In Light Of Recent Events, I'm Delaying Posting About The Kardashians
And 10 other reasons to be cheerful.
In light of recent world events, I am delaying publishing my devotional essay about reality TV show, The Kardashians.
I know what you’re thinking, we literally never want an essay about the Kardashians; believe me, I’ve already considered this. I fully suspect that when I do publish the essay about my problematic love for the queens of Calabasas, it will result in at least 15 unsubscribes and a 1% read rate because in the first paragraph I mention Cousin Cici, an inconsequential satellite character that not even fans of the show care about.
Alas, my need to write the essay is not about you. Like my inexplicable love for the show, it’s a compulsion. A disease. A poison in the body. Much like trapped wind it's “better out than in” but, also like trapped wind, putting it out into the world risks repulsing friends & loved ones and losing a significant amount of social status.
But anyway, now is not the time.
Sending out anything silly these days feels in poor taste, let alone an essay about the people who popularized giant bubble butts. I considered posting some of my more hard-hitting think-pieces instead, like “15 Reasons Why My Dog Must Never Master the English Language”, or “How Do You Know When It's Time to Move to the Woods and Whittle Spoons?”, but even before I drop those, a very short note needed to come out (I am no longer making fart analogies!)
At risk of laboring a point made by people much sexier than me - visionaries like Prince and Bowie who both predicted how weird the internet would make us back in 1999 - let’s just state for the record: these are strange times - period.
Our phones are random image generators that we play Russian roulette with every time we open. On social media, we mindlessly graze without much thought or mental preparation for what the next piece of content might be. It could be an impossibly adorable video of a small French boy completing a miniature obstacle course, or it could be an image of profound human suffering, the likes of which we’ve never witnessed, especially not while shaking a depressing mail-order salad* and wearing a comedy t-shirt that says Local Boogey Man.
I literally just got a notification that Jared Leto became the first person to legally climb the Empire State Building; a bizarre piece of information I never asked for that threatens to push more useful knowledge from my brain like Pythagoras’s theorem or the name of Henry VIII’s fifth wife**.
This week, I watched a video of a woman talking about how strange it is to be bombarded with so much random information - some trivial, some traumatizing - and then go right back to work as if your brain is still fully intact. Underneath, someone had posted a glib comment which basically said “Get over it, snowflake! This is the most comfortable we’ve ever been as a civilization! We have longer life spans, better healthcare, and fewer wars, famine & pestilence than ever - you’d already be dead if you were living through another era!” as if,
a) an increased level of comfort, political progress, and safety has been the lived experience of everyone on this planet and
b) the gold standard for a good life is simply to not die of syphilis aged 23 with a head full of wooden teeth, or not personally know anyone who's had their head installed on a spike recently.
Watching a genocide happen, in real time, on your phone, in between cat videos and work emails, is evidence that we have unlocked a strange new level to the human experience. And don’t let anyone convince you it’s unreasonable to feel extremely distressed, overwhelmed, and generally unenthused*** about your job.
Even Neo vomited a little bit when he found out about the Matrix and he was a made-up character in a movie who hadn’t even seen a corpse.****
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to ten pound baby to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.