Back to the Future
I’ve been trying to blog off and on now for 8 years and have managed to do everything but say what I needed to say. I can tell you the ins and outs of building websites and maintaining servers but it mostly amounted to expensive hand waving with the advent of email-based blog sites. I’m tired of micromanaging my tools and just want to write.
I’ve heard people complain that they don’t know what to write about, but it mystifies me because I’ve always worried about what not to write. There is enough noise in the world. What compels me is that after reading pages of conversation, nobody ever seems to hit on the gist of an idea. It’s always something so simple, something crying out in my mind, yet it’s often overlooked. I feel like every time I didn’t chip in, some opportunity for rationality was lost. A little color faded from the world, at least my world.
It’s weird that anybody in his or her right mind would want to write freely, at the risk of drawing criticism. But here I am doing just that. I need to get the words out to clear out my own mental closet and make room for the more important things. I guess I don’t care as much anymore about “changing the world” because I know that it pushes back a million times harder than I ever could. I just want to add a bit of insight.
It’s a mistake to think that people need to be led to the truth. I used to waste hours mass emailing my friends with rants about politics and health and all the stereotypical sophomoric thinking that self-proclaimed experts love to blabber on about. So this time I’m going to keep it brief, to the point. Draw your own conclusions.
My current inspiration comes from deep thinkers like Thom Hartmann and Paul Graham. I highly respect anyone who speak truth to evil, or at the very least to the mundane. Nihilism is so rampant in our society and so misleading, that to reject any of it hints at the need to reject all of it. The most rational arguments are so often vacuous because they neglect meaning and nuance. The cure for hopelessness is self-evidently not the removal of hope…
This year I rejected responsibility as it’s been imposed on my by others and have begun to replace it with applied self-actualization. It’s hard to explain why this is so important, but the basic idea is that when you work within the system that others would have you work in, then you are limited to their vision of what’s possible. I was burning the candle at both ends and my contribution was so mediocre that the harder I tried, the harder I failed. I feel like I’ve spent my life with the peddle to the metal but I was in first gear.
I lost most of the last decade trying to survive and persuade, at the expense of demonstration. We’ve had some progress finally and I feel like the world is back on track to the point where we can begin to think about how to move on to bigger and better things. For me, the years went 1999, 2000 …2011. The decade of the Nothings (a term I borrowed from the children’s movie Neverending Story) was largely forgettable, not just because progress was slow, but because we actually regressed in some ways. But the damage to our collective psyche was a necessary part of our healing. I don’t think a typical member of my generation on the eve of the millennium would have believed how far the country would slip afterwards.
Anyway, I don’t want to dwell on that, because the future is finally here. I haven’t felt this good since the 90s. I want to get in touch with interesting people who are making great things possible and changing the status quo. I want to become part of something bigger. I don’t want this decade to suck like the last one did. In the most nonreligious way I can say it: amen to that.
Join me on Twitter @zackarymorris
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