Weekly Wrap 9/13

hi, hello, stop trying to fix your feelings and other musings!

Welcome to another installment of Weekly Wrapped.

If you are new here, this is basically like virtually grabbing a cup of coffee with me and I share with you about everything I am reading, watching and thinking about. Rather than avoiding anything stained by the world, here at Jenna’s Column, we seek to find glimpses of the good in all things.

I post every Monday and alternate between these recommendation posts and longer form pieces about Gen Z and faith. Subscribe to stay tuned!

First, I want to say hello to some new faces here, hi, hello! I have gotten a handful of new subscribers this past week so please introduce yourself in my DMS/comments, I’d love to meet you! First, I’ll give a quick intro of myself. 

My name is Jenna and I am a 20-something trying to navigate being a faithful Christian in an age where nihilistic and black-and-white thinking is pervasive and seems like the loudest voice in culture, particularly in the digital spaces we occupy.

I live in Southern California and graduated a few months ago with a degree in journalism from Biola University. I love Princess Diaries (as evidenced by my profile photo), the New Testament, hot caramel lattes, tattoos, reading, the beach, electric blue nail polish, scrapbooking and writing. Here’s an actual picture of me (I am not Anne Hathaway, even though I am also a talented brunette).

Every other week I offer a “WRAP” which includes writing I find edifying, meaning that it builds up rather than tears down, books I am reading that I love, or a review if I have finished something particularly good, things I am appreciating which is usually art and music, and things I am pondering which are usually TikToks I saved that have stuck with me over the course of the week.

The internet can be a dark scary place, but there are corners of it that are infused with thoughtful explorations and safe communities of thinkers, and I hope that my Substack can be one of those. 

I hope you stay awhile! Next week, we will have a longer form article as usual. 

Writing 

As some of you may know, I studied journalism in undergrad. I also work at a newspaper part-time which means I think about the news and the media a lot. I try to share uplifting stories, or ones that offer new helpful insights into narratives we have just accepted about the way that society/culture functions. 

This week’s pieces are a little bit more heavy, but I hope they are fruitful for you to read. 

The Silicon Valley Paradox

A Substack I deeply enjoy, although it sometimes sends me into dread when I think about the state of our tech-obsessed culture (me included) is After Babel. 

Here’s a quick description of what the writer of After Babel, Johnathan Haidt, is all about. 

The story of Babel is the best metaphor I’ve found for making sense of the momentous sociological, cultural, and epistemological changes that occurred in many nations in the early 2010s, which gave us the chaos, fragmentation, and outrage that began to set in by the mid-2010s.

Haidt has written plenty of articles for the Atlantic and a new one dropped this week. He wrote a piece along with Zach Rausch and Lennon Torres about how weird it is that the tech giants in Silicon Valley are not letting their kids use devices, while they go on selling them to everybody else's… 

Many of them pay more than $35,000 a year to send their kids to the Waldorf School of the Peninsula—a few miles down the road from Meta’s and Google’s headquarters—which doesn’t allow children to use screens until seventh or eighth grade.

This sort of feels like if the doctor prescribing your medication refused to take it himself. It would feel a little odd, wouldn’t it? Well, it is unsurprising that the powers that be in tech are protecting their kids from the weapons they are building. It’s just a shame they are against legislation to protect other kids too. 

I was born in 2001 and I remember a time before smartphones, but not for long. I had an Instagram page in 5th grade, which looking back is seriously so odd. But I have been (chronically) online for over a decade now, and my adolescence and early adulthood have been shaped by my internet and social media usage in strange, mostly unconscious ways. So along with a lot of people my age I am guessing, I am curious about the ways this impacts me and the next generation. 

Thankfully I have scrubbed my Instagram page of my Snapchat dog filter selfies but as we know, everything on the internet lives forever…

Haidt returns to the reality that the young and vulnerable do not need algorithms. 

Do teens really need bottomless, algorithmically curated news feeds that prioritize emotional power and political extremity just to find information? Do they really benefit from being interrupted throughout the day with manipulative notifications designed to keep them looking and clicking? How much was gained when social-media platforms took over teens’ online lives? How much was lost?

For those who are not convinced yet, another point he made stuck with me. 

If evidence suggested that another product were hurting any significant number of the children and adolescents who used it, that product would be pulled from the shelves immediately and the manufacturer would be forced to fix it. Big Tech must be held to the same standard.

One of the authors Lennon, also dismantled the argument that the internet is necessary to develop a sense of belonging for kids and young adults who fall into marginalized communities. 

Although social media can certainly provide benefits to vulnerable teens, the industry has regularly dismissed the fact that its platforms are consistently, and disproportionately, hurting them.

It's embarrassing to be a stay-at-home mom

Birth rates in developed countries are dropping, and they have been for a while now, even in places like Hungary who give plenty of financial incentives. There has been plenty of ink spilled by researchers and entire governments about why this is. 

Johann Kurtz’s, theory is that having kids is connected to status. 

First, he quotes Will Soar describing our ravenous desire for status. 

We play for status, if only subtly, with every social interaction, every contribution we make to work, love or family life and every internet post. We play with how we dress, how we speak and what we believe. We play with our lives – with the story we tell of our past and our dreams of the future. Our waking existence is accompanied by its racing commentary of emotions: we can feel horrors when we slip, even by a fraction, and taste ecstasy when we soar.

BRB I will be thinking about this quote for the foreseeable future. Wow. Particularly in our social media age, this feels more poignant than ever. 

Basically, Kurtz’s thesis is that having kids now is not “cool” anymore.

Specifically, I contend that the basic epistemological assumptions which underpin modern civilization result in the net status outcome of having a child being lower than the status outcomes of various competing undertakings, and that this results in a population-wide hyper-sensitivity to any and all adverse factors which make having children more difficult, whatever these may be in a given society.

He goes on.

Because having and raising children is inherently difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, these tradeoffs are common, and so the act of having children is commonly and widely suppressed.

The shift of collapsing fertility is a big conversation and one I do not know a lot about. I hope that after reading Kurtz’s piece, you will feel more educated about the topic. 

The choice to have or not have kids is a complex one, and I hope this piece can shed some light on the cultural narrative that having kids is embarrassing or not “cool” anymore. 

As a childless young woman myself, I am grateful that I do not feel the pressure to have kids in the same way that previous generations have. While someday I hope to have them, I don’t need to wait until I have them for my life to matter. A lot of women in the generations before me did not have this privilege so I do not take it lightly. 

With that being said, there is so much honor and goodness in motherhood. There is plenty of merit in bringing image-bearers into the world and shaping and forming them into kind, honest folks. Especially as a woman, I had a lot of feelings come up while I read this piece. I highly recommend looking at it closer (no paywall on this one) and reflecting on what it brought up for you internally. 

Reading 

I am still plowing through “Fairy Tale” by Stephen King. That monster of a novel is not even close to his biggest book, but it is taking me forever to get through. It is around 600 pages, but one of my friends mentioned to me that “IT” (the scary clown movie) was over 1,000 which to me is *actually* insane. 

As a writer, I am deeply impressed but as a reader, I am seriously intimidated at the length of these King books. 

I really have not been reading as much as I have liked lately so not much to report here, so please drop any recommendations in the comments!

Appreciating 

I listen to a lot of podcasts, but I realized that I do not think I have ever shared any of my favorites on here! 

Dear Abbey

One that I love is called “Dear Abbey.” It’s a solo podcast where the host explores her own mental health journey and answers questions from her listeners. It’s such a sweet corner of the internet where compassion, kindness and acceptance are the pervasive feelings I walk away with after listening to an episode. 

For those who struggle with OCD, depression and other mental health struggles, this will be a place where you feel understood and seen without shame or the need to “fix” what feels wrong with you. In a world of obsessive self-improvement content, it is a breath of fresh air. 

Personally, when I am really struggling with my mental health, I can be quick to intellectualize my feelings. Basically, I rationalize how I am feeling instead of actually expressing and sitting in my emotions. “Dear Abbey” is a helpful reminder that feelings need to be felt, not fixed.

I listen to it on Spotify but she also has a YouTube channel where she has video versions of her episodes as well. 

Pondering 

A cut-out prayer – from a Henri Nouwen book I have long forgotten the title of – that has lived in my Bible on a loose piece of paper and recenters me to Christ, and gently convicts me of the temptation to be busy and distracted is making it to the “pondering” part of this week’s post. 

Dear Lord, give me a growing desire to pray. It remains so hard for me to give my time generously to you. I am still greedy for time to be useful, effective, successful, time to perform, excel and produce. 

But you, O Lord, ask nothing else than my simple presence, my humble recognition of my nakedness, my defenseless confession of my sins, so that you can let the rays of your love enter my heart and give me the deep knowledge that I can love because you have loved me first, and that I can do good because you have shown me your goodness first. 

What holds me back? What makes me so hesitant and stingy, so careful and calculating? Do I still doubt that I need nothing besdies you? Do I still want to build up some kind of reserve 

Alright, that is all for this week. I hope you took away some things for meaningful reflection. 

Before I go, I want to update you all. 

I recently added an option to upgrade your subscription. For as low as $5 a month, you can add this page to your long list of subscriptions you already have. 

As a young writer, these subscriptions help give me more time and flexibility to create better content for you all. It communicates to me that my writing matters and is worth investing in. Thank you to those who financially support Jenna’s Column. 

Thank you to my free subscribers as well. You show me that you think my writing matters and is worth investing in too. 

Have a lovely weekend! 

Your friend, 

Jenna