A Temporary Cyber-Train Derailment Observed

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I had a thought today, halfway through an article I was reading about the algorithm and “interest media” based on whatever you click on and engage with, that there has to be a different way to approach the written word for dinosaurs like me. I thought that maybe, with all the AI content being pumped into the veins of the internet like some kind of desperate, battlefield transfusion, the only thing that I have to offer that might actually breathe some life into the genre is to just write from the inside about the raw mess of human experience.

Yeah, sure, my worries about geopolitics and AI and the other forces re-shaping the world matter, but you could have your friendly neighborhood AI spit out your own bespoke doomerist briefing, allowing it to perform pattern recognition and future-prediction to a degree of accuracy carried out to more decimal points than I could ever care to count.

Only humans bleed.

Maybe my real job is to self-exsanguinate for clicks…and cash.

But there’s a downside to all that vulnerability. It can be exploited by bad actors, and mine was taken advantage of in an unusually shitty way this afternoon.

It’s funny how easily nascent optimism can be hijacked. I was getting ready to sit down to write something upbeat and forward-looking today, when some guy I follow on a topic of interest decided he was way too insecure to handle a mild criticism I made about him always acting like everyone else is either more stupid or more wrong (or both) than he is, and launched an atomic suckerpunch in reply:

“Did you know,” this insignificant asshat oozed smugly, “there’s a Catholic subreddit thread about how you’ve left your wife and 9 kids to find yourself and trauma dumping the collapse of your personal life onto your Substack and how some people feel has for you bc you went to an awful fundamentalist Catholic parish and others just think you’re a vapid narcissist?

I would wanna know about it if that were me.”

Of course, this isn’t true.

But it was the social media equivalent stabbing a finger into a gunshot wound, and twisting. My attitude changed in a heartbeat. Gone was the gingerly-cultivated ember of positivity I’ve been nurturing in recent days, hoping to see it blossom into a roaring flame of optimistic momentum. Instead, I was slammed back into the same grinding, implacable pain, loss of agency, and sobbing grief over familial loss that I’ve languished in for many months. I was thrust, at whiplash-speed, into the familiar empty ache of squandered youth, self-blame, the inability to understand how forever actually isn’t, and the dark nights where intrusive thoughts about how it could all stop hurting if I just had the courage to make a single hard choice come unbidden.

These thoughts are unwelcome guests, and never keen to leave.

I share a lot here, but not all. The full details of the personal hell I’ve staggered through over the past year aren’t all fit for public consumption. I beautify the ugly just enough to make it palatable, because anything more is a rhetorical choking hazard.

And all it took was one guy trying to use my pain to take me down a peg. The very human thing that distinguishes us from the clankers also makes us vulnerable to insidious attacks from our own kind.

There’s something about knowing that other human beings are willing to exploit your deepest anguish for their own amusement or social advancement without a second thought that feels incomprehensibly cruel to people with actual souls.

A few years ago, Jordan Peterson famously told Joe Rogan that social media has created a new kind of chestless parasite: the man with no sense of the actual cost of being a craven piece of shit, because he never actually says it to your face, so he never has to deal with the consequences:

So that kind of comment that you describe where someone will say ‘I don’t agree with your views, you’re hurting all these people’ -- those comments don’t make me angry. What makes me angry is something like a casual insult. That makes me angry. It’s like because, I think, that’s a tough one. The problem with Twitter is that the price of being a prick has fallen to zero, but that’s not true in real life. So the question is if someone is being a thoughtless prick to you on Twitter, maybe you should just ignore it, but the thing is, ignoring psychopathic behavior does not make it go away.

Sometimes, psychopathic behavior feels like the only kind we get. And it has a tendency to taint the psychic landscape in ways that take some time to recover from.

So I will beg your forgiveness for not delivering the piece I had originally intended to write today, as I return to the careful stewardship of that tiny little flame. It did not go out, but it grew smaller for a while.

The truth is, I don’t know if life can ever actually be better than it is right now, but I want to nourish the idea that it is at least a possibility, if only for the sake of keeping me going. And for that to happen, I will need to come back to this with fresh eyes and a renewed mindset on another day.

There is beauty in the world, and beauty is a salve.

And to that, at least, I will hold fast for as long as I can.

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