On Mental Masturbation

When I was thirteen, I stood in a field on a cliff. It was raining hard and my decidedly not-waterproof jacket had long since been soaked through.

I looked out over the edge, where a low stone wall separated me from a steep drop into the sea, crashing deafeningly on the rocks just below. I looked down, where the soft ground under me was starting to give way, water pooling up around my sinking shoes.

Then, all at once, I was subsumed by the rain, by the grass under my feet, by the depth of the ocean that stretched before me as far as I could see, pulling me down, dissolving me into an acute, all-consuming melancholy, a magical somewhere that shone a vivid, otherworldly green.

This moment opened like a portal, filling me with a vitality that I feel to this day – sharp and alive and utterly, utterly satisfied.

At the time, I certainly couldn't have described it to you. But I would have assumed that you wanted to hear all about it.

"Most people are not interesting and most people do not have new information to give you." -Iliza Schlesinger*

I've developed enormous contempt for anyone stuck in the delusion that other people are dying to hear their thoughts, that their personality is so compelling that everything – everything – that they say warrants an immortal life on the internet – anyone lost in what my dad would call mental masturbation.

This phenomenon is ever-present in media; listen to any excited pleasure-seeker recording themselves alternating between exploring their own amplified voice and laughing at nothing, in the assumption that busy adults will find listening to their unedited, meandering stream of consciousness as fascinating as they did speaking it into existence.

For heaven's sake, I think as I unwittingly encounter another public offender. No one signed up to listen to you verbally stroke yourself into an overpriced microphone. I promise, you aren't that interesting.

But this is not true.

A cursory look at the internet and, indeed, humanity, will show that plenty of people – podcasters, actors, bloggers – make a good living jerking themselves, metaphorically and otherwise. Being outraged at the audacity of their indulgence it is not going to make that untrue (or make my own meandering stream of consciousness immune to the same criticism). Clearly, some people find them very interesting.

So, I could be wrong. Maybe the world is gagging for a twenty-six minute analysis of a photo your mother took of you in 1993.

Making the leap of faith that someone wants to hear what I have to say gets more difficult as I get older – acquiring more experiences of being told to shove it, discovering that stories of being drawn to a stormy ocean are depressingly common, both of which can metastasize into an unhealthy preoccupation with being interesting.

This new cynicism can make even having all-consuming moments in the first place feel like a waste of precious energy.

If I go out one evening to that grassy cliff and the next day, discover my shoes are still wet, before long, every attempt at a diversion devolves into punishing myself for being delusional enough to interrupt the carefully-tuned mechanisms of my Very Important Adult Life to reclaim some of the magic I felt as a child.

…how long will my shoes take to dry this time I wonder if my car will grow mold if I leave wet shoes in it how much money have I thrown away on replacing shoes I really should learn to take better care of my things…

Far cry from the mystique of the rainy seaside.

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The thirteen-year-old girl who stood at the edge of that cliff didn't care much for reality. She swam quite happily in her delusion – and would have jumped in with her shoes firmly on.

She was every moment, illuminated by the vitality that radiated from every corner of her own fantastic universe. She unabashedly filtered everything through her own shimmery lens, unhindered by whatever reality she later discovered as an adult. There was no doubt in her mind of the sheer brilliance of her sparkling personality, that everybody wanted to hear what she had to say.

She is the reason I ever did anything. I would be nothing without her.

She is the key to opening that portal on that cliffside, to the consuming moments that make life worth living.

She is also a conceited, high-handed, little narcissist without the mental capacity to peer outside her own thick skull. I can't put her in charge because I can't trust her not to stick her hand down her pants in public.

It takes an adult to go beyond childish self-pleasure, to take pure ego and fantasy and make a film or a book (or a blog post) that is worth another adult's precious time and attention.

The crime is not jerking off in front of people. The crime is refusing to get better at it.

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But, as you might already be aware, the claim that any of this has been worth your precious time and attention is dubious at best.

A month ago, a friend came to visit me. We went to a cafe downtown and had just made ourselves comfortable at an outdoor table when suddenly, I was gripped by panic.

She's driven forty minutes to see you, I thought. She doesn't want to sit here.

I hurried us along, but because the downtown is small, we ended up back at the cafe, and she asked why we had left.

"I don't know," I said, hesitantly. "I think I was worried you'd be bored."

She shrugged. "I'm fine. What do you want to do?"

I took a long sip of my coffee, looking at the cars slowly making their way through the narrow streets, watching sweaty tourists struggle down the sunny sidewalk.

"I want to sit here," I said, after a moment. "I want to spend the rest of my life sitting right here."

She absently nodded her assent, her eyes following a green sedan passing in front of where we sat, the driver's radio turned up loud for all to hear.

"You know," she said when he'd passed. "Most people aren't that interesting."

*Iliza Schlesinger, interview with Rob Lowe, Literally! With Rob Lowe, SiriusXM Podcasts, July 1, 2021. Podcast, MP3 Audio, 1:06:05.