Yearn in Review

Daisy Alioto looks backwards and forwards.

If you’re looking for a simple “Best of Dirt 2023” list, come back tomorrow! We’ll be recapping the dirtiest stories of the year, as voted on by our readers.

When the common periwinkle population exploded in Maine in the 19th century, it literally changed the color of the coastline. The stone-colored winkles ate the orange, red and green algae that once lined the bottom of the northeastern shallows. Marine biologists have studied oil paintings from the period to try and determine the degree of this color shift—which is the exact intersection of art and science I find irresistible. 

I can see Casco Bay from the window of my grandmother’s old house, which sits at the tip of one of three peninsulas offshooting a bigger one. The three smaller peninsulas are like a chicken’s foot and the leg, the long peninsula, is the road that takes me into town over the course of a 20-minute drive. (In order to get into town, I have to pass my old college campus. Sometimes I pause at a crosswalk for the younger version of myself to cross. It doesn’t bother me anymore, these ghosts.) I could do it in faster than 20 minutes, I know every twist and turn, but there is no accounting for deer—and you should always account for deer. 

Earlier this year, I passed Google’s Street View car on my way to the grocery store and felt a profound sense of dread. Similar to the moment a woman appeared in front of me at my grandmother’s funeral and said, “I heard you’re getting the house.” 

She wasn’t my grandmother, technically. She was always Cheryl. And the house cannot simply be gotten but it’s true that my grandmother died here and my husband and I are living here part time, weeding the gardens, mowing the lawn, keeping the pipes from freezing. It is also true that in the picture of the house on Street View, August 2013, it is my grandmother’s car parked out front. In the latest photo–August 2023–I am still at the grocery store. 

This year, I drove the long peninsula at 3am when there was nobody else on it. I drove it at 4am with the night nurses and the fishermen. All hours of the day, blasting my music, thinking, “I’ve got to get more money.” Past the church with the steeple, the old graveyard, the “we buy boats” sign, the door wreaths (winter), quilts on clotheslines (summer), the family compound that I heard is divided down the middle because the two sides don’t talk to each other (eternal), the old state flag flying next to the Ukrainian one, sandy soil, dark pines, and fat stacks of lobster traps. 

In the spring, I went with my mother to clean out my grandmother’s safety deposit box at the bank. Inside were birth certificates for humans and cremation certificates for multiple golden retrievers. “She was the end of the line,” my mother said. 

I have sometimes wondered if living in the place where she slipped away has pressed me a little too tightly against my grief. The mail that comes in her name. The old scent of the house slowly replaced, until the only spot that still smells like her is the inside of the closets. I like being here. Our road terminates in a marina with a seafood restaurant. In the summer, the younger restaurant staff live in a dormitory together down the street. I like seeing them walk to work in the morning with their backpacks. I like hearing the lobster boats humming from a distance. 

Earlier this year, Dirt contributor Michelle Santiago Cortés wrote about “yearnposting”, examining the trend of Instagram and TikTok content for people that “want to be devastated (in a good way).” These posts, “combine the warmth of a wholesome meme with the hope of a motivational post and the raw emotion of a trauma meme,” like a video by noted yearner Sotce, sliding her hands across a wooden floor, captioned, “sometimes i go back in time just so i can feel it twice.”

If authenticity was the emotional register of the aughts and post-aughts era, yearning will define the 2020s. It’s not that things have changed so much: online shopping, pornification, bland pop music, and sans serif fonts are not recent developments. However, the stakes for preserving our relationship to things that cannot immediately be had have never felt higher. After all, yearning is a subset of authenticity––a specific type of authenticity that comes from wanting. It’s the thing that we turn to after too easily “having” causes us to lose our way. Yearning isn’t like wellness in the way Gwyneth Paltrow or Andrew Huberman would sell wellness because it often feels like unwellness, but then it also feels like healing. 

A sample of recent meme formats applied to yearning include: “Did you seriously just yearn in front of me,” “yearning is like the gooning of the heart,” and “how fake lovers look when real romantic yearners come at them.” In 2024, I predict we’re going to start seeing more posts like, “does anyone else have this burning yearning yearning feeling deep inside them that hurts so bad ?” and “haha the longing and yearning isnt even thaat bad throws up”

There are some things that have meaningfully changed since the post-aughts: deep fakes have gotten better. Artificial intelligence, if not developing more rapidly, is landing in consumer hands with a pace previously unseen. This is technology that challenges authenticity by making it harder to tell what is real. For the past twenty years, the dominant business models—aided and abetted by software—have turned culture into a simulacrum. Now, software is the simulacrum, a surgeon reaching into its own belly to write and revise without the aid of the human hand or mind. 

But does AI yearn? Does it “want” in any credible way? For the time being, we seem to maintain our human advantage. “We need a human renaissance in the age of intelligent machines,” argues Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic, saying we should make deep connections with other people—the type of connections that, in my view, are based on a mutual power of refusal. This directly opposes the view that digital avatars unburdened by human limitations can solve the current loneliness crisis. 

“Not everything should be recorded or shared; there is individual freedom in embracing ephemerality. More human interactions should take place only between the people involved; privacy is key to preserving our humanity,” writes LaFrance. That goes for the relationship between a critic and their subject as well. In the words of Vivian Medithi, “I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by SEO, starving, hysterical, naked.” 

In 2024, yearning is the human voice on the other end of the suicide crisis hotline, offering, as Evan Grillon writes, “solicitude unalloyed by the past or the future of the relationship, unconditional in the true sense of the word.” It is the ambiguous Reply, containing, “any level of intimacy, any level of investment, any level of care,” according to Mariah Kreutter. 

A humanism that responds to the collapse of Big Authenticity will be sexier. As Magdalene Taylor recently wrote, “Real things and actual human experiences are hot, even in the written form. They have a libidinal energy that’s been drained from us in the current technological era. And we’re going to want to get that energy back.” This collapse might even manifest in a return to psychoanalysis, as Sophie Kemp posits: “there is something alluring about sitting on a couch in a room with oak paneled walls, talking about your dreams.” 

Yearning is magical thinking. Yearning is jewelry made of baby teeth. It’s admitting that Imagine Dragons might be good, actually. It’s ugly food, like really ugly, onscreen in Napoleon Dynamite, “meaty, carnal, overflowing with strange fluids, equal parts grotesque and alluring.” It’s a writer in Prague conducting a friendship in voice notes.

If “what cannot be said will be wept” in the words of Anne Carson, then the yearner resists easy expression or the type of self-labeling that can be contained in an email signature. As Chidinma Iwu writes in Dirt about Afrodrill as a “genre of recalcitrance,” any innovations that come out of this era of post-authenticity will resemble, “the subgenre of a subgenre”. What cannot be wept will defy categorization. 

I’m not afraid to yearn, I’m afraid of what happens when the yearning ends. Yearning subverts the dichotomy between healthy and unhealthy. Is it healthy to smoke a cigarette? Is it healthy to take blood transfusions from your son to live an extra ten years? Why is one type of magical thinking worthy of a Paradigm investment, and the other type is worthy of scorn if your self-driving vehicle takes a wrong turn into Tenderloin and then stalls. 

Want wants to want want. To accept yearning means accepting that you have the same rights as the “wrong” type of addict. Silicon Valley’s dirty secret is that the fastest way to create shareholder value is to create addiction and pleasure’s dirty secret is that, decoupled from yearning, sex is just a latent impulse—like the tailbones that used to be tails.