I don’t know if I can describe it well, but there’s an uncomfortable place I reach when I think I’ve come to “the end” of something. It’s in letting something that pushed me forward die. It’s cutting out a habit or an argument I might have used passionately for years. When people describe profound changes in who they are or are becoming, I think it centers around these kinds of emotional pivots in how you’re willing to engage with your world.
One of the first times it happened to me was reading The Will to Power. The concept of exhaustion struck such a cord that I experienced a wave of calm and just put the book down and nonchalantly went about my day. How I found myself reading that book was a long emotional story that started with falling for a religious girl. After I’d written the whiny blogs, argued until I could pop, could quote the bible and prominent scientists and philosophers, and this well past when I felt so compelled to be with her, here’s Nietzsche talking about all the effort and time and what it amounts to and I was able to just turn it off.
Without diving too far back into memory lane, I started to feel it again right before starting this. I was watching a Frontline episode chronicling Obama’s presidency and the divide that’s grown in this country. The endless nauseating illogical ideological bullshit from people screaming in the streets and over the airwaves has to cultivate that same exhausted sense in any thinking individual. Compound your initial reaction to a lunatic chanting “death panels” with thoughtful breakdowns from an aspiring “rationalist” who says your approach to conversing with that person needs more nuance than “you’re batshit and stupid.”
They’re right, but I think they’re also more wrong in your approach to that person in general. A body loaded up with terrible ideas that will obstruct or kill you is just that, a deadly and dangerous vehicle you need to control or avoid. This isn’t my lazy stab at defending an offshoot of communism or authoritarianism. I’m trying to zero in on the psychological implications of being ceaselessly berated by the incoherent and angry. I never feel more changed, and for the worse, than in contemplating the hoops one must hop through in order to “appease” someone who wants you dead.
Part of the issue is in feeling like you’re alone. This is why we see these rallies and marches. Silently suffering alone people need something, anything, to suggest they have allies as the narrative swirls around polarization. A fetal heartbeat later the pro-life feminists are arguing with the main event organizers and black women wonder if wearing pinks hats at the BLM meeting will cause a fight. Everyone feels like their particular insight or soundbite is loaded with extra wisdom. If someone does in fact have more wisdom or insight, it can’t be recognized by any shared metric of value or truth. You want to think the details matter, but the more people start to rattle off what they consider details, you can no longer bring yourself to listen to any more.
This is why I take long periods off from reading. I’m not learning anything new. I’m seeing humans do human things over and over again and pretend like they’ve learned anything. You understand how naive and foolish leaders can be. You see the same froth at the mouths of past opposition as you see in the streets today. You see brilliant minds with brilliant analysis and analogies herding us all together into treatises someone will assuredly accuse you of not reading close enough. Inevitably someone else will come along and group the various thinkers into categories and offer short-hand digestible bits of their work that most align with the ways in which they remember them, and thus new shortcuts, cliches, and errant quotes are born. All of it for what? To me, just to speak the futile struggle with being human.
I’ve been so bored with myself for what seems like forever. I’m tired of my lack of story. I barely watch the shows I put on. I can’t bring myself to read another article about how Hitler 2 is destroying something I hadn’t thought about yet. I can’t express myself through music and while there’s a fleeing chance you might get something out of what I write about, I keep seeing the same things showing up more palpable and worse worded. When I’m “done” elevating over and assessing the mess of existence and just need to “do” things, what’s afforded me is minimum wage bullshit like stocking shelves or delivering food. It’s not depressive or incorrect to think of yourself as not mattering on those terms.
Again I just want to sleep. Watch me just drop whatever I’m holding in the middle of a night shift stocking episode and stoically walk out of the door. Watch the weight of the futile struggle bring me to my knees and the relief I’ll feel just being able to bow to the pointlessness of it all. I’m so tired.
