NotPopCulture

So this place is no longer called No Target. There are a few reasons why I've abandoned the old name, none of which are particularly interesting. Perhaps the biggest thing for me was how insane it felt for the title of the blog to be different from the URL address. Look! They're now the same.

These are exciting times. Honest.

Spread too thin?

I always had high hopes for myself. I bought into the lie they tell you at school that “you can do anything if you set your mind to it”, and then sat around waiting for my mind to get set on something. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.

For a while I thought it was music that would make me “special”, or at the very least, give me an excuse to slack off at university:

“Why bother getting a good night’s sleep before tomorrow’s 9am economic anthropology class, when instead I could stay up and help write a song that defines our generation? Now pass the red wine and the reefer and play me that second verse again...”

As attractive as that lifestyle was, when I turned from my late-teens to early-twenties, doubts set in. Despite talks with promoters and producers who’d say all the right things about how “relevant” they thought our sound was, the Dakar Rally fan-base never extended much beyond friends of friends with nothing better to do. There came a point when persuading people to come to the next gig was my main reason for wanting to go out and meet people, and I found myself keeping in contact with those I otherwise found uninspired and uninteresting just to chase an elusive half-promise they once made to “come see you guys play sometime”. I had, in the words of Vincent Vincent & the Villains, “turned into someone that I didn’t like- and that’s no fun”.

So it’s against this back-drop of having tried and failed at a grand plan for the future (and allowing myself to become a self-serving, sycophant-seeker in the process) that I’m left wondering: what next? What can I do to escape the quagmire of life as a bored paper-pushing public servant, who relieves his creative frustrations by sporadically updating a seldom-read blog?

Q. Is a bland picture better than no picture at all?

These seem like the options:

a) Accept life as a fed-up, paper-pushing public servant. Keep drinking too much, never get laid, and occasionally go to karaoke bars with other grumpy paper-pushing public servants to sing Hard-Fi’s “Living for the Weekend” or ”Working for a Cash Machine” or any other song that’s horrible but helps you to connect with everyone around you who’s also boring, bored and miserable.

b) Stop writing self-indulgent rubbish like this, and write something people might actually want to read. Start a new blog with a narrower focus, which is easy to update regularly. Take up those offers to write for the Worship Street Irregulars and Savy Gamer, and build up a decent portfolio of varied writing. Learn more about proper journalism.

c) Have a go at music again. Get back into the habit of playing the guitar for at least an hour a day. Learn the interesting scales, rhythms and licks you never got around to last time, and get better at improvising. Persuade the talented but nervous musicians around you to get involved, and do something genuinely interesting with it. Maybe start a band called “the Sycophant Seekers”.

d) Work to develop a popular application for the iPhone. Use that app as a springboard for establishing a profitable business, working alongside your friends on something you’re in control of and truly believe in. Get bought out by Google for $100,000,000,000 before the age of 30 and retire into the sunset, using the money to live a life of sophisticated but modest pleasures, while anonymously but informedly donating to worthy charities.

My instinct is to answer “e) all of the above”, but is that in any way realistic? How will I be able to keep scheduling four hours a day for playing videogames and watching tv while juggling those kind of ambitions?

Oh. Is that the answer?

Minor personal loss > Major international tragedy

On the eve of 2008 (i.e. 369 days ago), our family dog paid his last ever trip to the vet. He’d been in steady decline for the previous year and putting him down was undoubtedly the kindest thing to do, but it was nonetheless a very sad occasion. The women were weeping, the men’s stiff upper lips were quivering, and more than once it was remarked that, “this truly feels like a death in the family”.

Around three years earlier, on Boxing Day in 2004, a major tsunami hit the South Pacific. Several thousand people died, whole communities were wiped out, and families were left in pieces. It was arguably the most devastating natural disaster since the Tangshan earthquake of 1979, and a humanitarian crisis was left in its wake.

My brother, during one of those drunken existential conversations that seem somehow unavoidable during the festive period, recently pointed to these two events and declared that because he was more upset by the death of an elderly dog than the deaths of thousands of fit and healthy human beings, the human race must be shallow and self-interested by nature. He’d had personal experience of the dog, so he would dearly miss him; by contrast, although he could recognise the inherent tragedy of the tsunami, he felt little or no emotional response to it. Those deaths would have little or no impact on his life, so just like every other callous and selfish human would, he quickly forgot about it.

Now, it should go without saying that we simply wouldn’t be able to function if we were too good at empathising with our fellow man, and it’s both healthy and necessary to be able to maintain some emotional distance from the world around you . If you’ve just become the sole surviving member of your family it’s understandable that you might spend a number of weeks or months grieving; but to do so after watching the ten o’clock news would make you utterly dysfunctional.

In fact, it's possible that some super-empathetic variant of Homo sapiens did once or might one day exist. The trouble is that they’d be utterly doomed as a species from wasting their energy crying or rejoicing over events that didn’t affect them. The process of natural selection that has (arguably) made the human mind what it is today, has nothing to do with ‘good’ or ‘evil’, ‘selfish’ or ‘selfless’. It is simply that which works that survives and thrives.

Those who are particularly lacking in empathy we generally call sociopaths or psychopaths. It’s been argued by some that these marginalised individuals are in fact incredibly well adapted for the current evolutionary scene. By not wasting energy on the problems of others, and not feeling at all guilty about exploiting other people, they’re often incredibly successful resource gatherers (i.e. businessmen). Similarly, although in most societies it's fairly taboo for men to indulge in one-night stands, impregnate women, and then leave them to bring up a child alone, this is the sociopath’s preferred method of operating. By ignoring the stigma that usually surrounds fathering many children by many different mothers (especially without providing any financial support), the sociopath can potentially enjoy the kind of ‘reproductive success’ that would put Genghis Khan to shame.

Of course, the success of the psychopath's adaptation depends entirely on there being a large majority of those who play by the rules. If everyone was out for themselves and was happy to exploit or manipulate at every opportunity without remorse, we (as a species) wouldn't be able to do all the useful things that come about through mutually beneficial cooperation.

Oops. What's happened? Where did all this sketchy evolutionary psychology come from? And what have psychopaths got to do with anything? Oh yes! I was trying to show what amounts to an "appropriate" level of empathy. And I was saying in the most long-winded way possible that we should aim to be somewhere between psychopaths and the kind of gibbering wreck that cries when watching the news. And that that's nothing to be ashamed of. And...

...maybe I'll stick to posting Youtube videos.