[1238] Pop Psychology

I doubt this is the right way to say it , but I’m jealous of people who find themselves in a worthwhile bubble.

The types of bubbles that come to mind are about family, music, and comedy. I know people with big enough families that it’s seemingly every day it’s someone’s birthday, or graduation, or new job. There’s a ton of get togethers and vacations planned. You don’t need to know anything else about that family other than they’ve got a persistent recorder and shout-outer who seems genuinely enthusiastic about the job. In music, it’s seeing artists I like pop up in random places; their talent being recognized as belonging in any band or on any stage. In comedy, it’s imagining sitting at “the table,” and casually working out jokes with people who keep you in the back of their head as a bit player if they get a sitcom.

I’m not confused or naive about the amount of work it takes to fit in anywhere. I know how often people have to bend over backwards to make peace with the messiness of their families. I know there are an endless list of sorrowful and ridiculous tales as it pertains to the entertainment industry. But you can definitely see when someone fits. You know they’re being looked out for, celebrated, and people want them to be around.

I thought I had something like that both at my first job at the movie theater, and then for a few years in college. It’s times where it felt like I was in something of a surrogate family. I’ve had individual members of my actual family contribute to that feeling, but one or two people does not constitute a group vibe and environment. I could point pretty quickly to all of the fucked up things within those spaces, but they were genuinely irrelevant to something “higher” that seemed to be going on in how we worked together or joked. Many things didn’t need to be said, and you could truly trust people do what you needed of them in service to that shared dynamic.

Of course, people grow up, move away, get fired, or die. New management comes in. Life stressors pile on and less-vocalized dreams get pursued and crash into the reality of the attempt. All of a sudden nostalgia might rear its ugly head. Now, you wonder if you should have spent more time checking in and talking out alienating gossip. Or, and I think this is what most people do, they either isolate or force a new kind of togetherness that scratches a basic human itch, but maybe never quite tastes right.

Increasingly, I’m suspicious that the type of vibe or connectedness I’m exploring can be created. It has to be an accident, no? My first job had like 60 people, in pretty active rotation, working at any one time. Certainly those that hung on long enough formed a certain core, but also separate from others who hung on just as long but remained cunts. In college, there were regular groups and dorms who partied together, and you can do a certain amount of filtering out those who puke on your shit or fight. But a third of that crowd I went to high school with, and we weren’t close there. Then the saddest T. Swift fear comes creeping in that they never loved me, or her, or anyone, or anything.

The next closest things I had to that kind of, at least informal support systems, have literally betrayed me financially, on several occasions, and/or threatened my life. I didn’t wish my ex-best-friend’s family a Merry Christmas or Happy New Year. They didn’t reach out to me either. Nor was there an exchange between me and my actual brother. I went home for a couple days, ate dinner, collected my few hundred dollars, and retreated back to my fort.

I’m carrying on as though I don’t spend time with my friends, and none of this is meant to dismiss or downplay the significance of their impact on me or my appreciation for them. They, too, have vibes and environments that I don’t. They’re close with their messy families. They’ve got “real jobs.” They join sports leagues or faith groups. Most of them I bump into maybe once every 3 to 6 months, if that. We’re close enough that I can be trusted to house-sit for a week, but finding the time for a regular dinner or game night would be a stretch given our habits, obligations, and limitations I surmise. If we get jobs at the same spot, that’s kind of like bowling together, right?

I also have my little bizarro community in Last War. People I’ve never met, heard, or seen consistently laugh at the goofy shit I put into the chat, and you get drive-by conversations of human connection about IRL things. Am I addicted to incrementally increasing my troop power? Or, is it hard to shake the feeling of being wanted when my account was locked out for weeks, and they didn’t kick me out of the alliance?

I can’t tell sometimes if I write in the world’s most useless bid to build a community. That was a random thing I often forget about, getting 120-something followers on Sondry before it went dead. Like, if I had started a Substack at the right time or adopted Wordpress sooner, could I be one of those niche voices who’s making just enough money to “do whatever is they do” with my reflections? Is the community there, but also knows you shouldn’t try on reddit? I retain this belief that my life can systematically change on the back of one conversation or one connection. And not just for the worse as someone says, “Time to die, mother fucker!” before pulling a trigger.

I’m always doing the math. I’m trying to put numbers behind my “objective” good place I exist in nearly every moment of every day. If you read through my writing, you’ll see dozens of times where I speak to being fed, clothed, having nice shit, creating memories, and exercising my options and creativity. I’m trying to be at peace as though I’ve been doing what I want/need to all along were I to die tomorrow. I’m trying to exercise my voice and choices in a manner that I observe an incredible amount of people seemingly unable to do. The dark side of these places you fit is that it’s perhaps hard to distinguish where “you” exist. Indeed, the more “I” stuck out, the less anyone, generally, has wanted anything to do with me.

It’s disorienting to feel like you have to stumble into the kind of place I miss by accident, and be as intentional as I try to be. Surely, I should just fix my situation and go make friends, right? Talk more on the Discord with the other people who go to too many concerts and get deep into their interpersonal lore and inside jokes. Get paired up with a bunch of randos in a bowling league. Organize the Google Meet with your Last War compatriots. It’s. So. Simple. Once you power through the contrivances, your newest bestest friends will manifest. It’ll be just like when you threw the house parties.

It won’t be the 150th time you were the inviter instead of invited. It won’t be creating a dozen cringe faces as those who aren’t used to you hear how you joke or speak when you’re trying not to perform to get along. It won’t be filling you with dread and sadness as you clock the holes at the center of your group that aren’t getting filled by the activity anymore than yours is. It won’t be any of that you have to shuffle aside in regular blogs as you argue for the utility of being social and moving around more often. It won’t be an awkward series of adult play-dates with people you would have bullied in high school, because you’re kind of a dick, and no amount of getting old or more nuanced and understanding erases based animal impressions. That sounds remarkably like the exact excuses to keep not doing the things, no?

But also, I’m almost too much a man of action. My inaction is something I can rely on as telling me earnestly what I do or don’t want. Nothing’s stopping me, and I don’t have the patience that you need in being the one who’s trying right now. I’m more than mollified going to shows with my friend or dad. I’m comfortable doing things alone. I’d take another group, but I’m not going to live or die by it.

[1237] Pointy Fingers

I think I’m gonna need to uncover what I want to talk about as I do.

Part of me wants to talk about attention. As a watcher of hundreds of shows, listener to dozens of podcasts, and attender of hundreds of performances, my sense of how I utilize my attention might be an aberration. Sam Harris beckons us to “wake up,” an idea echoed from one of my favorite movies Waking Life. The throughline of a movie I first caught as a teenager to the words of a public thinker today is my memory and expression of my attention.

It strikes me as mutually if not equally important to consider not just what you focus on, but how. Rich people talking about issues talk about them differently than “average” or “poor” people. I still don’t get the sense that any camp really clocks that difference. It’s one highlighted when you bounce between podcasts. Posh intellectual types speak differently than contributors to the brand, and seemingly what ties them all together is the ability to confidently assert their opinions as good as any person with a million views ranting in their car.

Why would we want attention altogether? We know people monetize it. We know how isolated and angry or anxious people feel, so when someone even pretends to see it there’s a vein of solidarity. As a counselor, I tend to see the exact opposite desire. The more people pay attention, the more they see how responsible they are, and they don’t like that. The more they focus, the more they feel the layers of contradictions and discomfort in their body. It’s akin to being invited to working out, and immediately recoiling from the pain.

If you’re like me, I hate working out. I hate running. I did yoga again for the first time in months, and it was incredibly painful, and I felt immediately better, which has carried into today. The payout is rarely in the moment, and my scattered attention feels mildly tortured focusing on the pain behind my knees as I stretch and shift my hips back. I can also recall a time where I ran so consistently playing ultimate frisbee that I stopped getting winded over the course of two back-to-back games. My attention, when there’s mitigating factors, can be utilized to substantially better health than I regularly maintain otherwise.

I just got back home. My home is an endless series of calls for my attention. My computer has nine screens. I have hundreds of shows left to watch. My water has been broken for weeks. The instruments glare at me. The half-finished cutting board woodworking project is hanging out. The next videogame can be popped in or my phone is going to buzz that my resource production has maxed in Last War. My cat tries to force herself into my lap. I’m a little hungry. I’m a little cold. I have 259, functionally spam emails, from things I’ve at one point shown an interest in.

Those emails are all running the same kind of “give me your attention” game, thus they all become flat and “too much” very quickly. If any given journalist or essayist needs to post 3-10 times a week, you think I’m reading all that? If I’ve been to 50 different venues who all want me to see who’s coming up next…If I’ve expressed 30 seconds of interest in your guitar course and then you email me 30 times to remember to checkout or with your even better deal…It’s impossible to give a fuck. Now, I kinda hate what I sorta liked. Even the things pretending to organize it all, like Unroll Me, are junk, and you’ll spend as much time arguing with it as you would just deleting everything or unsubscribing.

Between this paragraph and the last I tackled my email. This month I got 113 unopened messages about performances at different venues or from band-tracking apps, and 105 unopened messages from a group I’ve just labeled “Talkers,” be they individual journalists, writers, statisticians, or podcasters. That’s not including actual spam, or those endless multi-tier email auto-signups if you click through an ad or sign up for something in order to order. Buried in all that bullshit were 2 emails I actually needed to focus on, my accidentally almost-lapsed car insurance, and what I need to do for/with a debt consolidation company.

While I’m writing I’m pausing to kill zombies. I’m contemplating heading outside to “pretty up” my white-trash looking property, or heading to town to Door Dash a bit. The calculation, the “why,” driving my behavior has been situated in a decently arbitrary place for quite some time. I have loose “wants.” My needs I’m never truly without. By extension, what grabs my focus often feels arbitrary or meaningless or on its way to being something I kinda liked that turns into something I sorta hate. I need more money, but only because I want to feel better about where I’m situated in what I owe to friends or family who need it in exactly the manner I do. I’m not taking food out of kids' mouths, like my Nazi governor, but it doesn’t mean I like the look, even fleetingly, like a leaching piece of shit.

Here’s where my orientation gets baited. I also have an exhaustive personality. If I decide to focus on one thing, I will do that one thing until I break. If I can convince myself that I am, in fact, too big of a leaching piece of shit, you won’t hear from me until I’ve fixed my problem so definitively, I can hardly recognize why I considered it a problem in the first place. I’ll be back to working sun up to sun down. I’ll sell everything there is to sell. I’ll eat the same cost-effective sandwich for every meal. I’ll essentially be playing dress-up as a guy with “real problems” and taking on the noble stress of how to be accountable to them.

In order to do that, I’d have to ignore, never forget, everything that has contributed to my current circumstances. I’d have to personalize every single detail as though there was no good reason to choose otherwise in the moment that I decided to increase my debt or stay in instead of drive all day and night. It becomes this all-encompassing, and ridiculous, exercise in self-flagellation. It’s barely sustainable. It’s not going to win me a medal or adoration. Why am I working then? For who? To get what? To build what? I want to keep doing almost all of what I’m currently doing, it’s just not mathing right in who I’d prefer to owe and over what time frame.

Hopefully, I find out in the next day or so whether I’ll have secured a new “normal” full-time job. I don’t hate the idea of a consistent paycheck. Combining that with any luck whatsoever in selling what I wish to sell should help me fix my debt situation in 3 months. The catastrophic feelings I catch when I look at my bank account or think about when someone covers a meal for me will swing the opposite direction. Theoretically, the weather will improve a little by then. I always have “so much” work to do, and yet observe myself sitting, waiting, and trying to efficiently approach so I don’t churn myself into a bitter and exhausted husk. I will do it. It’s a genuine worry I will pick that. And that’s precisely the point where you actually would only have yourself to blame.