The kickoff phrase this afternoon will be “something for nothing.” It seems an adequate way for me to describe how “my culture” behaves while they ignore that it is in fact what's happening and there are major consequences.
One thing I think separates a lot of genuine and real pursuits is the difference between the people who gain attention verses the ones who seek it. You can do either for good or bad reasons to be sure, but in gaining attention instead of seeking it, I think you're able to speak about “the world” responding to you more than a hundred speculations might speak to your motivations in pursuing attention. I think we try to hide the idea that we want attention. “Nobody likes a show-off,” they say. There's always a bigger fish, someone more talented, or reason your idea will fail.
I think it's an irrational fear that keeps us from acknowledging and accepting those limitations in our reach and perspective. We want the praise, the positive press, and the tortured well-wishing and ass-kissing speech denoting our competence and accomplishments. With enough of that, we start to delve into ideas of what we “deserve.” An entirely new mythology surrounds our impact and nature of our alleged positive consequence on the world. Maybe you were “discovered” for something you could do or studied, but now you're ushered into a position to promote and advocate, and it's unclear precisely how much you're translating.
It's fame culture in general. It's every criticism of becoming a “YouTube celebrity.” It trickles down into the all-star at the office or the high-school championship you're still talking about 40 years later. There's no denying people have different degrees of competence that can set them apart within or between realms. There's every effort to deny that “they” aren't the smallest sliver of “us.”
That is, psychologically, we accept the joy they bring us. We accept their effort in lieu of our own. Yes, score more touchdowns for “our” team! Yes, “humanity” sure is brilliant with that new cancer cure! Let's upvote 20 thousand times someone pursuing a recipe for a gourmet Kit-Kat over 5 days. We collectively positively regard indulging in the arts and honing a skill at the highest levels, right? That kind of stuff works for dozens of psychological booster shots every day.
What matters more seems to be everything that surrounds every pursuit. Why does that person get to spend 5 days dicking around in a kitchen to get, “Hmm, that's pretty good” from her fellow cooks, and significantly more don't? Why do we supplement indulgence and distraction before education? Cooking is a skill, and a potentially expensive one to develop at that. I don't begrudge people their hobbies or indulgences as a matter of habit or resentment. But I have to think “we” needs to look for and respect the things about us that don't feel good to a much greater degree than every indulgent and mildly smug video lets us off the hook for.
It's easy to tell the story of “your life” as a series of accomplishments that you think speaks to you. It's significantly harder to hold in your mind contexts that inform your approach to every moment let alone every day or month or individual task you seek out. I got really good at guitar at one point in my life. I posted exactly 0 videos showing you that my hands could work as fast as thousands of other people you can find online. It was an individual, selfish point to prove to myself. I didn't have anything real to say through the music I was playing but, “I can do this.” So, “showing off” felt stupid. Okay, so maybe the person who lists the 90 steps over 5 days to get Kit-Kats really had something to say. Go on, what was it?
For me to even flirt with the idea that something is “mine,” and not some emergent phenomenon dictated by every impartial circumstance, I had to fight for a voice and grow comfortable with that “being on” feeling I've described before. The first time you see me post a cooking or guitar or gardening video, the pride I take in what I'm doing will be real and the example I hope to set will try and speak to my values or hard-fought voice. Cooking can be your thing, that's great, but anyone who's spent an inordinate amount of time pursuing something obsessively has 90 or 900 steps it took to get there. I don't like hearing the smirk as you read off the list of what yours were for your thing.
I feel like this is a weird thing to be put off by. I feel it pretty hard to explain. But I feel it nonetheless. I don't want to give people chances to piggy-back my effort or consider themselves “supportive” of what I know full-well to be pure self-indulgence. I want more of a collective rationale and identity. I don't want to sublimate the individual, but we live in incredibly selfish and resentful times. I don't need gourmet Kit-Kats. Literally nobody does. We need them even less, somehow, with the planet on fire. No, it's not either/or, but it kind of is. You maintain focus on things that make you feel good, or on things that will ensure more people can feel good over longer periods of time. You're allowed to indulge, but right now, I just don't feel you're allowed to celebrate indulgence in the ways we do, lazily or otherwise.
My “leadership” in my job want to get into Heaven. They want to do so through State funding and prayer meetings and willful blindness to the practical impact on the ground to their employees. Is there a more indulgent an idea than eternal grace and peace? I don't think so. Do I suspect these people also believe they deserve to get there, despite every faux-humble sentiment deferring their brilliance and stewardship? Absolutely. But they're not giving anything. They aren't providers. They're playing along. They're reciting the cultural normative terminology. They're gleaning undue praise and positivity from the isolated incidents of individuals who decided to do something better for themselves. And the more nothing they raise up and spin, the more somethings they'll get in the form of cash, attention, or praise.
The world feeds on that nothingness. They say nature abhors a vacuum. The less you are you, the more praise you have for others who seem to be doing indulgence right. The less you feel you're helping, the more help you're going to see in your flailing actions in response to a world you don't understand, shockingly often, deliberately. No one wants to believe they're infinitely small and violent and messy and wasteful and confused. In fact, they can't believe it, because when they do, they get depressed and suicidal or addicted. Which, I suppose a better phrasing would be, that they can't accept it for what it is or is making them feel, so the indescribable hole is filled other ways.
I think subconsciously or not, we pursue things in ways that let us trade excuses. Instead of acknowledgment, and struggle, and honesty, and accountability, it's desperately dig up a hold-harmless position and defer to an impartial machine or uncaring world or dignified victimhood. We don't see the God in one another, we envy each other's desperate gambler. “You picked food!? I wish I could care so much about Kit-Kats!” I don't envy the chef, or the kid making a million dollars playing video games, or anyone who draws true joy and connection from whatever their artistic pursuit. I envy the person able to succeed with equal parts due for them as an individual and all that went right or wrong to see themselves where they sit. Would a recipe video get so highly upvoted with a 2 minute thank you to where the money came from and a reminder that when she's not cooking she's out protesting for women's rights? Or what if it ended with the admission this was a complicated new way to advertise Kit-Kats?
I don't buy the “separate realms” kind of posture about how to conceive of life or your place in it either. You're not “just” a “professional” or a “drunk” or a “chef” or whatever else. You're a part of and accountable to the whole, even if that whole never bothers to figure that out. Isn't that how we got Trump? We pretended we weren't a gigantic mess of ignorance and disregard as we pulled back our hammers ready to break the glass ceiling? Isn't it easier to imagine the rest of the world, and general world history, doesn't exist in our story of the glass ceiling? But the selfishness is an obsession. I certainly can't escape my mind, and writing is the only way I know how to hold myself accountable. No one else bothers to step in, and I'm certainly not offering many things to “like” and “upvote.”
That's because I want a real something. When I write, it can be self-indulgently ridiculous or convoluted, but it's not nothing. It's not an empty and easy thing to dig out the abstracted pit in an anxious chest. It's not easy to dictate every aching moment of your life that doesn't look like how you've anticipated or worked towards. “My” story is each try in spite of my feelings. It's the redirecting of my speech to speak to my values or what I've learned. It's the collective pile of shit of drunk-spouted obscenity and every borrowed line from sources of inspiration. I don't want the 5 minute YouTube version of that, even if it would sell. I don't want thousands of empty-headed followers. I don't want to be dishonorably “reviewed” and retweeted by those who've stopped trying, and I don't want to be celebrated for things I overwhelmingly had nothing to do with but be born into a luckier circumstance.
You're going to know all the hell and bullshit and waste that goes into what I create. I want to be a stark example of the whole of human existence that we take for granted every day. I want deference paid to every unremarked labor that gave us a sense of stability. I want it to be true that my perspective can actually help in a meaningful and efficient way, but we've chosen differently for considerably worse reasons than we'll admit. I want lines to get stuck in your head for years like the ones that have stuck in mine. An intangible abstracted concept like the nothingness of my words speaking to what more than just feels right is the only something that keeps me going. So naturally, I don't think I look like much to the rest of the world.
