Colton Valentine

*Twenty-thirteen was the year I got super into SoulCycle. It’s gross but I don’t care because I need it and I love it (ha ha so gross). Actually, wait, that’s completely misleading because I only got into it two months ago. Whatever, it’s the best. *



*— Mary HK Choi, the awl.com*



 



Replace “SoulCycle”—the spinning phenomenon sweeping the affluent, pro-fitness nation—with “heroin,” and Choi seems clear-cut for a dependency diagnosis. She has all the telltale signs: skewed perception of how long she’s been on the drug; repeated revulsion at her “gross” behavior; recognition of the compulsion but complete inability to stop. The habit consumes Choi’s resources and displaces old vices. She “stops buying clothes, shoes, cigarettes, weed, cocktails (what a racket) and pounds of bulk gummy candy” to pay for the privilege to “zone out for a spell.” She ends by proselytizing: “SoulCycle feels gross, is gross and I’m grateful to have found it. If you’ve ever suspected you’d be into it, get over yourself and go.” Even as she reviles the cultic exercise class, she desperately pulls others into the fantasy.



Choi’s story epitomizes the emerging micro-genre I’ll call the “SoulCycle Narrative”: personal pieces structured like tales of addiction and published on blogs and local news outlets, even in *The New York Times*. The dealer of choice is the exercise franchise SoulCycle, which, for 34 dollars, offers 45 minutes of pedaling on indoor stationary bikes, in the dark, with house music blaring. Printed on the candle-lit studio walls is a manifesto with lines like “we inhale intention and exhale expectation.” Instructors shout a mixture of encouragement, dance instructions, and new-agey, spiritual mantras: “I want the next breath to be an exorcism.” Exercise is not an uncommon contemporary addiction, but SoulCycle dresses its junkies in exclusive style1, and the new narcotic for the rich has transformed a single Upper West Side studio into a national franchise with over 1,200 employees in 40 cities. What distinguishes the SoulCycle Narrative most of all, though, is that it recounts a distinctly postmodern addiction: affirming dependence as transcendence, abandoning critical distance, embracing the irrational with irony.



Though “addiction” did not arise as a medical term until the nineteenth century, people have been telling tales of dependence for millennia. Roman historian Seneca wrote, “excessive alcohol will destroy the mind and magnify character defects.” The Bible is littered with concern over Noah’s delight in drink. Recent archeological evidence suggests 30,000-year-old cultivation of opiates, the drug that spurred the modern addiction narrative with Thomas De Quincey’s *Confessions of an English Opium-Eater* in 1821. The genre passed through Charles Baudelaire’s riff on Quincy in *Les paradis artificiels* to its more recent forms in William S. Burroughs’ *Junky* and Caroline Knapp’s *Drinking: A Love Story*.



From Quincey to Knapp, the addiction narrative traces similar story arcs with similar language. In an intimate, confessional register, it begins by recounting trepidation, building to the climactic moment of first exposure. Those initial experiences are tinged with rapture and breathless nostalgia; the retrospective narrator cannot help but yearn for unpolluted intoxication. Then comes the slow descent, coated in motifs of monstrous transformation, of being taken over by a demon. Loss of mind follows loss of friends until...rock bottom. The result is slow, painful recovery, reconciliation, and—in the better tales—shrewd insight.



The SoulCycle Narrative fits comfortably into these tropes and story arcs. Like a teeneager taking her first bong-hit, the cycling protagonist is anxious as she anticipates the initial class. She finds herself overwhelmed by social codes: online reservations booked days in advance, waitlist lurkers waiting for no-shows, an insider language with inscrutable phrases like “tap it back” and “add a quarter turn.” (Translations: Move the buttocks to the rear of the bike, lengthening the spine; increase the bike’s resistance to maximize calorie burn in the thighs.) But once the spinner takes her first endorphin-toke, there’s no going back. “The body has no choice but to submit,” says David Holmes in a pando.com piece, and the “emotional misery your fucked-up life’s been serving you” vanishes in the room just as when a fiend enters his opium den or Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole. A perfect mix of upper and hallucinogen, spinning grants the narrators energy, escape, and transcendence. In a piece on *The Verge*, Nitashak Tiku reluctantly attends a first class with the sole aim of speaking with Twitter’s CEO. Unsurprisingly, the social media hotshot’s a SoulCycle devotee, and Tiku thinks she can leverage the cycling endorphins to start a conversation despite the strobe lights and techno. She fails, twice, but along the way SoulCycle becomes her “new best friend.” Drugs have always been great companions, and by the narrative’s end, Tiku hardly remembers the reason she first came to the class.



Next comes withdrawal from old communities. Holmes is reticent to advertise his habit because he thinks he will be unfairly judged as “a person who craves status and exclusivity.”2 He hides from watchful eyes and cites other cyclers who are even more dependent. Several pieces quote fanatics selecting apartments due to SoulCycle studio proximity, ensuring their dealer is always within reach. One woman rearranges her work schedule to leave prime class-booking time free. “I would do anything I could to afford these rides,” she says of her thirteen-class-a-week lifestyle. “Don’t knock it until you try it” says a shirt. “This isn’t spinning, it’s a way of life” echoes another cycler.



In the classic addiction narrative, those statements would signal a turn toward crisis, the first hints of rock-bottom, withdrawal, and treatment. The SoulCycle analog, though, makes no such move. Holmes opts for the perplexing resolution, “if we are elitists, then it’s a close-knit community of elitism—an in-crowd of equals,” fully embracing his drugged-up cohorts, all but glorifying the economic barrier to being “equal.” He acknowledges the transience of the high, the need for another fix within hours—but ultimately affirms his behavior: “Surely there are worse things to be addicted to.” So the SoulCycle Narrative ends not by confronting the drug, but by accepting it, indeed celebrating it. While the habit may be expensive and indulgent, the narrative deems it beneficial and, mostly importantly, connective.



Connection, in fact, is what makes SoulCycle a distinctly postmodern addiction. The traditional narrative of dependence is told by an outcast whose consumptive habits have made him a modernist monad: someone, like Edvard Munch’s subject in *The Scream*, who stands alone, observing the world at a harrowing distance. But the SoulCycle spin-off reels with spiritual exclamations of how riders pedal—and breathe and exorcise—to a single beat: a transcendence of subjectivity that spurns ecstatic wonder without any of the darkness that makes most addicts shriek. In his famous case-study on postmodernism, Fredric Jameson calls this the swap of modernist “expressions” for postmodernist “intensities.” Intensities are “free-floating and impersonal”—developing between cyclers rather than within them—and they are dominated by a “peculiar kind of euphoria.” If modernist addiction confronted the horror of isolated expressions, postmodern addiction ends with the acceptance of relativism and affirmation of irrationality. The moral quandary of a connection so soaked in wealth is forgotten amidst all the endorphins. If the body has not broken down, if the pack rides together, the next squat can be popped like a pill without shame.



Postmodern addiction, then, no longer plagues the individual, but rather satisfies her so fully she forgets the rest of the world. Perhaps most insidiously it allows for and incorporates its own critique. Though the SoulCycle Narrative is filled with complaints about the price and the practice—half the riders, like Choi, revile themselves for going—any objections are irrationally abandoned at its end. Jameson, too, noted that postmodern capitalism elides distance between an analyst and a cultural phenomenon, so “the luxury of the old-fashioned ideological critique, the indignant moral denunciation of the other, becomes unavailable.” The SoulCycle Narrative is too bound up in its own luxury to hit rock bottom, too connected to the pack of riders to stop and think about its place in the broader cultural fabric. The critic holds her ironic relationship to spinning right up until she enters the candle-lit room. But then, in the wake of her contemporary spiritual nihilism, a rider’s connection to that pack is simply too wondrous to resist: “the visual culture of consumerism” fills her “voids” and she is blinded in euphoria. She will die gloriously, sweating like the Übermensch in a room beyond good and evil—even if the rest of the world burns.



 



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1 Literally. The brand has an overwhelming assortment of paraphernalia: water bottles, skull-shirts, leggings, sweats, fingerless gloves, bandanas, “embroidered cashmere socks,” even their custom candles. Plus, there’s supplemental material on the best Soul-music, Soul-diets, Soul-lifestyle. For every Bob Marley and White Castle reference in stoner tales, there’s an Avicii-remix or chia-seed smoothie in those of the cycler. The bike itself comes for a reasonable $2,200: the equivalent of two months of every-day SoulCycle or a few-year membership at a well-equipped gym. 



 



2Never mind that he clearly is that person. “I am one of the privileged few who have reserved their spots for the 8:00 AM session,” he says, describing the intense competition for bikes that causes people to pay double ($60+) for priority access. In the SoulCycle addict community, “privilege” does not denote the financial luxury of affording a class, but rather the good fortune to have beaten out other riders for a bike. The “unprivileged,” one presumes, are those who clicked too slowly, who remain burdened with that extra thirty dollars. A January *New York Times* piece “A Race to the Front Row” describes the “status symbol” of peddling in the front of a class. By delineating the haves and have nots within a spin community, the article boldly ignores the status symbol of just belonging to the community. Sterilized, safe competition arises between members of the elite—for a front bike, for a favorite instructor. 

Each day a requiem for zeal arrives in my gmail inbox: *The Harvard Crimson*’s Flyby-blog newsletter.



One recent piece reduced earnest service work in “Exploring the lives of Harvard’s homeless business vendors” to sycophantic go-getter-ness with the lead: “Reminding us a little bit of our (formerly) overachieving selves, two high school students…” Another post deemed what are arguably the most prestigious humanities orations in the United States, given, this year, by America’s most prestigious writer, mere fabricated pseudo-intellectualism: Toni Morrison’s final Norton Lecture was called: “the type of intellectual curiosity experience you claimed to be interested in when you applied to Harvard.”



                  No doubt Flyby has its reasons, in a Harvard lambasted for over-achieving, egoism, and self-import, to adopt a deprecating tone. But I am haunted by the scope of that rhetoric, not because it bears on Flyby, but because it articulates and reiterates an alarming self-impression: that Harvard students are banal, disinterested, selfish, and anti-intellectual. It is a mindset given excellent expression by Friedrich Nietzsche’s “slave morality”: a self-fulfilling, self-flagellating prophecy that humans are fundamentally weak. I’d like to call its 2016 incarnation “Netflix morality.” Because, according to this mindset, binge-watching television comatose in bed is a Harvard student’s preferred activity.[[1]](#_ftn1)



                  So what constitutes “Netflix morality”? Sleep is one fixation: “We’re honestly shocked that we could be this sleep-deprived already, given that it’s only week two of classes,” writes one post, “At least we have the upside-down smiley face emoji to perfectly personify our woes.” Exhaustion pervades the content, yet the hope of shifting insomniac tendencies is forgotten in an emoji—that paragon of bland, ironic indifference. Food is another, highlighted in an entire “Free Food Watch” column that succeeds brilliantly in effacing the academic, artistic, or cultural significance of every event in light of its (frankly disappointing) gustatory offerings. No discipline is safe: The other day “If you’re willing to trek to Pierce and sit through some engineering final project presentations” combined with “Farkas will be hosting the reading of one senior’s thesis play at 7:30 p.m. Food will be provided!” to deny the value of SEAS and the performing arts in a single catered-crunch. Meetings sponsored by affinity groups are reduced to the presence of potstickers and pad thai.



                  An alimentary or soporific allure, however, is not, in Netflix morality, strictly necessary to negate intellectual meaning. A recent “Reflections on Rejections” panel (fodder for another day of Nietzsche) was summed up with “if Dean Dingman didn’t have to hand in his thesis neither do you.” This same tone pervades any description of “work”: midterms, readings, but especially theses. School is never permitted to be genuinely enjoyable or meaningful; it is always a chore, a chore holding the vain hope that some excuse could vanish Toni Morrison or a scholarly study of her novels—to make a bit more time for Netflix.



                  In *The Genealogy of Morals*, Nietzsche gives one narrative for how this mindset develops. He delineates broadly between self-affirming moralities and self-negating moralities; the first externalizes emotions while the second internalizes them. More specifically, the negating type posits a “a neutral agent, free to manifest its strength or contain it”—a division between sentiment and action Nietzsche finds absurd. Theorizing this break is essential in self-negating moralities because it allows the formulation “I could have but I didn’t” as in “I could have performed an interest in Toni Morrison or the homeless advocacy but I did not need to.” In a self-affirming morality, such logic would not hold: Validation could not be accrued for something that did not manifest, for “the sublime slight of hand which gives weakness the appearance of free choice and one’s natural disposition the distinction of merit.”



                  To read the opening graphs of Flyby is to confront daily such a sublime slight of hand. My contention lies not with *actual *Netflix watching but rather with the way campus culture projects a message that it *must* be happening, that apathy is laudable, desirable, and fundamentally unchangeable. In a sense, this is a national issue—traceable to millennial self-justifying indifference; or perhaps to material changes in newly addictive technologies like Facebook and Netflix that have someone bypassed our social restrictions for substances like alcohol and weed.



                  Yet its presence is far more perturbing at an institution professed to be the paragon of intellectual, creative, and professional passion. Harvard adherents to “Netflix morality” deny all previous accomplishments and earnest work ethics as simply the false projections of overachieving high school selves, offering those daily epitaphs on the tombstone of zeal. But why are we so quick to posit a split of intention and action, to identify interest homeless advocacy and Nobel lectures as inauthentic? Are we truly so intellectually deadened and narrow-minded that earnest engagement becomes impossible once we step into Harvard Yard? How do we ignore the glaring observation that millions would love to nourish their minds on the engineering projects and thesis theater Flyby deep-fries into food each day? Perhaps, Netflix morality has arisen as a defense mechanism to this very construct, a fear of what a self-affirming morality would look like in the Harvard student: narcissism, egoism, pretentiousness.



                  Or perhaps it is the *result* of the normalizing discourse we see on Flyby, a discourse that creates what it presumes to name. Nietzsche noted that “the ascetic priest, seemingly life’s enemy and great negator, is in truth one of the major conserving and affirmative forces,” for he shepherds “the vast flock of defeated disgruntled sufferers and self-tormentors.” Is this not the precise role of the Flyby author, the high priest of Netflix morality? In constantly appealing to the anti-intellectual, anti-motivational sensibility in its readers, the writer becomes the most wondrous validator: the figure who justifies every self-negating action, who normalizes acedia with a shepherd’s gentle hand. We imitate what we read; we forget affirmation and speak lines of negation without knowing it; we say no to our friends’ invitations—and begin to watch Netflix.



                  “Is there really enough pride, courage, self-assurance, intellectual energy, responsibility, *freedom of the will*, to make philosophy possible in our world today?” asked Nietzsche a hundred years ago. I must ask the same question of Harvard today. Luckily, a genealogy of morals never implies fatalism, but rather charts the arrival of a certain mindset to gesture at other options. Could we imagine an alternative? A self-affirming campus morality of unabashed pride in homeless advocacy; courage to earnestly love a thesis; self-assurance to be intellectually energized by events and by peers; a demand that the gratification of sedative, self-abnegating pleasures not be a requiem for our minds and our bodies; in short, a freedom of the will, a will to be free of Netflix.



 



 





[[1]](#_ftnref1) One enormous qualification: Though I find aspects of Nietzsche’s theory remarkably poignant for contemporary binge-watching culture, vast sections of his work are downright despicable, particularly in the way they have been appropriated to justify an assortment of twentieth-century narcissistic, ignorant, and xenophobic terrors. There is no doubt a piece ethically justifying Donald Trump on Nietzsche’s morality waiting to be written. Still, I hold strongly to the tenet that poignant ideas can be culled from a sundry intellectual history, that we must not reject all materials from a brilliant mind due to the fates of its more protean products.

The reputation of today’s college students has, by now, been raked through the mud in the pages of most of America’s prominent publications. We’re coddled, spoiled, out of touch, addled by an overdose of political correctness, desiring nothing other than to be swathed in comfort, shielded from anything our social-media fueled, reactionary hysteria might deem “unsafe.” Heralding the death of both free speech and American excellence, pundits and writers of op-eds have sounded the alarm on what they see as a veritable epidemic; the prognosis is dim.



For the generation raised in an era dominated by apocalyptic climate-change predictions and the post-9/11 discourse of terror, this may come as no surprise. All signs point to doom and destruction, and we are reminded tragically and frequently that danger is still unequally apportioned along age-old lines of identity and privilege. Can we be blamed for running to safety?



In 1866, The Harvard Advocate was founded to run in the opposite direction: For 150 years, Dulce est Periculum has been our magazine’smotto, rendering danger—not beauty or truth—the value by which we orient our writing and art. As President and Publisher, we have found that our organization lies in a disjointed cultural position: far from aligned with the op-ed pundits, but sensitive to their appraisal; a step out-of-sync with undergraduates and administrative deans who discount the real merits of danger. It’s an uncomfortable spot.



And it has lead us to believe that these warring factions have conflated two forms of safety. On the one hand there is physical harm, slander, discrimination, perils that tasted sweet to the wrong people in the past and must never do so again. On the other there is intellectual insecurity and combative debate, the grit of a challenge. To banish the second in name of the first robs undergraduates of the risks we need to both better ourselves and tackle more ambitious, collective pursuits.



The millennial generation has long been derided for ignoring such challenges. Before the reign of the “coddled” epithet, we were “apathetic.” To prioritize the perfect selfie angle over issues of global importance signaled our narcissism, we were told. But as we have turned our attention from Instagram feeds to more pressing social movements—Black Lives Matter, Occupy and its offshoots, the newly prominent campaign against campus sexual assault—a different source for our apathy has surfaced: fear. Cautioned and discouraged by the inability of our predecessors to adequately and definitively succeed, we worry about stepping on each other’s toes, panic at the thought of leaving someone out. When so many things are problematized, the scope of our ambitions narrows, and we begin to focus on small, immediate, and—in the grander scheme—relatively trivial concerns.



And nowhere does triviality seem so trivial as at our crimson-colored bastion of American academic elitism. Harvard, as understood by administrative envoys and Crimson editorials, applies too much pressure with its comps and cut-throat classes, generating an exclusive, hierarchical, and unsafe environment. This is sound reasoning, but reasoning that has come to inflate the relative smallness of collegiate pressure—and to ignore its many merits. As any top-rate athlete knows, if we want to improve, we must work hard, usually very hard. A small group of admission officers did not grant those who matriculate a carte blanche of permanent validation, and sometimes, we will deserve a C. Sometimes we will not want to hear a Marxist professor invalidate our future professions. Sometimes we will be cut. Insecurity in these moments, in a classroom or comp, can be a productive sort of discomfort.



But something about the Harvard bubble has obscured this logic, letting us equate personal invalidation with structural injustice and, most insidiously, ignore actual injustice. True, there remains on this campus a cornucopia of traditions and organizations tinged with distasteful remnants of archaic power structures, and there is much to be reformed within Harvard if it is to uphold its promises. Progress starts small, and it starts at home. But something is wrong when every student opines on exclusivity in Harvard’s elite social clubs, while remaining silent on issues far more central to our global future. We argue more about the politics of an introductory comp meeting than about actual politics. These conflations, these slidings of scale, arise from the same fear: a fear of offending each other, of potentially disagreeing, of confrontation. When we hold back, we stop talking, we stop listening, and we stop connecting. Very often, we stop acting.



Over the past four years, the two of us have seen a rise of that paralysis at 21 South Street: a tendency to swap sweet danger for bland cordiality, to keep meetings serene lest one undergraduate provoke another. Too often, the Advocate’s members say no to perils before tasting their flavor, closing their ears to each other and falling prey to suspicions that fracture meetings before they have begun. This fear of real engagement is particularly disquieting when it bears on relations to the broader Harvard community. Amidst the best intentions for organizational improvement, the Advocate find itself caught up in obsessive analysis of its own culture—in examining a minute position on this campus and trying to divine the mental states of all who perceive it. A quote spoken at the wrong moment, a candle misplaced—these are the details that have become invested with the greatest weight. Constant inward-facing dialogue has inflated our membership’s sense of self-importance beyond reasonable proportion. Hyper-concerned with imagined complaints, many become deaf to valid criticism and distanced from the magazine’s actual purpose.



As we bid farewell to the Advocate, we hope those left behind will recall that purpose’s primacy: This magazine should serve as a space for fearless debate over literature and art, our aesthetic risks ideally playing a small part in a campus culture that boldly demands not just extracurricular and dormitory justice, but racial, gender, sexual, environmental, and economic justice. The fear that narrows our focus to trivialities and personal affronts should impede neither pursuit, so we must remain vigilant to differentiate between species of fears, and of safeties.



To fuel that vigil, we return to our timeless motto, and to the firm belief that beyond its appeal as a decent spot for a cocktail, the Advocate still holds a commitment to one or two lofty ideals. On its sesquicentennial, this magazine—be it a victim of Comstockery, an organ of responsible criticism, or great organic zilch—has something to teach us muck-raked millennials: Danger, when shaken right, is still sweet.