All Fall Down/Distraction.

The monthly pole dance.

Are we experiencing a time of dangerous mass distraction and mass disengagement ?

The actual beginning of this little tale is me partially cremating the sausages that I was supposed to be slow roasting for our dinner. I was doing quite well in that I managed to remember that i’d put them in the oven and was checking them periodically as I prepared the onions and spuds : when last I checked them I decided that they needed another ten minutes in the oven so off I went to continue something I was watching on Youtube. Twenty minutes later I wondered what the smell was wafting up from the kitchen !

My partner says that, once again, it happened because I became distracted…….I say once again because it does seem to be a habit.

Yesterday, I put down my crafting tools and started packing away all of the materials I was working with and the project that I was a good way through. After that I came up to the computer and trashed the post that I was working on : one of the series of crafty table posts that i’m writing about my efforts to become a small time railway modeler. In fact, iv’e just abandoned the whole project and stored many of the posts in progress in the file marked recycle bin. This morning i’m about to head outside and have another fight with the big old Kangoo hammer and muck out whatever hole I manage to make through the next layer of concrete slab.

Today I intend to make the argument that many men, like myself, are retreating from the obvious and serious problems in our country and instead retreating into a world of distraction via their own hobbies and interests : all aided and abetted by the internet. In the last post I explained how I felt that the modelers ability of seeing the details of the world around them perhaps make them better observers of the world : today I want to argue the opposite and say that the same fascination with miniature detail is also acting as a huge distraction and it’s a distraction that is causing us to lose sight of the bigger picture.

In this post I want to go a bit Peterson in the way that he does himself when he is delivering a lecture : i’m not here to lecture though but, like Dr Peterson, I am trying to work my way through this in my own mind and eventually via my own words on screen. I’m sorry to have to report that Dr Peterson is seriously ill once again – some of what he often says will make an appearance here.

During Dr Peterson’s recent years he often spoke about the problem of male incels – men that couldn’t get laid or form a long lasting relationship with anything except their right hand !. The usual (feminist) joke was that men became incels because they were too weak or too out of shape to compete with the alpha males and where they were was in their mom’s basement playing combat games on their computers, jacking off to cheap porn or interacting with their only fans ‘girlfriends’. I now know that most of the above is actually wrong and what they’re actually doing is building highly detailed model railways !

I apologize for my harsh views today : if anything I have YouTube exhaustion on top of the DOMS that I get from a vibration rich and very noisy Kangoo hammer.

In a previous post I commented that having a modelers eye is a useful way of looking at the world but then so is the eye of the nurse, the sailor and the outdoorsman. Right now, it seems that the hobby of railway modeling is on the rise and my YouTube feed gives me a dozen new recommendations a day of layouts to look at and modelers to follow : one recent video just covered a model railway exhibition in an attempt to briefly highlight each and every one of the 55 layouts on display. There’s no great harm in this : I would describe the hobby as mostly harmless compared to many of the other things that a modeler could get into when they have some amount of disposable income to play with (internet porn, only fans and alcohol come to mind).

I’m not about to say that model railways make you a bad person – unless perhaps you choose to model BR period diesels. Even Dr Peterson seems to give the nod to engaging hobby’s although in his thinking hobby’s come a long way down the list of good and useful ways to spend your time : that’s behind challenging work, close relationships and friendships.

I have some difficulty explaining why I think that something as simple and harmless as building a model railway is maybe not a great idea and certainly not a great use of time at a certain age and stage in life : i’m most likely at that stage myself and one of my main objections to hobby distractions or obsessions is that most of my life is now behind me and what I have left I feel I should use as productively and meaningfully as possible.

Best use of time is, I feel, at the heart of my objection to hobby’s that seem to become either child like or an obsession about stuff (things) and I would argue that obsession does seem to be a feature of many middle aged modelers. A small example is that I happened to watch a modelers video channel and in it, one time, he covered a layout and a modeler who’d been rejected by a club and in so doing had been given a whole load of very minor reasons why his model hadn’t made the grade – mostly in terms of very minor details. I have another take on this which I draw from another branch of miniature modeling : that of making and painting miniatures for competition.

In the strange micro-world of painting fantasy miniatures for one of the more prestigious modeling and painting prizes – that of the Golden Demon competition held under the aegis of British corporation Wargames World/Warhammer the entrants aren’t so much judged on their artistry as on their adherence to the official canon and on increasingly fine detail – in effect, negative marking of any ‘mistakes’. I would suggest that not only is the corporation spoiling the hobby but also promoting a very negative obsession with it’s own rules of what is canonical and what isn’t.

Perhaps the nearest thing to what i’m trying to say is found in a slightly out of context biblical verse – that these things might even be considered childish : When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. ¹² For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.

I don’t like quoting from the bible in that way but : when the cap fits, i’m learning to wear it.

I suspect that this phenomenon has a lot to do with a small factor of a trait (orderliness) in the Big 5 Model of psychometrics although it does also seem, to me, to have a lot to do with retreat from the real and ugly world into a personal safe space where the grass is green and beautifully kept steam locomotives run to time. I suspect also that this is a very male phenomenon but that view really only comes from noticing that most of the modelers that feature on Youtube videos are men, furthermore, I know from my own short time as a video content creator that the demographic of my own viewers is that most of them were middle aged men.

From what I know I find that YouTube is a very male orientated thing – both mostly male content creators and a male audience while the opposite, which I see as being social media/Facebook etc is largely a female dominated phenomenon and women generally aren’t in their dad’s basement building finescale model railways to a death metal sound track. I do though think that women are more at the mercy of addictive distraction via those same things. I might well be wrong but there others that study the expression of female disagreeableness through social media bullying so it’s possible that some women are getting the worst of two worlds : being both addicted to it and harmed at the same time.

There is of course another side to the argument : i’m often wrong and might be with this one.

It’s highly likely that what makes it onto my Youtube recommendations list is mainly only the dramatic and negative stuff – the Youtube algorythym works that way – and it is the mostly harmless world of blokes working on their model railways that is actually surprisingly positive and good for their mental health rather than being constantly bombarded with the Youtube world of political activism of whichever color and flavor you’re being fed a diet of.

With this in mind I say this : if railway modeling takes you away from the cares and stresses of the world then so be it and I hope you enjoy your ‘away’ time. It might even be that people like myself need that kind of retreat to stay halfway sane and functional or it might even be that getting together with other railway modelers, or any other kind of modeler for that matter, is the front door to social contact with other blokes – again all well and good I say. For me though I think I have to be, in fact, more choosy and protective with my time and perhaps any time spent on the internet, other than useful research is time that iv’e lost and will never get back.

With all the problems that the internet seems to throw in our lap on a daily basis I may be at the point of choosing to leave it all behind just as I did with Tv fifteen years ago : having not watched a television program in all of that time I don’t know whether there’s something vital about it that i’m not getting……I doubt it though. If today I thought that there was something that I would really like to watch then I would go out and buy a new television : as it is I find that I don’t miss it and i’m wondering if it would be the same thing with the internet. I intend to take an internet ‘holiday’ of several months, read a lot more and see how I feel at the end of it.

R.I.P Sausages……