Category: essays

There was a thing I noticed when I absent-mindedly opened Twitter on my phone the other day. I say absent-mindedly because if I’m not using Twitter for work, I’m almost certainly doing it out of habit, not because I have something to say or am experiencing a sudden hunger for tweets. Anyway, the thing I noticed was how my anxiety level went up almost immediately.

Hold on, Paul, I can hear you thinking. That’s not some novel insight. Everyone knows that Twitter makes us all crazy. Yes, yes, but before you so rudely interrupted me, I was going to say that I noticed why I became so much more anxious (compared to my normal slow-boil-anxiety that is ever-present).

Yes, Paul, you’re butting in with again. We know why: because everything is terrible and there’s nothing to be done. You’ve already written this essay, Paul. Well, that’s what you think, know-it-all imaginary reader! I’m still one step ahead of you.

What I noticed—and no more interrupting, please—was that my surge of stress had less to do with the particulars of each individual example of things-being-terrible, and more to do with the dizzying variety of topics of concern to which I was being exposed, and about which I was implicitly expected to feel something. Strongly.

And I just wouldn’t.

Now, I almost typed “couldn’t,” but in fact the whole point of me even telling you about this (assuming you haven’t already left because I made you mad earlier in this piece) was because I realized that I had a kind of agency here. I realized, or at least remembered, that I could choose my areas of concern. I actually don’t have to have Big Feelings about everything.

Think of this. In another era, before the internet was a thing, there was only so much we were likely to be exposed to in our day-to-day lives. Assuming a moderate degree of cultural literacy and interest in affairs beyond oneself, a person might have Big Feelings about things in their own lives, in things going on in their families and communities, and in the broader sweeps of current events (in other words, what was in the newspapers or on the evening news).

In addition to these more universal areas of concern, a person might have particular interests in one or more subject matters of some social relevance; the environment, business, homelessness, racism, naughty words in popular music, whatever. You’d probably have your ways of keeping up with the developments in those areas and have corresponding Big Feelings about things that happened within them.

If you cared a lot about, say, environmentalism to the exclusion of most other things, you might not have any idea what was going on in the fight for racial justice. Or maybe you would! If you did, it was because you sought that information out, proactively. You chose to add that area of concern to your plate. And good for you!

But here’s what wouldn’t happen. You probably wouldn’t be aware of what was happening in, say, evangelical Christianity, or computer programming, or crime and policing. Maybe you did! But it would be because you chose to. Unless you sought out information about those topics, you probably didn’t know a lot about what was happening within those spheres of concern, and therefore were spared having Big Feelings about things that happened within those spheres.

You were also likely spared the expectation of having Big Feelings about them.

Hell, if you were someone whose primary area of concern was environmentalism, it could be that you were really focused on, say, the preservation of forests in New England, and maybe had little idea what air pollution was doing to people in China. You might have no idea how neglected infrastructure caused water to be undrinkable in American minority communities. It’s all environmentalism, but there existed no firehose of information that would force ideas upon you that came from branches of a larger topic (air pollution in China), or interconnected with others (systemic racism leading to the neglect of a community’s water supply).

Today, because of the internet, there is a much better chance that we can be made aware of all these other areas of concern. Far, far too many important issues have gone unaddressed for ages, in large part because most folks simply never encountered them. They didn’t know what was happening outside their existing areas of concern. The fact that those of us who care a lot about climate change are now acutely aware of how global warming will harm the global poor, for example, is really good. In an earlier age, we might not have known that, or not really understood it.

A single human, however, cannot carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. There is a fine line between being well-informed and overwhelmed. The well-intentioned person who cares about those New England forests should also know what smog does to the lungs of people in Beijing, and how a broken system can allow Black people in Flint to be sickened by lead in their water.

But the lava-flow of information from social media makes the implicit demand that our naïve environmentalist also be aware of, concerned over, and have Big Feelings about, say, every crazy thing a Fox News personality says, every shady dealing by business executives, every hint of hurtful cultural stereotyping or appropriation in popular media, every lie told by a politician, every new statistic about job loss and poverty, every wasteful expenditure by the federal government, every idiotic and backward bill introduced in a state legislature, every abuse of authority by police, every example of neglect of military servicemembers, every instance of unfair preferential treatment, every poorly conceived public musing on unfamiliar topics, every foot inserted into every mouth, every head inserted into every ass.

It’s good that we know what’s going on in spheres to which we once did not have had access. It’s good that gross injustices are now being put squarely before the eyes of people who would otherwise have looked away. It is a blessing. We can do more to make more things better because we know more.

An individual, however, can only do so much. They have a finite store of emotion and processing power. Yet the social media universe demands Big Feelings about almost literally everything.

So what I figured out was, hey, I don’t have to do that. I can allocate my anxiety. I can decide how much of my concern will be distributed among a set of issues. I can choose the issues into which I will dive deeply, and which ones I will merely wade into. And I can choose to keep my eyes and mind open to new areas of concern as they cross my awareness, and from those, decide which I will allocate my emotional and intellectual resources, and which ones I will leave to others better suited to do something about them.

This is not about assigning absolute value to one issue or another, to say that environmental issue X is more or less important than racial-justice issue Y or corporate-ethics issue Z. It is about deciding, of my own volition, where my particular talents, experience, interests, and skills are best directed. I can care very much about corporate ethics, but good lord I know nothing about business. I can choose to learn more about it, of course, or I can choose to offer my support to those who know what the hell they’re doing. If I were to writhe and churn over every wrongdoing by a CEO, I would merely make myself ill, and do nothing to further the cause of reform. I can support good efforts without accepting a personal emotional stake.

The idea isn’t that we shouldn’t care, or that we care too much, but that we, as individual human animals, can’t live in that feeling, that concern, that outrage for such heightened frequencies, intensities, and durations. We can genuinely and deeply care about a wide array of issues without taking each new infraction, offense, or horror as an emergency for which we are responsible to witness, demand redress, and emotionally digest. We aren’t built for it.

Whatever your bag is, whatever gets you passionate about making the world less shitty than it is, go and dig deeply into it. Take advantage of the many tendrils of the Information Superhighway and expose yourself to the secondary and tertiary issues that overlap with yours. Follow the intellectual paths that speak to you and make it a point to keep learning more. Let your moral circle widen, and as Vonnegut said, let your soul grow.

But a widened moral circle needn’t contain a porous heart. Be intentional about the frequency, volume, and quality of the information you allow into your sphere of concern; resist the expectation that you voluntarily convert each piece of information into shrapnel to be lodged in your chest. You can care without rending yourself asunder. I know it’s possible.

And of course, there’s plenty we can just stop caring so much about altogether. Moments ago, the twitterverse demanded I have Very Strong Feelings about a rude word emblazoned on a ring worn by a U.S. Senator.

I declined.

If you find this newsletter or anything else I produce useful or pleasing, perhaps you’d consider tossing some currency my way.

A long time ago, I began to take a serious interest in music; that is, listening to it, singing along with it, and indulging in fantasies about being a musician. I was about 8 years old when Nickelodeon started running old episodes of The Monkees (a sitcom featuring a prefabricated band about the misadventures of a fictional version of said prefabricated band), and I just loved it. I didn’t own any Monkees records, and had no means of going and purchasing any, and it never really occurred to me that one could buy a Monkees record; I think I assumed they simply didn’t exist for some reason. I mean, I was 8.

So to satisfy this need, I took what was already at the time a gravely outdated cassette recorder, and when The Monkees aired on cable, I held the device up to the TV and hit record when a song played on the show. I did this over the course of a few episodes and soon had a decent collection of Monkees songs on my crappy little tape deck with a single mono speaker—not that this mattered, because of course I was recording from the TV’s speaker. I listened to it all the time.

When my dad realized I had been doing this, he said, “You know, we can buy you a Monkees tape.” That was really nice of him, but in my 8-year-old brain, it was kind of silly. I already had all the songs, dad!

I did eventually acquire The Monkees’ Greatest Hits on audio cassette, and I was very glad to have it. The songs were way longer on the album than on the TV show! The theme song even had a second verse! And there were a bunch of songs that weren’t even on the show! And wow, “Listen to the Band,” that one was weird!

While I also noticed that I could hear more of the instrumentation on the album than on my tape of TV audio, it wasn’t all that much different to me. I mean, it was still the same crummy old tape deck with the mono speaker. It didn’t seem crummy at all to me, as I had little to compare it to. So it was fine! When I eventually got other tapes—“Weird Al” Yankovic, the soundtracks to Ghostbusters and Transformers: The Movie, and so on—it was the same. I was just happy to have them.

I wasn’t done recording music straight from the TV, either. Over the next couple of years I would also start recording music from my video games (good lord did I love the music from Mega Man II), other kinds of music I was growing to like from MTV and VH1, and even sketches from Nick at Nite’s reruns of SCTV. These were the crappiest possible ways to get this kind of audio, but I didn’t know, and therefore didn’t care. I could now listen to those SCTV sketches over and over, memorizing them without intending to, and reenacting them on my own recordings. And I could listen to my Phil Collins and Genesis songs all I wanted, pulled right from the tinny sound in my room coming out of my tiny TV set.

At some point, I was given a portable cassette player (what I would call a Walkman, but of course wasn’t). I’d still listen to the same stuff, poorly recorded by me, totally unaware that “audio production” was a thing that mattered a lot to people who made and listened to music.

And yes, my family thought it was very weird. Especially the TV-recorded video game music. My grandfather couldn’t even fathom it. My dad summarily dismissed the music itself as “probably written by a computer.” Whatever, dad! You’ll never understand me!

As my music tastes matured, I started digging through my dad’s collection of tapes, most of which were themselves copies from vinyl LPs. Dad, himself a savant of a musician, had an extensive (and today, one would definitely say quality) record collection, and I began to avail myself of the stuff I thought I might be into. I already knew I liked the Beatles—every car ride with few exceptions was an extended Beatles session—but I had never really listened to them on my own. They were a good place to start.

At some point I had also gotten a better tape deck, one that actually had two speakers for stereo. I had no idea what difference that made because, again, most of what I was listening to was recorded from the TV speaker and into a tape deck’s built-in microphone. Also, I think around this time the “Walkman” had probably stopped working. One evening, I decided to listen to a Beatles tape—a real “dub” from a real record—through a set of cheap earbud headphones plugged into the tape deck. I don’t remember which album, but I would guess it was one that had some collection of songs I already knew; “Eight Days a Week” rings a bell, so it may have been Beatles for Sale, but so does and “Drive My Car” and “Nowhere Man,” so maybe it was Rubber Soul. But it could also just have been a mix.

I was probably 10 years old, and I still remember the sensation of hearing different instruments and different voices seeming to come from different locations around my ears. The boys sounded like they were singing into one ear, and the drums and guitar sounded like they were coming into the other ear! It wasn’t all just a mush of sounds. It was like a tapestry. Or a stage play, where you see every actor, every prop, every set piece. It was utterly transporting.

(Apparently, I was also singing along and doing a poor job of harmonizing, as my little brother would later complain, “You sounded terrible.”)

I was certainly going to raid my dad’s collection for more music. And I wasn’t going back to sounds recorded from a TV speaker.

This is not the origin story of an audiophile. But by my late twenties and early thirties, when I had a real job and enjoyed a living wage, I did begin to care much more about maximizing the quality of the means by which my ears received the air vibrations of music. I had several agonizing crises over what headphones to buy, which only became more fraught when I’d go into a store and sample headphones well outside my price range. Holy shit, I didn’t know music could sound this good!!! Every uptick in audio quality I experienced spoiled whatever I had previously enjoyed. Hell, just knowing that there were better things out there made it difficult to be happy with whatever I had.

This comes up in countless other ways. When Apple introduced “Retina displays” with the iPhone 4, screens with sufficiently high resolution that individual pixels became indistinguishable in normal use, it ruined me for all other displays. Reading text on a non-Retina screen, something I had been doing for some thirty years without complaint or problem, now felt like having my eyeballs scraped by jagged text.

At least that came from actual lived experience, wherein a demonstrably superior execution of a particular kind of product makes previous iterations look worse, because they are, in fact, worse. But I also bought the iPhone 12 when it came out while I already owned an iPhone 11. Why? Did I have direct experience with the new model, and thereby knew that my current phone was now teetering on obsolescence? Of course not. It was just new, it looked a little cooler, and the marketing all said it was better. You will not be surprised to know that a few months into owning the iPhone 12, it has not provided me a meaningfully better smartphone experience than the iPhone 11. Nor whatever phone I owned before that. But just being aware of new things, by comparing what I have to what might be, often convinces me, with great conviction, that I must acquire it. I had been fine before. The curse of new knowledge, however, robbed me of that contentment. Or, more accurately, I let it myself be robbed. I invited the burglar in and offered him a sandwich.

I recently bought a new laptop. Or, rather, I should say I recently bought three laptops, because the first two, since returned, had flaws on their displays. Since this was intended for gaming, I had made peace with needing to settle for an eye-scratching, non-Retina display, something years of Macs, iPhones, iPads, and Galaxies had ruined me for.

But the first laptop had what seemed to me to be a lot of what is called IPS glow, the light haze around the borders of the screen. This is apparently fairly normal for these kinds of machines, but I had now been conditioned by Retina displays and quad-HD OLEDs, so it seemed unacceptable. The next laptop had a slight blemish of light bleed in the center of the display (I think that one was a reasonable rejection). The last one, the one I’m using now to type this, was just fine. More expensive, of course. It does have a tiny bit of light bleed at the very bottom corner, but I am trying to be okay with it.

This will seem like a divergence, but it’s not. I have spent a lot less time on social media in the last few weeks. Like many folks, this is in part because the world seems less on fire than it did a few weeks ago, and doomscrolling the news feels less necessary. It never was necessary, of course.

Apart from lowering my overall anxiety levels about the state of civilization (which, for the record, remain high), social media distancing has also made me feel less compelled to produce. Longtime readers of mine (all six of you) will know that I am gripped by a feeling of obligation to make myself relevant through my creative work, be it my writing, music, or other endeavors. I often feel that in order to justify my existence, in order to atone for all the things I never accomplished when I was younger, and in order to feel that I have somehow mattered, I must Become Known and cross some threshold of relevance and significance.

In recent weeks, though, I have felt this pang much less sharply than usual. It could merely be the fact that I feel very wrapped up in my gaming, which is a new thing for me. It could also have something to do with the changing political reality.

But I think that it’s mainly because I’m looking at Twitter way less.

Think back to the beginning of the pandemic. Suddenly everyone (it seemed) was part of this renaissance-of-the-remote, people writing novels and cooking and painting and performing and streaming and Tik-Tokking, and I’d be damned if I was going to be left in the creative dust. I started a newsletter. I revived my blog. I recorded some music. I made videos. I was going to matter.

I felt like I had to matter. It was a kind of race, one I had already been losing, when suddenly a lot more runners appeared on the track. Hey! Slow down up there! I was trying to matter first!

I was comparing myself and my output to what I saw from social media. But of course, what I see on social media will always tend to be stuff from those who have already broken through. Of course I was seeing things from people who were already in a position to create. Of course I would see things from people who already had the freedom to churn out content.

Yet I compared. I compared and found myself lacking. And as Dogberry says in Much Ado about Nothing, “Comparisons are odorous.”

When I was listening to the Monkees on my old mono tape deck from sounds recorded from a cable TV rerun, I had no idea what I was missing. Comparing my tapes to the stereo sounds of a professionally produced album out of actual headphones, I learned there was a deeper, more meaningful experience of music to be had. It was good that I compared one to the other. But I was also happy before.

Just because something is better (in fact or in perception) doesn’t make it necessary. Nor does it even necessarily make it a good. And it definitely doesn’t make it necessarily good for me. Or you, I bet.

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As an awkward, neurotic, bespectacled smartypants, I am stereotypically predisposed to be a fan of superheroes. And so I am, but only fairly recently.

When I was a kid, I liked the cartoons and toys associated with characters like Spider-Man and Superman, but no more than I liked any other inescapable franchise at the time. My prime action figure playing years were much more focused on Transformers, He-Man, Ghostbusters, and, just as I was becoming a little too old for such things, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Once I had grown out of toys, the Star Trek universe became my obsession. Superheroes didn’t capture my imagination the way they have for so many other kids who later go on to become true fans and indulge in superhero geekdom.

I think part of the reason is their roots in comic books, and when I say “comic books,” I mean the byzantine lattice of comic book culture and lore; the dizzying array of characters, story threads, reboots, crossovers, and timelines. Whenever I would dip my toes into a given title, I would inevitably run into that asterisk in some panel, in which a major piece of information would be hinted at in a character’s passing comment, only to be directed to a footnote telling me, “SEE [COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SERIES] #657!” Well, I haven’t seen whats-its-whatever issue 657, so I guess I’m just going to be lost.

But that’s another story.* (*SEE BLOG POST 6-23-2014!)

Despite my compulsion for completionism, I’m now mostly at peace with that aspect of superhero comics (mostly). My latter-day enthusiasm for superheroes, along with some help from digital comic book all-you-can-eat subscription services, have made it so that I can now dive into comics with a much reduced sense of cultural intimidation.

I think the other reason I didn’t take to superheroes earlier was that they often seemed to me to be sort of dopey. This is no doubt in large part because my first frames of reference were shows like Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends and Super Friends, which were really, really dopey. As I grew up, the idea that folks with superpowers would dress up in colorful, tight-fitting costumes, beat up bank robbers, and fight evil clowns and superintelligent gorillas just seemed kind of silly. Superheroes seemed like a form of escapism that was dated and irrelevant. Star Trek, by contrast, was all about the future and what we might be capable of in the coming centuries (and was also sometimes dopey, but different-dopey). Superheroes were essentially cops with absurd outfits who could fly or punch really hard.

Now I’m in my 40s, and I absolutely love superheroes. What happened?

I suppose like a lot of people, I got bitten by the radioactive superhero bug in large part due to the Marvel Cinematic Universe films of the past decade-plus, as well as the Christopher Nolan Dark Knight films. Previously, a lot of superhero shows and films I’d seen could sort of be summed up with a pretty basic template: Regular person becomes endowed with powers, an evil force threatens the status quo, hero fights this evil by using their superpowers.

The Marvel and Dark Knight movies, however, gave me more to chew on. Tony Stark, Bruce Wayne, and Steve Rogers were never just fighting an evil nemesis. They were also struggling with themselves and with a society that either created them, marginalized them, created their enemies, or any combination thereof.

Steve Rogers didn’t get his powers by accident of birth or extraordinary circumstances, and he wasn’t worthy of becoming Captain America because he was the best soldier. He was a superhero because he was a good man, the guy who was most willing to give every ounce of himself to save others. Tony Stark was forced to contend with his destructive legacy as a plundering industrialist, as well as his mammoth ego. Bruce Wayne was consumed by his own darkness, and struggled to harness his inner demons so that he could stop outer demons from bringing darkness to others.

And these were just the first handful of those movies. Mostly, they kept getting better.

These stories had a different kind of template, something like this: Protagonist witnesses unacceptable injustices or perceives a grave threat. They discover the possibility of having extraordinary powers, but must then become worthy of those powers through some struggle with themselves or other malign force, and then give everything of themselves—including, if necessary, their lives—in order to right that injustice or defeat that threat. And often victory raises new questions and perhaps creates new problems.

The Nolan Dark Knight films, and the Frank Miller graphic novels that inspired them, are a little different, in that they tell a story of a world so terrible that it creates ever-more terrible villains, which then requires a response from heroes that must become ever-more terrible themselves. But the struggle of those heroes is still central to the story and, for me, their appeal. And even the Avengers films acknowledge the arms-race dynamic of increasingly existential dangers requiring ever more extreme reactions from the good guys, which, as Vision says in Captain America: Civil War, “invites challenge” from even more powerful villains, and the ensuing conflict “breeds catastrophe.”

At the core, I suppose, is that courage—that of the hero and perhaps others in the story—must be cultivated and achieved. It isn’t presumed. And that is something that moves me at a very deep level.

Because of course the central problem for a good superhero story is how to offer a superpowered person a genuine challenge. An almost all-powerful being like Kal-El (Superman) isn’t courageous because he saves the passengers on a runaway train about to fall into an abyss. He knows he’ll be fine whether he carries the train to safety or lays down to have his body serve as the track. He needs to have adversaries thrown at him that equal and exceed him in strength (Zod, Doomsday, etc.), and he needs to be faced with enemies that can’t be defeated with brute force: finding purpose, finding belonging among an alien species, grieving the loss of a family and a world he never got the chance to know, using his powers responsibly, balancing freedom and security, and so on.

While I am very much delighted by a good old fashioned Superman vs. Zod smackdown, I’m captivated by the choices Superman will have to make in order to defeat Zod and protect the world he’s adopted without becoming Zod himself.

You can apply this across the board of superhero stories. It works for “street-level” heroes like Bruce Wayne (Batman), Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel), Matt Murdock (Daredevil), or Oliver Queen (Green Arrow), and it works for more “cosmic” heroes like Thor, Carol Danvers (Captain Marvel), or Diana of Themyscira (Wonder Woman). What are they willing to do to defeat evil-doers? Are they willing to do evil themselves? What and who are they willing to sacrifice? Their extraordinary abilities are a given, the status quo of the world of the story. The power of their stories is not only what they choose to do with those powers, but how they arrive at those decisions; what must they give of their own lives, their beliefs, their souls?

Alright, well, this is all very highfalutin and whatnot, but my enthusiasm for superhero stories has another equally important factor: Fantasy escapism.

You don’t need me to tell you how the world is going to hell right now, and that our assumptions about what is good and what is evil have been muddied. Our illusions about who and what we can trust have been shattered. For all the struggles with moral ambiguity in good superhero storytelling, it’s no wonder that I find it incredibly appealing that, at the very least, choices are made and executed on. Whereas in the real world, it feels like all we can do is tread moral waters and examine our failures into infinity, but superheroes eventually make a choice and act on it.

If done well, they do so with awe-inspiring spectacle, suspense, wit, and heart. I have been delighting in the full lineup of CW’s DC “Arrowverse” said superhero series, from the faux-gritty Arrow to the more explicitly-comedic Legends of Tomorrow (working my way up to the big “Crisis on Infinite Earths” crossover event), and part of their appeal for me is that they are a little, well, dopey. But whereas the superhero cartoons of my childhood were dopey in the sense of being shoddy products, the DC shows embrace their campiness.

They are not satire by any means. They are not mocking the genre, but embracing its quirks. When something outlandish happens (Felicity Smoak’s paralysis is technologically cured in the middle of a couple’s spat with Oliver Queen! Barry Allen altered everyone’s lives when he time-traveled too much! Former supervillain Mick Rory became best friends with George Washington!), the event is acknowledged as outlandish, and then promptly folded into the story and taken as seriously as anything else. And it works.

And I also think part of why these shows work for me is that they operate more or less like comic books. Each scene feels like a page of panels, and any rush-through of complicated plot points feels justified by the succinctness demanded by the format. And like the comic books, they come with complicated backstories and lore that enriches the experience for those who are immersed in it, but doesn’t totally alienate those who are tuning in for the first time. Of course, I am making a point of going through the entire “Arrowverse,” episode by episode, because I’m just like that.

I guess what it all comes down to is this: In a time when things feel so dark, I’m glad I’ve made the choice to spend time with stories in which people with extraordinary powers or abilities make the choice to use those abilities for something other than personal gain. They choose to save the world.

As always, if you find this stuff valuable, you can toss some currency my way.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant, so they say. Wicked deeds and ideas can be defeated by offering them up to public scrutiny, exposing them as morally unacceptable and shaming them out of the mainstream and out of power.

There are times when this has been true, when the public has been exposed to some gross injustice, rejected it, and appealed to authorities to make a change.

Cable news and social media are fueled by these kinds of appeals. During the Obama years, I had to stop watching cable news because I could no longer stomach the hours of broadcast dedicated to telling me how racism, religious zealotry, and plutocratic criminality were taking over the country. To save my own sanity during the Trump era, I tried to prune my social media feeds of accounts that shared primarily political content, because nearly everything I saw was dedicated to making me angry about every single morally repugnant whim expressed by malicious actors. And it was all terrible and morally repugnant!

But my attempts to lessen the amount of political outrage in my feed were futile, for in the era of Trump, it feels like it’s all there was to talk about. I began the (also futile) practice of replying to or quoting tweets about the latest horror by appending, “So what do we do?” I wanted more than tattling. I wanted marching orders. They never came.

Because it’s not just regular folks tweeting out their outrage. It’s politicians, prominent media personalities, major cultural figures, renowned academics—people in positions of real, genuine power. If all they could do was point to bad things happening to say, “You see???” then what were we of the unwashed masses supposed to do about it?

Other than vote. I get it. And we did, and it mostly worked out for the better, but it wasn’t nearly enough. And the horrors will, and do, just continue. And we will continue to go “you see???“

But who are we talking to when we do that? Every time we stoke our collective ire and give attention to the genuinely destructive torrent of moral and ethical horrors, whether they come from presidents, media figures, local politicians, or everyday despicable people, we are pointing it out for a reason. We are asking for someone to do something about it.

We are aggrieved customers in the marketplace of ideas, and we are demanding to speak to the manager. We are all Karens now.

Here’s the problem I think most of us have yet to acknowledge: There is no manager. Our emails to customer support are bouncing back. We are dialing a complaint hotline to nowhere.

There are elections, of course, in which the customers can, in effect, hire and fire the managers of the store’s government and policy department, but this has little to no impact on the store’s other aisles. The racism section is still being stocked, the science-denial section is getting novel new products in every day, and the theocracy department just opened up an outlet store. Business is booming.

It doesn’t matter how much we complain about what are objectively abysmal things being done and the abysmal people doing them. Those managers don’t hear our complaints because we’re not their customers.

One such abysmal human with abysmal ideas is Jordan Peterson, and you may have heard that employees at Penguin Press are disgusted that they are publishing Peterson’s latest book, as I would be if I worked there. Fredrik deBoer, whose post on this subject helped clarify my thinking for this piece, says this is an example of a poor tactic on the part of progressives: appealing to authorities to protect them from people with harmful ideas:

What if there is no authority to which you can appeal to make Jordan Peterson go away? What if Jordan Peterson is a fact of life? Let’s set aside God for a moment. What is the authority that could shut Peterson up? A Canadian citizen with tenure, a large network of conservative admirers, the ability to broadcast directly to his fans, and a talent for encoding reactionary ideas without the out-and-out hateful trappings of many of his contemporaries, he simply does not strike me as someone you can silence even if you wanted to.

Now, that doesn’t change the fact that Penguin Press could make the moral choice not to be part of the machinery that helps Peterson spread and profit off of his message, even knowing that someone else will gladly do it instead. But the larger point holds: Peterson will get his captive audience regardless of any complaints to the manager.

DeBoer says the only real solution to the problem of Peterson and what he represents is to persuade people he’s wrong and make a convincing case for something better. “I get that this is more complicated, and less emotionally fulfilling, than running to the teacher to get him in trouble,” writes deBoer. “But what’s the alternative? … There is no authority which will simply remove Jordan Peterson from public life for you.”

For public officeholders, usually the best we can do is to know who we’re dealing with and vote accordingly. But at some point we have to acknowledge that all the things that horrify us about politicians like Trump, Louie Gohmert, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, Matt Gaetz, or any other garbage officeholders and candidates, are the very things that give them their power. For their market, their vileness is their primary selling feature. Pointing it out over and over mostly serves as free advertising.

Instead, we have to be better. We have to build movements, support candidates, make arguments, develop ideas, and produce media that are better than theirs. We have to be more than aggrieved, we must be active. We must do more than point out the bad things, we must, ourselves, be the sources of good things.

No one will do it for us. You see?

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I am tantalized by the glowing reviews of the new MacBooks running on Apple’s own processors, wherein normally jaded tech pundits express their astonishment at the speed, battery life, and fluidity of these M1-based laptops. But as tempted as I am to scrape together the means to purchase one, I simply can’t justify it. You see, I already have a laptop running Apple Silicon, and even after two years it’s still wicked fast, unfailingly fluid, lasts as long on a charge as I need it to, and like the M1 Macs, it also runs iOS apps.

Of course, I’m talking about an iPad.

For the past several months, the 2018 11-inch iPad Pro has been my primary personal computer (as opposed to a work computer, which is a 2017 iMac). I sold my MacBook Air a few months ago in order to cut some pandemic-era costs, and I have been genuinely surprised by how little I’ve missed having a traditional laptop and how I almost never feel the need to use my work machine for “serious computing.” This was supposed to be a kind of sacrifice, and I was prepared to deal with what I assumed would be a heavily compromised experience. But as things stand right now, if I had to choose between my iPad Pro as my main “laptop” and a fancy new M1 MacBook, I think I’d have to stick with my current setup.

I did not expect this.

To be clear, I wouldn’t replace my work desktop with an iPad. My job as a communications director for a national nonprofit benefits mightily from a large screen running multiple applications at once, an easily manipulated cascade of windows and tabs, browsers outfitted with extensions, and a robust file system augmented with several external drives.

But I tell you, if I had to do my job from the iPad, I totally could. I could not have said that just a couple of years ago.

When the work day is over, I use my iPad Pro to write essays, articles, newsletters, and the novel I’m working on. I use it to record and edit video and audio for my podcast and YouTube channel. I manage my photo collection with it and do basic image editing (“basic” because I have no idea what I’m doing, not because of any shortcomings with the hardware). I also draw my ridiculous sketches with it, play a few games, watch TV shows and movies, read books and articles, and even write and record songs.

And perhaps most importantly, I use it to read comics. I’ll get to that in a bit.

There’s nothing special about my setup. It’s an 11-inch iPad Pro with Apple’s Magic Keyboard and Pencil. That’s it. No dongles, no drives, no mouse. I used Logitech’s less expensive keyboard-with-trackpad solution for a time, and while it was very good, it was a victim of its own success, showing me that an iPad-only solution for my personal computing needs really was possible, and worth the extra cost to make the experience just that much better with Apple’s keyboard.

There are definitely limitations and frustrations with using an iPad as a laptop, but they have been massively reduced with the last couple of years’ worth of iPadOS updates. Apple’s full embrace of the trackpad really has made all the difference in the world; not just that they enabled the functionality, but optimized for it. Simple processes that were once maddening to attempt on an iPad, such as working with a CMS like WordPress, are now almost indistinguishable from the experience on a laptop. The inability to truly arrange windowed apps, and the weird block the iPad has on doing anything else while video conferencing or recording, are definitely pains in the ass. But I can cope.

As reviewers of the M1 MacBooks have raved about the zippiness of the new laptops, I realized that these were qualities that my iPad setup already possessed, and it also reminded me what I would be missing if I were to opt instead for something like a Surface Pro. There simply aren’t any other platforms that offer this kind of instantaneous responsiveness.

And then I remembered that the iPad Pro’s display also boasts the 120Hz “ProMotion” refresh rate, which not even Apple’s own laptops (or phones!) have yet. The front-facing camera on my iPad is still leaps and bounds better than those on the new MacBooks. And though the M1 Macs run iOS apps, by all accounts the experience is about as awkward as running Android apps on ChromeOS: doable, but kind of a mess. But at least Chomebooks have touchscreens for interacting with Android apps! MacBooks still don’t, so using an iOS app on an M1 Mac would still be a cursor-only situation. Not optimal.

As a side note, I used to own an 11-inch MacBook Air, circa 2012, and while I wound up needing something more powerful and with a larger display to get work done, good lord I loved that thing. It was so small and adorable! The iPad isn’t adorable by any means, but its compact size recalls a lot of what I loved about that old 11-inch Air.

As for comic books: If Windows had available tablet-optimized apps for Marvel Unlimited and ComiXology, I might very well have switched to a Surface Pro ages ago, and all my personal computing needs would have been fulfilled; a tablet-laptop hybrid with a complete ecosystem of powerful, desktop-class applications. But on Windows, Marvel and ComiXology are limited to their abysmal web interfaces (and Marvel Unlimited’s iOS app is already janky). And of course with a Surface or other Windows two-in-one, there would also have been the lesser battery life, the display’s lower refresh rate, and the general chug and churn of PC performance.

My day job has particular demands that make a traditional PC, if not necessary, then at least highly preferred. The iPad can fill in when necessary as a secondary work machine, but I wouldn’t want it to be my primary work device. Besides, I go to some lengths to keep my work and personal lives separate, and that very much includes my technology; my iMac sits on a desk in a particular corner of my apartment, and when my work day is done, I leave that desk and make it a point to avoid using that space for anything else. Opening up the iPad Pro and Magic Keyboard signals to my brain that work-work is over, and whatever I do next is for me. It might still be work, but, hopefully, it will be largely labors of love.

Or it might just be catching up with Thor and Loki in the Marvel “War of the Realms” crossover event. Who can say?

I’m still drooling over those new M1 MacBooks. If fortune smiles upon me such that I can acquire one, I certainly won’t turn it away. But things being what they are at this point, owning one would mean selling my iPad setup to cover the cost. Not only is that not worth it right now, in some meaningful ways, it would feel like a step back.

Go figure.

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The United States is politically held hostage by tens of millions of people living in a delusional version of reality. No matter the facts staring them in the face, just a little less than half of the electorate seems to believe in an alternate universe in which Trump won the election, left-wing terrorists are destroying our cities, COVID is a hoax or an exaggerated flu, and white Christians are the most oppressed group in history.

So I had a thought.

Information silos, filter bubbles, and algorithms can obviously make millions of people believe almost anything. So if what the Cult of Trump needs is to live in a fake reality, well, maybe we can just let them. And then the rest of us can carry on with actual reality.

I turned this thought into a bit of speculative fiction.

* * *

After a hard day at work, Rick plops down on the couch and flips through his phone to see what’s new.

He’s a father of three, but two of the kids are grown and out of the house, and the other is out with friends. His wife, Danielle, is making dinner, which she always does unless she’s not feeling well.

Rick scrolls through his social media feeds and gets updated on some of the latest headlines. The border wall had just been completed, and the pictures were stunning. 30-foot high partitions, black as midnight, effectively invisible in the dark, but reflective so that the sun blazed in the eyes of anyone who looked at it from the right angle. Smooth, unscalable, and a true monument to America’s force of will against invaders. President Trump would be there tomorrow afternoon for a ceremony celebrating this achievement.

It’s a good time for this kind of morale boost, as China has made more threats against the United States, promising to choke the American economy while making incursions into our Pacific territory. And who knows when they might release another virus. The president has been undeterred, however, and Rick is reassured when he hears Trump call China’s bluff. You just try it, thinks Rick. See what Donald does.

It is 2023. Joe Biden is embroiled in several lawsuits over his attempt to steal the 2020 election. Hunter Biden is in prison in Moscow. Kamala Harris is still out there, working with AOC, Antifa, and George Soros (now 93 and obviously being kept alive with some kind of secret pharmaceuticals or cybernetic implants) to foment a revolution and take over the country. (No chance, thinks Rick.) Black rioters have nearly destroyed several major Democrat-run cities, so they are now being occupied by federal agents who are arresting criminals, guarding property, and saving the lives of innocent Americans. The president has forced Twitter to shut down for censoring conservatives, which is against the Constitution. Facebook has learned its lesson and now treats conservative voices fairly.

As he scrolls through his feed, Rick almost skips past a headline that said something about someone on Fox News saying something about Joe Biden. He reverses the direction of his thumb swiping to find the item. And there it is. The post reads, “Fox News Guest Says Joe Biden is Currently President!” Rick chuckles out loud.

“What’s so funny?” Danielle asks from the kitchen.

“Something really stupid,” says Rick. “Not important.”

It is stupid. Everyone knows that Fox News went off the rails back in 2020, and really couldn’t be trusted anymore, except for a few hosts like Hannity and Tucker. But what kind of delusional nonsense was this? Why would anyone say that Joe Biden was actually president right now? Some kind of hangover from the 2020 election debacle? The facts are the facts! Trump won the election, even though Democrats tried to steal it with loads of fake votes. But President Trump refused to concede, vowed to keep fighting, and eventually (and inevitably) triumphed in the courts. Thank you, Justice Barrett!

Some say that Trump is thinking about running for a third term. That would be just fine with Rick.

Danielle coughs from the kitchen. And then again, and emits a little bit of a groan.

Rick calls out, “You okay, honey?” Danielle had been under the weather ever since they went to that basketball game Danielle’s nephew was playing in. It was actually a really good game, and the place was packed! She probably picked up some bug going around.

“I’ve been better,” she responds. “I’ll lay down after dinner.”

Rick makes a mental note to check her temperature, and maybe his own. He’s not feeling so great either, but he’s never been one to admit when he’s sick.

Then he remembers what he was looking at. Right, that dumb Fox News person who said Biden’s the president. Rick taps on the item.

The post had been deleted.

That’s weird. Fake news never really goes away, does it? You just have to keep vigilant, and only trust the sources that you know for sure are giving it to you straight.

Rick thinks back to the border wall, and he smiles. Yeah, he thinks, Trump is doing a fantastic job in his second term. A third term would be just fine by him.

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I’m beginning to hate natural selection.

I’m not talking about the theory of evolution as a scientific concept, I mean I am having some strong feelings about what a pain in the ass natural selection is to me, right now.

If you’re new to my writing, let me just give you a quick status report: my sense of self is kind of garbage. I’m not currently experiencing existential anguish, per se (but, you know, catch me on a different day and see what you get), but I am wrestling with a crisis about who I am and why I bother existing.

And a lot of that hinges on a deep, aggravating need for validation. I need other people to justify my existence for me. It’s a big reason why I was a professional actor, why I write, why I make music, and why I do pretty much anything else not directly related to my own survival or the well-being of those I love. I need to be told by The World that I belong.

For the last few years, I’ve been able to pin some of the blame for this on my autism, having been diagnosed with Asperger’s at the age of 39. As you might imagine, someone with my particular neurological quirks might grow up developing a sense of alienation. That’s what happens when you 1) feel like you’re not the same as everyone else, and 2) are constantly told you are not the same as everyone else, often in very painful terms.

So of course I seek validation now! I’ve been conditioned over several decades to expect to be an outcast, to believe that any sense of belonging I do manage to experience is temporary and tenuous at best, and that I am not capable of judging for myself whether or not I possess sufficient value as a person to continue existing.

Damn you, autism!

The thing is, the need to feel belonging with a tribe is not particular to the neurodivergent. It’s hard-wired into humanity as a whole at the deepest levels. Many humans achieve this belonging rather easily (or so it seems to me). They provide value to their families and communities, they receive the benefits of being a part of those families and communities, and they are validated for playing their part in those social systems. They don’t have to think about it.

But threaten that belonging, cause someone to feel like their place in the tribe could be reduced or taken away, and see what atavistic shit comes up.

For someone like me, that sense of threat is ever-present, and I feel it on every level: I feel like humanity on Earth doesn’t want me, and I also assume I am perpetually on the edge of being rejected by the people Iove. Any minute now, they’re going to decide they’ve had it.

So maybe I feel this kind of alienation and anxiety more often or more severely than most, but all of us have it in us. We’re supposed to! It’s how early humans survived through our time as nomadic hunter-gatherers.

It was Robert Wright, in Why Buddhism is True, who clarified this point for me, that this anxiety over other’s opinions of us is all natural selection’s fault:

Why would natural selection design organisms to feel discomfort that seems so pointless? Maybe because in the environment of our ancestors it wouldn’t have been pointless; in a hunter-gatherer society, you’re pretty much always performing in front of people you’ll see again and whose opinions therefore matter. My mother used to say, “We wouldn’t spend so much time worrying about what other people think of us if we realized how seldom they do.” She was right; our assumption that people give much thought to us one way or the other is often an illusion, as is our unspoken sense that it matters what pretty much everyone we see thinks of us. But these intuitions were less often illusory in the environment of our evolution, and that’s one reason they’re so persistent today.

That’s right, natural selection wants us to be insecure.

There’s so much else that natural selection “wants” us to do that is ultimately harmful to us now. And it seems to me that so much of what we think of as human civilization and progress is really a big species-wide struggle against natural selection and all the things it pushes us to do against our own interests, from the desire to eat too much sugar to the urge to decimate nearby tribes and take their resources. Self-doubt is just one more thing.

I think natural selection and I need to have a talk. I need to thank it for getting us all this far, what with the conscious brains, the opposable thumbs, and whatnot. And then I need to tell it, honestly, that its time with me is over, because it’s holding me back from, well, evolving.

I need to remember that my ache for belonging, while exacerbated by my autism and other quirks, ultimately stems from an instinct that no longer serves its purpose, and that I am free to let it go. To be at peace with who I am and where I am, I think I to kick natural selection out of the tribe.

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I am trying to disconnect without isolating. I am trying to find meaning without validation. I am trying to unburden without irresponsibility. I am trying to be aware without being overwhelmed. I am trying to be at peace without being passive. I am trying to matter without having to ask whether I matter. I am trying to fit in without being too ordinary. I am trying to stand out without jutting. I am trying to have hope without being crushed by it.

Maybe it’s that last one that needs to go.

Derrick Jensen wrote a few years ago in praise of giving up on hope. He’s talking about this in the context of his struggle to defend the natural world from decimation by humanity. To me, it applies universally. It’s not even about rejecting hope, but simply not dealing with it one way or the other. Once hope becomes irrelevant, Jensen says:

…you realize you never needed it in the first place. You realize that giving up on hope didn’t kill you. It didn’t even make you less effective. In fact it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or something else to solve your problems … and you just began doing whatever it takes to solve those problems yourself.

This is not the same as hopelessness. Hopelessness implies defeat, pessimism, resignation to things getting worse. This is something else.

Here’s the part that’s both the most appealing about this idea and the most frightening:

When you give up on hope, something even better happens than it not killing you, which is that in some sense it does kill you. You die. And there’s a wonderful thing about being dead, which is that they — those in power — cannot really touch you anymore. … The socially constructed you died. The civilized you died. The manufactured, fabricated, stamped, molded you died. The victim died.

And who is left when that you dies? You are left. Animal you. Naked you. Vulnerable (and invulnerable) you. Mortal you. Survivor you. The you who thinks not what the culture taught you to think but what you think. The you who feels not what the culture taught you to feel but what you feel. The you who is not who the culture taught you to be but who you are.

As someone who has wasted so much precious life trying to define himself through others’ perceptions, who could not find any value in himself without the explicit approval of everyone else, this is tantalizing and bewildering.

When I was first wrestling with my identity in the aftermath of my diagnosis as autistic a few years ago, I thought it might be an opportunity to redefine who I was, to shed my masks, discover the person underneath them, and let that person live their life. The frightening part was not knowing who that might be, because the masks seemed to be as much a part of who I was as anything else.

Later, I began to take a more nuanced view. While I must still learn to accept my unmasked, unfiltered self, there is still power to be had with intentional masking, endowing myself with aspects of an identity in order to achieve the things my unmasked self might seek. One can adapt without self-deception. One can modulate one’s behavior without imprisoning oneself. One can augment, and those augmentations are under the control of the “true” self.

But whether one is masking, passing, augmenting, retrofitting, or what have you, I wonder now if it’s hope that is still an ingredient of falseness. Maybe I can’t get free of the fetters I’ve fitted myself with, nor the ones that the culture has clapped onto me, because I maintain a delusion that meaning, peace, and validation will still be given to me by Someone Else, by some force Out There. Maybe by shedding hope, I empower myself to provide it on my own.

“When you quit relying on hope,” writes Jensen, “and instead begin to protect the people, things, and places you love, you become very dangerous indeed to those in power.”

In my case, “those in power” are the imaginary blessings from an amorphous other. That’s what I’ve allowed to have power over me, the wish, the hope, that at some point I’d prove myself worthy to be One of You, worthy to belong to this world.

Maybe if I give up on hope, the ache for validation, the yearning to matter, will ease.

But that’s just a hope, too, isn’t it?

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