The Asshole Writings: 2007-present

The new "I'm a-ight."

You don’t need human relationships to be happy.  God has placed it all around us.

- Christopher McCandless aka Alexander Supertramp

If you ever saw the film Into the Wild, you’ll recognize the above quote.  Into the Wild is the story of a privileged young man who rebels against his parents’ plans for his future and decides that the thing that is going to bring him “truth” is the complete solitude of Alaska.  Eschewing a compass, a map, survival skills, and every shred of common sense granted to human beings, he attempted to discover himself by living out of an abandoned bus in terra incognita, or at least as incognita as you allow something to be by not bringing a map with you.  In the film, Supertramp lasts approximately four months on his own before coming to the seemingly profound discovery “Happiness [is] only real when shared.”

The thing that makes nature so wondrous is that for every ounce of beauty contained there in, there are at least that many ounces of danger.  The wilderness is the most beautiful and cruel place imaginable.

With the advent of the Information Age, though, the wilderness has become digital.  Navigating the rough waters of the World Wide Web is as precipitous as negotiating a cliff face or a churning river, only you can still feel the air conditioning.  And to carry this metaphor to its merciful conclusion, we as a society are increasingly turning into Alexander Supertramp, but instead of ditching the map and compass, we are ditching interaction and decency.

In the mile-a-minute world we live in now, there seems to be insufficient time to stop and appreciate those around us.  ”What’s the point in trying to understand this person?  If I’m interested I’ll look them up on Facebook and that should tell me everything I need to know.”  Whatever happened to human curiosity?

I consider myself a reasonably interesting person.  I have a variety of things I’m passionate about.  I come from a unique family, have had some unique experiences, have been some unique places.  More importantly, I understand that other people do to, and that interests me greatly.  But it seems like more and more, no one cares to engage in the simple and wonderful act of discovery.  I have no never been as profoundly lonely in my life as I am right now.  I have a wonderful woman who is willing and happy to journey with me down whatever bizarre paths our minds may wander.  I have a family who is willing to do the same.

But somewhere between childhood, college, and reality, the art of fostering new relationships has abandoned me.  It could be simply that I’m an asshole, but I honestly don’t think that’s it (spoken like a typical asshole).

I think that the bounty of the digital age has robbed us of our yearning to communicate with one another face-to-face.  The basic desire may still be there (like the “let’s grab some coffee” text message), but overwhelmingly the quick digital fix trumps all.

For example, look at the utter destruction of video and record stores.  With the advent of Netflix and fancy TVs that can access movies through the internet straight to your living room, the need for your friendly neighborhood video store is gone (even if your friendly neighborhood video store was a Hollywood Video).  Likewise, as iTunes and Amazon continue to provide access to mountainous volumes of music at our fingertips, the likes of Virgin Records, Tower Records, and God knows how many mom-and-pop shops have closed their doors.

Unfortunately, it cuts both ways.  I’m a music collector, particularly classical music, and I’ve been able to instantly download literally hundreds of musical items that I’ve enjoyed immensely.  But ask anyone who knows me and they’ll tell you that I like nothing more than going to a great record store, feeling the materials in my hand as a scour the place for hours seeing what might pop up, and most importantly, talking to the guy who works there and getting his opinion on something or having a conversation about a CD I might be interested in.  But the days of getting an opinion from “Ron” are gone.  These days we get our opinions from “JakeTheSnake69@anonymous.who the fuck is that guy?”

My parents first gave us access to the internet through good old America Online back in the early 1990s sometime (Windows 3.1 represent).  At the time, you could only have 10 characters for your username, so I naturally tried 49ersFan, or 49erGuy, ErikK or whatever else came to mind.  Of course, everything had been snatched up by then, so anything I tried fizzled out into a series of random numbers (49e5833922, anyone?).  Finally, out of nothing more than a desire to not suffer the number curse, I tried “CrackLaden,” as in laden with the solid, smokable form of cocaine.  Not surprisingly, it worked.

What is surprising is that more people know me as CrackLaden than as Erik.  There is no denying the fact that our internet personalities and our everyday personalities are two different things.  Erik is not nearly as stuck to his opinion guns as CrackLaden is.  CrackLaden doesn’t curse as much as Erik (I know that seems impossible, but trust me).

Unfortunately, CrackLaden also has significantly more interaction with people than Erik does, and consequently, Erik continues to withdraw further inward because he gets the impression that he is quite literally disappearing from other people’s consciousness.  CrackLaden is still going strong, though: a couple hundred Facebook friends, a blog that no one reads, a nice circle of e-friends on message boards celebrating similar passions.

Is it possible to speak in the digital 3rd person?  Pretty sure I just did.

The anonymity of a computer screen is wonderfully protective, but it is also alarmingly invasive.  It enables us to segregate ourselves into groups of “friends” or “followers” or “Celtics fans” or “medical librarians” without the need to actually discover these similarities through a conversation.

All this being said, the reality is that you have to get tangled in the Web if you want to live.  There is a truism that says, “if it doesn’t exist online, it doesn’t exist.”  It would be nice if the solution were as simple as orchestrating a massive worldwide conspiracy to destroy the tubes of the internet, but it has become a lifeline.  There used to be a time when you went on vacation for a week and came home without an hour’s worth of “inbox cleanup” awaiting you in addition to everything else.  That time has past.

The irony that I am writing this on a weblog that will automatically update a Twitter page saying that a new post is up is not lost on me.  Technology has allowed me to see things I never would have seen, hear music I never would have been able to hear, and learn things that I never even considered learning about.  It has created a world where anyone with access to the World Wide Web can make themselves known to someone 10,000 miles away, and the exchange of ideas is truly staggering.

But it’s coming at the expense of our sense of human discovery and interaction.  There is no greater feeling than making a true connection with another human being and seeing that connection develop into friendship, or love, or both.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to tweet my status update to my friends and followers.