500-WORD RANT #17
It’s Crowded Here at the Center of the Universe.
A special long-form holiday rant about writers, ranters, narcissism, and mortality.
As you know, when I decide to rant about something, I don’t just vomit out my thoughts like some random drunk who has passed out while approaching the point of no return from alcohol poisoning.
No, I let my observations on the human condition ferment within my brain, add research for flavor tones (depending on the exact mood of the rant), and then let them age into a delicate mélange of self-deprecating humor, biting satire and quasi-scientific ruminations.
No, you, dear readers, get some high-quality vomit.
The inspiration for this particular rant comes in response to an article by one of the most popular writers on Medium who wrote about social media influencers, writing on this platform, plagiarism, and narcissism.
When it comes to narcissism, nothing brings us back down from our self-defined, exalted position at the center of the universe than dealing with something crushing and important, like the finality of death.
I’m here with my wife’s family in France to celebrate the commercially sponsored, totally secular, and sanitized version of the Christmas holidays that began with planning a memorial for my wife’s father and then mourning his loss.
Out of respect to my wife’s privacy, I won’t go into a lot of details, but there is enough in common with losing my dad this past June and my mom ten years before that it brought out a lot of the grief that I still must be processing.
It’s ironic that when you cry, laugh, cry, go through the motions of regular life, cry some more, occasionally cry with laughter, and cry until you think you have no more tears left in you, there’s always a reserve of tears just waiting to make an appearance at the right time.
For a few days, a small window opens into the human condition.
When I lost my mother ten years ago after a long slide into nothingness (senile dementia is very similar to Alzheimer’s) and received the condolences of each guest at the memorial service we hosted, I realized how each person’s recollection of her represented only a tiny sliver of their experience with her during her life.
I probably knew more about my mom than anyone alive, because she told me so much about her life and the struggles she endured as a child of the Great Depression, a survivor of sexual abuse, an early guinea pig in the use of LSD to treat psychological disorder, and a wayfarer through every religion as she sought the spiritual guidance to heal herself.
I knew all about her crazy temper, dysfunctional relationships (how in the world does a New York Jew become serious with a German man who turned out to be a former Nazi?), her lack of boundaries (which caused so much damage early in my marriage that I had to choose my wife, at the cost of pushing away my mother) and all the other irrational behavior fueled by her fears.
But I also knew about her courage, her self-sacrifice to save me from repeating the patterns of her PTSD-afflicted family (I’m going to call it that, even though the term was unknown in the late 19th century when my great uncle had to hide in freezing Russian marshes to escape from being murdered by the Cossacks as they attacked his village), and the generosity she showed so many strangers because she believed that one of them could be an angel in disguise.
I knew about the lengths to which she tried to heal her family, caring for her sick father at the end of his life, supported her sister in life and in death (a story I will tell later), and created a social club called Laugh Lovers to help all the lonely people like her.
And even with what I think is an abnormal amount of knowledge about my mom, I’m sure that there was far more to her life’s story that is now silent, reduced to ashes and sitting in a box inside a cabinet in our house.
(Sorry mom, we were going to spread your ashes around the fruit trees we planted as a memorial to you — a lifetime of hard work and saving is the reason we could buy my wife’s dream house — and it’s about time to give you the send-off you deserve.)
I mourn not just because of the pain of emotional loss, but the inability to learn my father-in-law’s full story.
As I walk through the house, it feels like an archaeological dig — a lifetime’s collection of books, tools, machines, furniture, videos, papers, clothes, toiletries, and other evidence of him— as I try to make sense of another person’s life and mourn for all the possibilities never realized in the past, as well as those that will never be dreamed.
While I don’t have any real knowledge about my father-in-law’s life other than the surface things people notice and then use to judge someone else, I look at old photos of him that I was collecting to put together a slide show for his memorial and see so much unspoken suffering.
Of course, that pain might come out in mood swings and a little too much drinking, but how the hell can any of us from a younger generation judge him when he had to survive the poverty and cruelty of the Nazi occupation during WWII?
In 1933, my wife’s maternal grandfather built a house near what was once a small village and open farm fields about 20 km south of Paris, not far from Rue National 20, the ancient north-south transportation artery used before France built its modern highways.
The house is now occupied by my brother-in-law, who bought it from his grandmother many years ago, and he has done a tremendous amount of work to expand and modernize the house.
As we sat at the table for breakfast, he showed us the direction and location of the shell that pierced the roof, passed within a couple of feet of the bassinet holding one of my uncles, and exited through the window and into the back yard without exploding, as the allies battled northward to liberate Paris in 1944. (I don’t know who fired the shell.)
Life is as fragile as a non-functioning artillery projectile.
My wife’s entire family would have been uprooted out of history, regardless of whether my mother-in-law might have survived the explosion. Without her parents and brother, there would be no third sibling after the war, no house for the family to shelter my in-laws after they got married, and possibly no marriage at all.
The chances of my wife being born and leading a life that would lead to us meeting and having our sons seem astronomically small.
And that leads me back to my original point.
It’s crowded here at the center of the universe.
In case it’s not clear by now, I’m mocking our narcissistic tendencies.
Also, the origin of this self-deprecating joke goes back at least to the 1980s, but is probably far older than that.
I learned it from my marriage-counselor-turned therapist back in 1992, and he learned it from his 12-step sponsor when he was battling for sobriety fifteen years before that.
Who knows how far that saying goes back before then?
Unlike the narcissists preening throughout the internet who think that each fart and belch is important news to share on every social media platform imaginable (I can hardly wait for Sniff-Chat™ and TasteBook™), people who get their asses kicked on a regular basis by life — and death of loved ones — recognize the importance of humility.
A scientific aside
But in the interest of academic fairness, before I go deeper into this rant about narcissism, here’s a scientific article that posits we are the center of the universe, in one sense. (Sorry, this refers to all of humanity, not just you.)
The idea is that on the spectrum starting at the smallest thing in the universe (cold dark matter) and ending in the largest cluster of super galaxies, human beings sit in the middle.
We’re kind of like glazed donuts — not as small as a donut hole, not as big as an apple fritter, without much substance and containing lots of empty calories, but still something that, in limited quantities, can be sweet and be worth sharing over a cup of coffee.
Here’s a quote from an interview Tom Yulsman did for his book Cosmic Origins — the Quest for Our Cosmic Roots with astronomer Sandra Faber:
So far from feeling dwarfed by the vast reaches and energy of the cosmos, what we really learn is that we are the most remarkable and complicated product of cosmic evolution, and our potential is unlimited. — Sandra Faber
According to Yulsman:
In their essays and books, Primack and Abrams use an illustration known as the Cosmic Uroboros to illustrate the vastly different scales of the cosmos — and where we fit in… this turns out to be the only size that conscious beings like us could be.”
Apparently, I’ve been proven wrong by these astronomers and heavy-duty scientific thinkers: your farts and belches are, in fact, the work of special beings.
So please carry on with your butt selfies, you yoga-pantsed “fitness” instructors. Inform us of your every gastronomic excess and drinking binge, you gluttons and drunks of the world. Show us your death-defying mishaps as you hope to be cast for the next Jackass movie, you crazy meat bags who risk letting out all the life-juice with each stupid prank. Whine and complain-brag to your heart’s content, you privileged (fill in your own invective here, I’m trying to stay positive). Overshare every emotion and thought without ever displaying the smallest shred of self-awareness or growth, you tortured personal essayists. And troll on, all you mofo losers trying to make the rest of humanity miserable.
And I will continue to rant like a lone wolf howling in the wilderness, trying to warn the innocent about the dangers of external validation and get-rich-quick schemes.
I hope you didn’t think I’m done with you yet, did you? That was the introduction to my rant about other ranters and the subject of narcissism.
I read an article by John Gorman, and I really enjoyed his quaint Johnny-come-lately, I’m-telling-you-the-truth-that-no-one-dares-to-write about narcissistic social media influencers.
I loved this quote from his June article, You Are Not the Cosmos:
“I almost titled this essay, “How to Be An Influencer Without Selling Your Soul.” Almost. Yet that felt too sleazy. I thought better to steal the title of an obscure essay by one of my favorite writers…” — John Gorman
There’s a man of my own heart.
A couple of months later, in September, I wrote a rant about the fact that my research and analysis of the inscrutable algorithm was appearing in the articles of far more popular writers, and asked why these people were announcing their “revelations” a week after I wrote a post on that exact subject.
Even though I was totally unaware of his writing, I wrote,
“How can these narcissists be so unethical as to think they can plagiarize the ideas that I stole from others?”
As I read through his article for the first time last night, I kept seeing the same themes I’ve been writing about for years in virtual anonymity, a Medium-imposed life sentence of Curgatory.™
It’s entirely possible that people prefer John’s bare-knuckle take-no-prisoners style of writing to my dry-humored, quasi-academic tone.
I guess the fact that he has 47,000 more followers might prove this hypothesis.
I’m glad he got his message through to so many people.
Unlike most of the mega-popular social media stars on Medium, his articles get highlighted for his entertaining ability to turn a phrase (almost as much as mine, ha!).
But you’re asking how can I say “Johnny-come-lately” when he wrote his article two months before I started my 500-Word-Rant column, right?
Because I wrote a rant about people like John ranting about the preponderance of self-help garbage and sales pitches clogging up our feeds back in 2016:
To you, John, and all the others, congratulations on making money from complaining. (Obviously, I have the added complaint of not making as much money from complaining as you are.)
But when it comes to the subject matter of poking
“…the untouchable bear — the dudes who write like chat-bots. The ones who tell you to optimize your headlines and content for maximum views. The ones with newsletters and online courses and webinars. The ones with no soul.” — John Gorman
Dude, you are so late to the game. To quote me from all the way back in 2016:
While I totally agree with your premise, I have to observe that your articles are basically doing the same thing — getting huge numbers of views and recommends, while taking attention away from writers who have written something meaningful — as the people you complain about.
But being the blogger generation, we just like to spew out whatever is on our minds, as if we were the first to think about it. Worse yet, we think the problem just started because it happened to come to our attention at that particular moment.
Because I do my research, I know I’m not the first person to go after the snake oil salesmen of Medium:
Here are two of the greatest hit pieces about the life hackers, self-help gurus and shysters that exhort their innocent followers to learn how they, too, can [fill in the benefit here, you’ve heard them already].
Writers who blog, on the other hand, can produce brilliant and subversive satire that will make you pee your pants. Take, for example, these outstanding articles by Henry Wismayer and Morgan Rock Loehr.
These articles were written in social media’s Pleistocene age, almost four years ago. (If you want to read their entire spit-take, gut-busting catalog of humorous rage, I compiled it here.)
That, my friends, is why I can neither take credit for writing something original that’s being copied by others, nor why someone with more social media popularity can claim that I somehow found and copied his work.
And we have no idea who inspired Medium’s crown princes of satire when they wrote their articles.
The whole point is that humanity is interconnected and we are influenced by others, regardless of whether we consciously know about their work or not, but too narcissistic to realize we weren’t the first one to come up with an idea.
For those of you fortunate enough to have a computer or mobile device and internet access, we are all dealing with or will deal with the same kinds of issues: relationship dysfunction, depression and other mental illnesses, chronic pain, loss, lack of connection, trauma, and, mortality.
As I’ve written so many times in the past, writing is something we do for our own sanity, regardless of how much or little attention each person doled out by the arbitrary and absurd social media universe.
All we can do is keep sharing our stories to entertain, educate or inspire, and once in awhile perform the service of comforting others to know they are not alone in their suffering.
Merry Christ-madan-zaa-nukkah and a Happy New Year to all.
