Clickbait: A Seeker's Guide to Meaning in the Modern World

By Ryan Melsom

How do you find a sense of purpose when all you've ever known is a life of selfies and swimming pools? Six teenagers in Los Angeles struggle to find stories for themselves as their old lives fall apart and their lack of direction comes painfully into focus. School is ending, old friendships are vanishing, and nobody really seems to care anymore. That's just the beginning. Everything from here hinges on a question: can you take the very things that have made life feel empty and turn them into something more?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ryan Melsom
• Release date: Jun 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9780992080037

Ryan Melsom

Ryan Melsom was raised in Kamloops, British Columbia, and has since lived in cities across Canada. He pursues creative work with little regard for divisions among different media, having focused at different times in his life on punk music, painting, digital art, book design, poetry, fiction, web design, programming, scholarly work, professional interviewing, business development, and many others in between. His 2017 novel Clickbait is the first official publication of Ryan's small press project Hintonburg + Page and his third book. He currently lives in Ottawa with his wife Elisabeth and sons, John and Sam.

Book preview

Why You Should Give up Sex and Devote Your Life to This Book

When I was a teenager, I often fantasized about becoming a monk. I was captivated by the image of contemplating divinity in seclusion – the peace of it, a beacon amidst the bewilderment of high school. I pictured living in a place high in the mountains where you’d climb a thousand or so stone steps before you arrived. I wouldn’t have to speak to anyone for weeks at a time there. I’d simply commune with God, eat humble meals, and gradually forget all about the accelerating sense of emptiness that seemed to be consuming everyone and everything.

There was something, though, that stopped me from taking that path. Back then I would have joked I was against celibacy, but the truth was I had no template for action – no way of envisioning myself into a radical change like that. I’d also come to suspect that, perhaps, the rejection of the world wasn’t as interesting of a challenge as that of seeking supreme meaning from within the petty dramas and trivial circumstances of daily life. If you could maintain a sense of peace in the face of backstabbing friends and all the things you can’t afford and global warming and keeping up with the Whoevers, you’d gain wisdom you could never get sequestered away from the world. That’s what this book is about, really – seeking beauty and ecstasy and truth in the most unexpected of places: daily life.

Some people say the world is a shallow place these days. Our lives get flattened into photos and run through filters and edited down to practically nothing as we put ourselves online. These strange images in turn become the us the world knows. Our heartfelt reactions become data sets for marketers. Anything that seems to have some greater meaning or purpose ends up another part of the unrelenting roar of everyone trying to shout over everyone else for attention.

In short, if you can find beauty there, you can find it anywhere.

A couple of old stories get at what I mean. The symbol of the lotus flower is an important one for Buddhists. With its peaceful white petals, it stands for the idea of enlightenment itself – of overcoming all of the temptations and desires of life to find an eternal, unshakeable peace. It’s serene and beautiful, but the very next thing many Buddhists will tell you is that the lotus grows from stinking mud. There’s a similar story about the Buddha who sits disguised in a pile of filthy rags on the side of the road. He’s willing to bestow enlightenment on anyone who asks, but virtually everyone walks by without noticing him.

On a certain level what these stories say is that anything can become the stuff of enlightenment – sitting in a monastery or scrolling through Tumblr. Anything can become your connection to the divine (or flow or Tao or dharma or whatever path to truth that calls you). The Kabbalah states that there are 600,000 roads to God – as many as there are people, symbolically speaking. Clickbait, in a much humbler vein, tells the story of six young adults and the unique paths they find for themselves in the search for meaning and purpose. I hope you can find traces of your own enlightening mud and rags amidst their tales. I’ve even included a few discussion topics at the end of the book if you’re looking for some place to start.

As with everything I write, it’s a little hard to categorize what kind of writing this is and who precisely it’s written for. If you are a person who suspects something’s been lost with access to all of this wondrous technology or are perhaps someone who’s always had trouble connecting your own life to spiritual texts written thousands of years ago, you might like this. If you are someone who equates pop culture and high art, you also may find a place for yourself in this book. After all, the world is really just the stories we tell ourselves about it – the power of that simple idea is not to be underestimated here or anywhere else.

Even if, when you open up the following pages, you find yourself asking why, say, you’re trapped inside the head of someone obsessing over someone else liking their Instagram likes, please take my word for it now that the details of daily life matter. There’s a search here – it’s one I’ve followed myself for years – and, like the winding path of life itself, if you come along for the walk, it’s bound to take you to some surprising and enlightening places.

Ryan Melsom

April 28, 2017

Ottawa, Canada

PART I

The Things We Couldn’t Say

Why You Should Delete Your Instagram Right Now

Tao saw a tree blossoming, and it was the Buddha, but he wasn’t really aware of that. There was just something peaceful or happy about it, so he took a picture with his phone and posted it. People liked it and the radiant Alea even commented that it was so beautiful. Tao was happy about her comment and thanked her and said she was so supportive. He felt she was. She always liked the things he posted, and so he tried to like a lot of the photos she took, too. There were a lot of pictures of her feet in different places. She took one on the sand by the water when she was in Dominican, and he commented on how much he liked it and wished he was there, which she also liked back.

He was walking to meet Josh and Amber at the Avenue Diner. He wanted to have the fries, which were so good. He might have a milkshake too, but they were pricey. He kept touching his cheek, checking for rain, but couldn’t figure out whether he really felt it or not. He looked at his hand closely to see if there was moisture, but the light was kind of flat and nothing was clear one way or the other. He took a picture of his hand and posted that too. His phone had a really cool filter called HDR off that made the pavement in background look blurry and his hand crisp and in focus. He shared it and Alea liked it, which made him happy.

Do you want whip in that?

It doesn’t matter. I don’t know.

A look of pain crossed her face when he said it, and she drew in a breath of air like she was about to say something involved. She wasn’t moving her hand on the touch screen anymore, it was just hovering there, so he had to say something so that he could get his drink. He said sure and she started moving her hand again and said two seventy-three to him after a few seconds and she handed him a terminal so he could swipe his debit card.

The machine said chip malfunction, and so he asked if he could try it again and it worked fine the second time.

It’s been hit and miss today, she said and it sounded like she might have been making an apology.

Alea and Emma were sitting outside and Tao smiled vaguely as he sat down to join them. He put his plastic cup on the metal table, and little beads of moisture were already starting to form and drip down its sides. The cup’s pink, creamy insides looked delicious, and Emma said wait, and she grabbed a quick photo with nobody in the background, just some cars driving by. It looked really good and it said Chow on the side in black felt marker. She said she loved to take pictures of people’s drinks. She said it was her aesthetic. Tao didn’t really respond.

Where do you think you’re going? Alea was saying into her phone.

Who’s she talking to? Tao asked Emma. She shrugged and took a sip of her drink.

He looked down at his phone and started checking if anybody was doing anything interesting and Emma did the same after watching his face for a moment. Bryan was in Ireland with his family, and he was lucky because they served him beer there and his dad said it was fine because it was his heritage. There were lots of pictures of pint glasses with water dripping down the sides, and Tao commented that he was so jealous because it was so hot in LA. There were a lot of photos of stone buildings and it looked like it always rained there because there was moss on everything. Some of the buildings had red and gold painted wood signs that looked like they took a long time to make. It seemed kind of pointless, that much effort for ugly signs that would rot in the moisture.

It was a heat wave. It hadn’t rained for sixty-three days. They decided to have a photo contest where they’d capture signs of the drought and the winner would get shotgun for the last two weeks of the summer. This was no insignificant prize, because the air conditioning in Amber’s car was so weak that it only really made any difference for people sitting in the front, leaning forward. The back was known as Death Valley.

Amber took a picture of a dog lying on its side with its tongue hanging out touching the dead grass it was on. The dog was so hot its eyes looked dry and glazed, and Amber, as always, put herself in its place and decided to go get it some water after she got her snap. Josh was going to take a picture of a homeless guy who was wearing jeans and sweating so badly that there was moisture on the pavement around him, but Amber berated him for being so insensitive and nixed it. He settled for close-ups of dead weeds speckled with grasshopper husks, which actually turned out pretty good once he settled on a filter called LA Beurre for them. Alea liked one of them, but she restrained herself with the others because she was in the contest too and she didn’t want to bias anyone’s opinion.

Tao couldn’t think of what to shoot. He was at the galleria sitting there watching people walk by. He was daydreaming of Alea and how her feet looked extra tanned in her silver flip-flops. People walked by and it seemed like a lot of them were bickering with each other under their breath. He texted to Alea, this isn’t going well and she texted back you’re going down bitch.

The calm waves of people walking by suddenly broke. There was a body that whipped to the side, another guy standing there, leaning his chest forward, fists clenched, waiting and breathing fast. People shuffled back and formed a space. The guy who got shoved ran at the other one and punched him square in the jaw, which made his head snap sideways and to the back, and Tao could clearly imagine the hot thud it would have made in his ears when it connected. Some friends pulled the guy who had thrown the punch away, saying, Let’s get out of here. It isn’t worth it. Security’s coming.

They shambled off and the other guy glared after them for a second, but Tao could tell he didn’t really want to do anything else. He just felt embarrassed, and Tao wanted to smile to give him some comfort but he didn’t because it might be awkward and the guy wasn’t looking anyway. Later that afternoon it started to rain, and it didn’t stop for three weeks.

She was underwater.

Emma opened her eyes and looked up into the blurry, dancing