People are just broken
People are just broken
The shortfalls of society are usually more mundane and personal.
I used to have a roommate that I lived with for some time. We met through a mutual friend who was also formerly a roommate, and over the months since it’s been us and my immediate family living together he has slowly turned into a stranger for no apparent reason.
One of the things he often does to all of us that gets on our nerves is that he has no impetus to greet us at all. My husband and I spent months greeting him when he would walk in the door, and half the time he wouldn’t even respond to us. When he did, he was very short about it. But he never initiated or said hello, and that’s one of those basic things you’re (supposedly) taught when you are five. Now that he’s 25, there’s really no one to tell him. You generally say hi to the people that you live with unless you just did that already or something. But it’s more than that.
One time I woke up to go to work in the morning and asked him to turn down his phone where he was watching TikTok, and he straight up told me “no.” We were both up at two in the morning getting ready to go to work, and my husband was waiting in the living room to chauffeur me while this stupid argument went down between us in the kitchen. He told me that “I have two rooms and play my stereo” as justification for his behaviour, which is a really toxic thing to say. I started cussing him out and he turned it down but I really didn’t care at that point, because he pissed me off. You know, people are like this! It confused the hell out of me at first, and then made me very angry once I realised he was choosing to be an asshole. He’s never apologised or talked about it since, and even had a big fake 20 minute conversation with me the next weekend while I was drunk. I’m sure that made him feel a lot better about the altercation where he was so much more in the wrong. People really are broken like this. And I think about what he did to me every day he comes in here and doesn’t even say hello. It’s hard not to be bothered even just a little bit, continuing to live with an irredeemable toxic asshole roommate, but that’s life. Everything comes to an end eventually.
You wouldn’t expect any of this out of him if you didn’t know him, or if you only knew him as an employee. He’s very good at concealing how broken he is, and it’s not a manipulative or insidious sort of thing. He goes to the gym every day, lives on frozen ready-made grocery store junk, has no friends, and no life. He has a nice speaking demeanour and is physically attractive. We’ve all been told he’s saving up to go to school. Lots of young women lust after him, but he takes his gigachad body and wastes it being alone all the time because he refuses to learn how to socialise with people. He used to jerk off all the time but is now proud of going abstinent, which is a hilarious deflection of what the root problem seems to be with his sex life. People are like this!
Keeping up appearances isn’t going to work when your moment arrives and the stress is real, because the real world doesn’t run on appearances. It runs on saying hello in the morning and generally being liked. I think this disconnect is what people hearken to when they talk about clowns, or the “clown world.” People do shitty TikTok dances and become prostitutes in a hundred different ways because they mortgaged their soul a long time ago. Even Christianity is getting co-opted into the performance, with zero self-awareness. You’ll keep posting, because there’s nowhere deeper in your life than a social media feed to find meaning in anymore. And you’ll have no idea what you’re even looking at, because you’ve traded away what you see with what you do, becoming effectively schizophrenic. Somebody can be 1,000% right about something but if it’s not presented in the most flattering and digestible way, you’ll say they’re so obviously wrong. Basic reality is devolved for you into a masturbatory aesthetic, because you can’t handle the truth.
I read discourses sometimes on social media, I think about drama and careers and all of the cheap advice I’ve ever read about breaking into an industry, and moments like these where I’m ignored in my own home makes me realise that most people’s problem is much more simple. People are broken, and as a result they don’t give a shit about others, because their brokenness makes for conflict that they can’t confront and take responsibility for. Hell, even zoomers are so bad that they act like it’s fucking cool to not care. That’s insane.
They need to say hello, but they don’t. They need to apologise or make amends, but they run away. They need to keep going even when they’re being awkward, but they get stuck in their heads and make it worse. They need to go outside, but they stay home. And on and on and on. It’s a people problem, and the problem is about giving a shit. Forget about politics and artificial intelligence until you can conquer this most basic of tasks. Even Elon struggles with it. A fact that needs to be drilled into people: even if you are broken, you can still choose to give a shit.
There’s no substitute for giving a shit. You can’t fake it, either. In anything that matters people will see through it instantly. Replacing all of your real connections with fake aesthetics and consumerist garbage is an awful coping mechanism. Steely Dan said you can’t buy a thrill, and that was obvious in the 1970s. Will you start caring?
Besides the roommate, my other impetus for penning this came from a viral video out of New York City I saw in which an angry old man was spitting absolute intolerant truth and dignity to a trumpet player in the park. Clipped out of context by a surreptitious smartphone recorder, it makes him look terrible, but if you listen to what he says you realise he is right.
I don’t know about you, but if it’s categorically impossible to have these kinds of unflattering interventions into society, we’re basically guaranteed to devolve it into a 24/7 minstrel show. Something about the phones has got to stop to stop that.