For a while, I was harboring the intent to become more positive in my life. I thought I had become altogether too negative, dwelling on what's wrong with the world, what's most worthy of ridicule, finding ways to exact that ridicule, etc, etc. My girlfriend is always pontificating on the inspiration she derives from the famously positive and more often than not when she speaks of them I find I hadn't even realized these people were positive at all. Will Wheaton? I thought he was just a famous nerd. Apparently, he's an inspiration and a model of positivity. Jackie Chan? Apparently NOT just a man who hurts himself for a living; he's an icon of hard work and discipline. Huh!
People love positive people. Positive is IN; irony, out. Its the mantra of the late Twenty-o-oughts, and the Obama-lama vision of the next decade. Its new! Its hope! People love it! That's the rub of it though. I realized I was trying to be more positive for the exclusive reason that I wanted more people to ascribe that quality to me. I actually WANTED people to LIKE me. That's absurd, even cynical. I've never really cared how many people like me or whether they like me for the right reasons or not. I'm not just saying that for antithetical reasons. I'm just the last of the Gen-Xers, last of the seasoned aesthetes of apathy. That makes me a dinosaur in this new age of hope and its nothing to be proud of. Its no surprise then that this sudden approval seeking sentiment had taken over my thinking. There are other external factors in my desired change of attitude too, and I was frankly more than a little surprised by them:
Damn you, Facebook. Curse you, Twitter. A pox on both your houses! Yes, I blame you more than anything else.
I escaped the four year popularity contest of high school unscathed by the drudgery elitism. I never once considered an avenue of microcosmic stardom, although more likely then not because I wouldn't have been capable of carrying any kind of fame-nabbing stunt to fruition. I was just not fated to be a popular guy, and I embraced that fact.
Now all these years later, I suddenly found myself in the throes of an internal popularity experiment much to the contrary of my own nature. Lets be fair though, there is something about the easily quantifiable measures of popularity in online social networking that appeals to my scientific side. You can readily read the progress of your sociability on myspace, facebook, or whatever by the little friend counter in the corner of the home page. On twitter, they even offer grading statistics that are derived from your ratio of posts versus followers versus those you follow. You can quickly determine your net worth as a cyber-human based on any of these indexes. You can then evaluation your own performance and adjust your strategies. Its a twisted little game and its relatively easy.
So that's it. Decades of my life spent preening, dressing nice, being polite, funny, erudite, entertaining, charming, yadda yadda, have all been for naught. Complete wastes of time, it turns out. Who knew? Apparently, all I had to do to make friends was sign up for myspace, make a few snarky remarks about myself and start sending out those friend requests.
I'm up to a hundred pals on Facebook. I'm surpassed by most of my friends and until yesterday this bothered me endlessly, although I didn't know it or was even aware of it on a conscious level. There was a burning fraction of my brain consuming itself with calculations of how to attract more friends, how to be more clever, how to instigate more comments, how to truly brand myself. I have given myself a thorough slapping and have since quarantined this part of my brain.
Last night I dreamt people were reading my blog and judging me on it. That was the final straw of nonsense. I'm not going to spend a good night's sleep on social anxiety.
Now, I have no intention of cutting any one off, leaving any of these sites, or stopping myself form blogging. I enjoy all of that immensely. I enjoy the forum of ideas that is the internet far too much to disown it. Worse, I would become a hypocrite. I've already spent an awful lot of time making fun of my Luddite friends who refuse to join the social networking party and I wouldn't want to make myself eat my own words or become a comedy of duplicity. I need a steady platform on which to ridicule others and leaving any of these sites would pull that out from under me. That would be an unacceptable tragedy.
Also, I'm no longer making any effort to be positive. Screw that. Its not in my nature. I couldn't write a letter to my own grandmother without oozing some sort of sardonic vitriol about some thing another. Good thing I don't have a grandmother and I don't write any one any letters. I'm sarcastic, pessimistic, a fault-seeker, and I have no reason to ever change. To be anything else is to be against my own personage and an outrage to the very cosmic order of the universe.
So much for that New Years resolution then. It was a mindless one anyway, conceived out of brief self-abandonment. You positive people need us negatives around anyway. We keep every one grounded; we point out your flaws of logic; we let you how goofy you look in those sweater vests; we tell you how much your favorite bands really suck. Sometimes we even change your mind. We're worth having around, really, no matter how much fun we spoil.
Also remember the law of conservation of fun: fun is never created nor destroyed, only transferred to some one else. You may not be having any when we're around, but we are. That's something to be positive about.
