Awhile back I renamed my Substack to the odd-sounding title “Monsters, Machines, and Madmen”.
Like many things I meant to get around to, the around never got did, the post diving into it never got wrote, and so I left this mystery unexplained.
I had this high-concept idea of sorting the articles into those three categories, and turning it into a sort of personal-development and business-related extravaganza. Really I just wanted a way to talk about cool books and scifi action movies, but you can turn almost anything into a pretentious high-concept idea, so why not take that otherwise boring topic and give it a little fun energy.
Each of those three words in the title carries some serious weight if you look underneath.
Take “Monsters” for example.
On the surface that probably brings up images of vampires, werewolves, Herman Munster, and kids dressing up for Halloween.
Not the most compelling or serious idea.
Zoom out and ask what is a monster, exactly?
A monster is a threat.
A monster is a force of opposition.
An adversary.
A ruthless killer who will stop at nothing to get what he/she/it wants, and you’re in the way.
A mysterious, vague horror that tickles at the ancient centers of the hind-brain and provokes our most basic and powerful emotions, these being fear and anxiety.
Aliens, Predators, Things, Terminators, they’re all out there (or in there), leering with human eyes.
It’s been said, I forget by who, that you can judge a soul’s character by the quality of its enemies.
Based on what I see on social media, there are people out there whose greatest enemy is the minimum-wage cashier at McDonald’s. There are people so sucked into sports fandom and celebrity gossip that these phantom “problems” take over their lives.
That’s a low-quality enemy.
The Monster’s always been with us and always will be. There’s no such thing as a life free of enemies and problems. The wealthiest people in the world have lives full of problems. That remote tribe on the Sentinel Islands has problems.
Monsters test us. Our responses to the Monster define who we are. You can’t get rid of them and wouldn’t want to.
Which is an important clue to Monster-ness.
Maybe the worst thing you can do is settle for an unworthy adversary.
The key to upping your game is finding a better caliber of problem, enemy, question, or antagonist.
I’m going to be talking this up more. Make sure you’re hooked in to the Substack if you want to stay tuned:
https://mattpmn.substack.com/subscribe
Matt Perryman