![]() Having a sense of humour – that is, preferring to have fun with, rather than at the expense of, other people – becomes a strange kind of disadvantage.īut a truly liberal (in the broadest sense of the word) society cannot function properly without humour. Online, though, in part because it’s much easier to ascertain somebody’s views than it is the subtleties of their character, we construct our social circles around shared (and strictly policed) beliefs. ![]() In the analogue world, goodnatured people of different ideological bents intermingle perfectly fine. Elsewhere, inexplicably popular “trad” Twitter accounts like “the Cultural Tutor” repeat their one tiresome schtick: that everything humans have produced since about 1910 just flat-out sucks.Įvidently, the internet is a large part of the problem. Disenfranchised teenage boys get to look up to Andrew Tate, a man I’ve never seen smile. It seems mostly to be men at various stages of nervous breakdowns staring stony-faced into TV cameras, warning us about “The Regime” or “The Machine” coming to force fried insects down our throats. Oh, and that’s before the tiresome pedants burst out from behind the bushes to inform you that, ackshually, St George was Turkish, or love is just your neurones fizzing, or every charming cultural tradition you ever cared about is just an arbitrary, worthless invention.Īlternative media isn’t much better. They’re joined by the red-faced talk radio hosts getting endlessly exasperated with the small-town dunces phoning in. It boasts the permanently frowning Jordan Peterson and faux-macho grifters whose only idea of fun is a “joy-by-numbers” routine seemingly designed just to wind up the libs – “honey, can you take a photo of me holding this raw steak and cigar?” In the middle are “sensible” centrists from the Financial Times or Economist who just wish people would stop being so damn irrational and look at the stats. We all know the “social justice” left is plagued by interaction-by-algorithm bots like Robin DiAngelo, but the other side fields an equally dour team of anti-woke critics. Science and Technical Research and Development.Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities.Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives.Information and Communications Technology.HR, Training and Organisational Development.Health - Medical and Nursing Management.Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance.Far more important, ultimately, is a much more basic divide that cuts through all groups: that between the joyful and the humourless. None of these supposedly unbridgeable binaries actually matter. ![]() My anger, I realised, was heterodox, sparked by the woke and anti-woke, left and right, conservative and progressive, religious and atheist alike – a seemingly scattershot set of individuals. But when I started drawing Venn diagrams in my mind to distinguish those people who annoy me, I couldn’t find a consistent overlap. ![]() Instead, I thought, if I could simply figure out which Twitter subcultures really irked me, I could cut them from my timeline once and for all. My immediate reaction was to get off social media altogether, but I’m too vain for that. Somewhere between the Remainer lawyers, cartoon frogs, and Greek statues chastising me for not building gothic cathedrals any more, I suddenly realised I’d just completely lost the will to live. But one morning last week, cheerfully doomscrolling away, something inside me suddenly snapped. It’s a lifestyle hack shared by tens of thousands across the country, which goes some way to explaining why our public discourse is in such a tremendous state right now. Until recently my days generally started with the same basic wellness routine: wake up, open Twitter and allow my mind to enter into a higher state of all-encompassing rage. ![]()
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