If I can't find something to write about, does that mean things are okay, or that I'm dead inside? I don't feel dead, but I certainly never trust that things are okay. I know, I know. It's not either/or. It's a false premise to begin with. I don't write for the exact same reason every time. “Dead inside” is a vague characterization I've used to mean actual stagnated capacity for feeling and general jaded indifference. “Things” being “okay” or not has nothing to do with digging up something specific and coherent to talk about. I'm no less in a ponder-worthy situation that I'm finding hard to explore without all the palpably raw push of a headache or anxiety.
I'm “normalizing.” I'm getting too old to fight too ferociously. I'm skeptical enough of my posture and where it's gotten me to begin exploring new paths. I'm taking on a matter-of-fact approach to how day to day life operates, and why it's reasonable and expected people should behave that way. Free alcohol at a fundraiser!? No, put in a few dollars and sip a tiny cup. Mingle. Try not to hog the watermelon pieces. Meeting canceled? Congratulations! You just got paid to do literally nothing but try and cross your fingers. Want to talk about big plans and realms of influence over time? A few short years and handful of conversations with the right movers and money makers and acceptance is practically guaranteed. It's everything I've ever said it would be.
A persistent theme in Byron's assessment of me is that I should figure out a “work/life balance.” In my view, he's operating under the presumption that I don't have one, or the one I have is one he can't recognize. I'd prefer a “meaning/practical” balance. I watch enough, lounge enough, find cheats for turning my job into the “incidental” thing that doesn't preoccupy my mind as much as things I'd rather have in there. I don't find a lot of meaning in my life unless I'm building the tools to form the culture and crowd I want to create with in the future. Finding cushy jobs and self-assured associations can do a lot of work in obscuring how meaningless your life registers. I want it constantly scalding my temples.
It's meaningful to have lived it. I have to try and fail. I have to grow exhausted. I'm not hell bent on self-destruction or “the hard way” as some kind of bravado and ego driven ethos. I'm attempting to explore old themes and ways of conducting a life with a modern bent. I appreciate the excesses of capitalism while I stress the word excess. It's a false narrative to think of things as “falling behind” when I'm focusing on reading vs watching vs listening, so whether it's picking 5 things from each category to do a day, or powering through a chunk until the end, it will always be too much and an ever-fleeting source of inspiration. What matters is that it feels like a choice instead of an obligation or punishment. I've read myself uncharacteristically sad. I've looked at a 35 episode backlog as a weird thing to burden myself with.
My criticism of the “normal” world has much to do with how I feel it's molded people to stop thinking or talking like they did when I knew them in school. It remains a source of mild fear that I'll do what I think I'm going to do, and still get everything I want normally put aside as a regret or pipe dream. “If only I had the time to play the piano!” So they sell it instead. “If only I had the money!” I'd like to show what mild sacrifices and a proper budget can do for your savings in a year. I don't have the added obligations of a spouse or children, which I'm told are significant contributors to why the world looks the way it does.
I choose a certain degree of pain. I want to work through stomach-dropping feelings of contemplating the people I care about finding intimacy and connection with someone else. I want to act better than that feeling. In comparison to the amount of things I'm lax about, the self-imposed difficulty I actually choose pales in comparison. I wouldn't mind being primarily vegetarian. Everything I read suggests better health and longevity. I forgo the “pain” of prepping meals or learning new recipes to make it seem more palatable. I want to know the consequences, personally, of being the CEO sleeping on the factory floor to handle issues at precisely the moment they come up. I believe the testimony of every ex Amazon or Tesla employee who described a level of danger or slavery, because it's a familiar feeling I harbor within myself. You don't get to Mars or take over every industry on the planet feeling comfortable getting paid to do nothing.
What's most striking isn't things being exactly as I thought they would. What's been weird, and again this has developed over time, is the flat acceptance of any premise. Let me unpack that. I've been compelled to accept, one way or another, every step of my life that's gotten me to this point. Every mess that befalls business creation, every shit or broken relationship, every job I didn't give a shit about, and every purely mental criticism of my insistence to meticulously chronicle it for the last 5 people on the planet who can stand to read me at length. I go to a fund raiser, okay, this is who I am, polite tiny cheese piece eater. I hop into a co-worker I've never met's car, and can proceed to have a good conversation for several hours. It doesn't matter what else is going on, that's where we are. My opinion doesn't matter, as long as the task is being observed as “correct” by enough of those watching.
A line from Waking Life has been creeping into my head lately. The whole paragraph goes, “When it was over, all I could think about was how this entire notion of oneself, what we are, is just this logical structure, a place to momentarily house all the abstractions. It was a time to become conscious, to give form and coherence to the mystery, and I had been a part of that. It was a gift. Life was raging all around me and every moment was magical. I loved all the people, dealing with all the contradictory impulses - that's what I loved the most, connecting with the people. Looking back, that's all that really mattered.” Those last two lines have been echoing.
I think intuitively I act like this is true despite everything I might do to the contrary. Nothing is more dynamic or full of potential than a person. Nothing is so seemingly contradictory yet consistent. Nothing can choose to obsess and find itself so conflicted it can go properly mad. I'm studying people in all of my TV shows. I'm distilling people down to trends and attitudes in taking in histories and philosophies. Disorganized people are going to get me killed because they and their considerably worse conceptions of what it means to be a person are held accountable to self-destructive gods removed from their own.
It's not a secret why I'm “naturally” suited to deal with the social work field. How many times have I heard concerns over “burn out?” Dozens. Wide-eyed idealists join up thinking they're going to help! Who knew that your good will and faith don't counteract meth and generational abuse? Everyone except you. Me though? The one with one foot in low-key reasonable parenting and one mentally and emotionally abusive? I know the reality on both sides. I know the abject futility and the undying support. I know the world is both, all the time, all at once, in everything we do. The choice to observe yourself in terms that are “better” or bolstered by the evidence isn't “bias.” It's work. It's a fight. I can do my job better than everyone, and internally be at a fever pitch running the opposite direction. It's a concert, not a contradiction.
I think to myself that I want “the best.” It's a bad characterization. I want the most meaningful. I want the friendships that observe the same fluidity of conversation as I can manage with strangers. I want the the reality of the good and bad acknowledged and worked with, not taken for granted and swept aside. I'm not gonna “pray” things get better. I want to identify and turn things into markers and tools. Whether it's my experience or money, this is just another waylay in my generally dismissive and combative take on so-called existence. Just like tomorrow will be, or the next year if I choose to regard it as such. It's why writing reminds me how often my words are betrayed. How full all the “nothing” I've been doing really is. You know how easy it is to talk for a few hours when you've seen every episode of every favorite show of your new acquaintance?
Perhaps I've been a perfect moron in not wading into the world of “working-people” beyond the measure of barely-sustaining McJobs. I argued I found utility in them at the time. I might not have softened a few choice edges that would have seen me fired or quitting early. I might not have had a choice at all and am still tumbling down a probability matrix looking nothing like how I would've designed it. The point is, the moment is either bearable or not depending on whether I can see options and freedom as a result of what I'm doing. Money is options. The nature of this job provides plenty of drive time freedom to watch or listen at my leisure. Learning there are new people worth talking to and making jokes with at length pulls your selfish head out of your ass long enough to take a look around.
If we take that Waking Life paragraph, I could perhaps soften how I consider the ever-falling away relationships in school or life. If nothing else, it was meaningful at the time, and it sucks you changed for the worse, or my ideas about you did the same. I think it's a cheap trick to try and consider people in your life as mere chapters of your sordid past or interpersonal hurdles on your way to self-actualization. I've previously likened people to songs. I suppose I don't understand why the tent just doesn't get bigger. Why the “love” people endlessly drone on about can't find its way into anything than the mouths of the world's biggest hypocrites or handful of genuinely earnest. Why thousands of polite acquaintances are better than a handful of deeply rooted working connections.
Did you hear about the Pokemon Go meet-up in some big city where hundreds of people showed up, the game crashed, and they all went home? This phenomenon hitting every nostalgic and future-tempting button, uniting old and new alike, big and small town, and it didn't actually seem capable of connecting people. It wasn't quite augmented reality. It wasn't quite social. It was a time-intense spectacle. It was an in-group qualifier. It was a chance to be popular for no reason. The people were secondary. The “shared interest” category would read “myself.” What makes you love Pokemon or yearn for the past are deeply human points of potential connection that capturing the same rare bird will never be. But we're still hunting.
