1002: Irritants of the Modern World

I have a peculiar sense of déjà vu as I write this as I have a strange feeling I’ve written a very similar post before… but d’you ever feel like the world just isn’t quite built with you in mind?

I’m not talking about difficulty getting around — though obviously there are people out there with physical difficulties for whom the world literally isn’t really built for — but rather a sense of detachment, a feeling of not quite “belonging” to modern society, a sense that others are “getting” something you’re not. (No filthy comments!)

I’ve been having this feeling to an increasing degree over the past few years. When I consider the things about modern society that irritate me, I sometimes find myself wondering if I’m just being unreasonable or if there is, in fact, some sort of root cause for the feelings of dissatisfaction and frustration I so often feel.

Let’s take a few examples to demonstrate what I mean.

Firstly, one from my professional life. I review social and mobile games for a living, from the perspective of whether or not they’re likely to be profitable and if developers can learn/steal something from each other. Objectively speaking, I can recognise the patterns in design, structure and the use of compulsion mechanics to draw players in and encourage them to spend money, but I can never picture spending my own money on such titles. It might be because I’m a traditional (or “core” as we tend to be called nowadays) gamer and thus have certain expectations from my entertainment — expectations that more often than not aren’t met by puddle-deep mobile and social games — or it might be something else. Rage of Bahamut, for example, which is complete crap in almost every way it is possible for a game to be crap, is immensely successful and has been showing up high in the Top Grossing charts ever since its launch. I do not understand this.

Then there’s the perpetual popularity of terrible, terrible television shows and the attached assumptions that you should know who Rylan(?) from The X-Factor is in order to have a successful water-cooler conversation. Thing is, every time X-Factor comes on, all I see on Twitter from the fairly broad spectrum of people I follow is unbridled hate — but they’re still watching it. I do not understand this either.

Then there are smaller, stupid questions. Why do people buy clothes with dates they probably weren’t born in printed prominently on them? What possible use could a 19-inch 1080p television be? What sort of pillock falls for those text messages that tell you how much money you could claim from your “recent” (and non-existent) accident? Who wakes up one morning and decides they want to be a loss adjuster? Why would I want to join yet another mobile social network that does nothing more than allow me to “Like” random things? Why do so many people respond to those utterly inane brand posts on Facebook? More to the point, why does the block of cheese we have in the fridge have its own Facebook page?

I do not understand any of these things either.

It’s not difficult to see why certain subcultures, be they socioeconomic or interest-based, find themselves feeling somewhat alienated from “normal” society, whatever that is. I certainly do at times, and I’m pretty sure that I’m not the only one out there. There are too many unanswered questions out there, and either I’m not looking in the right place for the answers or the rest of society just doesn’t care.

Oh well. Time to sleep. The world will continue not making sense in the morning. This has been your after-midnight philosophical bollocks for the evening; hopefully I should be feeling a little more coherent come the morning.

Good night.