Standing on the Outside

So here we are again, standing on the outside, looking in. Twitter, of all things, seems to have kicked this bout of my extensionalist, ahem, Existentialist Crisis having an Existentialist Crisis. Partly its that sense of standing looking in at everyone else's perfect lives and careers when I'm still trying to work out what the hell I'm meant to be doing with mine. Like the spud in the cartoon, I'm wondering what my purpose is, and how I best achieve it. Even as I'm hoping it lies in writing and teaching, I'm forced to admit I honestly don't know.

It isn't just that though, it's also the amount of certainty I see online, certainty that this group or that will save the day, that this politician or that policy maker will wave a magic wand and make things different. To be honest, most days I'm not even certain what I want for lunch, let alone what I want to be in life or who should be running the country. I feel the same way I did about the Extinction Rebellion protests in London, I want to support them but, ultimately, the way the world works, the way systems work almost guarantee that there's no way change will happen; consequently all those people will be left with is the feeling of disappointment as their heroes turn out to have feet of clay.

I've seen it happen before, with countless leaders and celebrities, (consider how both Clinton and Blair fell from grace) and I'm left faintly bewildered that having been failed in the past people are so keen to hitch their wagon to yet another horse who will simply fail them. It's like a syndicate of snake oil salespeople just roll into town and offer different cures, and when one doesn't work, we just roll along to the next one. You might as well plaster "one born every minute" onto the populace's collective backs.


The issue is also that because human brains by building connections, once a person has been declared persona non grata, everything they've done is also seen that way - so we throw out ideas that might be perfectly good, and eminently sensible, because the person who advocated them couldn't eat a bacon sandwich or did something we think was beyond the pale. The ideas and policies they advocated may, actually, be perfectly good, but because they've become a problem, we throw the whole lot out and move onto the next grifter. And of course this can work the other way around with someone who's so Teflon coated they can brazen out anything. To raise the stakes of modern politics, anyone who wasn't Alexander Johnson would have been finished in politics around the time their many philanderings came to public light. Because he could just shrug it off as unimportant though, we've bought so much of the snake oil he's reached the positon of 'prime snake oil salesperson' trying to flog the naff idea of Brexit to the population and steering the UK over the edge of the cliff.

This issue of faces and 'connective tissue' by the way, is why I think so many companies don't let you see the horrors who run them, and instead keep us all distracted with the latest pretty people they've paid to do their advertising. Making a model, actress, or singer the face of their brands means we tap into a different set of connections than if an old geezer poled up on screen and said 'buy our stuff'. Even in cases where the owners are well known (Bill Gates and Richard Branson for example), a pretty face we either associate with cool things or with nothing at all is a better way to sell stuff.

Anyway, at present we have to add into the whole 'miracle cure' thing the increasingly fractious tensions between Left and Right, the ever growing reliance on blame seeking and tribalism. Perhaps it's Twitter's bubble effect at work but it feels as if so many people are just digging into their trenches and buckling down to bitch about things with their fellow travellers that nothing is ever going to reach them. To me, this political circle jerk is fundamentally pointless, it doesn't do anything useful, just makes people feel better for being 'pure' - and that seems poisonous because purity is a pointless goal. Nothing is purely one thing or another, success comes from mixing and matching elements rather than by exiling everything we don't agree with. Furthermore, by beginning the process of exiling we can end up going to extremes, which only makes the swing back, when it comes, all the more violent - guaranteeing that society, politics, and economics lurches from one extreme to another. In other words, we end up with a scenario that pleases almost nobody but for very loud, very stupid, people who don't think for themselves.

That leaves me in a situation where I just can't relate to this confidence that if x, y or z happen everything will be fine. I sense that we just don't know enough to be certain of anything at present and that scares me. And it makes me wonder if everyone secretly feels this way or if I'm on my own? Is it like being an adult where everyone's actually making it up as they go along?

For a long time I've had the feeling that we don't actually understand the world we live in anymore and nothing's really shaken this - is this why I feel so unattached? And are the passionate believers in politicians and causes just reacting to that by clinging to things they do understand, even though it's doomed to failure? I mean, I'd like to dig into all those things that stop us changing things - not EU law, which I think is relatively benign, but the contracts with big congolomerates, the things that groups like the IMF have insisted upon etc, because that seems to be where the issues arise. If I'm honest I don't know if governments can change anything or if they're so tightly bound by bureaucracy and deals that the Prime Minister is a bit of a fig leaf.

And yes, I do realise I sound as if I'm being a snooty bugger, but I actually wonder if I'm just dense for not feeling this way. Am I missing something obvious? Am I deficient in some respect when I fail to feel impassioned by something somebody has said, or look at AOC and think 'you're cool but I give it ten years before you lose all your fans'?

Anyway, I don't know that I have any answers, likely not, I'm just taking a Twitter break (apart from the instance where I post this to there) and look there's a kitty. Everything's better with a kitty.

Right?