I know I said I'd stop writing this blog, as it has mostly been just me screaming into the void, but I feel like screaming, anyway.
Last February I turned forty years old. I've had a lot of thoughts on it, so this will be part one of a series of posts on my aging.
I wasn't sure how to respond to that. I know I don't talk much in real life, which is weird, because when I first met my wife I was a social butterfly. I would joke with random strangers. Didn't mind just going up to people and saying hi. Just thinking about it makes me chuckle at how young I was, because it was a really long time ago.
A few weeks ago I was thinking about that myself. I never talked to people anymore. Unless it's about politics. I didn't tell people about my personal life and I didn't care much about theirs, but if the subject of politics came up, I could have an hour long discussion about it. Your hobbies? I don't care. How was your vacation? Don't give a shit. But Trump decided to abandon the Kurds to be slaughtered in Rojava and I had a lot of things to say about it.
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| I really hope he goes away forever now |
This had been a thing long before Trump. I started being politically active in 2004, when I was worried that George W. Bush was going to get my balls blown off by sending me to Iraq (I joined the military in 2002, shortly after 9/11). I volunteered for John Kerry and did my best to make sure Bush was a one term president. That didn't work out, I got sent to Iraq, and managed to not get my balls (or any other part of my anatomy) blown off. I did my part for the American empire and survived.
During my time in Iraq, I started getting into political blogging. It was the only way I could do any sort of political work. Talking about how much the president sucks ass while in military uniform was not a smart move economically, and being able to speak anonymously about things going on felt safe. When I came home, I continued political blogging while doing activism work in real life.
However...
By 2010 I had become disillusioned with the Democratic Party and stopped going to meetings or paying dues. I started being active on Facebook and found a bunch of political pages to like and before long my whole feed was filled with it. In 2013, I was working up to 70 hours a week, and with a new kid I didn't have any time to spend with friends or meet other people. So my entire social life has been online.
I previously wrote about Facebook changing their algorithm during the mid-2010s. They made it so you would be more likely to see things that would make you angry. And they succeeded. My entire online social life began to be a series of arguments with Republicans. Just non-stop arguing. That was the only time I was really talking to anyone.
Thinking back to this blog, I started it in late 2013, and if you look closely enough, you can see the change in me where I was having a bit of a life (did a lot of running in 2014) and over the years I started talking more and more about politics. You can see my personality evolving.
Being that obsessed about politics wasn't doing my depression any favors. When I found opportunities to be happy I felt guilty about being happy. Oh, you want to be happy?, I'd tell myself. Must be nice being a privileged cis white dude. You know racism is still a thing, right? And then I'd go back to being depressed, because being depressed meant I least gave a shit.
But feelings are meaningless without action, and despite my best efforts, I haven't taken a lot of action. This is not because of laziness or a lack of motivation, but because between having a full time job that has me working both nights and weekends, along with raising two kids, I simply do not have the time. Most real world political stuff (rallies, meetings, organizing) takes place when I'm working or sleeping. It doesn't make any sense for me to be angry or depressed about things that I can't even organize collectively to change.
In the age of Covid, you can see online that this constant anger is a common phenomenon now. Go to any comment section of a news page on Facebook or wherever, and you see it. I think watching other people do the same behavior I had been engaged in for years caused me to have some introspection on it. Watching people be angry at relatively mundane things and raging in the comment section just seemed weird. The protesting of the quarantine was weird. People making plans to kidnap and kill the Governor or Michigan because they couldn't have sit down service at Applebee's was weird. It was strange that people were mad about a simple safety measure. But they were told on social media to be mad, so mad they got. With people having to stay home to avoid getting sick, being online was the most social they could get, and many started going down the same path I took years ago. And as people got more and more insane I had to look at myself and how social media was affecting my mind and mental health.
Now that I'm forty, it doesn't make sense to be mad about things that I can't fix. I'm certainly not saying that nobody can or should fix it. If you have the ability to organize to make things better, please do it. It's just that I'm too fucking old now to be angry when I can't do anything.
Last night I was laying in bed with my wife and thinking about what she had said to me a few days prior about being hard to talk to. And since I had a few days to think about it, I told her that it's easy to know what's going on inside my head. It's all politics, all the time. When a conversation isn't about politics, my mind wanders and thinks about politics. I judge people based on my standards of politics and if they aren't as far left as I am, I think they're a horrible person. I know she's scared to talk to me about politics because she never felt like she was one bad day away from burning it all down, and she's scared that I'd leave her or resent her for it. I let politics become my entire personality and I'm tired of it.
I'm forty now. I'm going to leave the saving of the world to the Zoomers and younger millennials who are more woke and politically aware than previous generations before them, The people who have the time to make change and make it better. As for me, I'm going to work on being happy and enjoying my life. I deserve to be happy.
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