Tag: BOTM

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10374 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-03-27 21:37:14 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-03-27 21:37:14 [post_content] =>

How the ephemerality of the internet and the many ways we present ourselves online has warped our ability to know who we really are.

Will the Future Like You? Reflections on the Age of Hyper-Reinvention begins with a declaration: Our personal identities have not kept pace with the tempo of technology. And, according to author Patricia Martin, this imbalance has made us wholly unprepared to explore—let alone answer—the age-old question of who we really are.

In her book, Martin, a cognitive psychology-informed cultural analyst and host of the podcast Jung in the World, frames many of her arguments using Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes, applying them to identity formation in the digital age. If Jung’s original thesis proposes that humans rely on universal themes and inherited behaviors in the psyche to present who we are across self, shadow, persona, and anima, Martin contends the ephemerality of the internet has warped our inheritance. Her primary concern are the selves we present to the world via our various performances online, often manufactured as authentic while being anything but. Carrying out numerous ethnographic approaches including content analysis, narrative interviews, and sorting and coding “15,000 online users across 500 million posts,” she concludes these performances are also occurring at an exorbitant rate never experienced before in human history, sowing mass identity confusion in the process.

Having become increasingly skeptical (and weary) of internet self-presentation via social media, I devoured Martin’s latest work, which utilized psychoanalytical language and frameworks to explore observations I’ve mainly considered through a cultural and anthropological lens. But even those who don’t agree with Martin (or me) about the current state of affairs will likely find instructive value in the book’s summations about our ever brave new technological era and its effects on identity.

According to Martin, there are three main elements contributing to our modern distortions of self-construction and development: “personal fog,” “chronic self-doubt,” and “cascading crossroads.” Borrowing from Jung’s definition of the persona as a complex system that helps the individual relate with the world socially by wearing a kind of mask, Martin argues that personal fog comes from the continuous amplification and proliferation of various personas online, which obliterate our sense of who we are. Chronic self-doubt, meanwhile, delineates the distances between our digital presentations, which rely on external validation, and the selves we present offline, a gap that can cause tremendous self-uncertainty. Finally, cascading crossroads is characterized by how previously reliable identity anchors—such as family and work, or even other modes, such as class, gender, and where we consider home—now fluctuate more frequently, making our shape-shifting far more incessant.

Among the many examples Martin offers of this increasing ephemerality, she cites the story of the trailblazing confessional blogger, Heather Armstrong. In the early aughts, Armstrong’s blog, Dooce, was a “mommy tell-all” magnet to millions, especially young mothers, who regularly consumed her relatable personal accounts of raising two children in Salt Lake City, Utah. But even before Dooce’s eventual decline due to the rise of social media, Martin points out that as Armstrong “matured, she found her light waning,” and the blogger increasingly divulged more serious confessions, including daily alcohol consumption and marital issues, not to mention the details of her history with depression. Martin isn’t explicit about whether Armstrong’s solemn shift was a cry for help or an effort to reinvigorate the blog. She does, however, add that “Dooce attempted several comebacks. But traffic never bounced back.” In 2023, Armstrong died by suicide. Examining how she was remembered, Martin notes “how little was said about her massive output of content, the effort it took, and the emotional toll of constant reinvention…”

While Armstrong’s story is a particularly dire case, there are others—admittedly less tragic—throughout the book that still speak to the toll our relationship to having an audience is taking on our relationship to ourselves. Martin also makes clear this goes beyond those who are, in some shape or form, attempting to be influencers: All of us online are liable to the emotional struggles of trying to juggle various presentations at cost to our psyche and identity development.

However, the book doesn’t propose that we all abandon the internet (to the extent that we can) to counter these identity disruptions. Nor does Martin suggest that we wholly desert digital performance and presentation altogether. Rather, she asks the reader to more carefully consider the repercussions to our relationships—both to ourselves and others—online, where our identities are overwhelmed by seemingly endless transmutations, and ultimately underpinned by digital spaces extorting our identity confusion for profit.

This inevitably has affinities with Karl Marx’s concept of the alienation of the factory worker from anything that could give their work meaning. But for me, it brought to mind Aimé Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, and its thesis that the thingification of the colonized subject turns them into a commodity, isolating a person from themselves and the other. Transposing Cesaire’s contentions onto Martin’s begs questions worth probing further: Are we being colonized by the internet? Or by the tech bros that run it?

Luckily, Martin doesn’t leave us without specific resolutions for alleviating our identity disruptions, the greatest of which is—perhaps surprisingly—a spiritual recommendation: that we reconsider the soul. Some anecdotes in the book are even dedicated to people who've been able to subvert identity confusion by relying on time-honored means of transformation and soul-enrichment: insulating themselves offline, and leaning on close bonds in the flesh.

Martin also challenges us not to render onto technology what cannot be done by technology. Instead, she encourages us to create and honor our most true selves beyond the curations the internet can only offer. “We set boundaries, we verify claims, and we don’t give ourselves away too easily for the sake of a little fawning attention,” Martin writes in the concluding chapters of the book; to me, sound advice regardless of which continuum of internet identity discourse you choose to be on. She also offers perhaps one resolve for the question the book’s title proposes, Will the Future Like You?: Ultimately, the quest to answer this in the digital space is a hollow endeavor, because it requires an endless reconfiguration of selves, often to our own detriment. So, whatever selves we do offer up as performance in digital spaces, at the very least, we should refuse to give in fully—saving us perhaps not only from ourselves, but for ourselves.

[post_title] => March Book of the Month: "Will The Future Like You?" by Patricia Martin [post_excerpt] => How the ephemerality of the internet has warped our ability to know who we are. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => march-book-of-the-month-botm-will-the-future-like-you-patricia-martin-identity-online-social-media-nonfiction-psychology [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-03-27 21:38:46 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-03-27 21:38:46 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10374 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

March 27, 2026March 27, 2026

March Book of the Month: “Will The Future Like You?” by Patricia Martin

by Kovie Biakolo

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10212 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-02-26 12:45:10 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-02-26 12:45:10 [post_content] =>

A memoir interwoven with historical research that might leave you wondering if anything really changes in these United States.

The Mixed Marriage Project’s title will more than likely give an onlooker pause. Perhaps that’s the point. But before conjuring up too many presumptions based on the name, one might also note it is the work of renowned law professor and sociologist Dorothy E. Roberts. Amongst other books, Roberts is the author of Killing the Black Body (about black women’s reproductive history in the United States) and Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century. In her latest, a memoir interwoven with historical research, she unfolds her parents’ interracial relationship, and through it, partly unravels a United States’ history of the subject itself.

The “project” of the book’s title is personal for Roberts: In the 1930s, her father, a white American of Welsh and German descent, set out to examine interracial relationships between black and white people specifically, while studying to be an anthropologist at the University of Chicago. His interview-based research, which explored interracial unions formed as early as the late 1800s, continued till the 1960s and ’70s, and included interviewing the children of couples he’d earlier surveyed. This feat was supposed to become a book, sold to a publisher while her father was working as a professor at Chicago’s Roosevelt University. But the book was never published, and its stories left untold until now.

Roberts theorizes the reason for this was that her father’s work had become so interwoven into his identity—and their family life—that its completion would have caused a real identity disruption. Who was he if he wasn’t working on the project? And where did that leave her and her family?

Through her own research, Roberts learns her mother, a black, Jamaican immigrant, was also involved in this work, conducting interviews alongside her father for many years. Both were committed to the project’s objectives, one of which was to demonstrate that interracial relationships are not inherently abnormal, because black and white people are not fundamentally different. This was also how her parents met: While majoring in chemistry at Roosevelt, her mother became her father’s research assistant. (In the book, Roberts explicitly states she “wonder[s] how their professional partnership evolved into a romantic one—and whether they worried about the perception of impropriety.”) This prompts Roberts to question an underlying reason for her parents' marriage: Were they supposed to be embodiments of their own mixed marriage project? If Roberts’ parents were indeed as much a part of the study as they were leads of it, she concludes, it would make her and her sisters its subjects, too—or, at least, its personified outcomes.

Rather than be rattled by this possibility, the author measures it against the people she personally knew her parents to be—curious, culturally-aware, well-traveled, and community-minded. Her parents’ relationship, after all, existed beyond their work, and they were initially drawn to each other by their shared sense of adventure, similar values on education, and complementary sensibilities—her mother as the planner and her father as the spontaneous one. By her own admission, Roberts gives them a latitude that an outsider might not. But I reckon this is where the book shines as memoir, rather than an investigation of an investigation: the reader gets to know Roberts’ parents through her loving eyes. Loving eyes that, for the record, do not condone the same politics her parents—especially her father—may have arrived at through their work: that interracial relationships offer some kind of medium to restore black and white relations in the United States, shaped by white supremacy and violence. (On this, Roberts pointedly disagrees.)

Beyond family history, the themes in Project will be recognizable to anyone versed on the discourse, likely causing you to wonder if anything really changes in these United States. The politics of the study’s participants—black men, black women, white men, and white women in heterosexual, interracial relationships—reveal how black men-white women couples were seen as more “acceptable” but also more arduous in the long-run; white women often lost privilege they couldn’t regain unless divorced. The research also highlighted the sexual tropes attached to black women-white men couples—and the misogynoir that informs outsiders' views of them. Recurring themes, regardless of interracial pairings, showed how marital cutting across the color line affected one’s choice of neighborhood and the life afforded to them and, possibly, their children. Also recurring—especially in the civil rights era—were the many well-meaning couples who entered these marriages in the hopes of proving to the world as much as to themselves that interracial coupling inherently combats a racist society. This hope, Roberts argues, was often an erroneous one, as countless couples later found out.

In the lasting analysis of her father’s work, Roberts arrives at the same conclusion that she began with regarding interracial relationships: They are not panacea for a society, a country, or a world that has yet to unravel itself from white supremacy, let alone repair its many casualties. But in Project, Roberts shows us that despite flawed, socially-constructed and racialized societies, people will enter unions and arrangements of all kinds, her parents included. These unions may not transcend race, but they do demonstrate that, in spite of the race politics attached, people will deem them worth fighting for. Some do so naively and are thus confronted with seeing the depths of racism like they never have before. But others, especially the curious, culturally-aware, and community-minded, go into them with eyes wide open, prepared to confront all of its politics united.

[post_title] => February Book of the Month: "The Mixed Marriage Project" by Dorothy E. Roberts [post_excerpt] => A memoir interwoven with historical research that might leave you wondering if anything really changes in these United States. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => february-book-of-the-month-botm-pick-the-mixed-marriage-project-by-dorothy-e-roberts-memoir-interracial-relationships-dating-history-research [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-02-27 20:45:28 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-02-27 20:45:28 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10212 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

February 26, 2026February 27, 2026

February Book of the Month: “The Mixed Marriage Project” by Dorothy E. Roberts

by Kovie Biakolo

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 9993 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-01-29 23:07:30 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-01-29 23:07:30 [post_content] =>

A memoir that grapples with changing ambitions and the myth of having it all.

Many millennials (or non-millenials, for that matter) will be familiar with the overarching plight of Amil Niazi’s Life After Ambition, her "good enough memoir": the experience of being stuck in the rat race of chasing one dream after another, only to find yourself on a never-ending grind. In this race, there’s always one more goal to achieve—one more professional hurdle to overcome, one more career ambition to attain—before the dream can be realized. For women especially, relentlessly pursuing a profession, while ensuring all other aspects of your life are left unscathed, becomes an ever-shifting goalpost; the quintessential “having it all”.

As the book’s title implies, Niazi unfolds the futility of this chase, made especially futile given the instabilities accompanying her career of choice—journalism and writing. But the memoir is as much a personal unfolding as it is a professional one. In it, we learn of Niazi’s parents' almost romcom-like origins before she disabuses the reader of the myth of their marriage and the prospect of an idyllic childhood. There are the anticipated working-class migrant struggles, the family never having quite enough, which takes them across oceans to seek a better life in England, where the author was born, and eventually, to Canada, where the author has spent most of her life. There’s also the abuse between her parents, which Niazi touches without ever quite expounding on, even as she informs of their eventual divorce and sketches her own experience of intimate partner abuse later in life.

In Niazi’s childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, there’s a persistent feeling of lack. There’s little romanticizing of her circumstances, and she admits her personal rat race was likely born from this instinct: Storytelling—reporting and writing—was the one endeavor that allowed her to make sense of the world. In distressing but humorous episodes, she depicts a life of underemployment before eventually landing a job that sets her on a viable career path. Amid all the instabilities, she moves from Vancouver to Toronto with a boyfriend who physically abuses her—and there, the violent ending of their final contact results in a hard-to-shake addiction to prescription drugs. Through all of this, Niazi continues to work, uncertain of who she can trust with the vulnerable parts of her life, but finding stability through her ambitions—learning along the way, her calculus won’t always pay off.

There are bright spots throughout Niazi’s ordeals, despite the numerous and varied difficulties. There is a dog she loves and cares for, friends who intervene, and a reliable boyfriend who eventually becomes her husband. Yet her career ambitions remain the driving force that shapes her life, until suddenly, it isn’t; and for Niazi, a large part of this shift happens when she becomes a mother. After a period in London—chosen, of course, for her career ambitions—she ultimately returns to Toronto with her family when she realizes those ambitions have changed.

Indeed, in the final analysis of Life After Ambition, I wonder if the author doesn’t slightly betray the title. She gains fresh perspective through her choice to pursue having a third child, and by attempting the kind of writing career she’s always longed for, one less defined by output, and instead, by balance. For her, motherhood and writing are intertwined and related; one aids the other, and though she must make sacrifices to have both, neither can be forfeited.

Perhaps less than delineating what life looks like after ambition fades and falters, what the author concludes is what becomes of us—especially of many women—when our ambitions include more than the careers we set out to have. In so doing, what Niazi offers in her debut book is not only a re-think of our lives as she unravels her own, but a re-defining of ambition entirely, demanding we consider the whole of our lives, and not just the parts we keep separate in the name of career.

[post_title] => January Book of the Month: "Life After Ambition" by Amil Niazi [post_excerpt] => A memoir that grapples with changing ambitions and the myth of having it all. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => book-of-the-month-botm-january-pick-life-after-ambition-amil-niazi-memoir [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-01-29 23:09:45 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-01-29 23:09:45 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=9993 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

January 29, 2026January 29, 2026

January Book of the Month: “Life After Ambition” by Amil Niazi

by Kovie Biakolo

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