The Holodeck
This is my desk.
There are some drawers of junk on the left side and yet more drawers beyond that. There’s also a bed to the right — I don’t sleep there, but I often put my stuff there too. I am ashamed to say it is frequently this messy.
But this disaster-zone of wires, papers, office supplies, and electronics is my place. I don’t even have the rest of the room; my younger brother has the other desk and the floor for working and spreading his stuff around.
Through 11th and 12th grade, I had this massive 2.1 speaker system from the early 2000's and two different bricks of laptops that couldn’t run without constant AC-adapter life support. I really had desktop workstations without the posture-preserving benefits of actual desktop workstations. That’s all gone now, but more on that later.
The past two years of my life, I have spent a disproportionate amount of time and done the majority of my work at this desk, in front of a computer. Get a cup of tea, put on some SoundCloud DJ mix, fire up my laptop, and get cracking. Here, I got in the zone, whether I was working, socializing, or just surfing the web. It was my supersuit, the means by which I became my best.
But more importantly, my desk was my window to the rest of the world. I learned about technology, politics, philosophy, and the world from here. I learned about racism, sexism, LGBTQ discrimination, and mental illness from here. I saw gay marriage become legal and watched Ferguson burn from here.
This was my virtual reality system — no headset required.
My neck, my eyes, and my wrists are not happy about that, because in the end, I was just spending all my time on a laptop. It’s not healthy — but it’s better than the alternative:
Ignorance.
I am a cis-male, heterosexual, upper-middle-class Indian-American with no mental illness. I live in the depths of suburbia, surrounded by subdivisions and new cars. I could ignore the biggest problems in the world. I could say they’re solved, or that they never were problems, because they are not my problems.
Out of sight, out of mind.
That is privilege: the freedom to ignore major problems. That is the disease. And the remedy is choosing not to ignore the rest of the world. The remedy is reading the news, reading activists’ blog posts, learning about other people’s lives. The remedy was my desk. My aching wrist, by comparison, is a minor side effect.
Okay, now I’m talking to you, the reader. You probably have privilege in some way — the capacity to ignore problems, the capacity to see the status quo as perfectly acceptable. And as long as you see no reason to change the world in that aspect that gives you privilege, you are impeding the progress of society.
Let me rephrase that:
If you are white and you are not reading about systemic racism, you are part of the problem.
If you don’t have depression and you are not reading about depression and suicide, you are part of the problem.
If you are cisgender and you are not reading about transgender rights, you are part of the problem.
Because although doing nothing but love and support people feels nice, you’re fundamentally doing nothing. I’m not saying you need to join a protest — not yet, at least — but check your privilege. And by “check your privilege,” I mean read about issues that not your issues.
Vox’s card-stack explainers are good places to start. From there, read blogs, follow activists on Twitter, keep learning. Once you see problems, you can’t unsee them. You notice sexist comments, you’ll hear people perpetuate stereotypes you know are wrong, and you’ll notice yourself do double-takes upon seeing black men in suits.
Knowing is half the battle.
But back to my desk. I’m leaving it in a week. My new speaker system is wireless and portable. My new laptop is light and has a fantastic battery life. I’m moving to college, where my friends are a five-minute walk away, where I have a massive library to explore, where incredibly smart professors have hours of their schedule literally dedicated to talking to students.
It might not be where history is being made right now, but it’s not as isolated from the world as my hometown. And it’s about time I stopped reading about the world online and started living in that world.
