The Future isn’t What it Used to Be

‘A radiant crescendo, beneath the mushroom cloud confetti.’

If there’s one thing I’ve been unerringly good at since I was a small child, it’s rationalising all the fucked and bad things that happen to me into a new narrative. I think this is one of the things I found most fascinating and profound when I first read Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth when I was around 21. All the best books tell you something that you already know. Tolle talks about the ego as a story or narrative that you tell yourself, this was something I’d realised very early in life, although I hadn’t made the distinction with ‘the ego.’ Our identities are made up of stories we tell ourselves. I realised early, you could just change the story. You could simply view it from another perspective. Stories don’t have to be black or white, or fixed or even linear. If you’re not happy with the story you can subvert the narrative and just tell a better one. In terms of the ego: the ego as Tolle says, isn’t your authentic state of being anyway, so rationally, subverting your own internal narrative isn’t any less authentic. In fact, this is ultimately the basis for pretty much all self-help. ‘Tell yourself that every cloud has a silver lining, practise affirmations, change your internal dialogue, tell yourself you’re beautiful and unique rather than you’re a worthless piece of shit.’ All coins have two sides so it’s certainly possible to be beautiful and unique and also a worthless piece of shit. There’s nothing necessarily inauthentic or patently untrue about focussing on the positives. Of course, the flaw of self-help is in the proposition itself. The semantics of it suggest that your self needs help. So ultimately if you’re practising self-help, you’re putting a sticking plaster over a gaping wound of your own making. Around the mid 2000s some people at least had the good sense to utilise the more functional and proactive term: self-development. However, while this is slightly better, it still crumbles under scrutiny. Why does your self need developing? Tolle was the first I’d encountered who really grasped the real issue. For what it’s worth, unless you’re someone who doesn’t wish to live in a cave for the next 25 years, and even then, you can never truly eradicate the ego. It’s going to catch up with you. It’s a bit like living with a Tiger. The best you can do is be consciously aware that you are in fact living with a pet inside your head, a rather dangerous one and that sooner or later, by its basic nature it will attack. If you’re consciously aware of this fact, then you’re more or less on the right track and you’re in a stronger position to deal with the issue when it inevitably strikes. In fact the more conscious you are of this, the more you can take proper precautions and effectively neuter it as an existential threat. At worst, it’ll just be something that overpowers and mauls you from time to time rather than something that rips apart your entire fragile, snowflake reality.

I mention this as at it’s heart is the nature of identity and understanding the nature of identity is something that I’ve wrestled with for most of my life. Identity comes easily, or at least naturally to the majority of people. Their identities aren’t defined however by their own internal dialogues – my own has often been a bloodbath between the Camusian and the Epicurean schools of thought, with occasional spats between the Objectivists and the Marxian which would escalate into a disturbing inner Battle Royale where no-one can actually win – they’re defined by other people. They’re defined by how they look, what they wear, the music they listen to, their group of friends, the things they talk about etc. It wouldn’t cross their mind to challenge that identity or even that it’s something that can be changed. It’s as fixed as a Nepalese mountain range. Well, at least to an earthquake or avalanche happens. This is something that I’ve never really experienced. I suppose my whole life has been one of shifting perspectives. This is something which used to trouble me. I was like the proverbial weathervane, shifting across a sea of perspectives and possibilities. It really wasn’t as quaint as I make it sound. I was an uneasy, awkward person, shifting around trying to understand myself and my place in the world, trying to understand what *I* actually thought, what my ‘own’ perspective was, what my ‘own’ values actually were. This was actually something which was dark and confusing. As you grow up and the expectations of your family and society are all around you, telling you what they think (or feel) you should do with your life, what the idealised person looks or acts like, it was like constantly trying on an endless number of masks, hoping, just hoping that one of them would fit perfectly and would resolve all of the endless dissonance between what’s going on in your head and the person ‘society’ says you should be. This isn’t a small ask anyway, but it’s further complicated when you’re a hormonal teenager and you actually want to get with girls. Still, I was fairly certain that just because I was actually painfully shy, awkward and had absolutely no social awareness that it shouldn’t stop me getting laid as much, if not more than the ‘popular’ kids. I did and have some additional luck due to certain friendships and acquaintances I developed absolutely by chance, which I’ve discussed in a previous entry, but other than that, this was just another problem to solve.

As an aside, I spoke about this recently with my director. She says she laughs when she looks at me because I have a lot of ‘swagger’ which reminds her of a younger version of herself, when in reality I’m someone who is just trying to hold it all together. So much in fact that she was actually surprised that I’m a natural introvert and nerd ostensibly because I can talk to people. Stereotypes. I’m surprised she doesn’t think I spend I spend my spare time thinking about how to construct low-level telepathic fields, psychic inhibitors and the development of a robot army, too.

Anyway, as it happens, in terms of type theory, my confidence stems from the extraverted thinking. This is my second superpower, which allows me to confidently hone in on problems in systems/ideas/concepts that most people find unwieldy and complex and then quickly compartmentalise and break down in simple blocks of logic, which is then followed by a break down of the components in terms of importance and necessity, followed by a simple solution and a lot of bewilderment on the part of myself as to why no-one else could figure the fucking thing out. Of course in reality, utility aside, no-one likes a smart arse, and because the majority of people in this country are inversely introverted thinking/extroverted feeling types, there’s no immediate bond with most people either so it becomes just one of many reasons why friendships with deep bonds can be more difficult to come by. However, that doesn’t even begin to scratch the service. Someone pointed out to me that I don’t actually bother making conversation unless I have what is essentially a utilitarian reason for doing so. The overwhelming majority of people just talk about what is happening or what has happened. This isn’t something I’m actually interested in at all. I can see what is happening and try as I might, I find it irritating and pointless to discuss and reaffirm something I can quite clearly see. What I’m interested in is why it’s happening which limits the chances of finding someone to have a conversation I’m actually interested in to probably less than 10% of the population. I’ve found this to be a problem even with people I like. I dated a woman I was inordinately fond of, she was and is a kind-hearted person but I would often find talking to her to be a little on the stultifying side. This has been exacerbated quite a bit following the decline of our ‘relationship,’ also for reasons beyond this, it’s akin to watching say 2001: A Space Odyssey – probably not the best example as it was a piss take about the moon landings being faked for TV, but anyway – where you have someone’s vision of what the future will look like, but when the date passes i.e 2001, you look at it and it’s nice and quaint, but at the same time there’s a bit of a weird feeling, because it’s an abandoned future that’s never materialised. That’s how I fee every time this woman speaks to me at this point. It’s nice and everything but I’d rather she just a sense of nostalgia for what could have been, it’s still underpinned by a nagging sense of reality, or, what actually is. I am still fond of her and I care deeply about her wellbeing, but it will take me a long time to process the nature of that. I digress. Nonetheless, it’s only taken 31 years but at least I’m becoming intensely comfortable with the nature of identity and my place in the world, if not the other stuff.