The Two Faces of Gasbaggery

It should not surprise us that gasbaggery functions like a drug. The practiced gasbag does not merely speak; he performs sovereignty. He presents himself as a man plugged into the hidden circuitry of the world—wired to the grapevine, fluent in relevance, dispensing commentary as if it were intelligence. We listen, not because the content is profound, but because the delivery suggests mastery.

And so we gravitate toward the gifted gossip—the one who narrates minor events with blockbuster urgency, who seasons every anecdote with scandal, who topples the famous with a flourish and hands us our daily ration of schadenfreude. It is theater masquerading as insight, and we applaud accordingly.

To understand the appetite for this performance, we can turn to Blaise Pascal, who diagnosed the human condition with unnerving precision. He called it divertissement—our endless appetite for distraction. Not the crude kind, but the refined variety: light, engaging, socially acceptable diversions that keep the mind busy and the soul anesthetized. Divertissement fills the void. It spares us the burden of self-awareness. It keeps loneliness at bay and death politely out of frame.

In the post-COVID world—where many people retreated into curated cocoons and allowed real friendships to atrophy—this appetite has metastasized. Podcasts proliferate like mold in a damp basement. There are now millions of them, each offering the same quiet illusion: that you are sitting at a table, coffee in hand, among friends. These hosts become stand-ins for relationships you no longer maintain. They chatter; you listen; the loneliness softens, if only slightly.

If podcasts don’t suffice, there are the influencers—on YouTube, on TikTok—each one broadcasting intimacy on demand, each one inviting you into a simulated community of like-minded spectators, all gathered around the same flickering fire of curated personality. The opportunities for distraction are now effectively infinite.

It is no wonder that a lifelong gasbag such as myself looks upon these operators with envy. Their reach flatters the ego. Their attention looks like proof. I fall easily into the childish arithmetic: visibility equals worth. The louder the voice, the greater the man. It is nonsense, of course, but it is persuasive nonsense.

Pascal would not be impressed. He saw divertissement for what it is: a beautifully decorated trap. A man can spend his entire life wandering through these amusements, never arriving anywhere, mistaking motion for purpose. The reasons we fall for it are not flattering. Gasbaggery thrives in the soil of mediocrity—low stakes, endlessly renewable, socially rewarded. It keeps the mind in motion without requiring it to go anywhere. Like wheels spinning in mud, there is activity, but no progress.

Worse, it flatters our vanity. Gossip diminishes others while quietly inflating ourselves. It signals belonging, earns status, and allows us to sit in judgment with all the authority of a man who has never examined his own defects. Hypocrisy, in this form, is not merely tolerated—it is enjoyable.

And yet, not all gasbaggery is cheap.

Some of it is priceless.

I think of my father. I miss him. Some of my most vivid memories are of sitting at the dinner table long after the meal was finished, listening to his stories. They were extravagant, alive—tales of drunken nights in the army, of a long-forgotten relative who worked off his indenture in a mental institution, of strange fruits eaten in distant countries, of meals so exquisite he pitied the rest of humanity for never tasting them. He told these stories with such conviction that the room seemed to expand around them.

There was also the night he was thrown out of a movie theater for laughing too loudly—laughing so hard he continued walking all the way home, alarming passing drivers who assumed they had encountered a madman.

That was gasbaggery, too—but of a different order. It was not performance for status. It was connection. It was love, disguised as storytelling. It did not diminish others; it enlarged the room.

This is the distinction that matters.

There is the Pascalian gasbag—the gossiping scold, spinning endlessly in the mud of distraction and vanity. And there is the other kind—the storyteller who binds people together, who turns memory into something warm and enduring.

If I must be a gasbag—and I must—I would prefer the latter.

As a Verbosaurus Rex, I must know the two faces of gasbaggery and decide which one I’m willing to wear.