I want to do something a little different and muse a bit about social media, and one comment I've received in response to my writing in particular. It follows:
"See that? Yep, those are your guts, spilled randomly on the internet. I see them too.
Have you gotten enough out?
I don't really understand why you involved me in the whole thing though, seems the kind of conversation you have with *you,* but I hope you got something out of the process.
Anyways, well... okay, that was interesting, but I'm off to my own life again.
For the record? Seems like you are probably harder on yourself than you need to be, and hopefully you also take as much effort giving yourself grace.
Wait, hold up, no, before you're tempted to summon up another 1000 words, I didn't say I wanted to hear about it...I'm just saying."
This feels like a masterpiece. It strikes me as convoluted. It feels embarrassed. It succinctly captured the energy I feel one must anticipate in trying to do anything creatively or self-constructively and put it online. He's trying to detach himself, but also seems to feel provoked. I have to go over it line by line.
"See that? Yep, those are your guts, spilled randomly on the internet. I see them too."
I hear Daniel Stern's voice in Wonder Years. Almost like he's trying to add a bit of whimsy to the idea of him bothering to speak at all. I imagine some version of him is either actively patting my head or desperately resisting the urge to. This is the initial distance creating sentiment. Eeewww, dude, look icky guts. Now we're all a party to your gross guts! But maybe you couldn't help yourself, so take a seat and listen up.
"Have you gotten enough out?"
This isn't a sincere question. This is whomever failed to guide this person mocking them, now channeled at me. The blog he's responding to I state several times over is the 1,100th I've written over 20 years. He's existentially exhausted by the idea of being this thoughtful regarding anything. Incidentally, if you scroll through his posts, he's offering old-guy wisdom after having seen it all himself. He's cooked, in his mind. It's time to dole out advice in the last place anyone's willing to listen, but then what else is probably new for him?
"I don't really understand why you involved me in the whole thing though…"
This part is the most telling, not about this guy, but what the internet does to you. Philosophize This does a good job of explaining Byung Chul-Han's description of our narcissism bred from our internet circumstances. Who can even flirt with saying a sentence like this if they're not compulsively self-involved? I don't know who anyone is that responds to anything I say. They're a disembodied voice from either the vague hate or vague mildly-encouraging camps that pop up. Charitably, this could just be a really poor phrasing of, "I don't understand what I was to take away from this." But, I put this to every reader of anything someone has written, figure out why you bothered in the first place. Don't throw that the writing exists in the writer's face and act like something's been done to you.
"seems the kind of conversation you have with *you,* but I hope you got something out of the process."
So, yes, obviously, and this is also stated in the blog. I'm literally, every time, showing what complicated introspection to keep my head straight and values expressed looks like. Maybe you don't need to do all that. I'm jealous. Sometimes, in fact only ever drunk and in years-apart fashion, I get told how much I help someone else think about their own circumstances. It's unnatural to spend as much time as we do up our own asses and not just be mindlessly pumping out TikTok videos or craving sad music in response.
"Anyways, well... okay, that was interesting, but I'm off to my own life again."
I hear versions of this a lot. I'm called "interesting" a lot. It's less pain-inducing than when someone wishes me luck, but they're in the same spirit. I'm some "thing" that the person engaging it shouldn't really be handling but for it's quaint novelty and clear struggle with itself. They don't know how to help me release my head from the proverbial fence or bucket, so they have to still say something right? So, interesting you had all those…*thoughts* ::shudder:: Why don't we put them in their own special place waaaaay far away from what all us normals are doing over here.
"For the record? Seems like you are probably harder on yourself than you need to be, and hopefully you also take as much effort giving yourself grace."
Here's where the crack in the ironic armor shows up. A person who was simply and merely in touch with their own perspective, struggles and incompleteness and all, would just say this. It wouldn't have to be qualified and buried in all of the other inanity. This is the decent person who connected with something in the writing he's too tired or down on himself about exploring any further. People read thinking things out in this way as some kind of outsized effort. And it is, for them. Most of us are thinking ourselves in circles, getting paralyzed, and then doubling down on our crippling depression and anxiety, addictions, or fucking meme speak. If he'd just said this, this blog wouldn't exist.
"Wait, hold up, no, before you're tempted to summon up another 1000 words, I didn't say I wanted to hear about it...I'm just saying."
Now here's the internal rejection and reaction to doing or saying something nice and even the remote idea that I would recognize, respond, and try to connect. Can you think of anything more distasteful in the modern environment than to say or discover something *real* being said and exchanged? Let's strangle that baby in the crib, allude once again to "just how many words there are, gosh." And pretend like we didn't enter the arena of a "social network" where the rules are to crash your siloed thinking into someone else's and pretend there's no consequences and no real person on the other side.
After all, he's "just saying."
All of that said and explored, I posted my living arrangements online. I played by the internet rules and was handsomely rewarded in internet points. The overwhelming sentiments were, "This is why I come here." I, robustly and unambiguously a male, have created a living space unlike many others. The novelty was enjoyed and reviled. It was judged as both dangerous and about to burst into flames, and as paradise. Both a genius hacker and musical prodigy live here as likely as a serial killer basement dwelling end of the world prepping troll. The only things that really made it through were one or two genuinely sincere people willing to explain in more depth the hazards of extension cords, and the people who recognized how much my inner-child never died.
That post got some 1,500 upvotes, and 645 comments. None of those comments warranted their own blog. Those people weren't engaging with me in the same way someone who reads what I'm thinking about how and why I create the things I do. They weren't engaging with me at all. They were nicely surprised by their niche subreddit delivering at continued just-enough intervals. A few were worth some fun exchanges. It started to get redundant and lazy with people who weren't reading what others had said before.
And in a day and a half, it's on to the next thing. I can't even say "I" liked or didn't the attention because I wasn't the star of the show. All I did was get a little bit more inside my head about how soon and what it's going to cost me to get normal outlets. But, ultimately, it could be argued I "did the internet right." I let a superficial glance at my circumstances field superficial engagement to everyone's "delight." It didn't garner enough attention to make the news. It didn't prompt any of them to think, "What else has this guy posted?" If I'd taken slightly better pictures and added more with an ability to read the titles on my books, video games, or band stickers, I bet I would have driven just a touch more engagement lol.
I think the internet has made my experience of people even worse. That is, the ironic detachment craving the next thing, fake performative relationships protecting informal "rules" to conform to, and the airs people take on in trying to politely belittle you for "not getting it" were exhausting before we built that brand of nihilism into how we understand the zeitgeist. We're not serious thinkers or actors on the world. It's always a qualified and calculated performance.
If you can talk real fast and make influential people feel validated, they'll platform your Ben Shapiro stick-up-my-ass charade and you'll be celebrated and rewarded with money. If you can tie yourself in knots justifying every nakedly stupid fascist comment and move your Nazi wanna-be dictator or insurrectionist "representative" makes, you'll get to feel like you're a part of history and doing something religion-level righteous enabling them. And then somehow again in defying them every time the bare minimum leaks out of you! This is how you can listen to people genuinely be flabbergasted that their actions resulted in pain or death. They were just performing. None of this was meant to be taken seriously.
For better or worse, in the fairyland you might occupy that suggests you should interpret me with some kind of flattering filter or wisened birdseye distance, I aspire to be a serious person. Not self conscious, but to act like what I do and say has consequences. I want to be consistent. I want to have reasons. I want to really connect and really create and really change the things that piss me off, confuse me, or seem to feel as perfectly avoidable catastrophes if we pay closer attention and talk and think better. Welcome to the process. Resist the urge to blame me for stapling your eyes open and forcing you to recite it.
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