Looking for inspiration on the internet is like looking for love in all the wrong places. People who spend most of their time doing proper offline things like cooking with loved ones or educating women in Afghanistan will tell you this. Luckily, you don't have to venture out into the Middle East or even your own kitchen to figure that out. The startling discovery can be made right here on... you guessed it, the internet.
Let's start with the obvious: You've googled "inspiration" and found a fucking software firm. How depressing. Moving on, you google "inspirational quotes". Why? Well, assuming you're like me, you have a great deal of respect for people who have achieved something and then managed to bitesize it into user-friendly quotes you can put on Facebook. Hey, look at that, there's actually a site called inpirational-quotes, wonder if they have any of my favourite authors.
OK, so this site is nothing like a blog, feed or anything remotely web 2.0. You actually have to click on categories, making it a bit like porn, only here it's not "interracial" or "bukkake", but heavier stuff like "Build a Good Character" and "Dealing with People". Who doesn't want that?
Top of the list in the character building category is Henry David Thoreau: "You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one." See, that's what I mean, cooking with loved ones! Educating women in Afghanistan! Actually being out there hammering and forging and... OK, one more quote, and I'm good to go.
Lord Chesterfield: "Be your character what it will, it will be known, and nobody will take it upon your word." What? Couldn't have made that a bit more readily accessible, could you, Chester? OK, so I suppose it means that whatever you try and tell people about how wonderful you are, they'll see through it. Or that people will talk shit about you, and there's nothing you can do to stop it? Not very inspirational, that. Was just thinking of joining the armed forces, writing home about this terrible, terrible war, but what does it matter if there's no one to believe me?! Fuck this, next quote.
Thomas Paine: "Reputation is what men and women think of us; character is what God and angels know of us." Huh? Thomas Paine talking about angels? I thought he was an atheist or at least agnostic, and here he is going on about... Heeeey, wait a minute, maybe he's taking the piss out of that whole "essence of character", "inner core" thing and doing a Warhol - a post-modern "I'm deeply superficial"-ish statement for the Enlightenment age.
Like, saying that none of us can ever really know anything about ourselves, eh? Eh? Doesn't make sense to do that when you're 250 years away from post-modernism, though. OK, I give up, dude's obviously into angels, but translate that into "we", and it's about knowing your own, sometimes murky, morals and motives and having the balls to confront them instead of riding on a wave of popularity.
So, what I have learned so far? In order to build character you should go out into the world, expecting to be slaughtered, seen through or simply misunderstood. Yet if you can look yourself in the face after having brooded sufficiently over the flaws in your personality, you should be fine.
Result: I have become a repressed and bitter closeted gay Oxford don.
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