The other day, I was trying to explain to two incredibly brilliant, but thoroughly pessimistic people, why the world isn’t actually shit. I think they suffer, like many well meaning, middle-class people, from a saturation of mainstream and social media; it weighs them down with a profound, dystopian hopelessness. As I have said before, I stopped using social media when Facebook rolled out it’s ‘timeline’ function, which, going by some googling, was about nine years ago now. I used Instagram for a while during the pandemic, but have since deactivated it in disgust. I also recently tried Twitter for a couple of months, as I have been thinking about how to share the writing I put on here. It will not be via Twitter, of that much I am sure.
I used to hate Russell Brand. I say hate, but what I really mean is that I wrote him off as an unredeemable, facile, vacuous misogynist. He became an irrelevance to me. Needless to say, I have changed my mind because he has clearly changed. He is now asking really interesting questions and making really interesting points. He has become someone I enjoy listening to; someone I frequently find myself in agreement with. Really, this post isn’t about Russell Brand, although I highly recommend watching his YouTube channel. This post is actually about myself and an aspect of “cancel culture”: the denial of human growth.