OK. So.
Here’s something I’ve noticed but previously been largely unable to articulate, and to be incredibly unfair I’m going to crystallise this observation down to one person’s blog. Even worse, I’m not going to link to it, or quote from it, or give you anything that would make this a valid argument, so you’re going to have to be on my side pretty early or this is going to come across as sneering and unpleasant and really not what I’m intending.
I guess this starts with Facebook.
I’ve been ill for the last couple of days (just a cold, but a bad one), and as such I’ve basically been doing the absolute minimum without letting my body atrophy into some weird calcified mass. That’s boiled down to a few things - browsing Tumblr, listening to this stand-up set, playing Mass Effect 2 and, yes, flicking around Facebook on my phone to ogle the lives of a bunch of people I don’t even speak to anymore.
Let me make this pretty clear: this isn’t a thing I do with any degree of regularity. I think Facebook poisons people, which is why I have twenty friends who can be split into those I see on a regular basis and people from the internet. I do this to provide a necessary limit on the amount of information I’m exposed to - the thinking being that if everyone has the same attitude to privacy that I do, then I’m not going to stumble across privileged information by mindlessly clicking around.
Here’s what I’ve learned: pretty much no-one has the same attitude to privacy as me. And that’s how I had a horrifying flashback to a time when a seriously screwed-up me got rejected by a girl (four years ago), the time I made an ass out of myself by playing Radio Ga Ga at the local town hall in front of a few hundred 16-year-olds (seven years ago), and in some masochistic drive managed to check in on every single person who I’ve deliberately and angrily cut ties with over the last ten years (ten, eight, five, three and one and a half years ago).
But here’s what else I learned: one of these people has set up a website devoted to dispensing advice. It’s one of those vaguely life-coachy (if that’s a word) websites - loads of short, snappy sentences with total conviction and no sources, a grand sense of learned wisdom that may or may not be rooted in any evidence, and the sort of tone that gives you the impression of all-inclusive detachment - it’s all directed at you, but there is no I.
I don’t really want to pick apart this guy’s life, because that’s weird, but I will draw out two fairly key attributes - he’s fucking smart, and he’s 21. I think those two together can be problematic given a certain path through life.
It’s a little awkward to look at something like this, because I think that once or twice I’ve been guilty of it myself. My goal has always to focus on the personal first - as in, this is my opinion, or my experience, or my view on the world and yours is likely to be completely different. I - and everyone else in my AS Level Philosophy class - learned about moral and cultural relativism when I was seventeen, and it kind of stuck in my head as something to bear in mind. But, yeah - a few times, I’ve forgotten that and tried to be some twisted Voice for the People. Having a following will do that to you (and that’s why I don’t, not really, anymore).
This isn’t even an attack, by the way. It’s more just… curious. While I might stray from it sometimes, I know that as a 22-year-old with a very particular and warped life up to this point I have no business advising others on how to live their lives. When I do, it’s always prefaced by “if it was me, I’d…” or “I don’t really know, but….” And - and - I’d wager that the same goes for most people my age. Regardless of how wonderfully peachy your life has been up to this point, people at around this age would be a little short-sighted to tell others how to live a good life. I’m aware that my choices from a few years ago, or last week, or today could have the power to fuck up my forties or give me a ludicrously huge retirement fund. I don’t know. That’s it - I just don’t know, and it’s my personal belief that no-one else in their early twenties knows either.
I think it has to come down to emulation. When you grow up, you look at what the adults are doing, and they all seem so assured. I saw that attitude mostly in my Dad, who - and when I think about this, it’s kind of terrifying - has never openly expressed doubt in the twenty or so years that I’ve had a rudimentary understanding of human speech patterns. Everything is certain. But it wasn’t just my Dad - everyone does this. Part of why I like comedians like Louis CK is because they negate that sort of attitude - when you conjoin lines from your stand up set with “I dunno”, there’s a reassuring sense that look, there’s a middle-aged man who can admit he doesn’t have his shit worked out. It’s refreshing.
You do it when you’re growing up because you’re trying to figure out why you’re on this planet, and rather than treat that issue with the weight it deserves, you just pretend to know in the hope that you’ll fool others. And as you get older, you begin to forget that all of this was based off copying the adults in the first place, and begin to think that it’s normal - that having a Plan for your life and being a Bright Young Achiever is somehow a model for good living. Advertising works because you’ve already bought into a certain lifestyle, not because it’s really good at selling it to you.
This sort of mindset is how you get human bear-baiting television like The Jeremy Kyle Show and Britain’s Got Talent. It’s how you get countless office conversations about Fifty Shades of Grey. It’s how people in sales-driven jobs start copying Patrick Bateman and never stop. It’s how you get people watching Jerry Maguire who don’t see the tragic element of the titular character yelling “show me the money” down the phone. You can’t start a casual conversation with “oh my god, there’s no straightforward answer when it comes to how to approach my life”, because no-one likes hearing about that level of insecurity.
I am twenty-two. I have wants, and fears. I have a rudimentary sense of right and wrong that changes according to my sensitivity and that acquires new levels of detail and nuance every day. I have an idea of what career I’d like to end up in, but I’m aware and ready for the possibility that my life might not pan out that way. I see writing as a sort of therapy, because it’s always helped me work my shit out - the reason I have so much embarrassing stuff in the nine years I’ve been blogging is because I was largely talking to myself and trying to make sense of things. I’m still doing that. That’s what this is. This might accrue a cluster of likes, maybe even the odd reblog (though god knows why), but it’s all irrelevant - if I can set this down as a record of my state of mind at the moment, then maybe I can look back on it in a few years’ time and see how I’ve learned. Or maybe I still won’t have a clue.