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You know what you haven’t heard lately? That the younger generation doesn’t care about things. We thought television and the internet was going to create an era of self-involved, uncaring youths. Instead, they care too much, about too many things (and maybe they are self-involved, but so are we). That, combined with youth culture in general taking over popular culture, means that we all are too engaged with too many things in too many domains. I don’t think this is where we thought we would end up. We thought it was going to be little virtual bubbles, playing video games by ourselves, laughing at the sitcom from Natural Born Killers waiting for our Domino’s pizza.
Instead we do play video games, but with… no, not with… we play video games at other people. That’s what’s happening. We do things AT others. We are disconnected but not disengaged. As I write this post, I’m thinking about if people liked my TikTok post from last night. And I’m a middle-aged man. At any given time I have about three or four things I’ve put out into the world that I’m wondering how people like them.1
It’s like a perverse version of fame. With fame, way more people know you than you know them. It’s abnormal. It skews your sense of the world and people. The phenomenon I’m describing is knowing way more about issues and people than you can do anything about. We know the earth is dying, we know someone hacked the Colonial Pipeline, we know a genocide is happening right now, but what can I or you specifically do about it? We can barely even influence our local elections. So we generate a whole bunch of emotion over something we have no control over. And we try to sell the idea that every little action helps to each other, almost as a way to justify the swirling emotions.
To be precise, I know that we still complain that people don’t care enough. Not enough people, and especially young people, vote. But we do often complain that people are too outraged/sad/happy about a variety of things. It’s like we took the mechanism of empathy and caring and pushed it in front of a funhouse mirror. We have all the worst parts of passion embedded in our day-to-day culture.
Anyway. Have a great day!
Update: The kittens were picked up and moved by the mama cat to the parking lot behind our house. The neighbors back there found the family and are taking care of the little ones now. That mama cat is back to roaming our yard looking for food (and companionship probably).
Finished: I edited the video I took on our trip to Mexico! And I synced it up to a fun Dadi Freyr song, “10 Years” … the Chromeo remix! Check it out!
Recommended: This talk from the University of Chicago is a bracing correction to how we think about writing. Essentially: we spend all our years in school writing for readers that we pay to read our work. After school, that stops… and we only succeed as writers by providing value to our readers. Well worth an hour of your time if writing is a part of your life in anyway.
Recommended: You are waiting for your appointment with Global Entry (or SENTRI or NEXUS… I don’t know what those are but maybe you do). The appointment is in four months. You would love to go sooner. For that, try Appointment Scanner. They text you when someone cancels and you pick the slot up. It works great and costs $29 one time for three months of scanning. Eric and I just used it to get our Global Entry status approved, and when we came home from Mexico, it literally took 5 seconds to go through customs with it.
A friend of mine has decided he wants to be an Instagram influencer. I would estimate at any moment that he has 5-10 things or more that he is waiting for validation on, a photo shoot, a quirky post, an email to a potential branded content partner.