gloomy
Deep thoughts on modern family life by Kathryn Jether-Morton.
Illustration: Hannah Bachmann
This article originally appeared in Brooding, a subscriber-only newsletter about modern family life. Sign up here.
We have a remote property in Vermont about 500 meters from the Canadian border. Our neighbors have installed wildlife cameras along their property lines to monitor human traffic, meaning illegal immigrants. A CBPS helicopter patrols regularly overhead. The other day my kids were playing with a friend on the side of the driveway where one of these cameras was mounted, and one of the kids was forced to mime a sex act for the camera (luckily). especially). While some may think it’s just harmless fun, the camera appears to be linked to live footage from a neighbor’s home. Surveillance as home decoration! Someone soon appeared and told the children to cut it. I was shocked, but the kids weren’t.
Control is the spirit of our time. It is everywhere and embedded in everything. We may experience it as a convenience or an amenity, like how we can tweak our Sweetgreen or Starbucks order until it’s just right, or customize our Amazon devices to anticipate our needs. You may also experience control as statistics such as steps taken, heart rate, fitness tracker ringtone, weekly phone report, or number of books read per year. Then there are supervisory controls like finding rings, nests, and friends. This is why I ask apps for directions to places I’ve been to hundreds of times, in case there’s an unexpected traffic jam. We buy carefully designed baby products to give us the illusion of control, and we buy mushrooms and ketamine (which, ironically, have historically been used to help us lose control). attempts to improve performance by ingesting small amounts of substances (substances).
Control culture begins with consumer choices, but it also permeates our expectations of how others should behave and how we raise our children. We work with and regulate our children, carefully defining boundaries with their friends. We control our intake and outcomes, but we rarely realize we’re doing it. The search for control is so prevalent in our lives that we take it for granted. Life feels exhausting when everyone is obsessed with maintaining control but no one calls it that. And parenting today is exhausting no matter how you look at it. How is this spirit of control realized in our most intimate spaces?
I started thinking about control as a flavor of our culture after reading the very interesting 2007 book “Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s” by sociologist Sam Binkley. If relaxing was the ethos for much of the 1970s, what is the ethos today?The longer I thought about this, the more obvious it seemed to me. What was loosening in the 1970s has been contained, ordered, and tightened. Whether you think it’s for the best or not, it’s hard to deny it.
I have been obsessed with control ever since I was an anxious child growing up in a very lax environment. I craved order and predictability, but I was taught that a certain amount of chaos was necessary to live a meaningful life. From a young age, I controlled my actions to bring order to the insane people around me. (Therapists really hate it when kids do this.) Even into my twenties, my friends thought I had an overdeveloped instinct for self-control. I never went wild. I never used abusive language. Even though I wanted to let go, I couldn’t. Control became a habit and sometimes it functioned as a prison.
However, in my 30s, people I met started to think of me as a “easy-going, laid-back person”. My reputation changed before my eyes, among my new friends anyway. For several years I thought it was me who had changed and was happy with myself. growth! But I realized that I hadn’t changed much. I still have a very hard time releasing the tight grip on my own behavior. What has changed is the definition of control we share. By the standards of the 1990s and 2000s, I was pretty solid, but by today’s anxiety-filled standards, I’m a relatively calm cucumber.
As soon as a child comes out of the womb, a firehose of vaguely vile bullshit is aimed at them, and it becomes the parent’s job, at least for the next 12 years, to scrape the bullshit into a clean pile. Drowning in options, we parse and organize information, classify what is useful and what is harmful, and engage in the necessary work of vigilantly fortifying and protecting our small sphere of consumption from unwanted intrusions. Masu.
Parental control in infancy begins with relentlessly maintaining a non-toxic environment, whatever that means to you. Managing eating and sleep has always been a necessity for parents trying to run a family while working, but today’s options for controlling and optimizing your baby’s sleep go far beyond practical utility. In early childhood, parents have to manage crappy food, toys that last less than an afternoon in the trash, and technology that is empty and addictive. Did you know that there are AI-generated YouTube videos for young children that contain no human emotional content? In many cases, our obsession with control is completely justified. , which makes it all the more depressing.
This continues into early childhood and beyond, when the child’s social world becomes a place for further optimization: safety, the right friends and activities, the right schools. When we think about parenting today, it’s less about participating in a shared family culture and more about managing outcomes for two decades. There is no doubt that it shapes many of our personalities.
I’ve been monitoring myself for control freak behavior since I was 6 years old, so I’m pretty good at this kind of reflex. One of the things I do is what my husband calls a “conversational border collie” behavior. I unconsciously bring people together, away from conflict and sometimes unintentionally away from honesty. I instinctively give people the easy way out. I encourage people to retract or reconsider what they said. I like to keep everyone safe in the middle of the conversation, where everything is predictable and nothing happens. This is one of the qualities I most regret in myself, and also one of the most difficult to shake. I’m sure it influenced the way I interacted with my children. Maybe it’s not doing them much harm, but it continues to suppress me to the extent that I feel continuous with the management-oriented world around me.
When you let the rules control you, you create needs within you that can never be fully met. I don’t visit peaceful places. In 1995, Julianne Moore had her first leading role in the film Safe, directed by Todd Haynes. At the time, it was promoted as a creepy psychological thriller. Today, this eeriness comes from how presciently Haynes predicted our culture’s underlying obsession with purity and control. In the film, Moore’s character suffers from a mysterious, undiagnosable disorder that makes him hypersensitive to his environment. She ends up receiving treatment at a recreation center run by a charlatan. She doesn’t improve, but she stays there anyway, and the film ends with her repeating “I love you” to herself as she stares blankly at her reflection in the mirror.
What I really hate about the control we feel within ourselves and radiate from others is that it drives us to act stupider than we actually are. It robs us of the ability to think imaginatively and sensitively about what life is actually like. Anxious parents truly believe they can control their child’s future by consuming and communicating with sufficient intention.
But if you stop and think about it, any adult knows that no matter how wonderful our childhood was, we always end up regretting something about our past. Part of growing up is changing and shedding old ways of living, even if those old ways include intensive product research and non-violent communication (such as becoming a conversational Border Collie). (See my strong desire to quit). Raising children with too much control over their mood, consumption, and safety makes it difficult for them to transform and change. We have become too good at defining what it means to be safe and happy for them. Its definition is actually thrilling and mysterious in its breadth. The walls are closing in. No wonder parenting looks so terrible to many people who aren’t parents.
There is comfort in accepting some disruption into the vacuum of control, even if it feels like an unwanted inconvenience. A few hours after the incident with the driveway camera, two loose dogs showed up on our property and cornered the children inside the house. There the children crouched behind the door, and the dogs stood outside, barking. They were a gray pitbull and a blonde-haired pup, both proudly unneutered and wearing spike-encrusted leather collars. While the children hid inside, the adults tried unsuccessfully to lure the dog so the children could return to the soccer game. In the countryside, most people know whose dog belongs to whom, but those of us living in the city had no idea. Strategies such as posting on a local Facebook page and calling the sheriff were discussed. Eventually we walked to our neighbor’s house and knocked on the door. The back of a young woman wearing a sweatshirt that read “Fuck it!” answered. “Yes,” she murmured. “That must be Ben’s dog. I’ll text him.”
The dogs took up residence in our garden and decided not to leave. I was at risk of running away and taking the kids indoors for a precious sunny afternoon. It wasn’t the country day we were looking forward to. Maybe they weren’t Ben’s dogs after all. Maybe Ben is at work. But then a loud whistle was heard from the forest, and the dogs returned home.
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