I am one of eight billion people living on Earth. Chickens and ants outnumber us, but still: eight billion! It’s a figure that’s impossible to wrap my mind around. I can fathom eight billion lives only in the abstract.
We’re put into institutions—rounded up into groups—so we can be more easily managed. To governments, what matters is that I follow the rules, pay my taxes, and am productive. To corporations, what matters is whether I can be persuaded to purchase a particular dining table or blouse. Social media companies seek to capture my attention, as if they were commercial trawlers and I one of countless fish. I’m a consumer and I’m a user. We are categorized because categories make us comprehensible.
This article appears in Issue 29 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
Over the past decade or so, I have felt myself participating in my own flattening. This should not be surprising: When we are flattened from the outside in, we begin also to flatten from the inside out. We begin to believe it matters what we purchase and how we appear. Not only do our experiences and perspectives become flattened; we begin to flatten others just as readily. Consider our broken, polarized political system, where we self-divide into us versus them, arguing ideology in comments sections. We begin to believe this impoverished idea of who we are, forgetting it has been imposed on us and has nothing to do with how it actually feels to be human.
I reject this impoverished view of who I am, and what I am capable of. Writing is a crucial component of that resistance. Writing connects me to a truer sense of self, rejecting the designations assigned to me of customer and worker. I am told, relentlessly, that life is about wealth, status, and consumption, and I understand why: this programming benefits the system. But I suspect that being alive is about something else entirely. I write to find out what that is. Why are we here? It’s an enormous, unanswerable question that does not benefit governments or corporations for us to ask. It feels necessary to ask it.
Writing is unmistakably human, because imagination and language are human. And so, I write to imagine for myself, to reject what has been imagined for me.
Writing is an exercise in specificity and idiosyncrasy. It rejects homogeneity of thought and existence. It acknowledges the differences between people.
Under capitalism, time is configured as a resource. When I write, I reject the value system that says time is money. I take it slow and let thoughts deepen. Taking it slow means I am a poor cog in the capitalist machine, which would benefit from a more machinelike nature. (I’ve been working on this essay for days, frustrated by my own inefficiency.)
I write to find out what interests me, and interests me in particular. Lately I’m learning about flight. Birds have air sacs throughout their bodies that act like bellows; some dinosaurs did too. The Rüppell’s griffon vulture is the only bird that can fly as high as a plane, able to make do with scant oxygen because of an alteration in one of its proteins.
I write to make a record of how it feels to exist. Or at least, I write to try. It isn’t an easy task, capturing existence in words. That difficulty feels human too. I write to ask: Is grief this way for you? Is love?
And though it happens alone, writing is a means of connection. It’s paradoxical, that attuning to my life connects me to others. I know of no practice that joins me to other humans more fully. Somehow, in attempting to communicate the specificity of our experience, we create a bridge from one consciousness to another. Writing is as paradoxical as being human is. You and I are only two of eight billion lives—insignificant, but remarkable.•
Rachel Khong’s debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, won a 2017 California Book Award and was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. From 2011 to 2016, she worked at Lucky Peach magazine, first as managing editor and then as executive editor. Her second novel, Real Americans, was published in April 2024
