Secrets (a Confession)

This is an attempt at The New Normal.

This is a personal post. The personal post, in fact. It almost feels as if all posts have been leading up to this, in a way, since most of my thoughts tend to circle around the premise. Warning: this may be a long one.

I didn’t go to college. There. I said it. This has long been, literally, my only regret in life. To understand why this simple fact has played such a major role in my existence for the past ten years, I have to go back a bit.

In high school, I lost my love to a car accident. Until that point, it was simply assumed that I would go to a good school after graduation. I had good grades, was very knowledge-hungry. When she died, though, I stopped trying. I barely managed to pick up a pencil for the next year. Honestly, I’m not quite sure how I graduated.

So I never applied to college- never even tried. And here’s the thing: nobody said a word about it. Not one word. Nobody ever said “What the fuck are you doing? Here’s an application. Get to it.” Everyone was afraid to speak up.

“He’s having a hard time letting go. Just leave him be.”

Before I knew it, I was nineteen, living in a shitty apartment and making seven dollars an hour moving furniture for a living. I came home from work one day, to what would become my wife, and as I sat down on the couch, exhausted, looking around the room at the cheap faux leather furniture, I realized that I hated my life.

I decided to do something about it. I joined the Navy, following in my grandfather’s footsteps, and opted for the college fund they offered in lieu of the enlistment bonus. Fifty thousand dollars (plus the GI Bill) would be plenty. I’d serve my four years, go to school, and get myself back on track.

It didn’t work out that way.

I made another mistake- one that has haunted me ever since.

I committed a crime. I engaged in a sexual act with a person who was, at the time, not old enough to consent to such an act. I was not aware of that fact until it was too late. Three months later, I was called into NCIS. who informed me that I was to be court-martialed for violation of Article 114 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

I was court-martialed, and my sentence included six months in the brig and a Bad Conduct Discharge.

I lost my college money- all $89,000 of it.

Around the same time, I found out that I was going to be a father. I couldn’t apply to college and take on the required student loan debt. I had to find a job.

A lot has gone on in the years since, but fast-forward to today, and I’m thirty-one years old, and still have no higher education.

I’ve come up with many excuses along the way as to why I haven’t taken the plunge. None are justified, or rationally sound. Most have something to do with that fatal mistake I made ten years ago: I’ve carried it around like a fifty-pound ankle bracelet, hiding my past from everyone I encounter while using it as a crutch, an excuse to fail. I hid it even from most of my family. (If you’re family, and learning of this for the first time, please accept my apologies. It’s much easier to tell these things to the blank page).

I used what I want to do as an excuse: the job that I want does not exist. I want to write, but I don’t want to be a conventional writer. I want to write novels, true, and freelance magazine pieces, but I also want to deliver stories in a way that’s never been done. After reading Craig Mod’s Hack the Cover I became fascinated with the idea of merging a book’s cover design with the text itself. I came across Days with My Father, a brilliant and immersive story told through pictures and text on a simple webpage.

I began to think of my dream job: telling stories in a completely new way, through a completely new medium. The evolution of the story began to take a firm hold on my mind.

How the hell would college help me land this job? What the hell is the job I want, anyway? It resides somewhere at the intersection of my interests- philosophy, literature, writing, design. A formal education in these disciplines would almost certainly not yield a job in any of these fields, let alone all of them, so how could I justify spending, say, 50k on an investment that was likely to produce almost no return?

I was missing the point. The point, as David Foster Wallace so brilliantly points out, is to develop the ability to think in a way that is required to move an industry, a person, forward.

My thirst for knowledge has led me to educate myself, in a way, over the years: I devour articles, books, videos- anything that furthers my grasp of the world. This is a helpful, but flawed, approach. It feels like erecting a structure on a bed of sand. My body of knowledge may contain all the pieces necessary to complete the structure, but the foundation on which it sits is porous and unsteady. I may be able to grasp a piece on Kant’s Categorical Framework, but I’ve no idea what prerequisite knowledge may be missing (Rumsfeld was onto something with his ‘unknown unknowns). I have the talent, but lack the skill.

Even my writing is haunted by these unknown unknowns. Is there a technique I'm not privy to missing from this essay, this short story? Is there a fundamental character development principle that dooms my writing to fail before it begins?

Besides, no progress will be made unless I take a step- any step.

Advance, and never halt, for advancing is perfection.

~ Khalil Gibran

I’m finished hiding from my past. I’m finished hanging my head when friends gather to share college stories, implying, by omission, that I have college stories, too (I’ve even made some up a time or two). I’m finished setting a bad example for my daughter. How could I possibly look her in the eye when the time comes for her to go to college when I haven’t done so myself?

The world owes me nothing. What I will gain, I must take from it. So, while I work on a play this winter, I will study my options. Come January, when the play is over, I will continue my education. I will take the next step, which is, in fact, the only step.

Feature Creep

Feature creep is a phrase often used in the tech world to describe a product that, as it slowly adds feature after feature, becomes a bloated and less useful version of its previous, simpler self. It’s a malady that often afflicts products in and outside of the digital world.

It can happen to people, too.

The other day, I found myself in a conversation in which I was dismissing the opposing perspective almost as soon as my brain registered it. These were valid arguments that directly conflicted with my point of view- typically, the stimulus for growth.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

~ Aristotle

This was not the sign of an educated mind.

Once I noticed my behavior, I stopped the conversation and began to investigate. When did I reach this point? How did I reach this point? I constantly praise the ability to see things from a different perspective, so why was I doing the exact opposite?

Feature creep.

Those of us who pride ourselves on personal growth- who seek out new ways of thinking, who strive to educate ourselves, monitor our habits in order to change them- run a dangerous risk of succumbing to feature creep.

My mode of thinking was, “I am the one who reads a lot, who works on bettering myself every day. I am the only one whose opinion matters, because I am the ‘enlightened one.’

I wasn’t thinking this out loud, of course, or even consciously. It only became clear when I put myself under a microscope... but I was thinking it. Every day, I add a new feature to myself: I read more articles, more classic fiction. I examine my modes of behavior, then modify them. I seek out the thoughts and opinions of those smarter than me, in order to claim their wisdom as my own. As I added feature after feature, I momentarily became the thing that I loathed.

I had become a product too complicated to remember my original purpose: to be better. I was certainly not being ‘better’ by embracing the sort of close-mindedness that I so often rail against.

---

I listened to the first episode of The Partially Examined Life the other day. In it, the trial of Socrates is being discussed, in which Socrates famously says that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” In dissecting that sentence, a thought arose among the podcasters: how many times can you revisit something? Once you’ve reflected on something to determine your stance on a subject, isn’t that it? Won’t you run out of things to ponder unless a particular situation comes up?

I thought of this after I realized what a schmuck I’d been. A supposition is never complete. You must revisit it every now and again, not only because your opinion at forty years old might differ from that of your thirty-year-old self, but because we run the risk of feature creep if our stances go unexamined for too long.

It can happen to your personal self, or even your professional self. Writers, designers, lawyers, managers: how often have you dismissed the opinions of your subordinates, simply because they’re your subordinates, or because they’re less experienced? Pay attention to your conversations. If you find yourself discarding input as soon as it comes in, you’ve come down with a serious case of feature creep.

We are imperfect beings, subject to lapses. Only when we realize that the examination must be ongoing can we personally realize the potential of the most important phrase ever to grace our ears:

The unexamined life is not worth living.

~ Socrates

I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.

Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (via junkycosmonaut)

zenhabits:

Summer in Berlin, via conorberlin

robot-heart:

Tea - Freshly brewed and Freshly Clicked (by anshu_si)

The New Normal

Every day, I am amazed. I’m amazed by the things people build, by the depth of a person’s being. I am amazed by the fact that these things are readily available for me to witness.

I’ve marveled over the fact that friendship is changing because connections are changing. Not so long ago, friendships were largely determined by geographic proximity to another person. As the web becomes more pervasive, location is being replaced by other factors more conducive to true connection: interests, beliefs, ambitions.

I’ve noticed, too, that as these connections run deeper, another effect has emerged: the New Normal.

Twenty years ago, as I was growing up, people shared very little of themselves with others. A close-knit group of best friends could claim to know each other very well, but even that paradigm, in retrospect, seems one of closely guarded selves.

For contrast, take the recent piece over on Deliberatism, in which Eric Karjaluoto laments the effect of Facebook and the like on his life. Eric speaks with remarkable candor, giving us a glimpse of the inner workings of his psyche. By doing so, it feels as if I know a small portion of Eric better than I knew most of my ‘best friends’ growing up. By baring his soul, he’s uncovered a portion of mine in one simple, truthful piece of writing.

This is a trend I see more and more around the web, and I couldn’t be more ecstatic about its implications.

We all hid(e) the more neurotic, darker regions of our brains from our circles. In fact, we still do. Somehow, though, the web has made full disclosure a more inviting prospect. Perhaps because our words can now float in the ether, with no threat of immediate rejection, we are freed to shed more light on the corners of ourselves so long neglected.

The result, if this trend continues, will be deeper connections, since we are no longer connecting by favorite ballplayers, or soccer matches, or the watercooler, or through some mutual acquaintance. We are connecting to people across the world by threads as yet unseen, from places we’ve been afraid to access ourselves, let alone reveal to the world. This is crucial to our understanding of the world. If we hide so much of ourselves, how can we expect to gain a true understanding of our world, since we, essentially, create the reality that we occupy?

This candor, this truth, reminds me of the Slow Web Movement, but feels much more deliberate, more profound, more meaningful. Call it the Deep Web Movement. Show me who you are. I will reciprocate, and the web- the world- will be a better place for it. After all, our reality is, at its simplest level, a vast network of connections between you, me, and everyone in-between. Our world can only go as deep as those connections. Be you. All of you, without censors. This is the New Normal.

On Beauty

To reach its current position among our society and our psyches, beauty has had a long and arduous journey. It constantly redefines itself as human tastes evolve. In On Beauty, Umberto Eco summarized the ever-changing role of beauty thusly:

Beauty has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country.

Knowing that the role of beauty has been so “immutable,” I find myself wondering how we would currently define the concept. To a pessimist, the question would yield a depressing answer: one need only to glance at the stick figures in the latest Vogue Magazine to conclude that beauty is a 98-pound blonde who eats every three days.

Centuries ago, that wasn’t the case. In fact, quite the opposite was true. Women were revered for their shapeliness, as it suggested a natural ability to give birth. Birthing hips were beautiful.

The process of the evolution of beauty brings to mind a story from philosopher Daniel Dennett regarding sweetness. The question asked is, simply, why are sweet things sweet? Dennett tells us that during man’s hunter/ gatherer days, our bodies developed a penchant for sugar because we needed the calories sugar offered to fuel our long days of hunting. Rigorous activity called for many calories, and since sugary foods had high caloric content, we developed a taste for sugar as a byproduct of our lifestyle. Today, evolution simply hasn’t had time to catch up. We no longer live that way, now leading much more sedentary lifestyles (in comparison), so our sweet tooths do more damage than good.

The same could be happening to our concept of beauty.

The Turning Point

In the early 1900s, Oskar Kokoschka began to tamper with the concept of beauty. Early in his career, Kokoshka began to focus on the idea of truth as beauty, and in doing so, turned the art world on its head.

Until Kokoschka’s arrival, art was largely revered for its adherence to one concept: the more aesthetically pleasing (read: beautiful), the better. Instead of trying to mirror reality, though, Kokoschka deliberately distorted it to reveal a hidden inner truth.

Kokoshka began to create, in traditional terms, ugly things. To his mind, however, they were in fact more beautiful than works past, simply because they revealed a truth hitherto unnoticed- a truth that the traditional concept of beauty could never reveal.

The Academy of Fine Art rejected his work, stating that if he were going to skew reality, the least he could do was make reality more “beautiful.”

Kokoshka persisted in painting what he saw below the surface, and the face of art began to change: truth was beginning to rival beauty. Indeed, truth was beauty. This was his lesson to the world: a thing is not beautiful because of superficial aesthetic qualities, but for what it reveals about human nature. This is the mantra that must define the next phase of our evolution.

Our Role

The question, of course, is how to proceed. After all, the idea of realigning truth with beauty seems to be quite an abstract one. For a concrete, modern example, take a look at what Jonah Lehrer (yes, I know he’s been discredited, but the piece is still fantastic and appropriate) wrote in the June edition of The New Yorker in the essay The Virtues of Daydreaming. Lehrer quotes Virginia Woolf, who encapsulates the process of daydreaming:

Certainly she was losing consciousness of outer things. And as she
lost consciousness of outer things … her mind kept throwing up from its
depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a
fountain spurting.

Lehrer expands on this concept, saying “A daydream is that fountain spurting, spilling strange new thoughts into the stream of consciousness. And these spurts turn out to be surprisingly useful.”

Lehrer’s point is that daydreaming has, to this point, been largely viewed as a useless thing, the product of a lazy or undisciplined mind. The piece goes on to cite multiple studies that suggest that mind-wandering can be an extremely valuable tool in generating ideas and solving problems. More often than not, our unconscious minds are much better at problem-solving than our conscious minds are, so daydreaming may actually be a valuable tool when properly understood.

This type of thinking exemplifies a profound shift in the way we operate in the world: question an existing mode of thought, test it, and use the results to better understand our minds.

What has been done, then? Truth has been given a rank above all else, and out of that truth emerges a better world. What better definition of beauty can there be?

This type of thinking must not only persist, but thrive, and with the proliferation of the widening access to information, it’s easier than ever to do so. When anyone can publish (and read what’s published), more outdated concepts can be questioned. In fact, the collective intelligence effect may make us more adept than ever at interpreting the truth of our reality.

All around us, truth bubbles below the surface of our reality. When it tries to escape through the medium of our minds, we must recognize it for what it is: Beauty, disguised as Truth.