I also see the movers and shakers. The people, mostly white, mostly men, who want to leave their mark on the world. This is a much more common way of living, especially in America. It is easier in the digital age. If one makes a big enough noise or hoards enough cash for others to feel a shortage, one gets remembered. The world, both in individual instances and as a whole, is always undulating with change and progress. Problems are always arising and being solved. I think we, as a culture, are living in what will be seen, by history, as a particularly stupid moment in the human story. At least until we shed the idea of human importance. We rose out of energy's creation of living organisms, then we developed a bit of strange, isolated consciousness. Since then, we have been dealing with very human problems, and we don't see the limits of our own ambitions. At the moment we are experimenting with the benefits of attention. When we feel the boost in power that attention gives us, it makes us feel, in some skewed way, right. In the digital age, this has become addicting. So many of us look for any attention we can get, mostly through social media, and we put a lot of effort into this. Some of us have even realized that it doesn't matter whether this attention is positive or negative. Of course, the most disgusting examples of this phenomenon is our current commander-in-chief or any other reality television star who doesn't really create anything other than attention hoarding train wrecks of humanity.
It's cool, I'm not mad about it. I'm just trying to figure out where my own motivations fall. I've accepted the strange times I live in, I just want to figure out my own best course. I've experimented with a few different methods of feeling this connection. I've tried making digestible art, shows and movies and shit. But everyone is doing that, so it's not really something that makes much of a difference. I tried to do weird things with destructive behavior. I tried to take social media and use it as a venue for anti-establishment activity, strange performance-art style therapy. That was met with a lot of resistance and didn't do wonders for my own psyche, especially when I had a brush with people who were using the internet for really shitty stuff.
After a difficult but necessary reset (read: suicide attempt, recovery home, and destitution) I tried movement and action. I shook my old habits in such a way that many new ideas and routes were presented to me. This was productive, but it did not change my core, life takes more work than that. Not being able to keep the pace, I have slipped back into old patterns.
However, now I've got my mind in order, or, at least, made some significant progress, and I think the answers are coming. One of my shortcomings is my want for the next success or lesson, even at the expense of the moment. The solution, for me, is documentation without any hope for monetary, social, or spiritual reward. I've naturally begun to produce a running record of my own thoughts and creative impulses. I can actively look at how I feel in the moment, and then I can see the repetition, the things I obsess over and other ideas or motivations that should be a priority and are not.
I haven't had many ideas of what to do with any of this material. A lot of it would be stuff no one would have interest in even if I still had any online or print forum at my disposal. It's more like journal entries, or a big ol' 4th step. I used to think my purpose might be to document my progress from a slobbering drunk to an enlightened being, for the benefit of others. This is before I realized no one listens to anyone else when it comes to these matters, and I should just concern myself with myself and not worry about anyone else.
I don't really have any interest in trying to pursue money or fame anymore. So, I think I will continue to do what comes natural, and not do anything that doesn't feel right. There are still plenty of challenges and scary puzzles to face without the added worry of bank accounts or twitter followers. How this will manifest in the digital world, I think, will be the equivalent of me setting paper boats of content adrift in the digital river. I'm just going to start making all of my work available, in whatever format anyone would want. I feel like it's not an unfair tap of resources to carve out a little nest on the internet for all of my shit to live. If the Kardashians can live their bullcrap existence in the public eye, cementing their contribution, at least temporarily, on the sidewalk of humanity, I can use a few bytes of storage for my stream-of-consciousness.
My aim is that I can produce without any hope or pretense. It will just be. And with that lack of blemished motivation, I will empty myself, creating room for bigger and more interesting improvement. I will leave a record of myself in the flow of the collective. In this way, my contributions, however insignificant or arguably tangible, will become more real in my own experience. If nothing else, this will help me to achieve the kind of immortality previously reserved for great minds and now accessible to anyone, whether we judge an act 'great' or not. The subjectivity of worth and accessibility of tools have facilitated this, so I might as well make use of it. Many people have preached to the advantage of creation for creation's sake, and I'm now starting to see the benefit.
And I'm just not one for selfies and memes.
Sometimes I sound like a broken record. I am frequently unaware of this repetition. So, additionally, this work has helped me see the patterns in my own behavior and my own judgments, many of which are illustrated above and all of which I would like to break in order to find new paths.
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