Sad Man
I met an electrical engineer in the USA who has spent the better part of a decade trying to get into the audience of a TV show called Survivor.
He talked about it openly, without irony or embarrassment, as if it were a normal long-term project that had simply not been completed yet.
This was not a man lacking competence. He had a real profession, difficult work, and intelligence. But none of that produced a public marker that suggested that any of this counted.
The Survivor challenge offers him a kind of difficulty that is both gatekept and random. Either you are selected or you are not. If you are, legitimacy arrives instantly. If you are not, failure can be attributed to the process rather than to the self.
What struck me was that the pursuit was not easy. It was arbitrarily hard. Travel, applications, waiting, retries, chasing hidden QR codes, etc. That is, effort without any mastery curve.
It is a form of striving with no limits, which makes it strangely safe. You can persist indefinitely without ever being told you are bad at it.
For me, there is sadness in this. It is not despair or dysfunction. It is a life where meaning has been externalised into a meaningless selection system.
Being counted replaces becoming something. Presence substitutes for progress. The goal is not transformation but adjacency to a recognised narrative.
Once you notice it, you see it everywhere. Events, audiences, challenges, participation loops. Institutions optimised to certify attendance rather than interrogate ability.
People move through them competently, politely and repeatedly. They live, consume and die. Not because they are stupid or weak, but because they see no point in being any other way.
These people, cunning rats, don’t make the mistake of conflating social prominence with substantive variance from any mean.
They are simply organisms responding to the low-risk local environment, one that never promised transcendence.
offshore westerly 