The stillness of sufficiency

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What is a life for, production or presence?

There’s no doubt U.S. American culture is shaped by, and founded on, productivity. From the shores of African and Black enslavement, where a body’s output was the measuring stick of a person’s value, to the assembly lines of the Industrial revolution that further quantified human value by human output, nothing defines the United States better than a “can-do” attitude and a productivity clause that seems to be written into us from birth.

This clause seems to be part of a contract many of us have unwittingly signed, one that stipulates our value, our worth, our personhood, to be defined by what we produce, that is, our corporate and consumerist output.

We are expected to produce (not create) and consume until our dying breaths. We are taught that to be citizens of society, we must be valuable, and that value is calculated by how much money we make for others.

This isn’t to say that work is unnecessary or undignified; far from. The question is, who the work benefits, how much we agree to it, and what we get out of it. Many of us are content with our 40-hour weeks and our paychecks in return for that time. And that is fine.

But what I’ve been thinking about lately is how creativity and productivity are intertwined. As a published author, I expect myself to produce book after book, on deadlines I arbitrarily create for myself, in an effort to produce. Sometimes, this is fine, and my creative juices need an outlet, which I am able to give them. Other times, I’m unsure of how much I expect my creativity to be manufactured by a sense of productivity.

Often, I catch myself between projects, with a week or so of “downtime,” and I tell myself, I should be doing research, I should be planning my next manuscript, I should be, should be, should be…

And yet, with my background in neuroscience, I know full well the brain does not operate best while constantly stimulated. The brain works best in between resting periods, and during such times, where it can consolidate information and experiences, define connections between them, and imagine new things. Incubation is necessary for human intellect, creativity, and even identity. You can’t know who you are if you never sit still long enough to ask–and answer.

In 2025, I wrote five full-length manuscripts, and about 80% of a sixth novel, and was so proud I was able to be “so productive.” This year, I am now working on editing about 4 of those manuscripts, and mourning that I cannot write five more this year, even as I am relieved I don’t plan to. Even with that output, and the stockpile of manuscripts, I still find myself reducing my creative work into commodified components: # manuscripts, # ratings, # reviews, #…

There’s a gap between creativity and productivity, between creating for the joy of it, and creating a commodity. Even this blog, which has been dormant for a while, I’ve now revived, and just the other day, I wondered idly whether I should be monetizing it, whether I should be more consistent in what I publish, whether this could be something I commodify as a secondary income stream.

I quickly rejected the idea, not the least because, even if I could monetize it, it wouldn’t be worth much in the dollars it brings in. But there’s another reason: this space is one for me to think and share those thoughts, rather than turning it into a “hustle,” and I intend to keep it that way (for now, maybe for forever). It’s so easy to fall into the trap of doing more, being more, producing more, at the expense of simply being.

This is not to disregard the times when finances demand such labor, and this is not to disregard the lives where such privilege and luck are not afforded. I recognize my concerns come from a plentitude of both. But where I am in life, I have to consider beyond basic needs that are already met, and more.

To be a creative, to be an artist, is to learn to rest and be still, something I am desperately struggling to learn beyond an intellectual understanding.

It’s not comfortable sitting still or doing less; it feels like a failure of self and time, like I am “wasting my life.” And yet, I find the times I do so, that is, rest, my days feel longer, in a good way, and I feel like I’ve done more for myself and my life. Those are the days I am able to marry creative pursuits with more mundane tasks, like errands and social obligations, without feeling tired. In fact, I feel more energized, because I am able to get through to-dos without losing myself in them.

I wonder, then, if a life lived this way lasts longer, not in time, but in the perception of it.

Tonight, as I sit in my living room, watching the blue light fade from the sky and become night, I am allowing myself stillness and silence. That is a privilege, and a rarity it seems these days, I know, and I am a lucky person to have such things. But this path to stillness is not straight and narrow. I’m recognizing that stillness can be found not just in the state of “not-doing,” but in the state of “doing enough.”

What I mean can be shown in an example. This year, as I edit my 2025 manuscripts, I am not pushing myself hard. Even today, I planned on editing two to three chapters of a manuscript, ended up editing four, and then grew greedy and tried to push myself to edit even more. I stopped myself in time, recognizing I had hit a fatigue point, and yes, I could have pushed myself to do more, but I would have enjoyed it less, been less creative, and more frustrated. Instead, I chose to leave the coffeeshop and go home, where I sat and read with a cup of golden milk.

Stillness, I wonder then, does not have to show up in sitting in silence or idly; it can come in doing enough to remain on, or to reach the path you want, but not pushing yourself unnecessarily. It demands listening to your mind and body, and not ignoring them just because “you can.”

I “could have” edited more today; I “could have” been more productive, but I was productive enough, and that is good enough for me. This is the stillness of sufficiency.

By: Rania Hanna

Curating against anti-intellectualism

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I’ve been thinking more about curation.

The last few years, I have hoarded more and more books, only to find myself stepping into my home library and not knowing what I want to read. On Google, I have pulled up a random number generator, selecting first a range from 1 to the number of bookshelves I have, and then within that shelf, selecting a range from 1 to 30 or so, to narrow down to a single title. Rarely, which is to say, never, have I pulled that book off its shelf and actually read it.

Instead, I would find myself back at the bookstore, searching for some book to read that suited my mood. I’d come home, either read the book, or end up setting it atop a pile and choosing something else to read.

This cycle has continued on to the point of a certain fatigue, and, if I’m being honest, frustration at not knowing what to read or how to choose.

My home library has traditionally numbered in the hundreds, sometimes rising to 600+ books, which I’ve always taken pride in. There’s a certain comfort in surrounding myself with the written word, being inspired by others’ thoughts, and always aspiring to read every book I own.

These physical books are besides the audiobooks and digital copies I have bought over the years.

The past few weeks though, in a fit of early spring cleaning, I have purged about 200 physical books, over the span of several weeks, donating many to my local library.

And the more I do so, the more books I want to let go of. It’s been surprisingly easy to do, something I’ve rarely, if ever, experienced before. I still have books piled atop books, and on my bookcases, and crammed in piles surrounding the space, but the gaps are beginning to show.

Some of the books I have had for well over a dozen years, having never opened them once to read. Others I thought I would enjoy, only to find myself tossing it aside. Still others I enjoyed at one point in my life, but have grown away from them.

Now, my shelves are taken up by books I have yet to read, but have a higher likelihood of being selected in the coming months and years. I have saved stories I have enjoyed, ones I would recommend to someone. In other words, I have curated something of a proper library, one that represents who I am and who I am becoming.

Books that I once revered have been removed; stories I once thought I “should” enjoy have been replaced by ones I will. I am growing far less concerned about having “classics” on my shelves that I do not enjoy, though I have tried to.

Which brings me to something I have been thinking about more and more recently: literary colonialism.

When thinking about the books I grew up reading in the United States, in school or simply through exposure, most have been Eurocentric, written by white people, mostly male. They have been excellent reads, and have provoked thought and consideration. But rarely has my formal education expanded beyond these identities. Even in world literature classes, anything outside that identity was pulled from more ancient epics, like that of Gilgamesh, or snippets here and there from other works, but mostly, even our global narratives were pulled from England (Shakespeare), Germany (Beowulf), Italy (Dante’s Inferno, Divine Comedy), Greece (Homer’s works), and the like, i.e. Eurocentric, white, male. I don’t recall reading a single Black author in school in any meaningful way, not Toni Morrison’s works, Octavia Butler’s, the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s, even MLK Jr’s. Not a single Black American author, not a single brown author, and limited female ones.

Why is that?

I am certainly not the first to argue this literary limitation, and certainly not the first to do anything about it, nor am I the most educated voice on this. But as I grow more into myself and into who I want to be, I am learning to lean less on what I have been told is worthy of being read, and more on what I think is deserving of my energy.

This is important. Stories we read shape what we think people should be and how they should act. They tell us what to value, what to reject. They tell us how to be. And that is a powerful and dangerous power.

In curating my library, I am not seeing the loss of 200 books; I am seeing the gain of the space I am making for other voices to be heard. I am creating opportunity to listen to those I have not historically listened or paid attention to, or the ones I wasn’t exposed to in my education. In essence, I am curating not just a library, but my own curiosity. And that is one of the greatest things I can do in developing my mind.

There also seems to be a metaphor in here about stepping back, narrowing focus, and being more deliberate. While my shelves are being cleared off, I’m seeing more of the titles I already own, books that I want to read being more visible because they’re no longer hidden by other titles. A reversal of paralysis by analysis, I suppose.

With our society’s descent into a defanged intellectualism, that is, anti-intellectualism, by way of book bans, whitewashing of history, erasure of voices, and the like, this has become all the more pressing. It feels almost like survival in its urgency.

I plan to continue this curation, centering voices I have not historically given space to, and educating myself the best way I can. I am also retaining physical copies of works, something I touched upon in another blog post, access is not ownership. When reality can be manipulated, media updated or deleted, it is that much more important to house physical copies when and where possible, and to support those institutions that allow us access, like libraries.

By: Rania Hanna

“Hanna’s a last name?! Last?”

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I work as a user researcher, and today was rough. A midday participant asked me as we were beginning our session whether my name, which shows up as Hanna, Rania is ‘Hanna’ or ‘Rania.’ I told him it’s Rania, and he expressed such confusion about how a last name could be Hanna.

“Hanna’s a last name?! Last?”

“Yes,” I said, about to launch into how it’s an old Christian Syrian name, meaning “John,” but I decided not to bother.

His immediate question was, “Are you Indian?”

“No,” I said, “It’s Middle Eastern,” referring to my name.

“You’re Arabic?” he asked.

“Arabic’s a language, I’m Middle Eastern, I’m Syrian.”

“So where are you speaking to me from? What part of the world? Are you…over there?”

At this point, I’m feeling snarky, so I said, “What does my accent sound like to you?”

“Well, from here,” he said.

“Yeah, I’m American, I was born here.”

He tried continuing the conversation, but I said we had a few minutes before the session so I would be stepping out until then.

Later, during the session, with two of my colleagues on the call, this participant proceeded to say, unprompted, “I asked you if you were Indian because I don’t like talking to people in those countries. Whenever I call customer support and get a person from there…I like to talk to people who have my accent. I don’t like when a company outsources to other countries, it doesn’t make me feel valued.”

I quickly messaged a colleague with “wtf.”

The call continued, but I’d lost steam, and quickly ended the call. My second colleague messaged me, offering sympathy and support, and eventually, made me laugh about the whole situation, and I felt much better.

All this leads me to this:

We need community, we need people who reach out to others and offer support. We also need courage to say to those who have grown far too comfortable sharing ignorant opinions, “shut up.” Or, if not that, then certainly something more eloquent and intelligent.

What I mean is, we need to normalize calling people out, and teaching ourselves how to do so. Today is the first time I was confidently “snarky,” which is to say, stood up for myself. It’s not snark, it’s self-protection and calling out people, though I wish I’d done more to be more blatant about his disrespect. We need to learn, and to help others learn, how to speak up more, because so few of us are taught how to do so.

This post is not meant to be anything profound; I simply wanted to share an experience I had today, and offer some of my preliminary thoughts. I’m sure I’ll return to this in the future, once I’ve collected more of my senses and opinions, and perhaps some of my learnings.

By: Rania Hanna

Decentering violence

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I’ve been taking Arabic classes recently to improve my spoken and reading skills. I grew up speaking the Syrian Homs dialect, but since leaving home thirteen years ago, I haven’t been able to speak to anyone as much in Arabic. So the classes are a way I am reclaiming one of my mother tongues and my culture.

During a class recently, my Syrian teacher and I were discussing films. She loves Agatha Christie. And we were talking about the genres we enjoy when we both learned that we used to love horror, and now…we don’t. It’s not that we don’t like a good scare; it’s more the violence and gore that we can’t take in anymore. It’s something I’ve thought about occasionally the last few years, when I have realized that the movies I used to gravitate to: the Saw franchise, slashers, and the like are the ones I can’t stand to see or hear now. Midsommar, which is arguably a good movie, was difficult for me to watch, and I stepped out of the theatre right before the ‘mallet scene.’

Even “softer” movies with a touch of gore do not appeal to me. I still love a good scare, though, and a horror I watched that I think is so engaging is Oddity. It’s less focused on slashing, and more focused on the psychological horror, and though there is violence, is it not as central as in other films.

As I was considering this since my class and conversation, I happened to come across a Threads post that asked a similar question: do you no longer consumer horror? One of the comments got my attention: @alilamos wrote:

“Those movies are all about collective participation and consent. Our brain & body process fake horror the same way as real horror. You rationally know it’s fake, but your brain processes it the same emotionally. So you sitting in a theater being entertained by torture and violence is actually very similar to being one of them enjoying it in real life. It makes us all see violence as entertainment like they want us to.”

It got me thinking that maybe the poster is on to something. The media we consume becomes part of us. Often, I find myself thinking something only to realize that maybe, I simply imbibed it from the internet without even knowing it. How often have you thought of something only to recognize, days later, that you got your “idea” from something else? How often do you choose something and “don’t know why it came to mind,” only to realize afterwards, oh, right, this number I “randomly chose” is ‘actually my grandfather’s birthday and I was thinking of his death anniversary four days ago.’

Our brains are good at patterns and good at consolidating information. They’re also really good at picking up information from our environments, and kneading it into the neural connections that already exist. Of course, memory consolidation requires conscious discernment, but our environments do shape our minds in ways we don’t always notice.

This is not to say that art should be created to coddle or comfort. Of course not. And this is not to say we should not reach for the art that makes us uncomfortable, that pushes our understanding of the world. It’s more that we should reach for consideration, for story, rather than spectacle.

It is to say, however, that we should be aware, and we should actively choose what we consume. Making a spectacle of violence, becoming desensitized to it, does have an effect on us, whether we realize it. We’ve seen it in the ‘video game x violence research’ literature, and though the research is mixed, meta-analyses have found that consuming violence in video games does have a positive correlation with real-world aggression and lowered empathy. Prosocial games have the opposite effect.

I wrote recently about moving into cognitive conservation, about being more aware of what I consume and focusing more on depth and thought. I think the same goes for the media we consume, using it to sculpt our minds and bodies into what we want society to be, rather than letting spectacle and desensitization shape us. We should be left uncomfortable by our art, if and when we so choose, but not be left desensitized towards our collective humanity by it.

Art can wound, expose, accuse, and compel us. But there is a difference between being compelled deliberately, and compelled by default. I want to see more consequence, more substance, in the art and media I consume, and less gratuitous carnage. Some stories, by nature, have carnage, and that is the story that is being told; it may be historical, it may be symbolic, but it is necessary to the telling of that particular story. But to simply have just to have it is another thing altogether. Our minds are molded by what it is fed, and because of that, it is a rare and wondrous thing. To provide it with nourishment is a different form of cognitive conservation than I wrote about last week; it is a conservation of empathy, of society, of self.

Reclaiming Arabic has reminded me that the mind is porous and is easily shaped. What we stay engaged in becomes our fluency, the language we speak best and most naturally. If a tongue can be lost through neglect or severance, and recovered through reversal of that, so, too, can society move towards something better and healthier, starting with the stories being told, and how they are being told, and for whom.

The question isn’t whether art is meant to unsettle us; I think it should. The question, instead, is whether we are choosing what unsettles us, and why, and how. I want to be disturbed into thoughtfulness and awareness, rather than dulled into apathy. I want my Self to be shaped deliberately rather than by status quo, or by those who already hold the reins of narrative and art.

By: Rania Hanna

I think our society is shifting into conservation

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I’m sick this weekend, battling a cold, and just a day before I felt the most sick, I was ravenous. I ate four meals, smaller ones, but more than I would normally consume, and I was starting to slow down in my energy levels. This is normal, as the body mounts an immune response (a metabolically expensive process), and focuses more on energy. Your appetite increases so your body can defend itself, and your body slows down so you conserve energy. Your body shifts from productivity to repair.

The following day, my body gave up, forcing me to take a day off of work. I had trouble sleeping the night before, and ended up dozing off into light naps.

Now, day three of my cold, and I have bursts of energy, but mostly feel like sitting or taking naps, and baking pita bread.

This has got me thinking: when a body is sick, it focuses on slowing down and nourishing itself. I wonder then, of a mind that is also sick with overstimulation and overconsumption. What happens to it?

I think that, it too, slows down and focuses on nourishing itself. I say this because I have noticed that the past few months, I’ve been returning to classics in my reading, craving depth and thought I hadn’t engaged with in a while. I’m seeking more to read to better understand the human condition, to learn, to “return to my roots” in a literary capacity. And, I’ve been focusing on slowing down.

Even in my writing, I am choosing not to push myself, my plots, or my timelines into something they don’t organically grow into. Last year, in 2025, I wrote almost six manuscripts (one I got about 80% of the way through before the new year came around). This year, I am working on editing them, focusing more on building on what I’ve already sown. And though I initially had plans to write at least two, maybe three, manuscripts this year, I have accepted that I may end up writing only one, and have begun to think that I may not write any at all.

This slowing down, both deliberate and organic, comes from shedding old skins last year. I moved on from some decisions I’d made earlier in life, even just years prior, and though I mourn them, I feel lighter without them, more like myself, and less like a shape I was trying to force myself into. That is, I feel more like I am wearing a skin I naturally fit into, rather than stretching out one that no longer fits me.

What I think is happening to my brain is a response to chronic overstimulation, a shift from productivity to repair, a sort of cognitive conservation. This makes sense, as when the brain sustains cognitive overload, i.e. “has too many tabs open,” working memory and decision-making reduce. It’s a sort of “sickness” that your brain decides it has to mount an immune response to, and so it shifts gears into restorative modes.

It’s why my brain has chosen classic literature or more “serious” works to read; it wants something that forces me to slow down because writing pace is slower, compels me to digest what I am reading, which forces me further to slow down. It’s a return to what is familiar and comfortable, and provides a stability as I often recognize what path a plot will take. It also reduces my task-switching: it’s difficult to “switch to another tab” when I’m digesting a thoughtful paragraph. This reading depth leads to sustained attention, which is further less stimulating since I’m focusing on one task, and one task alone.

And I’m seeing it elsewhere, too, not just in my reading. When I was younger, I could sit still, in silence, and enjoy it. The last few years, I have needed stimulation: an audiobook, a podcast, music, a YouTube video. Now, it’s almost as if I can’t stand the noise and stimulation, and instead want stillness and silence.

I’m not alone in this. I wrote in an earlier post “at least for a segment of our society, we desire simplicity and a reclamation of our human intelligence. It feels more like a quiet revolution, an unwinding of what our modern technology has wrought, reverting to less integrated and more simplified routines.“

What I mean to say with all this is as our minds and bodies desire healing from a society that is overwrought in pace, consumerism, and disconnection, I think our minds will begin responding in the same ways our bodies do when sick: by slowing down, digging deeper into our shared wisdom, and doing the things that nourish us. When a biological or psychological system is under strain, it moves to conserve, by simplifying and focusing on core functions.

And I think our society is shifting into conservation.

By: Rania Hanna

Access is not Ownership

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Something I’ve been thinking quite a lot about lately is the impermanence of things. I don’t mean that in an existential way, but in a tangible, physical domain manner.

Some years ago, I was surprised to learn that with an Audible (owned by Amazon) subscription, we do not own the audiobooks. Audible can, and has, removed titles at will, though once purchased, you should be able to access that title forever in the platform. But this leads me to several other questions, including, is something actually yours when it exists in “the cloud” in non-tangible format (at least, non-tangible in that it cannot be manipulated as an object by you) and could, theoretically, be removed at any point by someone other than you? Is it ownership, or is it permission to access that these platforms offer us?

And does it matter?

I’m sure this brings up many counterpoints and philosophical questions, but I’m more curious about what effect this has on our psychology, to feel so disconnected from the very things we interact with, and the very things which we purport to “own.” If a mega-conglomerate can control what I have access to, do I have, truly, access to those things? If the gate can be opened and closed without my control, do I control that gate?

I worry of the sense of impermanence this creates in our psyches, the idea that attachment is a risk, that nothing is real or stable. To me, this goes beyond the more philosophical “nothing lasts forever,” and more into the territory of a constantly shifting floor. I wonder if this will transfer not just to our perceptions of how media exists, but to our relationships, our sense of belonging and community, and the more important things in life. I wonder then: does this lead to more individualism and a further erosion of our communities and societies?

This, of course, leads to the natural concern of censorship. With book bans galore, too many to list out here, any opportunity for powers to remove or restrict access to books is a concern. When you do not physically retain something, it becomes that much easier to “disappear” it from your possession, doesn’t it?

This doesn’t just end with books.

In May 2023, before the October 7th attack on Israel, and before Israel’s current genocide of Palestinians, Mohammed Assaf, a Palestinian singer, claimed his popular song, Ana Dammi Falastini (My Blood is Palestinian), released in 2015, was removed from both Spotify and Apple. Assaf said he’d received “an official email about it, on the pretext that the song incites the Zionist enemy, …”

I know this song well, having listened to it for years, and not once does it mention, even implicitly, Zionism, never mind violence. The song is simply one that shows pride in, and honors, Palestinian heritage.

Spotify denied having removed the song, but claimed that “availability may vary over time and by country.” They further added that though they themselves did not remove the song, the song’s distributor did.

None of this makes sense to me given Assaf’s claim on receiving the email that specifically called out a Zionist-centered reason for the song’s removal. And while the song was unavailable on Spotify and Apple, it remained streaming on Arabic-music platform, Anghami.

The song was eventually relisted on Spotify following backlash, and after “a new license agreement was signed.” This apparently is not that new or unusual, though, with songs disappearing due to expired agreements, and reappearing once new ones are signed. But this still harkens back to my earlier point in this article: who owns the very things we consume? And what power can, and do, they wield over us because of this?

What’s interesting to me, besides the removal at will of media is the changing of media.

After watching the movie Sinners, I found the movie soundtrack on Spotify and quickly added my favorite songs to my “Liked” list.

But some weeks ago, when relistening to one of the songs, Pale, Pale, Moon, I was surprised to find the song sounded different from my memory of it. I listened again, and again, replaying the beginning segment in particular. Had the song been updated or changed since I’d last listened to it? It didn’t seem like a remix.

I quickly wondered if I was losing my mind.

A quick review of Spotify, and I realized that there were two versions of the song, one by singer Jayme Lawson, which was the one I knew first, and another by singer Brittany Howard, which was the one I’d heard that sounded different to me. I enjoy both, but one is more familiar to me.

This instance had a simple, and innocuous, explanation, but it did get me thinking: media can be so easily and subtly updated without our noticing and control, can’t it? What does this mean, then, for our sense of shared reality? Our sense of truth? How do we retain veracity when our entire realities can be force-changed like an operating system pushing out updates? When reality can be updated, how do we keep trusting our senses and each other?

Ownership does have a certain feel to me, more of a consumerist or capitalistic mentality, and may not be what we are all after. But for me, it’s not so much the ownership, as the continued and promised access, without change, to media, especially books, music, and art. What happens to a society if what it is exposed to can be changed without permission and without explanation?

With the change of US TikTok from Chinese ByteDance to US control, entire accounts have seen plummeting views and even banning. Emmy-winning Palestinian journalist surviving in Gaza Bisan Owda, with her 1.4 million followers, has been permanently banned from Tiktok after the change to US hands. According to an Al Jazeera article, “Hours after Owda shared her video, an account that appeared to have the same username was still visible on TikTok in Australia – but not in the Middle East, when Al Jazeera checked in different geographies.” When platforms control so much of our access to information, to thought, to clarity, what kind of reality is being created for us?

It concerns me, this thought, because it connects to power structures, to propaganda, censorship, suppression, and, ultimately, to loss of freedom. Intellectual identity and access is inherent to freedom, to education, and the reliable access to it is an integral foundation of a healthy society. When that access can be interrupted or outfitted with a new texture, we no longer have education; we have redirection, misdirection, and ultimately, de-education.

I am hardly the first to point all of this out, and I don’t have answers to most of the questions I’ve posed above, but I do wonder about them. I wonder what type of society is being, and has been, created when reality, especially art, can be so easily updated, turned on or off at will, and subject to outside powers.

By: Rania Hanna

Let me know what you think, whether you’ve had the same thoughts, or different ones, and whether this all bothers you as much as it does me.

Searching for Real, not Reels

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I recently saw a video of a baby penguin, and quickly shared it with others, claiming “how adorable” the animal was. But very soon I realized I’d made a mistake: the baby penguin was, in fact, not real. It was AI-gen.

Artificial intelligence—AI—seems here to stay, for better or for worse. With the rise of both evaluative and generative AI, the integrated use of technology in our works of ‘creation’ is already more or less accepted as a given as our society continues along these trends.

What I wonder, though, is not so much the use and abuse of AI, but the shedding of technology. More and more—at least within my own algorithmically-shaped feeds (which are themselves an issue, creating parallel realities for different users)—do I see content creators proclaiming to rid themselves of ‘smart’ technology and going back to analog, or at least to ‘dumb’ phones and such.

As more AI-gen videos flood the internet and reality becomes harder to discern, I believe that people are going to rely more on either older content, or on books and other printed material, for verifiable truth. What better way to feel confident that what you are engaging with is based on direct human creation rather than artificial duplication, than something published years before the first current-form AI videos dropped. We will turn our attention more to provenance, seeking a known and verified chain of authorship, labor, and historical context. We will be searching for what is real.

I’m seeing the idea of brain-rot circulating through the internet, even in my limited and simplified use of social media, and the narrative that to read much (books, it seems) is to be ‘ungovernable.’ Even younger people are embracing being bored. What this reads as to me is the recognition that technology has hit its everyday usage limits in our lives and, at least for a segment of our society, we desire simplicity and a reclamation of our human intelligence. It feels more like a quiet revolution, an unwinding of what our modern technology has wrought, reverting to less integrated and more simplified routines.

AI feels like it is taking over without our consent. From the Gemini overviews of documents in my Google Drive, Google gmail summaries of email chains, to even WordPress, where I am writing this post, AI is interruptive, disruptive, and inescapable. As AI is shoved further down our throats, it won’t be a wonder when we reach our choking point and turn our backs on it.

I also wonder whether all of this is in part related to the in-built distancing between user and technology. With the loss of haptic sensations, like buttons that depress when pressed, the clicking of dials fiddled with, the weight of mechanical feedback, I think our brains are begging to be able to interact with the world again. Our minds do not like disconnecting from the things our bodies, especially our hands, interact with, and we do not, in fact, enjoy outsourcing our thinking. Perhaps our brains are not only tired of constant and sensory-deprived stimulation, but are longing to (literally) feel the world push back again.

All this to say: as our ennui and distrust of technology increase, I do think we will shed it and return to more analog-based sources of information. Books, archival catalogs, and the ‘old internet’ will be where we search for our truths, rather than the ‘new’ internet, where origins are unknown, and even content itself cannot be trusted to be real.

By: Rania Hanna

It’s been a while: world on fire, creative work, and upcoming comic

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Hi friends. It’s been a while.

Honestly, I haven’t had much energy lately to post much of anything, not the least of which a well-thought out blog post that’s worth sending out. Arguably, I don’t have the energy to write this one, but I’ll try to put down my thoughts regardless.

It’s been a horrible year. The world seems on fire, in some places, quite literally, including in Palestine/Israel, Syria, Turkey, California, Oregon, and other places. It seems the entire world is ablaze literally, and certainly, figuratively.

Palestine is under 22 months of siege, genocide, Israeli-engineered famine, and, as scholars are saying, a holocaust. Syria is under attack by Israel, including in Damascus and in southern Syria, where Druze populations are. Lebanon is precarious, with ongoing threats of attacks from Israel. Never mind our perilous situation in the United States, with Trump’s orders to send in the National Guard into DC, of which I saw groups of 3 or 5 roaming the National Mall and metro stations just two weekends ago.

It’s a scary time, and that’s not even going into the assaults on women, queer, Indigenous, Black, and other lives in America alone.

(BTW, there’s a bookish auction ongoing to raise funds for immigrant and trans rights, through August 27th).

With everything going on, I’ve continued to write, but I feel a bit…dead…inside, like I’m mostly a shell of a person right now. Creatively, I’m still doing work, but I can feel both body and mind slowing down, grieving, and, frankly, retracting, even as I try to reach out to people more. It’s a fine line between staying informed, trying to do work that can contribute to a healthy society, and protecting myself from the constant onslaught of horrible events. No wonder my recent Youtube watches have been on nomading through the US in a car, finding a couple acres to build a homestead on, and relaxing book recommendations coupled with homemade pastries and teas.

I have a few projects I’ve been working on, including a few novels, and one semi-memoir/social commentary on Arab-American discrimination and racism. They’re in different stages of creation, some I’m in the throes of edits for, others I’m still doing research for.

However, a short spread in a comic issue is coming out, a story on imperialism’s actions on collective memory and the rewriting of history. The story comes out in Planet Comics: Book Six, which you can back on Kickstarter. The work has hit full funding, but if you’d like a copy, feel free to back the project. It should come out in November-ish of this year.

Here’s a bit on my piece:

Rania Hanna (author of The Jinn Daughter), Erin Dodge and Ari Pluchinsky bring us the single-issue story, “The Archivist of Al-Azrakh”!

Sample page from “The Archivist of Al-Azrakh”

Signing off for now, and maybe for a while,
Rania

Movable Feast at Bookmarks – be there!

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MARK YOUR CALENDARS

Guess where I’ll be this January? At the Moveable Feast at @bookmarksnc!
January 24-25th, 2025, in Winston-Salem, NC, both the Saturday afternoon and Sunday afternoon events will be a traditional Movable Feast style event, where each author will visit ten tables for ten minutes each (think speed dating with authors!)

You can view more information and find ticket links at bookmarksnc.org/MovableFeast.