[1191] One More

There’s a part of attempting to accomplish something I don’t speak much about. It’s there before you start, while you’re doing it, and sometimes after you’re done. The language that arises is different at each stage, but it all centers around a fundamental question, “What’s the point?”

Figuring out “the point” is the work of tying your emotional reality to your actions. This is no small feat, particularly when so much of our modern existence is hijacked and smoothed over. In the past, if you didn’t immediately set to work, you’d starve, or freeze, or be eaten. Today? You can go months or years garbling your chemical systems about where to act as you slowly kill yourself moment to moment.

You can then try to supplement “the reasons” or the manner in which you get something done. This is the realm of apologetics. This is where you leverage language to justify. You “deserve” a lot in this space. It’s why you can spend a little extra on the indulgence, for the hundredth time, or forgo the difficult conversation that would cause you emotional distress. It’s where you try to ride reactionary momentum or a manic high. It’s the oddly comforting hug of a depressive episode.

I just got some clothes put away that have been sprawled out for weeks. I don’t usually have clothes sprawled out for weeks, and it was mildly emotionally taxing to navigate the chaos I was allowing. Until 20 minutes ago, the emotional weight of contemplating and engaging that task was trumped by an ambivalent attitude I was taking towards their impact. I was “too tired.” “It doesn’t matter.” “It’s not that serious.” “I’ll do it later.” All, just true enough to serve the purpose of delaying what I know would make me feel better.

I’m someone who likes to have something else going on while he’s engaged in mundane or time-consuming things. I want to drive with the podcast at 2x speed. I was hanging my band t-shirts while watching a Frontline episode about Tibet. I’m rarely watching TV without playing a phone game. I read “the classics” or about how to grow mushrooms while taking a shit. Time always feels like it’s running out, and the majority of what I wish I knew or experienced is something I wish I knew or experienced already. I’m, desperate, to “arrive.”

Intellectually, I know I never will. Emotionally, it happens with snapshot moments when I look at the area I just organized or thing I just built. It happens when I get my shows watched and sorted. It happens when I move one thing of a certain type to a place of other things like it. The “point” is the “act of organizing.” Will I ever rearrange my room in the perfect way? Of course not. Will I ever satiate my quest to watch “all” of television? Of course not. That I’m embedded into a medium and shuffling around its variables is the point.

“Shuffle” doesn’t mean something isn’t being or can’t be rendered destroyed. If I allow myself to get overtly wrapped into my TV shows, maybe that irreparably chips away at my desire and capacity to seek out other people. If I get consumed by an increasingly pathological desire to collect and sort, now the realm of “things” are telling the story of their power over me. What I’m invariably doing in my shuffle is trying to sort some confounding feeling that doesn’t allow me to sit pretty and get comfortable being “stagnant.”

I have evidence of my aberrant or “other” kind of nature literally surrounding me. I have home infrastructure I’ve built looking down. I have a dozen instruments inviting me to play. I have 9 screens each with their own ask for a certain kind of attention. I will, theoretically, never be able to “erase” the evidence of who I am or how I operate. That is, unless I stop. Unless I look around at what I have achieved and say, “Good enough.”

Now, for someone who feels stuck in amateur land making just enough out of the resources he allocates somewhat haphazardly, yeah, I have enough to “get by.” I can make shitty demos of music. I can put together decent wood work, especially if I bother to take my time. I can fluidly do a fair amount on my computer and in navigating software. I am perfectly capable of attempting to hunker down and save most of my money so I can see cheap shows occasionally, versus ones I’d kill for regularly.

It’s not real stability though. It’s not evidence of what I aspire to or would dream about. It’s treading water, getting lucky, and constantly crossing your fingers that it won’t go catastrophically wrong and erase everything. Real stability would be my job paying me at least twice as much as it does. It would be the barriers to running my non-profit being illegal to maintain by the monopolies that protect their access to your insurance and addictions. It would be a friend and family group not so selfish, exhausted, or exploited to engage in higher-order goals together. It would be a persistent practical goal that exists every day reasonably achieved through reasonably persistent effort.

Instead, we have, “Play the game this specific way indefinitely, or die.” You work, or you starve, or you become a leach in the minds of everyone wholly unsympathetic to your hunger. You accept what’s on offer because the punishment for defying and organizing you haven’t adequately prepared for. I’ve been hearing so much lately about how you “can’t give up in advance.”

What? That’s all I’ve watched people do my entire life. Give up to the complacent or complicit emotions. Give up to their gods. Give up to their bureaucratic overlords and technocratic oligarchs. Let’s occupy Wall Street, but not a goddamn history or finance book. Let’s scream that black lives matter, and give the keys to embezzlers. Let’s fight for $15 as though it wasn’t supposed to be $21 at the time, and even higher now.

I emotionally resist doing the “small” things in my life because I struggle to connect them to the bigger things. Before he went full fascist, I was compelled by the “clean your room” stuff of Jordan Peterson. It made sense to me to create a certain order in your own life before you presume to wish to tackle the larger mess. What are you supposed to make of that sentiment from someone who clearly hasn’t resolved their own abhorrent feelings with regard to power and control? Was that his desperate plea for a reality he doesn’t fundamentally believe in nor can ever realize?

My reframing involves elevating the “small” things into the big things. I’m not cleaning my room so I can, in fact, tackle the large things. I’m cleaning my room for it’s own sake. It makes me feel better. The better I feel, the less I feel tempted to apologize for fascist behavior. The less I want to lie. The less I want to escape and adopt a strident face as I decry my righteousness against your…whatever it is I pretend to know you’re doing. I want to organize my work because I want to enjoy more than resent how I spend my time each day, not because I want to eventually find myself in a zero sum epic battle with corporations where everyone on the planet gets unionized the day before I die.

There’s a vital distinction between “norms” and “policy.” When you make it normal to violate policy, you’ve broken a mechanism that might otherwise help to stabilize and hold accountable what you’re trying to organize. If you have a lot of high-minded ideas about your behavior, voting patterns, or hierarchy of concerns, but your norm is to eschew evidence or define honesty, nothing you say about how things are “supposed to” work makes sense. I think in order for me to remain basically coherent, I need digressions like this. I need to see my reasoning play out beat by beat. Am I making assumptions and judgments based on vibes to claim some broader factual truth? If so, hopefully incidentally and accidentally in a way that can be quoted and refuted.

I couldn’t even eat pizza and hang laundry until I wrote at least this much 5 hours ago. I’m back, not because I was empty or any less antagonized by thought slurry. I want to “get more done” with my day. I want to connect to it in a way that doesn’t have me reflexively resisting it, thinking it doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t be able to find the meaning behind what I’m doing if I wasn’t willing to look.