I’m so grateful to have met you!! This piece is so brilliant and I’m honored to be included here 💘 I’ll be thinking about secular metaphysics and manufactured nonchalance for a long time and I’m excited to dive in during many more chats with you!!
"Our cultural obsession with nonchalance and this particular breed of mythmaking long predates Instagram, as does the desire to manufacture it." — this part is so important! it seems like even within the growing awareness of manufactured nonchalance, we're relieved to be able to blame it on instagram, just so we can pretend like it's out of our control because the big bad internet tricked us. Thank you for sharing this!!
Also side note, a DC meet-up sounds lovely and I'll have to join next time!
Your 2017 piece still resonates—especially in tracing manufactured nonchalance from Castiglione’s sprezzatura to van-life aesthetics. You show how effortlessness has become both aspiration and expectation, a shared performance we recognize and repeat. The contrast between Vivien and Diana in The Portrait of a Mirror captures this well: one polished, the other deliberately effortful—yet both caught in the same loop of signal and surface.
What I also admire is how you push beyond aesthetics into what you call secular metaphysics. That’s an interface that always gives me pause—I'm drawn to the “metaphysical” side while hearing the echo of readers muttering, “Quit making a point all the time.” But you hold that tension deftly. You name the illusion without retreating into irony or easy answers. The result is something rare: a critique that keeps looking—clear-eyed, unfinished, and honest.
You make the artifice visible without breaking the frame. Grateful for the insight!
I’m so grateful to have met you!! This piece is so brilliant and I’m honored to be included here 💘 I’ll be thinking about secular metaphysics and manufactured nonchalance for a long time and I’m excited to dive in during many more chats with you!!
For sure—I’m so glad you liked it as much as I did yours
"Our cultural obsession with nonchalance and this particular breed of mythmaking long predates Instagram, as does the desire to manufacture it." — this part is so important! it seems like even within the growing awareness of manufactured nonchalance, we're relieved to be able to blame it on instagram, just so we can pretend like it's out of our control because the big bad internet tricked us. Thank you for sharing this!!
Also side note, a DC meet-up sounds lovely and I'll have to join next time!
Yes! & I’m realizing I should have linked this to the line you cite https://joukovsky.substack.com/p/the-theory-of-the-leisure-class-on
Your 2017 piece still resonates—especially in tracing manufactured nonchalance from Castiglione’s sprezzatura to van-life aesthetics. You show how effortlessness has become both aspiration and expectation, a shared performance we recognize and repeat. The contrast between Vivien and Diana in The Portrait of a Mirror captures this well: one polished, the other deliberately effortful—yet both caught in the same loop of signal and surface.
What I also admire is how you push beyond aesthetics into what you call secular metaphysics. That’s an interface that always gives me pause—I'm drawn to the “metaphysical” side while hearing the echo of readers muttering, “Quit making a point all the time.” But you hold that tension deftly. You name the illusion without retreating into irony or easy answers. The result is something rare: a critique that keeps looking—clear-eyed, unfinished, and honest.
You make the artifice visible without breaking the frame. Grateful for the insight!