The cacaphony.
It's been a long time, livejournal.
I have quite a bit on my mind and nowhere else to put it, so it goes here. If nobody reads it, so be it.
I've been considering starting a blog for the past few days, just as a way to get myself writing-I've essentially stopped in the last several months-but I have a major reservation about the idea. I don't want to be one of those people with a blog. I don't want to be just another idiot prattling on about his own opinions or the mundane, boring details of his life or divulging personal stories and secrets just for the sake of doing it. For the sake of vanity, for the sake of self-importance, for the sake, really, of self-indulgence.
And that's why I've stopped writing. Self-expression strikes me as self-indulgent.
Now, I'm not talking about ALL forms of self-expression. I could understand the desire to create something beautiful, something that lasts beyond your short life, something that inspires somebody to think, or to feel, or what-have-you. But more people are studying and creating arts and media of some form or another than ever before. The internet has made us all amateur artists and writers (and photographers and video-makers, and everything else). There's too many voices out there saying too many things that are, really, worthless, and I'm just not sure it's the right thing to do to contribute to the chaos.
I've always viewed writing as a tool useful for communicating ideas that may (possibly) motivate somebody to do something (or think something) good. I understand that there is beauty in words, but I have always primarily seen them as a tool for communication; furthermore, what beauty may exist in words is only useful inasmuch as it enhances the communicative aspect of language. There are differing views, but that's how I see it, and most of my writing falls into, or in-between, two categories-communicative and therapeutic. The therapeutic stuff is really just for me, if someobody else is going to see it, it ought to be someone who knows me. As for the communicative writing-the better half, the half I'd show the world-well, that's all well and good, but only if I feel I have something valuable to say. At the moment, I just plain don't.
This is why I'm skittish about the idea of starting a blog, or even having a MySpace account-I find our generation's narcissistic compultion to put one's life on display utterly repulsive and disgusting. We're selling ourselves like we're trendy products and I just don't want any part of it. It's a fact of life, of course, so it seems fairly humdrum most of the time; but if I really think about it absolutely sickens me. Something has gone fundamentally wrong in a society where every self-centered (and, let's face it, we're all self-centered) middle-class kid decides that they must broadcast the totality of their thoughts and opinions and experiences, no matter how ordinary, to the entire world. Livejournal is a symptom of this, and so is MySpace, but so are those political blogs praised as signs of democratic life among the young. What good does it do our country, our citizenry, to have a million little Rush Limbaughs and Michael Moores shouting at each other? What good does it do literature to have nice, fresh generation of creative writing students, all well-schooled in showing-not-telling? What good does it do anybody to put yourself on display, on the internet, so that the entire world can know how cool and popular you are and how many friends (all 296 of them) you have? And let's customize it, too! Let's customize everything, paint our laptops different colors (you can choose six) and drive cars that are different shapes (you can choose three) and wear special t-shirts with special patterns on them (you can choose nine) and tell the world about it on our blog and take a picture of it, no take seven, and post it all on MySpace until the whole world is shouting ME, ME, ME, until....nobody is listening anymore and everything turns to background noise. Somehow the entire enterprise manages to degrade individuality while destroying unity. America is now such a highly advanced consumer society that that the very act of being an individual, the very things that make us human, are now commodities, commodities that can be advertised, packaged, bought and sold (at a very high mark-up, might I add).
Which brings me along to another realization about myself-I am a twenty-two year old curmudgeon. A conservative, even. I think it was Russell Kirk who said (I paraphrase) that a conservative is someone who stands atop the gates of history yelling, STOP!, and when I see all this, I want to do nothing more than to yell stop. I miss the old days, when everyone was trying to be the same-then you could tell who the individuals were; and conformity has its social advantages-it certainly helps society run smoothly, for the most part. We live in a convoluted world, however, where you conform by being an individual, while simultaneously cancelling out the positive aspects of both.
One should expect such blatant narcissism from a generation that began preparing for college at age twelve.
What does this have to do with me? Not much, it's just a rant, and it's something I haven't done in quite some time. If you want to know about me, I feel directionless, but liberated-for the first time in my life I am free to, possibly, pursue a primary activity I do not consider worthless and disconnected from the real world (i.e., school). That's nice, but I suppose the previous rant stemmed for the fact that I do often feel like an outsider in my own world, in my own generation, a throwback or an alien, maybe. I can't possibly figure out where I belong in the world that we are creating, together and beyond my control. Everything seems ossified, stratified, composed of a bunch of disparate and tangled up strands, strands with no real purpose or connection beyond the accidental, strands filled, mostly, with shit. This all sounds very pessimistic, I know, and I am a pessimist, but it's not meant to be pessimistic, because I'm just starting to look in and ask why and realize, more and more each day, that none of it makes much sense. Maybe that's not a bad thing, but it definitely makes life difficult.
I have quite a bit on my mind and nowhere else to put it, so it goes here. If nobody reads it, so be it.
I've been considering starting a blog for the past few days, just as a way to get myself writing-I've essentially stopped in the last several months-but I have a major reservation about the idea. I don't want to be one of those people with a blog. I don't want to be just another idiot prattling on about his own opinions or the mundane, boring details of his life or divulging personal stories and secrets just for the sake of doing it. For the sake of vanity, for the sake of self-importance, for the sake, really, of self-indulgence.
And that's why I've stopped writing. Self-expression strikes me as self-indulgent.
Now, I'm not talking about ALL forms of self-expression. I could understand the desire to create something beautiful, something that lasts beyond your short life, something that inspires somebody to think, or to feel, or what-have-you. But more people are studying and creating arts and media of some form or another than ever before. The internet has made us all amateur artists and writers (and photographers and video-makers, and everything else). There's too many voices out there saying too many things that are, really, worthless, and I'm just not sure it's the right thing to do to contribute to the chaos.
I've always viewed writing as a tool useful for communicating ideas that may (possibly) motivate somebody to do something (or think something) good. I understand that there is beauty in words, but I have always primarily seen them as a tool for communication; furthermore, what beauty may exist in words is only useful inasmuch as it enhances the communicative aspect of language. There are differing views, but that's how I see it, and most of my writing falls into, or in-between, two categories-communicative and therapeutic. The therapeutic stuff is really just for me, if someobody else is going to see it, it ought to be someone who knows me. As for the communicative writing-the better half, the half I'd show the world-well, that's all well and good, but only if I feel I have something valuable to say. At the moment, I just plain don't.
This is why I'm skittish about the idea of starting a blog, or even having a MySpace account-I find our generation's narcissistic compultion to put one's life on display utterly repulsive and disgusting. We're selling ourselves like we're trendy products and I just don't want any part of it. It's a fact of life, of course, so it seems fairly humdrum most of the time; but if I really think about it absolutely sickens me. Something has gone fundamentally wrong in a society where every self-centered (and, let's face it, we're all self-centered) middle-class kid decides that they must broadcast the totality of their thoughts and opinions and experiences, no matter how ordinary, to the entire world. Livejournal is a symptom of this, and so is MySpace, but so are those political blogs praised as signs of democratic life among the young. What good does it do our country, our citizenry, to have a million little Rush Limbaughs and Michael Moores shouting at each other? What good does it do literature to have nice, fresh generation of creative writing students, all well-schooled in showing-not-telling? What good does it do anybody to put yourself on display, on the internet, so that the entire world can know how cool and popular you are and how many friends (all 296 of them) you have? And let's customize it, too! Let's customize everything, paint our laptops different colors (you can choose six) and drive cars that are different shapes (you can choose three) and wear special t-shirts with special patterns on them (you can choose nine) and tell the world about it on our blog and take a picture of it, no take seven, and post it all on MySpace until the whole world is shouting ME, ME, ME, until....nobody is listening anymore and everything turns to background noise. Somehow the entire enterprise manages to degrade individuality while destroying unity. America is now such a highly advanced consumer society that that the very act of being an individual, the very things that make us human, are now commodities, commodities that can be advertised, packaged, bought and sold (at a very high mark-up, might I add).
Which brings me along to another realization about myself-I am a twenty-two year old curmudgeon. A conservative, even. I think it was Russell Kirk who said (I paraphrase) that a conservative is someone who stands atop the gates of history yelling, STOP!, and when I see all this, I want to do nothing more than to yell stop. I miss the old days, when everyone was trying to be the same-then you could tell who the individuals were; and conformity has its social advantages-it certainly helps society run smoothly, for the most part. We live in a convoluted world, however, where you conform by being an individual, while simultaneously cancelling out the positive aspects of both.
One should expect such blatant narcissism from a generation that began preparing for college at age twelve.
What does this have to do with me? Not much, it's just a rant, and it's something I haven't done in quite some time. If you want to know about me, I feel directionless, but liberated-for the first time in my life I am free to, possibly, pursue a primary activity I do not consider worthless and disconnected from the real world (i.e., school). That's nice, but I suppose the previous rant stemmed for the fact that I do often feel like an outsider in my own world, in my own generation, a throwback or an alien, maybe. I can't possibly figure out where I belong in the world that we are creating, together and beyond my control. Everything seems ossified, stratified, composed of a bunch of disparate and tangled up strands, strands with no real purpose or connection beyond the accidental, strands filled, mostly, with shit. This all sounds very pessimistic, I know, and I am a pessimist, but it's not meant to be pessimistic, because I'm just starting to look in and ask why and realize, more and more each day, that none of it makes much sense. Maybe that's not a bad thing, but it definitely makes life difficult.