into my body post-haste, I was most certainly going to die. “Bonking”, we call that in our family, a verb, which sounds sexual but in fact means you are about to expire from lack of food and/or drink.

The coveted bench in front of the beloved coffee shop was empty, it being long past peak loitering hours, and I made myself at home, shoved muffin into my face, swilled my iced cortado like it was the titty-juice of the gods. The sugar and caffeine hit my blood stream, and I was saved. I was going to live.

I had with me my HHC, a notebook, pen, and novel: The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore (perfect, depressing, post-WW2 Ireland, TW: “spinster”, n-word, alcoholism). I arranged it all beside me, ready to make the most of the sunshine and blood sugar rush and primo bench spot.

But what did I actually do? Delved directly into the HHC, allowed myself to be dominated by it, checked all my apps, then checked them all again. Maybe I answered an email, added something to my calendar. Maybe I pruned a list or two. Maybe I texted everyone back and back. Mostly I scrolled Instagram. There was surely some lust or longing involved, some covetousness. A dash of schadenfreude, no doubt. Some envy, but envy can be handily subsumed by a bit of judgment and hatefulness before swinging back around to good old lust, longing, covetousness. Cheap drugs.

Many minutes vanished forever while I ignored the notebook, the pen, the novel, my immediate surroundings, and the remaining half muffin, which I’d carelessly left on the far end of the bench.

Eventually I came back into my body and noticed where I was in time and space, and glanced up to see the half-muffin being swarmed by small birds. First one, then another, then four, then nine. They were going to town on that half-muffin. It was a jolly frenzy, and it reminded me of something. Something about survival, communication. Something about groupthink. Something about simple carbs, cheap drugs. Something about group dynamics. I took a few photos and thought about posting one. But nothing witty enough came to mind for a caption. I couldn’t make it mean anything.

— From “Smashing the Tablets”, ed. Sara Lippmann and Seth Rogoff, forthcoming from SUNY Press in 2025

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Elisa Albert is the author of the novels HUMAN BLUES, AFTER BIRTH, and THE BOOK OF DAHLIA, as well as the short-story collection HOW THIS NIGHT IS DIFFERENT. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Paris Review Daily, n+1, the Guardian, Lilith, Michigan Quarterly, The Literary Review, Bennington Review, New York Magazine, Gulf Coast, Commentary, Washington Square, and many others.

A Pushcart Prize nominee, finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize and Paterson Fiction Prize, winner of the Moment Magazine debut fiction prize, and Literary Death Match champion, Albert has served as writer-in-residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Holland and at the Hanse-Wissenschaftkolleg in Germany.

Albert's newest book, THE SNARLING GIRL AND OTHER ESSAYS, represents the best of her published nonfiction from over the past decade. She currently teaches creative writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

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What are five tiny delights that lift your spirits and make you happy?

1. Dogs;

2. Coffee;

3. Sunlight;

4. Plants;

5. Legs-up-the-wall.

None of which are actually tiny.

What are five tiny JEWISH delights that lift your spirits and make you happy?

In no particular order:

1. A pre-Havdalah nap;

2. Blessing my offspring;

3. Cholent in the slow cooker;

4. Yelling at my mom to make her stop yelling at me;

5. Losing my shit at least once every Friday afternoon.

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Please join Elissa Wald in conversation with Elisa Albert on March 20th!
5 pm Pacific time; 8 pm Eastern
Zoom link to come