A SAMPLE SUBSTACK POST

(Please treat this as a writing/style sample but NOT an editing sample, because I generally throw my substack posts up without much editing, otherwise I’d never stop working on them)

RIVERDALE SEASON SIX AND THE MEANING OF LIFE

My dearest Readers,

It’s been a while since my last post, in part because I spent the last two weeks useless with Covid, but also because I spent the weeks before that dedicating most of my creative and organizational energy to recording and producing a podcast called Riverdale Season Six: The Podcast (the first two episodes are out now!)

I promise this is not a promo post, but the context of the podcast idea is necessary to set up the pretentious philosophical follow up that will make up most of this lil essay.

If you haven’t seen Riverdale, here is a real list of things you’ll find in just the sixth season:

• multiple universes

• ghosts

• the literal Devil

• serial killers

• time travel

• super powers

• heated debates over civil policy with respect to unhoused people

• an immortal racist warlock

• Lesbian witches

• McCarthyism

• the historic struggle for civil rights within the Black community

• Pro-union organizing

• intra-family assassinations

• and pagan human sacrifice

The premise of the pod is that my friend Omar Najam and I, both legitimate fans of Riverdale, are rewatching Riverdale Season Six, which we’ve both seen before. Each episode, however, we are joined by a friend who has not seen the show and has only seen whatever episode they’ll be discussing with us. They are universally and understandably baffled by the show, and the comedy of the podcast comes from their genuine attempts to make sense of what’s going on or in their complete despairing admission of defeat. Inevitably, even the most optimistic guests get to a point where they’ve given up their struggle for meaning and start to let the nonsense lore of Riverdale simply wash over them.

So, of course, this is a very silly comedy podcast, and in part I wanted to make it because I thought it would be funny. And it is!

However, I think there’s something deeper to the project, something we don’t necessarily get too into during the pod itself, but something that definitely lurks beneath every episode, for me at least.

You see, Riverdale Season Six is absurd, but so is existence itself. The experience of struggling to make sense of Riverdale Season Six is a direct analogue for the struggle to make sense of our lives. I know, a grandiose comparison, but I am being 100% sincere. 

Riverdale Season Six is absurd, but that doesn’t mean there’s no value in trying to understand it. While many of your questions will never be answered about why certain decisions were made, and while you may never discover a consistent set of rules governing the world of the show, there are still compelling human stories being told. When plunged into a random episode with no context, it all feels like there’s no way anybody could make sense of what is happening. Surely it’s all so essentially random that there’s no point even trying. 

But if you despair completely, if you give up on finding any meaning or beauty in the show, you will miss those genuine moments of aesthetic value. 

You can’t fully understand the poignance of Betty’s performance at Slaughtercon if you aren’t aware of her longstanding fear of her own impulses, her deeply-rooted distrust of her own self, thanks to growing up being manipulated and traumatized by a father who was at times loving and kind while at others evil and cruel — a father who told Betty her whole life that she carried that same evil inside her. Maybe most people aren’t the daughter of a serial killer, and maybe most of us don’t now work for the FBI, and maybe most of us aren’t in a cat-and-mouse struggle with the Trash Bag Killer, but I think most of us can relate to fearing something lurking within ourselves. Maybe it is fear of repeating patterns of trauma that you experienced as a kid. Maybe it’s fear of your own harmful impulses, or fear of being something you desperately don’t want to be. Betty’s arc is absurd in its specifics, but imminently relatable in its various gestures. And by gesture here, I mean it in the way artists use it: the gist of a pose, the line of action, the most-simplified sense of a thing. 

stolen from lovelifedrawing.com

You are not Betty. But I bet there are ways in which, now that you think about it, you can relate to the gesture of Betty.

And that’s the point!

Absolutely nothing in life is fully relatable in its specifics, because specific things are, by their very nature, only truly themselves. It’s why humans use categories to understand the world, or, in other words, why we try to sort specific objects into rough groupings of similar objects. It’s only through abstraction, through generalization, through identifying the shared gestures of things, that we can begin to create digestible order out of the infinitely specific chaos around us. 

Categories, however, are inherently flawed tools. As you simplify and reduce, you necessarily lose the ability to fully account for all the nuance of things as they really are. 

The mistake human brains so desperately want to make is to forget that our categories are tools we create to help ourselves make sense of the world. Instead, most humans walk around convinced that the categories themselves are what’s actually real. But that’s not the case. What’s real are the specific things. 

For example, “man”. This is a category we use to conveniently divide the endlessly complex specificity of the individual people around us into two, much-more-easily digested groupings. The categories are soothing. They make things easier for us. But what happens when people whom we have sorted into the “man” category start acting in ways that defy that grouping? And this can be anything from a trans woman denying the label altogether to a gentle boy who simply does not enjoy roughhousing (the specific traits we ascribe to “man” will vary from culture to culture and person to person of course). In these cases, some people will rethink their category of “man” and seek to add enough flexibility to account for new outliers. Some people will abandon the category altogether. Most people, I think, at least at first, will find it instead much more convenient to either force the person back into line with how a “man” ought to be one. 

Sometimes, as is often the case of the gentle boy, a rigid mind will instead seek to reject them from the group of “man” altogether and deny them the protections and privileges associated with that category.

It might be confusing to some, then, that the trans woman, who seeks to remove herself from that same rigid-minded person’s category of “man”, will often find herself denied the option to leave. You see, categories are tools observers use to make order of the chaos around them. It’s ok for a rigid observer to eject any member of a category they want. It’s not ok, however, for an object of observation to start denying the legitimacy of her categories, because this challenges the epistemically authority, and thus existential security, of the rigid observer.

A comfortable and stable relationship to the absurdity of existence requires, for many humans, that we ignore whatever specifics don’t fit into our generalized models, and that we beat into compliance those rebellious and contradictory specifics that refuse to be ignored. 

This is dogmatism. This is what David Hume warned about at the end of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. This is why Socrates was sentenced to death for encouraging the Athenian Youth to question assumed and inherited categories. 

Dogmatism leads to all kinds of suffering, both internally and externally, when we punish others for not adhering to our categories and punish ourselves for not living up to our own impossible abstracted standards. 

It’s why men are so fucking depressed under patriarchy. Almost nobody can live up to the mythologized image of strong, stoic, brilliant, brave, heroic, unflappable, perfect provider that capitalist patriarchy pretends “man” is in order to justify the dominance of men. However, for so many men, it’s existentially easier to blame their suffering, their failure to live up to this image of what they should be, on feminism or immigrants or black people or trans people, rather than risk challenging their own category of “man”.

So, Riverdale. 

When our guests find themselves drowning in the unprocessable chaos of Riverdale Season Six, they have a few options:

1. They can imagine explanations that allow them to create order in the chaos themselves. These explanations are always incorrect, but they are soothing.

2. Or they can rely on Omar and Me to provide them with context, offering them our own categories and explanations derived from more experience with the show. Our memory for the show is pretty good, so these are correct maybe 70% of the time, and correct enough 90% of the time. 

3. They can give up entirely and reject the episode and refuse to engage with it.

Option A has the advantage of allowing the guest to find the most flexible and individually resonant relationship with the episode, and many enjoy the puzzle of creating these systems. It is, however, constant and exhausting, because Riverdale Season Six, like life, is unceasing in its chaos.

Option B has some of the same advantages of A, while requiring less energetic investment from the guests, but means that their understanding of the show is only as right or wrong, or as deep or shallow, as the systems that Omar and I offer them.

Option C takes up the least creative energy, and is in some ways the easiest way through, but at the expense of any chance to find meaning or beauty in the show, leaving guests bored and sometimes annoyed at us for making them watch it. 

In a forty minute episode of television that you are watching by yourself, it’s possible to spend the entire time in the world of Option A, taking your best wild stabs at meaning creation, and committing the energy required to order this mess of chaotic input into a digestible and satisfying enough viewing experience. 

In life, however, this is simply impossible. Nobody has the energy or ability or even opportunity to create our own systems of understanding from scratch. From childhood, we are taught the systems and categories of our parents and broader society. Which is good. If everybody categorized the universe from scratch, communication would be absolutely impossible. Look at the conflicts and miscommunications that occur between completely different cultures, cultures whose categories and explanations differ greatly from each others’, and imagine that same disconnect extended to every single human being. Even if we remove the potential for violence, there would simply be no way to cooperate, and we would die as individuals.

However, trusting too much in the systems of others without trying to some degree to process the chaos ourselves will create massive, rigidified cultural systems that will tend away from accurately describing things as they really are and instead settle deeper and deeper into simply and confidently explaining everything in a way that most people can understand. As with the example of “man” above, this will mean that entire cultures and societies now depend on forcing the surrounding world to abide by their categories, rather than admit their own instability. Thus, crusades, wars, oppressions, etc.

And then there’s Option C, which is in some ways really the most rational option: accept that I will never actually be able to understand the chaos. My human brain is not fit to hold the insurmountable complexity of everything around me, and any attempt is doomed to fail. Basically, nihilism. This is the most honest and potentially least frustrating option. However, in exchange for the acceptance and honesty, you lose out on the potential to enjoy experiences of meaning and aesthetic enjoyment, even if those experiences are themselves based on misunderstandings and oversimplifications. 

And humans need meaning. We need it as much as we need food and water. 

But the creation of meaning is exhausting and dangerous. 

But the acceptance of meaninglessness leads to despair.

So what do we do?

I don’t have a clear answer for you. That’s kind of the point of all this. 

But I can at least try to share the gesture of my own strategy:

First, accept the lesson of Option C. Remember that all our categories and systems are fabrications and best attempts, and that, as a result, we should not try to force other people to exist within the boundaries of our incomplete understanding of the world. Resist the temptations of dogmatism.

And then try to sneak some of Options A and B anyway, just for fun. Build systems of meaning on top of the fundamental acknowledgment of the incomprehensible absurdity. Adopt the categories and systems of others insofar as you need to to communicate, but never so far as to use them to justify harm.

Recognize the inherent stupidity and failure of the project to begin with. Then do it anyway.

Life is absurd. The universe is irrational. There’s too much going on for reasons we will never actually divine. All is chaos, and I will never truly understand it. But I will do my best to understand it anyway, just for fun.

Riverdale Season Six is, maybe, “bad”. But it is also the greatest season of television ever made.

It is the perfect illustration of our limited experience of existence. 

It is the meaning of life itself.

Or, at least, it has just as much claim to it as anything else does.

love,

Sara