Apparently, Illness Is My New Content Strategy

Yesterday, I wrote a blog announcing that I was sick, my brain had stopped functioning and I was going back to bed.

Five thousand people read it.

This is slightly insulting.

I have written about politics, social media, ageing, technology, modern culture and the gradual collapse of civilisation. I have sat at this computer attempting to make intelligent observations, construct proper sentences and occasionally say something that might cause another human being to think.

Apparently, none of that was necessary.

All I had to do was become ill.

Five thousand people arrived to read about me lying under a doona, unable to follow the plot of a television program or remember where I had put my damned drink.

This may be the most successful professional decision my immune system has ever made.

Naturally, this creates a problem. If I recover, will the readers disappear? Am I now required to remain slightly unwell for the sake of engagement?

Perhaps tomorrow I will need to develop a rash.

By Wednesday, I could have a mysterious limp—although nobody who knows me would notice the difference. And on here, behind a computer, I can be whoever I want to be. Young. Beautiful. Possibly even able to walk in a straight line.

Because really, if you can be anyone you like online, who is going to deliberately choose old and ugly?

This is how the internet works now. You can spend hours researching an important subject and carefully developing an argument, only to have twelve people read it—three of whom are probably bots trying to sell you cryptocurrency.

Then you write, “I feel like crap and I’m going back to bed,” and suddenly you’re Tolstoy.

I suppose people responded because being sick is universal. Politics divides us. Social media infuriates us. But everyone understands lying in bed feeling dreadful, negotiating with themselves about whether they are sick enough to justify getting up for food.

It was honest, simple and required no specialist knowledge beyond having once possessed a human body that betrayed you.

Still, five thousand visitors is five thousand visitors. I am not complaining.

Actually, I am. Complaining is apparently excellent for traffic.

So, today’s health update is that I’m still sick, still tired and still incapable of producing anything profound—except weird, thick phlegm that makes me gag.

Based on yesterday’s numbers, this one should go viral.

Sniffing...

Hard to believe, yet it's the truth.

I still have this damned cold; albeit; down to a running nose that has me sipping and slurping back in. It's revolting. At least the 'everything is aching' part is over with.

It's rather amusing. Tuesday and Wednesday I wanted to die. Begged to whatever God just to give me blessed relief. Kill me now...

Now; I have to say, I'm rather glad they ignored me!

My Body Has Lodged A Formal Complaint

I am sick.

Not mildly unwell in that glamorous television way, where someone lies elegantly beneath a white doona with slightly tousled hair and a single tissue nearby.

I mean properly sick. The sort where your entire body appears to have held a meeting without you and unanimously voted to stop cooperating.

My head hurts. My body hurts. Even my hair feels unwell, and technically it’s already dead.

I had every intention of writing something clever today. Perhaps a thoughtful observation about modern society, politics, social media or another miraculous Facebook product apparently invented by a doctor nobody can locate.

But my brain has temporarily left the building.

At the moment, my greatest intellectual achievement is remembering where I put my drink. Occasionally, I find it. Unfortunately, by then I’ve forgotten why I wanted it.

Being sick also destroys your sense of time. You sleep for what feels like eight hours, wake up convinced it must be tomorrow and discover that seventeen minutes have passed.

Then you attempt to watch television, but following a plot requires resources you no longer possess. Somebody gets murdered, three detectives arrive and before long you realise you’ve been staring at the screen for half an hour without absorbing a single thing. By the end, you don’t know who the killer was, who died or whether you accidentally changed programs halfway through.

People tell you to rest, as though that is an activity you can perform successfully. You lie down. You sit up. You adjust the pillow. You remove the blanket because you’re hot, then drag it back because you’re freezing. You cough, complain and briefly consider whether this is simply your life now.

So that’s today’s blog.

There is no social commentary, no clever conclusion and no attempt to explain what is wrong with the world.

The world can remain wrong without my supervision for one day.

I am going back to bed.

Apparently, I Have Nothing To Say

I sat down to write today’s blog and discovered I had absolutely nothing to say.

This is unusual for me. I normally have opinions about everything. Politics, television, social media, ageing, potholes, weak coffee, sharks, household appliances that require an engineering degree and products advertised on Facebook that claim to reverse thirty years of physical decline using rosemary and positive thinking.

Today? Nothing.

I stared at the screen, waiting for inspiration. The screen stared back. Eventually, we both accepted that neither of us was bringing much to the relationship.

Of course, the internet doesn’t allow you to have nothing to say anymore. You must constantly produce content. You need thoughts, reactions, hot takes and preferably a strong emotional response to something that happened twelve minutes ago. If you aren’t posting, commenting, sharing or becoming temporarily furious, people may assume you have died.

Once, you could simply have a quiet day. Nobody demanded an update. You could sit in your house, drink coffee and achieve nothing without turning it into a lifestyle philosophy.

Now, even doing nothing has to become content.

“Today I am embracing stillness.”

No, you’re lying on the couch watching television. And that’s perfectly fine.

Perhaps having nothing to say is actually a sign of mental health. Maybe my brain has finally decided it doesn’t need to investigate every idiotic advertisement, political statement or celebrity confession placed in front of it.

Perhaps it has taken the day off.

It has been working fairly hard lately. There is a lot of nonsense to process. Every time it thinks it has caught up, someone launches an AI-powered toothbrush, a billionaire starts another argument, or a woman on Facebook explains that doctors don’t want us to know about the healing properties of ordinary kitchen salt.

My brain deserves annual leave.

So; today’s blog is about nothing. No profound conclusion. No outrage. No carefully constructed observation about the collapse of civilisation.

Just me, sitting here, drinking coffee and admitting that for once, I don’t have an opinion worth sharing.

I’m sure it won’t last.

Great White - In A Cave Somewhere Pointing At A Map Of Bondi

Apparently, Australia is rolling out an enormous new shark strategy involving drones, surveillance, tracking systems and enough futuristic technology to make the average beach look like the set of a military operation.

We now have drones flying overhead, listening stations beneath the water, tagged sharks sending signals and people staring at computer screens waiting for something with a fin to wander into the wrong postcode.

All of this is designed to keep us safer.

And fair enough. Nobody wants to be eaten while trying to enjoy a Sunday afternoon at the beach. It would put a definite dampener on the day, particularly if you had already paid fourteen dollars for parking.

But I can’t help wondering whether the sharks are sitting beneath the surface, looking up at all this equipment and thinking, What the bloody hell happened to these people?

Because the sharks haven’t changed.

They are still doing exactly what sharks have always done. Swimming around. Eating things. Occasionally investigating something they probably shouldn’t. They aren’t plotting against us. They haven’t formed an underwater terrorist organisation. There isn’t a great white in a cave somewhere pointing at a map of Bondi.

We are the ones who have changed.

Once upon a time, people understood that the ocean was not a municipal swimming pool. It was enormous, unpredictable and full of creatures that had not signed a behavioural agreement with the local council.

You went in knowing there were risks.

There were waves. There were rips. There were jellyfish, stingrays, blue-ringed octopuses and several thousand other Australian animals quietly waiting for an opportunity to ruin your holiday.

That was Australia.

Now we seem slightly offended that the ocean still contains sharks.

We behave as though they have broken into our space, when technically we are the ones wandering into their house wearing fluorescent bathers and splashing around like injured seals.

Then, when a shark appears, we call the authorities.

“There’s a shark in the ocean!”

Yes. That is generally where they keep them.

We’ve become so accustomed to controlling everything that we can no longer cope with the idea of nature doing whatever it likes. We track our sleep, count our steps, monitor our heart rate and receive alerts when the washing machine has finished. Naturally, we now expect the sea to send us a notification before anything dangerous happens.

Warning: Large shark approaching. Please exit the water and consider visiting the gift shop.

Soon, I expect every shark will be required to wear a GPS ankle bracelet.

There will be an app, of course.

You’ll open it before going to the beach and discover that Barry the Great White was last seen near Newcastle, Sharon the Tiger Shark is behaving suspiciously off Port Macquarie and Kevin has breached the exclusion zone again.

Kevin has always been a problem.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t use technology to protect people. If drones can spot sharks, locate swimmers in trouble and help lifesavers respond faster, that is obviously a good thing. Anything that saves a life is worth considering.

But there is something fascinating about the lengths we will go to make the natural world feel safe, orderly and answerable to us.

We don’t just want to reduce the risk. We want to eliminate it.

We want to swim in the shark’s habitat without encountering a shark. We want to build houses surrounded by bush but never experience a bushfire. We want to live beside rivers that never flood and under trees that never drop branches.

We want nature, but only if it has been properly supervised.

Preferably by a drone.

Perhaps this is because we have spent so much of our lives indoors that we have forgotten what the outdoors actually is. Nature is lovely on television. It is less charming when it bites you. We love wildlife when it is photogenic, distant and aware of its contractual obligations. Dolphins are welcome. Whales are magnificent. Penguins are adorable.

Sharks have terrible public relations.

A dolphin could probably knock someone unconscious and we would still describe the encounter as magical. A shark swims within fifty metres of a person and suddenly helicopters are circling overhead.

The shark itself may not even be interested. It could simply be passing through, completely unaware that it has triggered three drones, two patrol boats, a beach evacuation and a live cross to breakfast television.

Perhaps the real problem is that we have come to believe every bad event must have been preventable. If something goes wrong, somebody must have failed. There should have been a warning, a barrier, a policy, an app or a government department making sure the wild animal behaved appropriately.

But the ocean has never promised to be safe. That is part of what makes it the ocean. By all means, use the drones. Track the sharks. Warn the swimmers. Give the lifesavers every tool available to help keep people alive.

Just don’t forget who is visiting whom.

The sharks haven’t invaded our beaches.

We have simply become shocked to discover that the ocean is still wild—and that not everything in the world can be made completely safe, no matter how much technology we fly above