Highlights
A guide to what’s important.
People ask why I write. The truthful answer is: I don’t know what else to do. I’ve already been doing it for a decade, and it’s how I make my money. Starting a new vocation doesn’t appeal to me. I like to avoid high-risk, low-reward effort at all times.
That’s not to say my writing’s great. It’s better (and more profitable) than my music — but in much the same way that a Toyota can scorch a Hyundai over a quarter-mile.
The first person to ever tell me my writing wasn’t any good — not my Twitter presence, which is not writing so much as it’s verbal drool — was someone very, very close to me. And it cut pretty deep. So I stopped writing, because the idea of doing something that actively turned off someone close to me is a fate worse than a thousand lashes. That probably makes me insecure, and makes the classic personification of an anxious attachment disorder. I won’t argue that.
That person left my life. So I started writing again. Because I was lonely and the idea of talking to people in real life scares me, especially when none of my Oxfords are ironed and I’m too busy quoting Chance the Rapper lyrics to actually be present in a conversation about gentrification.
So, here we are, writing about monsters that scare me. And, like the very best monsters in all the most thrilling films, the monsters we fear the most are the demons who hold us under their possession. So, this isn’t a proclamation of a moral high ground. Instead, it is an admission: I have a disease.
For what’s felt like an eternity, I felt a need to be heard. I felt a need to be seen. I was full of shit. And, then, I looked in the mirror and realized — in no small or uncertain terms — that I was the shit I was full of.
I was caught up chasing life’s small pleasures rather than really enjoying life’s small things. I was sharing too much of myself — the wrong parts of myself — and losing all sense of boundaries and perspective.
I suppose this series of writing is an atonement. Or a correction. Or an acknowledgment, at the very least. Whatever it is, it’s all I have: Like I said, I don’t know what else to do.
Truth is truth. The rest is just marketing. And, whereas creativity used to be a distillation of the truth, pretty much all creativity is marketing now.
Creativity is whoever created the site “Fuck Yeah, Sharks.” It’s so innocently subversive, approachable and remarkably human. A meditation on nature’s awesome power and beauty, and our inability to fully understand it beyond superlatives and cussing.
Creativity was once Facebook. You could draw on someone’s wall. You could come up with quirky names for yourself. You could send up your political views, and play off-brand Candy Crush-style games.
Creativity was once Twitter. You could pretend you were a couch, or an elevator in a New York investment bank, and say some really, really bizarre shit that people would let marinate a bit, and find amusing.
This wild-wild west of Social Media no longer really exists. We’re all our real selves. If a real self even exists. What we really are is distorted, homogenized pictures of our ideal selves. Our real names and real pictures now stand-in as avatars for a certain ethos. An airbrushed, photoshopped, Instagrammed approximation of ourselves at our very best. Forget ‘Nique, We are all The Human Highlight Film now. And the better the camera, the better the life.
Our friend list, photo albums and shared links are all carefully curated to represent and reflect ourselves at our most desirable, most likable, most True To Ourselves(TM). And, occasionally, that rare peek behind the curtain where we post a candid of ourselves, or a confessional blog post, where we explain the virtues of vulnerability and authenticity, even those pieces are edited to death and/or given an unvarnished black-and-white sheen to reflect the starkness and seriousness with which we wish to be taken.
This is not finding beauty in the boring. This is projecting beauty in the boring. This is not finding joy in the everyday, this is broadcasting joy in the everyday. Nobody is as happy as they appear. Nobody is as successful as they are for the five minutes out of the 24 hours each day at which they peek. That 483-like profile picture — the best of the 61 selfies you took in that ten-minute span — washed in the Lark Filter is canned validation bottled in a vacuum. This is not reflection, this is distortion.
To simply be aware, and not to alter, is the truest path to love. And the quickest escape route from the hamster wheel of “the pursuit of happiness.” Turning our Smartphone into a screening app through which we can exhaustively filter, delete, edit and tune out the life we used to see through our own eyes and process in our own hearts is the opposite of awareness. It’s performance art. Except without the art.
Now, we’re caught on a mill of making merely being awake and aware feel like more work than it used to be. Somewhere, we stopped telling people to say “thank you,” and start “practicing gratitude.” Somewhere, we stopped telling people to “shut the fuck up” and started telling people to “practice mindfulness.” We need to stop trying to use our minds and our phones as tools to enjoy our lives. We should just be.
I examine my feelings about it, and wonder what story people are trying to tell the world about themselves. What picture we are trying to paint. But, most importantly, why we feel the need to paint that picture at all. I think it’s possible we do it to feel a little less lonely, and a little more permanent.
Our lives are inherently lonely. No one can ever really know the 24x7, underneath-the-skin version of you. The sharing that’s meant to bring us closer to others actually removes us further from intimacy.
Our lives are also inherently transient, and everything feels more important than it is. Our lives are tiny and random, like bees or sharks. It is through our own deluded sense of self-worth, our ego and our ambitions that we convince ourselves our lives are these grand, big things worthy of parades and newspaper clippings. By everyone’s false belief in their own exceptionalism, we’re burying ourselves in a sea of sameness and monotony, and suddenly it’s impossible to gauge what’s truly big from what’s truly small. It’s all become mediocre basic life dressed up in the trappings of psuedo-art, as the Venn diagram between brands and people continue to blur and overlap.
We are not turning things into art, we are turning things into objects of others’ envy or appreciation. It becomes harder and harder for us to trust what we see, but rather than consciously question what’s in front of us, we bury our beliefs and laugh off our own skepticism — and either losing or feigning interest in absolutely everyone and everything.
This obsession with participating in, and lording over our own micro-empires in, the grand Shareable Content Marketplace(TM) has left us all in poverty of spirit, enslaved to our egos, stagnated in our personal growth, and obsessed with our image. It is a sickness, a deficit of virtue, and a misappropriation of our grandest truths: love, change and the present.
Perhaps I am just lamenting awareness as a dead technology, or thinking
that perhaps reality is now just too impermanent and lonely to deal with anymore. I don’t know a lot anymore beyond what the mind watches and what scalds the heart.
Most of my writing is still shit, but I have fun making it. This is the only way I make sense of the Earth because I make sense of it through my heart and not through my mind. I don’t care what it does in the Shareable Content Marketplace(TM). Not everything that I do has to be competitive, not everything is a contest to be won or a truckload of likes to be garnered. These are misguided Western values cloaked in capitalism, barbarism and vanity.
The creation is the beauty itself. The process is the point. There is no better or worse, just real and unreal, truth and lies. The real and the true are who we are. The unreal and the lies are what we present. Love is awareness of all this; love is not an engagement photo.
The only way we beat back the twin-barreled firing squad of loneliness and impermanence is by staying healthy, and doing things that matter to us, with the people we love. That’s how we live a full, if tiny, life.
My only life goals are to see the sun often, and drink my coffee black while it’s out. And then drink my whiskey straight under the stars. My happiness is not material. I can’t get it or achieve it, and it’s not exclusive to me. My writing is how I pass the time. It’s how I feel less lonely and how I try to achieve my own trite version of immortality. My words will live on long after I’ve gone, because the Internet — created by man to ostensibly make us all a little less lonely inside — is for fucking ever, until the cyborgs and/or Donald Trump nuke us all.
You are not the person you were. You are not the person you will become. Untethered from the weight of the past and the future, the present is all we have. Which means who we were, who we are, and who we will be never really exist outside of our own memory or ego.
Stop cutting to the highlight film. Go enjoy the game.
