Society is Too Complex
“Enough! Enough!...Wake up, America.”
I had a horrible moment of clarity recently.
I was driving south on 48th between Adams and Leighton, surrounded on all sides by other cars, it was 8 pm, all the other cars’ headlights were reflecting off my mirrors and blinding me, the bright streetlamps only added to my confusion, I was driving with one hand, We Didn’t Start the Fire was booming from my stereo, everyone in the world seemed to be on 48th and Leighton, my senses were completely overloaded, I was sweating, and I realized, right there, right then, I can’t handle it all.
Society is just too complex. Even Bellow, writing in the fifties, saw this coming and tried to warn us. There’s too much to keep track of. No one can possibly stay on top of everything that’s going on in the individual madness of everyday life. We live in a twenty-four-hour cycle of information overload. Everything is always coming at us at once: phones, screens, sounds, smells, ads, more screens, music, clothes, colors, cars, food, media, smaller screens, sports, clocks, beer, stocks, bigger screens, movies, games, concrete, glass, houses, light, energy, oceans—at every second your synapses are taking in more stuff than George Washington experienced every decade. Back in his day all Georgie had to worry about was keeping his wig powdered and eating as much as a horse. He was, of course, great at both, and his gut was as presidential as any I’ve ever seen.
Historians say he was 6’2’’, 200. King shit.
This insane sensory glut isn’t good for my tiny brain. I feel like I spend most of my waking time driving through Lincoln, my mouth open, dazzled, dazed, totally burned out from the wonder of it all. My sleeping moments are full of bizarre, chaotic stress dreams that usually involve getting Canvas notifications telling me I’ve failed several classes or terrible accidents at public swimming pools. Last night I dreamt that George Washington was chasing me with a cherry tree to chop me down, and I woke up with my head spinning at how fucked up and meaningless (or meaningful?) it was. Does anybody know any good dream analysts? I asked Dr. Gonzo what my nightmares meant, which was a mistake, as he turned very serious, looked me in the eyes, and said, “It’s time to have you arrested.”
I’ve also grown convinced that the American population numbers are a fabrication, though I don’t know by who. They tell me there’s 330 million people in this country, but I’m convinced there’s either 60 (sixty. just sixty. like five dozen) or a couple hundred trillion. Either the only people that exist are those I know personally and I’m living in the Truman Show (are you sure you are real? Do you really know me? Do you know anyone? When’s the last time you went outside and looked at a tree? Is it really alive? How much of your childhood do you remember?), or there are more people than we can possibly imagine. And no, I don’t need to prove this to you, because I’m like George Washington—I can’t tell a lie, baby.
All this brings me to my larger point, which I am declaring as the official stance of the Gonzo Papers: it’s time to chill the hell out. As a group. All of us. You, me, everyone you’ve ever seen, all of American civilization—let’s revert back to something simpler. I’d prefer we go all the way back to a hunter-gatherer state where the internet doesn’t exist and we walk everywhere, but that seems unlikely. So instead I have a few suggestions on where to start with our collective and much needed simplification of society.
1. Car headlights only in rural areas. Do people in this city not understand that you don’t need to have your brights on at every minute of every day? The streets are well-lit. What purpose does having your brights on serve other than to absolutely blind me? People even have their headlights on during the day. Am I crazy, or can everyone see well at noon? It’s sunny out. My retinas are suffering because people don’t realize they can see by the light of the sun. Unbelievable. Buddy, the streetlamps are there for a reason.
I look like this 98% of the time. Just a deer caught in headlights.
2. No more new TV shows. There are already enough. No, we don’t need ten more seasons of Wipeout or another primetime drama called something like Sacramento Fire or Who Wants to Be a Televised Idiot? (This also applies to YouTube. We need a perma-ban on new content while we all process the enormous amount of shit we’ve already created. Imagine trying to explain to George Washington that 500 hours of “moving picture images” are “uploaded” to a “website” every minute.) Forget for now that millions of people would love, in fact, to be a televised idiot. I know my loyal readers are much more cultured.
3. Three headlines per day. Not everything is news, dammit. Some things can happen and not need to be documented. As interesting as the articles accompanying headlines like “Six Babies Accidentally Build Lego Masterpiece” or “Man Gets Stuck in Washing Machine, Not Found Until Days Later by Irritated Wife Trying to Remove a Stain,” these things don’t need to be in the news. So let’s just stick to three headlines a day. That’s it. Remember my tiny overloaded walnut brain? It can process three new things a day, and no more. I write these posts three words a day over the course of several months. Really? Yes.
4. Conglomerate all restaurants into one. There is absolutely no reason that Applebee’s and Ruby Tuesday’s both need to exist. Same with Taco Bell and Taco John’s. Just make one giant restaurant chain called Super Double Plus Applebee’s that serves every food. I never want to have to make a decision about where to eat again. I don’t care about the side effects of forming a monopoly. I just want to be able to sit down and have a nice meal of six McChickens and four Cheddar Quesalupas at the same place. I’m pretty sure my right to do that is in the Constitution.
5. Freeze the phones at the latest model. I am not looking forward to the days of the iPhone 75. I’ve just begun to figure out my iPhone 7, which is basically what all the scared suburbanites in the fifties thought of when they heard “the future.” The future’s here, folks, and I’m telling you that technology is good enough. What else could you possibly expect from your phone? Want it to wipe your ass for you? There’s an app for that, which Dr. Gonzo swears is the best $4.99 he’s ever spent. George Washington didn’t even text back, and he still became president. Keep the phone models where they are. They don’t need to get any better. And if anyone has ever spent five dollars on an app besides Dr. Gonzo, you need to be arrested.
So there you have it: five easy solutions to a number of our current problems. This is the year we take a step back from the now-constant cliff of impending hysteria and exponential complexity, throw up our hands, and say “Look, as much as we’d love to watch Jimmy Fallon do TikTok dances, maybe we should find something better to do.” Or even better, take a look at the enormous bloated culture we’ve created that led to Jimmy Fallon TikTok dancing, and then go outside and look at clouds or something. George Washington would approve; after all, old Georgie never uploaded clickbait or turned his brights on at noon and he seemed to do just fine.
Ah…whatever. My brain is fried. Someday I’ll spend five bucks on an app to write all this for me.
