Day: October 18, 2017

Recently I’ve come to a crossroads in my life where I am having to consider why I am making the choices I am making–both professionally and in my home life. What is driving these choices? Is it fear? Love? Something far less binary? I believe the answer is something far less binary. Often I’ve broken the world down into the idea of giving and receiving love as the main impetus for why we do anything in life. More recently that turned into a binary dynamic when my partner introduced me to the idea of fear as a driving impetus. Perhaps it is not one or the other but more of a scale in which both emotions trigger a response.

Take for instance my desire to move. This is driven, on the surface, by practicality. I want to be closer to the people I love and I want to bring my kids closer to the things they need and love. Below the surface the argument is driven by more basic emotions. If I am closer than I get to spend more time with my partner, because neither of us has to waste as much time getting to the other. If I remain far away the time I get with my partner may continue to dwindle. Now this is both love and fear. The scale tips more strongly towards love in this case, because it is a desire-driven situation.

The job situation is more fear-induced. I want to leave my job because I am not part of the community and feel like I’ve become so far removed from the community and created key enemies such that I will not ever be a full part of that community. I also want to leave because I want to finish my career at this level where I started my career at this level and give something fundamental and all encompassing back to the people and place that took a chance on me. I feel like I am prepared to offer that now in a way my younger self was never capable of. That is love. While I would only leave my job to return to the starting point, I believe fear still wins out, because not feeling part of a community is a powerful feeling.

 

So we survive.

We do everything that is required of us. We move forward. We fight, claw, bite, scratch against the tide of overwhelming responsibility. We stare into the disappointment of lives that aren’t the ones we dreamed up as children. We stare at news broadcasts and internet memes that remind us how scary and ridiculous all of this is and yet we rely upon the somber seriousness of our lives to provide our lives with gravity–to tether us to these earthly responsibilities and habits designed largely to lock us into lives of modernity and mundanity.

I have ceded too much of myself to algorithms.

I watch them infect every moment of my network existence. They’re in my mail, creeping around in tiny letters proclaiming a better solution to this or that. They paint the edges of web pages with their certainty that the handful of items I looked at out of curiosity are everything that I need to continue my day. I grow impatient with the reminders of what I bought two years ago and certainly need to buy again and again.

I am not from this world.

I’m from the time when Knight Rider was king and a computer was a new-fangled device that you plugged into a Television. I’m from a time when we still said television; when we needed such things to watch shows. The internet wasn’t ubiquitous in my now. We plugged computers into phones with handles and cords. We played video games that didn’t look like real life or even try to mimic that. We told stories in books and magazines and made mixtapes. We loved conversations where we could see each other smile. We held hands and ran through the streets. At night we sat around and told each other stories. on the edge of cities there were fires and we sat around those and drank and sang and listened to music. In concerts we lit flames to signify our affection and togetherness.