A Life Without Struggle is Meaningless

Making do with what you have and thinking for yourself in the online era

I’ve actually done more writing than reading this past week, so I’m sharing an essay that I’ve been playing around with rather than the usual selection of inspirational quotes and art recommendations. Perhaps you’ll find something to mull over in the words that follow just the same. Forgive me if I sound like a broken record, but I want to document my observations as a first-generation digital native so that I can reflect on them in the future with greater insight.

What a time to be alive.

I’ve come to realise that one of the defining features of our current culture a quarter into the 21st century is inauthenticity. There has always been a lack of trust in the institutions that govern modern society, from politicians and law enforcement to reporters and scientists, but we seem to be more scared of each other than ever before. We throw around labels and accusations like stones in glass houses while putting up walls inside our castles in the air. Wisdom is power in an age of misinformation where having the humility to admit that we don’t know enough to form an opinion on everything is more valuable than being correct.

Campaign advertising has a lot to answer for. It’s the same reason that businesses put the most expensive items in shop windows and on the shelves at eye-level. They promise that a product or service will improve your life without any supporting evidence; you just have to trust them. We’ve all seen the before and after photos or timelapse videos that infomercials push on daytime TV, but how often do these things actually make people feel better? Being told that you need unnecessary stuff from every possible angle, in each spare second, to deserve to be here is nothing short of incentivised coercion.

The more you yearn for the unattainable, the easier you are to control.

Network (1976) - Credit: United Artists

The same marketing approach is found in contemporary media, from music and cinema to games and online influencers. Watch any film from the ’70s or ’80s and you’ll probably find that the men are scruffy, rugged fellows with acne scars, calloused hands and hair on their chests. These days, they all have chiselled jawlines and sixpacks without a single scar or blemish unless it serves the story. For women, visual aesthetics are just the beginning. Toxic masculinity still exists, but men can embrace their feminine side today in relative safety. What is socially acceptable changes with the times and creates new markets as a result.

And you know what sells? Sex appeal. There’s a poem of mine that my roommates like to reference in which I say all I can think about is food, sex and death. As it turns out, most men can relate to this and I can’t help but wonder how much of it is by design. Every marketing tactic plays on our fears and insecurities, all of which essentially boil down to sex. If we eat too much, we become overweight and unattractive, which makes it harder to find a romantic partner. And if we don’t reproduce to propagate the species, our bloodline and therefore our legacy dies with us, old and alone in a constant state of inadequacy.

The poem Simple Man from my book Momentary Infinity.

Of course, this attitude is subjective. But people who are afraid will turn to the first person promising a solution. Imposters and charlatans are working in every corner of the internet to exploit our vulnerabilities and profit from our desperation to fit in. History proves that anything can become true when enough people believe in it. So, what happens if we stop taking every word that we read for gospel and reach our own conclusions instead? The people - that’s you and me - begin to think for themselves. And there are few things more dangerous to a collective society than an individual with an idea.

Social media, however, has turned us all into content creators marketing ourselves as better versions of each other. As they say, if a service is free then you’re the product. There are benefits to being connected with those you care about and staying updated on their lives, or at least the parts that they choose to put on display, but it also creates a virtual distance. How ironic is that? We compare ourselves to edited photos of friends and videos of strangers doing impossible things all over the world without considering the number of takes or years of practise required to get that little slice of fabricated perfection.

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Help me keep the lights on by showing that my work has value.

Pick up a copy of my debut poetry collection and I’ll even sign it for you.

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Much of what we see online and in the news is ragebait designed to generate engagement. A negative reaction is still attention, after all, and the algorithm doesn’t factor in nuance. This is why woefully bad sequels and reboots keep getting produced; they’ll continue to make money regardless of their quality because the studios look at the figures without reading the comments. But why interact with something that will only perpetuate the cycle? We should be empowering the worthy few to create positive change and advance our culture. Instead, our finite resources of time and energy are being wasted on mindless vitriol.

Screens are not inherently bad; it all depends on how you use them. Developing a healthy relationship with technology is crucial as it becomes an integral part of our lives. The problem is that our devices are getting smarter so we don’t have to and services are becoming automated so we don’t have to work for them. But faster is not always better. We can have entire conversations with computers now so we don’t need to speak to another human being unless absolutely necessary, if we so choose. Nothing worth having is easy to attain and a life without struggle is meaningless.

If we let the new frontier of civilisation succumb to AI slop and brainrot, what hope is there for a better future in our online community?