Angry Outsider Losers

I like Cassandras and angry outsider losers. I feel I can trust them. I know they are not working one over on me; or if they are maneuvering, it’s so transparent that it will not work and their true self will show through.

Everyone agrees it’s good to make the right moves. We all clap like seals whenever someone makes the right moves and experiences money-success or social-success. We move closer, hoping the sheen will rub off on us by proximity.

The thing I like about angry outsider losers is their failure to thrive. If they made all the right moves, I would like them less. If they thrived, I wouldn’t like them so much.

I hunt them down like Pokemon. I put them up on my shelf. I place them alongside Malcolm Lowry, Frederick Exley, John Kennedy Toole, Marshall Frady, John Fante, and Henry Miller.

Now you can rest, I whisper. Or at least you no longer start from a zero of always being misunderstood.

I don’t feel like they’re social lepers, like their failure is contagious and going to injure my perfect health.

I like them because I am one myself (though I have also had a few scattered successes and been on the inside.)

There is a countertrend to the over-romanticization of shit and failure saying: it’s ok to thrive, its ok to be successful, its ok to live a ripe old age and teach at a small liberal arts college and not die alone in your hometown.

That is true, it is OK, good even.

But there is a repressive edge to this counter-trend.

I cannot love a thing that is widely-loved and celebrated as much as I love an unloved, failed or neglected thing.

This is a common obscurantist fetish among people of my type.

We want to discover things that are not getting as much love as everything else and lift them up and say “Give this more attention.”

I guess the reason for this is very rational: unloved things and people need love and encouragement, while loved things and people do not technically need more love and encouragement.

One person is full and smiling, the other is desperate and pathetic, who do you give your leftover pizza or a kind word to? Obviously.

The love you give to an unloved thing might actually transform someone, might encourage them to continue or do more.

You don’t need to love a thing that everyone already loves. You are usually doing it to a) participate in a conversation and join a tribe b) generate goodwill from the Loved Thing/Person and hope they will help you become the next loved thing, ie. back-scratching, ie. quid-pro-quo.

I hype you, you hype me, we’re good friends like friends should be, with a knick-knack paddy whack give the dog a bone, this old dog is going home.

Angry outsider losers only run into problems when they start Eeyoring and whining about how unloved they are or how they’re not in the right clique or they’re not getting the love and attention they deserve.

People don’t like that kind of thing. It makes people want to puke and run away.

We want our angry outsider losers to be like Diogenes or the desert saints or the buddha, rejectors who are HAPPY being rejectors. Happy being what they are.

It is true, it would be better for each of us if we just accepted everything.

But hilariously, ironically, no one is more captive to the cult of success than the failures. Because they have never been to it.

They see it as a magic place over the horizon where all their problems are solved.

If only...if only...I get this I get that...I get there...I’ll be satisfied.

You’ll never be satisfied, my love, till the day your heart stops, because you’re fundamentally an unsatisfied type.

Again, talk to anyone who’s had some middling degree of success. I’m not talking about overnight life-changing success. Talk to someone who’s gotten a big book contract or a big piece in Harper’s or New Yorker and what you will usually find is they had to make peace with the fact that their life did not change then and there.

They thought it would. It had been built up in their mind as transformative. But it wasn’t.

And that is both a good and painful thing to experience because it dispels you of your ridiculous illusions.

They’re grateful that it happened, they wouldn’t undo it, but it was just a single step, one brick in the wall, towards something.

Towards what?

Who knows, respect, money, power, economic stability, influence, all those things combined.

When you ask people to go a little deeper about what drives them in pursuit of success, or you ask people about what they “want” they always say the same thing: they just want it. Why? They don’t know.

Usually they give economic reasons which always make the most sense.

But sometimes it’s just a need to be loved or respected, or be like or not be like their father or mother, or fulfill certain early expectations imposed on themselves by themselves or others.

Psychological foundations for human behavior, always impenetrable and unknowable.

What drives every influencer?

Because I want. I need. Goo goo gaa gaa.

Everyone wants it.

What you need is food water and sleep. The rest is just desire.

My girlfriend and I have been re-watching Better Call Saul, and I hadn’t really thought about it when I first watched, but the broad contours of show are the story of the last 10 years—kind of the entire set-up of American society at this point.

Kim is hardworking, professional, dedicated, honest, and Jimmy is an angry fuck-up loser always looking for shortcuts.

Kim becomes partner at Schweikart & Cokely and even takes on extra work as a public defender. She puts one foot in front of the other each day. She has plenty of energy toward the maximum good.

Jimmy has a fine day job but gets mired in various thieving and criminal schemes. He embarks on a side-hustle wholesaling prepaid phones to drug dealers. For what? Why? He’s bored. He’s listless.

How many years and how many different worlds have I seen the women killing it, Kim Wexlers everywhere, and their fuck-up boyfriends scheming for quick-hit-success or moping playing video games all day.

The girls meet and talk about their success, how they shouldn’t be ashamed to demand more from their bosses and boyfriends, how they need a raise, a promotion, how they DESERVE it.

The men shamble around living vicariously through their girlfriends’ artistic and economic achievements (that is, if they’re lucky enough to have a girlfriend).

I can’t help but come back to my base case: no one deserves anything and everyone deserves everything.

Read Ten Caesars by Suetonius.

Everyone thinks it’s going to be different for them, they’re going to do it differently than everyone else.

Use the money the right way, use the success the right way.

But the ring of power corrupts. Money corrupts. Prestige corrupts.

We have about 5,000 years of religious books and history books that all seem to say the same thing—compromise with evil is not possible, eschew the status and prestige of the world, renounce comfort, become homeless.

But no one actually wants to do it (me included).

So we all go into the system and we all come out compromised and dirty-faced.

It’s never just the one thing. It’s the entire web of things.