Dwain Northey (Gen X)

If you’re looking for a blog with a clear mission statement, a carefully curated niche, or a predictable publishing schedule, you’ve probably taken a wrong turn somewhere on the internet.

This isn’t one of those blogs.

The name Esoteric Mandarins was chosen for a reason. First, it sounds vaguely intellectual, which helps disguise the fact that half the time I’m writing while annoyed about something. Second, because nobody—including me—ever really knows where my mind is going next.

One day I might be ranting about politics. The next day I could be questioning religion. Then I might wander into sports, climate change, economics, history, technology, music, or the strange social experiment we all seem to be participating in without our consent.

Sometimes all in the same essay.

My brain doesn’t travel in straight lines. It takes scenic routes through back alleys, side streets, and occasionally drives directly through the guardrail. A discussion about baseball might somehow end with observations about late-stage capitalism. An article about climate change could detour into 1980s childhood memories. A political essay might suddenly become a meditation on why adults voluntarily pay hundreds of dollars to sit in traffic on the way to a football game.

Welcome to Generation X thinking.

We are the generation raised largely unsupervised. We drank from garden hoses. We rode bicycles until the streetlights came on. We learned that life wasn’t fair long before it became a social media hashtag. We grew up watching institutions tell us one thing and reality tell us another. As a result, many of us developed a healthy skepticism toward authority, marketing, politicians, corporations, experts, celebrities, and pretty much anyone who insists they have all the answers.

Especially anyone who insists they have all the answers.

That skepticism fuels this blog.

I don’t write because I think I possess some hidden wisdom. I write because I find the world endlessly fascinating, occasionally absurd, and frequently deserving of a sarcastic raised eyebrow.

Some days the target is politicians. They make it easy.

Other days it’s billionaires trying to convince us they’re saving humanity while selling us subscriptions.

Sometimes it’s organized religion.

Sometimes it’s organized sports.

Sometimes it’s organized anything.

And sometimes it’s just the bizarre contradictions of modern life, where humanity can land a spacecraft on another world but still can’t figure out how to merge properly in traffic.

The common thread isn’t politics or religion or culture. The common thread is curiosity mixed with irritation. Something catches my attention, rattles around in my head for a while, and eventually escapes as an essay.

That’s what Esoteric Mandarins really is: a guided tour through the random corners of a Gen X mind.

There will be sarcasm.

There will be tangents.

There will be observations that make perfect sense and observations that may have arrived after taking three wrong turns and a shortcut through a conspiracy theory convention.

But every post starts the same way: something in the world made me stop and think, “Well, that’s weird.”

And from there, all bets are off.

So welcome aboard.

The destination is unknown.

The route is unplanned.

The driver is mildly annoyed.

And the radio is playing something from the 1980s.