My Writing Sucks, So Why Should You Keep Reading?

My writing sucks, so why should you keep reading?

You don’t have to! If you would prefer to listen to a reading of this post, please scroll to the bottom of the page! (10:35)

I know – My writing sucks, so why should you keep reading?

It does, especially my long form blog posts. And I guarantee that 95% of the general public could tell you so. The prose can be so dense it’s impenetrable, so abstract that it’s impossible to grasp. Even people who love me dearly can’t stomach it. My own father says he can’t understand what I’m trying to say because it’s too hard to read. He has frankly asked me, “How much of this is mental self-indulgence?” (He used a more graphic metaphor).

For better or for worse, none of it is.¹ But it does come off that way. And that sucks.

Before you rush to disagree or offer comfort, please understand that is not an exercise in self-deprecation.

My writing sucks, so why should you keep reading?

I Am a Flawed but Exceptional Everyman

I can forge an instant connection with almost anyone I meet in the real world. Much of my upbringing and life experiences are of a salt of the earth variety, and most ordinary people can relate to that. I’ve married, divorced, and had a kid. Hell, I’ve been homeless and I’ve owned a home in a middle-class suburb! And on the other side I’ve explored enough unusual experiences to find common ground with pretty much everybody else.

Growing up I was country boy in a rural setting raised by a devoutly religious lower-middle class family. I’ve spent half my life working in the roughest of physical trades. But I also found opportunities to explore a world far beyond my home. I’ve lived and worked in Manhattan and Europe, performed in a touring rock band, and even achieved transitory forms of conventional “success.” I can present myself as a well-groomed and educated elite. I have managed staff that included holders of terminal degrees even though I never went to college and I am entirely self-educated.

Being both cursed and blessed with mild and undiagnosed neurodivergence and mental illness, I was a weirdo social outcast right up through adolescence. But a lifetime of careful study eventually taught me how to mask my idiosyncrasies. I focused on the most socially-adept people I admired and assiduously internalized their behaviors. Not only can I pass as a “normie,” I can integrate seamlessly into society and project the social confidence associated with high status – When I need to.²

My writing sucks, so why should you keep reading?

The Challenge of Neurodivergence

All this to say…It really sucks that my writing sucks

But them’s the breaks. That’s just the way it bubbles out of my high-functioning Aspergersy head. I try to edit these posts, but just expressing the ideas takes a lot of time, so there’s only so much I can do. And I have to keep writing because right now I have the time, but that won’t last indefinitely.

My intention is to edit all the worthwhile posts into coherent essays and post them on a separate page. Until then I hope some of you will be patient with me and remember that these are just blog posts. And please don’t forget that this is a Preachy Variety Act!

So if you’re not after maximum traffic/clicks/followers, why do you care if your writing turns off 95% of readers?

Because I am an everyday human and my empathy and solidarity lies with the common rather than the exceptional. Because I do see myself as a messenger, and want to communicate to anyone who cares, not just clever intellectuals intrigued enough by my cryptic suggestions to enjoy the mental challenge of deciphering what I’m trying to say. I am trying to present a very simple message. It’s a universal invitation to consider an alternative life, the most ancient, precious, and sacred dream common to all of our kind.

What Else Contributes to the Problem?

I can’t seem to just spit it out. It’s because I think anyone who insist people have a problem they weren’t aware of while claiming to offer a solution that’s going to provide greater personal fulfillment sounds like a con artist or a cult leader. So to avoid that I try to lead the reader on a long roundabout path to show, rather than tell, how I got to my conclusions.

But the truth is, there’s really nothing disturbing or creepy to my proposal itself. In fact, I’m sure that anyone who reflects on it will see that it’s the mainstream lifestyle that is deeply disturbing and creepy. The problem with my proposal is, well, almost no one (but a few like the inspiring Alexandra Ross) is really interested in altering their lifestyle. In my opinion that’s because the Hive Mind has hijacked our ability to think clearly and independently.

My writing sucks so why should you keep reading?

My Writing Sucks, So Why Should You Keep Reading?

I’ll Spit It Out

My fear is that our opportunity to fully realize this dream is limited. We have lived through an incredible but brief moment of time. It seems clear to me that our window is currently closing. Surely you have noticed by now that life for everyday humans is getting worse. At our end-of-year celebrations we say, “I’m so glad that 20– is over!” And then the next year is worse. The trend is clear, and I see no reason to expect it to change.

I’m trying to say that I think water, food, and energy are going to become more scarce and expensive, and that infrastructure will continue to degrade. The more dependent your lifestyle is upon complex external systems to ensure adequate supplies of essentials, the harder you will be squeezed. I don’t enjoy saying this, but I don’t expect any of us to see that situation improve, for any prolonged period, during our lifetimes.

The good new is this – We are all unbelievably fortunate and have SO MUCH to be grateful for! It’s still an almost unimaginably wonderful time to be alive. (I just think that the more we disconnect from toxic Late Stage Post-Industrial Capitalist “civilization” and its insidious mind control, the more we’d be able to see it).

The Good News!

Not long ago, we, as a species, passed a momentous threshold. And it happened without the faintest of celebration or fanfare. At some point in the 20th Century it became possible for all of us to attain, to some degree, the Dream of Elysium. We achieved the means for all of us to have fine shelter, clean water, palatable food, and radically improved medical care in adequate quantities, while enjoying abundant free time and the materials to explore a vast range of creative self-expression.

And we no longer needed to kill each other to acquire this!

[In the timeline of our modern human existence, it was only yesterday that a land with abundant quantities of milk and honey provided sufficient incentive to invade and engage in ethnic cleansing to dispossess all former occupants. And this wasn’t just an Old Testament phenomenon, this is the standard pattern of colonization right up to modern times. In fact we founded the great “civilizations” of North America in the exact same fashion].

My writing sucks, so why should you keep reading?

The True Nature of Technology

The bountiful gifts bestowed by our most recent history didn’t end with just adequate shelter, water, and food. So many other wonderful, efficient, life-enhancing and preserving developments became available to us. Technology is NOT just electrons. Technology is every method humans have developed to accomplish a task. Not all good technological advances are high tech solutions. And, I assure you, not all high tech advances present good solutions!

There are ages upon ages of incredible low-tech solutions to timeless human problems. But our consumer economy requires that we dispose of this wisdom as quickly as possible because it is open source and cannot be monetized! I firmly believe that the fifty-thousand year curriculum of anatomically modern humans has furnished all the required technology for us to enjoy rich, fulfilling, healthy, human lives. To that we need add only the most judicious application of electronics. And we can do this while minimizing our dependence on external sources of food, energy, and other essentials.

My writing sucks, so why should you keep reading?

The Upsides to Downshifting

I think we have begun our descent from “peak civilization.” But there’s still time to create lives that, while simpler and less hyperstimulating, are also far more fulfilling. The key is to negotiate the largest “downshift” in consumptive expectations that we can stomach.

The upsides to such a “downshift” include –

• Reduced dependence upon complex external systems to provide essentials makes us antifragile, while providing increased freedom and control over our lives
• Reduction in the number of products owned means reduction in the number of products for which we must also furnish shelter, climate control, space, and energy. [OUR PRODUCTS ARE OUR DEPENDENTS!]
• All these reductions yield reduced economic strain, which in turn yields –
• Increased personal energy, free time, and financial power to devote towards the pursuit of our own creative self-expression, as well as quality time with friends and loved ones.

I fervently believe that the activities in the last bullet are the ones that matter most for human beings. I want access to those gifts to be far more available to ALL of us. But that last item also presents the greatest obstacle to the wider acceptance and success of this proposal.

• From my own experience, the personal fulfillment derived from an investment in creative self-expression is eroded by absence of community to share it with.
• It’s hard to spend time with friends and loved ones if they are firmly bound to the yoke of consumption
• It’s no good to increase our free time if we haven’t disengaged from dominant society. We’ll just be sitting around looking for society to provide us with entertainment. In that situation free time just means idleness and continued addiction to consumption with all attendant mind control

I think answers to these problems are addressed in Why Should You Celebrate Mediocrity?

Bonus Track! The Cat’s Rebuke!

Since I am posting spoken word recordings now…

After enduring cruel and protracted provocation from the entiitled, pampered cat (including meowing, knocking over objects, and taking a giant smelly crap in a location that could not be immediately identified) while was trying to rehearse a complex new song for the open mic, I completely lost my shit mid-song when he jumped up on the forbidden kitchen counter. 

Forgetting to turn of the recorder my five minutes of excoriating and pleading is captured for posterity. It includes expletives, a catalog of new offenses in real time as I discovered them, much exasperation, and concludes with an impassioned attempt at negotiating a mutually-satisfactory settlement.

 

The Daily Stone

1. For better because I’m not wasting a reader’s time in pointless self-gratification. For worse because it’s harder to fix than simply acknowledging my tendencies to stroke my own ego. ↩︎
2. And only for finite periods of time. It is draining and consumes a lot of energy, which is then unavailable for other activities. Eventually I am tapped out completely and suffer some kind of breakdown. These have gotten worse over the years. ↩︎