A hipster Hamlet – replete with handlebar mustache, oxfords, and a plaid button-down – sits down and stares at the white laptop screen, using internet he paid for with a scone, and asks himself the final existential question: “to blog, or not to blog?”

Our hipster is not so naïve as to lack an ironical conscience about the whole thing: his inner voice is already mocking him in its snarky tone (“oh, another entitled white male who thinks he has something to say”). He is aware that the internet, and practically the entire publishing world with it, is already overflowing with trash. Filled with that kind of missing-comma, semicolon-lacking rants whose authors you imagine never took a breath when they vehemently beat their keyboards. Filled with the abortive dream-projects of wannabe amateurs who worship Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith and whoever else is in vogue, whoever else has their name whispered in reverential tones at the local café. He once imagined taking some of those Oprah- or Reese-Witherspoon-sponsored books and tearing them apart at the level of individual sentences so that people couldn’t enjoy them anymore, so that they had to try something else, something more in line with his own artistic and literary tastes (how is it acceptable that “literary fiction” is now a sub-genre of fiction?). But, he is aware that all of these thoughts are incredibly narcissistic, and his inner voice again critiques his entitled, self-important mentality.

He is aware that he has a greater chance of being heard if he were to just scream in a paper bag than if he were to buy a domain for $2.99 a month on WordPress, whose business model relies on taking advantage of the overly optimistic amateur writer. Yet, he asks himself, is it ethically permissible for him to feel such utter contempt for nearly everything he sees, without ever making an attempt of his own?

He is further aware that we live in a “raising awareness” culture, where people will consume art and media that raises awareness about societal issues, in order to feel that their consumption is actually production. He has in mind the kind of people who want to feel that they are generative, just citizens without ever having to do the work that justice always requires, and without having to reveal one’s ineptitude in the process. Without, above all, having to engage with the dirty, uneducated people whose lives have been destroyed by a capitalist system that is indifferent to human life, the people whom one has been taught by that very system to fear and loathe.

He has in mind the kind of people who are awful at talking to strangers (especially people of other nationalities, ethnicities, religions, genders, classes, sexualities, or abilities), but who act like armchair social workers. He has in mind middle-class white liberals. The kind who probably attended a private school, but who protest on Facebook that America is growing ever-more segregated. The kind who received a STEM-based vocational degree and so have the funds to support themselves but never were able to resolve an inchoate desire for something more fundamentally human. The kind of techies that fill Pike Place and line up to buy the latest seasonal beverage from the original Starbucks before going to see a new installation at SAM.

He is aware that, if it were ever to be read, his writing would just be another brick in the towering landfill of “raising awareness” art; that some other selfish, idiotic prick would waste his time reading it; and that some other schmuck would starve in all the accumulated filth we’ve created, while waiting for someone to give a damn. He is aware that the only people who would have the free time and drive to read this drivel are precisely the kind of indolent bourgeois morons that he hates.

The problem with “raising awareness” culture is that it is built on a myth, the kind of myth that paralyzes its audience, the myth of the “changed person.” Upon first viewing the film, photograph, painting, or abstract sculpture of the grimacing, traumatized person, the “changed person” suddenly realizes that other people exist, that they are suffering, and that one has a responsibility to them. The “changed person,” upon exposure to the art, is converted to a life of public service, and the sums of incremental improvements wrought by such “changed people” justify the “raising awareness” art as bearing a central function in our society, as necessary forms of documentation—to address atrocities as they currently exist, or to prevent them from repeating (cue that overused Santayana quote).

The problem is that nobody wants to be the “changed person.” Moreover, nobody ever witnesses this apocryphal “changed person.” As a result, everyone can walk around without ever needing to question if the emperor has clothes. Everyone can be assured that someone else is doing something to solve some other people’s problems, and that they are doing their part by supporting those problem solvers. The system thrives off of the kind of obscurity and vagueness that is inherent to any situation where what happened took place in another room, where one is always catching up on a missed event, where one is kept separated from others’ suffering, and where one perpetuates that separation through the consumption of “raising awareness” art.

The problem with American democracy today is that voting has made people passive and complacent. The issue is never that citizens need to do more, need to resolve their issues at a local, community level; instead, issues are taken to be representative of inept or powerless leaders. If anyone does bring up an issue present within the populace, it is that there needs to be a more substantive discussion of politics, rather than a repetition of soundbites and tag-lines (which, itself, has become a soundbite and a tag-line). These ivy-league grads with freshly-ironed collars, who just came from makeup, and who are internally counting the seconds between their blinks, act as if the general populace were not so removed from those issues that it would be impossible for them to form substantive opinions.

As a result, our system has continuously oscillated between conservative and progressive political platforms (platforms whose shared propensity for violent, imperialistic policies both domestically and abroad make me skeptical of their having a fundamental difference). In each new turn, the tangent flies further from its center; in the words of Yeates, we are all slouching towards Bethlehem. Out of the complacency of the indolent, greater power is granted to a central force, in the hopes that this leader may miraculously solve all one’s problems.

It is a farcical tragedy that a nation born out of a population’s widespread willingness to commit murder and risk death, in the name of a shared identity and reduced taxation, has now become such a breeding ground for political timidity and intellectual tepidity. While surely one must not continue the violence committed by such foolhardy and literally careless patriarchs, there is still need for courage. We claim to be technological giants, able to survive and supersede the demons of our antecedents, and yet we are still naught more than fragile, fleshly packages. We have no more understanding of why we are here, and perhaps even less, than any who came before us. This is a world built upon fear and powerlessness; it is informed by genealogies of ignorance and privilege, by a historical process of accumulated traumas and phobias, not by some divinely revealed Truth. There is no system—political, economic, or otherwise—where one can be assured that the “better man” will win. Indeed, we live the anxieties and hysteria caused by the realization that such Truth is dead. Voting, itself, is inherently a fearful and powerless act, as one hands one’s power over to another, in the hopes that the world will be better for it.

And so, after having written a breathless diatribe against nearly everything in belletristic and pop culture today (exactly the kind of self-aware diatribe that he already critiqued and is aware of perpetuating anyway), our cynical, radically progressive hipster must come up with a reason in favor of blogging. And indeed, dear reader, you must suspect that I have found such a reason, or what would be the point of writing this post? To do away with the ironical third-person, and to be sincere for a moment, I must confess that the idea came quite strongly and suddenly upon me. I am reminded of a quote from Kierkegaard, where he claimed that a good argument should always strike one like a wound from behind.

When one reads Kierkegaard, one feels that one is constantly being ratcheted up, at a painful staccato, from one level of consciousness to another. In economics, one calls this phenomenon level-k strategies, where strategy level-k responds to the flaws present within strategy level-k_minus_1, and where one’s strategy approaches optimality as k plunges towards infinity. Of course, though the game theorists who came up with level_k strategies had no idea that their economic theories were approximating Hegel’s philosophy of history, there is a clear notion of perpetual progress within it. Kierkegaard himself is utterly against all Hegelian notions of reasoned perfection, and would be the first to point out that level_k strategies might cycle infinitely, and that, limited to this single moment, limited to this infinitely finite present, one has no way of knowing what those strategies may be. The game of life might be like that one scene in The Princess Bride, where Vizzini continuously out-thinks himself, shifting between two possibilities. It could be like a game of rock, paper scissors, where—of course, you idiot, you should have picked rock instead of paper.

Reflecting on Kierkegaard’s notion of angst in his Being and Time, Heidegger writes that anxiety is the awareness of one’s back. In other words, when one fears the wound from behind, what is really affecting oneself is the realization that one has a blindspot, that something could come at any moment without one’s awareness. I imagine that the anxious person becomes like a dog chasing its tail; like someone turning back and forth like the cha-cha slide (“reverse, reverse!”) stuck as a broken record forever, as a kind of hellish, Dantean punishment; or like a coin endlessly flipping across a table, attempting to split itself in two, attempting to have both sides face up, when all these subdivisions, these fractals and tessellations, only leave more coins with more sides on the table.

In citing Kierkegaard and Heidegger, I already feel myself shifting towards that existential tradition, the kind that influenced Tillich’s title The Courage to Be—the tradition which argues that I have to forego a safe, ironic distance in the realization that, as a part of being, I have to choose, that I have to risk being an asshole or a moron or an overly-entitled narcissist.

But, if I’m being honest, the wound that struck me from behind wasn’t some academic revelation tucked within the tomes of continental philosophy. It came, in a moment of despair and self-doubt, when I opened a desk-drawer, one that had a fine layer of dust around its edges (I am aware that this sounds much like the beginning of Either/Or, but I swear that I’m being sincere, and that the high-flown cultural, academic and political references have stopped at this point). In it, I found an accumulation of writing assignments that my Mom had gathered and kept since I was in kindergarten. It was one of those rare moments when I appreciated my mother as a human being, not as the person who tries to regulate my behavior and always makes sure I do the right thing, not the nagging superego who receives—either out loud or in my head—all the anger of my procrastinating subconscious, but someone who gave up having a career because she wanted to make something in this world. I realized, as I took out the carefully preserved box (which, admittedly, I first saw as kind of useless and cliché), that I was that something.

My mother has a doctorate in education and specializes in teaching children with learning disabilities how to read. I have never been able to sleep easily, and my most potent memories from childhood are the times that I was alone with my thoughts and nightmares, in the darkness of my childhood bedroom. My family still likes to joke that I was like the Tasmanian Devil as an infant, and I was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADD as early as it was professionally acceptable to diagnose those illnesses. Having an intimate and professional familiarity with the troubles that lay ahead, throughout 1st to 4th grade, my mother took me from tutor to tutor, making sure that I would be able to read. Part of me has always hated reading, as I’ve never had the attention span for it. Most of the time when I read I have to actively remind myself to focus on the words on the page. But, the cognitive effort of reading has always been a kind of sadomasochistic pleasure for me, as I’m sure some gym-rats are addicted to the tearing of their muscle fibers.

Reading has always been a source of pain, pride and contempt, as I feel somewhat horrible while I do it, joy at having done it, and indignation against those who fail to do it. I suppose that my reading habits have now become the source of my cynical attitude towards everything, towards people who aren’t willing to put in the work. It’s given me a kind of conservative the-end-is-nigh mentality, which, thanks to the environmental pressures of my liberal arts education, has now been coupled with a radically progressive political outlook. So, now I think we all ought to care about the impoverished and the ostracized, even though I have such a hard time doing it myself, and I decry those who fail to do so.

I realize now that reading had also become a way to deal with paralysis, a haven to go to when I didn’t know how to think nor feel. Until age 9, I slept in a bunk bed (even though my siblings had their own bedrooms; it was a carry over from a previous house and it’s where my cousins slept when they came to visit), and I still have a vivid, tactile memory of the cloth that hung over it. I slept on the bottom bunk, and there was a gray, threadbare cover on the underside of the top bunk’s frame. When I couldn’t sleep, I would run my hands through it and try to force shapes and characters out of its grainy patterns and textures. I must have wasted countless hours of my life, trying to sleep, too tired to do anything but fear my inability to sleep, fear whatever demons might come in the night, just mindlessly running my hands through that cloth. I remember one night, staring at the cloth, and suddenly deciding to read. That night, I never slept, but I read through two full magic tree house books. I can remember reading Magic Tree House 3: Secret of the Pyramid, and feeling as if I could see the cat in the desert sands, somewhere in the horizon, dancing on shimmering waves of heat. I think there have been many times in my life, maybe even months of study, where I was similarly paralyzed, and where, though my readings and my reasons for reading may have been different, the underlying impotence and impatience was the same.

At the time of opening that desk-drawer, I had just gotten through the tail end of what had been a messy and rather unhealthy relationship. After a bit of counseling and introspection, I realized that I spent so much of my life afraid of being alone, of being that little kid trying to make it through the night, warding the demons off with books that he has such a hard time getting through. I realized that I put myself through some pretty awful relationships, because I thought that being alone would be so much worse, and because I was never willing to believe that I deserved better. I put so much effort into making people like me, and have such a hard time feeling proud of myself unless someone else says they are impressed. I also realized that I built a defense against criticism by holding everyone else in contempt, so that it didn’t even matter much when they complimented me, because I didn’t value them enough to value their opinion.

I also realized that I probably wasn’t alone in feeling that way, that it’s very difficult to be willing to be alone, to have confidence that something better will come around. I recently watched Marriage Story, and while I felt that Laura Dern’s character (Nora) was a bit of a stereotype (the kind of man-eating divorce attorney who thinks that misandry is the only feminist position), I was absolutely struck when she told her client applying for divorce: “you need to always remember that what you’re doing is an act of hope.” Though I’m sure that I wasn’t the intended audience of her words, I realized that I had spent so much of my life expecting the worst, and that I had paralyzed myself in that expectation.

When I opened the desk-drawer, and began reading, I was shocked by the voice I found. For once, I began to feel heat in my chest, the kind of joy that I had tried, in vain, to find in another’s embrace. For once, I was able to feel proud of myself. Sure, there were things I would have changed, surprisingly optimistic and pro-capitalistic opinions that I definitely no longer hold; but, there was, behind every poorly punctuated statement, a voice. There was a freshman who accurately cited Nietzsche and Socrates, creatively weaving them together in an essay on the dual sense of duty and immoralism in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn—for an English class where neither Nietzsche nor Socrates were on the syllabus. Though there was no dearth of grammar mistakes (I got a B+ in the class), I could also see why my teacher had decided to give me the award “Excellence in 9th Grade English” despite my slightly-above-average grade. I had always suspected that the award was just an oxymoron, one given to seemingly depressed students who needed a pick-me-up. As I continued reading, and looking at the notes in the margins, I realized that I could see myself from my former teacher’s eyes, that I could identify more with my teacher’s comments than with my own writing.

The words came when I could never imagine having uttered them, when I could no longer predict how the words would follow each other, and so I found myself as a different person. If the boy who had written that essay knew all the decisions he had to make, had to write them all down in a list right then and there, I don’t think he would have ended up the same person as I am today. I imagined all the places that this body has travelled since then, all the ways that it’s changed; I was surprised to find myself thinking about the distance between me and this boy in a spatial, rather than a temporal way—not as something existing on another, spectral plane, but as a body that has grown, has climbed and crawled its way here. How many forgotten touches, scents and sights have been lost in those intervening years?

In an essay on virtue in the public realm, Hannah Arendt (whom I consider to be the greatest philosopher of the past century) argues that we never know what we are; that our actions are like the movement of puppets; that we pull on, and are pulled by, our own strings; that the character of each puppet-master reveals itself only in the work of the historian. I could not see myself as this young writer, and the distance granted me the permission to feel proud. Whatever puppet-master has been guiding my long and unseen path, I now have confidence in it, because, despite its at times wayward trajectory, I would not change a moment of this life. And I re-read letters from friends and teachers, hoping for a pick-me-up, but honestly expecting to find the same tried-and-true, hackneyed expressions. Instead, they saw me with such insight that I had never, until then, had about myself. And, above all else, they had great confidence that I would make the right decisions, even as they didn’t know what those decisions would be—even as I didn’t think I could.

Even as I felt so foreign to myself, I knew that there I was again, the same little boy, sitting alone in my room, reading and crying.

In closing, I think back upon Hamlet; in particular, the expression: “Our wills and fates do so contrary run, that our devices still are overthrown; our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.” But, instead of thinking about this line in such a paralyzing, nihilistic way, it now inspires me with courage. For what a relief, that we don’t have to know our ends! What joy there can be in this separation from ourselves! And I begin to wonder how many people live in contempt of the stereotype of the hipster blogger, and how many of them use that contempt as a front for hiding who they are. They say that writing is a waste of everyone’s time, when writing for an hour a day isn’t wasting much, and may indeed be part of that cycle of activity, coming at the evening hours, which empowers one to continue waking up and meeting the tasks of each day. I think that so many people do not blog or journal, do not write for others to see, because they are afraid of what they might look back and find. We are forever our own audience; and, if purpose there be in this life, that purpose must be finding a way to live without regret, to live as those heroes whom we seek to watch.

I do not want to let a moment of this life pass by, without being able to place my eye upon it. If I am foolish, cruel or entitled, then what better way to learn than by exposing my faults to myself? Perhaps I might fail, perhaps this might be a cry to echo through the ether of the internet, without a single meaningful reader. But $2.99 a month is not a terrible cost to try, to see myself, to remember who I am. And thinking about myself as another person, still in the distant future, allows me to more easily think of another person as myself; perhaps, as one is wont to say in our documentary culture, the follies of my time will be fruit for someone else—and what better purpose, what better impetus than that to blog?