Anatonomy of an Obsession
“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.”
Winston Churchill.
KLOUT used to be a word, not a state of being. To my mind it should remain as such. It once meant something that held currency; even klout, in the real sense of the word: Influential.
Should it matter that someone, or rather someTHING else is leverging your score and setting your reputation afoot — mine too apparently, when one has not even set foot anywhere that should matter.
Can it be that this Id-obsessive era of me-myself-and-I, incumbent as it is on the devolving value of individualisation, the selfie generation signifies the ailment underpinning “I am the new me. Me is the transitive new black:I am that essential accessory to my own life” that is really at work.
As for the mastery of an existential culture in an age of irrelevance. Anyone with an IQ that stretches beyond that which one does in waiting in line for tickets or for a bus, or for one’s number to be up, should find their heckles rising at the notion of preferential treatment at the whim of an Algorithm.
Not that this article has anything at all to do with proteome quantification. It has everything to do with the unilateral qualification of one’s individual sphere of influence by something that should have no influence itself whatsoever.
Hairs on the back of one’s proverbial neck should be honed upright with the taut gait of one’s pet hound’s fur at the whiff such aspirational, arbitrary selectivity, that seeks to gain legitimate Relevancy as to sending forth your supposed social rapport with the Etherworld well before your materialise in the God-forbidden flesh.
I was proverbially ‘gobsmacked to read KLOUT is seeking the kind of influential foothold with job recruiters, hoteliers and one day , heaven help us lesser mortals, even bank managers. Beware for you may find yourself relegated to the last row, or the smallest room, or the worst table in a restaurant depending on what KLOUT’s algorithm deems your sphere of influence to be on any given day.
For those committed to such superficialities, you may find yourself upgraded, offered employment or even upgraded to business class based on your conscientious cultivation of such trite things as social presence. Perhaps you should consider hiring someone full time to oversee all that seemingly goes into this new culture of irrelevance and redundancy.
Perhaps this leaves me to walk some mileage in nomans-land as some kind of insolent cultural maverick turning my back on the slate of social platforms that make you who you are these days. Somehow, I prefer to be the one to determine my own identity. I’d like my klout to be of my own making.
Some time ago, I had some serious decisions to make. Moments such as these are never easy and it always feels preferential to slide into inertia which likes to ignore that even not choosing is a choice. So I chose to do nothing about any of it. I simply let things be. I let my inner sleeping dog lie. I decided to let my Id go; not to have anything to do me for a while. I filled time with other things than obsessing over myself and the expectations, real or imagined that come with all of me.
In the withdrawal to this process and for the amusing pun of it, some moments were deeply awkward, even painful, as I found myself increasingly aware, even prescient, the longer I chose to distance myself from me, of the multitudinous ways in which I had sabotaged myself over the years.
Detached from both my past and my future I found the present a space of surprising clarity, in which I could finally listen to where I needed to be, whether or not that went against vanity wishes or desires.
Central to this emergent awareness came a realisation of where I belong; back at my roots and that in whatever existential battleground we all find ourselves, my own obsession I discovered, was not so much with fighting irrelevance, but nurturing meaningfulness. I found I’d outgrown myself. Finally.
