How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Immolate Myself Online

Every time I read one of those op-eds where a rich kid talks half-guiltily about displacing someone from their home so they could have a place of their own or a critic hems and haws about reviewing art directly benefiting a notorious bigot, all I can think is that you couldn’t make me post something like that with a gun to my head. The motives behind this school of writing seem slippery and half-examined. There’s no money in it, even if the writer needs it. It’s unlikely to impress any editor with anything resembling an ethical compass. Never in its history as a subset of opinion writing has it brought the peace of mind or public understanding an author might semi-plausibly claim to seek by writing it. So what gives? Why do people with a relative degree of economic and career security seem so married to the act of self-immolating in public via whiny thinkpiece?

I believe that these writers subconsciously seek to subject themselves to outrage and public protest in order to recenter their personal narratives. Burdened by guilt or self-loathing, they turn to the crowd to reimagine themselves as victims, allowing themselves to retreat from the actual matter at hand and into the comfortable role of victimhood. It’s not “gentrification allows the petit bourgeois to parasitize the working poor”, it’s “I’m getting death threats, and people are being misogynists to me!” It’s not “I’ve chosen to be part of reviewing and publicizing a bigot’s intellectual property”, it’s “I’m being harassed just for writing an article.” This kind of half-intentional intellectual dishonesty allows the writer to sidestep truly processing their own complicity in wrongdoing and instead indulge in self-pity.

In author Ottessa Moshfegh’s article for The Paris Review, she recounts her experience renovating a house her father bought for her after a bank repossessed it from its former owner, whose heavy smoking has resulted in the coating of its interior in carcinogenic liquefied nicotine. There is an air of poverty pornography to the whole thing, a steadfast refusal on Moshfegh’s part to reveal the piece’s reason for being. We see the former owner at the brief story’s end, gray and coughing, sobbing in the “respectful” silence the author and her father afford him. Both impoverished characters in this brief narrative are depicted as pitiable in a way almost guaranteed to draw outrage like a lightning rod, and the material is nothing groundbreaking. A thousand stories of dilapidation and urban rot cover similar themes and images. Why subject yourself to a guaranteed firestorm if you’re not at least a little bit hungry for cleansing, simplifying public fury?

There may be a masochistic element at work in the writing of some such articles. That the internet is a humiliation fetishist’s paradise has long been an established punchline tossed around upon seeing the latest ghastly personal essay about, for example, a wealthy family subjecting their adopted and abandonment-traumatized child to repeated moves in the process of building their “dream home”, and certainly that desire for sexualized embarrassment exists for at least some writers. Beyond it, though, lie the many more mundane social uses for humiliation and punishment. We may desire to self-flagellate, to expose our sins in order to be rebuked and feel cleansed. We may wish to confess in the Catholic sense of the word, or to subconsciously open ourselves up to punishment and chastisement to deal with repressed guilt. Simple obliviousness, especially in the case of the rich, cannot be ruled out.

Where Moshfegh’s article positions itself carefully behind the remove of art, a sort of plausible deniability built into its structure, video game journalist Jessica Conditt’s piece on her decision to play and review the increasingly infamous video game Hogwarts Legacy is cloyingly personal. Conditt appeals again and again to her lifelong emotional connection to the world of Harry Potter, casting its 2000s-era fandom as her only source for queer fiction and attempting to conflate the business decision of reviewing a hugely popular game and the personal decision to remain financially and emotionally entangled in a corporate property inextricably bound to one of the world’s most prominent transphobes. She focuses so completely on evading the situation’s actuality that she neglects to make an argument for doing so outside the article, in reality, where people suffer, are immiserated, and die because of the violence Rowling funds, helps to litigate, and incites stochastically.

The real key to Condotti’s reasons for publishing her thinkpiece, though, lie in an offhand comment about her fear of attracting the ire of her loved ones. Any reasonable adult would be expected to understand that the act of preemptively going on the defensive over a controversial decision is far more likely to draw the very anger Condotti frets about than it is to assuage it. Did Condotti then sit and plot out a byzantine emotional flowchart in order to self-victimize, as she has done unrelentingly since the article’s publication? It’s highly unlikely. Selective ignorance seems the most probable culprit, but the fact that she appears to have hoodwinked herself into a guaranteed disaster remains. The line about worrying that her friends will be outraged with her is doubly telling in that it makes no mention of their hurt, or of their beliefs, or even of their trans or cisness. In the abstract, as in reality, Condotti’s concern is reserved for herself, preoccupied with imagining the victimhood she may subconsciously have sought out for herself to navigate the emotionally complex context of reviewing the game. At no point does she express the slightest interest in the feelings or experiences of transgender people, or even of her own intimates.

So what are we to do with these suppositions on the motivations of the terminally embarrassed and self-pitying? It’s an impossible thing to prove, of course, even when the shadow of the psychic landscape beneath is as clear as it is in Condotti’s case. Perhaps all we can take from it is a warning for ourselves, a reminder that by seeking the safe harbor of victimhood we deny ourselves the chance to grow and change, the chance to understand the pain of our loved ones and how we might oppose its causes. The next time you’re faced with the certainty that something you want to write or say will draw anger from your friends, your family, your children, you co-workers, your lovers, stop and ask yourself why they might feel that anger, and why you feel compelled to provoke it.