I sit, reading a book, while my kid plays with all the stupid bullshit other people have bought for him.
I am trying to model a behavior. I want my son to be the type of person who says “growing up, my parents were always reading”. I fantasize about a car ride in the future where he innocently asks “dad, what is binge watching?” and I can extoll upon him all the evils of Ted Sarandos and the Netflix corporation.
We live in a confined space where all of our stuff overlaps. My water bottle is occasionally a toy. I look up from my book and see him with a dog toy in his mouth, laughing hysterically. Other times it’s the dog with a cardboard book in his mouth.
“In that living room was where I first learnt about communal space and sharing, not just with other people but also with animals and ultimately the earth itself”, my son will say at a podium in 35 years, during a keynote speech. It’ll be at a well attended conference about protecting the last dozen trees left in America.
“My dad had a great vinyl and blu ray collection” he will say, unprompted, later in the evening.
In the living room again, he pulls the dog’s tail and the dog responds by licking the snot off his face. Out of frustration, my son throws a dog toy at the dog’s head. The dog licks him even more vigorously.
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This is the year I realized I’m not a basketball fan; I’m a Boston Celtics fan.
Watching a 27 year old rupture his achilles live on television, I think about all of the things I’d been ignoring. Am I happy? Or do I know that I should be happy and that knowledge is now giving me some facsimile of happiness that I’m forcing myself to feel? Am I still a communist or do I use Amazon Prime too often? Was I ever a communist or did I just like reading articles online?
Am I drinking too much or am I drinking a normal amount? Would someone who is drinking a normal amount Google “what is a normal amount to drink”?
The AI overview helpfully tells me that I can’t drive a car with a BAC over .08.
The Indiana Pacers are playing the Oklahoma City Thunder. A bunch of podcasters have told me for a week and a half that this will be an entertaining series. It will be “real hoops”. I watch the first quarter of Game 1 and by the second quarter, I’ve re-downloaded Twitter onto my phone.
If you are a Netflix executive then you know that looking at your phone while not paying attention to your television is actually called “the second screen experience”. My second screen experience is watching ICE raids while on my TV Alex Caruso plays tight defense on Tyrese Haliburton.
I type out “this sucks” on my phone and send it to a group chat completely devoid of context.
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Sometimes I try to convince myself that I’m doing something positive for the world. I idly try on ideas like they’re a shitty jacket that I don’t actually want to buy.
Maybe exercising is an act of revolution. Being in good shape. Being healthy in a world that seems to actively want to make us all sick. Being able to live to an old age, to be there for the future when we’ll need “people like me” to be alive. By exercising, I am radically rejecting the American way of life that all of these quote unquote corporations have tried to instill into all of us. Every step I take is a step against factory farming, health insurance companies, Dupont chemical spillage run-off, etc etc.
Or maybe raising a child in this world is the most important thing a person can do. What could be more important than making sure a 6 year old understands that the Pilgrims came to America by accident and this land actually still belongs to the Native American tribes who we mockingly named our cities and counties after? A new generation will eventually be in control of this country and that’s why it’s vital that I tell my 10 year old son that the Constitution is a piece of paper a bunch of racist, religious freaks signed 300 years ago and it’s all been downhill ever since.
Or maybe reading books is part of my praxis; in order to resist a culture of “consumption” created by tech companies, we need to go back to the simple joys of reading books. Holding physical paper. Going to the library. These things may seem small, but they are actually a direct response to Silicon Valley and their plan to flatten art into a series of algorithms they can use to “increase subscribers” and then “raise more seed capital”.
None of these feel right. I can see the seams. I don’t really believe these things, I’m just desperately trying to take the shit that I’m already doing and shove it into the “radical revolutionary” shaped outline that I’ve created in my brain.
I just want to feel like I’m doing something positive without actually having to change anything about my life, is that so much to ask for?
