The way I see it, the overarching reason Tim Rogers isn’t completely open despite saying it’s something he would like to do is the same reason it will probably make you feel weird when you read in the following words that (actual toilet talk incoming) I’ve shit out soft stools like 3-4 times today for reasons I don’t understand and feel weird and bad about not being able to understand but will just keep on ignoring ’cause I don’t get time to worry about it, or why it’s become a social taboo to discuss salary, benefits, and accommodations at the workplace, or, if you ask me, why the Catholic Church over hundreds of years social-engineered a big chunk of the world’s people to internalize, among other things, that the normal human desires inside of them to just relax and hang out and do their own thing to actually be the worst things one can do and will end one up being punished for an eternity. Or why I shared an aggressively personal fact about shitting and not the actual drawn out traumatic-yet-in-form-horribly-mundane experience I’ve been dealing with since March 1st, 2021, and why I’m going to stop that there, because I feel quite certain it probably made someone uncomfortable just to know that something is seriously wrong, and even if they’d be fine with hearing the details, it would be frustrating and painful for me to have to share it without knowing without a doubt that someone’s reaction won’t just make me feel just unfulfilled or annoyed about having done so.
If you’re speaking the English language in 2021, it is almost guaranteed that you live in a venomously truth and truthteller hostile culture, where telling the truth openly, even if you yourself are not ashamed or uncomfortable about doing so, somehow makes you the social deviant. And this is leaving aside people who use that sort of thing to attack or exploit or manipulate others. I guess part of that unfulfillment/annoyance I mentioned earlier has a lot to do with the idea that there is such a massive deficit in the exchange of truth in normal social relationships, or, topically, in a relationship between someone we’ll call a storyteller and a listener, that, at least in my experiences, there is no way to try and bridge that gulf casually that doesn’t just make people not know how to respond to it.
There’s a not insubstantial part of me that feels quite certain of the idea that the big idea behind this manufactured and despotistically instilled social landscape is in place maybe because if we all spoke openly and honestly with each other a little more often, we’d all be burning down more banks and busting open more prisons, or, perhaps, we’d never have tolerated the creation of those things in the first place. But I digress.
I dunno. It’s kind of the name of the game that practically all social interactions, or at least any with any level of privacy below 100.00%, involve some level of performance or omission or framing. Sometimes it’s to make a story more entertaining or relateable or impactful, sometimes it’s just out of courtesy to people who are less ready to have their day ruined than they think they are. I don’t really see any of this as artistic licence. It’s probably weird as hell to have the kind of memory Tim Rogers does in a culture where almost everyone else around you expects you to lie in one direction or another, mostly either to please them, entertain them, or keep the peace. He’s not alone in this but we all know there’s a pressure to either keep inconvenient, uncomfortable, or disgraceful things like being traumatized or being exploited to your damn self ’cause no one wants to hear it, but, if you can draw it out into a way that can be commodified, well, you still have to leave the substance of the trauma or exploitation out of it, so you might as well make some shit up sometimes, or to be more generous, gloss over things that just hurt too much to sell. I can’t help but keep thinking about Tim’s autobiographical (or to be thorough, presented-as-autobiographical) pieces on Medium, and I think I’m trying to prove another point here by paraphrasing the content of some of those here as if they are scandalous secrets even though anybody with an internet connection can read them, but whether or not you truthfully have performed what is by any stretch of the imagination subsistence sex work while of what I can only imagine was precarious immigration status in one of the top countries in the world where you personally would stick out like a sore thumb almost everywhere you are at any time, you’ve probably got some weird things you’re working out by writing wholly fabricated autobiographical pieces about that being what happened to you in your life. And even still, at that point, if I were to have to justify someone completely fabricating stories about performing subsistence sex work, I’d probably have to point out that a man writing about that kinda shit is pretty creatively transgressive even if they don’t frame it as autobiography, not gonna lie.
I mean, shit. There still has to be some means to reaffirm one’s right to privacy if nothing else, and, again, I feel aware of the fact that the suggestion that you might want to have privacy about something ironically really pisses a lot of people off too, so, you really can’t win. I affirmed my right to privacy above when I referred to an ongoing traumatic event in my own life while stopping short of describing it, even. And, really, I did do so to prove a point, but it wasn’t just to manipulate either. The nature of what’s going on means that no amount of well meaning sympathy or even actual desire to meaningfully assist can actually do anything, only the actual worst people in the world have any influence on alleviating or ending the situation, so it really does make me feel terrible when I can’t avoid sharing it. So my intention there really is to be courteous more than anything.
If I may be so bold as to make a sweeping statement, maybe the scary thing to consider here is that for all the thinkpieces and cultural attitudes towards it, it is just as easy or difficult to tell the truth or lie or ascertain what is truth or lies over the internet as anywhere else. The crisis of truth and authenticity and identity re: the internet isn’t that it is somehow so uniquely depersonalizing that anyone can just lie and be anything they want to be behind a username or with anonymity or whatever, I think the real crisis is that the only crisis that can really be true about the internet is that there was no crisis in the first place and this is just what human culture (to my knowledge and experience as an English speaker embedded within a settler colony) has been for a while. There’s a difference in context and form between how someone acts truthfully or untruthfully on Youtube and how they do that when you run into them in public, but I don’t feel that there’s a huge difference in substance.
I have a lot of faith in and relate a lot to king weirdo Tim Rogers, not because I wish I was him or even anything like him, but for personal/cultural/pseudo-spiritual reasons1, my greatest aspiration in life is to be a principled contrarian, and even when it at least sorta ruined several of my actual days, I cannot help but applaud the hater-confounding aggression with which Tim approached the release of this video. I truly feel that the greatest version of myself is someone whose presence endears myself to those who get it and that every one of my triumphs is horrible news to my haters. Ideally I can teach a hater a valuable lesson but if that’s not possible I’m just as happy to ruin their day. The only higher virtue than this is comedy which speaks for itself. So I guess to me Tim Rogers is an icon of hater-confoundery, and for that he has my undying respect and admiration, I don’t think I have the power to be able to disgust and befuddle as many haters as him but I will always try. Maybe this is overly generous towards the guy but also I think if you’re reading this I would be just as generous towards you. Yeah, I think that’s the truth, if you’re reading this, I’ll literally believe anything you tell me at this point, and if I find out later you fabricated something about what you said, I’ll probably assume you had a good reason.
1 - they’re not pseudo-spiritual, they’re spiritual, I’m the pseudo part of that
Maybe the intention to be authentic is the only tangible authenticity there is, at least under present conditions. No one is really truly 100% authentic in any capacity anywhere, and there’s a whole lot of reasons for most people to need to diminish a lot of their authenticity, so maybe just saying you’re really trying is enough for me.
I mean, you know who might be the only sort of people who get to be truly authentic without the associated social backlash? I bet you it’s guys like Elon Musk.
