[889] Nothing More

I suspect a mess.

One of the things I struggle most with is giving people credit. That's not to say I can't see what they're worth. I simply see people as “only” worth a series of superficial things that pass for what a lot of modern day culture consists of. Maybe you're smart, so you stay in school and get advanced degrees. But you'll subject yourself to a kind of financial or emotional ruin because “smart” only got you so far. Maybe you're really good at showing up or encouraging others, but you let your fear or ambivalence keep you from reaching out when you need help or contributing in service to a deeper ideal. Maybe you forgive everyone besides yourself.

A frequent topic of conversation between Allie and me is about the environments we're cultivated in and cultivating. You can take something as simple as a grocery store to think about everything implicated and matter-of-fact that goes into it. You don't have to pick fruit, cut vegetables, come up with a way to keep things cold, build a cart, or expect a fight to break out about when you're next to check-out. Food costs money, right? It grows everywhere, but you don't go to the store without money or the intention to steal. Food you don't eat goes in the trash, right? There's a large amount of people who wouldn't dream of composting or thinking of things in a cyclical manner. You go to the store, you buy food, you throw away the waste.

Every area of our life has these in-built expectations or hesitations whether we are paying attention to them or not. What's an online conversation? Does it even exist? Not even among friends! It's a fight by default. You're hearing in your mind an unwanted challenge, you don't have the wherewithal to “debate,” and you are situated in a place that cannot understand. It's what's expected and beaten into you. You're fighting, you can't hear or see what's said, and no one is attempting to understand. This whole conversation happens with yourself before you ask, “Why bother?” before posting anyway. If it's not a meme, emoji, or pleasantry, it's an off-limits way to engage.

I have my fair share of pissing matches with people online. It doesn't matter if I'm slinging hateful words or asking sincere questions, across the board my act to respond to someone's voice is treated as hostile, not an invitation. I think this is partly a consequence of the internet algorithms who assure us the world can be cultivated for us to see only what we want. I think this is a display of humanity's basic insecurity of discovering just how fraught with problems and complications their thinking can be. God forbid they be shown to be wrong, and in front of so many people!

Then you devolve into the condescension, the dismissing the very notion of “debate,” inevitably someone's mistyped word or phrasing gets latched onto, and the fight over the last miserable word until the post gets deleted or locked ensues. It's familiar, it's ridiculous, and no one has seen fit to study the consequences of it or how to get out of it.

I still try. I look for the analogy. I've got print-outs on toddlers who destroy houses and act like they're the boss. What is a parent supposed to do? Reset to a baseline expectation. This is akin to me insisting you actually quote me before claiming to disagree with something I've said. I don't trust your contrarian impulse, it's the default one offered to us by our internet training. If someone wants to pull their cord and recite cliché after cliché, return them to the question they've ignored. Don't give them more words to destroy.

What's worse than arguing with idiots, if it isn't something of a not-so-scientific study and exercise for you, is when your “friends” don't give you credit. I think I go above and beyond to share the most clear, researched, or affecting things that I read. They're almost never shared. I can say either people aren't or don't care to read. I can say they just don't have time. I can say they don't think it's actually as good or informative as I do. I can say they don't believe their crowds care or deserve to see it. I can say anything, because I don't know anything. There's no real feedback besides the handful of people I know pretty regularly read. The most important voices, that aren't even mine lol, are not breaking through to networks I'm not a part of. Whether what I post even makes it in front of a plurality of my friends, I don't know. I do know, it remains something of a personal secret whether anything was read or enjoyed.

If good information is treated as arbitrarily as cat videos, this medium that connects us all makes us feel hopeless and attacked by default, and even with regard to the people we seem to get along with or enjoy in real life don't tempt us to share or celebrate how they're orienting themselves to their thoughts, by what mechanism are we ever really sharing anything? What's the genuine connection? Who am I really hanging out with or talking to? How much credit can I give you, when the means by which we relate to each other 99% of the time, you appear to give me practically none?

I want to stress how large and impersonal I think this problem is. I know I read a disproportionate amount regardless. I know no one subscribed or signed up to hear from me or what I have to say. I know we've all got reasons we're too busy to be bothered with each other. None of that helps us pay attention to why or how we engage online. We can see thousands of sentiments about reducing screen time, the dangers to our children, and the ripping at the fabric of society, but we won't ask ourselves if maybe we should think out loud, deliberately, slowly, and try to piece together a collective framework for better understanding the world that isn't so miserable?

I've said it a lot how much I wish I had a blog a week from each one of my friends to read. No one wants to share, but I don't advocate for writing just because I've done it a lot. I think it's vital. I think we need to fight back against the many default forces that suggest our spaces and resources can only be used in specific and harmful ways. You have options of how to relate to me, to each other, this medium, and the world at large. How many people could live in an abandoned Wal-Mart? How much dust could you blow in the face of your enemies after grinding down its concrete walls? Who would bother or think to ask such a weird thing? Someone choosing to be just a little more creative and motivated in service to what's possible.

For as meaningless as the word “balance” has seemed to become today, perhaps we can move on to “tempering.” You're perhaps in balance at all times, physics-wise. But is your environment tempered by better choices about where your energy is directed? Can you simply read and respond to something? Can you share because you need to even and especially when you don't want to? There's nothing more or less dramatic going on nor exercise in patience and humility to practice.