Social Mania. Also Depression, Distraction, Motivation, David Foster Wallace, Albert Camus, and Other Subjects

"For believers, no explanation is necessary. For nonbelievers, no explanation is possible."

        Is it normal to be distracted? What is it about those days of ineffectiveness, those days of sloth that make us so resentful of our lives? We get up, we glug glug our cups of coffee, then we shove off to our place of employment begrudgingly, or if we are lucky, with some sense of inspired optimism. At the end of the work day, we bust out the door with the setting sun tickling our eyes and we experience that euphoric sense of freedom, of limitlessness, of potential that the evening might bring...
        But this brings us only a temporary joy because when we get home what do we do? Well, a wide range of banal but necessary tasks that we've been putting off; errands and the like, and then we get home with just enough daylight left to cook dinner and melt away in from of the Television. Why do we continue this cycle? Routine and comfort.
        Look, I thought freeing myself from the shackles of full-time servant work in the city would allow me the time and stress relief necessary to achieve some real personal goals. I was (and still am) so over the city. And while I'll admit that freeing myself from said useless drudgery has allowed me to accomplish a great deal this past year, I still feel so small. So is it me? Am I the type of person that is resentful of his own existence just because I haven't achieved some vague, abstract version of "success"? No I don't think so. But success would sure be nice.

        Is that what being a true artist is about?! Suffering with yourself until you vomit out something (hopefully) profound, relatable and consumable? Are we all doomed to live our own Dostoevsky Hell in order to escape ourselves? Am I simply impatient, or just outright untalented; or both?!
        Or perhaps I am human, perhaps longing for routine and seeking the comfort of sloth and lazy entitlement is just a part of every day life. In this culture of Netflix binges, in the thralls of the never ending Facebook feed of people I barely give a sh!t about...I sometimes find myself a helpless addict. It's not because I am useless, or evil or anything like that, it's because I actively silence the voice that says "Hey, you should probably not lose yourself in another YouTube hole, and rather dig into your creative process instead. You know, the only thing in your life that gives you any sense of joy or fulfillment?" That. Why are you putting that version of yourself so far into the background?"  We have to constantly battle that inclination to indulge our sense of stagnancy. Our id knows what we like: safety. But our ego is constantly pinching us to remind us of our wasted potential, our escape and isolation.

        It's because growing, in any sense, is a risk. It's scary, and takes effort, and distractions, however non-nutritious, can protect us from having to face that growth. That thing that might bring us to the next level, the next tier of being, the next plain of existence we know we belong on, or as Neitzche puts it: "Becoming the Ubermench," is put on hold, and consumable distraction enables the numbing passivity that prevents us from being who we are. That's why high rates of depression are correlated with high rates of drug use (heroine), that's why the male suicide rate is so high when industries evolve into no longer needing manual labor. Because distraction is so readily available, and the craving to be comfortably numb is so happily indulged. The search for meaning is pacified. Ennui.

        I know I know, it all sounds so daunting and I often receive criticism from my friends and family to not be so hard on myself. This is completely valid and offers me peace-of-mind, especially when I get that same "You should be writing" tick in the back of my head on holidays or special occasions or family events. This is the other side of the extreme. It's okay to enjoy life every now and again but I feel so f@cking guilty when I'm not writing. Which I suppose is a marvelous thing because it means that I'm aware that I'm not doing the thing that I was meant to be doing. This is a good sign. Also, especially in a country and time as this one, I can find some sense of empowerment in knowing that it is UP TO ME AND ONLY UP TO ME to make that change.   
You already know the thing that will change you for the better...you're just frozen. Unfreeze.
   
SOCIAL MEDIA: Compare, Compete, Judge, Repeat.


You cannot stop people from indulging in their sense of vindicated societal dread. Truly you can only, within your own heart choose to battle with it, or succumb to it. Change (societal or personal) is an inevitable, sometimes necessary fact of life, but do not let that fact stop you from finding some peace and contentment with the here and now.

        One of my music teachers once told me "Colin, you're not a guitar player until you can take apart a guitar and know the name of every piece of which you put back together. " Okay, so I'm paraphrasing, but essentially what he was telling me is that if you want to dedicate your life to something, you better know your sh!t inside and out. You better eat, sleep and breath the thing. You better make sure that the thing you dedicate your life to is something that without it, your life would be void of meaning. I suppose this is why I've joined an online review site: To work on my writing craft and formulate opinions, yes, but to also understand the value of constructing stories. Sure, I'll be reviewing media and offering subjective opinions, but my aim, rather than gleefully deconstructing something with salty undertones, will be to better understand the art of structure and be inspired by others speaking their creative voice.

Unrelated:
        I found myself asking some very cynical, perhaps jaded questions of myself this afternoon before stomaching the notion to sit down and write:
        Why do we seek out wisdom from pampered celebrities whose only true wish is to be worshiped? Why do we give platforms to people that pander and tweet empty platitudes and truisms? Why are we given such easy answers to such complex solutions? Why do we find ourselves aware of the problem but are always one step away from solving them? Simple. We are seeking for answers in all the wrong places, because the wrong places are presenting themselves to us in every dark corner throughout our day. And those voices are loud; too loud. We have the power to silence these monsters, leaving less room for the toxicity of drama and opening ourselves to the noble virtue of reason and peace.

The FACEBOOK Monster

Writing is constantly having to 'reel it in' and stop being a spectator for the majority of your day. This is not to say that being a spectator is a bad thing. Absolutely not. BUT, (again, I'll return to this theme) be mindful of the things that you are allowing to consume your time. Your time is all you have, dear reader. Your attention is a precious thing. This is something I have struggled with immensely. You see social media has more or less conditioned people (me) to be a spectator throughout my day. Their format is so vapid and dangerously addictive, especially when you really let it take you. Scrolling, scrolling, There's someone you knew back when your life had such promise and vigor. Look at me now, so ugly and so alone. There's that professor you so admired back in your junior year...oh Jesus, he's posted another insipid video about micro-aggression with a quippy, overly enthused headline. Dude, didn't you lose your job because you had an affair with a student? Oh, there's my very first girlfriend...she's aged terribly. Cute kid though... and she's a...really passionate Trump supporter. Oh and there's all her friends cussing her out for being evil. Geez I feel like I should say something in her defense, I mean I don't agree with this post at all but this is a toxic witch hunt...naaa, I've lost interest. I'm about sick of politics for the day anyways. OH! A celebrity scandal! A video of a CUTE CAT! Holy hell, it's been 25 minutes and I've literally done nothing. Nothing. I don't deserve the precious gift that is existence.  
        I wrote an article recently reviewing South Park's new episode where they mercilessly tool on the immoral corporatism of Mark Zuckerberg. They turn Zuckerberg into this weird caricature of a video game boss and it's absolutely hilarious. He takes the very literal embodiment of what I now refer to as the Facebook Monster. It's in our homes, in our beds, it's waiting for us when we get out of the shower. And it's our fault, we invited it into our lives so it's not going anywhere. It's very plain to me from listening to interview after interview of celebrities crushed by the weight of fame and public opinion and over exposure to the mob...that A. none of us need any of this. and B none of us really want it either. We are all left so empty after our brief encounter with the Monster, but it keeps us coming back with little notifications that are scientifically engineered to "keep us playing." A playful little token, a reward, a lie that lets us think for one brief moment in our visit to the Meta-verse that somebody gives a sh!t. But then why do we still feel so empty, so unsatisfied?
        Maybe if I keep scrolling I'll find something that will really scratch my itch. I can write later tonight. After dinner. And after a couple episodes of The Office.    
        Unfulfilled, empty addiction from unwavering technological leaps is precisely the thing that David Foster Wallace was concerned about in is Magnum Opus: The Infinite Jest. The Infinite Jest being the title of a film made that is so perfectly done, once you see it, you never ever want to do anything else.

        Don't wait for permission. Don't keep that Facebook mindset where you just watch sh!t go by and let things bother you until you just lash out on some comment section. And I also don't want you to take from this "Hey, you're right, I'll be more active on my Facebook, that will bring me more fulfillment. No. F@ck that, it won't. It will buy you temporary acknowledgement from your smug group of 12 sh!tty people that actually follow you. Donate your time to something better. All of Facebook is passive. It's not real. Don't live a passive life, live a bold one. The bold ones are the successful ones. People want to guilt you into being passive, to stifle your brilliance, to shout you down or nay-say. The loudest voice among them though? You, muthaf@cka, so don't let people with slave mentality convince you that you aren't virtuous if dare to overcome adversity and make something of yourself.

Sometimes when I'm out writing in cafe's like I am today, I get distracted with the fearful anxiety that not only my writing, but life itself, is pointless. So yeah. That's always fun. Sometimes I turn that energy into more writing, but sometimes the dread is so powerful that I can only curl up into a ball and either listen to music or watch YouTube. This morning I did both: After some light chords behind smooth, harmonic voices, I turned to the tube because I had nothing to read in my bag. Sometimes I use dread as a muse and other times I use it as an excuse to wallow and feel sorry for myself and the doom of humanity. It is what it is. Soren Kierkegaard talks about this dread paradox thusly: "dread is a sympathetic antipathy and and antipathetic sympathy," meaning simply: dread is a desire for what we fear and a fear of what we desire. It's a snowball of anxiety that traps you and distracts you from who you really are. You're funny, you're kind, you're curious and smart and motivated. Or at least you once were. Remember?

"The really important freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline. and being able to truly care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad, petty, unsexy ways, everyday. That is real freedom. That is being educated and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting. The rat race. The constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost some infinite thing."
- David Foster Wallace

 DFW also brings up what he calls an an old cliche, but I call a juicy piece of observational wisdom that applies to this mad, technological age:

"The mind is an excellent servant, but a terrible master."

 So we have to live our lives as though we have control over these thoughts, even though that is an illusion in itself. Take these rambling writings for example. I do them as unplanned exercises (sometimes with intent to review media, but again it's an exercise) for my writing chops. Upon sitting down to write, I may have an idea about the subjects I'd like to touch upon, but nothing ever exists as specific as it does until I breath life into it; until I allow my mind to wander and my fingers to type. So what is it that you are trying to breathe life into? As a creator, your thoughts can imprison you if you do not find the time to sit and explode every now and again. Our thoughts can very easily become the master as life continues to be thrust upon us, and day by day we feel that the world rotates around the sun with such pristine purpose, yet our existence, without some purpose, can feel completely erroneous. So, if I may throw out a little didactic witticism: We must identify the sun within our own life, and we must find the rotation that works best for us, and keeps our world on access, in balance, in harmony.
        "In the adult life," DFW says, "there is no atheism." So what he is saying is that we are all creatures of worship, so it is up to us to pick a God (capitol G) that actually has some substance. Are their morals and ethics and codes to your God, your purpose, your life? There are, of course, both good and bad gods (small g). Maybe you worship money, sugar, or that feeling you get when you refresh your phone and that little red notification invites you to indulge the illusion that you are important to someone (you aren't, or if you are, it's temporary).  
     "It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience," he says. "Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly...worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out."


**Let me digress for a moment and tie in some other famous people's wisdom while on the subject of celebrities...

Seinfeld's humor of exposing and over-analyzing humdrum, everyday events are timeless. The combination of "Oh my goodness I've been in that situation a million times and never thought of it that way," added with the fact that the characters' reactions are always ones of selfish indecencies which expose our own selfish reactions--it's perfect. ,We all have our group of friends and sure, you probably know at least four or 5 guys/gals that are wayyyy funnier than that Jerry guy who had a sitcom like 20 years ago right? They could easily do what he does and they've even made those observations before! Exactly. We all have. But none of us have the guts to stand up there and present those very clearly HOKEY DAD JOKES in font of anybody, let alone millions of people! His delightfully pedestrian observations on the everyday fly-buzzings of our lives are so relatable because they are so obvious in terms of subject matter. What he does though, better than everyone else out there, is respect the craft and formula of joke telling. He delivers in a way that is so essentially "everyman", so monotone, so flat, so, pedestrian, then he walks you into the most involved, eloquently worded scenario where you feel like you're sitting comfortably on a friend's couch, and laughing your @ss off as he so urgently cusses out the airline pilot or the bank teller or the stupid commercial or cussing out yet another insipid award show ...and that's the key right there: urgency. Everything maters to Seinfeld. Nothing is trivial. Even laundry is a cause to be theatrical in the mind of Seinfeld. It is in our banal, frustrating routines that we can encounter the most rigorous challenges...Seinfeld chooses to dissect these moments with whit and observational, judgmental humor that--as far as sitcoms go-- none can rival.** 

David Foster Wallace recognizes those frustrating little errands, obligations, and obstacles too. They weighed on him during his brief time in this existence. But he was able to turn those thoughts into poetry and raw lessons.

This speech by David Foster Wallace 
     



Putting An End to Crippling Dread and Depression Derived from Helplessness.

A favorite philosopher and novelist of mine, Albert Camus in his "Myth of Sisyphus" begs us to accept our fate, and understand that the drudgery of Sisyphus is inescapable...up, up, up, he pushes and pulls and sweats and toils with that bolder until he finally reaches the top of the hill, only to watch the bolder fall back down again. This is of course meant to illustrate the utter futility of life's struggle. But what Camus offers us is a simple twist: Imagine as Sisyphus pushes that boulder up the hill, he has the biggest, silliest, warmest of grins on his face. He loves the challenge, he wouldn't want to be anywhere else in the world than where he is right now. And when he reaches the top only to watch the bolder come plummeting back to earth? Why, he lets out a bout of hearty, melodious laughter! It's a moment of sheer joy in the accomplished ridiculousness. It's what he had been looking forward to the whole way up. It's an earned moment of reflection on a job well done. It's no longer a story of witless drudgery, it's an empowered sense of duty and a loving embrace of the mundane yet necessarily journey uphill. It is the embracing of Nietzsche's Amor Fati (the love of fate), the enjoyment of Aristotle's talos, and reinforced by Kierkegaard's Ethical Mode of existence .   

        Of course, we are only humans. And sometimes the mundane is f@cking dogsh!t and we know in our hearts that we deserve more, but we aren't there yet. So I think the exercise is to get you to see that even when life feels completely futile and your dreams so out of reach...you DO have a choice...you can dread the struggle, refuse it and break down into nothing, or you can lean into it, and enjoy every step of the way as you push that bolder up the hill. Sure, some days will be dreadful and tiresome, but some days will seem easier and easier if you approach it with a positive outlook and embrace the challenge.
        Think of your goals as that mountain. Let's take something concrete like mine, I want to be a published novelist. The novel is the bolder. The act of writing it is the climb, and finishing/ publishing/ sharing it will be at the top of this particular mountain. I can choose to dread it, choose to put it off, choose to detest it...and that would be misery. In fact, I don't know why I'd want to write a novel in the first place if both the idea and process of it were such hell. So that's a telling sign right there as far as your goal is concerned: is it something that brings you joy? Now I'm not suggesting that every time I sit down to the computer rainbows shoot from my fingers and every word scribbled is a piece of some profoundly orgasmic manifesto of divinity. No f@cking way. I wouldn't be trailing off in this mindless blog if every time I sat at the computer I had "it," I don't. We're not all Charles Bukowski. Sometimes that mountain is daunting as all hell.
        But what I do know is that every time I have a good, engaging thought, every time I bridge a gap between plot points, every time I find a nice character moment, I'm filled with a sense of joy and fulfillment. Sure, pushing that bolder is heavy, but nobody else but me is strong enough to bear my own burden, and there is something beautiful about that. We all have that bolder (or that cross if you prefer the Christian narrative) to carry. We have the choice of what that bolder represents, and we have the freedom to enjoy the climb.    


Some random thoughts:


This blog is unapologetic about how self-indulgent it is, and I kind of like that. If something isn't self-indulgent, it's probably shallow and safe and formulaic. The self is far more interesting thing than any conglomerate or system can concoct anyways. Or maybe I'm fetishizing the individual.

I don't like guns, but I'd like to own one.

Sometimes big ideas make you feel small (macro) and the best way to alleviate that stress is to focus on a small and simple (micro) joy. February is a torturous month of wet spring and earthly smells and birds chirping and also bitter cold snow and death. I haven't written poetry since the summer.

I get an irrational lump in my throat when sirens go by. As if crimes I've never committed have caught up to me and the boys in blue have come to enact frontier justice on this sensitive sad fool.

Hope is for those that believe the fire will burn itself out before it reaches them, faith is for those that dive into the fire headlong, confident that they can survive the scourges and come out safely on the other side. I may have come up with this, or I can contribute it too my my over exposed sense of cryptomnesia.

I haven't seen a good television show in a long time because I wrote my own and have since been rejected by the powers that be. But I'd like to invest time into a show, but there are too many, and the burden of choice is overwhelming. So I just watch porn instead.

I haven't been to the gym since October, but I don't get fat. I get weak. Weak like a tired dog in an alleyway desperate to feast out of the garbage.

I start to believe in God again when I hear a really pretty song.
Certain people fill me with murderous rage, and that's not very Godly.

If you don't tell the stories you want to tell, then someone else will control the narrative, and they might not tell it as well as you can, and that will fill you with a resentment so powerful that you'll start to hate everyone around you for daring to want to have a pleasant day, or for wishing you to have one too. The fear is worth overcoming.  Even when you think it's cheating to be a vacuum that just spits out a collection of thoughts, it's not. It's just research. Tell the story. If you don't control the conversation, someone will misrepresent your argument; someone will speak for you that doesn't represent you. Be loud.

I'm hyper aware of the power technology has over me when I wake up in the morning. It's very easy to base your whole day around whether or not someone texts you back. It's very easy to ignore people but impossible to ignore your phone.

It's very easy to get discouraged. It's very common to feel that everyone hates you. It's the enlightened person that understands that not everyone is going to like you and there is nothing you can do about it other than smile.

People aren't commodities.

Art is not pointless. Pointlessness is not Art.

"Don't ever let fear turn you against your playful heart."- Jim Carey


-CjM