Simply Just Here
The Critic, the Ideological Range Life, and How We Got There
A Finnish Bluesky user recently posted about how reading Hitler's Mein Kampf hadn't turned him into a Nazi, questioning the whole "monkey see, monkey do" anxiety that drives so much contemporary cultural criticism. I responded by sharing my own teenage reading experience—forced exposure to everything from the Communist Manifesto to that same Austrian corporal's polemic, seasoned with a healthy dose of Monty Python. The result? Ideological homelessness. Monkey read, it turns out, isn't necessarily monkey do.
This exchange got me thinking about the assumptions underlying our current cultural panic about "dangerous" texts and their supposed power to corrupt readers. Two recent essays—one about Nietzsche and Heidegger's influence on the far-right, another about science fiction's capture by tech fascists—both operate from the premise that exposure to certain ideas inevitably leads to ideological infection. But what about those of us who consumed everything indiscriminately and somehow fell through every tribal filter?
Everybody's Childhood Was Weird (Mine Was Just Visibly Weird)
My dad had peculiar ideas about what constituted important reading. Summer lists included Dostoevsky while I snuck in Stephen King: dense literature next to science fiction. The theory, I think, was that exposure to "significant" texts would create an educated person. What it actually created was someone immunized against taking any single worldview too seriously.
The real formative influences weren't the heavy philosophical tomes anyway. They were Boy Scout camps in Reagan-era Texas, where we played Nuclear War card games with zero irony while conducting proto-Beavis and Butthead pyrotechnic experiments—chucking Ziploc bags of Coleman fuel into bonfires, pretending to be F-4 Phantoms dropping napalm in the jungles of Indochina. When I later read Lord of the Flies for English class, it made perfect sense. I'd essentially lived it, just with merit badges and adult supervision that was apparently fine with recreational warfare simulation.
The crucial inoculation came from Monty Python's Matching Tie and Handkerchief. The "Bruces Song" (a.k.a., the Philosophers Song) reduced all the great thinkers of history to drunken hooligans who could never agree and spent their time getting shitfaced. Hard to take Nietzsche's Übermensch seriously when you've got Python in your head singing about how Immanuel Kant was a real pissant. The Bruces sketch—where every philosophy professor at the University of Woolamaloo is named Bruce and the main rule is "no poofters"—perfectly captured how intellectual institutions actually work: a bunch of similar people congratulating each other on their sophistication while enforcing unspoken rules about belonging.
Perhaps the most important realization was that my childhood probably wasn't more traumatic than anyone else's, just more obviously absurd. Everyone's formation involves some combination of institutional chaos, mixed messages, and well-meaning adults making questionable decisions. Mine just happened to include explicit napalm reenactments alongside forced readings of humanity's worst ideas.
Talkin' 'Bout My Generation('s Trauma)
GenX got a particular flavor of damage: intellectual exposure combined with institutional chaos, all wrapped in the safety of middle-class suburbs. We were the kids who grew up during the Cold War's final act, when nuclear annihilation felt genuinely possible but was also the subject of card games. We experienced democracy as a concept worth defending while watching our institutions demonstrate their fundamental dysfunction on a daily basis.
There's always the sobering recognition that our hardships pale compared to previous generations. The eighteen-year-olds who stormed Iwo Jima faced a completely different order of magnitude of trauma. Our generation got a strange, mediated version—psychological rather than physical, absurdist rather than heroic. But it was still formative in its own way, creating a specific kind of skepticism that's hard to shake.
The British comedians who created Python understood something essential about authority and intellectual pretension, probably because they'd survived post-war austerity and public school canings. Their irreverence became our philosophical foundation: if even the most serious thinkers are ultimately just clever people making stuff up and disagreeing with each other, why join anyone's movement?
Damage Isn't Optional, Repair Isn't Mandatory
Our current therapeutic culture assumes that damage is aberrational and that healing requires restoration to some mythical factory settings. But what if everyone's running on jury-rigged repairs, improvised workarounds, and aftermarket modifications? What if there never were any "certified replacement parts" for human experience?
The promise that THIS system—whether political, therapeutic, or spiritual—will finally restore you to proper functioning becomes less appealing when you've already accepted that you're permanently compromised and perpetually improvised. Everyone's damaged in different ways; some people just get better at working with their particular configuration rather than trying to fix it back to some imaginary original state.
This acceptance creates a strange immunity to ideological capture. Most movements are essentially selling restoration—the promise that joining them will heal whatever's broken in you or society. But if you've already made peace with being a collection of patches and workarounds, that sales pitch loses its power.
The exhaustion that sets in around sixteen isn't necessarily failure—it might just be realistic assessment of the human condition. Why keep searching for the right tribe when you've already figured out that all tribes are temporary arrangements of damaged people trying to convince themselves they've found something permanent?
This odd combination of fatigue, damage, and scar tissue that keeps you from searching for that ideological cul-de-sac also keeps you from seeking out the problematic and troublesome camps of the extremes. It's not that you're a misshapen peg that won't fit into any square or round holes; plugging in just doesn't have the appeal.
Nobody's Right If Everybody's Wrong
All of this analysis comes with the recognition that it's enabled by enormous privilege. Having a dad weird enough to push political philosophy on you requires education, disposable income, and enough family stability to have opinions about "important" books. Boy Scout chaos is middle-class leisure activity. An engineering degree from a private university represents access most people never get close to.
The gaping hole is real—the longing for community and meaning that movements provide. But the particular damage pattern created by privileged exposure to contradictory worldviews makes genuine belonging nearly impossible. You can see through group dynamics clearly enough that participation becomes difficult, but you can't stop wanting what everyone else seems to get from their tribes.
It's not that you don't need what movements offer; it's that you need it but can't access it because the scar tissue makes full commitment impossible. You're materially comfortable enough that you don't have to join something for survival, but constitutionally unable to join something for connection.
Ideological Range Life as Operating System
Pavement captured this condition perfectly in "Range Life"—the repetitive longing of "I want a range life / If I could settle down / If I could settle down / Then I would settle down." It's not romantic nomadism but the restless inability to commit despite desperately wanting to. The dismissive attitude toward both "nature kids" and "elegant bachelors" reads like intellectual superiority; however, it also can be defensive detachment from people who seem to have found their tribes.
Yet acknowledging that there are no viable alternatives to community, you end up drifting along, using just enough energy to stay afloat, occasionally paddling when something looks interesting. Not fully committing because you know it won't last, but not opting out entirely because there really isn't anywhere else to go.
This becomes a pragmatic form of nihilism—not "nothing matters" but "everything matters temporarily, and that's fine." The wisdom of strategic drift in a world where all the islands are eventually going to sink, while others pop up elsewhere.
Simply Just Here
A funny part is the absence of self-pity in all this. There's no sense of being broken compared to some ideal version, no mourning for a "whole" self that never existed. Just acceptance of this particular configuration of working parts and workarounds, functioning in its own specific way.
Maybe that's the most radical position of all—not needing to be fixed. The hole exists, the patches are visible, the longing persists, and none of that constitutes a problem requiring solution. It's just the current state of operations.
This morning I spent time debugging database misconfigurations and Salesforce endpoint errors that might delay a product launch by a day. It's 10:13 AM on a Friday, and day drinking sounds appealing even though I don't really drink. Later, I'll probably feed chat transcripts from six different Slack channels into ChatGPT to generate an incident report about why complex systems failed in predictable ways.
Life's been good to me so far, as Joe Walsh sang—even if, like him, I can't quite drive the Maserati—not because of a suspended license, but because I can't afford one. The privileges that enabled this particular form of damage also make it sustainable. There's comfort in floating along, occasionally paddling, keeping the menhirs rolling toward whatever henge we're all building together.
In the end, monkey read isn't monkey do—but maybe that's less wisdom than simple exhaustion, the kind that sets in early and teaches you that everyone's just trying to figure it out with whatever tools they happen to have available. And that's enough. That's simply just here.