Lately I have been enjoying the feeling of anonymity, the rejection of modernity, and the current “conversation.” In this day and age especially, there is something really pleasant in being an absolute nobody who is not paying attention to the same things the rest of the world is and does not share the same motivations. This is the complete opposite thing society and all our institutions seem to tell us: being up to date with what the latest celebrity said is important, new is better, old is bad, progress is good, using old shit is bad, if you don’t use X streaming service you’re seen as a loser, if you don’t watch this new superhero movie with grown adults running around in capes saving humanity while the country outside the movie theatre is falling apart you’re too cynical, having ambition and spending lots of money in a nightclub with Kardashianified factory made lipfiller whores is good, chilling in a forest for free and reading a book is bad, getting lots of shallow pussy is cool and waiting until you’ve met the right person is seen as naive and lame, etc. Society’s values are completely upside down.
I could keep going and I will, lol: being famous is seen as something to aspire to, the famous person in question with more money and influence and “followers” etc is seen as more astute than the average person because they were able to figure out something the rest of the population could not. Being part of “the cultural conversation” is good, you should be talking about the same things everyone else is, go ahead and be normal! Don’t you want to be a great big success? Don’t you want two agreeable big booty hoes who don’t know what the word “no” means? How about a phat yacht and enough land to go and plant your own sess crops? Get out there and be somebody, talk about the same things everyone else is. We want to hear your take on X thing making people upset currently! You can be an individual for awhile if you want, but don’t get too crazy, it’s bad for the shareholders, come back to us eventually, and join this age of mediocrity!
A guy with a sneaker deal who flies around the globe and visits 90000 different countries in the span of a week is generally considered to be more interesting than a guy who works on a construction site, makes not that much money, and has to do the same routine shit every day of his life until he drops dead. Most women will find the world traveler more exciting because he’s got more money, his parents will be oh so proud, and the news will always publish anything he has to say because he happens to be in an enviable position of influence the construction worker guy is not. I cannot lie to you: if I had the option, of course I would choose to be the world traveller guy instead of who I currently am. I wish I was rich so I didn’t have to wake up at early times and come home when it’s dark, etc etc. I hate being a prole in this system, and I hate what capitalism has done to most people without them even realizing it. I’d love to be rich too, of course I would. But not to have influence or likes or fame, only so I can get out the game entirely, buy my own land, get a hippie communist girlfriend with armpit hair, have kids, and drop off the face of the earth. Complete anonymity should be the goal for any man. I used to say stuff like, “I don’t wanna fit in, I wanna stand out,” but now I don’t even want that. I just want out, period lol.
That was all very ranty, let me start over. Lately I’ve been enjoying the feeling of being an average guy, a total loser, a mid magistrate lmao🤣 (that last one makes no sense, I just liked how it sounded with the alliteration). I know it sounds absolutely crazy in today’s world to say something like this, but I will do what I do on this website and explain my thinking here to the handful of people still reading (thank you, btw, it baffles me that people still return to a mid meaningless website with zero business model such as this one haha). You see, I am kind of reminded of my grandfathers (both now dead). They are what I’d call, “average men,” and I don’t mean that in a negative way at all. When I say average, I don’t mean “shitty,” which is the connotation the establishment would have people generally accept as truth. When I say “average,” I don’t mean a guy who is a failure. I just mean dudes who never made waves, and never wanted to. I used to be someone who wanted to make waves, but now I don’t really give a fuck because it wouldn’t necessarily say anything good about me; why would I want to be a success in a polluted body of water, the whole ocean is dirty and rigged lmao. For example, I used to feel bad I can’t find a girlfriend and everyone around me seems to have that one figured out. Now, I don’t really feel as bad because when you get to know most people there is not much to be attracted about. It’s kinda funny: the phrase, “there’s plenty of fish in the sea,” has always been a comment on the sea’s quantity, but it’s not an indication of quality. If you dive deeper into this so called sea you’ll see (bars? Or tongue twister, haha) you’re not missing much. It’s actually quite healthier to pop your head above the water and be out the game than in it. Anyway, as I was saying, if you were to Google my grandfathers’ names, you’d find nothing about them. They have no Wikipedia pages. They never made the news for saying anything good or bad. They didn’t go on Sally Jesse Raphael and talk about their problems, as Tony Soprano would say, they just did what they had to do.
And this is precisely the feeling I am getting at: just doing what you have to do in life, not anything to change the whole world, or what you feel would make you look cooler or be part of the group of whatever. If I can’t win in this system, then the abandonment of it is another form of victory for me. It seems bad on the surface, but there’s a real glory to being a loser with no influence whatsoever. I may never beat capitalism, it is simply too difficult to, but I can win by limiting my participation. Given the fact that our civilization is currently in a decline economically, morally, and spiritually, it stands to reason that one of the main things that is going by the wayside is the former idea of one having ambition. The new cool thing to me is all about having anti-ambition and being anti-algorithm, if that makes sense. Why should someone care about becoming famous and a major success in this world? What does it really mean to be a success in a world that has become such a shithole, and has been on a steady decline since 2019? Why should a person bother or care about working super hard in this stupid system anymore? The cat is pretty much out of the bag at this point: most people have access to the internet and can read/see what is going on, and the system has become very transparent. There is no longer any purpose to trying that hard in life anymore because none of this is leading to anywhere good in the next few years.
If you think about it, the idea and archetype of the “successful person” in a society is a fairly recent and somewhat modern concept. So it makes sense that it would disappear as quickly as it happened, I just unfortunately happen to be on the less lucky side of age when it comes to experiencing the benefits of such a robust, bustling society. I was literally born at the end of the best possible time lmfaooo. I believe that the concept of being a “somebody” made sense in previous generations where upward mobility was a real thing; it made sense to buy into the so-called “American Dream,” because if you played your cards right, the dream could certainly come true for you. You could have a house, a wife that looks like Farrah Fawcett, 2-3 children, and a career that paid for all of it. In the 2020s, this is not only unrealistic, everything is pointing to that never happening for society at large ever again. We are entering a new era that will involve rolling blackouts, scheduled times water will be available, food/resource scarcity, etc. There are certainly exceptions and there are still some young people getting married all the time who have parents giving them money to start their lives, and so forth. But my point still stands: that is an exception and those people will be pretending and living in some fantasy world where things are still okay and are actually incorrect and in the minority of people to do well. Most people in my generation are not doing very well and never will reach the heights they had in mind when they were growing up, that’s just the truth.
Fuck these so called Joneses and keeping up appearances for whoever the fuck they are. I couldn’t give a shit less about what is happening outside my door anymore. If it doesn’t affect me, my family, or my cat directly, I don’t give a fuck about it. I don’t give a fuck about having a white Dodge Challenger anymore. I don’t give a fuck about marrying a broad who looks like Farrah Fawcett anymore. The way I feel these days, if I were to ask a girl I like out, and she were to say no, I’d actually be happy. Good, great, now I have more time to finish reading more Russian novels. Maybe I’ll jack off to someone hotter than her and go back to reading when I’m done and enjoy my saved time. Or maybe I won’t even do that, maybe I’ll just go for a walk and think about life. Who gives a fuck.
Now, I am not saying you should be happy to be a useless piece of shit who jerks off and eats Doritos all day. I am not knocking the idea of ambition entirely; it’s good to have goals and hopes and dreams. Don’t give up on yourself. Work hard at your craft. Do your thing! Blah blah blah. I am not saying you should have zero ambition, that is not good or healthy. What I am saying is that it’s cooler to be more ambitious about being on the periphery of the system, if that makes sense. You might be saying to yourself, if you’re so out the game, why are you still posting this here? You’re not wrong, but you’re misunderstanding me: I am still on the periphery of the system. I am not trying to gain new eyeballs to my work, I am not promoting anything. I am just some guy. If I do stand-up comedy, it won’t be for the purpose of getting a Netflix special, like so many of my peers, for example. It will be just to make my friends and people like me laugh. If I direct a movie or write a script, again, it won’t be for any other greater purpose than to entertain myself. The reward is in the doing and the art itself, I am tired of capitalism because the shit coming out of its anus isn’t good anymore.
I don’t want to be a success in a world where it means jack shit. I wanted to be a success when it meant something. It doesn’t mean the same thing anymore, this is a culture of too much shitheadery to be proud of yourself in. It’s like being the smartest one in a classroom full of retarded people. Or to put it less offensively, it’s like being a Stanley Kubrick film in a theatre playing wall to wall Marvel movies; of course you are the best film there, but it’s by default due to the fact that no one is even trying anymore. We live in an age of such mediocrity, such low intellectualism (if at all), you should never pat yourself on the back if you happen to do well. That says nothing about you and everything about how shitty the culture you live in is. Just who exactly is my competition these days? Who is considered a great Hollywood screenwriter? Taika Waititi? I already know I’m more talented than him, and that’s not even a good barometer for success and says nothing. The bar is so low these days I wouldn’t even feel proud if I became successful, just disappointed in my fellow man.
At this point in my life I think I would just like to work my meaningless little job, quietly go to work, and then go off peacefully into my lil wooden coffin when it’s time for me to die, buried in the same area as my grandparents and parents in the Muslim section of the cemetery, that way we can meet each other quicker and chill in the afterlife if there is one. I know it sounds funny, but I’ve already bought the plot of land I want to be buried in. I don’t want anyone angry or hating me or even praising/loving something I say, I want no parts of this shit anymore, just completely out the game lol. No friends in high places or scary foes, no allies or enemies, no politics, just nothing. There is a freedom that comes with being a man of zero influence. There’s less pressure on me, I’m just some guy. I never did anything to hurt or help anyone, I was just some guy.
To put it another way: if this were War and Peace, I wouldn’t be Napoleon, I would probably be one of the soldiers eating soup who had no historical impact. I had almost nothing to do with the world around me, I just continued to exist within it. Whatever happened was exactly what was gonna happen anyway if I had never been born. I don’t matter, just like most people in the world do not matter (successful or unsuccessful). The only difference between people like me and people that are so-called successes is that they think they matter, whereas I know I do not, and it comforts me. You can say what you want about someone who is mid and a boring NPC with no life, but one thing you can’t say is that they ever did anything “bad.” Nothing I say or do will change the world, or make anyone do anything good or bad. If I die without leaving an impact on the world, in a way that is kind of a net positive (if you exclude my carbon emissions) because I didn’t end up creating any harm or destruction in an already awful world. I am not the problem, I never did anything to anyone — you can’t say the same about all these rich, famous, “successful,” assholes screaming for attention.
Once again, the prosperity of the 2010s were literally the last good days. We’ve got the highest world population ever in human history, there are more mentally unhinged people than ever before (effects of long covid might rear its ugly head at the end of this decade), food and water insecurity is coming next, it’s a bad nightmare, it’s all changing and turning into something worse. (BTW, you can chart the progression of our collapse and how far humanity is falling by how Kanye West has gotten over time, and that is not a knock on only him, because he is not the only one: this is what happens in a collapse, people lose their mf minds, realize nothing matters anymore, and act erratically).
To “circle back” (lol, that phrase makes me laugh for some reason haha) to my main point, there is a real joy in not being part of the competition anymore, so to speak. Of course I am still a citizen of my country and I pay taxes and blah blah blah, but I don’t feel that way in my mind. Sometimes it feels like I am living in another country, one where I don’t read the same news and don’t pay attention to the same things everyone else is. I’m just some guy living in my own country, Larrysingletonstan🤣. This is a very Boomer thing to say, but sometimes it’s nice to have the sort of existence that a guy like Mark Zuckerberg does not have any ownership of. For example, if I’m just sitting in a park somewhere smoking a cigarette, not listening to any music, not on my phone, not connected to civilization in any way really, that is a moment I get to have and keep for myself personally. It has nothing to do with anyone, that moment is just for me and the clarity of my mind. I have been trying to create a whole life like that lately.
Something I have learned about working in a library is that there’s a whole subculture of people just like myself. These are people who are sort of anti-capitalist, and sort of exist on the outside of “the culture.” They will not spend money if they don’t have to, and will try to find free ways of entertaining themselves or passing the time. These people are not luddites, they use the internet, and may even browse Twitter and check out the news. But they won’t comment on shit that’s going on, they never post photos of themselves, they have no cultural influence, and only have a passing knowledge of stuff that’s going on (if at all). It is a state of mind where you actively avoid most of what is currently happening for your own mental health and overall wellbeing. There are people who visit the library, spend all day there, leave when it’s closing time, and they do this every day. They are not trying to better themselves and working on a course or writing some project, they are just existing until it’s time to die, and nothing is wrong with that.
I think what I am trying to articulate here is that, if being in the 2010s was all about Muhammad Ali-ing oneself into greatness, and telling yourself you were awesome and cool and the best and everything, I think the cultural thing to do in the 2020s is now to opt out entirely. I don’t want to see the new _____ release, I don’t care what _____ has to say about ______, I don’t care about ______’s response to _______’s controversial remarks. It’s all a load of shit that has nothing to do with me or the betterment of the planet at large. I want nothing to do with this world if it’s gonna be this shitty, I don’t want to be rich or poor, I just wanna live, and be on the edge of civilization until it’s time for me to go.