Show and tell

I'm writing this blog post after having watched the episode of Black Mirror called Smithereens, and it's important for me to note that to myself the next time I decide to read this - anchoring oneself in your position in time is important.

Do we ever need to unplug from life, man. I fully recognize the irony in writing this on a laptop, while I stream music from my iPhone to my JBL Bluetooth speakers (something I've brought up in the past), but that sort of connectedness isn't precisely what I'm getting at here.

I'm getting at this bullshit idea that social media helps us connect with people, or keep in touch with people, or whatever you want to call it. I'm not sure what the best phrase is. I don't think it does that at all, or at least not well. What do you really know about someone from their social media presence? (Related - why is 'social media presence' even a phrase we care about?) Here's what I ate for dinner tonight. Here's a dog I saw walking around today. Here are some pictures from this thing I did. Here's the music I'm listening to right now. I'm a victim of some of these things (okay, usually only the last one), but the point is that I'm imploring people to engage with (another bullshit buzzword) something I care about. Maybe it's because I don't care all that much about food or dogs (and I'm not calling anyone out directly; these are simply the most readily-available examples), but I cannot fathom why people think I (or anyone else) cares about some dog I don't even know and they don't even know.

And it's not like I think everything I have to say is worthwhile, either. Trust me. I'm sure there are people who could give a shit what sports games I'm going to or what music I'm listening to. Like I said, I'm victim to some of these things, too.

What I'm getting at (and yes, as usual, I've said this in far more words than I've needed to (but what is life if lived concisely?)) is that I don't want you to show me the filtered, fabricated, ideal of what you think your life should be seen as. Frankly, I don't care. I care about what you think about as you lay in bed, wide awake. I care about what upsets you, what makes you feel alive, where you find beauty in this universe. Social media isn't only bad at being an outlet to find out those things about people - it's straight-up poisoning us and turning us into addicts for the instantaneous, fake happiness of scrolling through other people's lives.

And yeah, when I'm done with this post, my natural inclination is going to be to check my phone and go on Instagram, just because it's something to do. I need to make a list of things that are more enjoyable than going on Instagram to see what people I barely talk to are doing on this Friday night. I could start with playing piano, I could go for a walk along the water, hell I could just lay in bed and think.

It's not a perfect analogy to this, because it pertains to quotes, but it's been on my mind ever since I've been thinking about the conversations I want to be having with people.

"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The end is never the end

Questions to consider about our path and the paths of others with which it crosses...

Do things run their course, or is their course never run?

Does this only happen within a pocket of time, a phase or stage of life, or is everything one unit?

Do people really change, or do they become more true versions of who they were always going to be?

It feels right that things run their course within a phase of life. This goes back to what I've always believed about looking back and understanding how small you were compared to what you are now. I'm not sure I believe people change, although I do think I believe people grow. There are a lot of things I've experienced in my life, a lot of phases/stages, that I've come out the other side of having been a better person who has grown a lot as a result. There's almost always some collateral damage, but that might be what's required of us to grow (this is a good example of something being necessary vs. sufficient - collateral damage is necessary for growth (although I've never truly mastered this idea of necessary vs. sufficient, so who's to say)).

In the universal scheme of life, we've never truly run our full course with ideas or people. We're always evolving, always understanding more, and it's simply in smaller phases/stages of life that mini-courses are run. Checkpoints, if you will. You experience something with someone, that mini-course is run, and you come out the other side having grown as a person, with a little baggage. But our full, universal courses are never run.