another round of skimming and sorting of old blogs. Concurrently, I
had a Jordan Peterson lecture on in the background. It’s to the point
where I’ve heard enough of his lectures I no longer have to zero in
on each line that so initially captivated and motivated me. It’s an
apt analogy.
Writing is a reflection of “my burden.”
Whether I describe that as an “obsessed” mind, “sociopathic,”
an exercise of “honesty,” or you want to sum it all up as a
string of incoherent “rants,” it arose because I didn’t have the
words for the pain in my head and heart. That there are so many
religious traditions that try to capture the sort of “inevitable
suffering” that’s supposed to account for the essence of existence
I find incredibly telling. My head has adopted different but familiar
methods in trying to deal with it.
I’ve said it before, but it
bears repeating, people used to talk under my blogs. They talked a
lot. Acquaintances talked. Friends answered questions. They wrote
their own little blogs under mine and we discussed things over hours
or days. People called me out. They questioned shitty analogies and
words. They were comfortable saying, “I don’t know” about things
I wasn’t sure of either, but there was a cooperation and show of
solidarity in the mutual thoughtful effort. It eventually trickled out.
I can only
speculate, but I think that happened for a number of reasons.
Socially, the group dynamics shifted or degraded. In real time people
were moving into more advanced classes and starting to contemplate
“bigger” things than whatever the crazy guy at the end of the
hall had to say. There might be a measure of boredom and feeling it’s
all been said before. I could have simply exhausted a finite well of
goodwill that was willing to engage with my “combative” and
“intimidating” positions. Tellingly, I was considerably more
actually shitty with people back then, and they still stuck around to
talk or fight back. For any whiner today who thinks anything I’ve
written in the last several years is “too much,” let that
discrepancy testify to a deadly weak defensive skin.
If I
write something I’m working out, or think I’ve stumbled into some
insight, it stands to reason I’d want to defend it. You watched the
thought unfold. You might have ridden along the last few blogs that
anticipated a new conclusion. Whomever decided that any back and
forth or disagreement was automatically an untenable and impossible
“fight,” I have no idea. I genuinely wonder if the silence and
shoring up of “sides” of our political trends aligned with the
precipitous fall of anymore feedback. What I can be sure of is that
I’m not just confused or angry about nothing, and under what I’d
today consider a “worse” capacity and willingness for civility
prompted the kind of exchanges I couldn’t beg you today to contribute
towards.
I think that’s scary. Something else brilliantly
clear about those days is that there are always a gigantic amount of
problems that not enough people are willing to talk about. Would you
have guessed that I was worried about net neutrality in 2008? I
didn’t realize it either until I stumbled across that blog. Would a
conversation that organized and accounted for my concerns have
potentially steered us in a better direction today? Not that I’m a
community organizer, or seem to exert much power over anything but
the destruction of my social life and car, but the point is simple
enough, right? It makes me think of how many friends said they wished
they helped me create a Bitcoin mining machine when I offered the
money and we both had the time.
Is there a ton of redundancy?
Absolutely. Well before I had the patience to ignore, or even had the
term “ideological possession,” I had all of the complaints and
problems with “stupid” and “irrational” Christians and
lamented ever having to experience the depravity of a Dinesh D’Souza
dozens of times. But I have to think each time I was moved to say
something, either a step was being taken, or a chip was breaking off.
They remain invitations as well as doorways into the past. There are
versions of yourself perhaps so compactly stuffed beneath what you’re
doing right now, behind the eyes that are reading this, maybe you’ve
lost something important. Maybe it takes addressing, and then
readdressing, and then doubling down on that thing, whatever it is,
before you hit pay dirt.
I had one friend noting a trend of
people becoming “increasingly fake.” You’d think that would be
something I would say, but now I get a dimension to consider if that
idea ever crosses my mind. I used to get a ton of encouragement with
people calling me “deep,” or suggesting I compile and try to sell
a book. I think about this in how quickly I was able to get 200+
followers on a new, now defunct, blogging site with old thoughts
paired with a picture. I also bring it up to say none of that shit
was what motivated me to write then, and reading it back now, I don’t
feel some positive feeling for being praised. I’ll always want the
work of your input over the blow job.
A section of the lecture
in the background that did catch my ear was when Peterson started
discussing playing different games at once. You have many iterations
playing out over time, and you have to consider them all in trying to
account for how to orient yourself in the world this moment. I think
about this with regard to my level of “activism” or “morality”
that I didn’t engage in in the past and don’t get up to today. I know
it’s the cliché, but I’ve never once considered volunteering my time
to help the “less fortunate” in something like a soup kitchen or
clothing drive. More than that, I’m often the first one to point out
some paper or study that shits all over the efficacy of those
individuated, what I called selfish, acts.
I don’t know that
I’ve ever tried to compile the amount of “most pressing” games
I’m running in one place. I know that a huge motivation for pursuing
things entrepreneurial was the abject boredom and hatred I had for
school. I know that I want no scene even remotely adjacent to happen
to my dad or stepmom as what happened with my grandma. I know that if
I’m destined to have primarily superficial and harmful social
relationships, I’d rather be home and drunk during them. I’ve adopted
some concern for being familiar with our abundant media landscape.
And while I’m reading and watching and arguing, I’d like to believe
that the same tools I’ve exercised to gain what I have in life could
be adopted across different problems in the world.
Less
interesting to me are the vagaries of how that all fits together and
the degrees they need to be altered or sacrificed in order to appease
the present moment. More interesting is how many games are you
running? Have you completed any? Have they changed over time? Have
they been materially altered as you gained experiences or heard back
from your social circles? Because this is something I think is
vitally important to help explain some of my underbelly. I get
precisely no feedback. It wasn’t until I specifically tagged every
girl remaining on my friends list who I’d ever had a remote sexual
encounter with, and offered the concession that I was a sexual
assailant, that garnered more than a “like,” let alone a
conversation.
I have to wonder, did people stop thinking?
We can put up an endless list of
other reasons they aren’t responding, but I think they’ll miss the
point. Just to scratch the itch though, maybe facebook’s algorithm
makes sure only the same handful of people see when I post. Maybe I
literally am just “hated” and “taken for granted” enough to
be ignored. Maybe everyone is so busy and distracted they couldn’t be
bothered if they tried. Maybe every single thing I’ve said over the
last several years has been so intuitively obvious people almost feel
sorry for me that I bother to keep talking. Maybe “snowflake”
isn’t just an indication of someone’s derivative condescending
alt-right predilections, but a social condition that’s infected and
paralyzed. Maybe what got people talking initially had nothing to do
with me and I wasn’t aware enough to preserve whatever it was. Maybe
we really are living in impossibly dangerous times where the devoid
intellectual landscape has so altered us, we couldn’t understand the
origins and consequences of our silence until it killed us.
There’s
plenty of talk about the reasons we got Trump, and echoes of our
misunderstood and ignored history that could lead us into actual
nuclear war. There’s talk with the buzzwords of the day regarding
which direction we should heave the country after we wring it from
the cold dead hands of our oppressors. There’s funny signs at
marches. There’s tweet storms. And to be sure, there’s a string of
intellectuals and lecturers trying to put a box around what plagues
us and provide hope and objective means for moving forward. But I
can’t get my “friends” to talk to me? What does any of that
popularized polarizing mess at the top mean if I can’t get
intelligent conversation down here in the mud? What does it mean that
as I’ve gotten more patient, more deliberate, and more respectful of
my potential impact and responsibility, the conversational waters run
dry? The problems got bigger, my views got more nuanced, now,
nobody’s interested. I must point out, this isn’t entirely true. A
roommates girlfriend invited her bother over the other day. He’s 20,
low-status, and epitomized a white entitled mediocre opinion. He had
“plenty” to tell me about how Japan’s isolationism in the 1800s
is a model for how the U.S. should conduct itself today. This is what
you’ve left me with, people.
I want even the smallest grasp
on the largest trends. The technologies that will materially alter
your life started with that one article you caught 8 years ago. A
bill or foreign policy decision will ripple throughout the rest of
your life. How you talked about your feelings or plans for the people
in your life have an immense deal to tell you about why your
relationships look the way they do today. Literally, go to my blog
and you can take my words that came true. If instead you adopt a
complicit filter that decides all that’s important are the inches in
front of your nose, you’re at the whims of it all. You’ll sway the
wrong direction and bring us all down. Don’t talk back for my sake.
Do it because it’s literally the only way we can orient ourselves in
the world that approaches a practical life-affirming sense. Do it
because I’m telling you how cold and lonely I am, all the time, and
if you have a drop of “friendship” left in you, you’d bother to
understand what it means to do so.
Run the game where you
challenge or argue with Nick P. on top of all your others. Hit the
redundancy button until it breaks and the pieces need to be
reassembled into something new. Help me remember that really cool
thing you read about that it behooves us to check out more. Act like
this magical means of connecting with any idea and any person can be
used for more than positive feedback loops of arbitrary hatred and
goofiness. Do it because you don’t want to. Do it because it’s hard.
Do it because it takes time. Do it because you’re afraid of what
happens to a person like me if he loses too much of how to orient
himself in the world. I don’t actually care why you do it, but that
you in fact do. I know nothing about you but my last fleeing memories
of our time together and your cultivated online personas. I haven’t
known what I’m doing for so long because my context erased itself.
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