This post is about a zucchini, a broken microphone, and why I think the outrage cycle is the most effective inertia machine ever built.
Today in Chicago it was Kanye and the ADL. Next week it’ll be someone else. I’m not interested in relitigating who’s right, I’m interested in what all this click-bait, rage-bait do to us. They’re built to make you pick a side, get outraged, share it, and feel like you did something. You didn’t. You just spent twenty minutes of your one life on a distraction engineered to be forgotten by Friday.
These cultural distractions are all just “Us and Them“ as Pink Floyd put it. That’s the whole business model. Not truth. Not resolution. Just enough friction to keep you scrolling, because scrolling is where the money is. None of that moved a single real thing in my life. What did move something was a zucchini.
This year I have had the uncanny ability for growing zucchini. A foot-long zucchini is a small zucchini for me this year. Also this summer, while I was building out my studio, one of the shock mounts for my favorite microphone broke. The piece that broke was maybe fifty cents of hardware, but you would not find it on a shelf, because it is custom to the mount. Without it, my favorite microphone was just a cool looking paperweight. Queue taps on the bugle, please. My wife, who has never met a stranger, found out our neighbor Joe was a welder. I walked over on a Tuesday. He wiped down his bench, made the part by hand, and handed my shock mount back to me like it was nothing.
I paid him in a zucchini.
Not because I couldn’t afford real payment, instead because it was what the moment called for, and he took it like it was exactly the right currency. No Questions. No invoice. No system. No middleman taking a cut. Just two guys who wave at each other now. That’s the whole counter-argument to the outrage machine, right there. It didn’t ask me to pick a side. It just needed a neighbor and a Tuesday afternoon.
These distractions allow us to create the inertia that keeps us on the couch.
If someone in your life has ever fixed something of yours and refused to take real payment for it, send them this and tell them you still owe them a zucchini.