The Surfactant of Society

I’m not especially interested in current events, at least not in the way that phrase is usually meant. Most of what comes under that heading is not depth but churn (and chum): a steady stream of baiting, noise, outrage, triviality, and theatrical importance. I do not find this enlightening. I find it invasive. It asks for attention, reaction, and moral posture, but rarely for thought.

It is not that I don’t care what happens in the world. It is that I have very little interest in submitting my mind to an endless sequence of manufactured urgencies. Being saturated with headlines does not strike me as the same thing as being informed, much less being wise. A great deal of it feels like mental junk food presented as civic virtue.

I sometimes think modern culture is basically one giant surfactant. Its job is to reduce the surface tension of the mind so that noise, outrage, cliché, and theatrical importance can spread quickly and evenly across it. Current events help with this. Social media improves distribution. Cable news whips it into a foamy lather. Before long the entire surface of consciousness is coated in a thin, efficient film of borrowed urgency. Meanwhile some of us are still standing there with a pickaxe, trying to break through the ice.

What interests me more is what lies underneath things: motives, structures, language, character, self-deception, the quiet machinery of private and public life. The daily update cycle tends to flatten all of that. It keeps one skimming. It rewards speed, simplification, and ready-made opinion. I have had enough of surface.

That same dissatisfaction has spread inward. I am tired of my own stock vocabulary, my usual phrases, the stale language by which I have been naming both myself and the world. The words feel worn smooth from overuse. They no longer seem equal to experience. I want language with greater range, greater exactness, greater force. I want words that do more than gesture. I want them to penetrate.

So no, I do not apologize for being uninterested in current events. I am trying, however clumsily, to get beneath the froth. That may look like disengagement to people who confuse constant reaction with seriousness. I have no ambition to be well-adjusted to a civilization of surfaces.