The click-me temptation

and how to not give a fuck

I do what I can to find my people here. That’s leveled out at just shy of 600—a semi-anonymous crowd in the quad, among which amble may 30 stalwarts. I do the restacks, share things that interest my “friends” and me. Cry some at times, rage at others, relapse into my political addiction, but mostly try things out . . . research-laden deep-dives, reflections, some weird poetry. My grown-up reminds me that this is enough, maybe more than enough, and with a gratuity (thank you paid subbers) of around $189 a month (maybe idk $1/hr). Hey, I’m gonna do it anyway. It’s a graphomaniacal compulsion. That’s my adult, not the calculating one.

My child—not quite past yet even as I approach the conclusion of my third quarter of a century—wants the attention. That’s blogger’s nicotine talking. Maybe I should use the patch.

Saw something a couple days back about how so-and-so worked on a long-form piece—days and days of research and composition—received two “likes,” then posted something related to whatever the current pop-obsession was and opened the floodgates. C’est la vie, y’all. And for a split second, in the same way passing a liquor store sometimes pings my old alcoholic ass, I considered looking up the latest “thing” to traffic.

Then the grown-up snatched the youngster before he could walk in front of that car. Your heart won’t be in it, the grown-up reminded him. You’ll feel like a whore. You won’t finish.

They put candy by the checkout counters so kids in shopping carts will act out in the line and pressure the embarrassed parents.

I won’t just feel whorish . . . I’ll feel like a chump.

Thank God for the grown-up.

Which got me thinking . . . yeah, that. That mental tinnitus. (← Only death will finally make that ringing in your ears stop.) Thinking about the next or current or just past popular thing. What manufactured obsession now substitutes for the loss of anything resembling an actual culture? Gas prices, the World Cup, Greenspan’s death, pythons in Florida, the Reflecting Pool, Sydney Sweeney, the fucking Royals?

Honestly, I can’t keep up. More honestly, I don’t even try. Car’s in the shop again. Need to figure out what we’ll eat for lunch tomorrow before a prison visit. My beard needs a trim. And what the fuck is that pain in my knee?

What does occur to me—apart from lunch menus and cracked axles and a prison visit—is how the general quality of these pop-monomanias has been transformed across generations. I’m never going to lock-in to the latest thing, because I’m past tense . . . no, more than past tense . . . I’m not even the same verb. People my age are a different species than members of other age cohorts. Epistemologically, at least. The way we know is not the way others know. That’s a pretty big deal.

I suppose I could be one of those pathetic old fucks who tries to be “with it,” but with age comes diminished energy, and in husbanding that energy, we have to prioritize. In the choice between trying to be “with it” . . . with the payoff being my own imagination that I seem “with it” while appearing instead to others as a pathetic old fuck who tries to be “with it” . . . and the payoff of not giving a fuck and therefore being able to relax—something we couldn’t do until we were childless and retired, and therefore a treasure beyond counting—I’m gonna go with door number two.

Sometimes the adult has to tell the child to not give a fuck. It’s harder than you think. It takes practice. I think that book’s been written somewhere. Embarrassment, rejection, fitting in, fear of criticism, attention seeking, self-marketing . . . you know the deal. Mostly it’s just pathological insecurity. One thing my generation has in common with every generation after it is that we’re all alumni of The International Dog-Training Academy of Insecurity. Insecurity sells shit.

I said something idiotic in the subtitle about “how not to give a fuck.” Like I said, it’s not easy. Maybe at some level it’s not even possible. One could stack the Thrasymachian turtles all the way down . . . not giving a fuck is just another way of appearing not to give a fuck while giving a fuck about “not giving a fuck.” There’s the click-me temptation, the mental masturbation temptation ^^^ . . . a Library of Congress of temptation titles out there.

You’re gonna give a fuck about some things.

Don’t fall for the categorical-assignment temptation. It’s not like give-a-fuck=bad and don’t-give-a-fuck=good. Nuance. Context. It’s basic arithmetic, not particle physics. You’re supposed to give a fuck, especially about things over which you have some control and for which you’re supposed to take responsibility. That’s more Grown-up Shit 101, something that doesn’t sell shit nearly as well as insecurity or desperate self-absorbed hedonism, so it’s not on the general curriculum these days . . . which is one of those things that has undergone a qualitative transformation between generations. Each passing year, we become less responsible.

Understandable, given how technocracy has disabled us . . . this isn’t even news. Every field of endeavor, every site of responsibility that’s committee-fied and given a fucking bureau or division is a scenic hill or fertile valley ceded.

Our world is a Nazgulian panoptic grid—”neither living nor dead”—where we’re meant to be swallowed up by a ubiquitous electronic gaze, nursed on electronic hallucinations, anesthetized with electronic opium. Where we can’t seem to escape one kind of attention, and we’re the Stockholm Syndromatics chasing another form of attention to fill a void so dreadful we can only pretend it’s not there.

There’s a hypothetical woman who hates shaving and makeup. But she also hates unwanted attention. If she were to go hirsute and au naturel, well . . . it’s a way to “make a statement,” yeah? We’ve seen it. A rebellious pose. The “I don’t give a fuck” pose, which says “I really give a fuck.” She doesn’t want that either. She wants to be left the fuck alone, attended to only when there’s some practical reason to engage. Where’s the happy medium? Blend in with minimal concessions? Wear pants and sleeves? Find that Goldilocks sweet spot where she’s no longer noticed, where if she needs your attention, she’ll fucking ask for it?

We’re all Daru now. Read the story.

People my age, we were the first ones hooked on television. Some people, they can’t even go to sleep without a television on in the room. Now, as I’ve noticed among the very young, they can’t even watch a televised program without simultaneously scrolling their phones. We’ve been progressively distractified, rendered incapable of another kind of attention—focus, concentration, contemplation. Rats in a global virtual maze. This general disability entails the inability to relax.

Yep, back to that. People have to learn how to “meditate,” because what was once just a part of one’s daily cycle—relaxation—has been put on suppressive drugs.

The conscious pursuit of relaxation is already its own antithesis. We send each other selfies where we appear to be relaxing. A performance of relaxation polluted by the perversion of what was once shared, but not in the virtual sense.

In the same way that real grown-ups are exhausted by the unceasing obligation to give children in their care correction, our internal grown-up can become exhausted in the seemingly perpetual correction we have to give to our electronically broken internal child. There goes the temptation to just quit . . . surrender to the manufactured compulsions. True parenthood takes endurance. It will take endurance to learn how to relax.

Anyone who’s done terrifically hard labor—backbreaking stuff—has found the inflection point for relaxation; that time and place when his or her very atoms let one another go, and being can just flow through them like open windows on a soft spring day.

This post doesn’t “go anywhere.” It’s disjointed, not some pop-obsession. It won’t get a lot of clicks and “likes,” but maybe it speaks to someone.

Message in a bottle.

Peace.