A Hobby of Hurting Myself

An attempted assassination reminds me not to scroll

Why can’t I quit politics? 

Kicking it should be simple. It’s only a weird little hobby.

It’s got stats to memorize like baseball. Arcane and nuanced rules and playbooks that fans can enjoy feeling superior over like Armchair Quarterbacks. Teams to root for viciously like, well, any sport. 

It’s got a collaborative riffing writer’s workshop element in the form of digital hot take meme culture. (And yes, this piece ironically belongs in that category.)

But think about it! People get together, and they talk shop excitedly, and they put their bodies together in meatspace: chanting, synchronizing movement, and feeling alive. 

People buy merch, collect swag, and cosplay. It’s got conventions as highly produced and extra as Comic-Con. 

It’s a hobby. 

It may be one that claims to be the most important hobby there is, but that isn’t really all that materially or spiritually impactful in reality. Let’s admit it.

At most the results of elections are a downstream representation of the systems, cultural currents, attitudes, and mindsets of the ecology of humanity with connections to the spacetime where elections are taking place. Even those who don’t engage in the arguably irrational (unless you’re in a swing state) behavior of voting play a part in deciding results through the chaotic butterfly-to-hurricane causal chain that connects their grumpy supermarket scowls to the ballot box by way of the checkout clerk, that clerk’s partner’s sympathetic shoulder, and that partner’s politically undecided ride or die work bestie.

We talk about laws emboldening people to sink into their worst behaviors, but it’s the chicken and the egg isn’t it? It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop. The laws follow from the culture. The culture follows from our individual beliefs. And yes, our beliefs are granted social approval when they’re codified in law.

But no president will save us. We can’t right the course of the country by electing just the right leader. That would be like successfully treating the scraped knee of someone who tripped and fell because they’re weak from chemo. It’s a logical typing problem. Caring for the symptom won’t cure the conditions that generated it.

The drunken Silenus, supported by a satyr and a faun, Schelte a Bolswert / After Peter Paul Rubens (Creative Commons Zero, Public Domain dedication)

After volunteering with Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 campaigns—knocking on doors, making phone calls, screaming, chanting, and clapping at rallies—I find myself disillusioned. The people whose hobby is politics will tell me that I need to keep up the pressure but some will respect my body’s burnout. At least until they have a chance to point out how much rides on this.

I’m not so sure. 

I’ve heard there’s a playbook for counter-insurgency one of the alphabet agencies carts out to deal with genuinely grassroots protest movements like OWS and BLM. It apparently involves informants, agent provocateurs, harassment and spying. 

I can’t look it up because it’s the exact kind of thing that triggers me. Conspiracy Theory isn’t fun and games for someone whose first Bipolar psychotic break was deeply in progress while on his way to phone-bank for the first time (for President Obama’s re-election). 

So this is just a half-baked hunch based on an article or two that I’ve read from what I swear (yet only half-remember) were legitimate sources. But from my time as a lowly foot soldier and avid hobbyist, my analysis is that the status quo of the political body is a bit like the homeostasis of a human body: it has an immune system that develops antibodies against threats that might destablize it. 

So I believe that democracy is already dead. Or maybe it’s back to the elitist bigoted roots of the founding fathers. Either way, no matter what the hobbyists will say, it isn’t really the only game in town.

There are people whose worldviews I can hardly imagine, who don’t see the world in terms of geopolitical borders and governmental power, like a projection of our brightly colored “political map”-style globes in grade school. 

There are cartels who see criminal turf as true power. The Pope probably thinks more about converts than about countries. The tech and financial elite each view their transnational corporations as the true ground upon which civilization is built and as the halls within which power is distributed and wielded.

So why am I drawn to Twitter when the former President gets shot? Why am I anxiously pouring over the digital toilet stall walls (what Naomi Klein called the comments section in Doppleganger)? What purpose does my obsessive attempted clairsentience—intuiting others’ feelings—by reading the hot takes of Public Intellectuals (fancy influencers) and their chorus of mostly LLM bots? And why can’t I turn away when events like today’s occur? Why do I, someone massively triggered by politics due to a traumatic personal history of mental health struggles, feel compulsively drawn to keep up with current events?

Why do I have a hobby of hurting myself?

The hint is in my obsessive clairsentience. I feel a need for connection. For numerous reasons, I don’t feel safe unless I’ve got my finger on the pulsating rhythm of the vibe. And if that vibe is rotted—bloodthirsty, closed-minded, and opposed to empathy and kindness—I feel compelled to mediate.

There’s been a handful of situations recently where I’ve gotten myself in trouble by advocating for peace and universal human dignity in meatspace conversations about our most polarizing current events. 

Force in defense of life is good and justified, and seeking peace and reconciliation first is generally a good heuristic. It’s a complicated, paradoxical both/and that I’ve found so commonly flattened into the binary of Hitler apologism vs. the infallible ingroup. Nevermind that to get the ideological homogeneity that the ingroup seeks would demand a genocide of political opponents.

I find myself jostling into the middle of the Culture War like the busboy during a bar fight, holding his arms out and saying “c’mon let’s not do this!”

I feel the need to know that violence won’t break out at any minute. I feel responsible for keeping the peace.

But that doesn’t really answer the question, does it? Why do I keep compulsively hurting myself by spelunking into this particular bizarre hobby, even knowing it isn’t truly the only game in town?

The same reason I, an alcoholic, will often pick up the bottle. Some of us just have hobbies of poisoning ourselves.

It’s simple enough: the poison numbs the pain of separation.

I’m six months sober now. The longest since I was fifteen, I’d wager. Back then, I’d often half-jokingly declare “getting shitfaced enough to fall asleep on the neighbor’s lawn” was my Friday goal.

I wanted to get so blasted that I might feel safe around the neighbors I didn’t know and couldn’t trust. Safe the way my eight week old son feels safe falling asleep in the arms of strangers. I wanted a baby’s sense of absolute security, born in their development inability to conceptualize that they are separate from the other beings they encounter.

Babies literally can’t tell that others have their own subjective experience. They don’t even know where the matter of their body begins and ends. They exist with no duality—no separation between self and other.

I want that.

I have multiple hobbies that hurt and that I have so, so much trouble quitting because it doesn’t feel safe to fall asleep anywhere anymore.

Obviously our huge, anonymous societies feel especially unsafe if your identity (or your loved one’s) intersects with one of the classes being targeted by our deplorable bigoted regression.

Still. Putting aside our assumptions about the material truth of these beliefs, we can all empathize that it must be terrifying in our fragmented, untrustworthy world if you have been encouraged to believe your children are in danger of being raped, eaten and sent to Hell eternally through the state-sanctioned brainwashing you can’t protect them from. 

We’re not babies and there’s an advantage: we can adopt others’ perspectives. We can see that from the reality those Others authentically inhabit, everything is absolutely terrifying. Just as it is for us.

Its scary. I’m scared. Are you scared? Catch me scanning your eyes in person or your words on the screen. Are we all scared enough to take peace seriously yet?

It doesn’t work like that. 

Fear doesn’t lead to peace. Martin Luther King Jr. is credited with saying “hate can’t drive out hate, only love can do that.” At this point in my life, I keep trying to remember to check out of the energy harvesting that surrounds events like today’s attempted assassination. I can’t be online looking at whether anyone is rioting. 

(I just heard a bang. Someone’s leftover Independence Day fireworks? Fuck. I hope so.)

I have to focus on the baby asleep in my lap, my feet firmly on the floor, and the breath in my chest.

I know who you are in Truth.

I know what you are in Truth.

I know how you serve in Truth.

You are free. You are free. You are free.

~ Paul Selig’s Guides

The action of fear is to claim more fear.

It's hard. It’s hard as fuck. And still, the action of love is to claim the better world our hearts know is possible. 

I’m not commanding you to turn the other cheek, as if I had that authority. Don’t take this to be me callously suggesting you martyr yourself or your loved ones. And if I am called to action, I will endeavor to serve with my hands as well as my Being. It just seems like right now, I serve best by ignoring this harmful hobby and cultivating self-love instead.

Because the solution to feeling scared to sleep anywhere is not the bottle—it’s to love yourself enough to know you belong, wherever you are.

And scrolling the political side of Twitter famously inhibits self-love.