There's something I do, not very often, but often enough that I want to talk about. I've sat on several Amazon wishlists with different groupings of items, sometimes for years. Things can range from a $1 book to a $3000 high definition camera. There's things meant to scratch the OCD-adjacent itch like American Gladiators DVDs which have no torrent presence but I'll be damned if it didn't feel like I was missing out on the ability to reminisce when I first thought to look them up. Just now, I decided to start adding up the cheapest used versions of a 50+ long book list and see how much it would be to buy them all at once. I got bored a little over half way through and decided against some that were pricier than they should be, marring the results and estimation, but it's probably safe to say it'd be about $500 or so after shipping to get everything. My finger lingered over the “place order” button when I showed the cart at $309.
A small point to be rushed out of the way is that I have $309. I have the $500 or more it would take to order them all. I have the money to do that, and pay rent next month, and pay for gas and food, and stay as perfectly comfortable as I am now, but with 50 more books in my life. 50 more windows or distractions on topics I've found interesting enough to note on a list and then carry on with my life in spite of. 50 reminders of all of the things I'm not learning about that inspired me, excited me, or prompted me to act in a world that I'm otherwise mostly dragging myself through without the narcissism of a proper depression. Yes, that was a deliberately provocative and ignorant phrasing, good catch. It made me smirk, so it stays.
The large point to be labored over and confused, I'm sure, is that I am, in fact, inspired. I'm inspired in my feelings of “deadness.” I'm inspired by the indignant and ignorant testaments to our impending demise. I'm inspired by numbers and whiffs of ill-conceived yet tangible “progress.” There's a lot of the world that, despite everything contrary I might conjure to say about it, I'm actively wishing to learn about, understand, and then build into a new expression of myself. Thus, this overwhelming empowering sentiment of self-actualization and connection becomes the most depressing thing. To have an “intellectual” mode of viewing all topics as “potentially interesting” or drumming up reasons to claim interest is a step removed from rushing to Amazon or the library to devour where thoughts were pushing you.
I had to individually delete each book from the list. I had to see the title of something I want to be intimately familiar with fade into the background of my “one day” life, even if that life is maybe mere months away. I had to get the sinking feeling of “what if” my car or my guy working or some inconvenience pops up and the $300 or $500 could be better spent. Right before the book list I was reexamining heating/air conditioning units. A $1000 one of those might make a survivable difference where the flow of ideas might be a lower-order need than the flow of blood.
More and more I want to be the quasi-hermit just learning or just experimenting. I find myself growing increasingly fascinated with the infinite potential and particulars of what it means to be truly individual. The only path to wrapping oneself up in a tough blanket of understanding seems to be in the tireless pursuit of understanding as many pieces of the infinite sea of variables as you can pass through your consciousness. I'm already a fairly provocative and particular beast. Who am I after those 50 books? Who am I after trying and failing over and over again?
It's a different kind of energy. I got something of an adrenaline rush dealing with a particular kind of ignorant client. I was “excited” at the prospect of being what's going to be a pretty dramatic and severe consequence to stone-cold ignorance in a way that life rarely provides. At the same time, it's not lost on me that this isn't the kind of excited I want to be. It's also a kind of weak co-opting of State power that could arguably pass through anyone with my same title. Yes, the professional world let's you jiggle around details, but picking your weapon in a war you've been conscripted into seems fundamentally at odds with the kind of individual liberty or choice that would sustain meaningful interaction with the world.
I want to give myself up. I want to serve myself on a platter to the ideas that want to take me as far as they are able. I want to lose myself in the argument and effort and find myself in pieces scattered between pages. I don't want to hear the back of my mind chanting “gotta work for the weekend” and “working 9 to 5” as I feel defeated cracking a book I know I'll have to put down, no matter how good, so I'm not too tired for my job in the morning. I don't want to pretend “broken” is the same thing as “tempered.” I'm playing the game Red Dead Redemption and recently learned how to lasso and break horses. It's in the person who's riding you's best interest for you to forget you're as large and kicky as a horse.
My compulsion to sit and play, or read, or sleep, or just talk and eat forever are also provoked by my genuine feeling that we aren't going to make it. I want to enjoy my gilded age. I want my head put through as many word washings and tumble cycles as I can get my eyes and ears on. “People,” as that abstract concept or mass are always going to provide you the same things. Carving out your individual person is an every-moment kind of task. It's why I'm thankful for writing. I know I'm awake and “mildly annoyed.” I know I have an image of a video game bucking horse flashing in front of me and am I'm exhausted by Trump-esc ignorance, unyieldingly proud, and see first hand its deadly effects personally and culturally. I know I want a nice little dopaminergic rush from spending or to feel like something is happening that finally has to do with me, and not what I'm otherwise compelled to be doing.
I think, at a certain point, you get to be justly complicated. The concept of “listen to your elders” comes to mind. It's hard to say someone who's been around for 2 or 3 times longer than you have is going to be summed up. In theory, we should all be filled with layers of wisdom and in/dignity to be poked and shaken for insight, but those “sparkly” people running through the halls trying to turn on the light in every room might be garnering your attention for more than bombastic or selfish reasons. Enough obituaries have read “He/she was a point of light, the center of their family, the beacon etc” to the point of absurdity, but I think about it initially more cynically. An individual, almost by definition, is a brand.
If I were merely a machine, and I produced “content,” you'd have nearly 740 pages of whatever you want to call it. Was Anne Frank a “good” writer? Doesn't matter. Is Viktor Frankl's voice unique? Can you feel a line from Dostoevsky in your bones that sounds worlds apart from one of his no-name contemporaries? These famous individuals are manifest in various and insidious ways, but they thrive and live on in the people who adopted deeply personal genuine understanding from what they were attempting to convey. Ignorance and relativists may want to bicker of “true understanding” verses “false understanding,” which to me might indicate they're in some of the furthest places one might inhabit in their ability to understand much of anything at all.
If I were merely a machine, I have a consistent and powerful history of drawing out such deeply ingrained reactions to my being as to engender some of the harshest and most incoherent judgments. Simply, I'd provoke noise. At the same time, I make a lot of noise. I raise the concern. I ask for the fight. I talk too much and too loud. I try for the next boisterous laugh. I seek out other noise makers to fill the air when I need to breath.
We're currently caught in a psychological hole and feedback loop where noisy content stokes the flames that power the insecure engine away from individuated self-expression. That line is a convoluted way of describing our collective death. I said recently I'm not interested in dying if I'm going to bother with life. It's that much clearer to me now why I want to buy hundreds of dollars worth of books and secure my tiny shell that everything can burn down around.
I'm already breaking through, but I'm not enough. So much of me already exists and fights for its sole voice. I'm taking shape, as quickly as I can through writing, and as slow as it takes to get a driveway, or build a library, or pluck a sapling. Maybe I'm too hungry in wanting it 24/7. 2 weeks at a time is 26 monopolizing moments. That's dangerous and deadly. 8 am to 4:30 pm was agreed upon without your input. The base of my current orientation I consider corrupted, which means it has an expiration, and eventually I'll talk myself out of it. But I also know that argument is essentially dead without help from another individual or statistically unlikely empowering circumstances enriching me.
If it's still somehow lost on you, this is me fighting.
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