I want to start off this blog with some sad news. Two weeks ago, I euthanised my dogs. It was, is, to date, the third-worst day of my life. The second was the day Andrea died. The first was the day I needed to tell her she was going to die.
My boy doggle, Laszlo, was with me for fourteen years. My girl, Laika, for thirteen. I’ve known my boy only a year less than I knew my wife. This one hurt like a bastard. It has left an emptiness inside that I cannot comprehend yet know all too well. I’m intimately acquainted with it. I know and understand grief on a deep and personal level. So, what do you do when you’ve just held your doggies after you said goodbye to them?
Well, the sun goes down, the sun comes up, and you need to carry on living. Life has an infuriating way of doing that. It just carries on! Wednesday morning, switch on the laptop, open up Facebook and… boy, is the world fucked!
Everyone has an opinion on something. On how evil Musk is, on how beneficent he is. How stupid Trump is, his sheer genius. How cryptocurrencies are Ponzi schemes and how it’s the greatest asset ever invented. And none of these opinions are nuanced or contextualised. Everything is an “absolute unit” of great/shit. For a world so focused on not being binary, opinions sure as heck are!
I’ve recently read some books by Scott Adams, and he mentions how it’s possible for people to watch the same screen but see different movies. And now we decide what movie we’re watching, take it to the extreme, and defend it with vitriol, violence, and a certain bitterness that is absolutely toxic.
Albert Maysles said one of my favourite quotes:
“Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance”
Welcome to our world. Everything is rage-bait. Everything is a “gotcha” moment of somebody ridiculing a political opponent. In this case, “political” means, in the sense of Carol Hanisch’s definition of “the personal is political,” i.e., everything is political. These days, the brand of salt you buy is a political statement. The jeans you wear, an act of activism. There’s that famous meme: “To prove people will argue about anything, here’s a picture of a stick”.
And boy, do they! Make no mistake: this is carefully curated. This division, this deliberate removal of nuance to get people arguing, is not accidental or incidental. It’s a carefully curated piece of marketing. Outrage bait is great! I saw one last week: “Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster might crash back into Earth after space launch and land him in a lot of trouble”. All the Elon-haters were “such a knob” and “not such a genius now, is he?” Thousands of gleeful rage-baited anti-Elon comments to feed the advertising machine. But read the article, and it does not follow the headline. It states there is a 6% chance his Tesla could crash back to Earth in the next million years. The outrage machine feasts! Nobody reads the facts, and nobody is interested in the nuance. They are only interested in the headline that would get all the clicks, all the likes, all the advertising dollars. It’s clickbait culture, baby, and it’s gone rogue!
Now, it is a Sunday morning, and I miss my dogs terribly. I miss my wife. My father. My buddy Lucy. My muse kinky slinky. And what do I see on X, on Facebook, on Instagram? The outrage machine hard at work with a single mission: to piss you off so you can rage-click and fight with your fellow human being about a stick.
All this bullshit when there are books to be read (and written), walks to be taken, beers to be enjoyed with friends, loves to be had with puppies, love to be made, meals to be enjoyed.
Do yourself a favour: do not feed the outrage machine. Take the stick and throw it for your dogs. It’s so much more rewarding than bitching and moaning about the political conspiracy du jour. Disengage from the machine. They need you, and you do not need them! Your dogs, your spouse, your dreams deserve better.
Laika taking one last look at her world before crossing the rainbow bridge.
