The Existential Tug-of-War

3.21.18 - Various Locations ~ 1:41 PM -9:10 PM MT

            I just got out of TIPS training and despite the fact that the trainer was nice, I still think that the whole thing is a racket.  That being said, it was nice to clarify the accepted Colorado truths of hospitality: that you CAN serve someone without an ID and that the police CAN lie to you to entrap you.  The process was pretty painless on the whole.

            I followed it up with fries and a beer at Fate Brewing (highly recommend!) and proceeded to run five miles and climb for an hour at Earth Treks—my stomach felt somewhere between a washing machine and a college party—nonetheless, I powered through and managed to enjoy my calorie-burning.    

            I came home to eat the leftover Blue Pan Detroit-style-pizza (I say goddamn!) and watched a leaked video of Buffalo Bills wide receiver Zay Jones who was naked, trying to jump out of a 30th floor window.  

            Here comes the cliché, “athletes and celebrities are people too” that everyone says in unison when things like his happen. It’s sad that things have to come to this for us to remember the humanity of eachother.  I think the core takeaway of what happened with Zay is that mental health is not to be taken lightly, and that we have to be careful choosing the lens in which we see the world.  Who knows the way Zay has been looking through the glass but it’s clear that he’s hit a critical breaking point.  This is just a reminder that our mental health should always come first because the human mind is too powerful to be taken lightly.

            We don’t even know the extent of the capability of our brains yet we press forward with technology as if we can handle the perilous unknown that we are creating.  There will always be nostalgia for a simpler time but the time we find ourselves in is scarily precarious.  Our psyches are bombarded with information, temptation, and subversion almost every second of every day and we’re supposed to stay sane, confident, and working towards a worthy goal in life.  Not to mention that the information we’re being fed is intelligently crafted to manipulate or affect our very sensitive psyches.  Thus, it’s not a mystery when public figures meltdowns like this—the pressure for the average 21st century individual is enough—without the eyes of the world judging you 24/7.

            For most of us in the western world we lead relatively simple lives even though we long for more. Part of it is our culture of rampant consumerism and entertainment, but the other is that the human mind seems to long for acceptance, notoriety, and accolade.  We go to school, we find a job, and we hopefully find a partner and start a family and in between all of it time passes us by.  We wind up climbing into our death beds wondering where the time went watching the reel of our regrets on repeat.  I think that the human mind is confused, caught somewhere between the comfort of the simple and the ambition for innovation, getting yanked back and forth day-in-and-day-out in some sort of existential tug-of-war. 

                                              At least that’s how I feel sometimes.

            That’s why I focus on happiness in the now, assuring that Heather and I hash out our inner workings to the best of our abilities.  Our minds can be scary places and talking to others makes our own feel less alone.  Sharing intimate stories and thoughts reveals to the world that we are alike even though our insecurities tell us that we aren't.  Sometimes we need to silence the thoughts in our heads to let the words come from our lips to make us remember that we all suffer and that misery loves company. 

            Pain is inevitable in life, but the way we process and react to it, whether we share it or lock it up can make all the difference.  The lens in which we choose to view the world determines the reality before our eyes; let it be tinted with the courage to share the pain that stirs inside you: first for the benefit of yourself; and second for the benefit of mankind. 

"We Are What We Repeatedly Do"

2.25.18 - Brittany’s House off Independence ~ 9:46 AM MT

            Coming back from an Internet black hole, 30 minutes later, I’m finally putting some work in.  Its really hard for me to focus when there is so much content to consume, making it really easy to divert my attention to passive activities.  I’m grateful to have Brittany and Mike’s house to take refuge, although I wish their fireplace worked. 

            The thought that’s been bumping around my head is to unify all that I’ve been thinking about since studying philosophy in a non-fiction work about living a meaningful life in the 21st century.  My immediate response to my own thought is: who are you to say how to live a meaningful life?  To which I respond, I studied philosophy, Aristotle intensively, and have meaningful interactions day-in-and-day-out.  If you are what you consistently do, then what does that make the average American?  A consumer: products, food, entertainment--that is what our culture is known for. 

            I used to think about dismantling the ideology of businesses, how ethics should be enforced onto ad agencies and mega-corporations because it’s not “right” to manipulate the psyches of the masses to make a quick buck.  A realization on that idea is that the inertia behind the consumerist exploitation of the American population is so great and monolithic that it’d be like an ant standing in front of a tank rather than a person in Tiannamen square.  A disruption of the system through bureaucratic means not only sounds like an unconquerable uphill battle, but an exercise in futility.

            Instead, focusing on the tenet of Aristotle, you are what you constantly do, in order to have a meaningful life you need to make meaningful decisions.  You need to exercise discipline in your consummatory choices, recognizing the need for pain, for silence, for the higher cost of quality products to live a more meaningful life.  Unless you’re willing to live a meaningless, surface-level life, in which case that’s fine for you to Snapchat your days away, Facebooking until the screen on your phone burns your retinas.

            Aristotle’s tenet, then, is a phrase meaning that life is a pattern of decision-making.  It doesn’t need to be framed in good or bad decisions, but rather healthy or unhealthy ones.  We do not need to invoke a 21st century code of morality to live better lives, all we need is some science.      

Apollo Fields Wedding Photographers

3.12.18 - Bean Fosters – Golden, CO ~ 11:06 AM MT

It’s weird how a letter on a typewriter feels more real than a note typed into a word processor.  Something about the tangible ink slapped onto the page one neat character at a time that delivers finality to your words.  Typing on a typewriter forces you to arrange your thoughts in real time, creating a sense of emergency that nudges your mind to move forward rather than laterally. 

Once you organize the first few words of a sentence and you like them enough you put them down and you figure the rest out as you go.  Before you know it your fingers are splashing all over the keyboard and little tiny metallic pangs are echoing throughout the room until a delicate chime rings to delay the creative symphony for a few seconds. 

There is definitely something more present about typing on a typewriter.  On a computer with WiFi your mind is being torn to the sides, “come hang out in the periphery of the Internet where you won’t have to work so hard,” it calls to us.  But being lucid enough to arrange your thoughts with a focus where you can’t believe your fingers are actually moving with purposeful conviction feels like a submission to the magical creative element that eludes the amateur artist.  It’s funny that returning to a more primitive, real technology can trigger the magic that lives inside of us.

As I type this in Word Processor, I am constantly fumbling my thoughts, going back into my sentences and reworking them, never allowing my mind to uninhibitedly flow forward.  Real time editing grants me the godlike power to alter the creative process and assure that I don’t make any silly or clunky mistakes.  The problem with that is that it interferes with the free flowing creativity that is necessary to any worthy piece of work.  It would seem unnatural to see a painter go back over their work and erase a stroke of the brush.  When a painter dips their brush into a palate and splash it onto a canvas they mean it; when I write on a typewriter, plucking at the keys, I mean it. 

A real element is lost in the creative process when it lives in the electrons of a screen, separating our hands from our creation.  It is a similar transition in social media where we immerse ourselves in a world of appearances, a world that feels real, but isn’t.  It gives us this sense of partial familiarity because the importance of the real is lost in the robotic 1’s and 0’s of binary code. 

There’s nothing wrong with waiting for creativity to circle back around, sitting in discomfort as it orbits your mental grasp, just like there’s nothing wrong with admitting to something painful that’s happened in your life on social media.  But the electronic cursor that prods your mind, blinking in your face like a cruel mockery of your stagnant creativity is akin to the way that the world of positive appearances mocks your negative experiences.  A refusal to accept the real thrusts your existence into a world of appearances that seeks only to satisfy surface level gratification, ignoring the deeper concepts of our lives that wind up plaguing our minds into a cycle of consumptive passivity.

Allow pain to enter your mind and let seeds of creativity take on some water before you abandon their growth.  Simpler times seem nostalgic because our minds were more engaged, more responsible when we didn’t have crutches to carry us along in our lives.  It’s hard to argue for the welcoming of pain into one’s life, so think of it as an invitation to the real; a return to experience rather than appearance, because experience is where we derive meaning from and in the end we all want to lead meaningful lives.  Don’t let the electrons mock you into a passive life.  Move forward, not laterally. 

Happiness: A Focused Effort on Self-Improvement

It took me awhile to get in front of a keyboard today.  I'm still putting up the same obstacles between me and my writing.  A blank page forces me to come face-to-face with my potential and I sit and stare, like I'm waiting for a divine strike of inspiration. The thought of perfection paralyzes my hands and mind. The reality is that I just have to endure the pain if I want to be a professional writer.

I watched an interview with David Foster Wallace in an attempt to lure inspiration from the depths of my consciousness.  It still saddens me that a man with so much intellect and insight into the human condition took his life.  It saddens me to think about what else he could've contributed to the progress of humanity.

In the interview they spoke about the allure of drugs and entertainment and how they both provided a certain escape.  DFW linked these concepts to the ideology of self-gratification that pervades U.S. culture, where this hedonistic pleasure-center is constantly fed.  He touched on class as part of the problem as it is the privileged graduates holding Masters and Bachelors degrees that have the ability and affinity to engage in higher culture, while the uneducated are trapped in a cyclical poverty.  Let's face it - the endurance and focus necessary to read stuff like Infinite Jest is going to lose 9 times out of 10, even in educated circles.  The trick seems to be to expedite the transmission of self-developmental content in an engaging, inexpensive, and for lack of a better word, subversive manner.

A fulfilling life requires effort, discipline and thoughtful action, which are all products of self-development.  The problem is that mainstream media undermines all of these.  The passive satisfaction of our thoughts and desires renders the active life a laborious endeavor, devaluing the fulfilling process of work in favor of comfortable stupefaction.  Work has been an adversary to humans for millennia, but its stigma has grown exponentially since the dawn of the industrial age.

What would the argument for a life of fulfillment rather than comfort look like?  The Aristotelean aim was towards a happiness made possible by virtues like temperance, courage, friendship, honesty, etc.  The world we live in now subverts these virtues in the name of capitalistic enterprise; which means that our current system of values stands in opposition to our actualization of happiness and fulfillment.  We are given instruments enabling passive unhappiness and we are told that we are lazy, ungrateful leeches on the society.  MAYBE if we were given empowering tools rather than those determined by economic and capitalistic ends, we would be a more effective generation!  

This mostly sounds like entitled wishful thinking, but it's important for me to hash out these concepts.  Self-development is critical for lasting happiness and we live in a culture that undermines it around every corner.  Happiness and fulfillment require effort, discipline, and thoughtful action, which means that if want better lives, we need to make a concerted, focused effort on improving ourselves.