november 5, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

Naturally, I voted this morning.

There’s no getting around it. If you’ve read this blog before, you won’t be surprised that I’m going to talk about the election—but I promise we’ll get through it, and I promise it won’t be what you think.

I had a professor in undergrad who told me to never be “ashamed to be American” as a writer, and I never knew what that meant. At the time, I applied an assumed wisdom to everything he said because, for one thing, he was ancient, and for another, he was the first professor who engaged with me about creative writing and made me feel like I might be able to do it. So at the time, even though I didn’t know what he meant, I never forgot it.

I stood in line at 6:45 this morning and thought about how, assuming you’re not a teacher, it’s rare to stand in an elementary school cafeteria as a twenty-five-year-old man. All around were reminders of being young, a time in memory that feels both immediate and increasingly remote. The walls were covered in various decorations, including a tally sheet of all the kids in each grade who have “soared” recently, which apparently was a play on the school mascot which, I think, was an eagle. Fitting. One can only assume the tally sheet, publicly displayed in the cafeteria, is some sort of stick and carrot-type reward system based on an arbitrary description of good behavior, which I would guess is meant to inspire kids to be socially cohesive and relatively obedient. With an added element of competition because we are, after all, American. We try to teach our kids to be kind and to cooperate, to be patient and to work together, but an important addition is that it’s good (and morally correct) to win.

What terrible role models they have.

The lunch tables were folded up vertically and crammed in a corner, and the air felt surprisingly calm. There was none of the charged atmosphere or fear my more anxious tendencies predicted. You might not even know that the grassroots infrastructure of a contentious election were occurring directly in front of you, while each sleepy voter filled in bubbles in their own partitioned desk area.

Standing in line, I kept thinking of the term “civic duty.” I thought about what the term implies—a duty being something you perform, something you solemnly bear, and “civic” a somewhat archaic word once used to describe a class that is apparently no longer taught in schools, strictly speaking. Then again, trust half of what you see and none of what you hear, so they say.

For a while I thought I wouldn’t vote, and my cynicism on the subject, if not obvious, can likely be assumed based on things I’ve written before. Regardless of today’s outcome, we will continue to arm and fund Israel in its barbarism toward the Palestinians and, increasingly, the larger region; we will continue to move lockstep hand in hand toward climate disaster with no significant institutional or larger societal intentions to change our behavior; we will continue to force our most educated class of citizens to shoulder massive amounts of debt for the crime of going to college; and I’m sure we will continue to endure candidates who are not only completely ill equipped politically and characteristically to meet the moment we are in, but in ways that are becoming increasingly obvious seem to not give a shit about meeting that moment anyway.

But, regardless, we will continue. That’s important.

A good friend of mine unknowingly convinced me to vote when he rightfully pointed out that people have fought and died just for the right to do so and continue to fight and die for that same right elsewhere across the world. Not voting would be to spit on the graves of those who came before, and worked so hard to make that happen for us. Maybe part of the solemnity and responsibility implied by the term “civic duty” has to do with making difficult choices that you believe will get you closest to where you want to be, even if your choice won’t get you very close, and even if you don’t want to choose.

There’s no need to continue litigating the pros and cons of voting. What’s done is done, at least as far as what I can do in terms of this election, and if you’re going to vote, you’re going to vote, and if you’re not, you won’t. You don’t need my help convincing you one way or the other. 

The things I think ail us run much deeper than electoral politics, though. I’ll try to resist this becoming a sermon, because I don’t think I know how to live any better than the next guy, but if I can be sure of anything, it’s that living in a country seems to involve cooperation, participation, cohesion, and some semblance of function. 

If I had to hazard a guess about our larger cultural illnesses, I’d say maybe the more time we spend digitized, reading the anonymous thoughts of other people, and the more we maintain parasocial connections long beyond their shelf life via “friends” and “followers,” the less we see one another as people out here in the real world. The more we numb ourselves with mindless, algorithmically curated entertainment, the shorter our attention spans become, and our capacity for sitting in boredom or sustained, spontaneous thought dwindles. The fertile soil that produces self-knowledge, epiphanies, and creative expression is slowly being eroded by a torrent of nonsense that serves to distract us from… what, exactly? The “pain” of being alive in modernity? The monotony and cruel repetition of gainful employment? Our looming deaths?

The more we stare at our phones, the more information we give to advertisers and large corporations about our consumption habits, and the better they become at creating products and content that will sustain our attention, generate ad revenue, and make us dumber and more prone to our base psychological instincts. But, more importantly, the stronger the algorithm gets, the better we will become at numbing ourselves into something else.

The more we consume “content” in bite-sized pieces, the weaker our jaws become. You might not think that’s a problem, since everything is increasingly blended and softened and chewed up for us already, so to speak, but it only benefits the worst people on the planet for us to lose our ability to think. You have to be able to chew.

There’s so much noise that it gets harder and harder to parse out the music.

These things will persist regardless of who wins today—that is, if we even know who that is by tomorrow, and if no one tries any fuckery to change the outcome once we do. That fact is both a burden and a blessing. These are not easy problems to solve, and they aren’t even problems that are easily identified, or problems whose existence is even agreed upon by everyone. But the power to fix them resides within individuals. Delete Twitter. Take a fucking break from your phone and go outside. Talk to someone older than you and generally try to understand their angle. Read a goddamn book once in a while, and if you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, admit it. 

I admit it, freely—I have no idea what the hell I’m talking about most of the time. But if I can convince half of the maybe dozen or so people that consistently read this on a weekly basis to put their phones down, and try to bite off bigger, more challenging pieces of information, maybe our jaws will slowly restrengthen. Putting this forward isn’t without hypocrisy on my end—I still use TikTok now and then, and I’m no monk in a cloistered dark tower reading all day. But I’m trying. 

There’s a difference between political thought and political action, and there’s only so much good that “awareness” can bring. We owe it to each other to use the tools at our disposal to be informed, yes– but it’s useless to be paralyzed by it in too large a dose.

I’m hesitant to say so, but I wonder if we’ve been given candidates that reflect what we can intellectually handle as a culture, and candidates that further illustrate what we are willing to put up with. If it feels like there are no adults in the room, that there’s no one steering the ship, no one that cares about any of us real people down here, maybe that has something to do with it. We are a culture of bite-sized pieces, and therefore that is what we’ve been given: pieces, shells, and small ones at that. 

We live in a culture that caters to a smaller and smaller sector of the population that gets louder and louder every day. It’s a culture of microcultures, one in which if you stay plugged in, you can stay entirely within a world and a culture of your own creation. What that amalgamates to on a larger, country-level scale is still somewhat of a mystery. It’s very hard or impossible to know what a maze looks like from above when you’re lost amongst the hedgerows.

It’s always been the case that the powerful need to be bullied into working on behalf of the powerless, but it seems like we’re more interested in bullying each other and treating politics like a reality show parlor game than actually pursuing results in the real world. 

The real world: that thing we retreat from, more and more, in favor of a controlled and entertaining digital alternative. Better living through pixels. The digital world will never ask you to demand better of it, because the algorithm gets better every day at giving you exactly what you want a millisecond before you know you want it. 

I know much of this is, unfortunately, classic projection, too. I’m sure a majority of people, even if it’s a small majority, are overworked and underpaid, and they don’t have the time, privilege, or luxury to consume mindless entertainment all day. I have to believe that most Americans are doing their best.

I’m aware of the dangers of consuming media all day because I’ve had days where it’s all I’ve done. I know the strange mental fog and general physical malaise that can fill you after way too much screen time, when you’re reduced to a button that’s been pressed far too many times, a lever that’s been smashed to bits for an increasingly unsatisfying reward.

I just hope my cynicism is excessive, and that the sky doesn’t fall the way I think it might. May the title of this weekly writing habit never become prophetic.

I have to believe that there’s more to being an American than consuming. But if we aren’t careful, that may end up being all we’re capable of becoming. And if we aren’t careful, we may become a culture that doesn’t win, but merely chooses how, and with whom, to lose.