Mom, Watch Me Di(v)e

If you're not fucked up already, have you considered fucking yourself up?

Locked in a building
The place is on fire
Up in the penthouse
Taking a view
Alarms are ringing
The seconds are ticking
The canisters fly
And everyone laughs
And everyone laughs
- VNV Nation, "Lights Go Out"

(I don’t know if the title is culturally universal, so to anyone who doesn’t get it: there was (I have no idea if this is still a thing) a nearly universal practice of American kids at swimming pools demanding, “mom, watch me dive” as they would go off of the diving board, as when you’re little, you perceive it as an act of great courage and skill but your mom finds it about as interesting as a root canal after the 1,000th time in a row you’ve watched them dive. For a long time in TV, comics, etc., “mom, watch me dive… that’s nice, dear” was a kind of storytelling shorthand for a mom being ground down by a kid’s constant demand for attention and the sort of mindless repetition that kids have such a high tolerance for.)

A close friend I lost during the COVID lockdowns- who broke up with me because I had become a ‘dangerous right-wing radical’ (exact words) had, in our happier days, recommended a book to me as part of the “cultural exchange” aspect of our relationship when he became aware of how dramatically different our apparent politics were. It was called “Conflict Is Not Abuse,” a fairly famous tome in some circles, and it was so important to him that I read it that he offered to pay for it if I bought it and didn’t like it. (I declined that part, I don’t need to be bribed.)

The book- not my friend’s endorsement- ended up feeling like a little bit of a Trojan horse, as the thesis is mainly used to argue the pervasiveness of systemic racism, evil police, and weirdly specific stuff about Israel. It was clearly not written to persuade people like me of anything, but it was an interesting read because I could almost align with the underlying argument and remained baffled as to why the author didn’t see the argument as immediately disruptive to their own ideology, as it was (as I read it) a direct broadsides on progressive notions of victimhood and intersectionality thereof.

Anyway, without all the endless specifics of how it’s bad to call the police on nonwhite people, the foundational argument was surprisingly sober and roughly as follows: that we as a society have reached a sufficient level of numbness to people’s need for their distress (whether it be physical, emotional, or spiritual) to be acknowledged and responded to that we have become collectively conditioned that we’ll only get attention if we present everything as a SUPER EMERGENCY. It’s like the girlfriend that used to text you 911 all the time, back when phones were made out of dinosaur bones and texts were a pain.

The author was mainly concerned about the fact that this led to people calling the police about things that didn’t rise to the level of a police response, which would then invariably lead to police overreaction, etc. etc. It became progressively (for both meanings of the word) convoluted until there was a bunch of stuff in the last half about Palestine that I didn’t really understand how to connect, and then other stuff about restorative justice, but by that point my eyes had glazed over.

Anyway, there was a very valid observation: we have collectively learned to exaggerate our distress and our perceived suffering because we have learned that the normal, day-to-day things that hurt us don’t arouse anyone’s interest or sympathy. In a world where cutting your arm in the kitchen or stepping on a nail is boring, you’d better have cancer if you want anyone to come running, and it had better be a COOL kind of cancer with its own pronouns or something.

Pictured here: This is very cool cancer. Plus it makes you a better woman, apparently. I’m assuming my grandmother died because she wasn’t sufficiently feminine.

As insightful as this is, I think there’s actually an even more fundamental layer to this that goes a long way to answering the question, “what the fuck is wrong with everyone in general?”

I’m just going to lay out the statement, as I see it, and try to work forwards from there:

We have experienced- on a societal level- some kind of philosophical inversion whereby your social credibility is not in direct proportion to your actions but to your perceived proximity to suffering.

This is foundational to notions like the “victimhood Olympics,” cringe-inducing “diversity hires,” college application essays needing to include a competitive amount of hardship, and so on.

If you are perceived- and the key word here is perceived- to have a chronic limitation- you are considered more moral and more worthy. It has to be visible- so if your limitation is well-hidden or minor or entirely the product of your own imagination or belief system, you’d better find a way to illustrate it very graphically, like badges or facial tattoos or something.

Last night when I pulled three ticks out of my scalp, while on day two of being sick in bed with the flu or something (I’m fine now), I joked to Husbandmouth that I might get lucky and have “chronic Lyme” and make him take care of me forever. “What’s that?” I went on to explain that it was another one of those diseases that has absolutely no reliable diagnostic test or measurable symptoms for anyone but the patient that you have to doctor-shop for to find someone who will diagnose you that seems to somehow cluster in middle-aged women. (Yes, I’m aware that by most standards I am myself at this point a middle-aged woman.)

Those poor middle-aged women, Husbandmouth joked. Is their immune system missing something?

I joked in response, “attention.”

I fully expect a fair amount of abuse in the comments from people whose undetectable illness is, in fact, real. Please rest assured that I am not talking about you, I’m talking about everyone else except you, those fucking liars.

Immediately after I made the joke, I felt that little pit that happens simultaneously in my stomach and my brain when I feel like I’ve had a thought with broader implications to my understanding of things.

It is, in fact, an attention deficit disorder- but not the one that lets you drug your kids or get away with not being able to hold down a job.

Let me take a very brief tangent to talk about evolution, which is the brutal and heartless system of natural selection that made us possible. There is absolutely no advantage to weakness of any kind- mental, physical, or social. If you’re an individual with such a weakness, your only hope of passing on your genes is to compensate for that weakness in a way that lets you grow up strong enough to survive and meet a mate. There have never been “sympathy passes” for anything that directly interferes in the ability of an organism to survive to adulthood, meet a mate, and reproduce.

The purpose of that incredibly obvious previous statement is simply to make it clear that there is no natural incentive whatsoever to glorify or accentuate attributes of oneself that make you appear less capable, attractive, competent, intelligent, or healthy- and yet we seem to have entered an era in which self-admitted liabilities are not in fact liabilities but are the absolute tip of the motherfucking peacock’s tail- and how drab, dull, and unimpressive people that are merely healthy, sane, sober, well-adjusted, and sexually typical are.

As a society TODAY we have, collectively, become aware- from early childhood, for those of us young enough to have been born into this soup- that there is not enough love and attention in the ecosystem anymore that we will get as much as we need to be happy simply by existing in a non-bad way. You have to stand out, and the vast majority of ways to stand out positively enough to be ADORED are competitively impossible for most of us, are based on immutable traits we don’t have, or are simply things we’re not equipped, trained, or educated to pursue.

Why just be gay or straight when you could be something requiring an entirely new set of made-up words that is so unfathomable that people will oppress you without even trying? Why be boring old “neurotypical” when you can have super powers that others only dream of having? Disability is more interesting than health. Oppression is more interesting than success. Minority is more interesting than majority. Weakness is more interesting than strength. A lifetime of drama-riddled poor decisions is more interesting than holding a job and supporting a family.

I am not denying that disability, mental illness, or oppression literally exist in the world. They do. But increasingly, they seem to be accomplishments or virtues in themselves- traits that confer an inherent nobility, courage, or success- rather than the voluntary actions one takes that would logically signal one’s worth.

I posit that the insane shit that people are “self-identifying” as like fish and cake, or the relentless focus on things like race or the oppression of one’s ancestors or bad decisions one’s parents made or medical or mental diagnoses, are a survival mechanism. If we’re wired normally, we want love and attention, and there isn’t enough to go around unless you REALLY GET PEOPLE’S ATTENTION, so words are literally violence because I have to compete with that guy that got shotgunned in Afghanistan by a 10-year old and now has nightmares whenever he sees a kid in public when all I have is that a 10-year old at a gas station said I have a dyke haircut. ¹

We are scrambling for ways to trick, cajole, and demand that Mom watch us dive, and it isn’t all Mom’s fault.

I know that the kind of behavior I’m talking about is infantile, ridiculous, and annoying, and there’s tremendous countercultural satisfaction in meme-ing, mocking, insulting, and ostracizing people that do it. It’s 100% understandable to look at this as both symptomatic and causative of the continued dumbing and dividing and degrading of society.

You can say things like (for example), “well, this is all because we’ve rejected God and we need to come back to Jesus for our lives to have meaning and families to be healthy and society to be moral,” but if that’s your position, you need to be able to explain how exactly people who didn’t find anything they were looking for in traditional values could be motivated to return to them. Saying, “well, they just should, because it’s the only way to live a meaningful life without becoming a self-destructive lunatic” implies that the solution is self-evident, when for a couple billion people, it very clearly isn’t self-evident.

We can say with confidence that society is collectively losing its mind, and that the forms of acting out that we see around us- the stupid, the ridiculous, and the lethal- are clearly not appropriate responses to our present moment, but WHY, if we allegedly had such clear routes to a healthy society, did we go astray so thoroughly and catastrophically, and why weren’t those routes good enough for the present moment?

If you genuinely care about the situation, you have to try to understand it- not sympathize, not reward, not applaud, not like, but understand. As the old saying goes, would you rather actually get somewhere, or would you rather be right? Or something like that.

By the way, Mathew Crawford does a great job of dipping into specific areas of this in his Rounding The Earth stack:

A Historical Theory About the Cambrian Gender Explosion, Part 2

I think there are a couple of interlocking systems at play here:

1. Entitlement. We have been led to believe that we should expect a LOT more external satisfaction than the ecosystem can actually supply, and most of us won’t have the outlying amounts of wealth/luck/etc. to actually have it. We are not all beautiful, brilliant, or talented, and live a life where those gifts bring us adoration and success, but we’ve been told we SHOULD be, so when it doesn’t happen, we respond logically to it as a wrong outcome.

2. Neglect. A hell of a lot of people don’t have the attention span or social skills to treat each other well. Relationships aren’t as satisfying because they’re more superficial or happen at virtual removes or are more contingent or transactional because they’re based on social alliances around media/politics/ideology. Parents are absent or on their phone all the time or have absolutely no clue what they’re doing. This becomes an endless downward spiral as emotional cripples have children and emotionally cripple them.

3. Globalization. We are competing with literally the entire world and massive urban populations all at once to get into a handful of American colleges, get a tiny minority of high-paying jobs, get a spot on American Idol, get a date on an online dating network where prospective partners can compare us to literally 1000 other women or men every single day, and so on. We are told it’s bad to coalesce around homogeneous cultures and belief systems and that an atomized globe is a happier more just state for humanity.

   There are 7 billion of us and 6.999 billion of us will live completely unremarkable lives (at best, and a whole lot worse at worst) and we are all convinced that this need not be so. We are designed to compare ourselves to a couple hundred people at most. In the developed world, most of the underpinnings of our life break our evolutionary wiring in every conceivable way.

4. Existential horror. Right or wrong, there’s an increasing sense that there is no higher purpose to our existence- God, faith, or otherwise- and humans are not designed to cope with this at all. In fact, I think it’s probably the most basic separation of the human soul from other animals- a vulnerability that comes with what we believe makes human sentience distinct and unique. Before even our basic physical survival, the developed human mind requires a narrative that is resilient to reality, and it reverts to nihilistic self-destruction every single time that narrative breaks down beyond repair. We’re currently building insane totalitarian systems around the world to generate meaning in the absence of religious structures generating meaning for us. That’s how important existential meaning is- and the consequence of its withdrawal is always a perverse mutilation of the self in ever-widening circles.

…this article sat on my desktop for about three days at this point, here, because I had no idea how to continue it, and work and life happened in ways that made free-form creativity kind of take a vacation from my brain. Here I am on Wednesday, looking at this thing I wrote on the weekend while a confluence of a school shooting and economic crisis and a bunch of other bullshit all smashed together in my/our consciousness.

As I nudged at myself all this week to get back and finish this, a growing part of me began to say, “just delete it, it’s a waste of time and one of your shittier pieces of work. Everyone is going psycho because they’re not loved enough? Come on. You and Brothermouth would be hooting “gaaaaay” from the back of the room if someone gave this speech.”

But I have a distinct feeling that I’m right, even if I don’t like the way it sounds and don’t have strong answers to it.

I’m not sure we come back from this.

Discuss.

1. *This did not actually happen. A long time ago, a grown man at a gas station who was very drunk said I was wearing ‘dyke boots’ when I had my Doc Martens on, and I thought it was hilarious. But it made the analogy a lot funnier.)