[912] The Hunt

I think it is exceptionally rare, if not nearly impossible, to do anything in “light switch” fashion. The two ideas that embody light switch change coming to mind quickest regard brain injury a la Phineas Gage, and the phrase in ceasing drug use immediately as going “cold turkey.” Perhaps the addict relays a moment of epiphany in which it became almost mystically possible to stop. Perhaps most of us need something tantamount to a rod shooting through and eliminating the most objectionable parts of our brain.

I feel generally stable. This has not always been the case. When I am unstable, I can usually trace it back to a handful of pretty common or familiar things that, presumably, would destabilize most. I might be hungry, tired, or physically exhausted. It's not really a secret that when I donate plasma, that day I shouldn't be battling the heat with a power tool. I know Tuesday when I forget to pack a lunch, I'm going to be grumpy at 11:30 as I anticipate eating. In a fleetingly small amount of days, I sleep wrong, and perhaps there's a knot I've worked my head, shoulders, and back into that creates a tightness and unease I can't really shake. Those are all simple and anticipated.

I can still work myself up about all that I wish to do and be. I often point to other people's inconsistency or intransigence as “my” biggest hurdles. I reflexively frame issues as a series of any one person or group of individuals who appear, at least superficially, to have more to say and control over my fate than me. It's a long road to travel in attempting to discern where and when this may be the case. I may know that I can't save the planet replacing my light bulbs and recycling, but after I learn my statistical insignificance, do I continue to do so in service to the larger narrative? Do I more deliberately inform my conservation efforts going forward, or give up, hopeless and confident my example does not matter?

The story I tell myself at that point is an existential one. Am I seeing any light but one shining on the mockery and futility of my effort? Am I discovering creative ways to plug into and revolutionize what needs to happen at the macro scale? Can I parlay my individual effort into a series of compounding consequences and create something no one expected or could originally conceive? Just what does it mean for me to exist as someone who wants to recycle their cans or save a little energy one bulb at a time?

For me, every moment is something of an existential crisis. Whether I'm negotiating whether to wash dishes, write this, or find the steady and determined mind to knock out a more laborious task, answering “just who I am and why” is feverishly knocking, insisting to be let in and entertained. The different parts of my personality answer the door and generally keep the question satiated and engaged.

Well, how? Why?

How I've come to understand myself is an evolutionary process. I had to first discover what it meant to be embodied. I had to test and find my limits. I had to baste in the anxiety and angst of whatever I deemed to be a crisis. I had to figure out what the words I used to understand myself actually meant, for me, and how others employed them too often against me. I'm still doing so. It's a never-ending adaptation to whatever being presented to you in any given moment. It's work, but before it's work it's an awareness that it's the only real kind of work you ever have to do. Evaluate your circumstances, consider choices, make peace with the consequences of those choices.

One of the reasons the mental health discussion forms around the trauma experienced in childhood is that child brains don't have the capacity to engage that process. What does a child know about a sexually exploitative environment? How can a child be said to be responsible for their choices when we know their brains aren't even completely formed until their 20s? How can a sense of “resolution” for a “choice” be determined when accurately determining what you're even made of is functionally impossible?

Now, you get to your late 20s, 30s, and beyond, and perhaps for the first time you're even presented with the opportunity to “really adult” or “responsibly evaluate” your circumstances. Surely, we're modern creatures, so the wisdom of different cultures, schools of thought, and science are introduced early if not arbitrarily. Does merely teaching about slavery or The Holocaust mean you'll never behave like a psychopathic Stanford prison guard? Obviously not. The lessons of history have to be worked for, not merely handed over. I just completed the series Human Planet, and not a single tribe member said they inherited that day's meal from their ancestors. The knowledge of what to do had to be put in practice, the same risks taken, and the same respect for the nature of the task given. Or, you die.

I realize something in this moment about why I get anxious when I don't feel busy. Somewhere deep, I know hard work is the antithesis of death, so even superficially, too much comfort is synonymous with being dead. I don't wanna be dead yet, so every moment my subconscious screams I'm dying kicks up some butterflies and tension. Some level of work needs to be done, no? Add another reason I'm thankful for writing and the peace I'm able to make examining what constitutes my anxiety. It's not irrational nor uncontrollable, it's just complicated and hidden, and you never know what you watch or hear that's going to provoke, obscure, or illuminate.

Once again I return to probably the most repeated line in my head from Waking Life about what is the most universal human characteristic; fear or laziness? I'd have to look back through blogs, but I pretty readily answer laziness even if my first instinct might have been fear. I view the vast majority of everything good in my life as an extension of what I've been willing to work for. I think the narrative of that work is highly susceptible to kidnapping by self-aggrandizing and lazy understandings of “just who I am, and why.”

I don't think the entitled insurrectionist dipshits are afraid. I think they're too lazy to do the work of accepting how bad they really are or how good they could really be. That's when you find fear. That's when the reasonable fear of the consequences can take hold, when you embody the work and feel what's missing in threads of fabric it takes to weave together existence. I'm afraid of myself when I decide to grant myself the license to retaliate or methodically target. I know what I'm capable of. I'm afraid I get the money and power and control, and too comfortably slip into a kind of ambivalence about the values that drive my working ethos. Those are good things to worry about, stay mindful of, and bring up in conversation often so you don't turn into a rotting mockery of your potential.

The work of survival is endlessly obscured by modernity. You're situated, too comfortably, by default. I've never been hungry a day in my life. When my air conditioner breaks, I can burn fuel and sit in my car, or meander about a Wal-Mart. We're also given psychologically pacifying (another mockery) narratives about our place in the universe and heavenly desserts in spite of our abject sin. Why work when I can simply believe in the guy willing to take the crucifying for me? Why conserve what was given to me by right? Why learn for myself what can be easily recited over and over and never put into any real practical practice?

This is how I've come to understand my responsibilities and get excited about the nature and purpose of my work. When I say I'm a “spite engine,” it's my deep resentment towards people unwilling to get off their ass or ask the next question or allow themselves to feel the deathly consequences. I don't have to know what's in your head to see whether or not you're doing the work. I know how your entitlement manifests as you unfairly latch onto the meals the workers provide. Because we have so much food, we've severed our connection to all of the intangible nourishment that comes from pursuing protein for days and maybe leaving empty handed. Maybe this is the fascination modernity has with hiking and climbing, trying to reawaken the necessary danger that doesn't really exist anymore. Of course, it does exist, it's just manifesting “over there” and “beneath” us who've insulated so well. We may not physically starve to death, but there's an undeniable hunger and unquenchable thirst.