We Know Everything and Nothing

EPILOGUE: Everything is true and untrue when you're drowning in opinions.

Opinions, man. Everyone has ’em, and nowadays, they tend to be more rancid than assholes. The internet is saturated with luridly forgettable observations like “energy is a vibe” or how Joe Exotica displays 5 Key Traits All Effective Leaders Share. In a sense, opinions are almost pointless to have. Who you think killed Kennedy doesn’t say anything about Ted Cruz’s father; it says everything about your affectations and your version of Truth. We’re rolling burbles of non-sequiturs and axioms, rising and falling like the tides, lending shape and purpose to our personalities. Our opinions determine our reality and also shield us from it. They also govern how we love, how we change, and how we feel in the present. Depending on who you ask, the ocean is either an overwhelming force or a vast expanse of opportunity.

The internet can be a treacherous tesseract of banality that distends our sense of identity, distorts our sense of scale, and disfigures our sense of self. It can turn us into vainglorious dilettantes and Twitter Robespierres displacing our mental and spiritual alienation into a psychedelic realm to resolve our pretensions and anxieties, only for them to unravel into a tangle of fragrant grifty waste. Two cents here, two cents there, piling up, and yet, we’re all the poorer for it. What was once hailed as the great democratizer of information has revolutionized consciousness in the same way as slot machines or crack.

“The spectator’s consciousness, imprisoned in a flattened universe, bound by the screen of the spectacle behind which his life has been deported, knows only the fictional speakers who unilaterally surround him with their commodities and the politics of their commodities. The spectacle, in its entirety, is his ‘mirror image.’”

—Guy Deboard, The Society of the Spectacle

I spent the early days of the pandemic slowly amputating myself from the 24/7 infotainment cycle and its mind-splitting blasts of middle-brow haranguing, superheated pedantry, and sponsored Taco Bell ads. My thoughts became lucid, free from the low-flying panic attacks and the subsequent torrent of unhinged riffraff. Dostoevsky, Freud, and Nietzsche have all argued that people dread true freedom because it involves personal responsibility, so they defer to conformity. Freedom is scary. You are solely responsible for wrestling back command of how you think and feel from a dead spirit capable of turning you into a marionette at the whim of stultifying nihilism.

Nothing makes this more viscerally clear than lounging on a couch in solitude, alone with your thoughts in a quaint apartment, detached from a socially distant dread like an astronaut looking down on a planet full of dully run-throughs of routines whose origin and purpose have been snuffed by defective attention spans. Without immediate answers to any sweeping or specific questions, I sat with this discomfort in a process of Descartian unlearning and re-learning, threading together clanging, contradicting notions. It’s one thing to know you can choose your own thoughts. It’s invaluable to realize which ones are constructive in reasserting where you find meaning.

The art of doing nothing is profound. It quiets the echoes of what you think you should be. It grounds you in the essence of what it means to be you. It forces you to contemplate what you want to do with your existence. Ultimately, action separates belief from opinion. I can only realize my truth if I live it each day. People in my orbit will reflect my truth back to me if they see it through my actions — which, in turn, enables me to continue living my truth because I will be shaping my reality in the image of my beliefs. (Or, I become a street corner psychopath wearing a newspaper diaper and ranting about how I’m a Living God before getting tased by the cops and it winds up a viral YouTube video.)

This pandemic was humbling, not only in its capacity to vanquish our feeble attempts at meaning-making and future-predicting, but also its ability to undermine modernity’s logical underpinnings. I can’t help but think a lot of what society deems to be Objective Truth is merely the opinions of dead men validated by hordes of confused dupes, and the rest of us are shackled to the fuckery of fitting into their world. The Ancient Greek philosophers are given way too much credit—they were just early. I too could deduce some mind-blowing thoughts if nobody knew anything yet.

Much of our society and our opinions have been revealed to be built on frivolous and superfluous nonsense. We’re all fleeting and floating, like Ishmael hanging onto the coffin, adrift in an infinite abyss of nothing, with a natural tendency to set up a bulwark against the swelling Camusian doubts that threaten to obliterate the whole simulation. We deem it’s often best to gloss over the hazardous moments of uncertainty, and instead stare blankly into a solipsistic digital world, queuing up some Spotify while smashing “Like” on each of a girl’s 2,000 posts except her selfies to show her we’re definitely normal and most definitely not thirsty.

I broke my rhythm and confronted the fear of freedom, a glint of a future appeared through the miasma of a static and unending present. This fear is a pervasive emotion, though many interpret it as a stop sign instead of a question mark. Fear is not a wall; it is a mist you can flow through. It is integral to the soul, life-affirming and beautiful, and can guide you through the gates of knowledge and into the realm of enlightenment. Depression is a mere glance at the foot in front of you with no investment in where it’s leading to. And in embracing the lost art of being aware, I’ve been vibrating at a very high frequency with a centeredness and crystallized truth that’s escaped my entire adult existence — fuelled by a satori moment, some ego death, a surreal mental reorganization.

Logging on is an edifice of distraction we engage in to avoid confronting the fear of freedom. It is a retreat toward transient joys we put fake meaning into. Our digital fiefdoms are built on wit or clout or selfies with remarkable lighting, lording over stan-brained subjects bound by their mutual unwillingness to press “Unfollow.” I’ve read it somewhere that the journal is the rough draft of our personal narrative, as we only reach clarity through distance and perspective. Yet, the stories of our lives are constantly rewritten as we develop a psychic and spiritual fusion with our machines. We post under constant anxiety of whether we’re good enough, scrambling together a Jenga tower that collapses every day until we die bored and angry.

Posts have replaced thoughts. Like breaking news, these are rife with misinformation or huffy outrage or vulgar amnesia. Like Instagram pics, these are sepia-toned snapshots playing hideous tricks on the mind. Social media is the sandpaper with which we smooth out the wrinkles in our brains until they become frictionless planes — thereby improving the speed of our thoughts. It is a funhouse mirror world of unreality codependent with The News, a mesmerizingly ugly fiasco filled with parasitic headlines gnawing away at our sanity. It has been dominated by an oaf moron game show host blithely lumbering through the cribbed sanctums of the American political imagination with wholly unearned maximalism, despite limited evidence of his ability to walk even short distances.

For four grueling years, this dynamic created what David Roth describes as:

“…a perfect circle of obfuscatory noise — what Trump says will always be nonsensical and self-serving because his brain is a gilded bowl of rotten nectarines, and any response pegged exclusively and expressly to covering this state of arrested cognition will inherently be similarly nonsensical — and, differently but no more helpfully, equally self-serving.”

Even modest exposure to this mental incontinence would create serious reality-management issues for people without any kind of preexisting dissociative disorder. It’s not all that productive to be hyperaware of problems you have no reasonable hope of solving. It’s also not fulfilling to be one of a million undead vultures twittering at whatever’s trending. In fact, this corn syrup addiction to unleashing pithy updates enervates any kind of movement because it turns opinions into personal fashion expressions. You sit behind a keyboard and devise the precisely correct way to explain your quote-unquote acceptable musings.

The universe transforms into something to observe, not something to act upon. We’re offered things to think instead of things to do. Another opinion to have, another think piece to read, another emotion to petrify into a rock and bash yourself over the head with. If what makes you a “good person” is shaped by having the right set of takes, clicking on the right links, sharing the right tweets, then you are a mere consumer of opinions, uncertain of why you think what you think. It’s like giving a toddler a fiddle to hammer nails, and instead of an instruction manual, a BuzzFeed quiz to determine which Hogwarts House best describes them. The internet doesn’t teach us how to act, but how to react. We become miserable creatures too conscious of time to enjoy life in blissful unawareness of our mortality, but too hamster-wheeled in analysis paralysis to maximize our impermanence altogether.

Jia Tolentino described this feeling after the 2016 U.S. presidential election in her New Yorker essay, “Worst Year Ever, Until Next Year.”

“There is no limit to the amount of misfortune a person can take in via the Internet, and there’s no easy way to properly calibrate it — no guidebook for how to expand your heart to accommodate these simultaneous scales of human experience; no way to train your heart to separate the banal from the profound. Our ability to change things is not increasing at the same rate as our ability to know about them. No, [this] is not the worst year ever, but it’s the year I started feeling like the Internet would only ever induce the sense of powerlessness that comes when the sphere of what a person can influence remains static, while the sphere of what can influence us seems to expand without limit, allowing no respite at all.”

All this debilitating rage traps us in a honeypot of anti-social maladroits just one missed PSL away from winding up on the front page of the New York Post. Witnessing the sweaty molestation of truth is hard enough on the psyche, and it grows damn near impossible to disaggregate your own thoughts from the millions of opinions that absorb into this ongoing collective freakout. In a world full of idiots, anything is unfalsifiable.

Regardless, we return like piggies to the troth, hoping one day to stake our claim as ruler-for-a-day over the dysfunctional animal farm of moralizing, marketing, and meaning-making we call “The Discourse.” This space will never be a constructive hub for pursuing Truth because it fosters an inherently ego-driven contest to prove who is most worthy of attention. The sense of self is entwined with blue-check credibility — or being correct at all costs. Online squabbles are a clash of moral absolutes and libidinal cruelty, a reflexive defense against conflicting ideas that threaten key components of our personal identities. The passing path toward self-actualization dissipates utterly under harrumphing and handwringing.

America’s first openly asshole president was an adaptive mutation of Very Online brain-rot: preening and sneering, bloviating in semiliterate bursts, blinkered, grasping to understand subtext, and embroiled in a chronic struggle with object permanence. Now, there’s no through-line to any conversation — flabby bluster and bombast ALL-CAPPED in all directions, like avant-garde dialogue defeating meaning on purpose. It’d be almost dadaist if it wasn’t the bedrock of our deadening monotony. Many celebrities have been driven to insanity through constant surveillance and passerby spitting napalm at them, and now we’ve expanded that life to everyone. Probably fine.

Maybe that’s why my ceaseless barrage of angst in the face of an unlimited supply of terrible information was so impotent. Extemporizing into the digital void is less about expression and more about begging for permission and reassurance. It was a way to outsource responsibility for my happiness, to be told I’m right and I’m not some delusional, apoplectic crank. Wrapping ourselves in our opinions is endemic to a terminal identity crisis and a passive attempt at permanence, an ego-driven reflection of an alternate universe we construct for ourselves. This is pride gone pathological.

When we detach from the assumed certainty of the self, we can dissolve the ego and focus on the only certainties in this world: love, change, death, and the present. Everything else is just an opinion. Once you realize your self-actualization doesn’t hinge on anyone else’s point of view, you can act in accordance with your own code of conduct. We can maximize the value of our lives when we turn off our screens once in a while and look up at our shared reality, though we might realize we’ve been irretrievably squandering hours upon years doing nothing at all. One minute, you’re scrolling through the dogs of Instagram, the next, you’re middle-aged and nicknaming your ponch “Dalton.”

But, you know… This is just, like, my opinion, man.

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