Here Goes Nothing

by Steve Toltz

That’s not all I lament; why hadn’t I seen more of our world? Why did I never skydive or sexually experiment? Why exactly was I so uninterested in touching a dick? So what if I was heterosexual? Don’t most vegetarians eat fish?

‘Visiting the past because you’re nostalgic is like drinking sea water when you’re dying of thirst. It’ll only make you thirstier.

It annoyed me how people professed to believe in the unseen world and then bored you with how they’d seen it.

Here are some survival tools: The enemy of love is impatience and eye rolling. Even gentle mockery is corrosive. Learn how to defuse the other’s ticking bomb. Notice what the beginning of a negative spiral looks like. Prioritise snoring remedies. Don’t exaggerate hurt feelings. Have more morning sex than night sex. Identify which of your partner’s faults are unfixable and devise a workaround. In marriage it is survival of the deafest, okay?’

when you resolve to adore someone, you develop new blind spots as you go.

‘The frog at the bottom of a well believes that the sky is as small as the lid of a cooking pot.’

I disliked when anyone tried to give me knowledge non-consensually; I wanted to protect my ignorance, the most underrated of the human rights. Even when you mutter, ‘That’s okay, I don’t need to know,’ people still talk at you as though they’re an expert witness called to the stand. It’s a mortifying spectacle of unbearable pomposity.

Whenever I hear someone reciting a poem, I also hear the hours of practice they put into memorising it just for the occasion of saying it to you. It’s excruciating.

People are always trying to count your blessings for you, but their arithmetic is way off.

‘What is love even for? That’s easy. The redistribution of the burden of living. It emerges as the by-product of intimacy. Should we bother with it? That’s not entirely clear.’

‘Why do we give credence to “lived experience”? All the time people misperceive intentions, misread facial expressions, misunderstand tone; they project, transfer, carry a history of past troubled confrontations with them into benign interactions, and then you have to factor in confirmation bias, negativity bias, inter-group bias, the availability heuristic, the fundamental attribution error, the bandwagon effect, the clustering illusion, the empathy gap, salience, herding, selective attention. How can anyone know enough about every individual’s psychological state to confirm how much of their inner subjective experience corresponds with objective reality? Maybe it’s seventy percent. Maybe it’s eighty percent. Maybe it’s thirty percent. Let it be said once and for all: lived experience as an evidentiary standard is mostly garbage.’

The question is, how did we not see where this volatile and unhappy interplay of negative amplifiers was heading? Overpopulation, ecocide, unchecked capitalism—check! Unheeded warnings, perpetual growth, unstoppable consumerism—check! What I’m trying to say is, a triumph of the human spirit was bad for the environment. We objectified nature. Our backfires spread like wildfires. We were custodians of the earth and we physically abused our charge. Fishing the seas to extinction was as self-defeating as giving yourself a neck tattoo on the way to a job interview.’