I often wonder to what degree my life looks the way it does because of boredom. From the capacities or tolerances I’ve developed to the “world level” goals I’ve set for myself, there appears to be a mental thought floor I fall to where everything opens up. I wonder if this floor can do a solid job of explaining the 4 or 5 different strings of thought that have been goading another blog this last week or so.
I see an image of 5 women smoking in the shade behind one of the school buildings, all wearing their red uniforms, hair strewn about, utilizing makeshift seating. You can applaud them for all having jobs. You can dismiss and summarize each individual for their clothing and similar look and age. You can wonder about what they’re talking about and sigh with solidarity as you drive by at work yourself. If you’re ever in the ballpark of inferences you probably know what they’re talking about, what they’ll talk about tomorrow, what complaints they’re engaging in, what kind of friends and family they keep, and that general snapshot of what life looks like when you pursue smoking outside of your minimum wage job with your doppelgangers. It’s a kind of begrudging if not hopeless familiarity.
I think about that as a “delivery driver.” Because, of course that’s what I’m doing, but it’s not what I am. The company logo dons my car, but not my person. My identity, to me, has little to do with my capacity to drive food around town. One hopes that no matter how belittling you may desire to describe a group of people on their smoke break, they exist beyond the cliches of their look and habit as well. I’m not persuaded that’s the case, but you can hope, if you dare. It’s certainly not my experience as I’ve passively taken in pointless and boring commentary regarding heavy drug use from coworkers or one spat after another concerning negligible amounts of money that only found it’s disagreeable center via playing out dramatic heights of irresponsibility in the first place.
I met a girl who’s a self-described “punk rock anarchist, anti-capitalist, yada yada” with punk rock hair and a kid and an even more racoonish nature than one of my friends known for such a nature. Every other comment is about the ongoing “party” that is her life and all the free drugs people keep offering her, often, as an in to try and work out a sexual relationship. She’s immersed in her phone creating memes about all of the weak attempts and ignorant angry commentary people throw her way when they don’t get what they want. She’s fluidly contradictory when she describes her approach to work she does as opposed to the characteristics and behavior she considers makes others pieces of shit. She’s boring.
There’s always a level of irony or hypocrisy regarding our “ideal” selves and to the degree each moment bothers to speak to it. But to work so hard, whether it’s just on your hair or “political beliefs” and to sound so naive, dumb, or petty? I find this a kind of pattern in “lower class” people. There’s always an intricate dialogue about who they are, but if not for their drug use and hours spent at a job they profess to hate which definitely doesn’t pay enough, I’ve never managed to figure out who or what they are. Mind you, I don’t really care either, but it doesn’t spell a particularly good or coherent message about their potential impact on the world.
I think about how this ties into my “lack” of awe regarding the beauty of nature. It’s just a picture. What could happen to it, what’s going on underneath, and how it can be utilized are all vastly more interesting. When I look at the top of a mountain or over the vast expanse of trees from a fire tower, all I can think about is kicking a Syrian child off of it or tree-housing for the displaced. What about my life is so stressful that I need beautiful sunsets and nature to help calm me? The hustle of our exploitative joke existences isn’t what really gets to me. The lack of perspective or work done on it is. Away from a computer or cell signal surrounded by acid dropping naive minds marveling at the colors is the farthest away “we” could get from appreciating the daily utopia. These faux pilgrimages are just rich people versions of religiosity disguised as deep appreciation and solidarity. Weeping over images of their savior, but sure as shit noting the degrees of their own poverty before thinking they can help anyone else.
It seems to center around how you talk. How you discuss your circumstances or your friends. How and whether you refrain from statements that are “judgy” instead of answer seeking. Of course you’re always judging regardless and there’s rarely good answers. But you can always look at your internal response to how people would characterize you. You can have qualifiers in your life as examples of what’s really going on underneath. Are you your hair and what you pray it represents to other people more than you’re actually you? Are you screaming your vulnerability louder than you can act tough? Are your circumstances inconvenient, or dire? Is capitalism “evil?” or matter-of-factly consequential given infinite variables and historical circumstance?
To be clear, I don’t even think we deserve to last as any form of billions in a collective. I don’t think we’ve respected consciousness to any degree that suggests we should keep introducing people into the world like a “pro life” activist completely ignorant of the fallout of unwanted children and completely scornful of the ones alive and ignored already. I think “the world” is for the individuals. The ones who can make demonstrable consequences for “the masses” and manage to survive in spite of them. This doesn’t mean the individual is particularly good or bad either. There are plenty of individuals at seats of power who’ve accumulated millions of deaths on their hands, well-intentioned or otherwise. But that’s the power of taking on responsibility and making definitions of your place in the world. You incidentally dictate others’ lives either because of their refusal, incompetence, or impossible circumstance rendering them impotent.
If you wake up one day and find yourself an anarchist enjoying the bars and rides and drugs, you’re both incompetent and refusing. If you’re minimum wage having the same conversation every smoke break, you’re pretending you can’t escape your circumstance with better words and a desire to seek better information. The world is at once happening to you and because of you. And to me, you’re never more hopeless and negative than when you render yourself incapable of speaking to both sides. It’s insulting. It’s self-destructive. It’s incredibly and mind-numbingly boring. You won’t move on. You won’t learn. You won’t change. You’ll be a convoluted husk taking a complicated world and reducing it to a series of brain farts.
On the other end are people who pretend that because they have some grasp of what’s happening that they are above it all or de facto of consequence. These are the people Jordan Peterson warns about who fall in love with their own intellect and ego. The irony is often that the dumbest of the dumb are persuaded by their own posturing and the smartest of the smart get trapped in overwhelming humility and professions of how much yet they still do not know! Here I tend to default to the sentiments from entrepreneurship. It’s never the “right” time, but you have to start. You’ll never know enough, but it’s your responsibility to incorporate what you’ve learned or fucked up. The world’s leading authority on any subject is still a person with all of the baggage people claim. This doesn’t mean dismiss and disrespect, but try to build, incorporate, remix and inform the different levels of your experience and approach.
We don’t have many people advocating like that though. We have distractions. We have blisses to follow and trends to hashtag. And it’s not like we don’t have the opportunities to work towards something more meaningful and real, it’s that we’re either doing it alone or in the face of an unprecedented cultural doubt and nihilism. Don’t dream, pay the bills. Don’t worry, it’s “over there.” Don’t bother, it’s not your fault. Don’t mess with improving, just be engaged and stressed and worked and that’s more than enough. Why, that’s all those of us bothered to do before you, and look how we turned out! The world doesn’t feel like a calculable accountable entity that can summarily reform overnight, yet that’s exactly what it is. Whether it takes an asteroid or the spontaneous “awakening” of cultural and historical perspectives is yours to decide every moment.
