About Apathy

Post 503:

As many things as I try to accomplish, I think I have a natural predilection toward apathy.

I’ll come back to that in a second. For now I want to say a few things about a little novel called Apathy by Paul Neilan. I knew nothing of the writer or what to expect; it was one of those random buys.

Really funny. Really not appropriate for younger readers. Not just because the language and the inappropriate situations—if you’re super young there’s no way to understand where this guy’s coming from. A person needs a good amount of failure, shame and hopelessness to even begin to glean the message.

It’s a first-person account of a guy who just doesn’t care anymore. It’s all useless. The world is a fetid cesspool, undeniably horrid in every way imaginable. There’s no point, there’s no getting better, and the people surrounding him only make the fatuousness of existence more obvious.

Don’t enter without your sense of humor. And a big bag of I can’t be offended. Here’s a few takeaways. Some of the writing is really imaginative and clever—enough to get me laughing and opening my eyes really wide—in a room by myself.

It’s a quick read, and it’s not epic in scale. No, War and Peace this is not, but Tolstoy could be nihilistic in his own weird way—and he couldn’t make me red-faced with laughter.

So I recommend. And love that the writer thinks life is so pointless he writes a book about it, complaining about a world that’s not living up to a standard that apparently never existed in the first place.

But that’s why I like it. Apathy reminds me that when I get dark and nihilistic, that’s usually when I’m doing the most whining. If it’s pointless, whining is as pointless as everything else and thus a complete waste time. Dang it. Logic. One of those things I wish I didn’t have to care about.

Give a crap. Or at least limit your fecklessness to increments. Just a pro tip. No biggie.

Cheers. See you after.