The words landed. Phony shitlib.

I didn’t laugh when I read them. I froze. I sat there in the low blue light of my phone, staring at the message as if it had been hand-delivered by a ghost from every argument I’ve ever lost. My pulse shot up, my stomach dropped out, and I felt a kind of moral vertigo, like looking at a picture of myself that I didn’t know existed. I went from pissed to sad to overwhelmed by the absurdity of this world. The next morning, I laughed. It took 15 hours for humor to catch up with the truth.

And the truth is, I am a phony shitlib.

Not in the way they meant it, but in the way anyone trying to live ethically inside late-stage capitalism is a little phony. I am both the performance and the protest. I believe in mutual aid, but also own a home. I critique consumption while scrolling for moisturizer recommendations. I hate the billionaire class and still use their platforms to publish my thoughts about hating them. My politics are radical in theory and liberal in practice, which means my conscience is perpetually overdrafted. Whenever I think I’ve “risen above,” I hit my head on another truth I’ve avoided.

That’s why the insult stuck. It was rude, but also diagnostic. It pried open the space between who I want to be and how I appear, and appearances for people like me who are white, middle-aged, educated, downwardly mobile but still dressed in the language of progress, carry centuries of baggage. We are the demographic embodiment of “the problem.” We are too comfortable to revolt, too aware to relax, too broke to be elites but too privileged to call ourselves oppressed. The contradiction hums beneath every Zoom background and lawn sign. I am of the people who say, “defund the police” while worrying about the car break-ins on the block. We are the ones who talk about late-stage capitalism as if we didn’t just pay the mortgage.

I could say the insult wasn’t fair. I could tell you about the credit-card debt, the side hustles, the medical bills, the quiet panic of realizing the middle class life I expected no longer exists. But fairness misses the point. The sting came from recognition, not injustice. The phrase “phony shitlib” is a cultural Rorschach: a blot of ink where projection and perception merge. To the person who said it, it probably meant performative, hypocritical, self-satisfied. To me, it exposed a fear I’ve carried for decades; that my empathy is ornamental and I’m just another white lady rehearsing virtue for applause.

Beneath the politics were family, class, and belonging. Being called a phony shitlib touched the oldest wound: the ache of not fitting in anywhere. 

I replayed the moment obsessively. I told myself I shouldn’t care, that strangers’ judgments don’t matter. But they said what they said because they saw something real: the tension between conviction and comfort. They saw that I still benefit from the same systems I critique. They saw that my politics are lived in relative safety, and they were right. The part that stung most was knowing I can’t argue back.

When I finally laughed, it was a laugh of surrender.

It felt good to stop pretending that self-awareness exempts me from hypocrisy. Awareness just makes it harder to hide. Maybe that’s why so many people drift toward cynicism; it’s less exhausting than trying to stay hopeful inside a machine that rewards duplicity. But cynicism is its own phoniness, a kind of ironic camouflage for people who don’t want to risk sincerity. I’ve worn that armor, too. It doesn’t fit anymore.

Being called a phony shitlib clarified something I hadn’t articulated: that moral self-scrutiny doesn’t absolve anyone. It’s a practice, not a pass. The insult was an X-ray of my contradictions, and I needed to see the bones. To live ethically now is to live inside the conflict and the inconsistencies of our truths. The only dishonest thing is pretending that conflict doesn’t exist.

Maybe we all need an insult that functions like an audit. Something that reminds us we’re participants in what we despise. Phony shitlib just happened to be mine in the moment. It forced me to acknowledge that my politics, aesthetics, and grief operate within structures I didn’t build but still maintain. The phone I’m typing this on, the delicious, locally roasted coffee in my mug, and the words I use to critique capitalism are artifacts of the system I claim to resist. The awareness doesn’t purify me; it makes me responsible.

Responsibility stripped of performance is humbling. It asks for quiet repair instead of loud repentance. It asks you to give more than you post about. It asks you to stop measuring goodness by visibility. I can’t fix the optics of my life, but I can keep interrogating them: what I buy, what I hoard, what I defend. Maybe what separates the phony from the faithful is not the absence of contradiction, but the willingness to live inside it honestly.

Every time I think about the phrase now, I think of how absurd it is to want to be seen as both radical and respectable, as if the world could ever let you be both. I think of how politics in America has turned into performance art: left, right, and everything between, each side convinced the other is the real faker. The irony is that the system survives on our mutual accusations of phoniness. As long as we’re busy proving we’re authentic, we’ll never organize around what’s real.

I’m still broke. My house still needs repairs. I spend too much time writing for someone who should get a second job. None of that cancels the truth that I live a cushioned life compared to most people on the planet. Maybe that’s what the insult named: the dissonance between where the body lives one truth (economic insecurity) and the mind clings to another (ethical superiority). The result isn’t hypocrisy, not exactly, but it is an ongoing ache. I can’t claim purity while standing on a foundation of inequality, yet I can’t stop wanting to be good. 

To be a phony shitlib is to wake up every day in a collapsing empire, clutching my coffee mug like a talisman against despair, hoping my compost pile counts as resistance. It’s to keep believing in improvement while knowing the structure resists repair.

So yes, I’m a phony shitlib.

But not because I’m pretending to care. In this context, caring is already suspect when every act of compassion can be mistaken for branding. We’ve all been trained to market our virtue, and sometimes I forget I’m still doing it. The real work is unlearning the reflex to perform and relearning how to care quietly, redistribute quietly, and love quietly.

What started as an insult became an invitation. The phrase still has bite, but it also has music. It’s the soundtrack of my contradictions: funny, a little tragic, impossible to ignore. I carry it as a reminder to keep my ego in check, my empathy sharp, and my hypocrisy visible to myself. Maybe that’s all anyone can do in a world where love and rebellion are both sold wholesale.

The next time someone calls me a phony shitlib, I hope I laugh sooner because I finally understand the joke. It’s not about me. It’s about all of us who mistake consciousness for immunity, or find a form of escape within our awareness. It isn’t an escape. Awareness is the beginning of accountability. Laughter is the breath you take when you realize how heavy the truth really is.