Put your phone away

It's the most important thing you can do

There’s a meme going around: Sydney Sweeney is being interviewed by a GQ reporter, who “gives [her] the opportunity” to apologize for her jeans ad with American Eagle.

If you’re not terminally online, this will require a little explaining. Sydney Sweeney is an American actress. She’s probably best known for appearing in the HBO show Euphoria. The tagline of the ad campaign was, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”

It’s a pun on jeans/genes. It’s kind of funny and kind of sexy and kind of dumb. Basically, it’s a jeans ad.

Many people were offended (or pretended to be offended, it’s hard to tell) by the jeans campaign. Aside from a general sense that maybe it’s not okay to be sexy in public, the complaint seems to be that the ad is racist.

Huh? Well, the genes thing is said to be about race. There’s not really any hint of this in the ad, but that’s the complaint. Of course, to a reasonable person, this doesn’t make any sense at all. But a whole group of people have latched onto it. For what it’s worth, I haven’t heard any black people complaining about this, only weird white people.

Sydney refuses to be drawn in: “I think that, when I have an issue I want to speak about, people will hear.”

Okay, here’s the connection to chess. It would have been Danya’s 30th birthday yesterday. In my eulogy I wrote:

“There’s something about the fearful symmetry – one man spewing hate, another man, kinder and gentler, receiving it halfway across the world, both unable to log off – that I cannot yet put into words.”

Sydney did what neither Danya nor Kramnik could: she logged off. As she said in the interview,

“I put my phone away. I was filming every day. I was filming Euphoria, so I’m working like 16 hour days, and I don’t really bring my phone on set. I work and I go home and I go to sleep, so I don’t really see a lot of it.”

It’s so important to put your phone away and do your work. It’s the most important thing you can do.

Many of you aren’t ready to hear this, but Sydney Sweeney is much smarter than 99% of grandmasters. Being smart isn’t about being good at a board game. It’s about being able to navigate your life effectively.

I don’t mean to make light of Danya’s death by comparing it to this ultimately rather tawdry episode. Logging off isn’t easy. It’s tremendously hard. Often harder for people we don’t know because of struggles we know nothing about.

The interviewer, like Kramnik, engages in something called concern trolling. It means pretending to express concern, when the real intention is to undermine. As more and more of our life occurs online, we are all exposed to this kind of toxic energy. Resisting it is quickly becoming an essential life skill.

Watch Sydney carefully. With luck, you won’t be attacked so directly. But this energy is everywhere and you need to be able to sidestep it.

Be safe out there.