Category: on my mind

Most of this post derives from a series of chats with my good friend who beat me to the punch with his post, but is also in response to the two articles below.

http://nlmgtd.blogspot.com/2012/06/facebook.html

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/01/the_antisocial_network.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/8930/

I’ve been thinking about all the things that seem to detract from my life, and why it is that I so cling to these things that cause me pain. I’m wondering if I should embark on an effort to systematically eliminate all undesirable elements from my life in order to simplify it and hopefully be more at peace. Online social networks do not exactly rank on the top of my list of afflictions, but my life is pretty good in general and this should be an easy fish to shoot relative to the others.

Outside of facebook stalking a few cuties whom I’m way too shy to talk to, I don’t feel like I gain much utility from facebook these days. And I do think that I relate to some of the points in the Slate and Atlantic articles. The constant keeping up with the Joneses with respect to status updates and the facade of interestingness is exhausting. I simply don’t have the compelling need to display my life for all to see, nor do I have a desire to be doing something facebook-status-worthy every free waking moment of my life. I value peace and relaxation as much as excitement. I also sincerely believe that people are not quite as happy as they seem to be in their facebook statuses alone. I try to present a fair worldview and balance things out a little by posting some less happy things, some instances in my life where I am truly not feeling interesting or positive or sociable. Not surprisingly, most of those posts do not garner any responses. Maybe this will also be ignored by all.

The persistence of always-online technology is also something that I’m not sure I enjoy. While I understand the benefits of having a smart phone, I believe that it lends itself towards abuse in social situations. These days, I even use my phone as a watch. It becomes tethered to me, and it’s stifling. Knowing that emails are always right there, that all those websites and apps are a few seconds away. It becomes harder and harder to get away from computers or the online these days. Again, the utility of modern telecommunications is hard to overstate; on the other hand, I really don’t miss technology that much during those times I’m out backpacking or trekking and there’s no reception for miles. I’m seriously considering not renewing my data plan when my current cell phone contract expires.

And during social functions, if you’re truly enjoying the company of others at any event, would you really want to “check in” just to let everyone else know that you’re there? Maybe for a lot of people the answer is “yes”. As my friend mentioned, though, a good conversation should be engrossing and should consume you in that moment. Thinking narcissistically and posting some status update or checking in means you temporarily break out of the moment. (This is also why I’m not fond of taking pictures during vacations.) I still find it rude and distracting when people check their phones during conversations. I know I’m guilty of doing it when I’m bored.

But really, the main problem to me with facebook and other social networking sites really tend to broaden, and thus to me diffuse, the meaning of friendship. Of the hundreds of fb friends, how many do I consider true friends? How many of them consider me a true friend? Well, I know that roughly half of my blog traffic comes from fb, which means about 5 of you actually take the consideration to click through the link and read this post. It’s probably true that the other 5 people would’ve clicked via fb if their preferred source (google reader, something else?) weren’t there. It’s probably also true that the 5 of you that click via fb would have found a way to this post in some other way as well.

I guess it’s nice that there’s this communication avenue for people that doesn’t have an insistence to it — different from, say, a phone call that you pick up, or an email where one feels compelled to reply if it is directed towards you. On the other hand, it certainly doesn’t feel effective for conveying anything but small tidbits of at most semi-personal information.

What’s actually concerning to me is that maybe these little fb updates and tweets are replacing more meaningful forms of communication. I remember that in freshman year of high school I refused to get an email address because I thought it was a diluted form of communication. Why would you want to email someone when you could just call them instead?

And I also remember when I used to call friends’ landlines to ask them what’s up and what to do. Then I started using IM and while it became easier to contact people, some level of intimacy was lost. It no longer became possible to hope that my friends’ parents or siblings wouldn’t pick up the phone when I called.

I think the current state of facebook status updates and tweeting and blog posting is another step away from intimacy. We can now broadcast to hundreds or thousands of friends and acquaintances at once, which is a tremendous scale of communication. But it comes at the cost of the personal message, the care and attention to individual friends that one used to give. Even for one as introverted as myself, I feel the strands that might break relationships apart. I might just “like” your update instead of IMing or texting you about it. It begins to feel silly to call someone if everyone is posting daily updates online. What if you’re talking with someone and forgot about what they wrote a few days ago? Everything becomes easier, and everything becomes commensurately less meaningful.

I look at my phone bill every month and see just how few minutes I spend. Even my family, whom I dearly love, I rarely call. Most of my closest friends I’d never call except to organize in-person get togethers. And so I’m kind of glad that internets technologies allow me to keep in contact with a lot of friends that I’d otherwise never contact, lazy as I am with phone calling. (Incidentally, this is also why I’m so appreciative of these hangouts that my more proactive friends instigated.) But maybe the problem lies within ourselves. Maybe we should be uncomfortable and make phone calls instead of taking the easy route and IM or post on walls.

I’ve actually been thinking of whether to take everything here offline. A lot of times, I use this as a diary of sorts. But it’s not a perfect vehicle because there are some things that I don’t wish to reveal to the world as a whole, and also because there are some thoughts that I don’t want specific people to know. Which probably compounds my already typically dense and muddled writing into something that one of my friends constantly refers to as being very opaque.

What is the purpose of what I write? There is a certain amount of personal gain from writing these posts: if it didn’t help me sort out these infernal issues that I try to grapple with, I’m not sure I would post. Sometimes, I am writing for no one but myself. But other times, I really am writing for a small group of friends, for the ten of you out there who would actually take the time to read this. We should probably meet up and talk.

Given that I actually read through his magnum opus Infinite Jest, it’s not much of a secret that I like David Foster Wallace’s writing style. His commencement address, “This is Water”, is probably one of the more inspirational pieces of written work that I’ve read. A friend sent me a link last week, and the timing was apt to revisit the piece. Although knowing that D.F.W. committed suicide, this is probably one of those “do as he says and not as he does” sorts of works.

http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in-his-own-words

Lately, I’ve been experiencing what I can only best describe as mild panic attacks. Curl up in the fetal position hugging my pillow sorts of moments. They suck more when they happen at work, although the high chair that accompanies the standing desk is an acceptable alternative. I’m somewhat optimistic about establishing a truce soon.

For about as long as I can remember, the inner voice has never been quiet: there has always been either lengthy but largely meaningless internal discourse, or music playing inside my head when my mind wanders or is not attentive to the outside environment. Which is a surprisingly large amount of time, given that large swaths of our quotidian existence can be operated on autopilot. At times during these past few days, I do feel like music is the only thing that will save my mortal soul, that the songs that play in my mind are the only things that keep me alive. Like some sort of epic Pythagorean version of Speed. I am scared to know what happens after the music stops. Today, it’s been Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat major. I don’t know what evoked the song today, but it’s been the beautiful anchoring force for the day. Listening to songs on repeat for hours is calming.

It’s been a whirlwind past few weeks, and I feel like I’ve been on a roller coaster ride of personal highs and lows. And all this while my emotions have been fritzed. The conclusion of a short and unexpected chapter in my life has gotten me thinking. That a number of my friends also are also going through mini crises of their own has amplified my need to re-examine the trajectory of my life.

All in all, I have very little to complain about. I may not formally be in the one percent, but I am also not really that far off. I live a pretty comfortable life with few major risks, which is why it is so easy to become complacent. I try to slowly push my own limits, but in truth I don’t think I ever push myself as hard as I should to make a substantial difference in bettering myself. In the arena where I lack the most (viz. getting a girlfriend), I am miserable and a failure, and possibly a miserable failure.

I’ve been thinking lately about what exactly is at my core, or my true self. Time and experience shape much of our lives, but perhaps who we truly are does not change, no matter how much we try to change it. Is it possible to fundamentally change who you are or how you think? Maybe it’s true that I’ve become so self-absorbed in what I believe that my mind is closed to new ideas. Maybe as an adult that has assimilated some critical mass of experience and information, it’s no longer possible to truly alter one’s beliefs, ideals, and habits.

For a long time, I believed that the body was merely a vessel for the mind: it was the intellectual sphere that was interesting. The physical was all superficial.  I, now a little older, know that this position is not as tenable. Looking backwards, it seems so strange that this was a carefree thought of youth. Certainly most kids don’t think this way, or at least they don’t act like they do.

In some very abstract sense, ballet is my personal experiment testing out this hypothesis, a devotion of time towards reconciling the incompatible thoughts of the old (the body is nothing) and the new (the pursuit of perfection that manifests itself in the physical is nonetheless still a viable pursuit). Notwithstanding various societal pressures, the foray into ballet was but a baby step. The real shift was in the changing of beliefs, in admitting that it would be worthwhile to do something that previously would have been considered frivolous at best.

All evidence in my life points against the possibility that there is a soulmate for me. And even when you think you’ve found someone so compatible that it hurts to think about it, that feeling may not be — in all probability will not be — reciprocated. Yet, I think that there is something more than some mere Disneyesque fantasy in our need to believe that there is someone out there for us. Our connections with others are but a thimbleful among the ocean of billions of people. Those true, deep friendships are necessarily limited to a handful. And our desire to be desired must manifest itself in some form.

It’s true that I’m not a very affectionate person. I think it’s also true that physical looks are not nearly as important for me as they are for most other people (males and females both). This is probably why online dating seems so futile to me: how can you really get a good sense of who someone really is from some words and pictures? I’m actually beginning to be convinced that the only way I could be in a relationship with someone is if I’m friends with her beforehand. Unfortunately, this severely limits the possibilities of finding a so-called soulmate.

And it’s not like I necessarily need to be with someone, although at times I think it would be really, really nice to have someone to confide in. Despite the fact that trying to write everything down is definitely cathartic, this blog only serves weakly. I think my entire family tends to be fairly independent, and certainly this stubborn streak does appear to be inherited. I think it would also be very nice to have someone who believes in you during those bouts of self doubt.

At this point, I think that it is our purpose in life to serve some cause greater than ourselves, and that any self-oriented goal is doomed to be unsatisfactory. I’d like to think that the devotion to dance achieves something to this effect, that the pursuit of art completely independent of the necessities of survival somehow enriches the soul or encompasses some gestaltist notion of the human spirit, whatever that may mean. Or that I’ve chosen a job that meaningfully and positively impacts humanity. I would like to think that the products we build, used by billions, make people’s lives easier and better, and that my paltry contributions to search quality effect some change for the betterment of humanity as a whole. And maybe someday there will be that someone whom I can serve.

In the everyday scrum, I need to occasionally remind myself that this is, indeed, water: that the frustration with the infinitesimally glacial pace of improvement at the barre will yield satisfaction in a few months or years, and that mastery takes decades, not days; that the routine minutiae at the workplace that seem to slowly suck away all that once-felt joy and excitement of working still contribute to the team, the company, the world, if ever so slightly; that my friends and family are beautiful, beautiful people; that the roughest of storms eventually clear and everything becomes rainbows and puppies. That love exists even when we wish to forsake it. That water is everywhere.