Where I am sitting now is so far, so different, yet just a few feet away from where I was sitting the last time I wrote here. I have traveled through entire universes only to have moved about four feet to the southeast. I have dusted off the weight of what has come before me and slowly peel myself off the floor of my collapsed expectations under a ceiling of crumbling collective grief and retraumatization of pandemics past come to life through ancestral, epigenetic memories. Redesign, reawaken, reanimate. Judgments dissolve into anti-particle space dust carried away by the endless wind of voids. The bones of what humanity has built shiver in their marrow.
Nature of Questions
Only now am I beginning to figure out: it’s been difficult for me to find my one unique voice because I have so many voices wanting to come through me. It was a mistake to believe any one of those voices was more valid or worthy of being shared than another. They are equally valid. They conflict with each other, and so the tension of imposing hierarchy as resolution only calls more attention to the importance and necessity of discussing one subject from a variety of perspectives. I am reminded that diversity around unity is the seed of compassion, both inner and outer. Inside me, there’s a voice that wants to address humanity as a species, in a broad way, that is removed from discussing the personal view, yet, while unalienably incorporating it as the window. Hiding itself as the lens, not drawing attention to itself except as to make as clear as possible what is seen. There’s another voice that wants to talk about what I have lived through as a specific unit of consciousness walking on this Earth, that wants to be vulnerable, be as visible as the lens itself, tell of the horrors as well as the joys.
But mostly the horrors.
Why? Would I want to tell the unpretty story? Why would I want to call direct attention to my pain? If asked, most people will not admit what hurts them most, at least, in my experience. Somehow, we have created an ever-pervasive artificial proxy to share our innermost vulnerabilities while never admitting what they truly reveal. We play hide-and-seek with ourselves and everybody else. A confrontation with true intimacy and authenticity terrifies most people into fidgeting and distraction. We stay within the glass and metal boxes of our facsimiled lives and pretend they are unbreakable. Telling the ugly stories breaks the illusion. Why not break this?
It’s why we read books, memoirs, biographies, autobiographies. It’s why we watch films, television, plays; it’s why we listen to music. We want to feel & know the pain, the challenge, the difficulty. Reading someone else’s pain helps us know that we are not so alone in ours, either. That’s all it really is.
Somehow, life becomes so heavy that we may truly come to believe we are completely alone. Sometimes, how much you want to connect does not matter and isolation is the only result. Sometimes, there’s a shadow of pain lurking beneath the surface that colors everything you breathe.
But how do we become the people who want to write about the messiness of life? To share it? To use it as a bridge of connection instead of a self-punishing shame? How do we make sense of our stories enough to tell them in a way that honors all the gravity of every moment, even if those moments were frivolous? Nothing is truly frivolous, so why have we so desperately enjoyed convincing ourselves that it is? How do we celebrate the gorgeous catastrophes that make up each of our individual lives?
Maybe the answer lies in flipping the question. Maybe the question is not, why do I want to tell these stories, but why do these stories want to come through me? What ancestor is asking to once again relive human life through me? What piece of consciousness needs some of my light shined upon it? What actor wants to dance on my stage? What part of me wants to be heard right now? What bit of my mind wants to ask the question why?
Perhaps we only exist to tell the stories our ancestors prayed we would survive to tell. Maybe questioning the way they want to come through us and conflating it with outside approval is a disrespect to the lives that lived before us and for us to be here now. Maybe performance for its own sake is the start of a dying imagination. Maybe suppressing our stories is killing ourselves and by extension, the lives of everyone and everything else.
It sounds odd to consider that in a hyperconnected digital world we aren’t sharing our stories. A few software companies have convinced roughly half the world’s population that by using their software, they are sharing their real stories, that they are being authentic, that they are being heard and seen. But are these social software stories the real stories of our lives? What percentage of the stories we see are truly authentic? How many others are merely presented in approved formats and expected manners, such that they become sterile copies of each other that we have been trained to become excited for in routine and practiced ways? Have we as the human species been misled entirely away from being able to distinguish authenticity from manipulation?
Social Software Networks & Human Stories
It’s 2020, and hardly anyone considers that some media marketers—with their ever-questionable agenda perpetually available to the highest bidder—decided at some seemingly arbitrary point to call “social media” as “social networks.” We have tacitly accepted this as a fact of digital life. But “social networks” are a misnomer in their intended usage, because this term usurps a larger category of actual, human social networks to which we all belong, more eternal groupings, like families, communities, nations, heritages, and species. Such hubris could only be intentional and the work of a brilliant, yet either a remarkably longsighted or woefully shortsighted, visionary. A more precise term for what we currently call “social media” is social software networks.
Why this matters is the term social software networks calls attention to the inherently artificial demeanor involved with using them. When they are social software networks instead of social networks or social media, their magic falls apart. They no longer hold the weight of representing the true sum total of our humanity, or bear an often exaggerated sense of importance. Instead, we notice that they are simply tools we have used to try an experiment with each other. We’ve just gotten so lost in our own experiment that we started to believe it was truly our reality.
That’s how talented human storytellers are. They have the power to convince billions of people in the reality of the unreal, the unreality of the real, and to stop questioning what goes where. We just have mostly forgotten that this is the human birthright, not an exception.
Ideologies
Our powerful capacity for storytelling is neither inherently bad nor good, but its outcome can be dangerous. We need to be able to connect across spacetime with our stories, otherwise we would not survive as a species. We need imagination for innovation, for creativity, for survival. However, when our survival necessity is manipulated en masse by a small portion of our species, at this point, these actions become bad. Manipulating human imagination for destructive means is always bad action. Manipulating our emotions through our stories and the way we are allowed to express those stories are always bad actions. Perhaps ideologies can never be good or bad, but only the actions that are done using ideologies as motivation can be good or bad.
Perhaps we need to seriously reconsider all ideologies that are being used as motivation for anything. Perhaps their motives need a thorough identification. Maybe that’s the only way to be certain about their purity.
Once we are sure of their purity, then we can be certain our actions and choices are not tainted by the impure motivations of others.
Our world is such a place where powerful people sacrifice the few for the many and the money, in an equation that cancels out the incalculable value of a single life. They wrote this equation and insist we all bend to it, that we all compute through it, that we all fit into it.
Questioning Social Equations
But what if we don’t fit into that equation? What if that equation is wrong? What if that equation isn’t just? What if it is inherently unjust? What if it only represents the unjust deviation between our connection to all Life & the survival of our species, or the disconnection to all Life & the destruction of everything on Earth? If we do not define justice as equivalent and inseparable from survival and preservation of all Earth’s species and Life, what other criteria retain their purpose?
If the game is rigged, are we responsible for the outcomes? Calling ourselves complicit only goes so many levels deep. At a certain point, we aren’t calling the shots anymore and things are out of our control—and that’s also the most terrifying thing for the people at the very top of this hastily crumbling pyramid to accept. Once we remember the ones controlling our options are as as helpless to greater forces as we are are them, all of a sudden, both their power and our complicity flies out the window. All of a sudden, what we are complicit for ends at a certain point in the path. Arriving here, we must do our best to resist the urge to transform into cowards, standing at this point, shouting and stomping our feet, pointing our fingers at the ones who pull the strings while falling immobile and ignoring the power we have to untie the strings. It is from this point that we must pick up our dropped responsibility and remember who we are. We are the generation that somehow decided to tie ourselves to strings and let ourselves forget we were being pulled. Time to untie.