You're supposed to have something for people

Saturday 11/14/26

You're supposed to have things for other people just as they're supposed to have things for you.

That's how life is meant to work. I have this for you, oh, I see you have that for me.

It's not intended to be me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me...especially if one is completely uninteresting and essentially indistinguishable in the ways that count from everyone else.

What you say is supposed to offer something to others. Even what you post.

What can people get from it? Do they learn anything? Is it anything that can resonate? Illuminate? Inspire? Is there counsel? Support? Is humor on offer, which can be useful in a given day?

I block anyone who just has content about themselves. Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, uninteresting, attention addicted, insecure, pathetic me, me, me, me, me.

If you want to do non-stop me, me, me, me, me, could you at least try and work in something interesting? A compelling aspect about a special interest of yours?

We should always be contributing. This doesn't mean you don't share. But you share honestly. When we share something essential about ourselves, or a component of an impactful experience--which can take so many forms--we're providing others with that with which they may connect. This can alter their step on a given day. Firm up their personal ground.

If, for instance, it is a rainy, cold day, and I don't feel as if I have it in me to do much, though I have done much for, say, work and in creating, and I force myself to go to the Bunker Hill Monument to run stairs, where the gray of sky matches the gray of the obelisk, and no one else is there, and up and down I go, sweating, breathy hard, thinking, soldiering on--for make no mistake, this is a form of it--and I share that experience, and not performatively, but from a place of good faith, with befitting words, am I not giving something to someone else? Offering them something? This doesn't mean I don't do myself the good turn by writing what I write, saying what I say, because that speaks to me, too.

But people don't even have interests, do they? Their interests are themselves and others being interested in them, but not in any substantive or real way that might lead to, gasp, any kind of real exchange or anything real.

People want attention, not interaction. Connection? Ha. That is way too many bridges too far. True connection is among the rarest things in this world. Right up there with realness. It isn't for nothing that true connection requires realness from two people. What are the chances of that happening at the same time? What are the chances of two such people ever coming in contact with each other?

People aren't truly things, so they make up things to say that they are in order to have something to be. Then they put it in their Instagram bio. Writer. Their self-diagnosed condition which they chose because they think it effectively conveys that their brain isn't like the brains of others! They don't think the same way! Why, they're naturally creative! They aren't a "normie"!

Yeah you are. That's why you're doing this thing that millions of others are doing. And you can't even see the irony.

You could make an effort to be things instead. Become them.

I see hundreds of people each day with the like in their bios, and that's in limited time on those platforms because I am off doing what I do.

Labels don't confer reality. They aren't a light switch and then, wow, look, there you are, plain and irrefutable (that is, not easily shown to be full of shit) as whatever it is you've decided to label yourself.

I wouldn't expect a drug has ever had a greater hold on people or a person than attention does now. People are addicted to seeking it. At any cost. For no reason other than attention. Not because it's a good thing or for a good reason.

They'll take it just as readily for looking stupid. For making a spectacle of themselves. So long as they get that attention in their veins.

We're such a pathetic species now.

It's almost impossible to have any respect for anybody. Mentally, morally. As a thinker, as a person.

If you have real reason to respect yourself, your chances of finding anyone else to respect are infinitesimal.

People always say you shouldn't associate with people who blah blah blah and who don't blah blah blah--these being good things--but if you truly take that course you won't know anyone.

Is there anyone worth knowing?

If you learn you won't have anyone to talk to. Because having learned, you'll need other people who learn with whom to interact. People who learn more as they go forward. People who have an idea of what they don't know, too.

Then the more you learn, the more alone you are. Because what are you going to do with someone else who is way back there? And they won't want you either. You'll have nothing in common, which is one thing. But you'll be about totally different things in terms of how you live, what you do with your mind, which is different and worse.

I'll see these guys make posts about where to find women with whom they'll have things in common, meaning, activity-wise. Video game playing and the like. They'll make similar remarks along the lines of, "If we don't have things like that to do together and talk about, we won't have anything to talk about."

I mean, you could be intelligent, no? You could talk about ideas? Life? Art? Truth? How to grow? What you've learned lately? What you've been thinking about? How you feel?

But no. Video games. Or fantasy football. Being a "cat parent." Motorcycles.

Or bust.

They don't even understand that anyone they'd be with, everyone they've been with in the past, wasn't with them in the one-to-one sense, nor the other way around. It was a "throuple"--me, you, this activity stuff we required to be me and you because we weren't really, one-to-one, me and you.

The idea of not having something to talk about...this record has barely gotten started and it's five million words long. I can't conceive--honestly, it's very hard for me to get my mind around this--of not having things to talk about.

Everything is something to talk about. Talk about a bird you see. The stars. What you did wrong. Dreams you had, dreams you have.

Talk about what I'm talking about here. Do something about. Try to figure out ways through conversation. Tell someone something you don't normally tell anyone. When you're out and about at Christmastime and "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" comes on, talk about the guitar.

It's all right there and it's all inside of you. There are supposed to be things inside of you. If there is, that is enough. You talk about that and what's inside of the other person.

But I know better. I know people have nothing inside of them now.

It's like with "friends." Friendship no longer exists. Doing stuff with someone exists. That mostly exists because people are too insecure to go alone to wherever they wish to go. If they weren't, they wouldn't need the person with whom they went.

Look at people at a cafe or restaurant. Or anywhere. What are the doing? Are they having great talks? Or is each of them on their phone? What would you say the percentage of the time is now that it's the latter? Seventy-five percent?

Age doesn't matter either. Teenagers, octogenarians.

But just because they're not on their phones doesn't mean they're having great talks either. If they're talking, it's usually errand-y. "What time do we need to be there?" That kind of thing.

Go on Reddit and you'll read accounts of how hard it is to maintain friendships. People have all these reasons. The reasons are unvarying. They're meant to be sad, wise, indicative of one who has shed one's illusions against a backdrop of the sobering melancholia of the passage of years.

Well, that's just life. How it goes. We're all so busy. You get another job, you move, you get married, you have kids.

None of those are the reason. The reason is because you weren't really friends and you probably aren't capable of having a friend because you're not capable of being a friend and you didn't have anything to say to each other and both of you likely have nothing to say.

So it's just activity partners. That's what spouses usually are. Unions aren't the result of great loves. It's almost always a form of activity partner writ large to fill the days until it's Reaper time.

People have time. They have far, far, far more time than humans have ever had, if we're still calling people humans.

You ever read an account, like from a diary or a journal, of someone's life in the 1800s? Probably not. I've read many. People have no idea what it means to have a full day. Those people back then did.

We are so soft. So prone to making excuses for ourselves.

Relationships may have all these other components--the physical, the physically intimate--but ultimately they're verbal more than anything else. A successful, true relationship is about what two people have to say to each other, how and what they share, how and how well they listen.

Geography mattered much more in 1871 when you moved away than it does now. But even then, I can think of plenty of instances of people who remained friends regardless, with their friendships continuing to develop. You can read the correspondences of them.

This is also an age in which people all but declare a personal claim of heroism for posting a photo of themselves sans makeup.

"Hero of Mine" is truly a radical story today. It's radical in form. But also in definition. I don't believe people understand what heroism and being a hero actually is.

Sure, someone rescues the children at the orphanage and a litter of puppies from a burning blaze and they can go, "Right, hero," but that's not what I'm talking about.

Heroism is both a simple concept and something fantastically complex. It is also fantastically complex in its simplicity.

People want to be agreed with exponentially more than they want to be correct. They give little thought to the process of arriving at that which is correct. They don't see that through, aren't interested in the mental process/intellectual progression and rigors. Scarcely know of the rudiments of the workings.

Personally, I almost always irritated when people tell me they agree with me. Here, it's often a case of stolen intellectual valor. I will say something that person has never thought, couldn't come up with on their own, and they'll say, "I agree," like it's their thing, too.

Don't say that. It isn't productive. You're also gloming on to someone else's something that you wouldn't be able to realize on your own, intentionally or not. People aren't aware. It isn't that they're acting maliciously in these instances from my own life.

But now you can know. Think about it. I don't mean with me. We're unlikely to meet. As a thing. A correct thing. A better way of being. People also usually use "I agree" as a kind of final statement, the end of discourse, because agreement has been achieved.

It isn't two people having things for each other. Or one person having something for the other, as one hopes that other person will have something for them at another occasion, or maybe within a few seconds. The "having" gets cut off.

Of course, one of the many seemingly insurmountable problems of my life is that I always have infinitely more to give and do give than what anyone can give to me. I'm not talking things like a fair chance, a break, that which I deserve and deserved long, long, long ago.

I'm talking the interpersonal now. But I could do with some kindness, being seen and heard, being treated like a human rather than some god-like figure who will always be okay because he's so much more this, that, and the other than the rest of us, a stab, at least, at reciprocity.