Clarity

The imposed post-operative downtime that has me confined largely to quarters (no long dogwalks, bikerides, swims etc.) has led to a few moments of clarity, insight, and resolve. 

To name one: I'm clear now that I can improve the quality of my days, hence my life, if I skip several of my habitual internet pit-stops and stop "following" certain social media attention hogs I've wasted time and mental energy on. I followed because they are philosophers, nominally and in the modern academic sense anyway, who sometimes say things that amuse or bemuse or provoke in ways that seem constructive at the time but dissolve in retrospect. Scrolling from one such provocation to the next can seem rewarding or gratifying, but the time thus spent leaves barely a residue of valuable information. Never mind wisdom.

Finally said Bye to one of them yesterday, a young philosopher from the east coast teaching in New Orleans and tweeting incessantly about beer, his quest for a girlfriend, and sometimes his work (not to be confused with an actual life-philosophy, but rather just a particular narrow take on the job of teaching philosophy to people even less grown-up than himself.)  I've hung with him because he's clever, he likes dogs and baseball and John Prine, he poses interesting questions and sometimes suggests things worth reading and pondering. 

But a recent tweet flirted (not for the first time) with nihilism, another implied his own complacent self-satisfaction in a way that grated even more than usual, wondering if he'd not already accomplished everything important in life and whether there was anything else he needed to do in order to flourish. I was reminded of Horace Mann's exhortation: "Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity." But of course, ours is a shameless age. Our humanity (as distinct from our human-all too human-ness) is in short supply.

The straw that broke the camel's back for me was a series of tweets on Fathers Day mocking fatherhood. "Should I have a child just so I can be a #dilf," i.e. an object of female lust? That did it. "Bye" was my last reply. I'd cut him more slack, I suppose, if we actually knew one another in the non-virtual world. I'd buy him a beer and try to explain my objections to nihilism, to smugness,to taking parenthood so lightly, etc. But since we don't, and since life is short, I've better things to do with mine. 

One down, so many to go. It's now clear I've spent far too much time following the random superficial excrescences of shallow (though credentialed) minds, symptomatic of our self-presenting, self-polishing, socially saturated insecure immature age. We all just need to grow up. Sapere aude.