Random Thoughts, Part 18: Random is the New Order

 

My Random Thoughts series continues with Part 18! Still with random memes for exponential randomness! In fact, my inventory of memes is at an all-time high. These memes have to go! Enjoy!

 

431. What if wars involving mostly Black and brown people got half as much US media attention as wars involving mostly white people?

 

 

432. Coming of age in the 1990’s probably had a big part in making me interested in learning about various cultures of the world, because the 1990’s was perhaps the only decade in the last 90 or so years of American history when Americans weren’t constantly told to be scared of large portions of the world.

 

 

433. A few of the many ways I am deeply uncool:

·      I rarely want to watch a YouTube video posted on social media.

·      I would almost always rather read text than watch a video.

·      I often don’t turn on Netflix because the way it plays super loud clips when you’re just deciding what to watch is deeply annoying to me.

·      If a tweet says “(thread)” or a Facebook post is several paragraphs long, I will almost certainly stop reading (unless it’s Michael Harriot), but if a social media post links to a blog post, think piece, or news article, I might read that.

 

 

434. I am wondering (hoping?) that the age of hyper-anger that came to a peak in the late 2010’s is declining. Maybe we are moving into tired and sad times. Or maybe that’s just me. I’ve always been more prone to sadness than anger, and who wouldn’t be tired after … all this?

 

 

435. Robert Pattinson is a sad, tired Batman for our sad, tired times.

 

 

436. Buying a house and getting married are two times in your life when people will be happy for you, but they also start having all sorts of unsolicited opinions about your life.

 

 

 

437. A difficult thing for many white men given our socialization into the role of Knowers of All Things is to realize that there are things we do not understand and perhaps are not meant to understand, and then to be okay with that.

 

 

 

438. My online life became vastly better when I made a conscious decision not to be a Reply Guy.

 

 

439. I’m okay with Gen X being erased from conversations about generations. Maybe this is a very Gen X thing to say, but I never wanted to be part of a “generation” anyway. How lame. Whatever.

 

 

440. Things that happen on movies/TV that would be puzzling in real life:

·      People ending conversations without saying goodbye

·      People just not answering questions and walking away, instead of doing the polite thing and giving an awkward, evasive answer

·      Especially in sit-coms: everyone lives in clean, large suburban houses and/or palatial, tastefully decorated Big City apartments and does a fair bit of international travel, but they never worry about paying the bills, despite having what in real life would be low paying jobs along with frequent career and family changes

·      Everyone is thin, attractive, and wealthy enough they don’t have to worry about money

 

 

 

441. Why is so much of contemporary American conservatism about delighting in cruelty toward vulnerable people?

 

 

442. Sometimes I’m tired of, like, doing stuff. Other times I want to pack in as much as I can in my lifetime. Yet other times I wonder if these sentiments are as mutually contradictory as they seem.

 

 

443. I would say that I live my life philosophically in some broader sense, but this does not mean I always want to think about professional philosophy. In fact, the latter is often incompatible with the former.

 

 

444. One thing I like about walking is that your whole mode of knowing the world is different: slower, more intimate, more conducive to Zhuangzian “wandering round and about.” You are in the world rather than passing by it.

 

 

445. I’m mildly amused when people have really strong moral or technological opinions about one social media platform over another when in fact they’re all pretty close to equally awful.

 

 

446. It is in part because of the “equally awful” part mentioned above that I will not share the previous thought on social media.

 

 

 

447. Perhaps my most unpopular and most impractical educational opinion in terms of currently hegemonic educational trends: the most important parts of education cannot be assessed in terms of measurable outcomes.

 

 

448. Capitalism is like a group of privileged college students smoked weed for the first time and came up with an economic system in the ensuing bullshit session, and then we just… did that forever? “It’s, like, an invisible hand, man… everybody will be fine if we just, like, orient all human life around the greed of a small elite class, trust me, bro…” And very late in the session someone is like, “what if NFTs made, like, scarcity out of abundance, but, like, on purpose, or whatever, to make money for assholes? Whoa, dude…”

 

 

449. Some people mistake subtlety for inaction.

 

 

 

450. I feel like we’ve reached the point in the pandemic where I’m trying and failing to explain to people who kind of seem okay now that this massive upheaval in human history has changed me a bit.

 

 

 

451. Extra credit follows the same route of money and resources in a capitalist economy: those who least need it usually get the most of it.

 

 

452. If half the academics on social media are half as busy as they claim to be… I’m tired on their behalf.

 

 

 

453. Sometimes I think I should start planning meetings at 10pm just to get back at all the morning people who plan meetings before 10am.

 

 

454. The best thing straight men who think abortion is wrong can do to prevent abortion is to stop having sex. This seems obvious, but it says a lot that straight men who oppose abortion never make this argument.

 

 

455. I often talk about “finding myself on this walk” or “these events brought me to this other event,” because—contrary to what seems to be the mainstream American view of agency that often comes to the fore in discussions of fiction—I don’t think of myself as the sole sovereign of my actions. Rather, I see my decisions as merely one part, albeit an important part from my point of view, of a larger complex of causes that includes my past and current experiences, other people’s actions, and from the widest angle, the entire causal history of the universe, if not other universes (if there’s a multiverse!). It feels a bit silly to insist on being the “captain of my destiny” or whatever when I think of it like this!

 

 

456. I’m an “easy grader” probably because deep down I don’t really think that grades measure learning, or at least not the most important parts of learning.

 

 

457. The trick is to learn from the past without fetishizing it, and to move into the future without denigrating all that is past just because it’s past.

 

458. In general I think people overdo the whole “cat person versus dog person thing.” I like dogs just fine even if I prefer cats. But there’s a certain type of dog person who is not disabled but wants to bring their dog to all public indoor spaces: bars, restaurants, workplaces, etc. … I kinda don’t get that. It doesn’t offend me. I just don’t understand why you’d assume everyone wants to deal with your dog.

 

 

459. Some combination of decades of philosophy (especially Buddhism and Stoicism) and being a weirdo has led me to a place where I don’t really think people can be praised or blamed for anything at the deepest level of reality. This isn’t to say that praise and blame aren’t useful language-games or conventional truths or something. But at the end of the day people and events could not have been different than they are. It sounds depressing to some, but it’s actually liberating once you see that this doesn’t mean people and events must continue to be the way they are.

 

 

460. I’m too tired to hate pop culture anymore. You love the Star Wars prequels? More power to you! That’s between you and the Force.

 

 

461. White supremacist mass shootings are as American as baseball and genocide. That’s the current horror of it, but it doesn’t have to continue to be this way.

 

 

462. I used to joke about how I don’t have a fashion sense. But I think it’s even worse. I don’t have a sense of the very concept of fashion. We’re all conscious meat bags hurtling through the void! Wear whatever you want! What difference does it make to anybody else what cloth you put on your meat bag?

 

 

 

463. Some people see a popular trend and want to find out more about it. Others see a popular trend, say, “Meh,” and go about their business.