Book No. 40 of 2021
I was truly surprised by this book—for whatever reason I’d written it off as one of those internet celebrity vanity projects, and this only made it on my list because I saw smart authors I trust recommending it. So I was genuinely floored by its brilliance and relatability and honestly am thinking about buying my own copy to reflect on in the future.
Sun absolutely nails so, so many feelings that I’ve struggled to articulate myself—the capitalistic guilt of not fully exploiting your own labor, the severe specific anxieties around creating, the neverending struggle with sadness and burnout and the mistrust of happiness. My absolute favorite chapter was the one on eggs, which gorgeously and wistfully captures a beautiful facet of the first-gen Asian American experience.
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Big, big parallels to Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing (which Sun has explicitly said he was inspired by).
I also saw Gretchen McCulloch’s influence (from Because Internet and her other writing) on the chapter about online/text communication.