When I was young, I devoured books, to help offset the boredom of living in a nothing little suburb. Boredom was a menace, to be dreaded if not feared. How many hours dragged slowly, tediously by, as I felt the laborious slowness that truly defines life? No wonder we seek to escape it—a world of idle amusements has its drawbacks, but have you lived in a world without amusements?
I can't fault people who seek out ways of drowning out the ongoing Slow. I can even empathize with people who, in their drive to escape, turn to sociopathy and sadism. It's awful, but I remember all-too-keenly the need to fill that void that wasn't a void, less an emptiness than a banal fullness, a stuffed-to-the-brim Presence that grated—grated—against the ongoing effort of consciousness to find significance, meaning, or belonging. I've found my avoidance mechanisms, but on some level I still feel that deep aversion: play me about 45 seconds of a song I have no interest in, especially if there's an expectation that I like it, and I'll start to react the same way I do to poison ivy.
Books were my primary form of escape. Video games came close behind—and in video games I found the pleasure of the neverending loop, the ten-second mechanical riff that you repeat ad nauseum, with some nebulous future goal in mind to assure yourself that there is a reason for pushing forward. That loop is more common across genres of game than we give it credit for: the grind of an RPG or idle game isn't fundamentally different from the failure loop of a platformer or shooter, and is analogous to the moving of a piece in chess, or the dribble of a basketball.
Gary Gygax once said, of Dungeons and Dragons, that the mechanics are just an excuse to justify the sound of rolled dice. I think, too, that the allure of many games is that they offer some justification for rupturing that voidless void.
Video games are a contradiction: they're slow things that feel fast. You don't want a game to "end"—and here I would define the end of a game as the point at which you no longer want to play it. A game like Super Hexagon, which you can lose in a matter of seconds, isn't "over" when you've "lost" it: in fact, a term like "lost" is almost rhetorical, as is the idea that "a game" of Super Hexagon, singular, starts with the start of a level and ends when you've lost it. The game more accurately consists of a series of attempts in quick succession, and lasts far longer than the four seconds your first failed effort will take you. In a broader sense, all games work like this: you have instances of the game being played, and then you have a larger tent of that game within which all those instances reside. The individual instances are always faster, but the real game is usually the vaster and slower thing, the overall trajectory of the player. It can last a lifetime without feeling like a lifetime. That unbearable span becomes punctured by the illusion of immediacy.
This is the principle by which sports fandom is a game unto itself—a game almost but not quite entirely unrelated to the sport it's attached to. You don't have to play football to love a football team, or to follow it over the decades. Jon Bois and Alex Rubinstein's masterful history of the Seattle Mariners, which I watched despite knowing nothing about the Mariners, and despite caring very little about baseball in general, is in some ways a documentary about what it means to become attached to a team: the documentary consists almost entirely of static images and charts, and almost never bothers with the details of any one game, because the passion of a sports fan is measured by years, remembered by exceptional moments that could only exist against a whole nebula of unexceptional ones. The game is to follow along, to become invested, to find meaning—and to suddenly be able to commit yourself to a pocket of time that, in this moment, you can tell yourself matters, even if you almost certainly won't remember or care about this instance a year or a month or even a day from now. The commitment imbues meaning to the instant. Paradoxically and simultaneously, the instant serves to distract, on some level, from the commitment.
The artistry of life lies in the relationship between the two. Were the instant ever to become truly meaningless, it would immediately feel banal and excruciating. The whole must have some kind of meaning. Yet the meaning itself is not enough. We must find a way to be engaged.
I opened this by talking about books, not games, and I did so because books, to me, tend to leave me feeling more satisfied and complete than most kinds of entertainment. Even rereads of old favorites are a pleasure, because the experience of reading a book is the experience of filling your head with rivers of words, until your head is one big lake, and the book's richnesses seep their way into you. Books are difficult to reduce to memes—you can nab quotes from them, but quotes rarely capture the intricacy and complexity of even the cheapest novels, and better writers typically don't constrain themselves to the snappiness of quotation. (This holds for even the snappiest of 'em.) Yet books are far less immediately compelling than most games are, because the thrill of a book is inherently the thrill of its journey, revealed in one long and constrained ribbon. Each word, each sentence, offers the promise of the next, and that promise typically grows and grows as the book goes on. Compare that to the closed loop of a game in which feedback is immediate, actions are immediately met with consequence, and the promise is typically one of complete, sustained engagement from the very start.
I can't fault people who seek out ways of drowning out the ongoing Slow. I can even empathize with people who, in their drive to escape, turn to sociopathy and sadism. It's awful, but I remember all-too-keenly the need to fill that void that wasn't a void, less an emptiness than a banal fullness, a stuffed-to-the-brim Presence that grated—grated—against the ongoing effort of consciousness to find significance, meaning, or belonging. I've found my avoidance mechanisms, but on some level I still feel that deep aversion: play me about 45 seconds of a song I have no interest in, especially if there's an expectation that I like it, and I'll start to react the same way I do to poison ivy.
Books were my primary form of escape. Video games came close behind—and in video games I found the pleasure of the neverending loop, the ten-second mechanical riff that you repeat ad nauseum, with some nebulous future goal in mind to assure yourself that there is a reason for pushing forward. That loop is more common across genres of game than we give it credit for: the grind of an RPG or idle game isn't fundamentally different from the failure loop of a platformer or shooter, and is analogous to the moving of a piece in chess, or the dribble of a basketball.
Gary Gygax once said, of Dungeons and Dragons, that the mechanics are just an excuse to justify the sound of rolled dice. I think, too, that the allure of many games is that they offer some justification for rupturing that voidless void.
Video games are a contradiction: they're slow things that feel fast. You don't want a game to "end"—and here I would define the end of a game as the point at which you no longer want to play it. A game like Super Hexagon, which you can lose in a matter of seconds, isn't "over" when you've "lost" it: in fact, a term like "lost" is almost rhetorical, as is the idea that "a game" of Super Hexagon, singular, starts with the start of a level and ends when you've lost it. The game more accurately consists of a series of attempts in quick succession, and lasts far longer than the four seconds your first failed effort will take you. In a broader sense, all games work like this: you have instances of the game being played, and then you have a larger tent of that game within which all those instances reside. The individual instances are always faster, but the real game is usually the vaster and slower thing, the overall trajectory of the player. It can last a lifetime without feeling like a lifetime. That unbearable span becomes punctured by the illusion of immediacy.
This is the principle by which sports fandom is a game unto itself—a game almost but not quite entirely unrelated to the sport it's attached to. You don't have to play football to love a football team, or to follow it over the decades. Jon Bois and Alex Rubinstein's masterful history of the Seattle Mariners, which I watched despite knowing nothing about the Mariners, and despite caring very little about baseball in general, is in some ways a documentary about what it means to become attached to a team: the documentary consists almost entirely of static images and charts, and almost never bothers with the details of any one game, because the passion of a sports fan is measured by years, remembered by exceptional moments that could only exist against a whole nebula of unexceptional ones. The game is to follow along, to become invested, to find meaning—and to suddenly be able to commit yourself to a pocket of time that, in this moment, you can tell yourself matters, even if you almost certainly won't remember or care about this instance a year or a month or even a day from now. The commitment imbues meaning to the instant. Paradoxically and simultaneously, the instant serves to distract, on some level, from the commitment.
The artistry of life lies in the relationship between the two. Were the instant ever to become truly meaningless, it would immediately feel banal and excruciating. The whole must have some kind of meaning. Yet the meaning itself is not enough. We must find a way to be engaged.
I opened this by talking about books, not games, and I did so because books, to me, tend to leave me feeling more satisfied and complete than most kinds of entertainment. Even rereads of old favorites are a pleasure, because the experience of reading a book is the experience of filling your head with rivers of words, until your head is one big lake, and the book's richnesses seep their way into you. Books are difficult to reduce to memes—you can nab quotes from them, but quotes rarely capture the intricacy and complexity of even the cheapest novels, and better writers typically don't constrain themselves to the snappiness of quotation. (This holds for even the snappiest of 'em.) Yet books are far less immediately compelling than most games are, because the thrill of a book is inherently the thrill of its journey, revealed in one long and constrained ribbon. Each word, each sentence, offers the promise of the next, and that promise typically grows and grows as the book goes on. Compare that to the closed loop of a game in which feedback is immediate, actions are immediately met with consequence, and the promise is typically one of complete, sustained engagement from the very start.
At some point, however, the balance tips. The game, much like chewing gum, loses its flavor. The actions start to become perfunctory. The book, meanwhile, has planted enough of a seed in you that you find yourself racing through it, gathering more weight as you go on, a fandom in fast forward, a love affair culminated in an afternoon. Whatever the game's limits are—artificial slowness in an RPG, limited levels in a platformer, a ceiling of some kind—now actively conspire to keep you from finding meaning. The book, meanwhile, presented its limits to you from the start, and beyond that there are no limits, beyond the writer's own ability to find ways of laying humanity out on the table before you.
I find this balance absolutely intriguing—particularly the ways it changes across different kinds of media. There's something fascinating about the ways paintings simply present themselves to you, for instance, allowing you to determine how much time each one is worth. You can race through a museum in half an hour, only to find yourself sitting and staring at a single piece for two hours without stop. (Me, MoMA, "Broadway Boogie Woogie".) Likewise, I always love the way that different poets consider lines or even words of a poem: some don't read much more challengingly than prose, but others force you to stop and slow down, luxuriating in three words at a time, until you can somehow divine the way those manage to lead to the implausible fourth. I'm sympathetic to those snoots who prefer poetry and painting to other kinds of art for this very reason, just as I find the same kinds of slowly-marinading experience in classical music and certain kinds of jazz.
I find that movies grab me less quickly than TV does, particularly the sorts of movies that I care to see. Yet I rarely find television as rewarding as I find film, despite the endless insistence these days that TV is where the magic's at. In fact, I find something revealing about my taste in TV: generally, I prefer sitcoms to dramas, even though sitcoms are very gamelike in their repetition and obsession with engagement and hints of slow, gradual meaning. I find dramas to be strangely compromised: they have to promise enough stimulation to keep their audiences focused, while simultaneously claiming significance. In most long dramas, the latter eventually has to give: by season 7 of a show, how much of what happened in season 3 really mattered? Yet season 3 had to unfold with enough artful deliberation that we were convinced, in the moment, that this was somehow meaningful. I've increasingly heard the argument that some of the best TV is un-cinematic, and allows itself to be a little cheap and tawdry, because that's the most honest reflection of the medium; The Sopranos has lasting power in part because it fuses highbrow artistry with some incredibly tacky production work, and I've been enjoying The Shield for the same reason.
Meanwhile, TV that truly aspires to meet the standards of cinema typically finds itself alienating its audience pretty quickly, for the precise reason that it's not stimulating in the way that audiences demand. Auteurs like David Lynch can get away with it, but most people flat-out can't, particularly with studios breathing down their backs. Which is why my favorite recent TV is probably the one-two punch of Steven Conrad's Patriot and Perpetual Grace, LTD; the former pretends to be a spy thriller but quickly reveals itself to be nothing of the sort, so of course it got canceled, at which point Conrad moved nearly the entire cast over to Perpetual Grace, a gothic semi-Western that does feel somewhat like an unauthorized season 3 of Patriot. Strange, wonderful stuff. But I digress somewhat.
If you want to split this tendency up into extremes, then on the one end you have the idea of mindfulness, making yourself fully aware of every moment, and embracing it as the moment that it is. When I think of mindfulness, I think of morning mists and dew-specked grass; I cannot entirely leap from that kind of serenity to finding the same emotion at, say, a cramped and claustrophobic grocery store, though I make the effort whenever I can. With stillness and patience, you find that every moment passes, and that all you have to do is wait; the tendency to distract yourself from the moments, so that they slip by without your noticing, becomes unnecessary. Every moment becomes wholly engaging, because the engagement is an awareness; the meaning is somehow identical to the engagement, because the meaning is that you are conscious, you are capable of taking in the world, and it is your privilege and pleasure to get to bear witness to it, for a time, before you even begin to contemplate acting upon it. And on the other end of the spectrum, roughly, you have the entirety of social media.
Nobody understands social media, per se. We respond to it instinctively, intuitively, because it is engaging and even compelling. There is no narrative to it: we know that because we author it. There is no purpose to it, apart from keeping us going on. You are not given a handbook, when you first start using the site of your choice, explaining its overall intent. Even the idealistic doofiness of old phpBB forums, which often presented you with some amateur manifesto on what it means to belong to a community, has fallen by the wayside. At some point, Facebook had a splash page explaining its purpose and usefulness, and teaching you how you might use it to connect with friends and family. Now, Facebook tells you to sign up for it, and barely tells you anything else. You sign up for it because it's Facebook. What's there to know?
Here is the story of social media, the only one there is, the only one there can possibly be: you start using it, and then you and everybody else begin debating the meaningfulness of everything. Social media is one big contest to determine interest, and that interest typically takes the form of either deep insignificance (cats, 6-second comedy sketches) or deep significance. What do we call significant? It could be ourselves (our "brands", sorry), it could be some political cause, it could be some big-picture concept like Bitcoin or wokeness or anti-wokeness. Occasionally it is still pictures of family, or pictures of couples, though we all seem to faintly mock people who just want to see photos of their grandkids and the couples do seem to obsess over branding themselves increasingly over time. But ultimately, we log onto social media and begin to desperately seek some purpose. Why do outrage and conspiracy theories win out over everything else? Because those are machines which inherently generate meaning. Anger begets anger, both among sympathizers and detractors (I'm mad that you choose to be mad about this!), while cult thinking lets us delve into madness, co-creating chins of bizarre logic that we must increasingly believe in, for the same reasons that games need to offer us hypothetical endpoints: this can sustain us indefinitely, but only so long as we believe it is worth sustaining ourselves with. The moment we lose faith, it all collapses.
All of this happens because it must happen. And it must happen because, in our endless stimulation, in our endless distraction, in our endless engagement, we are being confronted with an obstinate and horrifying fact: nothing can keep a second from lasting an entire second. These times may be turbulent, but they tick by with the same old slowness, the same unbearable procession. We cannot yell our way forward. We cannot scroll ourselves into tomorrow. We talk about the feed's agonizing addictiveness, but does the feed addict us because it stimulates us? Or is the addiction that the feed doesn't offer anything? We might be obsessed with social media precisely because it has nothing to offer us, and we've decided that we're going to keep staring at it until it finally serves its purpose. You know, that purpose that it told us it had.
Society is obsessed with "content". Everything is becoming commodified at a staggering pace. Spotify devalues music, Netflix devalues film, the AV Club devalues the written language. There is a market for content, because everybody is desperately seeking meaning. And content is increasingly valueless, because it's designed for an audience of social media users, and social media precludes value. I'm not saying that its users don't value anything, or that valuable things can't be shared: this is not a taste judgment. This is a matter of putting a book next to a Game Boy. Project Gutenberg will let you share Virginia Woolf's short stories precisely as easily as you could share the latest celebrity news or JK Rowling outrage; you could pick up your phone every day and immediately get lost in stories so compelling that we keep finding new things in them hundreds of years after they were originally written. You can read the entire Oresteia on Wikipedia! But you can't share it on social media, not really. I mean, you can, but you won't, and if you did nobody would care about it. Because social media wants the opposite of that. It wants the thing that convinces you that what happened five seconds ago is the most important thing in the world, and that what happened five minutes ago is already so apocalyptic that you'd better already be fighting about it, and that if you somehow missed what happened five days ago, you are probably a real piece of shit who doesn't deserve to have friends, let alone cute throw pillows.
And then nothing happens. Even when something does happen, nothing happens. Jeffrey Epstein definitely killing himself happened five lifetimes ago, in 2019, and it will be years yet before anything major comes out of the thing he definitely killed himself over. That upsetting social crisis you marched for will still be around, five years from now, demanding that you march for it. Do things change? Absolutely. Are there moments in time when you can genuinely make a difference? Never stop believing it. Are you capable of making an impact on all the people in your life, pulling them out of despair, being their comfort in times of darkness and cold, encouraging them towards gentleness and tolerance and bravery and righteousness? So much more than you take advantage of, seriously. But those things happen slowly, and they happen when they happen: you will not miss them if you put your phone down, because they tend to find you, and not the other way around.
The alchemy of social media is that it takes that boring second you were trying to escape, makes it immediate and excruciating and vital, and then somehow forces you to live it out like the boring second it still is and always was. It's nearly the same as the alchemy of tabloid journalism (murders! rapes! corruption!), but tabloid journalism is still handed to you. On social media, you choose and participate and create it. One thing I didn't mention, when talking about sports, is that there's a reason they take up entire lifetimes, and it's because they're social mediums: they connect us to one another. Players connect in one way; fans connect in another. So sports endure, for the same reason that theatre endures: this old medium, always so seemingly close to death, will never struggle to find people who passionately throw themselves into it, because for them it will always be, not even a lifestyle, but a life. Social media has become another way of having a life. Read profiles of those big, loud names on social media, and learn the horrifying truth: when they meet in-person, they just keep talking about this shit, the same way that we do, and if they get paid for it, that just means they never have to turn off their phones and contemplate something healthier, like an Excel spreadsheet.
We are convinced that we are engaged. But are we really? Perhaps the draw for us, perhaps the thing that keeps us coming back, is that we are completely parched: parched for engagement, parched for participation, parched for connection, parched for meaning. We seek a glimmering oasis amidst a desert that never even claims to once have been a paradise. We call it a drought, but it was only ever this: we never had what we seek to "regain", which is why only the unscrupulous among us will pretend they've "lost" it. Perhaps our problem isn't that we're overstimulated. Perhaps we're badly malnourished, craving the kinds of electricity we could more readily find watching a low cloud sweep over a green hill at dawn.
I still play bad games sometimes, and in fact I tend to love them more than most "good" games, which are good in the way that "good prestige TV" is good. I've been obsessively perfecting a save file on a game that I loved when I was, oh, about 10 years old. And I've been watching a cheesy sitcom as I fiddle through it. It's the biggest waste of time I've let myself have all year, and I'm enjoying it, even if it does make me feel slightly gross. But at least with games like this, there's no illusion that I'm doing anything other than what I'm doing. It's a waste, seconds slipping away for no great purpose, and soon I'll find myself itching to do anything that provides me with something greater than that. If there is an integrity to be found in something so tawdry, it's that it never claims to be something it's not.
I find this balance absolutely intriguing—particularly the ways it changes across different kinds of media. There's something fascinating about the ways paintings simply present themselves to you, for instance, allowing you to determine how much time each one is worth. You can race through a museum in half an hour, only to find yourself sitting and staring at a single piece for two hours without stop. (Me, MoMA, "Broadway Boogie Woogie".) Likewise, I always love the way that different poets consider lines or even words of a poem: some don't read much more challengingly than prose, but others force you to stop and slow down, luxuriating in three words at a time, until you can somehow divine the way those manage to lead to the implausible fourth. I'm sympathetic to those snoots who prefer poetry and painting to other kinds of art for this very reason, just as I find the same kinds of slowly-marinading experience in classical music and certain kinds of jazz.
I find that movies grab me less quickly than TV does, particularly the sorts of movies that I care to see. Yet I rarely find television as rewarding as I find film, despite the endless insistence these days that TV is where the magic's at. In fact, I find something revealing about my taste in TV: generally, I prefer sitcoms to dramas, even though sitcoms are very gamelike in their repetition and obsession with engagement and hints of slow, gradual meaning. I find dramas to be strangely compromised: they have to promise enough stimulation to keep their audiences focused, while simultaneously claiming significance. In most long dramas, the latter eventually has to give: by season 7 of a show, how much of what happened in season 3 really mattered? Yet season 3 had to unfold with enough artful deliberation that we were convinced, in the moment, that this was somehow meaningful. I've increasingly heard the argument that some of the best TV is un-cinematic, and allows itself to be a little cheap and tawdry, because that's the most honest reflection of the medium; The Sopranos has lasting power in part because it fuses highbrow artistry with some incredibly tacky production work, and I've been enjoying The Shield for the same reason.
Meanwhile, TV that truly aspires to meet the standards of cinema typically finds itself alienating its audience pretty quickly, for the precise reason that it's not stimulating in the way that audiences demand. Auteurs like David Lynch can get away with it, but most people flat-out can't, particularly with studios breathing down their backs. Which is why my favorite recent TV is probably the one-two punch of Steven Conrad's Patriot and Perpetual Grace, LTD; the former pretends to be a spy thriller but quickly reveals itself to be nothing of the sort, so of course it got canceled, at which point Conrad moved nearly the entire cast over to Perpetual Grace, a gothic semi-Western that does feel somewhat like an unauthorized season 3 of Patriot. Strange, wonderful stuff. But I digress somewhat.
If you want to split this tendency up into extremes, then on the one end you have the idea of mindfulness, making yourself fully aware of every moment, and embracing it as the moment that it is. When I think of mindfulness, I think of morning mists and dew-specked grass; I cannot entirely leap from that kind of serenity to finding the same emotion at, say, a cramped and claustrophobic grocery store, though I make the effort whenever I can. With stillness and patience, you find that every moment passes, and that all you have to do is wait; the tendency to distract yourself from the moments, so that they slip by without your noticing, becomes unnecessary. Every moment becomes wholly engaging, because the engagement is an awareness; the meaning is somehow identical to the engagement, because the meaning is that you are conscious, you are capable of taking in the world, and it is your privilege and pleasure to get to bear witness to it, for a time, before you even begin to contemplate acting upon it. And on the other end of the spectrum, roughly, you have the entirety of social media.
Nobody understands social media, per se. We respond to it instinctively, intuitively, because it is engaging and even compelling. There is no narrative to it: we know that because we author it. There is no purpose to it, apart from keeping us going on. You are not given a handbook, when you first start using the site of your choice, explaining its overall intent. Even the idealistic doofiness of old phpBB forums, which often presented you with some amateur manifesto on what it means to belong to a community, has fallen by the wayside. At some point, Facebook had a splash page explaining its purpose and usefulness, and teaching you how you might use it to connect with friends and family. Now, Facebook tells you to sign up for it, and barely tells you anything else. You sign up for it because it's Facebook. What's there to know?
Here is the story of social media, the only one there is, the only one there can possibly be: you start using it, and then you and everybody else begin debating the meaningfulness of everything. Social media is one big contest to determine interest, and that interest typically takes the form of either deep insignificance (cats, 6-second comedy sketches) or deep significance. What do we call significant? It could be ourselves (our "brands", sorry), it could be some political cause, it could be some big-picture concept like Bitcoin or wokeness or anti-wokeness. Occasionally it is still pictures of family, or pictures of couples, though we all seem to faintly mock people who just want to see photos of their grandkids and the couples do seem to obsess over branding themselves increasingly over time. But ultimately, we log onto social media and begin to desperately seek some purpose. Why do outrage and conspiracy theories win out over everything else? Because those are machines which inherently generate meaning. Anger begets anger, both among sympathizers and detractors (I'm mad that you choose to be mad about this!), while cult thinking lets us delve into madness, co-creating chins of bizarre logic that we must increasingly believe in, for the same reasons that games need to offer us hypothetical endpoints: this can sustain us indefinitely, but only so long as we believe it is worth sustaining ourselves with. The moment we lose faith, it all collapses.
All of this happens because it must happen. And it must happen because, in our endless stimulation, in our endless distraction, in our endless engagement, we are being confronted with an obstinate and horrifying fact: nothing can keep a second from lasting an entire second. These times may be turbulent, but they tick by with the same old slowness, the same unbearable procession. We cannot yell our way forward. We cannot scroll ourselves into tomorrow. We talk about the feed's agonizing addictiveness, but does the feed addict us because it stimulates us? Or is the addiction that the feed doesn't offer anything? We might be obsessed with social media precisely because it has nothing to offer us, and we've decided that we're going to keep staring at it until it finally serves its purpose. You know, that purpose that it told us it had.
Society is obsessed with "content". Everything is becoming commodified at a staggering pace. Spotify devalues music, Netflix devalues film, the AV Club devalues the written language. There is a market for content, because everybody is desperately seeking meaning. And content is increasingly valueless, because it's designed for an audience of social media users, and social media precludes value. I'm not saying that its users don't value anything, or that valuable things can't be shared: this is not a taste judgment. This is a matter of putting a book next to a Game Boy. Project Gutenberg will let you share Virginia Woolf's short stories precisely as easily as you could share the latest celebrity news or JK Rowling outrage; you could pick up your phone every day and immediately get lost in stories so compelling that we keep finding new things in them hundreds of years after they were originally written. You can read the entire Oresteia on Wikipedia! But you can't share it on social media, not really. I mean, you can, but you won't, and if you did nobody would care about it. Because social media wants the opposite of that. It wants the thing that convinces you that what happened five seconds ago is the most important thing in the world, and that what happened five minutes ago is already so apocalyptic that you'd better already be fighting about it, and that if you somehow missed what happened five days ago, you are probably a real piece of shit who doesn't deserve to have friends, let alone cute throw pillows.
And then nothing happens. Even when something does happen, nothing happens. Jeffrey Epstein definitely killing himself happened five lifetimes ago, in 2019, and it will be years yet before anything major comes out of the thing he definitely killed himself over. That upsetting social crisis you marched for will still be around, five years from now, demanding that you march for it. Do things change? Absolutely. Are there moments in time when you can genuinely make a difference? Never stop believing it. Are you capable of making an impact on all the people in your life, pulling them out of despair, being their comfort in times of darkness and cold, encouraging them towards gentleness and tolerance and bravery and righteousness? So much more than you take advantage of, seriously. But those things happen slowly, and they happen when they happen: you will not miss them if you put your phone down, because they tend to find you, and not the other way around.
The alchemy of social media is that it takes that boring second you were trying to escape, makes it immediate and excruciating and vital, and then somehow forces you to live it out like the boring second it still is and always was. It's nearly the same as the alchemy of tabloid journalism (murders! rapes! corruption!), but tabloid journalism is still handed to you. On social media, you choose and participate and create it. One thing I didn't mention, when talking about sports, is that there's a reason they take up entire lifetimes, and it's because they're social mediums: they connect us to one another. Players connect in one way; fans connect in another. So sports endure, for the same reason that theatre endures: this old medium, always so seemingly close to death, will never struggle to find people who passionately throw themselves into it, because for them it will always be, not even a lifestyle, but a life. Social media has become another way of having a life. Read profiles of those big, loud names on social media, and learn the horrifying truth: when they meet in-person, they just keep talking about this shit, the same way that we do, and if they get paid for it, that just means they never have to turn off their phones and contemplate something healthier, like an Excel spreadsheet.
We are convinced that we are engaged. But are we really? Perhaps the draw for us, perhaps the thing that keeps us coming back, is that we are completely parched: parched for engagement, parched for participation, parched for connection, parched for meaning. We seek a glimmering oasis amidst a desert that never even claims to once have been a paradise. We call it a drought, but it was only ever this: we never had what we seek to "regain", which is why only the unscrupulous among us will pretend they've "lost" it. Perhaps our problem isn't that we're overstimulated. Perhaps we're badly malnourished, craving the kinds of electricity we could more readily find watching a low cloud sweep over a green hill at dawn.
I still play bad games sometimes, and in fact I tend to love them more than most "good" games, which are good in the way that "good prestige TV" is good. I've been obsessively perfecting a save file on a game that I loved when I was, oh, about 10 years old. And I've been watching a cheesy sitcom as I fiddle through it. It's the biggest waste of time I've let myself have all year, and I'm enjoying it, even if it does make me feel slightly gross. But at least with games like this, there's no illusion that I'm doing anything other than what I'm doing. It's a waste, seconds slipping away for no great purpose, and soon I'll find myself itching to do anything that provides me with something greater than that. If there is an integrity to be found in something so tawdry, it's that it never claims to be something it's not.