Avoiding the consumption of nonsense in ways that diminish the system's reach and profits is a commodity in itself
That so many normal people are behaving like flailing dung-monkeys is a sign we did not consent to the theft of our own minds and values—and should be demanding their return
Based on my Substack writing alone, I spend almost all of my time in a fatalistic funk, spending half of my waking days hunting down institutional or institutionally supported enemies—cheaters, liars, hypocrites—so I can spend the other half complaining about the dire impact of these solecisms on everyone and everything. And while plenty of independent writers focus largely on the deterioration of “Western” societies thanks to needless literal warfare abroad—for those of us lucky enough to be an ocean or so away from government-sponsored hostilities, that is—and insane gender-and-race wars at home, most of these writers seem to attach a modicum of hopefulness to their otherwise dolorous dispatches, whereas my sign-offs tend to be abrupt and dovetail into a barely unseen “UNLEASH THE NUKES!” (Openly pondering whether I should simply bow out for good from a world that has strayed too far from my own fixed terms probably doesn’t encourage a lot of sharing and sign-ups, either.)
The weekend before last, someone who has been reading my writing for over twenty years—first in Running Times, then on my personal website, then finally here on Beck of the Pack—and is also a New England native with a respectable Boston Marathon time to his credit made his first trip to Boulder. He now lives in a part of the country boasting some of the most unequivocally clueless “blue” voters in the United States and is nearing retirement. He’s doing fine in life, married with grown kids. He also has very few people in his life with whom he can hold a reality-based conversation, something that was never an issue for him before 2020 but is now a specter floating around and permeating his everyday existence.
This isn’t true of me, because as a childless single longtime freelancer, I have always had a far more circumscribed social circle than most, with the freedom to not interact beyond a surface level with the few people I truly wouldn’t be able to get along with, and the corresponding luxury of spending most of my time with people I can vent to, run ideas by, and be myself around.
My longtime reader-friend and I did some inevitable touristy things while he was here. One of these was hiking a portion of the Bear Canyon Creek Trail.
But we spent a lot of time talking about not so much current events as current prevailing attitudes—about freedom of expression, freedom of learning, freedom of creativity, freedom of exploration. Perhaps there was a common theme.
People don’t label the one-two complementary punch of mass online censorship and government disinformation “evil” because such intrusions keep a few restive souls from using racial slurs or from encouraging the likely next U.S. president from declaring martial law and deporting or incarcerating anyone with brown skin. It’s because these things are by definition evil, machinations by government and extra-governmental actors inextricably and absolutely tied to intentions to crush citizen thriving. And unless you’re either planning to die soon or very wealthy, you’re going to feel the sting of it all if the censorship regime persists unchecked.
Another thing we talked about—over extremely oversized pizza, ironically enough—was the freedom that comes with refusing to be deceived, coerced, or silenced despite monumental and coordinated gaslighting efforts by the most powerful people, all things considered, to ever inhabit Earth.
When I consider how I spend my days, they are mostly detached in substance from anything going on in the world, good or bad. Nothing about stepping outside for a run on a sunny but brisk spring morning is any different than it was twenty or thirty years ago. If anything, the people around me seem generally less happy to be doing whatever they’re doing than I am, even the exercisers and even the exercisers with dogs (“my” visitor remarked on this as well, so it’s not either just my imagination or just my vibe).
I gain a lot of animating energy from the deep and in some ways delicate relationships I have with people on the ground. These, a loving pet, and an honest source of income and self-sustenance are at least 98 percent of what any human needs to avoid feeling beat up by life, and as much as I want to think these are so basic that almost anyone can access them, this is a non-starter. A heap of ascribed characteristics and purely external factors have played a far greater role in where I am today than my own best decisions, and where I am seems curiously prosperous. Most of my longtime close friends understand that I know how fortunate I am just to have outlived my own determined efforts—gone but never forgotten—to dissolve myself from the biosphere using potable ethyl alcohol (and more than once, Listerine).
In the sphere of being free to refuse being mentally subverted by malign actors is the freedom to not consume. I don’t mean merely not buying things to End Capitalism; for someone like me, who is technically poor and moreover never replaces anything until it’s falling apart even when he’s flush, that part is easy. I mean not consuming things that financially and otherwise empower malign actors.
I am not talking about boycotting a brand of pisswater beer because a dwarfish male anorexic in drag has been seen promoting the stuff, although these efforts at least constitute organized and measurably impactful resistance to uninvited static. I mean not consuming the corporate media sources that wreck people’s brains (mostly Boomers and older citizens), the social-media platforms that censor facts while promoting those corporate-media propaganda outlets (mostly younger Millennials and Zoomers) and as much of the medical system as possible.
By simply not having cable television at home, I don’t have the option of feeding the advertisers on MSNBC, Fox News, or CNN. That part is fairly easy for most people. Also, it’s foolish to subscribe to “print” propaganda outlets when sites like archive.is exist for the purpose of evading paywalls and denying parent outlets page views. I am pleased to report that since I first mentioned doing this with stories within the Outside and Runner’s World domains, the pace at which free versions of stories in all of these demoralized outlets has grown noticeably, and now these outlets all have nearly complete companion libraries they never wanted thanks to my fellow archivers.
As far as social-media sites go, you may have noticed that articles in running-media outlets and everywhere else offer readers two choices: use these sites (especially Strava, the most openly Machiavellian allure for runners’ egos ever devised) badly, or use these sites terribly.
Despite frequent media attention years ago on the negative impact on mental health of sites like Facebook and Instagram, and the current refrain from the running media about the declining state of younger Americans’ collective mental health, no one seems willing to add these together and arrive at “avoid using social media entirely.”
This shift is no accident and has not been driven by the motives of the frazzled, Instagram-addicted writers churning out stories about how to make better use of social media, the virtual analog of telling a shambling alcoholic to switch his vice from whiskey to wine. Instead, the tech platforms themselves have become uneasy collaborators with legacy media outlets in both committing to pushing state-sponsored propaganda while stifling factual input. It is in the interest of the powerful to keep the citizenry scrolling through these (and only these) sites, where they will see acceptable (and only acceptable) narratives while gaining succor from memberships in balkanized communities of end-stage Never Trumpers and geriatrics sporting rusty “I’m With Her” buttons.
It’s also smart to avoid the so-called healthcare system to the fullest extent possible. I haven’t seen a doctor since 2019, and that was only because I was curious about my iron levels. But I have a much older friend who needs help getting to occasional medical appointments, and in accompanying her to these in recent months I’ve been shocked by how much the “delivery of healthcare” has changed not only since I was training to be a doctor for a while myself in the mid-1990s but just since “the pandemic.”
I included the image below in a wordless post the other day, and I’m posting it again without explanation other than to say that I took the photo in a waiting room, because I want people to think about the implications before I describe my experience that day in detail.
Whom or what, for example, would be protected by preventing a patient from operating an unseen audio-recording device while asking her physician or a nurse some probing or even offhanded questions about the safety or efficacy of the covid jabs? The patient, the medical professionals, or the hospital or clinic posting this signage?
In addition to not seeing doctors for the sniffles or in a search for antidepressants, it’s wise to try to figure out if any of the chronic medications you’re on are actually doing anything for you. If you’re my age and have even mildly “elevated” cholesterol or some other form of dyslipidemia on paper, some doctor has likely tried to put you on a statin drug as a de facto rite of passage. Not only is “cholesterol science” prone to changing course whenever a pharmaceutical company needs to patent a new chemical, but these drugs are pointless and often harmful.
Ask your doctor what your five-year or ten-year survival rate would be if you immediately stopped any prescription medications you’ve been on for at least three years (not counting hormones). He or she probably won’t have a clue and will be annoyed that you’ve been Doing Your Own Research. If this happens, push a little more and ask why healthcare accounts for about a fifth of U.S. GDP while life expectancy drops and everyone seems to die with closetsful of prescription pills…except people who survive to very old age and essentially have to be cattle-prodded to keep any medical appointments made on their behalf.
As for medications people do legitimately need, the natural response in a society balancing capitalism with some level humanism is to ensure that these remain among the most expensive medications in proportion to production on the market.
The 22-year-old essay I recently posted by “Jeff Kilgore"—now confirmed to be either deceased himself or pretending mightily to be—included some wisdom toward the end that captures what I’ve been pondering, and what crystallized further into cogency when someone was kind enough to seek out my company.
Know your Fate and love it. Live with it and glory in it. See the sublime beauty of it all and be grateful that you are part of this thing called the Cosmos. Be better than the rest who can do nothing more than bitch and whine. Be noble in all that you do. And when you exit, hold your head high. Though it may be bloodied, it is unbowed. Because no one can take the one thing that is yours, and that is your self-respect. Once you find it, it is a power that will fill you and sustain you for the rest of your days no matter how bad they get. You will not envy anyone. You will not mourn or cry. You will see people dying and know that it is good. You will be above it all, and you will know freedom. And you will consider it a privilege that you were able to participate for such a brief span in this thing we call Life.
This ethos is shared by people all over the world. When I read e-mails from readers, I often neglect to consider that none of these people—from Ireland, from Germany, from the Philippines, from Canada, and of course Russian trolls freed from digital Wikileaks dungeons—have any idea what the others are saying, and how harmonized these messages are in their droll observations and entreaties. Every one of you deserves the same nexus of continual affirmation you readers have provided for me in this way.
I hear from former democratic socialists, Christians, libertarians, Jews, war veterans, mellow old queers, atheists, Moms for Liberty supporters, seasoned marijuana cultivators, deep-dive contemporary music lovers, escapees from various religious and para-religious cults, law officers, and college students. Every one of these happenstance Earth-dwellers has their own core values and plans for life, and these diverge wildly both internally and from my own. But almost everyone just wants the nonsense and the bombings to stop and the cultural and artillery-shell smoke to clear and someone or something to step in and magically convince us all that we’re all pretty much okay living together despite our ineluctable differences. Some nasty people have enacted some far-ranging overhauls of civilization, but despite the ubiquity of the products of this malevolence, they haven’t turned everyone into a soulless husk just yet.
Wokish people, along with millions of Americans dragged along for the joyless, clicks-and-virtue-signaling-driven ride, are depressed largely because they know they are being untrue to their consciences and their physical selves.
On the other hand, believing that you’re taking the right stances, even if you consistently present them in imperfect ways assured of limiting your audience and driving off different sets of readers, is edifying in itself. It is accepting Fate and seizing the reins at the same time.
I will be unleashing a lot of static in the days to come, but all of it is aimed at institutions and a few ill-intended or hapless, captured people.
If only Kilgore could see us all now. He’d probably call me a fag and dare me, one more time, to ban him.