Call this a thinkpiece, because these ideas are not yet fully formed and I am writing them down, in part, in order to help complete their birth.

The basic idea is that modern life revolves around people getting the feeling but not the substance of things.

Take these macho “truck” ads. Please. The whole marketing of these vehicles is designed to sell the message that these trucks are for manly men who do things like haul cattle and drive upo twisty canyon roads and go “offroad” a lot. People to whom the important things are towing capacity and horsepower, because god damn it. there’s work that needs doin’ and Missy’s new gingham dress ain’t gonna pay for itself.

The message, obviously, is that if you buy this vehicle,  you’ll be a manly man too.

But you won’t. Not at all. Nothing about you, the proud new dipshit of a vehicle owner, will change. You will still be the same milquetoast middle aged Dad with a sensible job and a crippling mortgage that you were before you bought the damned thing.

But that doesn’t matter because buying and owning that thing makes you fee more manly, and that’s what matters. When you look at it, when you drive it, when you image what others see when they see you in it, you will feel like a big strong manly man, and that is what counts.

In fact, if the product actually did change you into a manly man, you wouldn’t want it. Because that would fuck up your life. It would be a total character change. You’d end up quitting your job and getting your welding ticket and moving to a ranch or some shit.

So what you are really buying is a life size toy that helps you pretend to be a big manly man without actually changing at all.

That makes it the equivalent of your kid’s fake light sabre. Just a tool for the imagination for your Muppet Babies world, where make believe is real until Nanny says it’s bedtime.

And the women have the same kind of shit going on too. Products marketed to them as though they have the magical power to turn you from a real live woman, warts and all, into a glamorous, beautiful, universally desired goddess.

And you know they can’t,. of course. But that doesn’t matter because, like with the trucks, if the products could actually do that, you wouldn’t want them because they would wreck your current life.

They, too, are only props for the imagination. Toys for big girls and boys. And the more you think about it, the more you realize that absolutely everything is marketed this way. It’s almost as if the actual properties of the actual product don’t matter. What matter is the land of make believe to which their product is the only key.

And the more media saturated we become, the more of our personal reality is composed of media we have consumed and thus the more of our lives we live in exactly these imaginary worlds.

Meanwhile, the real world is going all to hell.

Pause while I lay down. I do not feel at all well.

Another idea I have been meaning to explore is the problem of status competition in the modern era of communications.

Here’s the problem : as the global village grows, so does its population. And our status instincts have no limit to how many people it will feel we are, on some level, “in competition” with, and so we are rapidly reaching the point where we are in social competition with the entire world.

No wonder low self esteem is rampant. Who can beat the entire world? How can people not feel like they are at the bottom of the heap in that situation?

To make this more concrete, let’s talk female beauty. In the old days, a woman looking to attract a man only had the other gals her age in the village to compete with and thus stood a fair chance of being one of the prettiest girls around.

But then the village becomes a town, and suddenly she’s competing with two or three times the number of ladies. Then the town becomes a city, and the odds get even worse. And now we have a global village of billions.

And what makes it worse is that thanks to mass media, everyone has access to the highest status people in the world (celebrities), and can and will compare themselves to those illuminaries, and of course come up short.

It’s especially stark in the world of beauty, because in that case, the perfect women making real women feel ugly aren’t even real themselves. They are a quarter silicone and half Photoshop and the rest is the world’s best makeup, hair, and fashion professionals, plus of course perfect lighting and expert photography.

But it works on all levels. We all know the names of the richest (and therefore the most “successful” ) people in the world. We know of the top atheltes, the most famous rock stars and actors, the funniests comedians, and so on.

And because we always compare ourselves with the highest status members of our communities, we look upon these mighties and despair. They seem so high above us that we lose all hope of ever reaching their Olympian status.

It’s an unintended consequence of the internet and mass media in general, and I am not at all sure what can be done about it. You can tell people not to compare themselves to others until you are blue in the face, but they are still going to do it. It’s human nature.

What is needed is some kind of social machinery that lets us build a wall between our self worth and the teeming masses in terms of competition.

I don’t know how that would work. But it would save people a lot of misery.

Well that’s my rambling for the day. Now, I need to lay down and rest and hopefully feel better by the time that FRED rolls around.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

There’s so many people I could be. ^[1]

I’m serious. I contain multitudes. I’m a protean mass of multi-n-dimensional neospace writhing with virtual particles chomping at the bit to exist for just long enough to truly piss physicists off by being absolutely necessary for things to balance out and completely unable to be detected.

Well, okay. maybe not, but that was really fun to write.

It all boils down to that evil, evil word : potential. The human kind. The kind that makes people tell you how much potential you have when you are a kid, which turns into them carping at you for squandering your potential when you completely fail to become a keener eager to kick the world’s ass and instead continue to be a coaster who naively figures that if school is easy for you, why make it hard by getting all Type A about it?

Because some day you’ll want money, you little idiot.

But enough about that.

I have had this notion of my great potential my whole life, and it ended up settling into one of the cracks in my mind as the notion that no matter what I do, it’s wrong. I live in a continuous state of feeling like I am making the wrong choices, and eventually you have to learn to just tune that shit out or you won’t even be able to move.

I mean, it’s a bug burden to put on a kid to tell them of all the amazing things they could (and therefore should) do. At least, if you’re somewhat responsibility-averse like me.

I would love to go out into the world and do amazing things, and I am fully confident that I can do it, too.

But of course, first I would have to choose which amazing things, and therein lies the rub. As I have written here before, the science is clear that giving people more than a certain number of options makes them less happy with their choices, because what are the odds they have chosen the “right” ones?

And past that point, the more options there are, the unhappier people get.

Now imagine you are me, and in every choice in life you can see ten times the options of the normal person, and you begin to get an idea of why I have such problems picking a path in life and why I keep talking about a million hallways with a million doors each and other such metaphors.

That might be a scam, though. Let me explain.

This whole option paralysis bullshti is probably just one of the tools my depression uses to keep me in my place. I’m thinking that’s the whole reason it generates all those options and all those potential versions of myself.

I’d be lying if I said I knew how to make my mind stop generating a gazillion possibilities all the damned time. But surely (hi Shirley!) there is some kind of solution.

Of course there is. It’s called growing up and growing a pair. It’s called being capable of making a decision and sticking to it without constantly doubting myself. It’s called connecting with my Evil Kirk so Good Kirk can finally make up his mind about things.

But that would involve actually, ya know…. doing stuff.

So that can’t be right.

Seriously though, I think I am making progress there. I am finding it easier to imagine myself as a joyously engaged in and connected with reality, with days full of doings and a solid feeling of productivity to justify my existence.

It helps enormously to imagine it all as a game. Fun stuff I do in order to get out there in the world (online) and try to trick the world into giving me money.

That makes the whole thing way, way less scary. I’m practically gamifying life. That way the gap between playing video games all day and actually being productive seems a lot more like something I could actually leap.

And it keeps reality from getting too real for me to handle by putting it on the other side of this here computer screen. If I do it all online, I can probably handle it. If it’s online, that no matter what the emotional and social content is, the physical content is still just text and pictures on my computer screen.

And I can handle that.

But again : what to do, specifically? Everything is so simple and easy when you speak in generalities but what will I actually do? Which of the billions of possibilities I contain will I choose to become real?

That makes it all sound like some bizarre existentialist reality show.

The problem is that I come up with a possibility, like all that talk about becoming a public speaker in yesterday’s blog entry. And it all seems righteously possible and like a wonderful idea that would totally work, and I can even feel myself beginning to engage with the idea as a possibility and starting to think of how I would make it real.

And then my mind says “Yes, that would be nice. ” and hits the pause button HARD. Because now, it’s a real battle between my desire to act and move forward and my depression’s desire to keep me right where I am, where it can control things.

It just wants to keep me safe. in its horribly misguided and fucked up way.

So nothing ever comes of it. But I have hope because those dreams might still be getting put on pause, but they are getting bigger and brighter and more real every single time I dream one up.

And some day, I will dream one so vivid and perfect it will become reality.

Because it will then become..a quest.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.