Overnight, I’ve started listening to Radiohead. For the millions who have already experienced the pleasure of transcending their mortal form via Weird Fishes, this won’t seem particularly notable. But I have spent my entire life this far avowedly not listening to Radiohead, a band reserved for boyfriends. Now, to paraphrase Thom Yorke himself, it’s as if I’ve knocked a hole in a wall and can see out on to another plane I never knew existed.
This is just one of a series of drastic U-turns I’ve made in recent months that have significantly undercut my previous conception of what sort of person I am. I’ve gone from seven years of declaring that I would never get on a bike in London, to being an annoying cycling evangelist.
I finally moved to an area of the city that I had circled for ages but said I would never live in, for fear of being a cultural punchline. I got the tattoos I promised my mother I wouldn’t. I DJ. On dates with men who work in policy (new), I fiddle with silly little rings on my fingers (also new) while nursing a fresh lime and soda – which I historically labelled “disgusting” – because I don’t really drink alcohol now, and the taste is refreshing, actually. I woke up one day and started eating peanut butter. And nuts in general. Also tomatoes. I’m having a fringe cut in. All my “nevers” have fallen by the wayside.
These superficial changes, minor as they seem, represent the dissolution of certainties I had built my - supposedly – unique selfhood on. We define ourselves as much by what we are not as by what we are – at least I did. I’m not the sort of person who would go here, suit this, enjoy that. Except now it appears I am.
Furthermore, many of these changes bring me ever closer to fully embodying a particular stereotype of a middle-class, urban millennial working in a creative field. I have a nose ring and write for the Guardian, for God’s sake. The worst part is, I don’t mind it at all. In fact, the surrender to stereotype has been oddly freeing. You’d think conforming to a type would limit options; I’ve found the opposite.
In retrospect, I realise, I had been unconsciously devoting a large amount of energy to negative choice, a concept I’m borrowing and adapting from sociologist Eva Illouz’s 2019 treatise, The End of Love (by way of a viral Paris Review essay). In the book, Illouz examines at length the philosophy of “choice – sexual, consumer or emotional” that she believes has become the “chief trope under which the self and the will in liberal politics are organised”.
Illouz is mainly interested in love (who isn’t?) within a framework of advanced consumer capitalism. For her, “negative choice” means rejecting, not committing and constantly adjusting preferences on the go, as a way to analyse insecurity and uncertainty in modern romantic relationships. She links it to the precarious economic environment created by late-stage capitalism, with its short-term lets and zero-hours contracts.
But since picking up The End of Love I’ve mentally expanded the meaning of “negative choice” to complement Illouz’s own analysis of how, under capitalism, “choice” is now one of the fundamental ways we relate to ourselves and others. “The modern subject,” she writes, “grows into adulthood by exercising her capacity to engage in the deliberate act of choosing a large variety of objects: her sartorial or musical tastes, her profession, her number of sexual partners [...] are all ‘chosen’.”
To flip it: if “choices”, particularly the directly consumerist ones, are now one of the primary ways we construct ourselves, what sort of impact does it have when you devote most of your time to not choosing? Up until recently, I had a very shaky understanding of who I was, in terms of positive decision making, but I knew what I was not, to a fault. When your sense of a unique personhood is guided by all the things you can’t, won’t and shouldn’t engage with, the world is that bit smaller and less colourful. It breeds contempt and insecurity as well, for those who make choices that offend your own carefully curated superior tastes.
Gradually, though, this attitude has reversed. Perhaps getting older and having other certitudes blasted away made me care less about an outdated concept of “originality” and question everything else as a result. In its wake has come a desire to try things I once dismissed – and it turns out, at my core, perhaps my preferences run a little, well, basic. Yet I’ve never been more relaxed and sure of myself.
Anyway, I’ve come to realise that my understanding of originality was off the mark. I placed too much weight on my choices – or non-choices – to prove a distinct individuality that probably does not even exist, in a world of 8 billion people. Perhaps true singularity is realising it doesn’t really matter, caring less and treading your own path, even if it’s pedestrian in every sense. Either way, if it means I can listen to Weird Fishes over and over and over again, I’ll choose being one of the herd, every time.
Moya Lothian-McLean is a contributing editor at Novara Media
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