Meditation on Contempt and Indifference

Here I sit - nursing a scotch, looking out through the screen door at the pink and orange reflection of the sunset on the mountain—pondering my solitary act of civil disobedience.

You see the arc of it, don’t you? The hideous, sweeping line. Not just the hockey stick curve of the Great Acceleration—the GDP, the progress - and costs - the sheer, staggering, insane climb of every measurable metric since 1950. That part is the easy science. That’s the graph one hangs in the university hall to impress the new arrivals with the scope of our own, magnificent, self-destruction.

No. I’m speaking of the parallel line. The ghost twin. The terrifying ascent of contempt.

They told us the internet would shrink the world, make us all villagers, quaintly linked. That was the lie. It was a lie spun in the ether, a chemical mist from the exhaust pipe of progress. What it actually gave us was the perfect mechanism for self-sorting. We didn't form a village; we built a billion tiny, soundproofed bunkers, armed with algorithms that do nothing but feed us back the shape of our own faces, only angrier, more righteous. Tribalism, they call it. A polite, academic word for: I loathe your existence because your newsfeed differs from mine.

And the source? Oh, the source is clear. The Acceleration didn't just boost output; it vaporized context. It introduced a rate of change—economic, social, technological—that outpaced the fragile, analog capacity of the human heart to process it. We were thrust into a world of hyper-complexity, massive inequality, and existential threats we can’t even properly name, much less solve.

And what is the natural, ugly, little-understood response to overwhelming complexity? A retreat to simplicity. A feverish, desperate clawing back to the black-and-white. Us and Them. The tribe. A clearly defined enemy. It's a marvelous trick, isn't it? To take the anxiety born of global, systemic failures—climate, finance, technology—and channel it into the cheap, satisfying hatred of your neighbor. They're the ones to blame. Always Them.

And here is my small, useless contribution to the geometry of it all. My Defiance.

Charles Kuralt as host of CBS Sunday Morning was always my trusted, if not droll source of information of the day.  And when I started on MySpace, it was quaint—a bulletin board of bad poems. Then somewhere between Diana's death and and Katrina, I was snagged in the gin mill. Caught up in the increasing minute-by-minute chumming for sensation and outrage. Now? Mainstream and social media do not converse; they merely provoke. It is the theatre of the Pavlovian response: A flicker of outrage, a spasm of fear, and the machine has earned its next impression. I look at the screen and the world screams: "Look what he's done now! THE STORM IS COMING! Stop the genocide! Fix the interest rate!"

But I just couldn't. Can you? Of course not. You can’t solve the crushing Acceleration from your armchair, and you certainly can’t un-thread the cable of collective digital rage.

So, I chose to unplug. Or rather, I re-tuned. On social media, the algorithms now offer me only two things: the utterly trivial and the perfectly pleasant. Cat videos. Friends’ vacation pictures—a lovely, sun-drenched proof that somewhere, sanity persists. And I no longer tune into commercial mainstream media.

This isn't cowardice, understand. This is a cold, calculated act of Indifference as Defiance. I refuse to be rendered impotent by the impossible scale of their issues. I refuse to add my voice—my precious attention—to the collective roar of performative digital rage.

Instead, I choose the microscopic. The solvable. The immediate geometry of connection. My friends. My family. The community I can touch. I can offer attention. I can offer caring. I can solve the little, crucial issue of a single person’s loneliness today.

They are welcome to their contempt and outrage. I’ll be here, in the small, sunlit patch of the garden, deliberately, defiantly, tending to the things I can actually keep alive. It may be a momentary defense, a retreat.  Or it might be my best hope for peaceful longevity. But for now, it's the only honest posture left against the terrifying momentum of our own making. And perhaps... perhaps it is the only way to retain a small, vital piece of the human spirit they are so frantically trying to erase.