The pain in the pleasure in the pain

From religious fundamentalists to the cataclysmically Wokish, we* should all understand that our hostility toward each other is contrived—a feature, not a bug, of globalist policies

First, my occasional irregular suggestion to read the Web version of posts after about four hours have elapsed since their e-mail time stamp, depending on the time of day. You’re likely to see far fewer typos that way.

Also, you can elect to not receive posts in certain categories. Some people don’t like the “Images only” posts, while others seem to open every one of these. The media-related posts seem to cause the most silent unsubscribes, when spates of these occur. Most readers seem okay with these provided not too much time passes between substantive running-related posts, or dispatches from my dog.

Now to air out the place a bit, even if I may not be opening all of the right windows:

When I re-read my recent post about Strava’s balky, recondite price increase for subscribers, it looked like I had overly derided the basic value of vanity itself, rather than simply emphasize that people can probably replicate their Strava experiences on other social-ish platforms.

Some amount of vanity drives every optional venture anyone undertakes, including this Substack. I’m not getting rich doing this (though if I were, I’d be at least a little vain about that too) and were the site not enjoying a steady uptick in readership despite feeble-to-backward efforts to promote it, I wouldn’t put as much work into it. And when I was competing, I liked sharing my training logs, which required more work than it does today and thus arguably required more vanity on my part than a typical Stravarian exhibits by just having a watch and signing up for an account.

My contention isn’t even that you don’t have to pay money to ensure a reasonable influx of vanity. It’s that if people bitch about Strava but accede to the new prices in large enough numbers, then the company has no incentive to not do something similar not long in the future. It can behave like a major political party.

Anyway, I got several e-mails from Web-only users of Strava who were unaware that the company would soon be charging them more money, and at least one of them said he was definitely out as a paying user. I’m sure that will leave a mark on the Strava’s next earnings sheet.

On a broader scale, I clearly have mixed feelings toward running. Actually, it’s more accurate to say I have siloed feelings toward it. I love the activity itself and consider it a personal prerequisite for regularly writing about it for as long as I’m capable of doing it. I like weekends, because people I know and in whose outcomes I’m invested are usually racing in different parts of the country on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. I enjoy finding new places to run close to my own backyard and letting a four-legged mute lead the way.

Meanwhile, I have felt nothing but disdain toward the running media for over three years, owing more to the collapse of longstanding accepted norms within the industry than the ridiculous content it’s churned out. I’m almost awestruck by how rapidly the automatic derision toward obvious cheaters that runners long understood as axiomatic has given way to not merely the tolerance of lying buffoons with destructive agendas but their platforming, sponsorship, and sanctification by every principal figure in the sport.

As I mention often, none of this would matter were the entire corporate media not an unpretentious, nonstop propaganda show. That scenario is a non-starter, since niche-industry media only behave as they do because the leading outlets in the world do. But because this is where things stand, my ability to hold a basic conversation with regular cable news viewers is limited because those people are operating using different sets of facts than I am. This leads to chronic, sometimes unrelenting frustration.

One thing I’m happy about is that people use the comments sections as intended, and also give me e-mail feedback, which has grown substantial enough for me to lose partial track of. I don’t think many of the regulars were acquainted with me or my writing before stumbling across this place, and I suspect that my style tends to discourage oppositional feedback among those who anticipate, and aren’t interested in receiving, a blast of irate pushback.

Whether that’s true or not, I’m glad most people, like me, don’t care about that and are eager to chime in with what they think.

There are doctors, data statisticians, and mothers who read these posts and comment on them. While my vitriol toward the media reporting the things I rant about is immutable, my positions themselves are not absolute. I can be deeply disturbed by plain and systematic distortions of the truth without claiming to know what “the truth” is, be that the precise or even approximate level of damage caused my recent medical interventions, when the U.S. will move to digitalization of currency and an explicit social-credit system, or the likelihood of nuclear war.

Often, my desire to rip apart pieces of a story and categorize it as Wokish trumpeting obscures real debates. When I recently wrote about the Boston Marathon’s decision to allow pregnancy deferrals, I was stacking the drawbacks I saw alongside other questionable moves the B.A.A. has made lately as well as sneering as social-media activism. But a commenter pointed out other aspects of the picture that made sense to me, and on top of that, there’s no reason a magazine called Women’s Running shouldn’t advocate for just such a thing, even if the same publication has often seemed anti-woman in some ways.

I’ve gotten feedback just since starting this post on some of my word choices. I’ve come to terms with the fact that the people I insult with florid profanity are not the ones regularly reading this blog, or generously paying for its content. While it sucks that most of my targets make themselves unreachable even after polite disagreement, calling them the c-word in response is the equivalent of screaming at a teller because of all the bad drivers I encountered on the way to the bank. It doesn’t add much. When I re-read older posts, it’s usually the profanity excesses that I would change if I could, rather than any of my particular stances.

I will, however, always be more than salty if someone starts throwing around casual accusations of abuse or harassment. I’ve been through too much real hassle thanks to overtures like those to simply let them pass. On the other hand, to be realistic, every male alive has been labeled a creep at this point, and I do a fine job myself of voluntarily demolishing my own reputation in certain realms with the posts that I publish here.

(I’ll also be keeping most of the run-on sentences I create in my first drafts, but I may think harder about some of them from now on, unless I get too confused.)

The take-home message is that if I didn’t think about the feedback I get and try to integrate the useful stuff into my worldview, I’d be identical to the very people I criticize for being arrogant louts and cowards. My obligation in this area is no different than that of someone writing for a corporate outlet or corporate-sponsored newsletter.

I’ve also fallen openly into out-grouping people. This is a perhaps understandable response to being consistently labeled and demonized with facile pejoratives, directly and indirectly. But it misses the greater point, which is that I prefer to rail against concepts rather than people, other than the powerful people directly responsible for fueling so much public strife for three straight years. We* have been expressly invited by the very producers of this global reformation to hate each other for any number of reasons: Skin color, sexual orientation, vaccination status, masking in public, political affiliation, body shape, Ukraine. All of this brand-new or newly reignited, and not by accident.

I really hope that as I continue to wax spasmodic about various issues, people will bear in mind that I would just rather live in a world less burdened by the machinations of nasty people. A lot of good people have been yanked along for the ride and really don’t know what to think. I don’t have any idea where it’s going either. But I would rather try to find out and risk falling on my face than continue to feel helpless.

On a wryer note, I cannot imagine—I really can’t—cranking out a newsletter with the same truth value as, say, a typical Instagram influencer’s account. Or rewriting headlines of old posts and changing their content, or just deleting them wholesale, when someone catches me in a mistake or purposeful falsehood and asks for an explanation. Or crying about how someone made me feel bad after I spent three hours composing a completely fictitious account of my exploits and uploading it to the Web for all to see, then was mocked for it.

I may seem mercurial or out-of-synch as a person, but at least I can operate a website or running publication without pretending I also own a time machine or have access to a magic genie. Some of this I could manage in a vacuum, but for the rest I rely on reader input. As much as I appreciate the props, the other stuff sticks, too. I wouldn’t have managed a 4:11 mile yesterday on a slight uphill without every kind and skeptical word, and that’s just the tip of the magic this place provides.