The Speed

The Speed

Dec 22, 2021 | Time

Remember being a kid and thinking about adulthood? It seemed like a theory that would never be proven. Childhood lasted forever — every moment, experience, bowl of Quaker oatmeal seemed to require an eternity to complete.

Fast forward a few years, and we begin to experience time differently. Time moves with such haste, such speed, and we begin to understand why grandparents cannot remember what happened last week. For them, their time is somehow broken down into decades–the 50’s, 60’s, the 70’s–when did they graduate high school?

The speed of time. As we age, we acquire mass, it seems, and the speed at which we move through life increases in direct opposition to our ability to maintain our physical selves. We see wrinkles, run slower if at all, and a sadness creeps in that can only be explained by the realization that we are mortal.

Childhood ends when we realize the fundamental nature of time not only applies to us, it will bring us to our knees. If we have kids, then the even worse realization is that they will experience the same thing.

There is a laconic beauty to life. We are born, we die–and in between we have no memory of the former and pretend the latter does not exist until the illusion no longer works. Like Siegfried and Roy, the tiger will get us…

The Validation

The Validation

Nov 2, 2021 | Social Media

There is something deeply disturbing about the validation required by many today.

Did we eat the right food, say the right thing, buy the right product, look good doing it?

While not completely worthless–it is very rare when something can be designated in such a manner–social media is pretty close. Do we really need to say things to an audience of people that we for the most part do not know or honestly even care about?

Do you really care about Roger Jones, that dude you never talked to in 4th through 12th grade, but now 20 years later like each other’s posts about grilled cheese and babies?

Admittedly, there must be something biological that occurs when we post snippets of our lives on social media platforms. It sort of feels good. Yeah, our lives rock, our kids are too cute, our knowledge is too stellar.

It is crap. It really is a bunch of crap. There is something to be said for living within one’s own mind and heart and the parameters of a life you created with your own hands. A life that can be turned off or erased, which is entirely the case with social media, is not real.

The time we spend updating people we do not know, care about, or possible even like, can perhaps better be spent on the people with whom we work, love, or trying to love, etc.

There is an emptiness to social media, a puffing up of the proverbial chest, a step back into our primordial minds in which we must have sought validation wherever we could.

Validation cannot be bought, sold, or offered through video screens. Rather, it is an experience inside one’s mind, earned through breathing, letting go, crying, making mistakes, quitting jobs, landing them, giving birth, saying goodbye, falling down and getting up. 

Social media validates itself–that is all it does. It validates technology and the sadness we feel, but rarely express…

Love(s)

Love(s)

Oct 29, 2021 | Love

Love is something we discuss with others (or at least should). We point to it, demand and laud it. But what is it?

Are all loves the same? When we teach our kids about love, we explain it in a way that encourages them to think on it as if it were a timeless sort of thing. It is exists as some sort of truth, as if any deviation from it represents a failure on their respective part.

What if love is a construct? What if how we experience love results from cultural constructs that reinforce a worldview, a theory about human life? What if love is not a definitive thing at all, but rather itself a theory that frames our experience in a way that allows us to try and make sense of it?

Are all loves the same? Do you love the same way now as you did 20 years ago? Is what you felt 20 years ago not love? In 20 years, what will you think about how you love now?

Perhaps love is only defined in context and in relationship with others and, in turn, our very selves. Is love a verb? Is it a noun? Is it necessarily something we can satisfactorily describe in words to others?

Is love the ability to answer the demands of others in the ways they say they need? What if we think their worldview is wrong? Is love the ability to do for others in the way they need even if it contradicts our own views? Is that love, or is that disturbing?

Is your version of love better than mine? Can we both be correct? Do we love the same way and for the same reasons in all circumstances?

Which kinds of loves matter? What if they all matter? Do all loves ask us to do the same thing(s). Love may indeed be real, but perhaps it exists in the plural, which may in fact call into question whether any of us exactly understand when another says, “I love you.”

The Hate

The Hate

Sep 17, 2021 | Love

It is so easy to lay blame, point fingers, puff up our chests and essentially ‘hate’ what is around us.

Society subtly encourages angry thinking in its creation of various competitive platforms whereby people are challenged not to look within, but destroy something outside themselves.

Our lawns must be greener than our neighbors, our houses must be taller or shinier, we must be impervious to aging and eradicate our wrinkles. We need to join the gym and sweat, fight, and otherwise stick up our proverbial middle finger at a universe that is watching our every move.

Turn on the TV lately? We have reality shows where we have the unique opportunity to watch either rich or entirely boring people act stupid, ugly and just wrong. We cannot turn away, because it provides a glimpse into ourselves, and we have trouble loving that.

Love is not an action, a word or a thing. It is a way of life from which one cannot turn away, because it is at once an action and a thought, bound by space and time. It is a wave of energy, a particle, an electron floating, spinning, bouncing through the quantum universe.

In reality, though, do we know what love is? Do we really know? Does society really want us to love? Is that how things get promoted or sold?

Let’s place blame, assign guilt, puff up our chests like peacocks and parade before an empty universe. Let’s built towers and structure, monuments to ourselves that time will tear down over the eons.

Nothing we do will last. We will be the subject of incredible archaeological finds 175 million years from now. Will love last that long?

The answer is not clear, but the effort to love seems important. It matters. It is a feeling that is an end in and of itself. Will it last forever?

Does love really matter? For as long as we are on this earth, it does. Hate takes a short life and twists it into a black hole. Black holes are scary…

Jumping Ship

Jumping Ship

Jul 22, 2021 | Millennials

There is something to be said about jumping off of the proverbial ‘Millennial Falcon,’ this notion that people in their 20s and 30s do not just understand social media better (and they do), they understand more about life.

It is impossible that any one generation has THE answer(s), but millennials benefit from the visual nature of social media, which ‘captures’ their enlightenment. It is a preposterous idea, but one marketed to great effect.

Imagine if Baby Boomers had access to such technology in the 60’s? Surely, their message of peace and love seemed right. We see copious footage from TV and movies that demonstrate the force of their beliefs, but what we are missing is the platform of social media afforded to millennials that codify their ‘brand’ of knowledge.

What do millennials know? They know how to use technology, and this singular bit of knowledge bleeds into other areas of life and society. They know things, and with the click of a button this knowledge will be imparted to all.

There is something magical and yet predictable in the knowledge of young people. They KNOW, because they do not know what they do not know. Add on 15 years, a divorce perhaps, the birth of a child (or two), debt, wrinkles, the loss of one’s hair or job, and what you have is reality.

Reality is not pretty, nor do millennials possess a deeper understanding of it than anyone else. Like anyone, everyone, they are what they are, and it is neither good nor bad.

It is time, however, to abandon the ‘Millennial Falcon.’ Like all modes of transportation, it will eventually run aground or get blasted from the sky.

It is time to jump ship…