Wednesday 1/12/22
It feels like a minor miracle has occurred when someone gets "you're" and "your" correct. I actually do a double-take and sometimes let out a "wow."
I have been staying further away than usual from social media. It's the worst thing to ever happen to humanity, in my view. It plays as large a part in our devolution as anything. Our brokenness, fear, narcissism, complete absence of reasoning and critical thinking skills, ability to read--as in comprehend what we read--and be an individual.
When I do glance at Twitter, I see how self-congratulatory people are. A major theme now in society. But they're not congratulating themselves for something they overcame, or recognizing what they've learned. It will be over some bit of remembered pedantry from like fifteen years ago (which is just as often made up, so that they can get attention and this kind of moral credit that the absolute worst people seem to need more than an actual decent person ever would), about how they scolded someone once upon a time or tsk-tsked, and were generally a dick on this micro level (better yet if this makes them look like an "ally") that makes the reasonable people who come in contact with this sort of person try to avoid them, which is not always possible.
The emptiness of human lives in the twenty-first century. They have never been more empty. That's why all of this shit that isn't there needs to be manufactured, and the same old, same old must be regurgitated: people have nothing in their lives, or in themselves.
If we are not careful, if we don't change, if we do not find a better path on which to travel as humans, that helps us locate and grow that humanity, humans will self-replace at some point. They will replace themselves with robots, programs, whatever the technology becomes. They will actually remove themselves to be a machine, an app, whatever it is. They will formally forfeit their lives. We are on the way right now.
COVID and death porn is also huge. I look at my phone, I see misleading headlines I'm meant to click on, because the click is all--which is another reason we are hollow idiots--and I know if I do click I'm supposed to be happy that someone else is dead (preferably because I then feel more justified in my simple-minded, unnuanced, uneducated political beliefs, which get a gold medal--a boost--when the right kind of person dies), or that it's not me, as I mainline cakes and never walk more than I have to, would fly by hovercraft to the bathroom if I could, and that I am to view human life not as life or anything precious, but just some dumb shit you eat popcorn to, further weakening the already tattered, few remaining strands of empathy that remain in the world.
In these death porn pieces there will be a limited presentation of the facts. One is supposed to believe that the perfectly healthy person of thirty just keeled over dead, because of the demon COVID, when in reality they had a substance abuse problem that helped things along, and had already overdosed twice, or whatever it was, and their liver was failing. But that's reality, that's life, and life and reality must never enter the picture in our current world.
Death porn. Hey, how about some stair porn? Or some listen-to-good-music-that-matters porn? Or let's-actually-give-someone-something-worth-reading porn? By which I mean, some brains, some passion, some love, some positivity, some truth, some beauty, some art, some get-off-your-ass-ness-you-lazy-fuck.
Celebrate the lowest common denominator, celebrate stupidity, celebrate being a hypocritical asshole, and these are the things that then rise and become the norm, the status quo, how you must be to get anywhere in a society that is now entirely about these things.
