I took the photograph on the right, of the clear glass door, in Chelsea in New York this fall. It was a bitingly cold Saturday afternoon, the kind in New York when everyone on the street is rushing to get inside, to get warm, to get somewhere. But the title of Edwin Schlossberg’s new exhibit stopped me in my tracks. Once upon a time when everyone was conscious. Those words rang true for me, felt familiar, albeit in a sad kind of way: I recognized the potency of them, their acknowledgement of the self-induced unconscious spell we’ve all been under. This spell is in part cast by technology and social media, a sort of permanent slump, a life-sentence submersion in diametrical opposition to original thought. The echoes of Schlossberg’s observation are also political, of course: “once upon a time when everyone honored the rule of law,” reads the inscription on one painting. What’s particularly interesting to me, though, and what came to mind immediately when “once upon a time when everyone was conscious” snapped me out of my mindless reverie on 19th Street, is the irony of our collective unconsciousness. 

Over the past year and a half, I’ve sat in on countless discussions, both formal and informal, of race, political division, accountability, historical reckoning, fighting the algorithm, concerns over my generation’s fractured attention span, and the dangers of cancel culture—all of which suggest that we are all paying very close attention and thinking very hard and very critically about the world around us. Which isn’t totally untrue. But the pendulum has swung the other way: as a friend said to me recently, “You can’t say anything!” One reaction to the state of affairs of the last few years is a hypersensitivity to any hint of offense, as my friend pointed out. Which is its own breed of unconsciousness. 

Diversity in important rooms is necessary for equitable decisions to be made—but what about proclamations that television shows such as Gossip Girl, which is about a group of Upper East Side friends, are not diverse enough? Gossip Girl is an accurate reflection of the demographic it’s portraying, even if that means the world doesn’t look the way we might want it to look. I don’t disagree with those who believe that cancel culture is too far: accountability is different from erasure and censorship of faded ideals.  But maybe in order to penetrate the crux of our collective moral quandaries, we have to make mistakes, have to fumble a bit, have to state the obvious. 

Thoreau said, “One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.” Perhaps he was referring to the headstrong foolishness of the young, but I think this applies to the way older generations interact with younger generations as much as the other way around. In a complete departure from what I previously said, it’s easy for our parents and grandparents to shake their heads at social media. And as much as the fused-thinking symptom of social media scares me, I’m in awe of the activism it inspires. I’m no authority on the subject, just someone who likes to observe the ebbs and flows of our collective consciousness—or unconsciousness.