Today’s culture of perpetual mistrust is exhausting.

The other day, I received an SMS text message. This in itself was fairly unusual, as the only texts I tend to get these days are automated confirmations of deliveries and suchlike, but there was another layer of unusual to it.

“Hi mum,” the text said. “My phone’s not working, so please contact me on WhatsApp at [number] xxx”.

Initially, I thought this might be an honest-to-goodness wrong number, which is a phenomenon that used to be widespread, but today, where we tend to do everything via pre-populated contact lists, doesn’t tend to happen much. Something about it made me feel a bit suspicious, though, so I decided to Google the text of the message.

Sure enough, it was a scam. I was both disappointed and unsurprised to discover this, but it got me thinking: I used to be someone who really, honestly wanted to believe the best about my fellow man, but these days, it feels nigh-impossible to trust almost anything you see.

That “wrong number” is actually a scammer trying to get you to send them money, or to steal your personal information. That heartwarming post you saw on social media is actually a viral marketing campaign. That “look at me I’m so empowered” sex worker doing hot tub streams on Twitch is actually being forced into exploitation by darker forces working behind the scenes rather than because she wants to.

It’s exhausting to think that, more often than not, these days what you see is most definitely not what you get. The world feels like a darker place that is full of mistrust, and aside from the necessity for constant vigilance being very tiring, it also makes it difficult for those of us who do want to go about our business in a genuinely honest sort of way.

You see it everywhere. Creative types being forced to churn out “content” with clickbait titles just to get eyes on their work. Workplaces and brands jumping on silly trends like TikTok for no discernible reason other than “it’s popular, so we should be seen to be doing it”. The growth in various forms of AI-generated text, images and sounds making misinformation and lies easier to spread than ever before.

On top of all that, the services we’ve come to increasingly rely on over the years actively make themselves worse over time, and we just sit back and take it. For example, it used to be that I could click “Publish” on this post and it would automatically share it to my friends on Facebook and Twitter, but that’s not possible any more because of supposed “improvements” that both of those services have made.

This happens outside the online sphere, too. My last car I bought was worse than my previous one in terms of the features it had, but cost more. This despite me telling the car salesman to their face that I wanted to spend “about the same” on the new vehicle and have the same features.

And no-one seems particularly bothered by all this. I mean, sure, people comment on it occasionally, but no-one actually does anything about it. They keep posting their wacky MidJourney images, increasingly believing that “they” created the image through stringing words together. Scam text messages are a way of life, with people just shrugging at them rather than attempting to report them.

And those supposed to be “in charge” don’t do anything anyway, so why bother? There’s a house down the road from us whose front garden is constantly filled with obviously stolen motorcycles, which local kids can frequently be seen riding around making a nuisance of themselves on, without wearing any sort of safety gear or having any concern for the people around them.

It increasingly feels like we are a people blighted by absolute apathy and laziness, and despite countless warnings from dystopian popular media and the arts over the years, no-one really cares. So long as you have your content to consume and your vacuous “approval” of your fake life on social media from other fake people living fake existences, nothing seems to matter to anyone.

I’m really fed up of it. And it doesn’t feel like there’s a way to escape from it all. Because this isn’t just “an Internet thing” any more. It’s a “this is the world we live in now” thing.

#oneaday, Day 24: Your Over Their

The T-shirt in the comic above actually exists. So we’ve arrived at a situation where people don’t even proofread clothing.

Actually, I remember a friend who works in the printing business telling me a while back that it’s not the responsibility of the printing company to proofread or correct things like this; it’s the original designer’s fault. And it’s true—it is the original designer’s fault and they should be ridiculed for producing it (especially as it’s a pretty shitty design anyway), not to mention the idiots who pay money for it. I know for a fact if I was asked to print the T-shirt above I’d find it incredibly difficult to not correct it, though.

The reason? I believe in the sanctity of language. That’s a pretentious way of saying that I believe strongly that we should continue to spell things “correctly”. I know, I know, language changes over time and all that. But the reason we have certain rules in place with today’s modern form of English is to aid understanding.

Take “your” vs. “you’re”. We have two forms of “your/you’re” to prevent ambiguity. “You’re”, as everyone knows* is short for “you are”, with the apostrophe denoting that at least one letter has been removed to form a contraction. “Your”, on the other hand, is simply a possessive pronoun used as a an attributive adjective showing when something belongs to “you”. “If your single, so am I” doesn’t make any grammatical sense because, assuming that “single” is being used as a noun (which it should be if it’s following the word “your”) it needs a verb, otherwise the response to the T-shirt’s slogan is “If my single is what?”. “If you’re single, so am I” does make sense, however, because it’s saying “If you are single, so am I”. Which is a stupid and somewhat sluttish statement to make, but grammatically correct.

Unless, of course, they were going for a very heavily-buried programming joke. You know, like when you’re programming in C or something similar and instead of saying “if (single = true) { haveSexWithMe(); };” you can instead say “if (single) { haveSexWithMe(); };”. Essentially, then, suggesting that the full slogan is in fact “If your single status is firmly confirmed without any possibility of you being a cheating skank-basket, you can assume I am also single, even if I am not in reality”, but shortened to fit across someone’s boobies. I somehow think this scenario is unlikely, however.

Some accuse people who get riled about this sort of thing of being snobs. And perhaps we are; but to my mind, there’s not really a good excuse for using the wrong “your”. It’s two extra keystrokes to type “you’re”, a couple more flicks of the pen. We’re taught how to use “your” and “you’re” in primary school. I know plenty of people who have difficulties such as dyslexia who still know how to use the correct form of “your” and do so.

The only explanation I can come up with, then, is either laziness, ignorance or both. In an environment such as the Internet, your (yes, YOUR) written words are how you make your first impression. In reality you don’t walk into crowded rooms shouting “HERP DERP HERP”, belming and masturbating furiously, do you? So make sure you use the right word once in a while, hmm?**

* Well… apparently not.

** I am not for a second saying that using “your” instead of “you’re” means that you’re the sort of person who enters a room belming, masturbating furiously and shouting “HERP DERP HERP”. Although you might be. In which case you quite possibly deserve everything you get.

#oneaday, Day 133: Lazy Days

Everyone has lazy days. Days when nothing – nothing – gets done. And sometimes there’s not even a reason for getting nothing done. Just pure laziness. Or possibly your body telling your mind that it’s quite comfortable where it is, thank you very much, and would it mind awfully if it just sat here and atrophied for a few hours KTHXBAI.

It starts innocently enough. You sit down on the sofa. Perhaps you wanted a quick breather. Perhaps you’ve just had a phone call that went on for so long that that pacing-around-the-room thing that everyone does with mobile phones got a bit tiresome. Perhaps you were about to watch some TV. The circumstances of how you got to the sofa are about to become completely irrelevant.

At some point during your blissful reverie, something of earth-shattering importance will occur to you. Perhaps there’s a letter that you need to post today, or you’re running out of toilet paper and the shop is closing early for refurbishment today, or maybe you’re out of milk, or perhaps you actually have something useful to get on with. Whatever it is, your mind can’t stop thinking about it. A feeling of lurking panic starts to set in. What if you really need to take a dump and there isn’t enough toilet paper? There’s no-one else in the house so you can’t ask anyone else to go and fetch you some. Could you sink as low as using a towel or a newspaper? Or would you want to wash your shitty arse in the shower, like some sort of incontinent old person, only without a nurse to help you with the hideous process? The feeling of panic builds and you almost feel obliged to get up.

But no! Why should you get up? You’ve been working your arse off all week for little to no gratitude from the people that you work for. So you’ve earned this little sit down. You shouldn’t feel obliged to do anything. So you don’t. You say to yourself – possibly out loud – no. You are going to sit here until you’re nice and relaxed, or at least until Top Gear has finished. Then and only then you might think about getting up to post that letter.

“But the post goes at 4pm, and it’s 3.50 now,” says your mind. “If you don’t post that letter today, the council are going to charge you eight-hundred and fifty-four pounds for the privilege of another letter asking you where your eight-hundred and fifty-four pounds owed in money that they paid you by mistake actually is.” You close your eyes and block out the whingeing and nagging that your own mind is setting about you with. This is your time. Besides, the postman will come again tomorrow, and you can always change the date on the letter to look like you posted it earlier and it actually got lost in the post and then feign ignorance when the council start hammering on your door and bringing the bailiffs round.

You decide to give up trying to be productive and you lean back on the sofa in a more relaxed posture. Perhaps your mouth falls open in an expression of gormless contentment. You stare into space for a little while as the light starts to fade outside and you wonder if you probably should get up and cook something, but you’re not sure you can be bothered. You’d phone for pizza, but you don’t have any cash, and ordering one with a debit card is always such a hassle because they always phone back and say it hasn’t gone through and you think your card’s been declined because you’ve got no money but it’s actually them just typing the number in wrong and oh for heaven’s sake being by yourself sucks and wouldn’t it be much better if you had someone to talk to or cook dinner for? That might get you up off the damn sofa.

There are only two possible outcomes to this scenario once it gets to this point:

The first possibility is that you achieve victory over the soporific powers of the sofa, stand up and get something done. You post your letter, putting it right into the postman’s hand just as he is emptying the postbox into his big bag. Then you go and buy toilet paper and milk and order a pizza. Your evening goes swimmingly well, and you collapse into bed satisfied that you have spent your day as productively as you possibly could, with a much-needed break in the middle for a little quiet time and reflection.

And the other possibility is, of course, death.

In praise of slow

(With apologies to Carl Honore for shamelessly liberating the title of his book, which I haven’t read, but respect the sentiment behind the title.)

I sauntered to work today. Tomorrow I might amble, stroll, perambulate or, you know, walk. This is nothing unusual, you might think, but I’ve noticed a curious phenomenon develop over the last few years, and that is the fact that everyone seems to have somewhere more important than the place I’m going to get to, preferably much quicker than I do. As such, as I wander down the street, it’s almost inevitable, even at unsociable hours in the morning, that at least one person will come charging past me – not running, because that would look panicky – but walking at at least twice the speed I do. I don’t walk as slowly as, say, an elderly gentleman, but I still walk considerably slower than these people who are inevitably dressed in some sort of suit, wearing clip-cloppy shoes that immediately makes them somehow seem incredibly arrogant. Quite how shoes can be arrogant is anyone’s guess, but that’s what it makes me think.

Then there’s London. Anyone who’s ever visited London, however much you may have liked it, will have noticed how much of a hurry every damn person in that city is in. Traffic lights go amber and horns sound immediately like some sort of automatic reaction. Dare to stand slightly left-of-centre on the escalators leading down to the Underground and some greased-up City-boy businessman will make a snide comment like “Slow lane’s over there, mate”. Stand in a queue at Pret and you’ll see at least five people who have been waiting roughly fifteen seconds storm out in seeming disgust, muttering about inefficiency. (Contrast this with my experience a few years back when an entire symphony orchestra descended on one tiny kebab shop in the middle of Warsaw which was staffed by one rather uncomfortable looking man. Now that was inefficiency, although to be fair he was somewhat up against the wall. Almost literally.)

Then there’s the laziness of people who use computers. “Why can’t I drag that text into my subject header?” I heard one person ask of an email application – because using two keyboard shortcuts to copy and paste it was obviously just such a hassle. “Why can’t it do this?” “Why doesn’t this do my work for me?” “Computers are supposed to be efficient!”

And then – then – there’s the attention span of people on the Internet. Dare to write in more than one paragraph on a message board and there will be at least one response along the lines of “OMFG WALL OF TEXT” with nothing more meaningful to say. Well, thanks for that.

You’d think there’d be a point to this wall of text. And I guess there is. It’s to say to these people “slow the fuck down”. Leave ten minutes earlier so you can enjoy a walk to work without barging past people. Take your time over writing your emails and they might actually be spelled and punctuated correctly. Read someone’s wall of text and you might actually find something interesting that they had to say. And London? Just climb out of your own arse and realise that some people don’t want to live their lives at 300 miles per hour before dying of a heart attack at 28.

This post is dedicated to the people who take the time to sit down, chill out, relax, enjoy some time, some space and don’t mind being a little bit wordy and pretentious along the way. If you’re reading this and you’ve got this far, chances are you’re one of them. And to you I say, “Good job. Keep it up.”