F*ck cancel culture (no, not that one x)

i'm gonna hold ur flaky ass hand when i say this....

I’m not exaggerating when I say I stopped in my tracks.

A few disgruntled commuters shot me filthy looks for disrupting the flow of foot traffic out of Parsons Green station. I was too laser focused on the audibly uncomfortable voice on the group zoom to care.

“It’s just that buying a flat has been more expensive than we initially thought. It doesn’t make financial sense for us to go at this point…” she trailed off.

“…and Mia…?”1 I managed.

“Well… she’s in a similar situation. The start up costs for launching her brand are really piling up. I don’t think she’s going to be able to afford it either.”

“Got it.”

I wanted to throw up.

I reeled off some congratulatory platitudes about buying a new place (in this economy, no less!) and hung up. I stayed frozen on the pavement for a minute or so, staring at my darkened screen in disbelief.

For about a year, a group of us had planned to meet in South Africa at the end of the month and drive into the desert for Afrika Burns. I only knew two of the four-person group - sisters that I had befriended in Paris.

Much like the festival’s equally obnoxious American counterpart, there are strict policies about what one can take or leave behind in the desert. Therefore, planning our trip was akin to a military operation, complete with intimidating packing lists, overly-earnest applications to pre-organised campgrounds and spreadsheets with strict kitchen rotas for shared mealtimes. It was intense to say the least, and the dogged motivation our group had begun with had started to flag.

I get it, it was a huge commitment. They had also cancelled around a month in advance, fair play.

My problem was that I was flying into the festival from the UK. In fact, I was scheduled to leave for Namibia the following day to join a desert expedition with no wifi or phone signal for ten days. I had calculated beforehand - as I would already be in the region - that it was easier to wait alone and gather everyone’s supplies in Cape Town for three weeks than to come back to the UK. I had invested a huge amount of time, money and effort around these cancelled plans, and I didn’t have adequate time to salvage it.

In short, I was fucked.

To top it off, Mia hadn’t even bothered to join the call. I felt like an idiot.

An hour or so later, I emerged from my sister’s house with no clearer answer on how to proceed. My phone dinged.

I was enraged.

The pretension that following Matt, a perfect stranger, into a famously isolated desert festival - overrun with drugs and alcohol, without phone signal, in a country that I had never set foot in before and where I knew no-one - was appropriate solution to my predicament was infuriating.

Yes, I’ve done some stupid and dangerous shit in my life, but not quite that stupid and dangerous.

The message was so transparently an absolution of guilt (“I don’t know what the big deal is, she still could have gone!”) rather than an actual solution that it was honestly insulting. I didn’t even bother responding.

I know that I am overly sensitive about this, and I know why.

In 2015 - stay with me here, I promise this is relevant - I graduated from high school. Like many teens in the UK, I took a ‘gap year’ to travel. Emily2 and I eagerly planned to fly to Australia through a prolonged layover in Hong Kong. On the morning of our planned departure, I woke up to a text from Emily explaining that she had been sick all night. She was certain it was only travel anxiety but - as she is diabetic - she was obliged to be cleared by a doctor before flying out. She insisted that it was no big deal - that these things “happen all the time!” She encouraged me to get on the flight anyway, reassuring me that she would be right behind me.

Seemingly the moment that I arrived in Hong Kong, Emily’s response times began to lag. In following days she provided neither medical updates nor any amended timelines. I started to panic.

It felt like a betrayal to change the flight path we had chosen together. Yet, I was terrified and alone in Hong Kong. The window to join with other groups of friends setting off at the same time was swiftly closing. I sent her a text, desperate not to sound insensitive to her condition:

“Hey! Haven’t heard from you in a bit, I hope you’re feeling better :) don’t want to leave you in the lurch but if I don’t hear anything from you in 24 hours, I’m going to take that as a hint to start making other plans because I don’t really know what to do at this point. Let me know! xx”

24 hours passed, and then some.

I started sending frantic texts to anyone I even peripherally knew travelling around the South-Eastern quarter-sphere. Very cool and not at all desperate, I know.

Thankfully, I got a swift response from a girl I had known from boarding school: “Hey! I kinda knew this text was coming actually…. there’s something I think you should know.”

She attached a some screenshots of a group chat. Someone was explaining that they had recently spotted Emily in the smoking area of a club in the UK. They asked her why she wasn’t in Hong Kong. She, I presume drunkenly, bragged about pretending she was ill because she didn’t really feel like going: “her mom got super involved with planning and it just put me off, I guess. If I want I can join her later.”

When pressed about how that might make me feel, she said “It’s just one friend.”

These are, obviously, some pretty major examples. Yet, I’d argue that this attitude has seeped into every social interaction I have these days. Each plan I make - from simple afterwork drinks to planning-heavy desert festivals - there is a quiet undertone that that they will be cancelled last minute.

I hate this uncertainty. In fact, I hate it so much that I’ve made major decisions in my life just to avoid this behaviour. Explicitly, this blasé approach to socialising is the main reason I don’t live in New York. The last time I was there for a significant period, I planned a goodbye drinks for 14 people who RSVP-ed yes. 7 showed up, most of them late. I got a few half-hearted apology texts from the defectors, at around 2am. The event started at 9,30pm.

In comforting me, a friend described New York’s social scene as '“opportunistic.” I thought that was a terribly generous and succinct way of saying “many people here are asshole social climbers constantly looking for a better offer.”

In fact, throughout that six-month stint that the drinks aimed to celebrate, I got cancelled on so often that I would complain about it at work. A colleague teased me for not being “spontaneous” enough.

At the risk of sounding uptight,3 spontaneity is one of many justifications for what is objectively quite shitty behaviour. ‘Spontaneity’ takes its place amongst other similarly dissatisfying excuses like the disingenuously self-effacing “she won’t even notice if I’m not there!” (I will)4 or the weaponised therapy speak: “I’m setting boundaries and focusing on self-care this evening.” The latter is particularly frustrating, because it always forces your hand to respond “no worries, girl! are you ok? take care of yourself :)”

In reality, I really look forward to the plans that I make with friends. Often, I’ll pull myself through a hard week by gleefully contemplating the outfit I’ll wear, the appetisers I’ll order and the gossip I’ll deploy. I don’t think this is unusual - humans are fundamentally social creatures. We thrive on community and proximity. However, there are so many elements in modern culture that are eroding our connection to this truth. Everything has been ‘optimised’ to diminish community, third spaces and ‘un-productivity.’ I would go so far as to posit that because our hyper-connectivity renders plans really easy to cancel, we rarely have to think about the consequences of doing so. Sending a last minute WhatsApp doesn’t entail the same guilt as standing someone up. We’re less likely then to avoid it, or try to fix it if it’s genuinely unavoidable. It doesn’t help that there is a wine-mom adjacent corner of the internet evangelising the joy of cancelling on your friends.

Unfortunately, this contributes to the vicious cycle of our collective declining mental health. I consider it one of life’s cruelest ironies that self-isolation is such a strong impulse in depression, when the key to sparking joy in life is being around others. This notion deserves it’s own essay, but I digress. The conclusion is: self-hatred and doubt are feelings that will feed on themselves to destroy you. The surest way to diminish them is by spending time with people you love.

When you least want to spend time with other people, that’s when you need it the most.

I think that’s why Raye’s Click Clack Symphony has resonated so deeply with women across my social media feeds. Of course, it helps that the message packaged in an eloquent verse accompanied by a genuinely heart-soaring melody. The kernel of truth, however, still remains: a messy night out dancing with your girls actually contains an incredible healing power - it’s unironically restorative, invigorating, life affirming.

I often dispense the anecdote that as I was discharged from hospital after the most traumatic weeks of my life, I asked the Doctor whether I was cleared travel around Southern Spain on a girls’ trip. They looked me right in the eye and said with no trace of humour “that is literally exactly what you should be doing right now.”

It doesn’t have to be holiday, or even big night out - it can literally by sitting in the vicinity of a friend watching a movie in silence. At my core, I am a deeply anti-social person - there is still not enough propaganda on earth to convince me that self-care is an individual enterprise.

Concluding remarks and advice are as follows (I don’t have the energy to structure it in prose, sry). Some of these are more legitimate and objective than others:

Just because it’s easy to cancel, it doesn’t mean you should.
I’ve suffered from numerous varieties of depression.5 I understand what it’s like to not want to go anywhere. Sometimes the idea of putting on an uncomfortable outfit and making conversation with people you dislike seems the most torturous waste of time one could imagine. Trust me: go for an hour, make your excuses and leave (and buy yourself a treat on the way home)
I cannot say this enough - to have a village, you must be a villager. Sometimes it sucks, but that’s the price we pay for community.
Don’t be fucking rude, yeah?