Frequently Asked Questions
This blog is called the Reverse Midas Touch, and it’s a memoir. Now, allow me to preempt your first question: Isn’t thirty two a little young to start a memoir? To which I say, social media has so rotted my attention span, and the initial promise of social media, that it would become a sort of interactive diary through which I could track my life— over-reliance on that aspect has so rotted my memory, that, in terms of cranial decay in the face of total intellectual collapse, I’m closer to the sort of eighty seven year old who usually sets out on this type of project.
Now I’ll answer your second question: The book is called the Reverse Midas Touch because everything gold that I touch turns to shit. I’ve spent my life thus far finding scenes, workplaces, bars and clubs in what would from then on increasingly become understood as the Good Old Days. I would come in just in time to catch the decline, and never so late as to only have the new, lesser form with no golden age to compare to.
Third question quickly following on from the third one: Haven’t I heard? Everything has been getting worse across the world for decades now. Enshittification. Late capitalist machinations. The real reason time makes boomers of us all is because we’ve been feeling a progression of an economic squeeze which isn’t represented in graphs because those same graphs are specifically designed to ignore wealth consolidation. Worse: We’re living in a world organised by dinosaurs and run by technocapitalists, the former of which have no idea what the latter is doing, and so are effectively allowing them to run amock, and of course the latter of which answer only to the perverse incentives of a market ecosystem with no natural defence against bubbles, pump and dumps, the general putting first of the cart of profit before the horse of in any way benefitting human society. It’s an industrial complex populated by frustrating dweebs. And this question I must still reject. I agree that things on a macro can be pretty frustrating, but better than before? Doesn’t that ignore the reality that our shared actions in the before times are what begot the world we’re currently in? I know you or I don’t own any tech startups or venture capital firms, but whatever level of complacency existed then, it’s morer than the complacency which exists now. And if you feel more complacent about all of this now than you did then. I have terrible news for you: That’s the exact mechanism by which these assholes operate! Despair is actually incredibly useful for people who are trying to distract you, trying to operate lawlessly, trying to silo off your troublesome existence.
Fourth one: Is the whole book going to be like this? Barely if even a little. I’m going to start writing the book as it’s actually going to be from more or less here on, but if you’ve been at all appreciative of this framework, I’m more than happy to spoil the ending for you: Life, my life, is by turns exhausting, infuriating, and odious. But it’s mostly funny. The funny bits are good.