Dynamic Hypocrisy

There’s a weird thing with so-so jobs. Not bad jobs, but so-so jobs. Bad jobs piss you off. They put a fire in your belly to leave, and find something better. But so-so jobs are insidious. 

They aren’t too bad…they aren’t too painful…they aren’t too anything. But they still consume energy. You still have to put time and effort into it. But unlike a good job that rewards with positivity. Or even a bad job that make it obvious you’re in a pit. The so-so job just takes, and nothing else. There’s no feedback that you’re being drained. That there are a hundred tiny little nicks and scrapes (not even papercuts, you would have felt those.) 

For me, the worst is that they drain just enough to take away pleasure from other things. You’re suddenly a little too tired to go out. Or put in that extra effort because you had to deal with all those so-so things during the day. You don’t have as much attention or social energy for friends. 

It’s like a hole in your pocket, and losing a few coins every few days. You don’t notice them, but you always have less money than you thought you did.

I try to be hyper aware of so-so jobs. They’re much harder to spot. Because their signs is the detraction from everything else. The negative space of a painting making everything else a little less bright. Give me a bad job any day over a so-so one—those ones truly scare me.

There’s a service that will delete your old tweets (because those were from when nobody was following you.) Google Gmail doesn’t even talk about storage limits anymore. Snapchat measures in seconds. Flickr promises your photos will be there forever.

The tech world is starting to learn about duration and ephemera. In the beginning, there was the notion of permanence as the goal. Hard drives fail. Data corrupts. At the same time, the early pioneers were building the great library of knowledge, the internet. Why delete anything? Knowledge is precious. 

Fast-forward, a new category of services are built on the moment, the ephemeral. The antithesis to documentation, the moment is to be shared limited and is to disappear. 

So we are now backtracking through our archives, and adding the nuance of ephemera.

Facebook suffered bad PR over a non-event when users reported Facebook was leaking old private messages to public walls. Turns out the News Feed was just bringing up old posts. People forget how public and open they were in the beginning.

This notion of deleting tweets from when you didn’t have followers. The shifting context because of time and attention and audiences. It’s an intelligent realization that’s much more complex from the early days of “why not keep everything?”

But even this school of thought is nascent. Because it doesn’t capture the nuance of individualistic memory. 

There’s that one dude in your life. That dude simply remembers everything. Your birthday, his best friend’s childhood pet, the year we all went on spring break. It’s crazy how much he remembers. But crazier, is he also remembers what everyone did on spring break. He remembers the fourth shot that you didn’t. And you sorta wish he’d forget, but he can’t. His brain remembers.

On the other hand, you have another dude in your life. This dude doesn’t remember what he wore yesterday. He doesn’t remember why you gave him your keys to borrow. His mom yells at him because it was Mother’s Day last weekend. He already forgot why you gave him your keys already.

Everyone remembers different details and stories and experiences based on their memory capability and also desire. You might try really hard to remember your anniversary, but also work really hard to forget middle school. But middle school is also when you when your best friend. So you remember her. 

When someone deletes the tweet, they’re effectively deleting that memory for everyone at all points in-time for everyone. Or it’s like deleting all of middle school for everyone involved. But sometimes you want to remember a little piece of it. Or you want some people to remember a specific slice of it, and others with a different slice. 

It’s that nuance that I’ll be interested to see how the internet accounts for that.

1. Fear of heights
2. Fear of dolls that look to real, and will come to life, and kill me in my house.
3. Fear that I’m actually an idiot, and everyone’s just being nice

The first two are just things I’ve built my life around avoiding, and have been going just spiffy. I just let other people change light bulbs on ladders, and walk quickly away from particular thrift store aisles.

The third one though…it’s an insidious one. Because it’s a fear of something that only happens when you’re not around. The whispering I imagine is purposely so I don’t hear. And snickering, I assume there’s snickering. 

But unlike the first two fears that I can happily avoid, this fear has to be dealt with. Because the things I enjoy doing require me to believe that I’m good enough to them. To be creative. To be helpful. To add more to a project than to take away. It’s requires risk-taking, and to put myself in-front of people. To gain their confidence with my own confidence about myself. 

And I can’t do that if I don’t believe the things I’m suggesting come from informed and intelligent thoughts. (Informed as the situation allows, of course. I rather not edge into hubris.) 

So here we are. I’m realizing that this blog-like thing is my first concerted effort to overcome this. To make all the thoughts in my head public, and resist the feeling that they’re dumb thoughts that shouldn’t be said aloud. 

Meanwhile, porcelain dolls are still creepy as heck. I don’t know why they exist.

Growing up with video games, my bread-and-butter were RPGs. Role-playing games weren’t shooters or racing games, but a long narrative with you as the central hero. Often culminating into a final epic battle with the antagonist. 

I was talking to a friend the other day. We got on the topic of the motivation. The motivation of work. He spoke of the drive/burden of needing to do something meaningful. To find that job that lets you work on something you’re passionate about. And when the job you have isn’t that, how difficult it is for him. 

I couldn’t help but think of video games at that point. The thought I had was that the ultimate for “the hero” is slaying the final boss. To rid the world of the evil, or to save the kidnapped loved one. The purest expression of passion and motivation is clear within video games. 

But one of the issues is that the final boss fight is just one fight. It’s really just one moment out of the whole video game. Most of the time you’re collecting gold coins, or chasing bank robbers, or getting the next weapon. I realized that if I can contextualize a job, as not the final boss, but rather as acquiring that boomerang to beat the boss—then I’m fairly content. 

If I have to spend the time diving into dungeons, but in-turn get more armor or experience to better face that final boss—then it isn’t a waste. They are less-glamourous steps to get to my goals. 

The drawbacks, however, and this is what I’m still figuring out: 1) when will I be ready for that final boss? and 2) in the real world, what is my final boss?

Less poignant, more a marker to remember. To remember the importance of documenting. It’s one thing to imagine and then implement something new. But to also then record what that new thing is.

If anything I’m realizing that brilliant people get so busy doing brilliant things—that they never spend the time to reflect, to articulate, to archive, to pass on. Those processes get lost in the shuffle. 

It’s reinforced by the fact that it’s hard. It’s time-consuming. It’s a whole onto itself. 

But also it’s need to be cherished by the environment and culture of which it exists within. That you people to recognize the importance, to ask for it, and to allow time and space for you to do it. 

The documenting of a process is a process itself. 

The low-brow: I’ve been watching a lot of simplistic animes lately.

The high-brow: A while back, a mentor said I really good at creating my own opportunities. 

Recently, I couldn’t quite explain why I was watching so many cartoons. I thought I was just fatigued from the intense dramas. The Mad Men and the Black Mirrors of the world. Or else I was trying to contrast it from the complexities of the work day. 

But today as I queued up the next episode of yet another cartoon. I realized that it really wasn’t because of those reasons. Rather, I found myself falling in-love with the mythology of those worlds. The plot was as straightforward as it ever was. But the rules of the universe were enthralling. How a fun storyteller will slowly reveal each rule, and watching it play out.

So gravity may work the same for our main hero, but there might be dragons. And if not dragons, then magic. And if there’s magic then only some people get it because those people have this. Or that have to do that. These little rules that add up to the rhythms of the universe. 

And that’s what I love in real-life too. Finding out the rules of the system: the gravity, the inertia, the forces at play. Only then do we let the water flow, and see whether it goes down the mountain, or upwards. 

I almost couldn’t be bothered what direction it is, but rather if the concept of directionality even exists. So I finally figured out what the other side of the coin looks like when my mentor said I was good at finding opportunities. 

Because I really don’t care what the opportunities lie through open doors. It’s more fun to pop into an universe, and figure out: “What’s even a door here?”

The originating culture appropriates a body of clothing out of a mixture of aesthetic adequacy (“close enough, and I don’t hate this.”) and financial circumstance (“It’s from the thrift store because that’s all I can afford.”) The following upswell mimics the costuming to integrate into the culture. At a certain threshold, the costume becomes the uniform. 

Some participants move socially upwards as influencers, and the general populace notices. The general fashion-makers uptakes the ideas, and the look is now a commodity. Non-participants in the original culture take on the pastiche of the uniform, but don’t actually engage in said culture. Those people are labeled as “hipsters” circa 2000s, “posers” circa 1990s, (substitute term) circa any time period.

I’m less concerned about the “cold soulless machine of capitalism.” But I wonder out loud about how much of the outrage is the grieving process of a symbol losing the meaning it signifies?

Did pink polos hurt the rap game? 

You can grow up to be anything.

It’s weird to have to deal with a cultural aphorism as an individual. Our brains are all wired too differently to ever effectively process it the way it was intended. Growing up in the US suburbs during 90s means I grew up in probably the most overall supportive generation ever in history. Helicopter parents in minivans, school teachers afraid of lawsuits, and a general sense of Clinton frivolity meant the kid-gloves never really came off. 

And everyone was so supportive. Of course, you can grow up to be an astronaut. Or scientist. Or famous. Just don’t do drugs, and go to college. And it’ll all work out. 

(One housing crisis hangover later, and the landscape is a bit different. But nevertheless.)

The unintended consequence of being so supportive though is that some of my peers are existentially lost. Turns out if you spend your life thinking you can be anything, you may have forgotten to pick something in the meantime. Or worst, anything you do end up picking just feels like you’ve given up on everything else. 

It’s a strange feeling that’s probably foreign to any previous generation. Which makes sense on why the collective-they never even thought to prepare anyone for it. 

I imagine if I was born even 80 years earlier. Most likely I’d already know what I’d be spending the rest of my life doing. My father would have been a farmer, or a shop owner, or a craftsman. And as a kid I’d already be helping him out, and eventually take over when he got too old. And then at some point, I find a suitable mate with solid birthing hips, and repeat the cycle. 

That notion sounds like the very definition of anathema to anyone my age today, but there’s something nice in the clarity. The clearness of which I have a purpose in life. The simplicity of a goal already defined. 

But details aside, I think there’s something fundamental to both ends. It’s essential for someone, anyone, to feel that they have a place, a goal, a purpose. At the same time, in the search for it—there should be joy within that journey. 

There should be pleasure in chasing butterflies with that net, and also a confidence that it’s butterflies that you want to be chasing.

“When we finish chapter 12 by the end of the semester, you will have caught to what chemists knew back in 1930.” —Mr. Lindquist, 8th grade chemistry teacher

That phrase Mr. Lindquist said so casually changed my world. My 13-year old self couldn’t comprehend being so behind another human being. That in three months of work, I would still be behind by a century of knowledge. I’m still reeling from that day in many ways. 

Even in my design world, Photoshop updates every few months. New technology comes out every convention from smart watches to 3D printing. Everything is moving so fast these days (the old man in me shaking his fist at kids on his lawn…)

But something people talk about less is that our cultural intelligence is also moving at lightning speed. The teenage cynic side of me is genuinely surprised at how fast our culture changed to broadly accept gay marriage and even marijuana usage.

Today though I’m locked into that word “broadly.” Because it isn’t “universally,” only sorta close to “mostly.” Which creates a lot of tension when it comes to those who are tasked with maintaining societal norms when those norms are shifting so quickly.

So often my friends and colleagues are exasperated at the daily news of policemen doing seemingly incomprehensive actions. Fatally shooting a person of minority, or even just today shooting a mentally ill man in his house. 

From the outside and from our vantage point, it seems inexcusable. And it is ultimately inexcusable. But it prompts me to think, in the five to ten minutes that police officer has to assess the situation (often less) how much can that officer process about that situation?

It requires a lot of knowledge and training to comprehend the complexities of humanity today. Gender, sex, race, socioeconomic class—there are people who are literally spending their lives studying this, and they still often can’t capture all the nuances of these topics. 

So in a society of which we are too slow and too inarticulate to teach these nuances, what is the median level of knowledge of which most have to act upon? If you’re given an day, or an hour, or a scant minute to process all of these things—how far can you get into forming an opinion that’s fleshed? 

I’m forced to end this train of thought with neither excuses or solution, but it’s certainly something I will return to again and again until something clicks. It’s a worthwhile endeavor.

“Who gives a fuck about apple watch prices?” —Tweet

The internet is seemingly full of inane people. People with too much time on their hands. People who are wasting their lives. 

Well, not really, but everyone seems to feel that way. Every other comment seems to be attacking the original poster of a thought. 

“I love football.” “Why does anyone care about sports?”
“Taylor Swift is so great!” “Ugh, pop music. Listen to something good for once.”
“I think it the new Apple Watch will retail for $X.” “Who gives a fuck about apple watch prices?”

Now the weird thing is whether that person is speculating on prices because it’s their job as a tech news reporter, or if they’re just doing it just for idle daydreaming—why is the very exercise something to be lionized?

People in real life have always been allowed to be bored, or frivolous, or indulgent. (To an implicit limit, but nevertheless.) You are allowed to act sorta dumb at a party. Because it was a party. You could drink a bit too much. Or be a bit too loud. Or insist the DJ play R. Kelly a bit too many times. And it was okay. Everyone mostly enjoyed that you were enjoying it. 

And to those who didn’t, well, they just moved to the kitchen. Or took a smoke break. They just went to a different part of the party.

But the internet makes that hard. Your segmented internet from your Twitter feed to your Facebook to your emails is a seemingly claustrophobic room with too many strangers yelling “IGNITION REMIX. PLAY IGNITION.” 

So it’s one thing to have one drunk guy in a living room laughing too loud, and yelling catch phrases from Office Space. But it’s a thousand paper cuts when that guy shows up every twelfth FB news post with half his buddies liking it. 

Rarely has an entire group of people arrived at one party in same mood and mindset and goal. But also it rarely has mattered. Once you got your drink and your group found a suitable corner, you were set. 

Now it does. Within a few clicks, it can feel like the entire world is partying differently from you, and won’t let you find your corner. It’s always spilling beer into your lap. As for remedies for this? Who knows, I’m just here to party.

“Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?”
—George Carlin