You are a man like me— Erich Maria Remarque and the Beauty of Observing

Wanderers are often imagined to be people who walk aimlessly to clear their mind and transcend into a divine state to find better ideas.  However, wandering can also be a way of existing in a world that no longer feels stable.  Few writers capture this kind of wandering as poetically as Erich Maria Remarque, a German novelist whose life and writing were shaped by war and exile.  Remarque was born and raised in Osnabrück, Germany, and as Collier’s Weekly noted in 1945, was a “flaneur by nature”, stating his natural habit to take frequent walks to observe the people and buildings around him.  However, this habit changed his life after fighting in World War I on the frontlines of the Western front.  The trauma of this experience heightened his observant nature.  After the war, Remarque began frequently taking walks around the city to observe people and how the war affected their lives.  He used this research to inspire his writing in All Quiet on the Western Front.  Throughout his career, Remarque frequently used his observant and wandering nature as research for his novels that go deeply into the effect of war onto everyday people.  During World War II, Remarque was exiled from Germany for his books, forcing him to wander around and move all across the world in search of a new home.  Until the very end, Remarque never found stability in his life.  He wrote several books about being a refugee, and stated that while he was “no longer a German” he was also not an American.  He did not belong anywhere, but he felt the metropolitan life calling to him.

For Remarque, wandering was not just about travel or thinking, it was about learning to live without certainty, to observe human behavior and the effects that

history can have on city life.  His life and philosophy suggests that wandering is the way to uncover truths that routine can hide, and the way to learn more about humanity and learn to be okay without stability.

Inspired by Remarque, I spent six hours wandering through a station I had randomly picked.  Like him, I ensured to pack my journal and a pen to record my observations.  I kept in mind to observe everything and everyone, as my goal was to observe how history was seeping through the cracks of daily life.  I walked aimlessly to give myself a sense of uncertainty and I walked in the opposite direction of my instinct.  Most of all, I kept in mind to live in the moment.

    The city I wandered in was packed with history.  Businesses were run by the elderly and all of the door hinges were worn down, the stickers were cemented to the glass, and signs were eroded.  WIth acid rain and age, all of the signs in the city were cracked, rusted, or dripping off, giving it a unique edge.  Every house and building looked lived in, run down or musty, showing their age.  It was as if the city was stuck in the Showa era.  There was modern technology but it didn’t try to modernize their aesthetic and I really enjoyed the under-stimulating atmosphere.The city has a welcoming atmosphere and the repairs around town showed that the citizens really cared about preserving the city.  People have not left this town for mainstream Tokyo.  In the playground, parents were playing with their kids, workers were eating their lunch, and the elderly were exercising.  I drew and wrote about the people that I saw walking past me, taking note of the way their shoes were eroding, and the way they carried themselves, crafting stories of where they could be going.  Finally, I observed and took photos of how people and cars affected the ground below us.  At the bus stop, the graffiti that someone left was washed away. The road also had signs of frequent repair, creating a unique art piece right on the floor. 

    I believe that I came home profoundly changed after my wandering, and not in the way

that Paul was in All Quiet on the Western Front.  I am an avid music enjoyer and I have a fear of wasting time.  The anxiety of quiet and needing to live in the moment haunted me in the first hour of my stroll.  However, as I began focusing on the world around me, I began to see things that I had never noticed before.  The way gum fills in the cracks in the road, the wear and tear on door handles, the fact that teal bikes are popular amongst middle-aged women.  If I had never taken out my AirPods, I never would have noticed, and I never would have seen the beauty in it.  Despite experiencing the horrors of World Wars I and II, and being exiled, Remarque managed to see the beauty in the mundane.  His observant nature helped him see the things that other people failed to notice.  Through wandering, he learned to accept a life without certainty, and he learned everything he knows about humanity by observing the city, and he fell in love with cities because of the type of people he sees.  After being exiled, he found temporary “homes” by being himself, and wandering through cities that let him observe people.  

I believe that Remarque’s philosophy is exactly what is missing from modern society.  We are constantly trying to industrialize and become more efficient.  The world is on the brink of replacing people with A.I. because we aren’t “perfect” enough.  However, Remarque’s philosophy is a reminder to be okay with instability.  Instability tells us that we are alive.  Routine and monotony blocks the truth.  Breaking the pattern and looking around for once will help us see the beauty in life around us.  We will see the mundane things, the domino effect that history has on people, and we will be in awe of the small, beautiful things that life offers.  Cities won’t be places of virality, they will be loved because of how dense it is with the human spirit.

Hereditary

 Review: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

    I want to start this review off by saying that I review movies based on how well they can portray/invoke the the emotion that they want the audience to experience.

    Because this was one of the most miserable movies I have ever watched and it was impeccable.  Hereditary spends most of its run time being a melancholic drama, focusing on how the family is grieving the loss of two family members.  For the most part, it's just beautifully acted grief, showing the gut wrenching pain of loss and the confusing feelings that follow after.  It deals with familial trauma, and you can feel the tension between the family members through the screen and it's so claustrophobic in a way.  It makes you so uncomfortable.  I also loved how present the father was.  I feel like in horror movies, the dad is always distant and his ignorance ends up hurting the whole family.  (The Shining, Insidious, and The Haunting of Hill House, I'm looking at you).  However, in this movie, while the dad doesn't believe in the paranormal things happening in the house, it comes from a place of love for his son.  He's a present father.  He's the emotional anchor of the family, being a psychologist and all.  He checks in on all of his family while they're experiencing grief, he tries to keep them together.  When Peter, the son, has multiple mental breakdowns, he's the one who goes to pick him up.  He comforts his son when the paranormal things get too real.  I LOVE the dad in this movie.

    Another thing I love about this movie is how lovable the whole family is.  They aren't just douchebags waiting to be killed.  They're smart and kind, and you can understand all of their actions.  Annie, the mom, is processing the grief of losing her child, while also processing her anger towards Peter for causing the accident, while also processing her (lack of) grief of losing her mother.  Her grief spirals into using a seance to talk to her daughter, which causes her go to crazy.  Peter is dealing with the guilt of killing his sister, while dealing with being haunted by her, and watching his mom lose her sanity and the world go to shit.  Steve, the dad, is trying to keep his wife and son from losing their minds, while keeping it together for them.  However, all three of their struggles clash and create tension, causing Annie to deliver one of the best monologues I have ever heard.  She finally explodes in anger with how she had to organize the funeral for her own daughter, her anger towards Peter, the way her family treats her like she is crazy, and how the world feels like it is constantly blaming her for everything.  It was the most impactful thing I've ever heard.

    I also loved how the horror element of the movie was so subtle.  The horror comes from the family processing their grief.  Annie sees shadows of her mom and cultists in the dark, creating a sense of uneasiness throughout the movie, as the audience begins feeling uneasy over every dark room in the house.  Peter is haunted by reminders of his sister.  He sees shadows of her head falling off, he hears his sister's signature vocal stim of clucking, and he has nightmares of his mom killing him.  The horror of the movie is just so well done.  You need the context of the movie for the movie to be scary.  When Annie becomes fully possessed by the ghost of Pamon and she kickstarts the horrific Act 3 of the movie, I love the use of visual and audio effects.  When Annie cuts her head of with a piano wire, the goriness intensifies just through audio, as she starts cutting her head faster and faster until the sound lets us know that she finished, just with a thud.  The horror is so subtle and quiet but it's so good.  I also love the horror in this movie because it's so unexpected.  They weren't cheap jump scares or gallons of blood.  You have to watch the movie to understand it, because the horror comes from understanding the story.  The horror felt new and perfectly in place.

    I truly think that this is one of the best horror movies to exist: the ending id violent and gory, the characters are loveable, and the audio horror and emotionals are phenomenal.  10/10, highly recommend.

The Paradox of Tragedy

    You’ve probably watched a sad movie before.  Titanic, Grave of The Fireflies, Good Will Hunting. All three are some of the saddest movies to exist, but they
are also known as some of the best movies as well.  But why?  These movies portray war, death, and sacrifice, and make us cry.  But they’re somehow also amazing movies.  That’s exactly what the paradox of tragedy is.

    The connection between feelings of distress and pleasure was first made by Aristotle.  In his book titled Poetics, he states that Tragedy is “an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish a catharsis of these emotions.”  To put it simply, tragedy makes the audience experience pity or fear for the characters, leading to a release, or a catharsis of intense emotions.

    “The Paradox of Tragedy”, was coined by philosopher David Hume in his essay, Of Tragedy.  He defines it as, “an unaccountable pleasure, which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy,” saying that we are pleased by human misery in art but repulsed by it in real life.

    Hume describes 2 resolutions for this paradox.  The first is based on Jean Baptise Dubos, a french art critic, who wrote that we chase drama to have relief from the boredom of everyday life. He believes that humans are desperate for something that is out of the ordinary to happen, so we can escape from this boredom.  Hume, in part, agrees with this idea.  He believes that his idea would work in theory, in the same way humans are drawn to dramatic, controversial, or dark news, but he argues that we wouldn’t enjoy it in real life, even if it meant escaping boredom.  This is where he brings Fontenelle, a French Enlightenment author, as his second reference.  Fontenelle states that we enjoy tragedy BECAUSE it is fiction. We feel the negative emotion, but without real life stress, it allows room for pleasure.  But what happens to all of our negative emotions when we are pleased?  While Hume later argues that the negative emotions are simply overpowered by the pleasure and passion of the beauty of the Tragedy, modern philosophy and psychology states that it more has to do with our empathy, adding a third resolution to the paradox of tragedy.

    Philosopher Susan Feagin stated in her article, The Pleasure of Tragedy, that we experience pleasure from what she calls a “meta-response” or after response.  She states that this meta response is our response to reflecting on our initial response.  She states that as we reflect on our initial response to the melancholy of the art, we realize that we cared for the characters and felt genuine hope for their destinies and compassion for their stories.  And ultimately, this compassion is what made us shed tears.

    From a psychological perspective, tragedy makes our brains release hormones that make us empathetic and understanding of others, further proving Feagin’s point.

    According to the National Institute of Health and the Frontiers of Human Neuroscience, a hormone called prolactin is released when we interact with sad

media. Prolactin is released to regulate
anxiety and depression and comfort us by encouraging our body to seek connection with others.  

    In a study done by the Frontiers of Human Neuroscience in 2020, it was revealed that watching sad movies activate parts of the limbic system like the amygdala, associated with giving us negative emotions, but also releasing hormones like oxytocin, associated with making us feel empathy and the feeling of having a deep emotional bond with others.

    Piggybacking off of that, in March of last year, the Journal of Positive Psychology published a research paper on the effect of tragic art on empathy.  In the experiment, 150 politically conservative people from the United States, who supported Donald Trump and were therefore extremely apathetic towards undocumented immigrants, were shown videos and pictures of art depicting suffering refugees and immigrants.  After viewing these artworks, the subjects had a shift in attitude.  Whether they liked the art or not, they all reported that the videos made them think and feel deeply.  The study also detected that the participants felt more sympathetic towards undocumented immigrants after viewing the art, suggesting that tragic art has the ability to evoke meaningful and moving experiences that could help foster empathy for marginalized groups.

    From 330 BCE, when Aristotle first connected the feeling of pity, fear, and

distress to pleasure, it took until the 21st century for us to find a scientifically and philosophically supported resolution for the paradox of tragedy.  We derive pleasure from tragedy because it reminds us of our common humanity.  It subconsciously helps us recognize that there are people out there who are just like us, even helping the most apathetic people to have sympathy, and realize that we care for the general wellbeing of other human beings.  

    This is why tragedy, as an art form, is seen as the king or pinnacle of art because of how moving and raw it is.  Think about it.  What is the first William Shakespeare play that comes to mind?  Despite writing King Lear and a bunch of other light hearted plays, his tragedies are what most people remember and regard as some of the best plays to ever be written. 

    Tragedy helps us become more empathetic and be better people and help us not feel alone in the world.  This is why we keep watching Titanic, why Grave of the Fireflies still devastates us, and why Shakespeare’s tragedies endure—because through them, we find empathy, connection, and what it means to be human.

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

Review: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

           I got my first phone when I was 9 years old, to use as a gaming device on planes.  A year later, my mom finally caved in and let me download TikTok.  That single decision, led me into a new world of creativity, opportunity, and insecurity.  While I had access to new knowledge and inspiration, that was where I also learned that I was ugly.  I wasn't as skinny, tall, or as white as the girls on my phone.  I didn't have a button nose, and I wasn't confident.  Although I love my phone, and the cool apps that come with it, I truly wish that I had waited a little longer to start using a phone.
           I recently read The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist specializing in youth mental health.  Through research and personal experience, he offers a sympathetic approach to the stereotypical parental phrase of "It's because of the damn phone".

           He traces the sharp rise in mental illness to the shift from a “play-based childhood” to a “phone-based childhood” in the late 2000s.  Through data on insomnia, metaperception, the visual representation of popularity (i.e. likes and comments), and comparison with the childhood of the 2 previous generations, he builds a compelling argument that smartphones and social media have fundamentally
rewired Gen Z.

Haidt argues that the way millennials and Gen X were raised contributes to the issue.  The two generations were raised during the height of the “Stranger Danger” frenzy, raising them to fear what will happen to their kids in the outside world.  This overprotection in the outside world made them underprotective of their kids in the online world.  To combat this generational idea, Haidt proposes that parents must learn to make their children feel trusted, so that they feel in control of their lives instead of being controlled by their phones.  He also calls for parents to collectively delay giving their children smartphones, restrict social media until 16, and create phone-free schools.  Haidt places the responsibility of re-rewiring childhood on tech companies that insidiously design phones to be addictive, and on cultural norms rather than placing it on Gen Z’s lack of willpower.

However, the book has serious blind spots.  In Chapter 6, Haidt introduces the idea that rising rates of transgender people involves “social contagion”, stating that “...the fact that gender dysphoria now appears in social clusters (such as a group of close friends), the fact that parents and those who transition back to their natal sex identify social media as a major source of information and encouragement, and the fact that gender dysphoria is now being diagnosed among many adolescents who showed no signs of it as children all indicate that social influence and sociogenic transmission may be at work as well.”  While the rest of the book is well-researched and sympathetic , his take on LGBTQ+ youth is apathetic and risks reinforcing homophobic/transphobic narratives.

Haidt also states that the real world is inherently healthier than the online world, overlooking how social media can be a refuge for many, when their immediate environment is isolating or unsafe.

Finally, while phones amplify anxiety and social comparison, Haidt presents them as the primary cause of Gen-Z’s mental health crisis, oversimplifying a complex threat.  Economic instability, political crises, wars, and extreme isolation form the broader context surrounding Gen Z’s childhood.  Social media is not the root cause, it simply amplifies these preexisting factors.

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness offers a compelling and urgent warning about the negative impact that phones have on us.  It urges us to act as a collective for the sake of future generations, and his solutions don’t blame Gen Z for not trying harder.  They instead challenge social norms and companies that allowed the situation to become dire.

(However, the book is best when you go into it understanding that phones are just a contributing factor to our mental health crisis, not the sole architect)