00:00:53.240and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.
00:00:58.760I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files.
00:01:02.380Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:01:09.920These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:01:13.740Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:01:21.360If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:01:27.100Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:01:35.740Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions.
00:10:16.700And she said, oh, I have a small business.
00:10:19.640And so I'm able to make my own schedule. Then I saw another reply to that where they said, oh, okay, so you're able to have your peaceful mornings because you're exploiting the labor of your employees and that gives you the ability to enjoy your mornings. Terrible.
00:10:34.080And she replied, I'm the sole employee of my business. So just a lot of assumptions about her economic status and her privilege, all via her having a garden, her drinking coffee, her spending the mornings talking to her husband.
00:10:50.240Yeah, all assumptions coming from the worst possible place of like giving her no benefit of any doubt. Just like people actively wanting the most like meanest and worst possible way it could be true to be the case.
00:11:11.320Yes, that she's definitely exploiting her employees in order to have, like, she must be doing something bad if she's able to be enjoying these nice mornings consistently.
00:11:23.400So another kind of bucket of responses that I saw were contrasting how she described her own mornings and what they look like with their mornings.
00:11:33.220And so people whose mornings didn't sound great, you know, plagued by things like insomnia, anxiety, loneliness, chronic pain or fatigue.
00:11:43.880And yeah, when you compare waking up in the morning, feeling lonely and in pain and really
00:11:50.840exhausted and drained, that does not sound as nice as waking up in the morning and having
00:12:32.700The thing that you feel good about, you should feel bad.
00:12:34.920Yeah, I saw one response that was so specific that they replied to her tweet about the garden and the coffee and having coffee in the garden in the morning.
00:12:43.120Where I live, the winter snow is already starting and my patio is uncovered.
00:12:48.160And so I was like, ooh, wow, like, tough break.0.60
00:12:51.920Can't afford a covered patio like one of those capitalist fat cats.0.75
00:18:16.620And I can understand why that is making us kind of emotionally drained and exhausted where, you know, we just don't have a lot of other emotions to give other than anger and spite and bitterness because of that, because of that constant expectation that we always be reacting.
00:18:35.720But it's okay to not have a take, to be like, okay, this woman's having her coffee.
00:18:40.880I'm going to keep scrolling next thing, you know?
00:18:42.660And I have to say, even though I live in the middle of the city in D.C., I do actually have a garden in my apartment.
00:18:50.180And I have been known to spend a morning out there with a cup of coffee from time to time.
00:18:54.920And seeing this visceral reaction that everybody had to this coffee garden lady, I'm almost afraid to ever tweet a picture of my garden because I don't want the Internet coming after me.
00:19:08.000Yeah, and she did eventually tweet a picture of her garden.
00:19:12.140And she's done a, you know, her and her husband have done a great job of transforming their suburban lawn of their modest home into a little garden.
00:19:22.780But it certainly doesn't read like, you know, she's some super rich, out-of-touch person.
00:19:30.380She just looks like a normal house where normal people live.
00:19:33.020Yeah, it's not like she said, oh, every morning I fly to Paris so I can have authentic Parisian espresso or whatever.
00:19:40.160I think that we're so drained and so exhausted and so tense and tired as Americans that the littlest stuff, somebody expressing the smallest bit of, I'm not even sure I would call this luxury, the smallest bit of something that's not toiling, the smallest bit of something that's not the misery that I think so many of us are rightfully feeling, it hits a nerve.
00:20:05.480it's a real trigger point for us i i get it i don't i'm not happy that i get it and identify
00:20:09.880with it but i do understand it yeah and like you were saying it's it's two things it's the
00:20:17.480having that emotional reaction of like anger or jealousy or resentment uh or whatever it is um
00:20:27.280and then also saying something about it you know like not just like feeling annoyed and
00:20:35.400scrolling past you know i like i said before i look at twitter you know probably a couple hours0.66
00:20:40.760a day if you add it all together and i see shit that i find annoying all the time but don't need
00:20:47.400to weigh in on it oh my god and it's i spend i mean even just like literally before you and i0.86
00:20:52.360got on the mic before you were recording i was like have you heard about this tech bro who took
00:20:57.020an uber from manhattan to philly and he says that the three different state governments charged him
00:21:03.880all these fees. And I was so meticulously, he included a screenshot of the different
00:21:08.600tolls and fees that he was charged. And I was so meticulously going through this. I was like,
00:21:13.380this isn't adding up. Something's not right here. I lived in New York. What is this route?
00:21:17.700And I do think there's something about the internet that invites too much scrutiny and
00:21:23.440too much emotional investment into the ongoings of strangers. And it's partially due to the way
00:21:31.620that algorithms work like the reason why i saw the pollen tunnel tweet was because twitter it was a
00:21:37.240trend right and so you know someone can it's so easy to gamify that gamify people's willingness
00:21:44.620to be become emotionally invested in the business of strangers it's so easy to gamify that against
00:21:50.080us yeah there's the algorithm that really incentivizes negative content right because
00:21:56.400It's just an empirical fact that algorithms reward negative content with more likes, more visibility.
00:22:03.340But maybe just blaming it all on the algorithm is kind of letting us as a population off a little easy, right?
00:22:19.220Yes, it's the way that tech leaders have designed these platforms to continue to keep us on edge, angry and divided for their material benefit.
00:22:28.340But what's going on with us? Are we are we good? Are we are we all good?
00:22:32.320So let's take a quick break and then I want to get into our second vignette.
00:22:42.560Behind every night spent making the kids lunches, there's a lot of suspense.
00:24:11.020From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table.
00:24:17.420It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse.
00:24:25.320Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place.
00:24:34.500Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:25:49.600So we were just talking about the viral garden lady tweet.
00:25:53.000And after I saw the garden lady tweet, I realized that this kind of highly personal, aggrieved response to the innocuous happiness of others was everywhere on social media.
00:26:05.800Like this garden lady tweet, once I saw that, I was seeing this kind of response everywhere.
00:26:12.080Which brings me to our next vignette, which I'm calling Professor Gifts Students with Books.
00:26:19.180So in this situation, a college professor who has this very inspiring backstory.
00:26:25.780He's the son of two incarcerated parents, first in his family to go to college, and now he's a professor.
00:26:31.120He tweeted a picture of his campus office, which I have to say is just gorgeous.
00:26:36.920It's like one of those offices from a movie, you know, with the built-in bookshelves where all the walls are shelves, and it's just gorgeous.
00:26:44.300It's like very meticulously decorated.
00:26:47.340And it's one of those offices that anybody would die for.
00:27:38.200had my professors acted like this and been like this and cultivated the kind of environment where
00:27:44.980they were giving out these books as a token of our academic relationship, I might have stuck
00:27:51.480around grad school, but alas. I remember seeing this tweet and thinking how nice it was. And
00:27:57.880I got warm fuzzies. And for a while, all of the responses were other academics basically being
00:28:04.720this is really nice. This is really the ideal situation that you want between students and
00:28:10.780teachers where they feel this kind of connection and that connection is crystallized and symbolized
00:28:15.840in this way. Every woman was loving it. But then another professor responded. Let's call him
00:28:23.100Professor Petty. Professor Petty responded, accusing book professor of telling everyone
00:28:30.720what a great guy he was via what he called, quote, lifestyle porn. Professor Petty wrote a whole
00:28:39.020bunch of tweets. It was a whole back and forth, which I witnessed the entire thing go down.
00:28:43.940Professor Petty, he's a couple of Professor Petty's responses. He says, you've got a lovely
00:28:49.440office, dude, and you're rich enough to be able to give away the props that you decorate your
00:28:53.480office with. That's not political. That's gauche. I'm a cis white man who's working in an academic
00:28:59.320environment without a giant office bigger than my living room, nor with enough money or budget to
00:29:04.920give away the things that I need to do my job to any student who asks. Check yourself. He goes on
00:29:10.960to say, just seems to me like highly curated, performative, humble brags made superciliously
00:29:16.840from positions of extreme, unexamined privilege. Don't form the basis of inherently radical
00:29:22.760politics you may disagree i guess how can i do more than one thing at once if i've given the
00:29:29.220i need for my job away you seem to treat books as props and window dressing rather than tools
00:29:35.820of the trade super weird i donate things that i don't need or have dupes of but giving away books
00:29:41.940on request odd so professor petty damn yeah he professor petty did not like this and he really
00:29:49.280wanted like this was i read them as one paragraph but this was like a bunch of tweets he was like
00:29:55.380back and forth really digging in supercilious even i know i also love like what a like
00:30:02.960academic-y sounding drag this is i guess i'll say yeah it's it's so petty i don't know i so i i don't
00:30:13.140know how many people you follow in like academic twitter but definitely professors like tweeting
00:30:18.460about what it means to be a good professor and providing good mentorship and like different
00:30:23.180ways to be a good mentor that's like a common thing that people post about right so book professor
00:30:29.800is i think totally within those normal boundaries of talking about it and you know sounds like
00:30:39.380things are working out pretty well for book professor and that's great you know lots of
00:30:44.720If people have nice things happen to them, it doesn't mean that they're bad.
00:30:48.320Yes. And I should also reveal one of the reasons why the optics of this just weren't great was that book professor is black and Professor Petty is white.
00:31:01.300And so the optics of a white professor scolding a black professor and calling him privileged and saying, you know, you've got all this unexamined privilege and I don't have a big office and you do.
00:31:13.120and that's bad. It's just not a great look. It's really not. And also, being a professor who can't
00:31:21.840do his job without his books, it sounds pretty grim for Professor Petty. Yes. And I also think
00:31:28.620that the way that Professor Petty framed those tweets and his responses really strip away a lot
00:31:34.960of the context of Professor Books. His background as an academic who faced all of these challenges
00:31:41.060to get where he is, kind of returning the favor of this kind gesture that a professor did to him
00:31:46.640when he was coming up. Professor Petty really just flattens that situation and takes all the
00:31:51.540nuance out of it and turns it into someone humble bragging on the internet. But that's not really
00:31:57.360the spirit of what Professor Book said in the first place. Yeah, it really isn't. And, you know,
00:32:03.400I don't know where Professor Petty works, but it's probably not like a 14th century monastery
00:32:07.740where there's like three books that a team of monks has been working on over generations,
00:32:13.080you know, like there's a lot of books.
00:32:15.880Most professors I know who have offices in universities have more books than they know
00:32:31.780And so, as they do, Black Academia Twitter really came together to gather Professor Petty and support Professor Books.
00:32:43.100And eventually, Professor Petty deleted his tweets and apologized, saying that he was taking his frustrations with academia out on the wrong person.
00:32:52.960Which, yeah, obviously, I think I could tell you.
00:32:55.920I mean, this person, yeah, you didn't do anything wrong.
00:32:57.860You're taking all your anger out on him.
00:33:02.480If you're an academic sitting in your tiny office, watching everybody give props and
00:33:08.060accolades to another academic in their big, gleaming, beautiful office, of course, I think
00:33:14.020it's a little bit understandable for that to feel sort of personal.
00:33:17.620You know, and I am super, again, I don't love that I sort of partially get it because I
00:33:23.780am super familiar with that feeling of why not me?
00:33:27.120why do I have to cheer on others who have the things that I want but don't have access to?0.99
00:33:33.200Part of me gets that because, yeah, I'm a petty bitch. I've definitely felt that,0.95
00:33:38.440thought that before. Who hasn't? But I also think that it seems like it's very easy to get riled up
00:33:45.920by something that a stranger posts as a proxy for your feelings about a systemic or institutional
00:33:53.900frustration, right? Because sometimes the villain is something big and lofty. The college that you
00:34:00.700teach at is underfunding your department or not investing in infrastructure so your office is
00:34:05.740horrible and tiny. But those things do not have visible Twitter accounts that you can yell at and
00:34:11.780yell your grievances toward. Other academics tweeting pictures of their big, cool offices,
00:34:17.920they do. They're much more visible and easier to take your frustrations out on.
00:34:21.700Yeah, I can understand. There's plenty of things in academia to be frustrated and angry about. But like you said, don't take him out on a professor who is just trying to do something nice for students.
00:34:37.640You know, maybe it is a little eye-rolly, you know, if that's how you feel, fine, but I guess after all this, I kind of feel sorry for Professor Petty that he's in such a bad, dire, emotional place that, like, just, like, bubbled over and he felt that he had to express his frustration on Professor Books.
00:35:03.940Well, this is exactly what I'm saying. I think that we're all, I think that we're in a state of constant emotionality and kind of like, I think that for a lot of us, shit's feeling bleak right now. And so we're on this hair, we're showing up to online spaces on this hair trigger that I don't know that I've really felt the same way before. And I guess that's exactly what my claim is.0.91
00:35:30.780Yeah, Professor Petty probably would have had a much nicer night if he just like went out and talked with his friends, you know?
00:35:39.200Yeah. Or when scrolling Twitter, saw that picture, had whatever reaction he had, clocked it, asked himself a couple of leading questions like, oh, this is really, you're really annoyed about this. Why? That would lead him to the result of like, oh, I'm frustrated with my own situation in academia. I have frustrations about what's happening on my own campus.
00:36:03.120and that's i think that would be so much more productive and and maybe he it sounds like he
00:36:09.300got there eventually but i think he could have had a much nicer time if he got there without0.99
00:36:13.480being dragged by all of black academic twitter with like with withering fucking takedowns you0.99
00:36:19.520know black twitter users are like a like a sharp-tongued bunch too so i'm sure some of those0.99
00:36:24.140had to hurt yeah that probably sucked if he felt bad before he probably feels worse now exactly0.97
00:36:31.580And so this actually reminded me of, you know, I said earlier that it's been a while since I feel like I've seen people showing up on this like hair trigger with misery and anxiety.
00:36:41.940And it actually reminded me of the way that I felt in the early days of the pandemic.
00:36:46.760You know, I and like that was a hard time for all of us and easy for me to be in my, you know, apartment garden feeling whatever I was feeling.
00:36:56.580But, you know, I remember I would get super upset and super angry about all of these pictures
00:37:03.800of maskless patrons at crowded bars and restaurants. And this was during the part
00:37:10.200of the pandemic where I was like pretty deeply distancing. And so I was really feeling
00:37:15.980the emotional and physical and mental strain of all that distancing. It was not a great time.
00:37:23.560And I would get almost deeply, irrationally rageful at these images. And I would have to do the work of reminding myself, like, okay, Bridget, are you really mad that this 19-year-old college student in wherever went to this crowded bar?
00:37:44.880Or are you mad that like institutions and people with power and political leaders should have made better options to support people, right?
00:37:55.240Maybe our political leaders should have taken bolder action to keep those bars closed and like meaningfully paid and supported people to stay home and, you know, made better decisions to keep people safe.
00:38:05.940Like there was no picture of that on social media.
00:38:09.340What I did have was pictures of like 19-year-old college students partying.
00:38:12.940let's be real when I was 19 I probably would have been partying during a pandemic too because I
00:38:16.940wasn't very smart but I had to really work to remind myself that just because the people I am
00:38:23.860seeing partying every single time I open my social media apps are so visible the actual thing that I
00:38:31.160am angry about is not them partying it's that our leaders have failed us so bad that it turned it
00:38:36.900into like a personal choice and that those places were available to be overcrowded and all of that
00:38:41.660But it is work. And I think that so often we are using people who are visible as a proxy for our anger, which is oftentimes rightful, about something that is institutional and not so visible, which brings me to my last vignette, which we'll get into after a real quick break.
00:48:59.140And they there was a unionization effort, I think, like, what was that, like a year ago now that they, you know, fought and suppressed.
00:49:06.760And yeah, maybe if they paid their workers decently, called them workers, treated them as workers and, you know, worked with them, they would be able to provide the level of service that grocery lady is looking for.
00:49:23.420but they choose not to do that you know it's like it's hard to really fault uh you know that some
00:49:30.760some gig worker for not taking the gig work seriously because it's gig work and you know
00:49:37.020it's probably not how i would have done it but i don't know what's going on with this guy and i
00:49:40.940also think this idea you know when people talked about people with disabilities and the fact that
00:49:46.300they often do have to rely on services like instacart to get their groceries i think again
00:49:51.120that's a situation where the failing is institutional because people with disabilities
00:49:56.940should have accessible, reliable, affordable services to help them live their lives and to
00:50:02.760get them the things that they need in their lives. And instead, they're given this a private app
00:50:08.700like Instacart that really functions more like a pricey luxury service. And so it's not super
00:50:14.560accessible. It has all this exploitation built into it. Nevermind the fact that I'm sure there's
00:50:20.460lots of disabled folks who work, who are forced to do gig work and are being underpaid. And so
00:50:25.960again, I think these are, our issues are really institutional, but so often it's easier to blame
00:50:35.240the visible parties. You know, it's not the tech leaders who get rich off of apps like Instacart
00:50:39.580or the institutional failings. These people and things are not so easy to find and yell at on
00:50:45.580twitter but the person who tweeted about having a bad experience on instacart well she sure is
00:50:51.460she's very easy to find she tweeted about it yeah absolutely and it's there's more of that same
00:50:56.960post hoc justification like with garden lady where after the fact after people were already0.78
00:51:01.800piling on they were searching for reasons to dislike her you know like oh she's anti-vax which
00:51:07.780maybe she is maybe she's not i have no idea but obviously the the whole reason that everybody
00:51:13.220was tweeting about her wasn't because of her positions about vaccination right it was just
00:51:17.520some justification people found after the fact to justify what they already wanted to do and
00:51:23.640you know suggesting that this seemingly able-bodied person just go and get her own groceries it's
00:51:30.940you know it's like a level of snark that one would exist on the internet but uh but it does
00:51:38.580feel like people were piling on and like looking for reasons to support one side or the other
00:51:45.420because of problems caused by those larger systemic forces and instacart itself or i guess
00:51:52.580we don't know if it was instacart but whatever the app was like you said they're not visible
00:51:56.640uh grocery lady is visible jorts is visible uh fortunately the gig worker wasn't visible
00:52:03.520i know i what if he tweeted his side of the story like lady i'm getting paid nothing to do this okay
00:52:10.580he's probably out there has no idea any of this is happening he's probably
00:52:15.020knowing how men grocery shop probably out there stuck in the aisle trying to pick a good avocado
00:52:20.040he was just trying to call somebody to come help him find his way out
00:52:24.220meanwhile there are celebrity cats tweeting about him we we live in such a weird weird
00:53:02.500So all of this is to say that, you know, I saw lots of people in response to all of these vignettes being like, wow, people are so miserable.
00:53:10.620You know, I would never share my happy moment with the Internet because people are so miserable.0.95
00:53:16.900They're just going to crap all over it.0.97
00:53:18.780And I kind of agree, not in the, you know, kind of snarky, like, oh, you're so miserable, log off, touch grass kind of way.0.99
00:53:30.280I think that we as Americans are just really miserable right now. We're living through a
00:53:36.600pandemic, economic instability, climate instability, worsening division, political anxiety. And our
00:53:42.120institutions, who are ostensibly here to provide us support, really showed us that we're kind of
00:53:47.660just on our own. And I think everyone is exhausted. We're working more and more and more. The cost of
00:53:54.160everything is going up. And so this is not sustainable. People have less leisure time,
00:53:58.760less time to rest or even just process things. And so I feel like as a result, we're all just
00:54:04.040showing up tense and anxious and on edge. And when we are showing up online, we're bringing
00:54:09.980all of that tension with us. And of course, this is all exploited by social media platforms that
00:54:15.460we already know specifically feed us content that enrages us and encourages us to pile on strangers
00:54:21.420and turn them into proxies for our pain. And I guess I just want better for us. I want better
00:54:27.560for all of us yeah we deserve it i mean it it is kind of a great american tradition to like find
00:54:35.120proxies and blame them for our problems but it seems to really be showing up in a different way
00:54:40.240now that now that we've got social media yeah i mean and to be clear people have been miserable
00:54:46.420since forever there's going to be miserable people out there until the end until the end of time and
00:54:50.620they've always been there but i think social media obviously is inflaming something in us
00:54:55.720And I think as we grapple with, you know, what it means to be a person in 2022, which is not always so fun, I think it can put us in a situation where it's really locking us into a cycle of misery where we're angry, intense, algorithms are showing us things that are that are making us even more angry, intense, and the cycle continues.