"Kids these days" and Time

So I'm thinking that every decade I'm going to make a post like this to wax melancholy about how I'm getting old.

"But Dylan... you're not old."

Shut up.

I'm old enough to where everyone younger than me looks 13 but everyone older than me looks 29+. I'm old enough that I can actually say stuff like this but still young enough to have an endearing innocence about me (especially if I'm ever wrong). I'm old enough so that I can do cool stuff with the adults (since 21 grants you the last of the cool legal rights) but young enough that I'm still kinda hip and kinda cool and kinda in tune with these generational changes in culture.

Anyway, this post started off as one of those "oh things are different and stuff" kinds of posts but I imagine that's really not necessary for those who are in the very least bit aware of how things are. And this definitely isn't one of those 2012 posts (because believe me, that's coming) but it's one of those "things are just different" kind of posts.

I sit around and reflect on time (my own aporia of time, if you will) and think about how I've been around for just over two decades and things have changed a lot in the ways that the world works and in the way that I am. It's weird because I remember distinct events from my past and I think about the ways I've changed and it's amazing how I don't feel like an adult. In many ways I feel like the same kid I've always been and I wonder if that's how everyone feels--if everyone just imagines themselves as that same 8 year old swinging from tree branches and not knowing a thing about things and how anything is.

I suppose this post is going to be kind of short because I lost the point of it a long time ago but it will hopefully in it's vagueness spark some sort of independent thought about following posts considering memories and of course a 2011 wrap-up/2012 prediction post.

I just wonder how the future is going to be. Who is going to be in it, how my experiences will shape me... I just am totally uncertain about how things will be. To put it simply, it's an abyss--life, that is. Life after college is a great abyss that I don't feel that I'm ready to face. Things are so structured until now and I think now is the first time in my life that I can name certain people that I wish would be a part of it. (Am I coming back around to a point?)

Do we have an identity before our teenage years? Are we just cookie-cutter preteens that like the other things that the other preteens like until we decide that we don't care what anyone else likes? Maybe that's why we develop personal tastes and then look back on what subsequent and following generations of preteens like and think "God, I'm glad I don't like that cookie cutter stuff" even though we totally did.

If you haven't caught my drift yet, my main field of interest is the phenomenology of experience which I know seems kind of broad to those who have the vaguest idea of what that entails but I feel like it's the quintessential something that defines us as human beings and something that needs to be explored and understood. Time passes and it's the fundamental measurement by which we measure our lives. Believe me, I know. I wrote a 15 page paper about it. Our conceptions of past, present, and future are measured by memories, attention, and expectation respectively. Without these we wouldn't have any way by which to measure our lives and by my understanding our lives wouldn't carry any significant meaning (another existential issue). The point is, we look back on the past and compare it rather unfairly to the present and look at past events somewhat nostalgically thinking that things are somehow worse (here's where it will tie into the next few posts). Whether this is true or not is kind of irrelevant since things are how they are (though the continental philosophers would disagree) and there's not a lot anyone can do but desperately cling to memories.

Again, I'm not 100% sure what I'm rambling about since when I outline these posts at 2am as I'm trying to fall asleep it seems so much more potent and relevant but as always I apologize for whatever confusion might have arisen from your topical reading of this and praise whatever errant thoughts might have organically sprung from whatever words that you have read. Look forward to more concrete and hopefully more coherent and cogent thoughts in the near future.

EDIT 1 (1/3/12):

So I was re-reading this in a better state of mind and decided, surprisingly enough, that it wasn't as totally incoherent as I thought it was as I was reading, though it does lack the content I was hoping for. Hopefully this will fix that.

I used to be different. I used to be a quiet kid who didn't know what he wanted all the time but wasn't really all that concerned because time wasn't anything more than when I had to go to bed or get up for school and the future wasn't anything more than the teacher workday or the looming colossus itself: summer break. I used to think that people's opinion was based entirely on how fast you could run or whether or not you scored a run in kickball and we're all just going to kind of stay young and go to school together.

I thought girls were little more than cute things that that I wanted a girlfriend for some reason. The only music that existed was either the music in the movies or on the channels I watched or my parents music which was inherently not as good and never could have been (it was just noise and people screaming about stuff I didn't understand). Similarly movies were just things where people talked and it looked kind of real and they would often say stuff that I didn't get but my parents laughed so I laughed along like I got the joke.

Friends were people that lived close to you or went to the same school that thought you were cool too and you could share secrets about other students with and the group you were seen with defined you only as far as the gossip that was spread about any particular member--kind of like your group was only as the strong as the rumors about any one of you. Most importantly, my parents were just things that had jobs and money and things called bills and that's just how they've always been. They just annoy me when I'm trying to talk on the phone or play video games and they keep telling me to go to bed or do my homework but I need them to drive me places so I put up with their crap in exchange for being able to hang out with my friends--and that's how it will always be.

Not much has changed.

Nostalgia is a sticky mess that is easy to get trapped in and harder still to get out of and it's not something that I have to deal with anymore. Blame it on the meds or finding new, better things but I've been finding it easier and easier to throw old stuff away because it doesn't seem as important. Magical veils that surrounded memories have decayed and I now see them in different lights and most of them are therefore much less significant than I originally thought. That doesn't mean necessarily that they have objectively decreased in significance it's just that I guess I don't remember them in the same way anymore and what bothers me is I'm not really sure how I'm supposed to think about anything in my past.

I know that's kind of nutty to think about but if you consider that like newly opened wounds, memories are so much more potent and significant in direct proportion to their events of origin. That is, we cling to them with desperation relative to when they happened. For example, you never want to forget your first kiss between you and the person who just broke your heart because you feel like if you don't think about that memory constantly it will be like it never happened. Which I suppose is, in a way, true.

You look back on how silly you were to cling to things that in retrospect seem pretty insignificant and wonder how you could have been so naive to not anticipate much more significant events in your life. Again, we find ourselves at a Catch-22 since memories are always more significant than your predictions of what will happen in the future. Some might disagree but my evidence for this is in the idea that the future terrifies us so, as always, we cling to the known. What's more known to us than the past?

But what I find when I shake my head at high school kids in their skinny jeans and stupid hair and laughing obnoxiously loud about something that I probably wouldn't find funny is that I know that was me and I'm sure someone did that when they saw me and my idiot friends trolling about the mall. While everyone comes to that realization I think what is most surprising to me is that our perception of different generations changes as we learn more not only about our own lives, but the lives of others. By gradually filling the shoes of our parents we outgrow the shoes of our youth and wonder how they could have ever fit us. We shake our heads maybe not because we don't like their clothes or their music but more so that we don't understand what it's like to be them anymore. The memories we have of doing the things they're doing seem insignificant compared to our more recent experiences of more important things so we shake our heads saying, "they don't even know." That was a complicated sentence. Let me see if I can rephrase... Well, I can't.

Maybe it just has to do with not being able to remember how impressed we were with ourselves and doing things that in retrospect were kind of lame. Who knows. We seem as a culture kind of fixated on how things are always getting worse. In many ways, they are. Objectively speaking. But in many ways things are just changing which isn't inherently bad. Humans tend to be reactive and I think things will turn out okay as they always do.

On Creativity and the Artist

So I've made a realization... or at least a decision. Perhaps one based on the other.

Growing up we're really only told about a fraction of what life is really like. Before I continue I understand your apprehension to attribute to me any sort of legitimate knowledge of what life is really like; I think that a 21-year old college senior facing the abyss of adulthood has an interesting vantage point from which to base their views on. That said, I believe I know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, when we're growing up we're told that we're going to finish high school and go to college and then go to grad school and get a white collar job doing sort of kind of what our parents do or at least what our friend's parents do. It's like the the weirdest modified form of an agrarian/Old-world kind of view. And for a while I thought that's what I was going to do too. I thought I was going to go to college and do pretty well and then go to law school and become a lawyer for the vast majority of my life and then I'd retire and die. While this is still a possibility, I'm getting the feeling that this isn't necessarily the path that I should be on.

Again, they tell you as a kid that this is kind of what you're supposed to do--goading you into the maths and sciences or specializing in something like international politics (which seems like a really fancy way of saying you watch the news a lot). But they never really tell you that it's okay to not strive for a mid- to high-paying white collar job because I guess if they told everyone that then no one would. But what about the people that can't or know they just don't want to? You never get that encouragement to pursue passions or the arts. [Though don't get me started on the public school system not encouraging the students to pursue anything... because they don't.]

What college has taught me more than anything else (and here comes the point), is that I'm good at a lot of things. Before I get branded narcissistic, I want to qualify that by saying it taught me that I'm good at a lot of things I had never before imagined I would be good at. I've become something of an actor and consider myself pretty good at it. Someone told me yesterday for the first time in my life that my singing voice was beautiful. Beautiful? That made my life. I never philosophized before college or wondered about the nature of things. I didn't observe people or read Sigmund Freud for fun. I've come to realize that I am a creative person--that I look at things differently and have different capacities than many people.

But I'm sitting here just talking about my talents, I'm getting at the fact that maybe, just maybe, white collar work isn't for me. I'm not saying I'm going to be a vagrant. I'll work. But what I am saying is that I'm okay with only getting by as long as I have time to stretch my creative limbs.

If my parents are reading this, I'm sorry. I feel like I just came out of the proverbial closet and now they're sitting at the computer shaking their heads thinking they could have done something different and maybe I wouldn't have turned out this way. Then again maybe they would prefer I wear dresses as long as I'm still an accountant or a lawyer. I'm kidding (halfway). But why can't this be okay? Why isn't it okay to be an artist? Or a philosopher? Or a struggling anything?

It is okay. No one is saying it's not. But you look at people who work in grocery stores or are career baristas or waiters and you think, Wow that's sad... guess they never had a chance to go to college. Why does that have to be the mindset? Maybe they love their jobs. Or maybe they hate their jobs, they just love not having to take their work home with them or work 80-hour work weeks. Maybe they love interacting with people and don't care about living paycheck to paycheck. Again, no one is saying it's not okay for someone to live like this, but I want to see if maybe we can look at it not so much as them being deficient in some way that others are not, but instead that this is who they are and that's all they can be.

I love philosophy. Obviously. Nothing gets me going like a debate over human nature or political philosophy or even metaphysics. I think the most snide comment I get about being a philosophy major is, "What, are you going to be a philosopher?" My response is, "Yeah, why the heck not?"

I think this world needs creative people (and here comes the second point.) Yes, of course we need people to do politics and science and farming and accounting and all that stuff. But humans are the only species with the capacity for upper-level reasoning and temporal memory. We measure our lives through memories and the passage of time and we plan and we love and we create. We are the only species who seek to find meaning in our lives and constantly seek to find our true nature. Sure, I would love to make a ton of money grinding numbers or trying cases, but I'm not ashamed of being a human being who loves to think and be creative--even if that means not making a lot of money. This is just who I am. I know it seems like a cop-out to say that I want to spend my life enjoying being human because you can do that all the time. But what I do know for sure is that I don't regret anything. I don't care what people's perception of a good life is. No one should.

It's like I said--life is an abyss. You fill it with whatever you want. Some just tend to add more color than others. Me? I couldn't do without it.