Our lives!

There’s this scene in an episode of Seinfeld, George and Jerry are sitting at their usual spot in the usual restaurant talking about their usual women problems, when my all time favourite tv moment occurs:

Jerry: Ahh. [puts head down]
George: What?
Jerry: What is this? What are we doing? What in god’s name are we doing?
George: What?
Jerry: Our lives! What kind of lives are these? We’re like children. We’re not men.
George: No, we’re not. We’re not men.

Brace yourselves.

So I say to you, people of the internet, people of my generation, all nerds and social rejects, maybe even all people: what is this? What are we doing? Seriously, I want to know. We sit around all day forwarding lists to each other of asinine facts about our lives and expect others to create similar lists in some kind of effort to sift through the meaningless shit that inhabits our time and make some sense of it. We, to paraphrase another line from Seinfeld, pore over the excruciating minutiae of every single daily event via instant messengers, blogs, telephone, and even face to face. And there’s something else, we can’t express ourselves without somehow relating it to popular culture. Of course we also anticipate that everybody is automatically going to “get” our pop culture references, and why shouldn’t they? When we’re not circle jerking online or trying to fashion an identity cobbled together from magazine ads and Star Wars characters, we’re eating this pop culture and mass media up because that’s basically the only other thing to do.

Once we’ve chewed up enough pop culture we spit it back out in the form of polls of “what fictional character could kick this other fictional character’s ass?,” or we make shitty Photoshops with tired out cultural memes about Chuck Norris and Admiral Akbar, or we make videos of ourselves lip syncing pop songs.

We don’t have goals beyond getting another day of work behind us. I mean, everybody talks about traveling and imagines these brilliant career paths but then we knock some broad up or we marry some chick and then we’re rocking a keyboard the rest of our lives. So we live vicariously through video game companies, we let their success determine our happiness, get excited when they do well, down when they’re down. We idolize their heads of marketing and give them funny nicknames. We try to justify why our company’s sales were down a given week in Japan. A lot more commonly, we live vicariously through sports teams. And we reinforce this bond by referring to our favoured teams as “we” as though by simply residing in the same city we helped put our team on the field, or court, or ice. When we’re not referring to sports teams as “we,” we’re making assumptions about the groups to which we belong and making “we” generalizations.

We see people in the street and have whole relationships with them in our heads because we’re too afraid to talk to them, or because they’ve already got somebody. We see pictures of people and pick them apart for physical flaws, we visit websites dedicated to scoring people based on appearance on scales of one to ten, and take joy in maliciously giving bad votes to the ugly ones. Then we go to our message board of choice and whine about how we’re however-many-years-old virgins, but then try to trump each other on who’s had worse luck with women. We read the posts of others, of guys whose girlfriends cheated on them, and we hold these examples up, try to use them as proof that, yes, all women are whores. Secretly though we are living vicariously through these guys as well, wishing that those cheating girlfriends could be ours for once.

What kind of lives are these? We’re like children. We’re not men.