I love the written word — as both a writer and a reader. I owe that love to a childhood full of loneliness and isolation. I also had several wonderful teachers along the way, and devoured many incredible books. But nothing supercharged my love of language quite like my experience as an editorial writer for my college newspaper.
Writing for an audience constantly pushed me to better explain myself and thus to better understand myself and my beliefs. It was a challenge to say what I needed to say in 600-800 words, and harder still to defend my ideas when the responses came in (whether by letters to the editor, direct emails, or debates with friends and classmates). While I have improved as a writer since then, I have no doubt that those college years were the most literary growth I ever experienced in so compact of a time. No other time or modality — including college itself — altered my mind to so great a degree.
And yet, in my mid-forties now, I barely participate in thoughtful discourse except with my closest friends and family. I still write, and indeed have always had a notebook nearby, but I hardly ever share it with anyone. 25+ years of attempts to figure out how to utilize the power of online writing have been an embarrassing failure for me. Indeed, I’ve spent more time setting up new blogs and websites than I have actually writing on them.
The truth is that I’m sensitive — probably overly so. I simply can’t understand the sneering, antagonistic way that most people go about their lives. It was easier when I was younger and more scattered. The world was more black-and-white, good vs. evil, and it was easy to pigeonhole my ideological opponents as uninformed or just plain stupid. And although that is undoubtedly true of some of us, it’s not a satisfactory enough of an explanation for my mind and heart to rest.
Therein lay the problem: I’ve been looking for an explanation. I can’t conceive of how people can be so cruel to one another, saying such vile things, and so I’ve been holding my breath in the hopes that it’ll someday make sense. But the answer is too complex and individual to be distilled into a universal resolution. People can be mean or reactive for any number of reasons: trauma, bad diet, chronic pain, inadequate sleep, economic disparity, media/corporate manipulation, no exercise, location, fear, and more.
Each person has a different and nuanced combination of reasons why they are like they are. Some people respond to their anger, sadness, and uncertainty by digging into it and figuring it out. Others try to find healthier outlets for it, like jiu-jitsu and weight training in my case.
But many more seem to find it in casual, everyday cruelty. They treat service workers terribly, can’t resist leaving shitty comments on social media, fully indulge their road rage, and more. You’ve seen these people. Maybe you are one, at least some of the time. They often think they have no filter, which is true — but it’s not just a filter on their words, it’s a filter on their emotional maturity. They do not process their thoughts or consider what kind of person they actually want to be. And they most certainly don’t consider compassion to be a practice of any importance.
They are creatures of pure reaction, completely at the whims of the world around them. The problem is always external, and they see no reason to change it even if they’re miserable people.
Somewhere along the way, my resolve began to erode. Shitty behavior from shamelessly rude and self-centered people had me turning inward again. Aging and all the reflection, exhaustion, and even bitterness that comes with it contributed, as well. My social footprint shrank, and I would only share my personal opinions with folks I knew well, who I could trust to have meaningful interactions based on something — ANYTHING — other than self-service and cruelty.
I sincerely believed my opinions, and felt strongly about them, but didn’t think the expression of them mattered all that much or would make a significant difference in anyone’s life. Meekly, I’d look for clues that my ideas might be welcome in a situation and would often hold my tongue if I detected any derision in another person’s language. The older I got, the further I stepped back. Because it didn’t feel worth it to engage.
It wasn’t that I was scared or anything like that; I was tired. People in general are often exhausting to me. Exactly how exhausting they are is directly proportional to their communication skills. That’s it.
And while poor education often goes hand-in-hand with poor communication, it’s really more of a correlation than a causation. Which means that the only surefire way to know if someone is a good communicator is to interact with them.
At midlife now I’ve had to acknowledge that if I continue at this rate, I’ll end up like a lot of these people I dislike: isolated (even when around others), bitter, angry, reactive, needlessly mean, certain of my righteousness even when in the depths of obvious misery.
I need to address this knot in my chest. I need to unclench my jaw.
I don’t think I can change many people’s minds, and I doubt I’ll ever have much of a platform to speak to an audience of significant size. But I still need to write, and in ways that are more vulnerable and open than a notebook I guard fiercely. I need to get at the root of what bothers me about particular people. I need to do it for me.
That said, this is the first in a series of posts I’m going to do as a project. Instead of responding to ill-tempered strangers with no interest in real connection to another human, I’m going to write here about the things that elicit a reaction in me and attempt to unpack them in a way that I hope is beneficial and positive.
In honor of the teachers and others who have inspired me along the way, I’m going to try to avoid common fallacies and hold myself to high standards of writing and philosophical quality. This is analytical meditation in the way that works best for me.
Part of it is therapeutic: I’m trying to understand myself better and to unravel some of the things that I’ve pushed down over the years.
Another part is purely literary: I want to improve the quality of discourse and get back to something like what I had as an editorial writer over half my life ago. I don’t expect to change the world, but if I can engage even just a handful of people in a way that is nourishing and lively as opposed to combative and mean, I’ll have succeeded. Because it’s not differing opinions that bother me, it’s the smarmy assholes who spray their half-baked opinions around using provocative language, copious caps lock, and piss-poor grammar and spelling.
Devil’s advocates and other types that just live to get a rise out of people can go kick rocks. Sincere people, individuals with hope and kindness who really want to understand themselves and others for the betterment of their little world, these are the people I want to talk to and know more deeply.
There’s one detail that deserves special mention: Artificial Intelligence. I’ll probably do a separate post on it at some point, but for now I only want to address it as pertains to writing.
AI writing really, really sucks. It can convey information quickly and directly, but it’s not based on any kind of thought. It’s just an assembly line of sorts. Anyone with above a middle school reading level can typically spot AI-written articles pretty quickly.
Now, history is littered with snobby quotes from humans who underestimated technology and later found themselves humbled by it. I have no doubt that someday AI will advance enough so as to “write” original pieces that are varied, nuanced, and indistinguishable from human writing. And when “real” AI comes along — AKA Artificial General Intelligence — I might even be intrigued to see what it comes up with.
That’s part of why I won’t get on my high horse about how AI is causing us to collectively grow dumber. There’re plenty of folks already talking about that, and it still won’t stop it.
But none of that actually diminishes the existence and continued practice of human writing. We’ve got decades (if not centuries) ahead of us where AI, algorithms, robotics, etc. will be producing more, better, and faster than humans.
What I’m interested in is the cognitive development that goes along with the writing. Even as a person who’s only been paid peanuts a handful of times for my writing, I cannot understate the value that writing as a practice has had for my growth and development as a person. If I never get paid again for it, I would still keep going. It’s important to the very core of my being.
That’s why I’m doing this. I don’t want to be told what or how to think, and I want to have the mental robustness to untangle bad arguments and articulate my own. The vast majority of modern people will always have some kinds of machines/tools on which they rely, but it’s worth examining which one of those add something to one’s life and which take something away.
I do not want to outsource my self-expression to a machine. On the contrary, I want to refine and improve it through struggle and reflection. I want my thoughts, ideas, and creativity to come from me. I want to get to know Greg better all the time.
Powerful people/groups want very badly to control as much information as possible. They want to simplify language, filter out “objectionable” ideas, remove educational resources, separate us from the natural world and each other, and distract us with different forms of entertainment.
They want to keep us stupid, compliant, and arguing with each other instead of focusing on real problems and helping others. Bored, lonely, scared, ignorant people buy more stuff and cause less problems.
I don’t want a life like that. I want connection, surprise, experimentation, intellectual/spiritual stimulation, access to learning opportunities, and to develop new skills. I want that for you, too.
But it’s not going to come to us on a conveyor belt or through a screen, much less as a result of a promise from a politician or CEO. We have to participate in our own betterment, otherwise we are by default participating in our own existential imprisonment.
This was a bit longer than I was planning, and rather scattered. If you’ve made it this far, please accept my sincere thanks for reading. This is my first attempt at being openly vulnerable in quite some time, and I hope to make it a more regular practice. I hope you’ll join me in the comments, or by reflecting/writing yourself, or otherwise undertaking your own self-expression project in any form.
More soon, friends!