One Word Narratives

Word - Submitted by C. Endres

Words are like chemistry, only with the potential for far greater impact. Words can create and destroy; they can build up and tear down; they are sword and solace. Words allow us to reveal our innermost truths and to protect our secret selves from the prying eyes of an often callous audience.

As we have driven forward into this new connected age, the multitudes have found a platform to use words to communicate with themselves. The source of that mighty current remains the same, the drive to express our human thought, but the outlets and tributaries have developed millions of times over.

What is most glorious and horrific about this is the radical change language has undergone. Ideas are condensed into their most rudimentary forms and we rely more on a shared understanding of the meaning than on communicating the meaning explicitly.

An altruist uses their free time to share cute videos and memes to help those in pain feel better, even if only by the virtue of being distracted. A miscreant uses their time to troll and belittle others to see how far they can push the boundaries of decency and to test their own tolerance for ugliness.

Martin is both of these people.

In the world where he is visible, face-to-face with reality, Martin is a compassionate, sensitive, and caring citizen. He gives to charity when he can, is always there for his friends, and he is a ferocious advocate of fairness and equality. He does these things not because he was taught that it was necessary or that it was an obligation, but because doing them makes him feel good, as if he is contributing to ridding the world of some of the ugliness he knows and suspects hides and festers there.

But the satisfaction Martin gained from this kind sense of living never seemed to quite make up for his particular brand of existential angst. The banality of the modern world, despite its wonders and luxuries, threatened to choke him into either suicide or apathetic contentment. He had always been told he was exceptional, he should expect to be exceptional, and he had so much potential; so much potential.

Potential.

When the truth of the matter is, he had been conned into thinking potential or talent or some other inherent quality was enough to make great things happen for him. He had never understood the trap of the word potential – a monument to the unrealized but theoretically possible. He had failed to recognize the platitudes of adults not wanting him to feel mediocre and bland as they had been forced to, wanting and hoping that he should excel where they had proven to be so mundane and prosaic.

Worse than all this, Martin had never grasped how wonderfully complex and fulfilling such a normal life was. The modern understanding of the scope of history the members of his generation could grasp so easily thanks to the advancements of those who came before him pulled him out of a limited view of the possibilities of his reality and lead him to focus on the grandiose, the possible but improbable.

That knowledge, that understanding of scope, is not an inherently bad thing. It helps us learn from the past. It is why some rulers have been driven to benevolence and others have been driven to atrocity – the hope to have a legacy and the belief that, in the long run, the details of who they were, why they were would be irrelevant or forgotten.

So Martin had not come to terms with the likelihood that he would not live up to his alleged potential, but as it stared at him from the mirror and he was unable to continue making excuses for precisely why he had yet to start his road to greatness, it ate at him. It left him hollow in places that being a decent person could not fill. It drove him to find things, growing more extreme as time passed, that would make him feel...something.

In the modern world, there is one place where people think they have anonymity – the internet. It is a place where, they tell themselves, no one can see you. If they cannot see you, they cannot truly judge you. If they cannot judge you, there can be no real consequences.

Martin discovered something the Greeks, the Romans, and the Germans had before him – you could take joy in the misery of others, but it was unpredictable unless you both caused that misery and were in a position to witness it.

When he first discovered he could be maliciously cruel for his own amusement, he felt bad about it afterwards. But as time passed, his acts of aggression and hatred grew more repugnant, more extreme. He found communities on the internet where his behavior wasn't simply tolerated, it was praised.

He didn't know why he was being such a prick and he didn't know why he enjoyed it, at first, but once he became aware he realized that his failed potential was so far gone there wasn't anything else he could think of to drown out his regrets.

Previous generations of malcontents had found some comfort for their soul in the bottle, harmful as it may have been, Martin had found his in trolling.

He wasn't truly satisfied with what he could accomplish on such a small scale.

Nor was he alone.