[552] Hungry

There is no good place to begin. I suppose I mostly just want to talk about the fall of man. This fall plays out every moment of every impersonal lie we subject our perception to. Every "joke" you read in this forum speaks to it. It's every "fight" that plays out most dramatically within the confines of your blood pressure more than anywhere to do with the "real world." It's like a forced obsessive compulsiveness given that one way or another, the internet can remind you that nothing goes away. Whether you were dealing with a difficult problem or simply flew off the handle, these cobbling together of words suggest a permanence to your being that overwhelmingly skews negative.

What this does is it breaks down our empathy and honesty. There's a difference between someone like Hitler 2(Trump), for example, who gets a national pulpit to express views engendering racial hatred and the internet troll. Well, in the world of adults with perspective, there would be. One acts on impulse and immaturity, the other is a guiding beacon standard bearer, who, incidentally, acts on impulse and immaturity. Otherwise responsible adults feel bad when they've done or said something irresponsible or shitty. I feel we've crossed over into a world where standard metrics of decency are perpetually up for debate. This isn't because they should be, by any means, it's just we play so fast and loose with our conceptions of power we tend to destroy even a general communal identity structure.

For me personally, reddit will always be a place that I'm dragged back into the worst kinds of habits and arguments. I've had someone dig up my personal information and write an entire diatribe about how batshit they think I am, cherry picking some of my worst experiences I chose to write about over the last 12 years. Think about that, 12 years. How many fights have you been in in 12 years? The handful of mine stuck out and I wrote about them. How many depressed or angry thoughts might you have in 12 years? Mind you, they're formative years as well. Years that everyone rides out emotional roller coasters from time to time, let alone finds the capacity to retain them as mini explosions you see people carry out in their adult lives.

Not only is it a sheer lack of respect for the complicated existence we have with ourselves and how to process it all, it's abusing the wanton nature of influence on the internet. It's not just you who can make me look bad by going through my thoughts and picking the worst. I can do it to. In the same way you can pick apart news sources to turn anything into the worst or best thing you've ever heard or wanted to project. Now, at least for some institutions, there's a vested financial and moral payout for accountability and accuracy. In our personal lives? All we need to do is feel good about it. We don't have to accept basic truths about humanity and complex emotions or thoughts. That person is crazy.

Here we bump into the heart of the issue. We've lost the tools to figure out who's crazy and who isn't. Even if there were a fleeting capacity to diagnose someone from their words, judgments and prescriptions are offered at a blistering pace. One person's boredom and immaturity is another's protective order. I personally draw stark lines between making violent threats and expressing endless streams of bigoted hate speech, but then it's practically impossible to explain away or dial back the time you take a ho-hum attitude towards calling a random person a nigger. It's always in bad taste, that was certainly the point at the time, but genuine fears regarding that person's specific racism are arguably misplaced.

But of course, they can't be. We don't want them to be. It's not that literally everyone is probably what we understand to be racist, unconsciously or otherwise, it's that they've handed you the tool to be the self-righteous hero of an internet beat down. The only context is the voice you're reading their words in your head with. It's not your burden to take your time with their words or be patient with your initial reaction. They slipped, you won. Of course you both lost and you stained humanity, but thus is life with too much time and impersonality.

Let's make it more complicated. What if you're a fiction writer? What if your words are a caricature of how you feel and you blow them up? Like when someone screams, "I'll kill you!" and in any honest world you can be assured that anger isn't going to blow up into murder. What if a strategy for dealing with your life and thoughts is to adopt a character that likes to write. Now this character can shoulder the burden of these troublesome thoughts and put them down and away somewhere. Who's to say? Do we indict the fiction writers for their depictions of soulless or tasteless acts and words? Do we have any idea that these words are coming from somewhere honest and truthful despite endless professions they might be?

It's pretty easy to solidly say "no" on both counts. If I told you I murdered a homeless man in Florida in 1998, it would be not just wildly unreasonable to take this digression to the criminal records division and find a case that matches up. You shouldn't insist on my alibi. You shouldn't do whatever it takes to tie my reddit profile to random sites that may pop up on google and implore my ISP to give you a name. We can leave aside that I would have been a child in 1998, just think about how not even skeptical you are right now in reading this! My very explanation makes you want it to be true. You're reacting to a random thought and the very idea of plausible deniability as if I'm guilty. Does that make any fucking sense?

That's the world we live in now. We look for "moral high ground" as it exists in personal speculation and empty judgment. We don't know things. We don't think about things. We don't take responsibility for things. We don't let things die natural deaths and we prevent things from growing that would displace the feeble ground we've established for ourselves. Someone slaps your mistake to a picture or name and you can be memed. You can get in trouble years after the fact. You can be denied for all the work and thought you put into getting past that moment. Is it any wonder people feel so depressed by staying online? Is it impossible to admit the "polarization" will never go away as long as we don't address the basic assumptions about how this medium changes our emotional state with regard to knowledge and each other?

If you're a little crazy, the online world gives you space to be insanely moreso. If you're a little illogical, someone has taken your doozy and written a manifesto to its defense. If you're a little correct, you'll be able to find thousands of people to give you kudos like you just won a major award! Highest rated comment here I come! I guess reddit likes duck puns! And now your thoughts are awash in achieving such glory again one day. The worst part of this accelerant nature is that it rarely identifies or celebrates the a little bit crowd. The craziest of crazy gets to the top. The hardest to think or cope about gets buried very quickly. The one's who've figured out the empty pretentious "adult voice" that never really speaks to anything but the myth of civility and intelligence prevails as a standing denial and indictment of the reality. It's not all bad, just hide the haters!

You're the hater. You're a person who's capable of as much or as little hatred as you read into someone else's words. You swallow every word like you hope everyone is swallowing yours. It's just a joke to you. It's just you offering your honest opinion. It's just the internet. You find ways to distract yourself and silence the harm you cause yourself and other people. And don't be mistaken that it's just in your words. No no. The words by their nature are a level of ambiguity you try to use to absolve yourself. That is, humans can be complicated and ambiguous, but they can also know when they're lying. The words themselves can't.

Think about that when you're trying so hard to condemn "the other" or "the crazy." If you're working too hard, you're scared of your true nature. If you can't escape your past, it's because it's not in the past. Just like my worst professions of writing. They're there for me to stare at today. They can and will be used against me to hijack my struggles or insecurities and supplement them with yours. You didn't take my words as a process or an honest opportunity to reflect and empathize. You scapegoated. I'm sacrificed on your alter of impersonal depravity as your name and your face have no defense. We're equally as desperate. We're equally as bored. We hurt ourselves implicitly or explicitly. But I'm willing to keep talking. I'm willing to keep working and reflecting.

So I pity you, anonymous voices. I pity you for how much you believe in yourselves and the consequences of your power. If you pretended to have the best intentions, you'd still be doing nothing but destroying. The harder you feel you're behaving in earnest, the farther down an oblivious hole you tumble. The real world fallout is greater than you could imagine (well, presumably before the election of Hitler 2).

I'm so scared, not for my own safety or prospects because of the stupid shit I do online mind you, but because of how few people can even relate to my fear or figure out ways to relate to it honestly. We're still going to go around diagnosing each other. We're going to take snapshots and think they've anything to do with historical trends or the preponderance of evidence to the contrary. We're going to muster the resolve to fight and fear "controversial opinions" instead of actual fascism or personal insecurities regarding the endless series of empty words we use to suit our interests. And then what? We'll keep blaming each other into circles of mental and physical violence. When someone stops and admits it's their fault. When responsibility tries to take a breath, we'll pile on, ravenous.