It’s important for me to know my
priorities. Your perspective shapes everything. This is really an
idea that I can’t belabor enough. It can change as quickly as your
environment or it can remain as steadfast as your “thoroughly”
thought out ideas. I have religious friends who will believe in God,
despite all evidence or reason otherwise, and it shapes their
attitudes and behavior seemingly as dramatically as a clear and
present danger. They are entirely different people because of
one idea. But that’s the thing. I don’t think they really are. I
think your perspective is rooted in something deeper that gets
hijacked. I think when you are aware of this hijacking it’s hard to
take any one view about things overwhelmingly seriously.
I think there are main-stage ideas that
pull off a hijacking better than others. These include being beholden
to the ideas of your parents, getting into a relationship, believing
in a god, extremism in any sense, and falling victim to present
hedonism. It’s the last one I’m concerned with because it seems
to be the setting of the “phase shift” that all of my old
friends are going through. It’s a shift I warned about in however
many blogs ago.
It can certainly get old. Whether it is
doing certain things or spending too much time or thinking too long,
a craving to change takes root. There’s something of a
psychological need when it pertains to happiness, there’s a
hedonistic want that shapes your decision to change as the “right”
one regardless of how you came to that conclusion. It’s the thing
where the excuses come from. This is where the lapses in memory
reside. I certainly understand this want. I mean, who’s more
presently hedonistic than me?
I don’t mind or care if people want
to split up and travel around the world or seek certain kinds of
jobs. I practice a certain kind of detachment from things that
doesn’t make me message or text every friend that’s moved away to
remind them of my undying love and affection. Not that I don’t
appreciate hearing from someone who’s been thinking about me. I
just don’t want my point to get confused when I go further. I don’t
mean to force together some idiotic hippie love nest theoretical
future model of togetherness. I’m not trying to be deliberately
naïve to the wants and needs of other people. I just want to lean on
an idea that there are significantly more options when you allow them
for yourself.
I picked, for example, to live
relatively cheaply, work a form of denigrating job just enough to not
go crazy, try to make it to every hang out time and party, and fill
in the free time with TV shows, reading, music or other practices.
Whether intentional or not, I’ve talked to people who would frame
this as “rotting away” in a college town trapped in a sea of
retarded college kids. My perspective tells me that I will remember
almost every day I spend at the park with my friends in a way that I
won’t stacking beer in a cooler. My perspective has informed me of
the amount of money I can potentially make when I sacrifice all my
time towards some goal, and I’ve learned that I don’t want to
spend that much time unless I have to or am thoroughly enjoying
whatever it is I’m working on.
My perspective is also shaped by too
much news and too many conversations. It really does, as odd as it
seems to come across to most people, always weigh on my mind just how
much I really have in comparison to the rest of the world. If I
rotted away for the rest of my life in this town at a shitty job
engaging with infuriating people, it would still be one of the best
lives that anyone who’s ever existed has ever lived.
This doesn’t mean I don’t want
“more,” I mean, I’m American. It just means I don’t feel a
level of angst or maybe sadness when things don’t go my way. Of
course I’m not just happy to sit and wait, but there seems to be
some form of existential trauma going on with people who didn’t get
into grad school or who can’t find the perfect job.
Why I advocate so heavily on behalf of
keeping the relationships or surrounding yourself in friends is
because that’s worked for me. If I manage to feel something it’s
on those “perfect” days or perfect parties or hilarious string of
jokes bullshitting with friends or breaking in new personalities. I
understand relationships change and people grow apart, but that’s
different from forcing yourselves apart to power through your
individual forms of hell.
How much of what you expect from
yourself comes from “you” and how much is beaten into you by
society or some comparison to someone else?
If no one told you that you had to be a
certain level of “smart” what would you be interested in? If no
one painted a 2 story house with attached garage and a dog as an
American Ideal, would you be dramatically upset about not having
something resembling it? When I think about doing things to “better
myself” it’s in better understanding my relationships. I
understand that other people have other metrics, but I promise you,
no amount of things I own or far in advance I pay my rent will ever
speak to how I conceive of my capacity.
It’s for this reason that when I see
relationships failing or being redefined in negative terms for no
other reason than distance, I’m skeptical you are doing yourself
any favors digging your heals into your new environment. It’s the
same skepticism when you get into a relationship because you’re
desperately lonely. It’s the same skepticism that tries to keep
these blogs indirectly direct so that if you feel something resonate,
I didn’t try to tell you how you feel, but hopefully I’m actually
speaking to what you feel.
We’re constantly trying to prove
things to ourselves, but doing so without keeping in mind the
environment we’re working in seems to be destructive. This doesn’t
mean to work up the best excuses using a “modern times” theme to
arrest action, it means when you send out hundreds of applications
and get 2 call backs to less than ideal jobs or schools, it really
has nothing to do with you, and everything to do with the shitty
infrastructure you’re working in. It means when I don’t do them
same thing as you and don’t meet the same kind of disappointment, I
was sold on how little was out there earlier and it’s shaped my
choices.
I just want you to know why you’re
moving away. I want you to see every detail for why or if a
relationship has to change. I want you to really feel what the
difference is when the balance between friendships and money or time
spent in different environments has shifted. I say often that I’m
not terribly interested in traveling outside of the novelty and
social experimentation because I know wherever I go, damn there I am.
And who am I without my relationships to reflect it back?
