Your Life Is Not Big Enough to Be Part of Huge Moral Conversations

Your life is small, quaint, manageable. Or it should be

Photo courtesy of Darí Dorofeeva

I write on Substack for several reasons. The first is that I don’t have anything better to do.

The second is that it’s a search query, of sorts: I’m trying to route interesting people to my inbox by publishing interesting things. I’m trying to use writing as a conduit to connect to interesting people. And so far I’ve had some success. I’ve reached people I otherwise wouldn’t’ve, and some of these people are hilarious or brilliant or otherwise worth knowing.

Another reason is because I like providing value to people. My biggest strength in life has always been communicating — so, what better way to give back to the world for free than by writing?

The fourth is because Substack makes it easy.

There are other reasons, but those are the big ones. My point in saying all of this is that I don’t enjoy being online. In fact it is a completely overwhelming, demoralizing, repulsive place to be and I wish I didn’t have to be here. But the internet is the location at which I publish my work, so I don’t really have a choice. And the side effect of operating on a web platform is that, in order to engage with my audience and the people I’m actively trying to make friends with (see point 2 above), I am logistically forced to use the platform as a social hub. And when you use a platform socially, it inevitably also becomes a news hub, cultural commentary hub, political hub, and entertainment hub. Because the internet does a piss poor job of separating all of those things. In fact it actively tries not to separate them. That’s kind of the point.

That’s why we find ourselves at this particularly heated juncture in our cultural history. Because the baby and the bathwater are the same thing, so you can’t throw one out. You can’t use the internet without being smacked around by junk you weren’t even shopping for. You can’t be a casual user of the internet, because the internet wants you to be a professional user. A highly-emotional user. A user who has an opinion about each thing that appears before his eyes.

Because I have no choice but to regularly interact with the platform as such, in order to have interesting conversations and cultivate new ideas in collaboration with others, I am also exposed to the general zeitgeist of the whole internet. I scroll through approximately a few hundred ideas, headlines, and article titles a day. I read very few of them (my time is too valuable to read mediocre or low-hanging writing, I’m sorry), but I do get a general idea of what people are talking about. And I do, out of imminently-regretted curiosity, occasionally read a “popular” or “trendy” or “loud” article just to see what’s all the hubbub, bub.

Which brings me to the point of this article. Every time I turn around, I’m met with The Next Big Conversation on Substack. And, since this platform has become both a well-populated and timely reflection of the rest of the internet, that means it’s The Next Big Conversation in all of social media. Sometimes it’s based on goof-ass New York Times articles, or some science thing published in a journal, or some interview that someone gave where a point that never got settled in public debate gets reignited in the hearts and minds of all the eager readers of slop discourse.

You know what I’m talking about — the feeding trough of slop that gets refilled every day. It’s articles about feminism. And what exactly it means to be feminist, and how far the definitions of the words you use have to go in order to be a true supporter of the cause. (The goalposts for which are constantly moving.) Or it’s about traditional marriages and whether they’re Archaic, Oppressive Slave Relationships or they’re A Return To All That Is Good And Holy. It’s about moral philosophy, the large-scale ideas of the moment, and conversations you’re supposed to be having that involve hundreds of millions of people and tens of thousands of identified variables. It’s about the politics of change, and how our country is going utterly to hell, and what you must do and think in order to participate in the renaissance. It’s an endless argument about the meaning of words and the lessons of history. It’s an endless argument in which everyone has an opinion and nothing ever gets settled.

And every time I read one of these articles, I can’t help feeling like, even if I learned a little something, it wasn’t a good use of my time. Whatever game these people are playing, first of all, none of them are ever going to win. They don’t realize that the number of minds that get changed on the internet every day rounds down to zero. People don’t have moments of clarity very often in life, and they have them even less often on the internet. People read what they like, get that little helping of belief-validation, smile a dead little smile, and move on with their day. Or, they personally attack the person who wrote it for having the audacity to exist in gentle disagreement with them. What they don’t do is change their minds. People are always going to have different opinions than you, and you’re never going to “settle” a conversation on the internet. Or in public discourse. No matter how definitive you think your essay or comment is. Because someone else always has their own thing that is even definitive-r.

The second point about this game people play, is that they just don’t realize how big it is. They don’t realize that participating in this conversation is like throwing cups of water overboard during the sinking of the Titanic. The ship is headed where it’s headed, your assistance isn’t big enough to matter (unless you’re exceptionally good at scooping water), and you should be getting to a lifeboat. Because there aren’t enough of those, and these people standing here arguing are all going to die.

I have one goal with my writing, and one goal alone: to give you something you can actually carry back into your life and use to make it better. In other words, my goal is to write something practical. I want to help you have better and more productive relationships, and that’s pretty much it. I have very little interest in the topic du jour; if what I write isn’t useful long-term, I delete it. Because it isn’t worth the 50 kilobytes of data used to store it on the cloud. It’s slop in a trough. It’s the comedy of Jerry Seinfeld.

The most recent Big Conversation has been the feminization of the workplace. And I have read a number of essays, blog posts, and articles now discussing the issue, because I wondered if there was something there. And there is some mildly interesting discussion — whether it has happened, what that even means, how bad it has gotten, and why, and what does that mean for employers? Everybody has their take, and there’s always some piece you haven’t thought about yet. There’s always some angle you haven’t considered yet. Always. Same as with politics.

But the most important question is, what does that mean for the average employee? And the answer is, almost nothing. The average employee is not engaging with HR on a regular basis, attending high-level meetings, working on the company’s biggest projects, or doing much besides their job. The workplace is always going to be a place of bullshit in some ways or other, and if this is the latest kind of bullshit then you can mostly just ignore it. You know, the way humans have done since the beginning of jobs.

My take on the whole thing is, just make a couple simple rules for yourself. Here’s how hard I work, regardless of who’s in charge of me; and here’s the level of social-justice bullshit I’m willing to put up with in my work environment. If people cross that threshold, just tell them “look, I do a pretty good job of minding my own business here at work. I’m not interested in politics. I just like to work on interesting things. If that’s no longer sufficient for me to be an employee here, maybe it’s best I leave.”

Today’s internet wants to make every problem your problem. That is its defining purpose. It harvests your mental real estate like the corporations in The Grapes of Wrath, it seeks to colonize your mind as part of its growing empire. And the unbelievable, the miraculous, the divine gift of the internet is that it’s nothing like The Grapes of Wrath. You don’t have to participate at all. You don’t have to give up your land at all. You can just ignore the damned thing. It’s not coming for your actual house, just who lives in it.

The internet is too big a place and you are too small a creature to impact real change. Unless you’re a committed, serious writer or you feel particularly passionate about certain conversations. In which case that’s a calling, and you should not only do it but possibly get paid for it. But if you’re just an ordinary person who clicks the Like button and leaves comments, these huge moral conversations are too big for you. Because what you could be doing instead is calling your mother. How many more times are you even going to see her before she dies? 50? 60? What you could be doing instead is buying flowers for your girlfriend, or learning how to do card magic to amaze your nephews, or learning how to play the piano and bringing some indescribable beauty into your life. What you could be doing instead is picking on someone your own size, picking a battle you can win, impacting the conversations that actually affect the people you care about.

Because 99.9% of the conversations on the internet simply do not matter. They don’t impact you at all, and never will. They’re just people talking and talking and solving nothing and calling each other names that one would only call someone else in the de-personalized safety of an internet comment or a car. It doesn’t matter what a New York Times writer from Queens thinks about the demands of the word “feminism.” If you’re a woman and you’re in a happy relationship, she can go fuck herself. You don’t owe her ideas any of your time, no matter how culturally imperative she paints them to be. It doesn’t matter what some kid from Nebraska thinks about utilitarianism. It’s a great philosophy, it’s an untenable philosophy, who cares. What matters is that you walk in the door every day and the people in your own life are delighted to see you.

Are they? When you walk through the door of your own house, are the people there happy to see you? So happy that their smiles bare teeth? If they aren’t, put your phone down and save your own life.

“I admit that I am powerless over the internet and my life has become unmanageable.” - Techaholics Anonymous, Step One

“But what is past my help is past my care.” - Francis Beaumont