Cordyceps and Alienation
Composed July 7th 2022
A friend once asked me how family life was. I’d recently become a parent and had been married for over 5 years by then. I don’t remember, but my friend reminded me of this recently. He said my reply was:
A family is to the creative mind like a toilet brush to a good Gin and Tonic.
Apparently this amused my friend, who recently became a parent himself. We live thousands of miles apart now, despite once being housemates. We still get together to play online games now and then, but haven’t seen each other in years due to this fucking pandemic. Since he became a parent we’ve had zero time to game. We once talked about creating an artistic collective… also when he lived in New York I was going to go visit his studio as an artist in residence for a week or so. None of these things ever came to pass. Pissed away by the realities of family life.
I sometimes wonder, in my pessimistic and cynical way, whether I would have been happier without settling down and starting a family. Obviously, the answer is NO I would not have been. I do have some friends who remain single, and none of them bar none are even remotely happy and most of them are disgusted when I moan about my lot. It’s like that Nine Inch Nails song: Why do you get all the love in the world? Yeah, I got lots of love. But, with all that responsibility I have slowly ceased to be myself anymore.
Knew it would happen. If you become a parent, you can’t be independent anymore… you can’t be selfish. And I don’t just mean regular selfish, like being an arsehole. I mean even a little selfish. Want to join your friend and be an artist in residence in New York for a week? Selfish. Money that should be used on family, pissed away while you dick around with an old uni-mate, trying to be glamourous when you really aren’t.
Want to go on a writers’ retreat for a week on your own because you are mentally and physically exhausted and still haven’t finished your novel? Selfish… the expense and time away from family make you a twat. Family need you to take the bins out and occasionally cook, twice a day needed to walk the damn dog. Plus, coping alone with child while you are away… thoughtless. What a prick. That also never happened.
Have a lie in, even? Selfish… everybody else is up and why didn’t you help get breakfast ready? Dog is fucking staring at you, might as well be hopping on one leg she’s busting for a piss.
Fancy a few pints with your mates? Selfish, you need to walk the dog early tomorrow and how ever much you spend on booze you could have bought your kid some new Lego or put it in the bank or something (this one doesn’t actually stop me, but, you know… vague guilt)
Everything you do for yourself is selfish, and before you were a parent none of those things were even remotely bad. OK, it’s possible I am slightly exaggerating this a little. Maybe I have an exceptionally strict partner, or maybe an incredibly needy child. Maybe my dog walks are actually the high point of my day. Nevertheless, you get my point.
Things that didn’t use to be selfish are now selfish once you are a parent. That’s a fact. That’s a reality of having dependants. And that drives a new and conservative-seeking fear into your heart, because then you want to get a house and a mortgage, you care about your career, need to maintain a steady job. Can’t be galivanting, can’t be dgafing, gotta be a sensible mature adult.
Recently my partner got mad at me for knocking over some chamomile tea. I’d come back a bit late from a very rare night of drinks (first in three years) with a good friend. Instead of whiskey, I had focused on drinking chamomile when I got back, as I didn’t want to be too hungover. Made the tea, got to the top of the stairs, said good night to the dog; woke up covered in cold tea with angry wife over me, cross that I woke her up in the middle of the night and appalled at the pathetic state I was in. She said “you’re going to be forty this year! Forty! Act like it, time to grow up.”
Man, that hurts. It hurts because I was sensible, right up until the point where I lay down next to the dog to stare into her lovely brown eyes and remember all the good times we’ve had. 20 years ago I had a big group of friends and housemates. Every night was a mini-party and we were all thin and good looking. All our music was new. We had carefree jobs that kept us just out of the red, with enough left over to buy red wine and weed. We didn’t have a TV or gaming machines and we didn’t need them. Nowadays, my best friends are an old dog and my new RTX3080.
Sure, my life if fucking great. These are first world problems. Poor middle-aged man and his top of the range GPU (though soon it won’t be). I’m not saying my life isn’t great… it’s just hard for me to accept that I am no longer me anymore. I am some new me, and I don’t know who that is yet because I don’t know what I want anymore. The things I wanted, I got them. Now, instead of dreams they are realities that tether me to my own life choices and refuse to let go.
Watching a brilliant David Attenborough documentary a while back, I’m pretty sure it was Planet Earth 1, I learned about the Cordyceps mushroom. It’s a pretty sick mycelium, and what it does is it infects its host and takes over their mind. Luckily for us, the host is always an insect of some kind, like and ant or a beetle. Doesn’t do it on humans. Once infected, the host starts to act all strange and weird. It loses interest in doing stuff for its community or for itself. It merely aims for the highest ground and then, the fruiting body of the mushrooms bursts out of its brain… Alien eat your heart out. The reason for the high ground is that then the spores are more likely to be carried further and thus infect even more hapless scuttlers whose brains will also turn literally to fungus.
I think having become a family man is a bit like being infected with this cordyceps. It takes over everything you do and makes you seek the highest ground possible, in order to get the best sort of social advantages you can for your offspring. I’m talking all the types of Bourdieusian capital here, social, cultural, academic, technological, linguistic, economic. All of it. You want every advantage you can for your mind is now full of the fungal mush of what society wants us to think. It wants us to consume, to procreate, to contribute, to no longer be selfish and think only of the larger mycoses that is the fabric of today’s society. A fungal rot that has us devouring the planet at an unstoppable pace, caring nothing for ourselves and only feeding the rot as it spreads from generation to generation.
Now, I’m all for having kids… but it’s hard to be true to your values when you do have them… because they are no longer your own values. They are society’s values. If you raise your kids to be feral, outspoken, wild, crazy and interesting they might not fit into society and thus they might not be able to climb to the vantage point where the winds of the social cordyceps will carry their ideas and ideologies out into the winds of time and help us all continue blindly consuming and destroying the world. This for me has caused a feeling of Alienation, as Rahel Jaeggi has discussed in her brilliant book of the same name.
So, my solution is that I’m going to try to be more creative again. Starting from now. I’m going to find a new way to care about myself, to rediscover myself and my real values and be a happier human being. I don’t like seeing society as a disease, and if I do see it like that I need to teach my child how to game the system… how to fake being a cordyceps zombie without actually losing sight of who you are. Wish me luck though, I’ll need it.
