Behind You

"If the crowd is behind you, you're facing the wrong way." - Simon Munnery

I find being right very tempting. I am right and you are wrong. I am rational and intelligent and you are not. The desire to win an argument can be intoxicating. Overpowering. Consuming. Moral superiority can warm me like an emergency thermal blanket, my opponents (imagined, mistaken, or real) reflected in its silvery fun house mirrors.

I can write to receive likes and appreciative comments. That’s only human. But it is dangerous. Apparently, I am a car park ticket: thin, pliable, poorly rendered, and requiring validation.

And then there’s the path of generating offence. You get a reaction. Which is better than apathy. But in this world offence is taken easier than an unlocked bike. There’s no value in offending by itself. The demand for offence easily outstrips supply. Like the Starship Enterprise, our five-year mission seems to be: to explore strange new worlds to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly be offended where no man has been offended before! Such is this desire that opportunistic entrepreneurs seek to sate it.

I am not interested in the things that you are most certain about, even though those are the things that you will be most eager to share with me. I’m interested in the domains about which you are least certain. I’m interested in your beliefs that are most likely to change. Not necessarily because I want to change them. But because they are the least boring things to talk about. Maybe my ideas might change as well. Who knows.

There is so much content out there. So many bits of writing and speaking and acting. Some of it is even made with care and craft. I have been wondering whether I should continue writing here. Sometimes I need to write but perhaps I should do it in private and then delete it, burn it, throw it away. The world might be better with less content in it. Perhaps I will stop. Perhaps I won’t.

Come on Thom, ya miserable get.