I find that modern life tends to involve a lot of what I call ‘needless complexity’. What is that?
It’s quite simple. You need to do something (or want to) and you get bogged down in a bunch of things that have nothing to do with what you needed or wanted to do in the first place. Example: You want to send an email but when you go to open your computer you get a message that you need to update the OS, so you do that and then twenty minutes later you finally open your email server and see that your inbox is full or there is no storage available so you try to fix that but find that there is some part of the task that you aren’t getting right so you look online and the search results bring you twenty-five videos that claim to have the answer but are each 8-20 minutes long and you look for a simple text page with the answer and you find three hundred websites generated by AI and search engine optimized for keywords memory full or empty email. Then you finally find one page from six years ago on page 297 written by a guy named Jens which tells you the simple fix and how to do it. Maybe you have five other things pop up along the way that distract you from the email but by this time you are exhausted and you finally get to where you can write the email but there is no longer any enthusiasm or incentive for the act any longer. Maybe you send it or maybe you don’t and just go to mindless brain rot scrolling.
This happens countless times to countless people every day, probably every hour or minute. It’s not just email. It’s going to the grocery store. Paying a bill. Getting a service disconnected or connected. Or almost anything else in this life. It’s ridiculous, it’s needless, it’s complex, and it’s almost inescapable.
Here is my current example. I want to write about a variety of things and to share about a variety of things. They aren’t necessarily connected. They aren’t necessarily marketable or commercial. When blogging emerged, it was easy – I set up Vagobond.com and just did it but then SEO and content monetization and niche definition and sales funnels and you name it – needless complexity. I didn’t need any of that – I just wanted to write and share. Social media seemed like a fix – but then walled garden, recommendation algorithm, the destruction of some social media (goodby G+, so long Twitter, Tumblr what have you become?) And why? So that some company can keep me engaged, keep me on their site, show me their ads, watch me with their cookies and monetize my data or manipulate my moods to sell me things.
It’s all unbelievably frustrating and to use a non-PC word from the 90s that just works so well – it’s retarded. Here’s an example of needless complexity in vocabulary – when I say retarded I mean it doesn’t work as well as it should. It’s sub-optimal. It’s not normative. I’m not trying to shame some person who was born with a handicap, I’m not trying to hate against people with learning disabilities. Most of the retards I know are actually not handicapped, neurodivergent, or learning disabled – they are just normal Americans – who generally have proven themselves again and again to be a bunch of retards. So all of that needless complexity for me to just say that this whole tech system is retarded.
Are you retarded and offended by my use of the word? Do you think of your loved ones as retarded and are offended that I use the word? Maybe it’s time for you to stop thinking of your loved ones as retards and look in the mirror because it is likely you who are retarded – look in the mirror and then look up the word retard.
Silicon Valley and the tech world are obviously filled with retards because they built this entire needlessly complex system in their quest to become the elf with all the magic flasks, impress girls with their video gaming skills, or get enough money that they could become a modern day Jeffrey Epstein. Yeah, retard date rape nerds. We let them destroy what was actually pretty good. Newspapers, coffee shops, libraries, magazines, used book stores, travel, friendship – you name it and Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel, Bezos, Gates – they used their secret nerd powers to destroy and rebuild – with needless retard date rape nerd energy. Now they have Trump in power… we all know he’s a date rape a-hole but somehow he became a retard nerd too with his own social network and cryptocurrency.
Okay, enough of that. All of this makes me laugh. It’s beyond the pale. So here’s my solution – which is also needlessly complex.
I abandoned my previous blog/website because the search engines and browsers (autocorrect) hated it. I built this one. I don’t care if this one ranks well. It’s new and it’s mine. I installed WordPress on it and gave it a nice homepage.
My fiction and travel writing and metaverse/AI explorations – I’m going to share all of those things at https://indignified.substack.com – I’ll also share my Letters from Exile and Travel Video Content there.
My day to day travel and life photos – I’ll just post them to Instagram @cd_indignified and cross post to Threads and Facebook. I hate Meta – but it’s where most of my people exist – so it makes sense to use it that way.
I’ll use things like Tik Tok, Red Note, Linkedin, Farcaster, Zora, Bluesky etc to try to drive some engagement and subscriptions to my Substack and Insta. I have a Discord server that has some great people on it so I’ll probably keep sharing there as well.
And here – I’ll just post whatever the fuck (I had to undo autocorrect on fuck from duck three times to complete this sentence) I want. I’m trying to create a better version of social media with Bondr.app and I’m trying to create some other fun things that might bring some joy back into life for people like me. In the meantime, I’m living without a country and exploring the world through places and people. It really should be simple. Life should be simple – like for a bird. You wake, you shit, you eat, you fly, you eat, you do some fun things, you find a mate, you eat, you shit, you sleep, you die. Simple.
There it is – so much needless complexity. It’s super-fucking-retarded – and as a result – maybe so am I.
