If you haven’t already followed k-punk’s directions to Lawrence Miles’s most excellent blog, then follow mine.
Lawrence’s writing reminds me - and this has to be a generational thing, amongst other things - of Marcello Carlin’s. It’s intelligent in a way very few things these days are permitted to be. I’ve laboured for most of my life under the laughable misapprehension that intelligence - the gathering, organisation and dissemination thereof - is the one thing that gives my existence any meaning or validity whatsoever; and the trouble is that intelligence is actually very ill-suited to the task of making life meaningful and valid, as anyone with an ounce of intelligence will eventually realize. You’re better off buying a car; or rather, you’re better off being the sort of person who thinks they will be better off buying a car.
Except that, no, you’re not - I’ve always been stubborn about this - I used to yell at people who put forward the argument that it was better to be lobotomized and happy than alert and miserable, as if that were essentially the choice. Fuck it, I’ll still yell at anyone who tries to sell me that line (it’s usually someone middle class who’s used to their intelligence, such as it is, being taken for granted, and thinks it might be quite fun to live under the rubric of their own patronising low expectations of others for a change).
It is better - morally, existentially, sexually better - to be intelligent, as intelligent as you can be, all the time without ever giving a fucking inch to those who want you to be otherwise; it ultimately doesn’t matter in the slightest whether you’re miserable or not (at least on the scale of miseries the aforementioned middle class interlocutors might have to look forward to - I exclude genuine horror and grief, which have their own inexorable way of mattering), and even if it does matter, it’s still better to be intelligently miserable than blindly, hopelessly and stupidly miserable.
People who expect me to care about their happiness tend to be somewhat put out when they discover that I care much more about their intelligence; it’s just that I want what’s best for them, that’s all…