The door

Tuesday 12/17/24

Many people attempt to trade in their pain for an online following and, in doing so, trade away a life for an online following; the online persona, the posts, the thinking in terms of posts, of "living" in terms of posts, becomes their life, which is no life at all. I saw this woman online who posted about her bad marriage and her drinking, but now she was single and loving it and living her best life and sober and this was clearly her life--the barrage-style constant broadcasting of such things.

A person gets followers, they want more followers. That thinking takes over their life. It becomes what they live for, projecting an invented persona. In reality, they are sitting out their entire life, but there's just this smiley sticker on top of it all now. The woman posted a photo of her and her kids at some public pool, and she was wearing a bathing suit with the word "sober" all over it. Was for the photo-op--the life becomes for the photo-op; the managed optics.

You could see how the manner of thinking--which had really become a manner of need, of trying to fill a hole that can't be filled in this way--had displaced the life. The broadcast--which extended all the way to bathing suit signage as to what is or is not ingested--becomes the life and that is not a life. It's a defense mechanism, and a cheap, ultimately empty ego trip that masquerades as something bigger and weightier, and wiser, when it's not.

Society dictates that the more followers one has, the better they're doing, the more successful they are, the more worthy of the attention of others they are, the more their words count, the more they should be paid attention to, when usually the opposite of these things is true. But this is the trap in which our culture ensnares people and their thinking, and makes things worse for the whole, though no one see that because they're caught up in what's happening and one result of that is not being able to think and never stopping to think. We just go with this.

No one looks into it or much of anything. Majority rule rules. Without question. We are not equipped with the cognitive and communicative tools--or the courage to step out from the line and the ranks as ourselves, allowing that we have a clue who we truly are, and usually we don't--to do anything but go along. If others aren't doing it, we won't do it. And we are going to do what lots of others do. We take our cues from the majority, the consensus, the way in which things are done, the way in which they're said. More than our cues--our marching orders. And we never question those orders. If the orders are reversed, we simply change direction as the new majority rules/orders dictate.

You get what is a very bad status quo. A cancerous status quo. A status quo that works against connection, substance, truth, happiness, fulfillment, wellness, merit, intelligence, principles, depth. You take those things out of life, out of society, and reward and privilege these other things--the opposite of those good things--and you have a lot of unwell people who are much more lonely and less fulfilled than they would have been otherwise, and there's nothing they can do about it, except keep playing this game, as if it will either 1. Change things as they'd wish them to be changed in their own lives, which are increasingly all that they care about, though paradoxically the manner in which they care about their lives is the worst thing for their lives or 2. Allow them to believe what they are ultimately desperate to believe.

They become lulled--lobotomized--into a byproduct of that second thing. It's not true belief; it's a sort of glazed-over quasi-belief. The simulacrum of belief. And they have to return to this dopamine well for more hits and more hits on this drug in order to get by and feed the faux-belief so that it can passably represent something that it's not.

If something feels like how it is--in the grand, general sense, the way of things--you can get just about everyone else to buy into that. There's not a process of buying in. It doesn't even happen consciously; it's what automatically occurs. Like an object falling through the air because of gravity. We automatically go to ground. How does this stop?

It doesn't. There is no one to stop it. The person who is not infected by all of this will garner no support because they'll stand outside the ranks, and when we stand outside of the ranks now in our thinking and our awareness and our knowledge, we don't have anyone with us. No one sees us. There are no followers. Everyone is in the main square in town, so to speak, where they follow and cast votes for each other. That's how they get emotionally paid; and no amount of that form of payment actually adds up to anything in this emotional bank account, to continue with the metaphor--those true, valid reserves/coffers of self. It's a money hole, you could say.

Chuck and chuck and chuck, but nothing is filled. To stop is to risk losing what one wants to believe one has. And no one stops. If you take your cue from everyone, from the status quo--no matter how bad and harmful a thing it's become--you're committed to continuing. You lack the wherewithal, the skills, the self, the strength, the tools, to step out of the ranks/lines.

You end up with a world of inversions. What's trite and ordinary is held up as important and special. What's substantive is terrifying and off-putting and to be shunned, ignored, avoided.

An exercise: When was the last time you saw or read something original? Something that most people don't say or write?

Everything pretty much comes out of the same bucket, doesn't it? So a lot of what having these numbers is about--and what they signify in following--is how much time and energy one wishes to devote to displaying how insipid, ordinary, and mediocre they are, never rising above any of those things, because to do so is to lose footing in this pursuit.

What people want as much as anything is to look at someone else--anyone else--and feel as though they are on their level or better; if that person has fame--which will often be a matter of these very practices we're talking about, though not always--they must feel that that other person, and what that person represents, is theoretically achievable for them. (Sports is different, because that's seen as separate; but we all think and we all talk and we all write--post, text--so that's a group pool thing and not a separate thing.) Put in the right position, they could be that person or do what they do. The moment they think they could never be that other person, never do what that person does, is the exact moment they want nothing to do with that person, and that includes so much as seeing anything from that person if they have control over that--which they usually do by simply clicking away, given that's how a lot of the world now plays out: digitally. On screens.

It becomes almost impossible for anyone who is original in what they say or what they do to get anywhere, even if what they did, what they had, what they made, could be the best thing in the world, or the best thing to partake of in terms of value, what that thing adds to lives, entertainment, a combo. If there is a discrepancy in levels, there is a nearly insurmountable problem for that person on the unachievable (for others) level.

The more this goes along, the less likely it becomes that anyone can have anything but a negative reaction to that other person, what they say, what they do. There become fewer and fewer people like that; they're ground out of society, they stopped going down the road they were on, they never went down a road that might have been their true path, and you get a world where no one is capable of anything but reaching into the same bucket and pulling out and spreading around exactly what everyone else is pulling out and spreading around.

So can you only be like how almost everyone is--the same--or else you have to suffer? Be cast out, avoided, and find a way to content yourself with a proverbial loaf of bread and a bottle of milk as some hermit-type?

Another exercise: The next time you see someone with a huge following, and they post something, ask yourself: Do I see this anywhere? Is this new? Is this brilliant? Is this interesting? Is this entertaining? Is this wise? Is this insightful? Clever? Do many other people say this same thing? Is it special? Could I not come up with this? Have I not said this?

The answers are predictable--yes, no, no, no, no, no no, no, yes, no, yes, yes--because what is said is so pedestrian. It's just who is doing the saying. The name they have, the number of followers they have, their "brand." Maybe they're "hot." But what they're saying is the exact same thing--or very close--to what millions of other people are saying.

Now, if you had some amazing mind, ability, and you were a person of character and strength, would you take a look at all of this, understanding how it worked, and say, "I better be stupid and repeat this stupid shit in the same stupid language and spend my time and energy doing stupid things to build up a following so I can be successful and make money and get credit," or would you want to spend your time and energy doing great things?

But if you spend your time and energy doing great things, you're going to put yourself in an awful position, because it's a case of "my way or the highway" here, and the "my way" bit is how everything works now--that status quo. The prosaicness. The insipidity. Being ordinary. Being achievable. Cliches. False positivity which is as toxic--maybe more, because it's so insidious--as outright negativity.

We talk about trolls and that has a connotation of people who are negative for the sake of being negative; but there's a worse form of trolling, and it's the trolling of false positivity. We don't think of that as trolling. I think of it as trolling. What's the difference? Someone is being positive for the sake of being positive, which often involves lying and enabling. It allows all of this to keep going and going.

When we lie, we hurt. We hurt others, and when we lie to ourselves, we hurt ourselves and keep ourselves from things we want, need, and must have in order to live a healthy life emotionally, mentally, intellectually, platonically, romantically, spiritually. That last one doesn't mean God, but you do have a soul one way or the other, or at least you should. I am talking about our souls in describing what is a soulless set-up. This soulless status quo of which I've bene speaking.

When I talk about how I break things down into a problem to be solved, and I have perspective as to what constitutes a problem, and the size and scope of problems, I'm thinking about something like this problem, which is a central problem of my life and what I'm trying to do, both in my life and in the world. This is a problem to me, which is why other things that people bemoan as massive problems for them barely rate in my world. Because this is what I'm facing every day. It's what my focus is on. I don't have a solution right now. Clearly. What I've done is keep going, keep plugging away and hoping progress would accrue in that manner, and something would give, which would lead to other things coming down, breaking, and light coming in and light going out.

In Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped, Fontaine wages a battle inside of his prison cell. He wants to get out. The other prisoners do not understand what he is doing--they're not trying to escape. It hardly occurs to them, whereas, it's Fontaine's purpose--or part of his purpose, anyway. when they do think of him, they think he's fighting a battle that can't be won, though it's reasonable what he wants, what he deserves; what's less reasonable is the idea that this status quo is how it has to be, even if it looks like it will stay that way.

We think that a status quo must be closer to the side of the just rather than the side of injustice, because for all of our failings, the former is closer to natural order. Things go back to being less evil, or, if you like, more ordinary; but evil is benign, and that's more and more the case in our world, where positivity--because it's rarely honestly meant--is negative and more negative than negativity because it's typically more dishonest and destructive. It's wrecking lives, society, and culture, and obliterating the self and the individual, because those two things need honesty and to function with honesty in order for people to live authentically. Stop a person from living authentically and they might as well be dead, save for the drone-like role they play in society--providing the seed, carrying the embryo, writing the check, buying the gas, casting the vote, hitting the like button, following the follower.

What does Fontaine say by explanation for what he is doing? "I battle the door," he tells a fellow prisoner. Fontaine means the door, but he also is speaking about purpose; locating purpose in the short term--or the liminal term--in hopes to there being a greater long term purpose, which for him means his life on the other side of this door which he battles.

Most people kneel down in obeisance before the door in our world. They never approach it. Others who are doing the same thing look at everyone else actively--but really passively--engaged in what they're doing and like that, are comforted by that, are made to feel like they are good enough, and not lacking--though a part of them always knows otherwise, despite them; they've achieved what others have, or could, if they devote more time and energy to doing nothing of any substance and value. Slap it around, slop it around. Fluff, cheer, lie, repeat, copy and paste. The door is king. Sitting in the cell is where it's at.

All of these things of which we're spoken here contribute to the confinement. This is now our model of success in the world. There's no ability involved in it, no onus to create anything impactful or insightful or of true quality or any value. Originality is a death knell. But what if you can't be stupid and shallow and soulless and insipid? You're fucked? What if you're the opposite of those things? You're as fucked as can be? Is that the world?

It does seem to be the world. I'm living that out. But I'm just not going to accept yet that this has to be because it's so illogical that a world--even our world--must necessarily be that way after having become that way, and in worsening in that way, and in going further along in that way. There can't be greatness as a widespread accepted and welcomed commodity? I do think that's how it is. Just like the door was sealed and locked. A problem to be solved. But that doesn't mean all problems have solutions. And of course that's something I think about every second of my life even as I try and find a solution or keep going so that I might find a solution or a solution might naturally occur or happen out of an aggregate of factors, forces, and efforts.