I’ve been reading Okcupid profiles, and I keep seeing the same sentiment glaring back at me. Well, it’s not the same sentiment, it has many incarnations.
"you’re passionate about something"
" You deeply care about something, and you’d like to teach me"
" You pee on people in the shower, and have something that you deeply care about"
Well, for the most part, I feel like the anti-hero of the dead. It’s not a perfect comparison. It’s not that I don’t deeply care about something. I care about my self. I care about my family. I care about pizza. However, I haven’t had that deeply passionate fully enthralled feeling about anything in a while.
James Joyce suggested that the multiculturalism that followed globalization and the vast english empire would drown out the passion that necessary flowed from simple, home-grown culture. He argued that the english could never be passionate.
As a child of this global generation, the internets, moral relativism, existential fuckmenots etc, aren’t we all descendants of Joyce’s anti-hero? What am i Supposed to feel passionate about? Philosophy? I’m not disillusioned about it’s power. Philosophy is a great thing to think about while you’re drunk, but its charm fades when put into use. Nobody cares about the shit you think about the world. (ironic that I’m writing this right? )
Music? Fuck it, everyone has their own tastes. Politics? I don’t have a good solution for any of your problems. Plus for the longest time, I’ve wanted to save the poor from themselves, but I realized this is impossible. Art? I don’t get it. Literature, even though it’s a form of art, it’s all good, so fuck you. What is it that I should attach myself to as my cause?
Yet, I still feel something. I hope. Perhaps, I’m just getting old, and causes seem difficult to attach myself to. Perhaps it’s all about the the small battles. Fuck the overarching higher causes, I’ll fight the small battles and wage a war that takes me nowhere.
Are there any things you believe in, now that you’re old? Am I just cynical? Tired? Tired of failing ? Maybe, I too, am dead. If you haven’t read the dead, do it fuck face. http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/958/