Morning Routine
The world is full of actors pretending to be human.
I must visit LinkedIn periodically to renew my sense of horror.
This week, I witnessed a sight I shall never erase from memory. Unless I enlist the expensive therapy of a psychoanalyst, decades from now, I’ll remain traumatised.
On LinkedIn, a man named Alexander C shared a helpful recipe with millions of go-getters, success-mongers, and rise-and-grinders.
LinkedIn is a kind of Facebook for the unhinged whose pathologies gather little purchase on other social media platforms. Here, sociopathy frolics freely.
Anyway, Alex walked us through his ingenuity:
“I’m travelling for work and instead of eating a fancy dinner out, I’ve decided to cook a cheaper meal in the hotel room,” he explained.
“Even though the hotel room didn’t have a kitchen, I managed to use the coffee machine to cook chicken with butter and garlic.
“Although my company allows me to expense dinner while travelling, I wanted to save money because I know that every dollar counts.
“It’s the little things that get you promoted.”
When I was a child, reader, it was the little things that got you sectioned and jabbed with a floaty drug called Risperdal.
I don’t know whether Alex was commenting satirically upon our ‘rise and grind’ culture in which we publicly castrate ourselves to the lowest bidder in pursuit of some demented notion of ‘success,’ but this kind of madness prevails on LinkedIn.
The current fetish is that of the morning routine. One babbitt outlined his ‘perfect’ morning routine, which involved sixty minutes of what he called a ‘rampage of appreciation.’
I can only guess what such a rampage of appreciation entails. I wonder whether he uses his left or his right hand for such a rampage.
Our rise-and-grind culture has reached that unenviable Kármán Line where satire and reality meld into indistinction.
After trawling through YouTube in search of the morning routine which would change my entire life using just one simple trick, I couldn’t tell what was genuine and what was a parody.
One impossibly good-looking chap, with impossibly good hair, meditated each morning in the shower. Dre Drexler took us through his day in which he, an obviously perfect man, strove for imperfections, and read a book of power thoughts. For lunch, Dre whetted his perfect skin with a walnut salad. Oh, and he loved the sound of his alarm as this sound was his cue, like Pavlov’s dog, to impact the world in a unique and positive way.
(Reader, anyone employing the phony verb, ‘impact’ to mean anything other than faecal impaction is, ironically, full of shit.)
My morning routine would disappoint Drexler. I would not cut the mustard at LinkedIn.
I wake around nine a.m. usually with a cottonmouth. Promptly, I hand-roll a cigarette from the most mediocre of tobaccos. I press a button on the coffee machine for double espresso times two. By 9.30 a.m. I begin writing, first by hand, and then on the laptop. Until at least midday, I avoid contact with anyone breathing.
Around lunchtime, I stop writing. Then I either despair at what I’ve written, or convince myself that I am the next Swift, Addison, Steele, Pope, Mencken, or Christopher Hitchens.
At lunch, I buy a real newspaper and skip past any story with ‘race, racist, race row, Harry, Meghan,’ in the headline, or anything loosely connected to the modern obsession with melanin and genitalia. Often, I go for a walk in the groves. Beforehand, I mentally rehearse the day’s small talk and what I might say if accosted by giddy strangers who, for reasons of insanity, feign a vital interest in the minutiae of innocent bystanders.
I avoid the modern onslaught as best I can until I mix a whiskey sour and press it to my lips.
(Pro-tip: Ignore the purists insistent upon ‘fresh’ lemon juice. Collecting enough juice for one cocktail involves a stream of migrant workers grafting around the clock in teams of three. This endeavour takes forty-seven man-hours and $2,977 to squeeze enough juice for one paltry drink. Just buy a bottle of concentrate.)
The whiskey dances along my blood and lubricates my brain like oil would a combustion engine. Over a day, I smoke around twenty cigarettes. Provided that my generation will never own our own homes and that real wages haven’t budged since the 1970s, my retirement plan rests solely upon expiring politely before retirement age.
At the end of the day, I read over the 1,500 words I’ve written and usually detest 1,499 of those words. Then I open a bottle of wine and read books published before the year 2000 when everything went wrong.
One such book is David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd.
Back in 1950, Riesman observed the emergence of a new character type taking root amongst the American middle class, that of the ‘other-directed personality.’
Whereas the tradition-directed dominate in primitive societies, and the inner-directed dominate in industrial societies, the other-directed dominate in consumer societies.
The inner-directed type is guided by an ‘internal gyroscope’ of goals and principles implanted by his parents. He focuses more on producing than consuming. The opinions of others have little purchase upon the inner-directed. He’d rather esteem than love.
The other-directed is more attuned to the expectations of others. He looks to his peers and to mass media to get a sense of who he is. He’d rather love than esteem.
As J.D. Salinger wrote, the world is full of actors pretending to be human.
And yet, Riesman was six decades behind the social media age and the advent of freelance fame. Far from broadening horizons, the social media age has squeezed much of the planet into an incestuous small town where the burghers of a global village perform for the approval of others.
Nowadays, the other-directed type dominates our culture. Such personalities emerge during an age in which what one pretends to be is more important than who one is.
Such people are crowd-pleasers. They spend much of their lives trying to impress other people.
At the extremity, other-directed types aren’t so much people but products to be sold and manipulated. Today, they’re ‘building their brand’ like the denizens of LinkedIn. After all, much of the tendency to display one’s morning routine or one’s commitment to the ‘grind’ is a personal advertisement showcasing just how malleable and other-directed one might be.
To be other-directed is to depend upon others for a definition of oneself.
Most of us—your Millennial narrator especially—are utterly dependent upon others to tell us who we are. Perhaps that illustrates our epidemics of mental illness, loneliness, apathy, and anomie.
For instance, half of my social media friends seem to have trekked to Machu Picchu. What percentage did so because they wanted to do so, and what percentage did so to tell others and themselves that they too are living authentically?
But who is living authentically? Those who crowdsource their entire personalities to others, or those who, like Reisman’s idealised autonomous individual, direct their own tastes, their own preferences, their own personalities, and their own lives?
Sadly, I cannot foresee a time in which my name is emblazoned upon a book in the self-help section of Barnes and Noble. Telling people cleverly what they already know instinctively will always be a license to print money.
Love it man! Great work.
“Such personalities emerge during an age in which what one pretends to be is more important than who one is.”
Indeed.