Please like this post. Please share this post with your network. Please leave a comment below this post to lend meaning to this absolute wasteland of a world in which we inhabit. Please respond with an emoji and please print it off and hang it framed on your wall. The space in the kitchen is fine. Just take down those awful pictures your kids drew. Theyâre rubbish.
Weâve lost the ability to be comfortable with ourselves and what we do without the pathetic pleading that accompanies every action, explicit or implied. Ever since a weird dude at an American university creepily tried to rate women that wouldnât sleep with him, and ended up a gazillionaire, weâve started âsharingâ the innermost parts of our lives with almost complete strangers, in exchange for their begrudging and almost certainly insincere approval.
Sharing probably isnât the right word though, is it. Sharing suggests kindness. It evokes ensuring everyone has enough. Thereâs some intimacy to it. âShare your toys.â âIâd share my last piece of bread with you.â âLet me share some advice.â They all make sense. âLet me share with you, without knowing if you care or want it, a photo of my children at the garden centre.â Thatâs weird. âHere are the details of the medical procedure I just went throughâ. Thatâs not weird thatâs just unhinged. (And a real post I read yesterday).
For some, it seems the point of life, or the point of doing something, is to share it. People walk around towns live streaming it and getting comments from strangers in real time saying things like âniceâ or âyayâ (probably). Iâm told that people live stream themselves watching football. Not the actual match, but themselves. The camera is on them so we can all enjoy the thrill and excitement of watching a slightly obese fuckwit from Croydon go âoooh that was closeâ and then call the referee a wanker. I donât know what to make of this other than to fight hard at the urge felt in every fibre of my being to drive a fork into my eye. I also have a deep fear that this is only the first step. It wonât be long before we see people live streaming themselves watching someone live streaming themselves, until weâre all watching each other like some sort of bizarre hybrid of a circle jerk and a panopticon.
But you know whose fault this is? Itâs ours. Yours and mine. Itâs our generation that blindly walked into this death-trap of society. The revolution wasnât televised but it did receive 4 thumbs up, 7 hearts and a clown emoji.
Our generation had it all. We had the optimism and enthusiasm of the 90âs. The world was (mostly) at peace, economies were growing, swathes of Europe were shaking off the shackles of authoritarianism and appearing, bleary eyed in to a world in which anything was possible. The internet was connecting people instantaneously and information was becoming free. The web promised to democratise the flow of knowledge in untold ways. And what did we do with it? We invented tuition fees and Gogglebox. We were the generation that paid actual money for a Crazy Frog ringtone for fucks sake! It makes no sense.
We had the world at our feet and we unzipped our trousers and whazzed all over it. And shared a video of ourselves doing it.
Ok, so there are amazing things, sure. But theyâre just wasted on us, thatâs the problem. I can pick up my smart phone and access information from world renowned experts in audio or video form, or I can chat to an AI bot about their topic to help me understand it. Weâre surrounded by expertise, and rather than becoming sick of experts, as was claimed by a politician, weâre so enamoured with them we think weâre one of them. People listen to a podcast by Andrew Huberman and then the next day theyâre down the pub explaining the role of Dopamine and Norepinephrine in the motivation cycle (Itâs me, hi, Iâm the problem itâs me.)
There are two things I suggest we try and do to pull this back from the brink. One, stop sharing everything you do. Youâre not an influencer, youâre not an expert, youâre a normal fallible human who is craving the warm flicker of emotion we all get when we connect with someone, and two, start admitting that you donât know what youâre talking about at least 80% of the time. And THATâS FINE! If youâre a project manager then letâs hear your thoughts on agile vs waterfall (or maybe notâŠ) but donât pretend youâre also an expert on geopolitics, Greek history and Jungian psychology. If someone wants to know how you see the escalation in the South China Sea unfolding under a Hawkish US administration, then perhaps itâs fine to concede that in your role as a User Experience Designer at a small tech firm you donât really know.
I suppose this is harsh on those enthusiastic amateurs. Those of you who have actually kept an interest in a topic for longer than a 6 part BBC Sounds podcast series and have built up a bank of knowledge on a particular subject. Perhaps Iâm really talking to the dilettantes and the fools. The ignorant and the distracted. Perhaps this months instalment should have been a manifesto for myself and, in the ultimate ironic ending, I shouldnât have shared a single fucking word of it.
I promise Iâll do better.
Please share this post on instagram and tiktok. Tweet it to the fucktards still on there. Facebook it so the people you went to school with who are now massively racist can read it. Turn it into a YouTube video and read the comments. Write it out longhand and post it to your cousin in Australia. Or just do whatever you want. Iâm fairly certain itâs all pointless anyway.
Content Time
Good thing they included lyrics to this.
Tolkein Character or Antidepressant?
Or are Tolkein characters more effective than an antidepressant?
Books
I told you thereâd be more by Myers. This one has one of the darkest endings Iâve come across. Outstanding.
Podcasts
Strong Message Here
Outstanding satirical view of political language with Armando Ianucci and Helen Lewis.
There we have it for another month. As always, Iâm sorry.