Cat tax in comments
I think about the social contract… a lot. It’s a phrase/concept that gets thrown around a fair amount as if it’s some ancient scroll that was negotiated eons before any of us were born. Ancestral knowledge distributed amongst every living being to ensure that strangers can occupy the same public squares (literal and virtual) without causing too much irreparable harm. We break it constantly, but few of us ever experience full outcast status. I think this is because the nomenclature is misleading: The. Social. Contract. This makes it sound like some monolithic agreement. It’s not. The social contract is instead thousands upon thousands of micro-contracts that are renegotiated on the daily: From our favorite baristas, to the countless customer service professionals we only interact with every so often. Our favorite group chats, to the people who we like immensely but just sort of fade from our lives for no reason in particular. Being the social creatures that each of us are to varying degrees takes work. There are a lot of ends to a lot of bargains that we are constantly holding up, but this is an uneasy truth to dwell upon for too long. So The Social Contract it is. One agreement, broad strokes to live by to ensure mostly pleasant interactions on a day to day basis. We are not supposed to overthink this. We are not supposed to think about it at all, really.
But it’s my nature to overthink, to notice, to dwell. I notice how every relationship is transactional to some degree even if the transaction in question is simply excellent rapport. This is still something that we have tacitly agreed to provide each other with and it’s why we make a point to keep seeing each other. What happens if either of us finds ourselves in a spot when we're no longer able to perform to full capacity? At that point we're left to hope and trust that some more ineffable quality of friendship, professional dynamic, romantic love, etc. has taken hold to fill in the gaps. To say that social media has heightened this sense of every interaction requiring some sort of unspoken exchange is extremely “uh… duh,” but let’s unpack it anyway. We post as proof of life… our BEST LIFE. We’re paid in hearts and tossed-off compliments. We post through it and we’re gifted even more hearts, sympathies, and pocket inspirations. We prop each other up with all the stability of a Jenga tower.
But there are many (many) more ways to be online. Over time, I've managed to navigate my way into a divine algorithmic cul-de-sac where roughly 90 percent of my feeds consist of strangers telling stories about their cats. These encounters always go one of two ways: The person telling the story offers photos right away as “cat tax,” or somehow has the AUDACITY to tell a story about a cat without immediately producing images of said cat. When the latter happens, other strangers band together to collect. The tax is always paid in the form of a cute cat photo and everybody wins (because we are looking at photos of cats).
This wasn’t my initial instinct for a newsletter topic this week — I cycled through many, but they’re getting kinda lofty and most of what I feel like exploring in writing these days will take research, multiple drafts, and time. Cool. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool.
But somewhere along the way, I was asked to take in a pair of two month old foster kittens on a moment’s notice, so I did. Have you ever tried to write anything when kittens are running around your home acting like kittens? If you’ve tried, much less succeeded, you are a superhuman. DM me, teach me your ways. Pretty much all I’ve done since Wednesday is wake up at 4am, replenish wet food, scoop litter boxes, giggle, and squeal with delight. The kittens have moved onto their next foster (hence my revitalized capacity to put sentences and paragraphs together!) But they also managed to shake this big-but-not-too-big topic out of me. And, of course, I always pay my taxes (see above).