The Cultural Cringe

I wrote a list of stuff I'm interested in ranting about, and one thing that these phenomena generally seemed to have in common is that they can be framed in terms of my personal disenchantment about the culture I live in and western culture in general.

I'm not one of those unabiding pessimists that doesn't have the perspective to realise that things for us could be a lot worse (when I say us, I mean people in western societies - USA, Canada, Britain, west Europe). Conditions of material comfort for many of us, myself included, are to a degree that no other human society has hitherto experienced. We have the money for food, shelter and often even leisure. If I had the choice to either continue living my life or to immediately be reborn in some completely random place anywhere on the planet, I'd unequivocally choose the former.

This being said, in other respects I am a pessimist. I focus more on the negatives. I naturally find the widespread problems in western culture more interesting than the positives. That is what this blog is about.

I want to use the facelessness of the Internet to be a little polemical and as straightforward as possible, so I hope nobody gets offended. Unduly, anyway. I don't intend to defame or abuse for the sake of enjoyment. Many of us are unpleasant enough to swear at each other in chat rooms and message boards (I was guilty of it once or twice), and I figure I might as well direct that lack of restraint to something useful. Still, there's a shameful pleasure in dishing out verbal punishment on something. I'll do my best to direct it with justification. And please feel free to comment. But if you're just going to write telling me that I'm stupid because you know I'm wrong about something, don't waste your time.

So it begins - whatever it shall prove to be. My first entry (or the next one, anyway) will be about why Adam Duritz from Counting Crows is an idiot.