“You will never oppose imaginary conflict”
Me:
A long time ago someone I knew got suddenly and extremely excited about posting videos of themselves at the gym. They weren’t just committed to transforming their body - they really wanted to be seen as someone who was committed to transforming their body, which seemed much more effort-intensive to do. They weren’t just posting selfies straight from their camera with an affirmative caption or something, they were editing together multi-minute videos of themselves with special effects and multiple camera angles and inspirational slogans and music and really going above and beyond to create high-effort content, content that didn’t seem to get a whole lot of engagement. Speaking just for myself, I thought things like “I get it what you’re up to, I don’t need to watch another 3 minute video of lifting weights”, or “this seems unhealthy and insecure and I don’t want to enable you by paying attention to you”, when I thought anything at all as I scrolled past the videos in question.
One day I got grabbed when a video of theirs that auto-played as I scrolled by, starting with a splash text of “NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOUR STUPID GYM VIDEOS” over a video of them bench-pressing. There were quotes around the “NOBODY CARES…” text, suggesting that these were words that were actually written or spoken or something. As far as I could tell nobody actually said this - there wasn’t any kind of hostile response to these videos but instead just a lack of any response at all. But it worked for this person to present themselves as triumphing in some sort of hallucinated conflict, perhaps just an internal one but nevertheless one that provided some extra motivation and satisfaction. It’s not enough to quietly succeed, it’s much more important and satisfying to see your success as somehow defeating something.
This sort of move is made all over social media - you present a hateful dismissal from a stupid enemy and then crush them with the very next thing you say. You could do something like post “Muscular women will never be beautiful” and then post “muscular women:” with a picture of a beautiful muscular woman. Then everyone who agrees with you will engage with your post like crazy to support you in your efforts to defeat the haters.
I don’t want to deny the existence of conflict or haters etc, but what irritates me about all of this is the cheapness of it all. To me it’s a really shallow way to make people feel like they have some moral obligation to promote your content.
I also think this tendency to see one’s life as an expression of conflict is overblown, and causes much unnecessary human suffering. For many - or rather, many like me - every bad thing that happens in one’s life is to be interrogated for its systemic causes and understood as an expression of the Great Evil Of Society. Feel bad about who you are? That’s Capitalism. Get dumped? Capitalism. Don’t like your job? Capitalism. Too horny? Capitalism. Not horny enough? Capitalism. Perhaps many of these things are a product of Capitalism, or whatever the next Great Evil will be after Capitalism, but if everything is a product of great forces like this then you can’t improve your life in any way at all until the Great Evil Of Society is defeated forever. I don’t think that’s true and I don’t think that’s a helpful attitude even if it’s false!
I realize now that it’s funny to be writing about this phenomenon and how I think it should be opposed, given that my point is how it’s unhealthy to constantly be distinguishing phenomenon to oppose. I think at the end of the day that human life is frail and painful enough without looking for reasons to hate each other, including ourselves. Victory in conflict isn’t a precondition for happiness, and is instead often the very thing that prevents us from finding it.