today’s ride 🚋

i've been thinking about the olympics of moral superiority lately, mainly because i watched two people go almost twenty replies deep, tearing each other apart on twitter (do we see a trend here with me and this cursed website?). the irony is that both of them logged into a platform run by a guy who is a clear nazi, and then wasted their afternoons.

these spats start innocent enough, or as innocent as anything gets in that app. one tweet, a quote-tweet/reply, and then a bitter joust neither of them will remember by the next week. none of these fights really matter. they don’t solve anything. and more often than not, we’re usually arguing with someone who is closer to our values than a stranger.

for example, a friend of mine the other day asked “do you hate [redacted]? you’re always responding in opposition to what they say online.” and my response was no, of course not. i’m fine with them, but sometimes they just post idiotic things.

often times we aren’t even fighting about ethics! we're fighting about who gets to stand on the podium and puff their chest out, on a platform that's profiting off us both for staying mad, owned by the exact guy we're both supposedly boycotting in spirit. it’s why when i rebuke someone, it isn’t on a stance of “i am better than you.” it’s merely, “i don’t think you’ve thought this through completely.”

moral superiority functions exactly like a sport. there's some makeshift leaderboard, a crowd jeering on, and there's the little dopamine hit of watching someone else's form get picked apart in slow motion. and like any sport, the people best at it aren't necessarily the most virtuous by any means.

the reason why nobody's taking home gold in the moral olympics is because the track we’re running on is built on the very thing we're all condemning. your phone, my rent, the app you're currently screaming at someone on — the system we're all living inside wasn't designed to let anyone opt out with their hands unstained.

it was designed so that opting out costs more than most of us can actually pay. saying “there is no ethical consumption inside of capitalism” doesn’t mean we all get to be off the hook. but i'm saying it because pretending otherwise is its own kind of lie.

again, this isn’t an argument for nihilism (maybe it is for wet rock theory). i'm not telling you to throw your hands up, buy whatever, care about nothing, and let the whole thing rot. there is a distance between "i live inside a broken system" and "so nothing i do matters." you can embody both. i am implicated. i am still trying. those aren't in conflict. they're just uncomfortable sitting next to each other, which is probably why we avoid it and reach for the easier high of pointing at someone else's feed instead.

here's where it gets more complicated than a twitter thread, though. not everyone standing at that starting line is standing in the same spot. kimberlé crenshaw wrote about this back in 1989 — coined the actual term for it, ‘intersectionality’ — laying out how race and gender and class and everything else don't stack like separate weights, they compound into something that changes what "choice" even means for a given person.

the person still on that app because it's the only place their community organizing actually reaches people isn't playing the same game as the guy there for the main character energy. treating every "moral failure" as equally chosen, equally damning, flattens a difference that plays into the systemic discrimination and inequity of our society. (it isn’t lost on me how often it is white people instigating a lot of these fires).

so no — you don't have to live lawlessly just because the system's dirty. keep your boundaries. keep trying to do less harm where you actually can. but if the only muscle you're exercising is finding the speck in somebody else's feed while yours sits untouched on your own profile, that's not activism. that's not solidarity. that's just you finding a new way to feel like less of an asshole without doing anything about the fact that, well, you just might be an asshole.

from our last haiku, one of you said “sometimes i know that i’m holding back because of shame, but i have no idea how to get myself out of the shame spiral to actually do something about it. how do you get braver about being brave when you never have been before?”

this is a super tricky one! something i’ve come to learn is that a lot of ‘how to’s can really just be boiled down to “do the thing” vs. some secret formula of steps. like most emotional fortitudes, bravery is a muscle. you have to try and lift the weight, and fail, feel like shit, and maybe pee your pants a little from the fear or shame. then you do it again! and hopefully it’s better.

and if it isn’t? repeat previous steps until one day you’re like:

woah. i’m brave.

(send in your questions to [email protected] and maybe your question will be the star of the next newsletter!)

this week’s song is "feel better” by hodera, the project of singer-songwriter, matt smith, hailing from new jersey.

i don't think the answer is to stop caring, or stop calling things out when they actually matter. i think it's just remembering to turn that same flashlight on yourself every once in a while, even when it's dark in there. 🔦

if you don’t want to send in a question for deep dish with nish but still have thoughts, comments, concerns for my mental well-being after seeing this existential spiral caught on keyboard, talk to me! i love mail, even when it’s ‘e’.

liked what you read? tell someone about it! that beats me vageuposting into the void trying to fight an algorithm! 🤖

as always though, thanks for being here. 🙏

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