We Live In Truly Disorienting Times
This post contains lethal doses of sarcasm if read irresponsibly.
Like many millennials, social media has transformed my brain into an unattended firehose of scalding and indistinct anxiety. Whenever I’d look away from a screen and close my eyes, the black space would be quickly populated by the most urgent freak-out my depleted and agitated mind could come up with. Endless blasts of blinking notifications and messages. Every alarming and vaguely similar headline. All of it arrives too implacably fast for an answer or a cogent analysis, all of it disapproving and disappointed, temporary and somehow final.
It is a strange and stark contrast, this horrid digital hellscape and the banal real-life hellscape we find ourselves in. An absolutely heinous headline will populate our newsfeeds, a swift ping of existential dread zips through our consciousness like a torturous dopamine rush. After a few uneasy and unfinished seconds of coming to terms with the overwhelming bummer gravity of this moment, we pivot back to our fake email jobs, which we either tacitly or fulsomely accept as glorified paper-pushing.
Depending on the job and the season, chunks of the workday are spent filling up the dead space between deadlines and approvals and revisions while performing the appearance of diligence and tireless work ethic. During these uneventful lulls, I will passively doomscroll the Trending section on Twitter or my Instagram newsfeed, and the most flabby or slipshod or stan-brained parts obscure a lucid perspective on the overall trajectory of humanity. Earlier this week, I saw a video of a grown-ass woman firing a shotgun at a giant Target logo because they were… selling rainbow t-shirts?? In these crowded corners of social media, implied airhorns blare at all times and these internet-damaged goblins who might otherwise pass as normal in their professional and personal lives absolutely lose their shit about stuff so trivial and mundane and context-specific that it effectively has no valid comparisons elsewhere in the culture. And yet, we’re all swimming in their diarrhea.
Anyways, the headline du jour reads: “Texts from President Trump Reveal That He Said, ‘Bring Me Mike Pence and I Will Kill That Fucker Myself.’”
A ping then reverberates through my skull and it’s an email from the boss. “Hey gang! On the Viagra deck, can we fix the tagline on Page 1? It says, ‘Built to make moments that last,’ but legal says we have to say, ‘Built to make moments that last longer.’ Thanks, everyone!” I touch it up on V3.
I go back to perusing through dystopic images of the orange sky in New York City and reading attendant articles about why climate disaster is inevitable. My other direct report sends a Slack message asking about the status of the blog “5 Ways to Yassify Your Budget.”
It seems like any attempt to make sense of the discourse or the 24/7 news cycle would involve taking a long metal object like a Korean chopstick and inserting it up my nose. It would have to be pushed and pushed upward until the cribriform plate is broken and the chopstick slides directly into my brain. Wiggle it vigorously around until it is permanently lodged.
A threatening and annihilating headline zooms by: “Texas Attorney General Thinks Women Should Not Exist.”
Another ping, another email from the boss. “Also, on Page 5, the client thinks the elderly couple on the porch looks a little too horny. Can we scale that back a little and align on something more wholesome? Anyone have the bandwidth to make this edit?” I confirm that I have the bandwidth to undertake this crucial change and send a V5 with reduced horniness.
My Very Online socialist friend hate-shares a feature piece from The Economist about how millions of poor people are dying because they can’t afford housing and healthcare and this is actually good for the economy. The virtual company townhall is playing full-screen on the other duel monitor, and the CEO announces that they have a surplus of $10 million due to WFH policies and record profits, so they will invest it in opening a new office and giving every team member a $20 Starbucks gift card as appreciation.
Like a sick pervert, I reflexively spring back online for some more slop, like a piggy to the troth. It appears that the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of guns being citizens.
Then one more ping, one more email from the boss. “Actually, the client kinda likes the horny old people. So let’s go back to that other V if we can. Thanks!”
Related Read
If you enjoyed this, here’s part one of my series on the general brain-rot of the news/social media/politics ecosystem:
