[482] Know-It-All

Knowledge makes you smug. I should qualify that. Knowledge makes you smug in the face of idiots.

My prevailing problem is never really knowing how to cope with knowledge. As far as “first world problems” go, I think I have that shit on lock. I have nothing but time to learn about the world and its failings or otherwise. I can take in the whole of media culture, then spend uninterrupted weeks digesting the reporting about things that “matter more.”

For all of his “pop psychology” kind of take on the world, one thing I appreciate that I learned from Malcolm Gladwell was the idea of the “maven.” The information specialist or broker. The person who connects people via what they know. I think if I have a place in the world it would be adopting this kind of title and seeing where it goes.

I immediately feel cheap. Like I had an idea of what to talk about and then the last paragraph just punched me in the balls or something.

I'm worried that the world doesn't consist of people who “deserve it.” I think it'd be awesome to have like cool good looking mixed kids, for example. This idea violently slams into my general ideas about life in general and what I'd want to bestow to my kids. A sick planet sucking on a neoliberal teat is not a choice I want to make for someone else.

And so consider “deserving it.” I've said plainly before that I don't think my life has to particularly mean anything. To then make the leap that others should find it in themselves to “earn it” and cut out a place for themselves and their offspring is superficially contradictory. I think when you look into your own existence you find the rub. I'm writing, for example. I'm working and acting and choosing to try and engage with the “faceless masses” who tell me drunkenly in secret they appreciate what I do. Whether you want to call what I'm doing “deserving it” or not, if you're looking for a measure of what should count, “meaning something to someone else” seems as good a metric as any other.

My opinion aside of what I should or could mean, the idea that I'm of consequence matters independent of my small selfishness. I think this starts to resonate louder and louder as people get older, but I don't think it can be overstated, the nature of selfish behavior.

It's what to do when you learn! Where do you take it? I think of the myriad industries I think are totally corrupt or bullshit that people make fine lives out of and derive paychecks and pride to their heart's content. My thought, is anyone really under the impression I only consider myself in terms of the amount of movies or TV I can watch? My knowledge betrays my willingness or patience to play along. I'll take the random pill; we're all dying anyway after all, some of us with a few more nights out and expensive electronics than others.

It kills me that I'm happy to work in spite of my knowledge as well. I have no beef with working with my hands or doing manual labor. I just don't want to do it with things on my mind I know need to be fixed. There's always something that needs to be fixed that requires thinkers. I disagree with the idea that “manning up” and leveraging your ignorance against your muscles is a good thing.

Maybe more about me being smug. I'm so smug, I think I can create my own job related to information brokering. I think I can read and map and make phone calls in a way that builds a future I've literally never read about. And I'm tentatively confident in my ability. It's rather quiet. It's wildly speculative. And yet, my perspective of people and my capacity outweighs my concern for failure literally every time I think about it. I suppose the real question is whether one should begin to respect or consider the opinions of people who don't operate the same way.

It's really hard for me to find conflicting evidence. I have the suspicion that often when people talk to me they sort of...”give up.” I don't make emotional appeals. I don't berate them. I just sort of bring up personal angles or macro-level contentions or even nihilistic and fatalistic sentiments that leave them very begrudgingly agreeing with me. I think it's an extension of the “you should be a lawyer” comments I used to get as a child.

I think this gets in the way of “getting better.” I think I want more argument and disagreement, but I don't have people who spend the time to refute how I got somewhere. This works against me. I can live in relative comfort and have genuinely no existential worries for long periods of time, but I can feel wrong and can't find anyone to tell me why. I'm dealing with people who “get by.” I talk with people who adorn the behavior and habits of cliché quasi-power groups. I'm stuck with the “frustrated smart-types” who struggle to be as pragmatic as the next guy.

It sort of boils down to a question of “why learn?” For me, the answer is to shit on people. I like being smarter than you. I'm not saying I don't have friends who are becoming doctors. I'm saying I like to have perspective. I like diminishing my voice to such a small platform that by the time I have something to say, the suggestion is that it's worth a damn. I want to organize “my” information. I want to turn it into stories. I want to take the endless frustration I have with fake ass frontin' bitches and use it to create a world in which they can profligate around the individuals I really want to see the future. For better or...it's for worse, I feel this is the nature of the game.

It's a devious and mysterious mind that would force you to not only delineate but carry out the unstated rules of an existential game to a nondescript end. Given we only exist as a matter of perception, let's just lean on the idea that I'm fooling myself in woefully encumbered and indulgent ways.

[481] Chain Of Fools

I want to talk about shame. I want to talk about shame because I’m not sure I have any.

Consider the pissing contest. Any moment can devolve into one. Whether it’s trying to come up with the best names to call your combatant or maybe a feat of strength, speaking to our innate desires to compete can turn anything from polite conversation or contest into a potentially inflamed and ridiculous showing of assess.

But it’s more insidious than that. What happens when you don’t even care to compete, but go at it anyway? What if you’re so bored, jaded, or empty that you go “yeah, I’m down for this” when the aim isn’t even destruction, but just to uncover what the next moment in time will look like? This is the realm of trolling, of course. Doing things “for the lulz.” To me, I see a deeper problem in that it’s not even funny. I might chuckle at a particularly weak comeback, but the whole engagement registers as...helpless.

Perhaps it’s like an addiction. People say you can never know an addict's pain until you’ve been addicted.”Well, why don’t you just stop?” registering as terribly ignorant and small-minded. In online battles of twits, it’s often brought up how terribly insecure the other one is or how much they probably hate themselves. But you have to feel in the first place. You have to be invested as a point of pride.

And maybe it’s right here why it feels so confusing. I do take some kind of pride in showing myself to be more “I don’t care” than someone pretending. I’m not the thug on the street ready to take pride in catching a bullet or getting locked up for the rest of my life. I am considerably dismissive of what much of what people take a lot of pride in in life. Yes, you attorney-esc guy who pretends I’m desperate to harass you, I’m willing to show up in court and reduce you to my perception of our conversation the entire time. We’re idiots trying to out piss each other, only now you thought it wise to bring it to your job.

It’ll only be funny a few weeks later after I’ve paid my fine and reflect at how truly absurd it is to be an animal with the internet.

But let’s talk more about trolling. To me, the heart of trolling is about exposing absurdity. It’s the laziest attempt at a self-righteous condemnation of people’s pride. Unfortunately, it’s morphed into this buzzword for being a pretentious asshole. When you speak truth, absurdly or otherwise, it’s reduced to “bravo, you’re doing internet good” instead of “I should reflect on how stupid and petty I truly am.”

Some of us have a deeper appreciation for this than others. I write, fully awash in my folly. I know and own when I’m depraved and absurd and pointless and yes, when something reaches harassment levels, I’m capable and willing to own up to the difference. What got me a restraining order from my mom was harassment, but then, getting the restraining order was something of a peripheral goal anyway.

In any event, I think what bugs me more than anything is the kind of irony that goes unchecked and unacknowledged by the people who choose to engage with me. This is a distinction I think is wildly important to make. I don’t go looking for fights. People drop things in my lap and I like to be a cautionary tale.

I don’t find the motivation to arbitrarily attack what people have written, as my harassers do me. I don’t desperately cobble together their personal information and float it in personal messages so they know I know who they really are. I don’t make threats to kill or fight people. All of these regularly employed against me when people feel inflamed about my, in their view, shitty writing or self-indulgent blogs.

As well, me merely reacting to assholes on the internet doesn’t betray my self-confidence or sense of worth. This weird glorified stoicism is beyond me. Significantly more times than not do I choose to de-escalate situations, particularly when they’re not online. But, I don’t consider typing stupid things back and forth as dangerous as shoving matches outside a bar. Perhaps that’s an oversight.

Perhaps I just need to read more about and round out my conception of shame. Or maybe I need to find my pride again? Either way, when my boredom combines with people who are full of themselves, things degrade quickly. I wish I could care enough to make myself stop engaging. I wish I thought of myself as “better” than teaching a terrible lesson that the person isn’t capable of receiving in the first place. Sometimes I think I’m a little too much like an old person relying on the relief I feel conceiving of death as eliminating my capacity for concern. I suppose as long as it keeps me in civil and not criminal court it’ll remain a fairly manageable character flaw.

[480] Blah Before The Storm

I have the same few lines repeating in my head and I want them to progress. I’m stuck on the idea of “systems thinking.” My take is that you try to see things through from conception until the end and account for as many variables as possible.

The concept was introduced to me using a water spout and a tub. You have the spout, water, and tub to consider. Under perfect conditions you turn the spout on and the tub fills up in 30 seconds. Upon running the experiment you find that it actually took 38 seconds. Your window of things you have to consider widens. Is the faucet outside and wind is blowing the water away before it reaches? Is there a leak in the tub? Is something backing up the water? So perhaps you run your test inside, make sure there’s no problems with the faucet, and the tub isn’t leaking. Now the water takes 32 seconds. What’s the problem now? Air pressure? Is the building on a decline? Is the line where you’re going to call the bucket “filled” marked properly? What starts as a simple proposition and experiment starts to experience endless confounds.

When I try and consider systems, I try to think of different ones that play together. You have the “human” system. All the good and bad we are capable of is molded by our environments and experiences. I’m living within the confines of my body within the confines of my town and its weather and its laws. Nothing I think to do or say will negate or dismiss the physics of the “existence system.” It becomes a very broad and confusing way of trying to consider how to “generally help” something. You may infer, it’s not a method that screams results.

No less, the first step, in my estimation, of actually doing meaningful good is to accurately depict the nature of the problem. It’s a never ending source of frustration to listen to politicians and angry activist types who scream about some issue in particular they don’t like, but they don’t have 3 examples of how it fits into anything. “Bring back Glass-Steagall!” Like it wasn’t just 1 of dozens of pieces of legislation over years that were dismantled. Like the world of high finance and armies of lawyers don’t already have a plan if Bernie goes directly after them.

If you think of the money system, the political system, and the basic human animal system, the first two are dramatically more resilient. When you’re bored with trying to decode the language of finance and law, a hundred people are getting paid to find it the most interesting thing in the world. When you find the will and gumption to hit the voting booth, thousands of lobbies are lined up to make sure your guy stays in power by doing things you don’t have to notice. We’re not individually capable of maintaining the kind of built in reinforcing mechanism of big systems. When you organize you can start a trend that infiltrates the system, think Black Lives Matter making it into debates, but at this system’s core, black kids are still gonna get shot disproportionately and you’re just the whiny child it says “fuck it, here’s ice cream!” to once in awhile.

Can that be changed?

My thought is that it can only change when things become decentralized. When the system doesn’t educate you. When the system doesn’t feed you. When the system has no authority to use your money for illegal and deadly activities that keep you stuck, things shift and shift quickly. In order to decentralize, you need to educate. Urban farming is cool, there’s like ten people who know how to do it. There’s all kinds of new schools and methods being employed, all we hear about is privatization.

I think what compounds the problems in the effort to educate is that the system keeps you busy, distracted, and tired. You have to work several jobs to struggle. You’re stressed out about debt. You’re living with parents or pretending to be better off than you are. And have you seen Making A Murderer?

My task is to try and catalogue for the sake of telling coherent stories. When a superintendent can reform a poor area by focusing on all the things poor kids need in order to exceed in one aspect, school itself, it speaks to the larger project. Why can’t that be done elsewhere, right now? Asking and answering those kind of questions I think will dig up the roots of system impediments. The clogs in the faucet of necessary money. I think when you can tie people’s effort to actual results it helps reestablish empathy and a connection to where you live. This to stand in place of the romantic accounts, which I hate, of places like my town which come across as sentimental blurbs from a “Places to check out!” segment in a magazine.

If this all sounds like a big boring walk around about a hugely vague plan I’m working on, I’m sorry. This is really hard to think about and I want to find a way to not only judge success, but come across indicators to suggest what a sustained movement in the right direction would look like when my tool is employed. Say I connect another superintendent and see the sparks of things changing in a poor area elsewhere. Is that good, or throwing a dime in the fountain instead of a penny?

My concern is for the years we’re stuck with Clinton allowing big money to do its thing. The project almost more complicated if trying to engage a decentralization plan as people are struck by continual blows of neoliberalism. Best case, moving the ball forward at the local level in service to things Bernie puts forth.

Now I’m thinking of Hydra. Is the world truly organized like drug cartels? I have a suspicion, but I want to believe there’s too many moving parts for it to be as coherent as we might see in shows like The Blacklist. I’m embolden and terrified by the fact that my greatest ally is our own human stupidity. If I can build a system that outlasts someone’s will to dodge it. It would need it’s own kind of reinforcing loop that certainly wouldn’t be impervious to corruption. Does it make the effort less worth it? Are we all essentially forced to just ride it out in service to ourselves? Will I drive myself crazy thinking “I have a way! I have a way!” only to grow resentful and cold when it all blows up in my face?

I suppose I have to claim my project an extension of my ego and selfishness and nothing else. No one gives a shit until they see how it impacts them. I don’t expect them to give a shit until I figure out how to show “all of it” affects them. The task is to be a storyteller. The task is to identify. If I aim small at those two ends much of the gaps should fill themselves in. This is apparently what I’m betting on. Single documentaries set balls in motion to shut down exhibits at Seaworld. Just create a useful information factory and let people run with the product.

[479] Couch Potato Privilege

Fair or not, life seems a war of ideas. For scrutiny's sake, take the opening line. One must presume potential fairness to mock up against absurd inanity. You must feel or dismiss the connotation, a particularly fervent experiencer of it might insist, the word “war” must inhabit. Innocently, I've made a call to arms in an interpretative battle that can barrel down a multi-dimensional rabbit hole. You can already feel that my language is too encumbered and pretentious. I can react and dutifully explain away my word choice, or think to myself “fuck em” and move on. The closer you pay attention, the more you beckon headaches and drama and really really true and compelling feelings about the “proper” way to engage.

My perpetual suggestion has been that this pretense comes from the “wrong kind of selfishness.” That the world must conform to your conception or be dammed. I think, as a convening of my attitude of “already having arrived” I was able to experience a proper contentment and happiness yesterday. It stood out. The dominoes already looked lined up and ready to watch be knocked over. Were it not for a moment's propensity to be fleeting, I wouldn't find myself writing now. Was I the wrong kind of selfishness in feeling good? Is it the wrong kind of selfishness to try and explain it away now? 

Bloody hell, I truly don't want to make this ridiculously abstract. I'm trying to consider circumstance. I'm trying to consider the “secret struggle” that is often alluded to when deciding whether or not you're going to volley shit back at whomever threw it at you. I'm thinking about Martin Luther King Jr.'s “arc of history.” I'm thinking about time and alleged wastes of it. I'm worried that how these thoughts are making me feel will be lost if I don't focus on tying them coherently together. 

Let's start simple and talk my circumstances. The prompting of the title. I have couch potato privilege. There are people who would literally feel sick and ashamed to live like I do. There are people who make lucrative careers doubling down on what I do. Do I mean to suggest a kind of balance in writing about them this way? No. I genuinely wonder if there's an underlying truth that can guide my behavior with a brain forced to engage with dual contexts. 

Much of what I do, or mostly don't do, now is a result of working very hard very quickly and learning that my circumstances overrode my willingness or capacity. I hope everyone gets a chance to work themselves to exhaustion one day, but hopefully it will be in service to a measurable positive consequence. As popular conception has it, if and when you work hard, you’re aligned with those who can be picked up from a war field in South Sudan and come up to be a lawyer. The message, fund the organization that created that guy. At once behold the glory of charitable giving and feel shitty about your life having never been forced into being a child soldier turned lawyer, but you definitely got through another Game of Thrones season. 

Do I immediately sound defeatist? “Overrode my willingness or capacity.” I haven't stopped working on what I want to do in life, I just stopped going about it, as I'd describe it, like an overly-enthusiastic child. It's because I know what I'm capable of I pull back. Energy doesn't come from an endless source of benevolent intent. When I'm motivated and working hard, I need you to feel that, not watch me act like I'm terribly motivated and working hard. 

I find myself choking on a flood of ideas. I need to compile lists of wholesalers of crafting supplies because I want to see how big my step-mom's business can get. I recognize her talent and set-backs being the only one doing what she's doing, couple this with a fuck ton of business reading to recognize barriers, and know there's a lot to be done there. I want to get into enough studies to hire researchers to keep filling in my map so I can literally revolutionize how we conceive of and use information. I want to get the reading out of the way on how to do little side businesses that pop up on reddit all the time for a few grand here and there. I want to find Brandly Cooper's personal trainer for American sniper because I hate dieting and exercise, but John Krazinsky had the same guy and said it can only take 6 weeks. Yet, still, I want to watch all my backlogged TV shows and read all my menacingly staring at me books. 

What is a privilege if I exercise in service to “hot air?” I thought I was setting good examples, and it's led me here. I thought I was acting like a person with foresight and diligence. I suppose I certainly still think I matter. Everything I post to facebook gets saved on an excel sheet to be mined and mapped later. I relate my circumstances and most people just breath heavy and make some comment about being lucky or wishing for my freedom. I talk about getting a couple spinal taps for a study and people think “what the fuck, noooo” and then I say it made me 9 grand in 10 days and they go “weeeelllll.” 

I feel fractured. My energy has nowhere to go. My accomplishments don't register as “personally meaningful” because I'm already sold on who I am. I don't want to learn anymore, I want us to work together and sort of already know the things I do. I'd like to teach and like actually have that be respected like it once was. I'm almost positive I'll get there in some form or another. I'm just so hopelessly lost on why it has to take so long. I'm 27. I'm basically dead already. Move your asses, society. 

P.S. Fuck rich people. If I had fractions of what I consistently read about what they piss away on stupid shit, you'd never hear another word out of me that wasn't about what I was creating next.

[478] Big DaDa

I think society takes “progress” as an inevitability. Eventually we’ll have a pluralistic resource based scientific underpinning that guides our actions and future. People won’t go hungry, and we’ll be able to predict, if not flatly manipulate the weather. You’ll have backup organs stored away or will upload your personality into a computer to interface with the universe for as long as you stay plugged in. Or, maybe I’ve spent a little too much time in /r/futurology.

In any event, I think as a consequence of this enduring faith in technology and information, we assume a generalized “more is better.” More options, more distractions, more “opportunities” that will, let’s see if I can nail the language, help us “self-actualize” and “grow” in a rising tides kind of fashion. Our governmental organizations want your spending habits and every quip catalogued. They want supercomputers to sort through it all and give percentages about who’s dangerous and who’s not. We want body cam footage. We want statistics and papers and papers to contradict those papers.

I think we’re doing it backwards. When you feel compelled to collect data at NSA levels, it’s clearly related to ideas about control. If you practice a little humility and perspective about the nature of control, you look for other ways to exhibit it. That is, you seek to control yourself in spite of others or you look for information volunteered. I think we overlook how much we volunteer.

I just wrote about insecurity, for example. People don’t take to facebook and write ten pages about what they’re really afraid of or how beyond crippled they’d be if the toothpicks propping up their life snap. They make an offhanded comment. Ironically, they also phrase too deliberately. They disappear a little creepily hardcore into a hobby. The deeper information still comes out. Perhaps we’re too polite to ever bring it up, but it’s there.

I think data is used in service to the idealism. What does it tell you that 27% of high school teens reported feeling stressed about their financial future? Anything? If you’re familiar even remotely with questionnaires or teenagers, the best you can walk away with is a jolt to maybe talk to them more or plan a little more diligently in case of an emergency. The kind of sage patently obvious wisdom you hopefully take into parenting anyway. Did the team who crafted the questions, sat down the teens, and reported their findings ever think out the end game? Ideally, they’re helping inform you, right? Realistically, they’ve maybe washed your brain in another errant statistic.

I want less data. I want what people are already saying to simply be acknowledged, and not just when it’s related in facebook-friendly ways. I want the thousands of years of experience and potential wisdom to trigger action, or not. It’s why I feel my tasks regarding data management or helping the conversation are fairly easy. Everything I want is already there, it’s just a puzzle. I don’t need to cut out a niche so much as point to it. Hopefully, I’ll do it in a way that gets other people speaking up as well.

[477] Identity Politics

An identity seems a precarious thing. If you don’t have one, you’re at the will of every brush of outside power. The lemming ready and willing to jump off the cliff. If you do have one, you have to be prepared to keep replenishing and defending your ideas about it. You grow up in a rough-and-tumble world, you won’t feel like you’re doing things right if you don’t exhibit the fight in you. Worse than that, if circumstances manage to undermine your ideas about yourself, it can obliterate your will to live.

I think a lot about identity when I see arguments happen online. You don’t get someone else’s tone to know they’re being sarcastic or making a joke. You don’t hear their conviction or sadness or hesitation that would round-out how you approach the discussion. I think this exacerbates the jaded-sarcasm and/or dismissive name-calling. You can’t tell I’d be about to hit you, but you know what I’m after in calling you a bitch.

Not having an identity feels more straightforward, to me. I simply imagine a child. Surely you’re born primed certain ways, some are quiet and others hellions, but perhaps you’re adept at pointing out things they say as they grow up that you absolutely know came from their parents’ opinions and no place else. Perhaps someone can only exist in the form of references to TV or videogames. Perhaps they are referred to as “perfect” for one-track tasks handed down through an authority.

And maybe I’m already being unfair to these people. No less, for the sake of trying to speak to a distinction, that’s the best I have so far on one side of the line.

To have an identity requires a little or a lot more work. The little is simply making a claim about yourself. “I like Daria.” More work comes in if someone bothers to ask why. You can choose to entwine your identity towards it further, or it can remain a simple cartoon that once made you think you liked it. Another layer of work can appear if you take her monologues or attitudes and mock them up against your life and experiences. You could run a comparative analysis and ask if you like how you handled something or if you might want to be more like her. It’s here you begin to look down on the person who got a Daria tattoo who’s seen 3 episodes and got caught up in the hype of their friend group in high school.

But that’s something easy like TV. Identity politics know no borders. Art can speak to you. Your family and ideas about them may be where the bulk of “you” resides. People are inflamed by politics, not of course because so much is literally about to kill them, but dammit if part of them doesn’t feel under attack.

The word that comes to mind is “insecurity.” It seems as large a guiding principle of many people's actions as anything else. You can take cliches about insecure manhood and getting a big truck or a gun. You can talk emotional manipulation from distrust towards a spouse. Insecure access to healthcare and food have consequences in emotional control and cognitive abilities. This is of course the stark reality for lesser-developed nations that we pretend we haven’t only recently escaped from, and certainly not uniformly.

A distinction I’d like to make though, is less about your time spent mocking yourself up against cultural influences, and more about an attitude and habit. I think across debatable topics and despite your age group, you can see those who’ve molded an identity and those who play into the drama of never having figured theirs out.

One metric of this difference is openness versus closed. Let’s take something fun, like gay sex. I’m not gay. I can no less say gay sex and make jokes and clearly see my mouth wrapped around a cock while writing this, and it doesn’t somehow turn me gay. My mind is open. I can explore the “taboo” or “different” or what I know I would not enjoy, and it doesn’t threaten how I conceive of myself. By contrast, there are people who can’t read this paragraph without making faces, getting angry, or bustling with excitement to hit the comment section with commentary about being closeted or actually gay or what have you.

This speaks to the next difference. There’s a compulsive reflex in the insecure. They need to make you feel bad and tear down your identity. They need to dismiss you, belittle you, and put you into a box that you never volunteered for and likely never identified with. This is pretty baseline animal brain shortcutting, but in humans with a malicious agenda, it’s stoked and invoked to do extra dehumanizing work to put your disgusting or confusing self “over there” as an “evil one of them.”

Which moves us into another difference, anger. Surely, I’ve felt myself on the reasonable side of an issue and when discussing something, maybe guns, have felt angry that I can’t get through or get a question answered. This is not the anger I mean. The insecure need to cleanse the planet of what upsets them.They default to violent matter-of-fact rhetoric. Sometimes, it’s couched in more banal sentiments or conflated with several issues at once, but the end goal is fairly clear; burn it all down. The term “flame war” comes to mind as well the irony of the “conservative” blog titled “The Blaze.”

It’s just so easy to tear things down. It’s so easy to get angry. If you’re confused, make it the other person’s fault. If you’re afraid, turn them into the aggressor. (Any black people here who’ve been coached to never look like an “angry black male?”) Exponentiate the problem by giving the insecure voice anonymity via text. Let them find fellow playground politikers to pile on with damming sentiments and inane pronouncements. They need you to be as jaded and lazy of a cliche. Be damned if you don’t feel as battered around by the limp-wristed punches that plague them.

And if you’re an adult with an identity, it’s usually just annoying. If you’re provoked or engulfed in your insecurities, it’s hard to calculate the potential fallout. I think of bankrupted Wall Street people who’ve thrown themselves off of buildings and the rise in old white male suicides.

My wish is for you to think about things reflectively. When you don’t understand, don’t make a judgment that exposes your ignorance, ask a question that gives you and your combatant a chance to be better understood. This habit will help build an inquisitive and respectful identity. You may think you don’t want that, but then, I’m prompted to wonder what someone without an identity really wants anyway. Their mommy?

[476] Jibber Jabber

I feel I've made a gross oversight.

Mind you, it's the kind of ironic oversight that could have been avoided by a strict adherence to what I tend to advocate for. That is, I ask people to talk. Of course, I stress, I hope people have something to say, can get specific, and genuinely add to the sentiments I express. I also hope they forward what they believe and are willing to defend why they posted something.

But, and I think this might be an extension of the problems with the internet, how people talk or what they consider genuine or of value can come from less than compelling or appropriate places. I can think of one friend who will post about the daily struggles women have. I find a lot of the rhetoric and tone of these articles to be working against the cause. I may be wrong, but in my advocacy to read about what other people think, I'm essentially asking for things to argue with.

Argument has adopted a terrible connotative edge, to me. Instead of it feeling like an opportunity, to most people it seems to register as a kind of personal affront. I think I'm often misunderstood, and I've watched it happen to other friends, as being angry or dismissive when something that feels incomplete provokes a ton of questions. Yes, no article is completely comprehensive, but some refrain from blanket statements after blanket statement about men or guns or single statistics meant to bolster a bias from the start.

The idea that conflicting views could so actively work against me I suppose I've viewed as a kind of necessary component. As in, in some ways it's not smart or helpful to give leeway when following the path of that concession leads to a kind of absurdity. I don't know how we take it for granted that “all men are such and such” or “all women feel under perpetual threat of being raped” in every parking lot at night at all times. If that is indeed the case, or men are this rampant and terrifying, we have a dramatic problem on our hands. If, instead, women feel fear more often in general by virtue of being smaller, we're still talking about something important, but it gets more to the heart without unfairly maligning the other half.

But, as people endlessly want to condition me to believe, places like facebook and reddit are not for splitting hairs. I disagree to my peril, but, there are considerably worse problems to have.

There's this weird idea floating around that “everyone is contributing” by virtue of having the internet. “Media is diversified” is claimed in service to dismissing the consequences of outlets like FOX. In the same breath facebook, youtube, and reddit are “just distractions,” but also “grand opportunities for poor people to learn and connect.” It's all at once. It's soup. If you say FOX doesn't matter or Trump is a joke and then their rhetoric shows up in the mouths of vigilantes and ISIS recruiting videos, I struggle to believe you're pursuing larger truths in context constructively. It's how you use this tool and understand it as part of your larger world. I wish those capable of bringing more sense into things had the kind of proud brazen advocacy that I seem to only depict as hapless struggle.

It's not that I don't understand the problems with my social media mediums or my larger daily existence context. It's that I don't know what else to do but be the change I want to see. I want more coherent arguments that don't turn into flame wars, so I try. I invite a lot of potentially unhelpful commentary, because the alternative, disappearing into my ass and growing evermore sure of myself, is what I see other people do and it makes me rather angry and sad.

[475] Trigger Warning

Are we alone?

I spend a lot of time thinking about the individual verses the collective. I write. I'm, whether I want to be or not, part of a community of writers. What it means for me to write is different than what it means for there to “in fact be writers.” I drink. When I drink at a bar with a group of friends, 2 layers of “we” compete with my ability to disappear into my phone or call it an early night.

I think people abuse the power of “I” in claims about the “we.”

I, for example, frequently say something like “I hate people.” As a shorthand indictment of the whole of human existence I feel tends towards absurd disappointment. I'm abusing my selfish one-dimensional disposition. The difference between me and the “we,” whom I claim to hate, is I can write a blog identifying what I'm doing. I want to know how far it goes, why and when I use it, and whether or not something can be done about my personality and habit to get better.

I think it's amazingly easy to see the difference in types of people when you consider arguments. Literally every kind of argument breaks down the same way. It's “I” assertions and feelings abused to avoid or dismiss how “we” can come to an understanding. “I” found this chart that refutes “our” collective knowledge about climate change. “I” have a personal relationship with god that overrides “our” collection of gods mine definitely didn't rip off. “I” know cops who don't kill black kids so “our” conception of race is unfairly painting police in a corner. “I” worked for everything I have so “our” poverty is truly about lazy drug addicted welfare queens.

It's what I call small-minded. It's reflexive and therefore not necessarily malicious. People rely on the mental tools their environments have cultivated. If you don't provide a path for them to get over themselves, I would argue you're literally never talking to them. It's not just ships passing in the night, it's planets never learning of each others' existences.

At the same time, I think the burden is unduly shouldered by the people able to identify the problems I'm talking about. It's my fault when you don't understand because I'm claiming to understand why you don't understand. Me using “big words,” again, a charge I don't understand, and getting “meta” about the conversation, analyzing why it's failing as a last recourse, aren't communication towards anyone but people who already agree but are wise enough not to argue. I know this. The idea that I have to play with and trick you should no less give you pause.

For my part, I'm trying. I'm working on creating tools that make me hate you less. I don't like to feel like things are “pointless” to talk about. I don't like to believe people are going to live and die by their ignorance and biases. I'm not going to stop feeling like I'm truly the one to blame as long as I continue to talk about “all of you” like you won't find me puking in the toilet next to you when it all becomes too much.