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Gotta get those steps in

Monday 2/10/25

I have to admit to disliking anyone who says, "Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk" at the bottom of one of their social media posts. Such a person wants to be seen as clever, but an actual clever person would not have to say unfunny, annoying things in the exact same unfunny, annoying words of so many other unfunny, annoying people, because they'd be clever enough to think of their own smart things. A crazy concept in our world. It's more than dislike, actually. More like a deep-rooted loathing.


Having said that, if I knew some of those people in person, there could be other factors that tempered this loathing. But that's the thing, isn't it? You don't know most people that you encounter now, thanks to social media. You just know them through the relentless onslaught of vapid shit they say.


Somewhat on the topic: It may be impossible for me to also not loathe anyone who posts something and concludes that post with fifteen hashtags.


Often I look around me and think, "Despite what everyone seems to believe, we don't actually have to be this stupid." Intelligence--or not being stupid, anyway--has a choice component to it. The same as being in physical shape. You can choose to run stairs. Likewise, you can choose to think, to look something up, to do a bit of reading, to try to use your own words, to consider another perspective, etc. These are effort things. Decisions.


Sometimes I will see a person online whom I used to know in school and you have to verify it's them via LinkedIn, because they are physically unrecognizable. Could be a different human. Did they just say somewhere along the line, "I will never move my body again!" and stick to it?


I'm a big believer that when we all try our best--or make a reasonable attempt at doing so--that everything is better for all of us. But the world caters to those who are always on the way down, going lower and lower. It has no interest in those trying to go up. The very few who are are on their own. The higher one tries to go, the less people there are, the more alone a person is.


The irony is that those who are always going down are also on their own, but in different ways. They are alone because without growth, without self-awareness, without the ability and willingness and patience and necessary effort to communicate, there can only be separation, loneliness. No connection.


When we go down and we can't connect, we don't develop the skills and confidence we need to solve problems and become stronger and smarter and more useful not only to others, but to ourselves. Then we just post idiotic shit, watch the same bad shit that everyone watches on the same shit platforms, self-medicate, lose all individuality because we are not strong or smart enough to support any. We don't have the foundation to be our own person. An actual person.


Then we make choices based on comfort and making sure we're lied to, enabled, so that we don't have to face truths that would crush us. We seek to opiate socially. Emotionally. That's going to be mostly everyone, and just about everything in the world is for what those people are doing--doing to themselves, really, and doing to the world, which gets worse and worse.


Was talking to someone the other day about our world and high school; that is, how much the former is now like the latter. They had been talking about gossipy women in their forties--whom they know--and their cliques and their friend groups and how they talk about their respective status within these groups.


I think in terms of how you'd be in school, sitting there in class, and you'd want to get on with it. Get started, be done, move on to the next thing. And there would be these idiots who wouldn't shut up doing bad jokes that they'd repeat seemingly endlessly. It was the same jokes every day. The same quotes. The same lines they'd say. These kids were so dumb. Immature even for that age. Often, they were popular. I had my own thing going on, in that the hockey star was also the smart kid but smart in this way which no one really understood, because it was so different. That doesn't go over well with anybody. You don't have a group then. Your group is mostly you. Maybe a small group of friends. Or a friend or two. (I actually sent "Thank You, Human," to one of those friends--Schiller, whom I had mentioned on the radio once, but I did not hear back from him.)


When you're in that situation, you look at those people as people you won't have to be around later. And that's how it should have gone. Maybe it sort of did for a while. But then the world got dumber and dumber, and the people of that world came to be exactly like those idiots at the back of the class. The world made sure they got through the system--of the world--just as the school system once made sure they got through that. And it's as if you're rewarded--after a fashion--for being that idiot.


Social media makes the adult world high school. And you can say, well, I'm not on social media, and my spouse isn't on social media, and this woman I know isn't on it, and most people aren't, but there's bleed-through; environment. We take on those aspects of that cultural--anti-cultural--forum, what now serves as the public sphere and has such in influence over how we talk, the words we know, how we write, how we read--how we can't read and write; what we'll pretend to be, how we perform our lives, how we keep the truth back so as to present a version of us--which is totally fucking false--we want the world to see.


It reaches people. Hardly anyone won't be impacted. They'll change or not be what they would have been, and they won't know they are. It simply occurs. It's all around. There might be five people alive who don't become what's around them to a marked degree.


Was talking to this same person the other day. They always say how busy they are. Pull the strong, and out comes the remark. It's maddening, because it's not true. And they're saying it--constantly--to the wrong person, a guy who started work today at midnight--I'll grab like three hours, then I go again--which is regular enough, and who never says this busy thing.


That's what we say now. We create a self-fulfilling prophesy; not that we become busy, but that's our attitude, and your attitude makes for what you will often regard as inviolable reality. People used to be less this way. And I said to this person if this was 1985, and he was the age he is now, with the same everything--same job, same situation--he'd think that he had more time, he'd not always be saying how busy he was, and he'd just be getting on with shit and believe he could do additional things. I'm not saying he's lying now, because he mostly believes what he's saying. But it's not true. Let's say he had something to do that took an hour. Rather than be done in thirty-nine minutes, he'd keep going in circles for another twenty-one minutes, so it could take the hour. Circles, treading water, call it what you want. That's how we live. So you could say that we get our steps in, but we don't go as far.



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