You are all exhausting.
Yes you.
The ones who cannot go a day without biting toward the baited carrot dangling in front of you. Ravenous beasts, fooled into being satiated with poison at the behest of relevance. Ravenous and starving for nourishment. You won’t find it where you’re looking. Or over there where the hecklers are snapping their fingers for your attention either. You see a carrot, and though you’ll never even taste it, you chase it like it is the last chance you’ll have to find a meal. Chase the carrot and ignore the soul food. It’s on purpose.
The few of you who do taste it, aren’t the ones yelling about how delicious or how unsavory it must be. It’s too personal to you for that, and you can’t imagine why the rest of the world has it so wrong. But the others? The masses of you who are the observers and the commenters? You can’t help but opine endlessly on your opinions about the proverbial root vegetable.
But you’re right about it. You have to be. The alternative is unbearable. Your purpose is to fight.
It’s too orange, its too yellow. It’s crunchy, but it’s not the right texture. Carrot’s are good for you. Don’t eat that, it causes diarrhea. All day, every day, until they untie the carrot and replace it with a cantaloupe or whatever talking point of the day will generate the clicks and swell the algorithm. Then you argue over canteloupes with no chance of the one they’re promising you ever being in your possession. Not one of you gave a fuck about the carrot or the cantaloupe until they told you that you should.
I respect the ones dedicating their lives to a thing they know intimately. These creatures, they are the ones that are going extinct. They are being replaced with theory and opinion in lieu of knowledge and expertise. It’s you, the ones who seem to have an opinion on every blade of grass and every intangible thing without a callous or a scar to prove your worth. Spitting regurgitated venom and smiling as you wither away inside.
You exhaust me.
This of course is an anecdote of our times. Everybody in this interconnected web of anger and smug righteousness is feeding on vapor. Manufactured bait. It doesn’t smell, it doesn’t taste, and I am want to believe that half of the time it doesn’t even exist at all. But they make you believe it. And then they tell you to fight over it. Your purpose has been distilled down to conflict and branded rectitude. There is a copyright symbol beside every philosophy you peddle, and a tag on the inseam telling you how to care for the uniform you wear.
You are feeding their wallets, one click at a time. Vague rage baiting headlines, veiled possibilities, and weightless editorial opinions. They tell you it’s food, and you’re all still starving. Day after day, the addiction of current events and cultural relevance (hard air quotations on that one) draws you back in. You need substance and sustenance yet you dine on manufactured miasma.
For some, the trigger and the motivator is the manufactured enemy and your intolerance of their caring about something. If they care about it then you must hate it. And then you must tell everybody the seriousness of your hatred and how righteous you are for taking the opposite stance. Then for days on end, the proverbial rotten football gets passed back and forth, carried on the screams of justification and righteous anger. You are right. See, here’s somebody that agrees with you, it must be true. See that guy? He doesn’t agree. Let’s dehumanize him and stereotype him into irrelevance. On and on, every day ad infinitum.
For others, you latch on to a thing that makes sense to you in your moments of need. We are all listless vessels on the turbulent seas of culture and life, so you find some flotsam or another to give you your salvation. It’s understandable on the surface, but you disregard how badly your makeshift craft sinks further daily. The untenable life raft. The bucket and the flood. Instead of abandoning your chosen detritus in search of more sturdy harbor, you will defend your empire of dirt until it kills you.
If you find yourself seeing somebody wearing the uniform that cannot be trusted and you have an instant trigger of resistance, take a step back. I see you. I see many taking their last stand, mounted proudly on top of the hill of garbage that they have built for themselves. No matter how just and egalitarian the opponent is, your initial reflex is hatred and friction. I see it every day. It’s extinguishing the light that once burned in your eyes. The world, as a result, darkens.
You have been co-opted.
Don’t allow the enemy to claim the thing that actually helped. “What about that other thing that they speak that you do not agree with? Brandish the pitchforks and brazenly march to the beat of someone else’s drum cadence! If you don’t they might win, and we can’t have that!”
It’s utter foolishness. How do you not see the ruse? The great gotcha, working daily.
How are you really living? Are you making magic? Are you seeing gods in the places you look for them? Are you finding them when you’re not looking? Can you feel the rain when it’s soaking your socks and your hair, or are you standing in it swearing that it’s not raining?
I see a lot of you, soaked to the bone and drowning while you think you’re meandering through a desert.
I’ve seen you argue over gatherings of people in protest. I’ve seen you all argue over tabulation errors. I’ve seen you argue over humanitarianism, how it should be done, and how if it weren’t for this one thing, this one man, this one event, then utopia could flourish. Now I see you argue over revenue generating intermissions in the middle of mass funded games of sport. “See how beautiful and ugly and brave and cowardly and smug and unserious and amazing and relevant it is? Tune in next week for the next thing we want you to engage with. Your lives may depend on it!”
It’s everywhere. You can’t escape it. You are the algorithm and you fall for it every time. That’s why its monstrous size grows year after year, but the depth of who we are becomes more and more shallow. We have become a puddle in comparison to our once bountiful sea.
Where did the nuance go? The silent helpers that Mr Roger’s told us about when we were kids? They’re still there, deafened by the noise that you all scream from the sidelines. But they’re losing the spark they once had to lend you a hand when you’re drowning. How could they not? They’re exhausted too. And you’re killing them.
The forest is there, waiting to tell you the secrets of god and the universe. But you’re too caught up in arguing over whether the axe is part of the forest with its wooden handle, or if it means to tear down the temple. You’re not seeing the trees, only a representation of them on a screen. You’re not seeing the axe. The real one is wielded in the shadows, the embodiment of clandestine activity. You’re not there in the forest that was made for you. What you think you’re uniquely witnessing is a closed circuit television loop of carrots on strings.
If you were where you should be, you’d hear the sigh of the wind and the chittering squirrels telling you the good news that John Muir chased for a lifetime in his mountains. You’re looking at a repeating loop on a reel and claiming you’re exploring lands uncharted. You’re settling for the concept of god instead of the True Word that you won’t find inside of this machine or any other. In order to be there, you have to be yourself. Not the version they told you that you are.
I see you all and you exhaust me.
If you need me, I’ll be lost somewhere in the trees without a map. On purpose. These boots were made for walking, and that’s just what I’ll do. You squeaking wheels? I choose to keep walking away from all of you.
See you in the darkness, and the shadows.