Mouse as in the input device, not the adorable rodent.

Earlier, my mouse was being very naughty. It was connecting and disconnecting randomly, and it was shredding my poor nerves.

I don’t handle that kind of thing well. I’m too high strung.

The problem appears to be the cord connecting the mouse to Mister Computer. ^[1] I had to play a game similar to the contortions you used to have to do to get a TV signal back in the days of broadcast television just to get it working again.

Yes, my children, there was a time BEFORE the cable TV that you now presumably find quaint and strange and hard to understand.

There was even a time where if you wanted to watch a TV show, you had to actually be in front of a TV set at the time it was broadcast or you were SSOL.

Ask your dad what that means.

I’m still wrapping my brain around the fact that the generation I still think of as “the next generation”, Millennials, are actually the first place winners of the old people contest now. They are yesterday’s news, just like the hippies were in the 1970s.

Now we have Gen Z in the coveted “young people today” position and Generation Alpha is waiting in the wings.

The oldest Gen Alpha kids are 14 right now, meaning these kids were born in 2010 at the earliest, and that is so weird to me.

I’m only now learning to accept 90’s nostalgia. And I know we will be switching to early 2000s nostalgia soon and I will be completely lost.

I mean, I am already completely lost because I have never watched any of the one hour dramas that rule the culture for a spell.

So no Game of Thrones, no Downton Abbey, no The Sopranos, no Breaking Bad, no The Wire, no Orange is the New Black, nothing. None of these shows appealed to me.

Admittedly, that is largely because by the time I hear of these shows, they are already massive cultural juggernauts and I instinctively hide from shit like that.

I’m Gen-X and that means I inherenly avoid massively popular mainstream things. To me, those things always read as “crowded”, emotionally speaking, and I don’t endure tightly packed crowds for anything short of immortality.

Social anxiety. Claustrophobia. Bad childhood experiences. An extremely strong need for autonomy. By their powers combined, these things make tight crowds a no-go.

Oh, and tragically poor childhood socialization too.

I try to keep an open mind about things. I don’t reject things solely because they are mainstream. I am open to absolutely anything being good.

But I confess that when something gets acclaimed as the new thing “everyone” is watching, that makes me want to avoid it like the proverbial plague.

Call it anti-social. Call me a typical “edgy” Gen X-er. Call me closeminded. I won’t argue with any of those.

But I have been a contrarian all my life. Whichever way the herd went, I went the other way, and benefitted from whatever they left behind.

There can be a potent advantage in being an outlier.

Which is good, because the reasons I have to stay at the edge of the herd are not good.

Deep down in the guts of my nervous system, I am still the monkey raised in isolation who now sees the other monkeys as a threat.

I consider myself lucky that all this resulted in was my being a loner. It could have been so much worse. I could have ended up with a rage disorder, or Asperger’s, or even severe withdrawn nonverbal autism.

And the one thing I am not is a misanthrope.

Even though God knows I have every reason to be.

More after the break.

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More about misanthropy

The thing about misanthropy is that it’s not logically supportable.

None of our opinions on “people” are valid. There is no person named “people” about whom we can generalize. There’s almost eight billion human beings alive on planet Earth right now, and you think you know something about ALL of them?

Any opinion we have about “people” (or “humanity” or “the average citizen” or whatever) is clearly hopelessly biased by our own singular personal experiences which cannot, in any sense, be taken to be typical for the entire species.

Same with opinions about “life”. Whose life? When? Where? If you think life sucks, then that must mean that you think literally nobody is happy. Not even the people whose success in life you envy and resent.

Now I am not saying these abstractions are not necessary. Indeed, I am not even saying they are optional. Our anthropomorphic bias is so incredibly pervasive and strong that we even have to relate to the entire species AND life itself like it’s a person.

It’s hardwired into us. Myself included. I have had dark thoughts about “people” and “life” before. Knowing that these abstractions are irrational hardly makes me immune.

But it does give me a way to rescue myself from such dark ruminations. I can remind myself that whatever I am feeling about “people” is not based on anything rational and therefore I am free to discard it and return to neutral whenever I want to.

Because the truth is, we don’t know anything about “everybody”. But that truth is so massively unacceptable to us that we have no choice but to pretend we do.

The real truth of unique individuality multiplied by eight billion people is absolute madness and chaos without some degree of generalization.

And as irrational as they may be, these generalizations are functional. They “work”. They allow us to navigate the extreme complexity of the modern human social web without completely losing our minds and ending up hiding under the bed.

So consider these accurate but unwelcome observations of mine to be something you simply keep in your back pocket for emergencies in which an exit from social reality and its distortions is needed.

Otherwise, carry on illogically.

After all, we’re only human!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.