Dear Lana,

Sex and glamour used to be the shit. Sex and glamour seem so dull now.

Art has the power to recreate reality. For many years, I used to think the purpose of art was to recreate your own reality in as glamorously as possible. If art is, as Ayn Rand claimed, a function of selective perception, then what are the ethics of observing our own reality as glamorously as possible? Mundane moments can seem extraordinary with art, and the desire to be glamourous leads us to recreate our own mundane moments as glamorously as possible. In the face of experience, it seems almost necessary to glamourize our own experience to move past the past.

Unfortunately, I no longer subscribe to this frame of thought. I think I’m moving past the part of my life where I feel the need to glamourize my past in order to make sense of it. I used to want to construct every part of my past to generate some sort of glamour, but now I question why I ever did that in the first place. Life could be dull, and I’m okay with that.

Lana, I don’t know what it is, but I’m becoming more and more tired. At a certain point in life, I think there’s a point where you have to let go your dreams of glamour and be contented with what you have. No longer do I feel the need to create culture; I’m perfectly fine with just passively consuming it. Ideas of wanting to make “impact” on the world — it feels so distant that I genuinely believed I would actually make some sort of tangible change to the world. It seems like a product of undergrad, when the source of motivation to study was the idea that you could make an “impact” on the world. If anything, I think the idea of making an “impact” is a form of self-validation where you convince yourself that you have actually done something “meaningful” in your life. It is, above all, a phase.

More and more, I feel that the impact and glamour is not as important as I thought it would be. I am too tired and too unconvinced that attempting to do anything in life is something worth pursuing. I don’t want to become an award-winning writer or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. That would imply that you want to do something with your life, and I’m not too interested in doing anything with my life. I want to move as far away from society as possible — near a rocky beach ideally — and just passively learn about the world until I die. If I could just watch the sunrise and sunset each day and night with a glass of bottom-shelf wine, I’d be content with my life.

I used to think if we look deeply into ourselves, we can find not only the nature of ourselves but the nature of the universe itself. Glamour, by definition, exists on some form of separation. Through glamour, we distance ourselves from others by placing a pedestal between us and others. After all, glamour cannot exist without the mundane. The same could be said about impact. When we make an impact on anything, it implies that there was something that required impact to be made. The impact corrects the world to a greater equilibrium, and we have in effect corrected the world, validating our existence.

Nowadays, I’m not as convinced of these facets. Why would I care about learning about the nature of the universe? Why would I feel the need to separate myself from the mundane? I just want to drink White Claw and eat Funyuns.