Thursday 5/2/24
Rarely do I go on Instagram. I post the occasional photo. Usually it's pertaining to art--a movie poster, a record cover, book cover, something I saw at a museum. Sometimes it's of some place I went to or passed by, and on occasion it's just me, which I really do for myself so I can gauge where I'm at physically. I can be like, "This is was the shape you were in last spring, what shape are you in now?" It helps keep me on the ball. But that's all for my work and my quest, so that I can be as strong as I need to be, and then healthy for a long time when I'm no longer in this situation. I feel like I haven't even started yet. My life. Even with my work I feel like I'm at the beginning. Things will start when I have a real chance, which I've never had.
To be honest, I pretty much just mute people on social media. There aren't many people I need or want to hear anything from. Most people only want attention--no matter for how uninteresting a thing--and to play grab-ass. I'm not your guy for grab-ass. And I want to be interested. That makes me, apparently, a rare case. Others seemingly have no issue with partaking of things they do not find interesting. Why would you do that when there are things that are interesting which you could turn to instead? I'd say that comes down to people not knowing where to turn. I think sometimes about the old adage regarding the horse that has to be led to water to drink. That applies to people now, but it's not enough to lead them to water. You have to tell them what it is, explain how water works, make them bend over, put their face in the stream. It's like they can do nothing on their own. So they'll just fill their lives with things that even they don't like or care about. Everything has to come to a person; they won't go to anything. Not only that, it has to end up being pushed right in front of their face, otherwise it will be as if that thing does not exist to that person. Which is one key reason I haven't had a chance. We've seen this industry. It's not going to be pushing my work into faces until it has to.
There was this budding discussion--that is, I only saw a topic someone had broached, and there were replies in following that I couldn't see--on Instagram, and I thought that might be interesting. Someone had a quandary. I think it can be valuable to see how people go about finding a solution. And it need not be for some massive thing. What I can do--and what I have done--is take one thing that looks like it's limited to this area, and extrapolate that into something else in my own life or art. To someone else, it looks like there's no relation between the two things, but to me, there is.
Instagram said I had to download this other app--cumbersome; I would consider this inefficient tech, personally--in order to read this thread, that app being called, fittingly enough, Threads. Okay. I did this. I open up the app, and I see a pointless discussion because everyone was busy doing what everyone does on Threads--which I've since erased--and that is crack their jokes.
People are so witless. I'll wonder, "Do you think this is really funny? That you're clever?" And I can't believe, oftentimes, that people think it is or they are. It's like they can't stop themselves. Everyone does it, pretty much, regardless of age. The Boomers do it, the twenty-two-year-olds do it. It's often painful to me how awkward it is.
I'd say that one of the dominant themes of high school as I experienced it was unfunny people trying to get attention by being funny with one stupid comment after another. There was something desperate about it, very needy, and very childish. Now, one might say, those were children and so it goes with children. I had reservations about that even at the time because I couldn't see so many of those people ever changing or "growing up," as it were, at all.
Most people don't change, and very few grow. Life changes. Settings change, bodies change, possibilities change, prospects change, geography changes, roles change. But people tend not to. The reason is, change comes from within. Positive change, that is. That change from within may be spurred by life on the outside. That doesn't lessen the value of the change, or diminish what a person achieves when they grow. If you took most people, though, and regathered them in the high school of yore, or the college, or the home with their second wife, they'd be who they were then.
I find that very depressing and defeatist. I could not live like that because I would not be able to live with myself.
I cringe when I see a fifty-eight-year-old person try to make their joke and then write their "lol" at the end of it, with half of the words spelled incorrectly, a "then" for a "than" and the like. I think, "How is this all you are and why are you okay with it?" We have so much agency in determining the person we are. We don't have agency in determining if we'll be one of the world's best pianists or an NBA player--or most don't--but we really do--or we can--control a lot about ourselves. Our behavior, how we express ourselves--at least to a degree--and our maturity.
When these people make these jokes, comments, whatever we're going to call them, they're not trying to add to a discussion. It's entirely for them. And again I think, "Why? You need the attention that bad? As what? A wit? Did that even sound funny in your head, let alone here up on the screen?"
I remember being in class and the teacher wanted to get on with it, and she'd have to wait until the last crack was made from a student who was trying to have his moment as the funny in following from the last six students who had done the same. And while I didn't envision those kids ever growing up, I also didn't envision at the time that later I'd witness sixty-year-olds behaving the same way. Then again, there wasn't the internet, and I think I figured there wouldn't be as much of an opportunity, but now there is, and there's even more of one than what high school provided. That's another thing. I didn't know back then how much adult life would parallel high school, of all things.
It takes a secure person to try and engage with others. A person assured in who they are. We see it with all of this bad fiction. There's no attempt to engage with a reader. The person writing that story just wants attention. In publishing, it's like they wish to be ratified as this thing that they're clearly not. You're not a writer. And you certainly aren't a good writer. But they're not writing to engage with a reader. It's immature, it's needy, it's desperate, and it's for no one but them. People who are secure in themselves--and, in the writing example, people who are secure in what they're doing and offering--are about engagement. Not the way we use the term "engagement" now, as in engagement with one's followers, which means clicks and likes and is, paradoxically, usually indicative of a total absence of real engagement.
