Hello and welcome. Today we take a look at being against everything and everyone all of the time. You immediately see what’s wrong with that topic and could present multiple reasons why this is an idiotic idea – while piercing your snobby lips with closed eyes? Perfect, you are at the right place.
Some say: “That didn’t age well.” About old blues songs or 80s TV-advertisment. I think about that phrase many times a day. Only I think it about myself and my life lived. Therefore this infrequent format I DIDN’T AGE WELL will contain all matter of semi-autobiographical introspection and thoughts on humanity. For with age comes not only less general motivation and likeability BUT also some funny stories. Is this to be taken serious (spoilers: no) or a very misguided memoir? Let’s just get ready for my self-help ramblings that don’t help anyone, not even myself.
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Mornings feel sacred. Calm. The people on the street are more careful, more innocent. Still too early for the mean alcoholic at the bus stop to do more than softly sway with the wind while stroking her wiry hair full of twigs. Even the cashier at the supermarket is friendly, zen, almost helpful. Not like in the afternoon when he’s drained, pulling groceries without any will to live over his beep-maker. And then there’s me… among everyone. Quietly grumpy I watch my surroundings, eager to find some meaningless fart to get mad about.
Yes, I feel comfortable to call myself a contrarian. But what is that exactly? I’d say it is someone who after a night of hating on Christopher Nolan, the next day in front of an even bigger, deeper invested Nolan-hater praises Dunkirk. Someone with a bad or distorted sense for hypocrisy. Someone who is compulsively non-conformist, but applies it to EVERYTHING, not only meh-ing Depeche Mode or Twin Peaks, even towards opinions on bread or brushing teeth. “Do we really need that?” But without ever leaving his comfort zone of course.
Sure, everyone wants to be unique, the underdog and have a crazy fresh individualised take on things – maybe not going as far as being the lonely crazy nightcrawler under a bridge screaming about micro-plastic in cereals. But in my case it might even have something to do with where I come from. Upbringing, Austrian temperament and such. Oh yeah, this one’s going to get political.
Sure, everyone wants to be unique (…) maybe not going as far as being the lonely crazy nightcrawler under a bridge screaming about micro-plastic in cereals.
First things first. Origins. Do you know what my last name “Zorn” means? It is the German word for wrath, anger. So of course teachers and authority figures of my childhood kept making the same old joke: “Oh, little anger, are you very angry?” I was annoyed, by the unorginality of the joke rather than being teased. But something weird happened like a self-fulfilling prophecy. I had never considered myself as an angry person. I didn’t even have real awareness of that emotion. I knew that my family could sometimes be erratic and choleric, but friends had to point that fact out to me. Then mood-swings sneaked into my daily life more and more. I finally had to come to terms with it: I actually was getting very angry.
Now I can’t help to think how a surname not only names but defines a person, maybe their whole ancestry. A woman named Müller/Miller you will probably be able to point at some type of milling profession in their family’s history. Just like a Schmidt/Smith or a Schneider/Tailor it was their work or some outstanding attribute that defined them, making fellow humans call them out on it, their whole family, incisively and for so long until it stuck. Until it got cemented into their last name.
But what does that say about me and my family? Were my ancestors called that because it was our main feature to ragequit playing cards, scream furious curses at church or just had resting-Zorn-face? Was it really that emotion which defined us so strongly all the way into our surname? They must’ve been one pissed off great-great-great-great-great-great grandparent. Imagine being so extreme in a certain regard that it changes your last name into it… just out of curiosity, what is your last name? He He…
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So I grew up with this nominal brand in a small town in Upper Austria near the German border. Now after 20 years lived in the Austrian capital of Vienna and with some distance I noticed a few specific characteristics of this rural region. Duh. Many of our great authors were fueled by hating on the countryside and national quintessential traits. They have written about these things better than I ever could. Probably all contrarians. Anyway! Where I come from the people tend to be resentful. Plagued by generational hang-ups, mental instabilities, insecurities, fears and crippling systemic alcoholism you will find it hard to NOT be against everyone and everything. Perfect soil for growing contrarians.
As a young person growing up there among male peers I quickly had to learn that putting forth open affection or trust will get you punished. You confess to them something you feel ashamed for, it will become your new nickname. You don’t feel like talking misogynist dumb shit once, you will get ripped apart forever. An old pal of mine who stayed in that region and was about to get married a few years ago had a stag night. His so-called friends mixed toxically high alcohol distiller foreshots in his beers. He ended up unconscious and with his bride having to call an ambulance. Yeah, it got dark. This part of my rant I mean. He’s fine, thank god. But a good example for how psychotic Upper Austrian can sometimes behave clad in whimsy and comradery: Identify something conspicuous about the other and expose it, them – destroy this outlier.
An argument with people from my home town is FULL of contrary wordings. Being right is secondary, you need to assert yourself. You have to WIN discussions. Prove your superior intellect. “I have to have the bigger brain dick!” How does someone dare to have another opinion than oneself. Me and a local compatriot would agree for a second about Google services being evil or something, but then he manages to swiffel over to how the EU is the true villain, leaving me cradling my face in my hands.
“I have to have the bigger brain dick!”
Also many in this region are – you might have guessed it – extremely right-winged. Of course. They love it. Like pigs in shit. Partly because I grew up around so many extremist, alt-right people and being the contrarian I am, my natural reaction was becoming decidedly left leaning and socialist.
On this note please allow me to live up to my name and explode into a little tirade: I’m so sick of it, those fucking idiot Nazis and their idiot cult following. It doesn’t matter what we do, what we NOT do, what we think, what we say, scream or calmly express, they keep growing in numbers and unite, solidarize (something the left should be doing). You show them up, you hit them, they turn it into some advantage. But they got nothing, no actual ideology, no ground to stand on, no substance of argument. Only fake stances and lies. The right is the ACTUAL disgrace for this country.
They only communicate in infantile blaring reactions to issues that aren’t even issues. They are conning us SO hard. They’ll say anything to get their get-rich-fast-schemes going and facilitate a power grab. Like Nelson from The Simpson’s (sorry, I don’t have fresher references) with sticking a colon into a biology model’s mouth and “solving world hunger”, the right manages to feed their own shit to their fanbase, stuff they often caused themselves and blame every poor fuck out there, so they can go: “See, a reason to vote us!” And the idiots and whacky conspiracy theorists go and vote for the actual conspiracy. Ergo MORE SHIT, which they then can blame on everyone else again. The perfect shit circle. A perpetuum idiot mobile…
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Sorry, I needed this out. Where better to vent than in a self-help blog? How can I say all these things with so much convinction? Because in the end I myself am the best example for one of those Upper Austrian idiots. I retained the rudeness, envious meritocracy and harsh smartassery, callused and moulded by it I became the contrarian before you.
A friend of mine, let’s call him Michael, comes from the same town. He and I many nights created something like a contrarian stalemate when going out drinking together. Our arguments were excruishating especially for others sitting in on the same table. I apologize retrospectively. Oh, so so SO many hairs were split. I on my end felt in the right to be such a hardhead in order to demonstrate, reflect Michael’s own belittling stubbornness back to himself. A taste of his own medicine. Looking back I don’t buy this meta-excuse anymore. I was just as an annoying smartass as him. The contrarian arrogance, right?
Behind my mantle of “critical thinking” and “healthy scepticism” in truth always hid a sick obsessive need for chronic contradicting. Always find the “but” and have a snide comment about a topic. It must be a disorder or a misguided primal urge. Yes, being a contrarian is an affliction… Look, I managed to make myself the victim when I’m an asshole! Wonderful.
Behind my mantle of “critical thinking” and “healthy scepticism” in truth always hid a sick obsessive need for chronic contradicting.
My addictive tendencies seemed to have had a weird co-dependent relationship with my contrarian disease. I’m a lightweight when it comes to drinking, can’t handle my alcohol at all. One sip and I felt it, red cheeks, very over-impulsive thoughts and actions were sure to follow. Despite these facts my urge to contradict FORCED me to drank even more, exponentially. Until my own stubborness drank me under the table, blacked out and full of regret. This too got better.
The contrarian issue did not. This scurge spreads through online forums and and comment sections about videogame protagonists, bleeding into our real life and social interactions – oh no, another pandemic? Did I cause it?! I’m so sorry. I only just joked about it being a disease. That was fast. I use an old flip phone from 2008 these days. I’m one of those now. Partly because there is this study by Oxford Academics from February 2025 basically saying how mobile internet causes depression, attention disorders and make us allover mentally unwell. On a very measurable scale. I mean we always knew it. And here it is, in black and white. So it’s not only been a general anti-party boomer dad gut feeling.
But the contrarian pandemic got so bad that when confronted with a study like this, we tell ourselves “NAH, I got it under control.” I could show this to a smart, progressive thinking friend and he’d ignore it, or twist it cynically, with something about “science always being so wrong lately”. Like with other addictions or stagnate issues we negotiate every obvious counter argument. We’ll try everything else before trying to change. Even it’s just a dumb scrolling tick that got out of hand. I don’t want get nerd neck from those things, mf!
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It’s tiring, the constant micro-outraging throughout the days fueled by alt-righ media with Russian funding. So very tiring. We got too tired to change and too contrarian to even want to. Anti-fascist mega-progressive friends of mine just giggle, when I ask why they still use the data-stealing neo-fascist Facebook platforms. They disdainfully assure me how they will stay on those EVIL platforms and smile at my bewilderment. It doesn’t make sense. Every short momentum of resistance or boycott washes out because we rather have our lovely addictive routines. Hipster ad agency opinion leaders now sell conformism as being the new cool thing, the totally okay guilty pleasure. That’s being edgy now. Saying, I’m a fan of being corporate. Again a damn contrarian symptom.
I think I don’t like being a contrarian anymore. Always having to be against a notion, a person, even my own. I don’t like my art, put MYSELF down most of all, scoff at the good things in my life. “How long is that going to last?”. I’m so contrarian that I can’t let myself be happy. The contrarian curse. And for what? That I can scream: “I am NOT the one inferior. Kneel before my knowledge! Welcome to the overly informed Kingdom of Contraria!!! I AM ITS RULER.”
You know what’s the funniest thing about all this. I don’t know SHIT! I don’t even have the general knowledge to oppose all those opinions I encounter and badmouth bitch about. “Well, actually…”, “but you forget…” – I too got NOTHING. I’m so very frequently wrong about all kinds of things and probably should not publish writing in any form AT ALL. The contrarians reading this blog will of course already have pointed this out.
I’m so contrarian that I can’t let myself be happy.
Then I go and want to blame family trees or beer swiging upbringing, even where and the time I grew up. But you know what?Each time, before I’m being smugly anti and contrarian, I could DECIDE AGAINST it. We all could. Every time. Oh yes, we are not programmed robots, even if it would make things so much easier. Binary leaves no room for nuance, baby.
After all I want to feel content. And I want my fellow human beings to feel content. Mostly. And this contrary mindset does not accomplish any of these wants. It should be focused on things in our world that ACTUALLY needed to be fought or resented. But that would be too much work again…
You know, maybe I’ll manage to do it. Decide against being a contrarian dickhead now and again. Get a grip and not rudely oppose somebody’s opinion on coriander just for opposing’s sake. Still I predict, when I wake up tomorrow into the next sacred morning, I will manage to complain about it.
Josef Zorn, 23.8.2026