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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   9937 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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We've talked about Anthony Bourdain here a few times.

Here's this travel writer's account of following in his footsteps and after Bourdain finally meets with her and validates her, she has a bit of an identity crisis when she realizes he's a sad loser.

Firstly, being a travel journalist is not as glamorous as it looks, having tossed her cookies after eating token cooked goat brain and local fruit

The fast life always slows down, but not how you’d expect. After enough time, you just get used to the pace, then it doesn’t seem so fast.

The next day, I spent the entire afternoon curled up at the base of the porcelain throne, praying for salvation from the unwashed melon. I was going to stop doing drugs, I told myself. Nothing was worth the panic of a comedown. Then again, I’d said that several times before.

I began to realize that going to different countries wasn’t a solution to a life. I had stopped being able to outrun my problems. Eventually, life on the road just becomes regular life. Whereas most people escape for adventure, when you’re a travel writer, you start craving an escape to stability. But people keep telling you that you have a dream job.

With my head over the toilet, I came up with a plan to kill myself. It wasn’t about the fruit. It was about the fact that I was living out my dreams and I couldn’t feel anything. Life was meaningless and I saw only one way out. I was going to get a gun. I wasn’t going to leave a note.

But also, at some point she comes across an episode where Bourdain interviews Iggy Pop, the godfather of punk and his personal idol, and finds that an older and more mellow Iggy had come there from the gym, orders one drink, has the shrimp. Talks about how love and relationships are what sustain him now. It seems to crush Bourdain, who realizes the guy who invented live fast die young was just putting on an act, not leaving an instruction manual to be taken seriously.

Bourdain, who grappled with drug addiction and depression, kills himself at 61 during a bout of unrequited love.

I can't help but make the connection that the punk ethos and the travel-slutting ethos of taking the highs and the peaks and dodging the responsibilities and commitments, they might be a sign of enlightenment, or making the best of a cold uncaring world where nothing means anything, but probably it's an appealing outlet to the mentally ill and we should be skeptical of attempting to romanticize this kind of transience.

Quote our local @coffee_enjoyer back in 2024:

Here is the liberal-individualist boomer par excellence. He tours the world and waxes poetic on the quaint social life, yet considers himself above their primitive family and social ties. He sits down with large families to eat, he attends their communal festivals, and he transmits this all to the solitary Americans in their living room. He is the rootless cosmopolitan, an omni-tourist, an enjoyer of spectacle over substance. Seeing all these wonders of the world, he’s yet unable to internalize their moral significance and necessity. He is self-worshipping; he cooked himself an identity in Kitchen Confidential and was too blinded by pride to ever revise it. Bourdain wanted to be the cool Western individualist loner, enjoyer of all but adherent to none. He attended every place’s ritual meal — each one a eucharist, essential, consuming God — but only as the aloof tourist, the narrator. It was this pride and absence of self-reflection (one’s real needs and obligations) which is the deepest reason. He let his heart be captured by an exotic woman to fulfill his own self-image, the idol he worshipped, which led to his demise.

I am mostly unable to convince people in the progressive sphere that Bourdain's mental illness had anything to do with his lifestyle. Even Claude refuses to admit it. And adding the detail and sober account from this travel writer is met with the similar rejection. Mental illness just happens to people and living like a transient and dropping out of society and rejecting connection is just like, a totally valid way to live and says nothing about the mental state of the people living it, don'tchaknow? I just don't buy it, I guess.

I enjoyed travel slutting (and by this I mean extended tourism) and while I never identified with punk, for awhile I did the psychedelic Timothy Leary adjacent thing of trying to take drugs with numbers in their name and break out of default living, but ... it's kind of hard. And neither of these things are all that fulfilling at length. I'm not sure what's going through the heads of people who say they could just happily tour Europe or drop acid for forever. The fact that Bourdain is not a fringe figure but like a progressive hero meant to be celebrated and emulated is wild.

Say what you will about the lame conformity of marrying your sweetheart and having 2.3 kids and buying the house with a white picket fence and your thrills are drinking a beer, smoking a brisket and giving your wife a creampie every Saturday, but after seeing friends die so young or losing their minds or never really being able to hold a marriage together, to say nothing of the grim meathook reality I've seen traveling the third world, that lame conformist life looks more like a precious gift and I feel sorry for people who get conned into rejecting it.

Say what you will about the lame conformity of marrying....

Have you tried it? I can well believe it's the way to go on net, but it's not like nobody has ever felt overpowered by quiet desperation on that path either.

I think the picket-fence life works better than the alternative for the vast majority of people, and that you should not gamble on being in the minority unless you have a very good reason to believe otherwise.

Good point. I'm feeling this one lately, though in terms socio-economic rather than romantic. Not that the romance is going all that well, mind you.

I've always been odd, first tried and failed to find an alternate way of life, then buckled down hard on trying to make it somewhat conventionally. And now, at the meridian of middle age, I suspect I'm meeting my limits. The conventional ways aren't working out. But there aren't any promising alternatives either.

I'll just let Comac McCarthy speak for me here.

Lost ye way in the dark, said the old man. He stirred the fire, standing slender tusks of bone up out of the ashes. The kid didn’t answer. The old man swung his head back and forth. The way of the transgressor is hard. God made this world, but he didn’t make it to suit everybody, did he?

I don’t believe he much had me in mind.

Aye, said the old man. But where does a man come by his notions. What world’s he seen that he liked better?

I can think of better places and better ways.

Can ye make it be?

No.

No. It’s a mystery. A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he don’t want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It ain’t the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it.

Are any of McCarthy's works translated into German? Just curious.

Apparently:

I hope not. I strongly doubt there's any translator who can do him justice. Frankly, I don't think it's possible at all. It's a piece of American literature written in English, and IMO needs to be read as such.

That said, of course there are. Translators were always desparate for work, and nowadays translations are practically free. Whether or not they live up to the original work - barely anyone ever bothers to think about it.

Literary translation, particularly for prestige authors like McCarthy, is not really "desperate for work" work. The money's not good, but you generally do it on a grant, so you have to plan the project and justify it and so on.

I'm feeling this one lately, though in terms socio-economic rather than romantic. Not that the romance is going all that well, mind you.

I understand why you feel the latter way. If you don't mind my asking, why do you feel the socioeconomic path you've taken isn't working out for you?

Chiefly, I suppose, because it involves interacting with humans, which I am not good enough at. I can muddle through with great effort, but I slip up too often and end up not being on the same page as my nominal peers. Not being aware of the same information as them, not sharing their implicit norms and expectations, and not pursuing the same goals as them, and thus communicating and cooperating poorly with them. Over time, this has compounding effects - alienating people, stalling career, running out of friends, failing to build up capital, dropping out of my starting socioeconomic class, which in turn makes it even more difficult to interact with people.

Even my supposedly very technical job is maybe 10% making machines do things, and 90% coordinating with others. The exact percentages may have varied depending on the company and position, but it's always been soft skills over hard skills. And my abilities as a programmer may be decent, maybe even above average, but certainly not good enough to compensate for my shortcomings in all other areas. Including my ability to learn to adapt, which isn't that hot.

So why do I feel that way? Because I'm just not much good at any area of life. I consistently make poor decisions and deliver poor performance, even when trying to adapt and improve. And it has always been that way.

But what alternate paths are there? I'm not creative or innovative or entrepreneurial enough to be the randian superman. I'm not cut out for the maverick rockstar influencer rebel life either, lacking the people skills required for it. Doing the hippie hermit self-sufficiency thing isn't viable either; I am ultimately a civilized, technology-dependent modern human with no agricultural skills and no land or capital with which to buy land. And the obvious route of becoming unemployed and living off of social welfare (which the current federal government intends to reduce, anyways) outright disgusts me; if I fail my fellow humans, then let me at least not be a burden. Then there's the option of just taking a menial job like delivery driver - but I can't realistically make do with a significantly reduced salary; I do have a family depending on me, and costs of living are high. There's not enough slack.

So muddle through I will, on and on.

A lot of the more eccentric socioeconomic paths fizzle as you get older. The old careers have dealt with the problem of people aging up, if even their solutions aren’t always well-suited to the modern world. It’s recognised that there are a bunch of 50/60 year old bankers around who aren’t hotshots and people have some idea what to do with them.

If you do something newer and weirder, like NFT transaction consultancy, then when NFTs fall out of fashion you have to pull a new career together for yourself while all the traditional ones are already full of the people working their way up the old fashioned way.

To a certain degree your NFT transaction consultancy kind of character will survive by just skimming the waves of whatever becomes new and hip. Obviously lots will blow up in the attempt but I know enough crackhead energy crypto types who manage to skid along on occasional lottery hits

Because he's living in Germany, I assume.

Partially, but not mainly. Mainly it's just me. Germany is making it more difficult for me in some ways because

  • Costs of living are high, as is the tax burden, and I can't just make do with less,
  • Germany may offer generous welfare for comitted parasites, but I refuse to take it,
  • Germans place great value in people's ability to conform to implicit and high expectations, which I am decidedly not good at,
  • It's very hard to become self-sufficient, the market and the law don't really support it, and
  • Even relatively technical jobs are, to a large degree, about conforming to buerocratic and social norms.

But again, plenty of people deal just fine with all that, and prosper.

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