How We Live Now: Emma Gannon on understanding, not agreeing
Hello,
One of my worst habits is not doing what I’m told. I don’t meet deliberate acts of disobedience - they’re what make life worth living. No, I mean my complete inability to follow basic advice. I know I’m supposed to wear sunscreen in winter, but do I? I know I should get some fresh air every single day, but when things get busy… well. It makes no sense, but then nothing much does.
As Emma Gannon pointed out in this episode of How We Live Now, we hear good advice all the time, but it just becomes the water in which we swim. The simple things - like rest, fresh air, hydration - are the somehow the easiest to ignore, even though they’re elemental to our survival. Taking care of ourselves on the most basic level, and letting go of the idea that this is somehow too great a demand on the world, is something we need to relearn.
This is why I wanted to get Emma on my podcast - she just oozes smartness and common sense. She’s one of us - a true digital native, a storyteller who finds creative inspiration in online communities, and who has sought a more thoughtful way to be in the digital spaces that so dominate our lives.
And like so many of us, Emma found herself floored by burnout in recent months, and she wrote frankly and eloquently about the experience in her brilliant newsletter, The Hyphen. These are times in which self-care is hard to come by, and when exhaustion is never far away. I’m grateful to have thoughtful, questing voices like hers trying to figure out how to keep the best of the digital spaces that give us so much, without doing harm, either to ourselves or others.
In this episode, we discuss what it means to be a digital citizen - the pleasures and the agonies of coming together in the ether, and the ways it can both warp and welcome connection. Emma’s is a nuanced take, emphasising our own agency within social media spaces, and inviting us to be thoughtful and disciplined, rather than reactive and addicted. But above all else, she emphasises that this is about taking good care. Which is exactly what we all need to do.
Links from the episode:
How We Live Now is recorded using RiversideFM and hosted by Acast.
From the transcript
Emma Gannon:
Yeah, it's funny. I mean, I did a talk about the book the other day, and I was reeling off some tips, and then it made me think about this tweet that I saw a while ago that was like, "Basically human beings are leaves. They just need water and sunlight, and the right conditions." It was something about how we're just so... It's so basic, what we need. Have some water, go for a walk, call a friend, and I feel like I would be really annoyed if someone sat on a stage and told me that, but I felt like, as a digital native who has written about the internet for years, and years, and years, I'm kind of coming back around to this idea of like, "Oh, all of those tips that I've been told many times by people, I'm kind of starting to understand."
Katherine May:
We've got to relearn. No, honestly, as somebody who spends a lot of time saying to audiences like, "It's really important to rest when you're tired," you would not believe how many people get very angry at me for saying that. Yeah, I think maybe that message does need to be repeated, because I do think there are parts of human life where we've convinced ourselves that we've superseded the need for rest, hydration, contact with other human beings, all of the basics that your mum would've told you to do.
Emma Gannon:
Yeah, and your conversation around rest, oh, my God. Feel like it's one of the most important things ever right now, and probably always has been, but I don't know one person who knows how to rest. People might, like you say, kind of laugh that off. "Oh yeah, an obvious thing to rest," but it's like how many people actually rest? I don't think I know one person.
Katherine May:
No. Also, we are so used to commercialized pictures of rest, which are about having the right product in the most beautiful bathtub, with the scented candle that probably cost a hundred quid. That's always a woman who's resting and her face is blissful, and that is just not what rest is. That might be a tiny component of your rest if you can afford it, but it's actually not representing the stuff that we really need to do in the least. It sort of drives me a little bit crazy, honestly. Anyway, that's maybe a different conversation. You say this, I think, this lovely thing, which is, it's not about agreeing but understanding, and I think that's such a useful distinction to make. Can you unpack that a bit for us?
Emma Gannon:
Yes. It sort of comes from that quote that, "We're all equal, but we're not the same." We're not all the same, and I think this idea that everyone must think the way I think is really damaging, because we didn't grow up with the same environment, or the same teachers, or the same anything, and our experience of the world could be entirely different. I think, when it comes to actually just understanding. I mean, it sounds like a really big ask and it's scary to say these things in a time of massive kind of unrest in the world, but just extending that empathy just a tiny bit every day could change everything. I remember years ago reading something about this. I think it was a David Foster Wallace book, but I can't remember, but it was about how... It basically showed a story of someone coughing in the supermarket, and then someone cutting in line, and then someone else trying to take over in a car in front of you, and then it showed the people behind that.
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I loved this episode. So many podcasts fall into just doing a mini promo of the book when they have a writer on but this felt like a really genuine, open and honest conversation between two excellent writers and curious people. Listening as someone who has stepped away from the online world for a long time, and who is trying to find a way back in, it offered some really nice ideas for how we can be online and what that could look like
It was such a great episode. I listened two weeks ago and am still chewing on it all. I loved what she said about wanting to be with the people who harm us the least. Thank you so much for having her on.