#nonchalance

We’re made from stardust. Life is born from matter created billions of years ago. Life is a chemical reaction, and our bodies are just compartments of compartments for the various stages of the reaction to take place. Reproduction simply furthers the chemical reaction. Evolution finds new niches for the reaction to explore, new ways for it to sustain itself, for that is all it does. We are stars, and when we die our matter remains, and continues within the cycle. All that separates us from empty matter is consciousness. That is why life is never futile: life is the difference between humanity and carbon.

And within that life, we have love, the substance that makes us human. Love, passion, care, all synonyms for the same thing, that which makes us truly alive. The many different kinds of love, whether platonic or romantic or sexual, whether for a person who has been there through everything or for the song which held you from the ledge, whether for your cat or for that one book you could never get out of your head. Love is love. Much as we may pretend at differences, and much as I may agree with the idea of different kinds of love, it amounts to the same thing. It is passion. It is enjoyment of life, it is the things that make life worthwhile. When we care about something, we become truly alive. Without love, we have nothing, and are nothing.

The purpose which we find, that keeps us going, always stems from love. One must imagine Sisyphus happy, and we find our happiness in the people around us, in the taste of butter perfectly melted on toast, in the symphonies of our favourite artist, in the delight of a story well told, in the grin on our faces as we talk excitedly about whatever interests us most at the moment. Maybe I’m just a bit autistic, given that last one. Nevertheless, we care about things, and that gives us purpose. Noone becomes a nurse for the money, they do it because they care about helping people. The greatest works of art, the greatest acts of sacrifice, the greatest breakthroughs in science, they all come from love, from caring about something. Warped love, at times, but love all the same.

So, therefore, in order to find purpose, we must first love. In order to live, we must care. In order to be human, we must have passion.

Anyways, let’s talk about gooning.

Before we get into it properly, I’ll define some terms. Firstly, nonchalance. Nonchalance is not caring. Or, rather, it is caring so much what people think, that you pretend not to care. It’s a weird cycle, but it boils down to not caring. It is not putting in effort, it is not being emotional, it is not being honest. To me, it is stripping yourself down to the barest bones and presenting that as the true you, devoid of any individuality and any of the substance that separates a living person from just a collection of interestingly arranged chemicals. A nonchalant person is grey, colourless, essentially lifeless. I have been blessed with knowing only one truly nonchalant person in my life, and I have a genuine hatred for that behaviour.

Secondly, gooners. Gooners are porn addicts. But I’m going to be using it in a slightly different way. Let’s break it down into what it is at it’s core: not addiction to sex, or romance, or being with another person, but addiction to the dopamine rush of ejaculation. In that regard, one can be a gooner without being addicted to porn. It is addiction to that rush, wherever it comes from. To me, there is little difference between the person who vapes before their eyes are even fully open in the morning and the person who jacks off for hours instead of being a real person. A gooner is an addict to an effortless, lifeless facsimile of joy, produced solely for the sake of their addiction to that rush, whether from lead fumes, porn, TikTok at 3AM, betting everything on black, or spending a month’s salary on online shopping.

Finally, passion. Passion is easier to define. We all know what it is. Passion is caring, it is love, it is that substance I talked about earlier.

Nonchalance is the opposite of this. Not caring about something is the opposite of being passionate about something, that much is obvious to anyone who thinks for half a second. But what does this have to do with gooning? I’ll get there in just a second, bear with me here.

It goes beyond simply the absence of the substance. Life without love and care, to me, is life without meaning. Nonchalance, as the antithesis to passion, is a descriptor of a meaningless, futile life, simply a dying spark in an empty universe, rather than the bright collection of flame and fireworks that life is meant to be.

But that’s all about substance, and I’ve said it goes beyond this. So here it is:

Every time we don’t care, we lower the standard. Every time we rage against passion because it isn’t “nonchalant,” because it’s “doing too much,” we essentially yell out that the standard of worth for a given thing, whatever it may be, is lower. For example, a musician writes from the heart, making music with effort and passion and love. They are then ridiculed for that effort, which discourages effort and encourages lack thereof. We encourage not trying.

The thing is, that is where gooner culture comes from, and what it feeds into. When genuine effort is ridiculed, and lack of effort is encouraged, low effort slop becomes the norm. AI is a huge part of this; the more we say that people putting effort into art is stupid, the more we encourage the formation of artificially generated shitslop to replace it.

But the shitslop is addictive. Gooners are addicts, first and foremost. And its usually to something on a screen, whether porn or gambling or shitty videos. Gooners are, first and foremost, addicted to lack of passion, one way or another, and constantly submit themselves to a dispassionate existence.

TikTok is a perfect example of this. Small, digestible, short-form videos, perfect for that moment of mental ejaculation, that little rush of dopamine, but drawn out for as long as you keep scrolling. Low effort content like that, which, let’s be honest, is every social media platform, is just mental masturbation. It is the entertainment equivalent of porn; no genuine humanity, just abuse of our human brains, and the chemistry enclosed within, for profit. And we’re convinced we enjoy it through the insane machine that is the Ennui Engine, the algorithm, the ads, the everything. Consumerism at its finest. And you’re a good little slut, so you go back for more. That’s a good boy, let the algorithm tell you what to do. Obey. Scroll. Keep gooning. Keep buying, and keep being sold. Fucking whore.

We’re being sold. Bought and sold. The data farming on social media, the addiction to the goon fuel, everything is a transaction of some kind. A cigarette is at least honest with you. You go into the store, and buy the cigarette, maybe a lighter if you don’t have one, and smoke it. You become addicted, and buy more. The company profits. You become a slave to the addiction, but your slavemaster is whoever owns the cigarettes. Gooning is more sinister because it’s less obvious. Someone still profits, but you barely know you’re a slave to your addictions. The slavery of capitalism is manyfold. Actual slavery, the slavery of the proletariat, the slavery of addiction, they all amount to the same thing: profit. The core of capitalism, it’s heart. Everything being done is for profit; never forget that.

As passion dies, there’s less competition for the goon corpos, the people who sell it to you, whether “it” is AI slop or porn or shitty, low-effort TikToks. If there’s no alternatives, of course you’ll stroke one off, of course you’ll open your phone and let the screen massage your brain into goo, of course you’ll whip out the vape, of course you’ll gamble, of course you’ll give into your addictions, your vices, whatever they may be. The vape, the gambling, they’re less relevant, but the addictions are a part of it regardless of their form. Addicts are easy to control, because everything is done for profit. Whoever profits off of the substance profits from the addict, and they have the added advantage of controlling the addict through the addiction. Bonus points come from cost of production; it’s far cheaper to generate slop than it is to produce a work of care and love, and lower cost means higher profit. Addiction just means you can set the price as high as you want and they’ll keep coming back for more.