Nihilism: The Teenager's Escape from Reality

3.27.18  - 5004 Cody Street ~ 9:10 AM MT

            I’m starting to write at 9 today, which is a step in the right direction.  Once I spend a few minutes or hours sucking at the teat of mindless information it’s difficult for my mind to focus and get back on track.  When I first wake up my mind may be groggy but it’s the most clear that it will be all day. 

            Yesterday I helped a friend, let’s call him Mark, paint a room and we talked about everything from nostalgic video games (Link’s Awakening for Gameboy) to what animal we’d want to be reincarnated as (some type of bird).  He talked about that he doesn’t have much time to do anything and the time that he does have he enjoys being by himself and gaming, proclaiming that he has “no responsibilities to anyone but himself.”  At the time it seemed very appealing, carrying an air of total freedom, but I can’t help but think that it’s ironically one of the reasons he’s depressed.  He often uses it as a rationalization for sleeping in until noon and he never applies himself.

            I remember when I used to sleep in that late and I’d feel crummy.  It was tough to feel good about myself when I wasn’t leaving the stamp of my uniqueness on anything on any given day.  Floating through life is fine and all, but at some point I thought, “this is how you wake up middle aged never really doing anything.”  Pleasure and leisure can only get you so far but fulfillment lies in a putting in a concerted effort at something that you don’t mind doing over and over again, improving upon it every time.  When you sleep through the morning and coast through the afternoon, the only thing you get in exchange is whatever you’re dreaming about. 

            Heather helps me by pulling my productivity towards her end of the spectrum because that’s her default.  It’s also why we’re good together: because we bring each other towards a happy equilibrium.  Too much of anything is detrimental, just take either Mark or Heather by themselves—unhappy and caught in a cyclical pattern of what they know and what they feel comfortable doing.  I could definitely use some work getting pulled to the side of productivity but I tend to think I hover more around the center than either of them. 

            Mark also lets his cynicism paralyze his action in the form of anti-capitalistic nihilism.  He’s not wrong—it’s just too much for a human mind to carry with it, especially if you’re going to exist within the capitalistic structure and enjoy some of the luxuries it provides.  Perhaps I’m too cut and dry or I’ve bought into the system as well, but when you hold beliefs as strong as him I think that you have to either separate entirely, removing yourself from participation in the system as much as possible; or you come to grips with the futility of overthrowing it, accept the benefits it awards you, and you try to combat it in the most productive way that you can as an unique individual.  I don’t think he believes in some widespread Marxist revolution to overthrow the owners of the means of production (I used to) but I don’t see any value in nihilism.  It’s like a teenagers way out of the existential crisis of capitalism.

            My argument against nihilism is also the same one why I don’t harbor negative feelings towards people most of the time—because they don’t provide anything useful to me.  When you do things in life that have no positive purpose you are essentially keeping your needle close to neutral, perhaps even tilting towards the negative side of things, and I believe life is more than that.  You don’t have to achieve greatness, you don’t have to get a PHD or discover something new; all you have to do is try to leave the unique imprint of yourself somewhere everyday (with exception to intentionally hurting others), and try to err on the side of positivity. 

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. 

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.