Women have known this intimately for a long time.” “It’s very easy, under conditions of artificial but continually escalating obligation,” Tolentino writes in “Always Be Optimizing, “to find yourself organizing your life around practices you find ridiculous and possibly indefensible. All of these are routines Tolentino describes as degrading and dehumanizing, but routines with which she is intimately familiar. The same question also pushes through “Always Be Optimizing,” which delves into the aesthetics of the modern woman’s “ideal life”: sweating it out at Pure Barre on your lunch break, then refueling at Sweetgreen with a salad designed to be eaten in 10 minutes flat, wearing athleisure the whole time, all the better to discipline oneself to efficiently perform office work while also efficiently adhering to contemporary beauty standards. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark At the same time, it’s about how Tolentino herself, who built her career writing opinion-based essays on the internet, has benefited from the opinion-based economy that the internet created. That question animates “The I in Internet,” which examines the way the internet teaches us to treat forming and expressing an opinion as a meaningful action while simultaneously stealing the time we might use to actually enact change.

So then, what can we do? How do we survive? It’s this ambivalence that is at the center of the book: We live in a society that makes it easy and pleasurable to roll along with systems we know to be corrupt - like capitalism and sexism and racism - while also difficult and unpleasant to opt out of them, and almost impossible to oppose them in any meaningful way. “I have always accommodated everything I wish I were opposed to,” Tolentino writes toward the end of Trick Mirror. It’s a collection of essays on trying to survive the 21st century that are so incisive and elegantly constructed that as I read, I found myself wanting to underline particularly beautiful sentences again and again, until every page was black with ink. Her first book, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, expands on that theme. Tolentino came up on the women’s news sites the Hairpin and Jezebel and is now a staff writer for the New Yorker, where she takes a scalpel to concepts beloved of the Extremely Online, such as begging for celebrities to run you over with a truck and joking about Wife Guys. If you want to understand what it’s like to live your life on the internet right now, there are few writers better equipped to help you than Jia Tolentino.

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