I brewed beer for the first time the other day. There were a few small catastrophes. I left the burners on while pouring and stirring my extract and had to scrub the life out where the sticky mass scorched the bottom of my kettle. I left a tap open on my fermenter and had to clean vigorously after a small trickle of beer ran out and directly down an inconveniently placed air duct nearby. Mistakes were made.
Maybe my first beer will be spoiled. Maybe every beer I make will fault. Maybe I will make beer that has a Roquefort-level of blue mold on it. Maybe I’ll throw my hands up in dismay. But I will have tried to do something compelling I care deeply about, and only been a failure because I was in no way gifted at the craft, a boundary of my own limitation that I will have mapped fully and completely.
I caught myself a few days back in the cycle of social media brainrot. I deliberately removed myself from a feedback loop of doom-swiping and commentary-sniping. Certainly I was discontent and certainly there’s a lot to discontent about, the shallow absence of concern for the value of human life on display right now is contemptible. But the role that media, and in particular, new media has played in the soap opera-ification of our interactions is also contemptible.
I’d comment on a topic I’d see, and in my mind I’d see that as sharing an anecdote or giving some piece of advice or framing things in a way that hadn’t been otherwise shared. But there is also a larger and more intransigent problem, which is these forums deliberately feed off the churn. It is to their benefit to have oppositional and adversarial commentary, they will gladly force-feed it to the public and grow their traffic on the ensuing heated and increasingly extremist rhetoric.
While I am not advocating for people to simply stop communication entirely (or why would I be writing this in the first place?), I do think there is a clarity of purpose that is not being addressed. The purpose of this piece is to call attention to you to find the best use of your given abilities and seek out the things that brings you the deepest fulfillment. Writers should write, artists should draw, soapmakers should make soap, stained glass artisans should make stained glass, brewers should brew.
The thing I find troubling about the state of the world is it is being lead by people who don’t DO anything. They find no simple joys, small satisfactions, intimate beauty in the everyday existence of daily life. At the risk of seeming pithy, please consider if you are reading or listening to people who spend their time trying to incite a topic or posting photos of ‘experiences,’ they are not contributing to the world in any valid way.
Throughout human existence, the meaning of life has been sought by people. We are in an especially precarious position where people emulate people who don’t have any real passion, except to continually amass more and more and yet are less and less nurtured by their accumulative acquisitions. The meaning of life – the real meaning of life – is spending each day trying to make it really count, to discover what it holds, to hope that tomorrow is just as good, if not better.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but at least you tried it, you didn’t just SAY you were going to.