All In
I wake up as my phone rings and check the number. Another long distance area code, probably a debt collector. I push the button and set my head back down on my arms but realize it’s been twenty minutes so I should probably get back to work. The screen comes into focus, the first tab open to a protocol description for an encrypted p2p wireless network. Tabs cascade off the right side of the screen: exascale computing, crowd funding, 1% direct debit, quaternion interpolation, cheap graphene, I lose interest at seven distractions. Cat’s hungry, out of cat food. Need to take another test on eLance. Rear bike tire starting to fray. Roof leaking at sagging attachment. Did I shower yesterday? New chat messages. Friend finished his contract, good for him. I still need to open my other friend’s TV to see if it has failed capacitors like the iMacs I’ve been fixing. Partner’s not sure if local contract is still available. Email from girlfriend, three jobs available in my field. So tired. Shake it off, remember the goal. Back to programming. Flip open Xcode. No gl_FragDepth() in OpenGL ES, can’t render pixels and shadows in one pass over the sky. Have to invent another way to do it. Can’t set stencil buffer value either. Who decided this stuff? Will have to encapsulate the flaws away, work around them. Do it right, make it readable. Later. Hungry. Out of peanut butter. Out of bread anyway. Almost out of milk. Leftovers from yesterday, thank god. Yogi’s belly should be filled half with food, one quarter with water and one quarter with air. Wonder if philosophy was discovered through coercion or necessity. Irrelevant, it’s worked for a year now. Remember to learn yoga someday. When was the last time I meditated? Three months ago? Strangely don’t feel the need to. Life finds a way. Less is more. Why. The answers are elusive, ephemeral. When was the last time I felt certain? Maybe the summer of ‘93? Before divorce, college, alcohol and the working world? Or was it the fall of ‘99, in that brief interlude between college graduation and the end of the world? Or the summer of ‘01, just before 9/11? Was I certain at any time after that? What does certain even mean? Can a certain person be considered sane? Faith was an alien word that never held any meaning until this year. I know all about reality. A person is capable of almost anything when determined enough. The universe can be bent around a will. There is before and after. Before one discovers the exacting nature of the universe, life is filled with possibility and the wonder of the unknown. After one has made a determination of the nature of the universe, of right and wrong and the proper way to live, and the universe provides that reality, does wistfulness of the way it was before set in. Power is emptiness. Control overrated. But faith - the why, the unwritten word, the zen, that’s the final frontier. Seeking meaning, not having it. Walkabouts and vision quests and finding oneself. How does one compress a thousands desires into one day? Impossible. Solving every problem, inventing every device, demonstrating worth, would require immortality. What’s left is the hollow realization that it won’t come true. That the ideal world that would free us from the strange misery we inflict on each other will not only not exist anytime soon, but that even if it did, we would be the less satisfied for it. There are only small moves. Only dignity in living with our imperfections. The knowledge that we all fall, no matter how high we climb. The liberation of knowing that it does’t matter. On to step two. I’m awake now. Averaging the whole of the world’s expectations blurs into random noise. Why am I here? How can I best ask that question, knowing that there is no answer that would make any sense to anyone else. Where to begin? What am I to do? What should I be doing RIGHT NOW? Not procrastinating, that’s for sure. Or is it? Not sure, we’ve established that. This is the moment, it’s up to me what to do with it. Procrastination is just as relevant as not eating or not driving or not talking. Take the time to imagine, see it through. Remember the goal: to let go, to make the world real again. You are not in control. Believe it this time. Let it be. Just be. Take a deep breath. Stop thinking. Listen. The purring cat. The sleeping dog. The furnace kicking on. The computer fan. The fridge. The fingers on keyboard, the clammy feet, the kink in the neck, the spoon in the parts box, the eyeglasses under the junk mail, the forgotten projects scattered about the room in disarray. The spine tingling endorphins for no reason. The quiet inner voice. The day and the night and the sun and the moon and everything bigger than us. The jet plane in the sky. The ground beneath our feet. On to step three. There’s no step three! I remember when that used to be novel. Now it’s adrift in a sea of the ever frothing foam of distraction. We are here now, let the memories pass. There is only the age old question. The unknown. There are the smaller questions, like, do we create this reality as we go? Did we choose it before we were born? Do we really have any say in things or are we just crazy enough to believe that? Does it matter? More distraction. So much distraction, everywhere, constantly pulling us from experience. I grandiose my life, believing that I can tap into almost unimaginable resourcefulness. I could build sentient machines, I just need a hundred dollar development kit and a few years with free sample chips. I could build a solar device that costs next to nothing and could power the world for free, I just need a year of living expenses and access to the raw materials. I could build a flying machine that only needs the power to weight ratio of a human. And those are the easy projects. The hard ones, that keep me up at night, I’m not ready to talk about. The words of an insane person. Similar to the words of DaVinci, Tesla, Thomas Townsend Brown or Philo Farnsworth. Men far more brilliant than I’ll ever be, in times far more oppressive. Shame on me. I’ll be embarrassed when I post this, because it’s too revealing. Too crazy, too fringe, too unrealistic. My dreams are my own because they push the limits of my abilities. My imaginary ones. The truth is, I can’t even hold down a job without feeling like a rat in a cage. I can’t even clean my office. I can barely feed and clothe myself. I know in my heart that most of my inventions won’t actually work. That they’ve been tried and there is some bit of physics that I overlooked, some complication that will make them too expensive to be practical. But I’ve spent my life knee deep in algorithms so complex that simulating them dwarfs the complexity of almost anything I’ve encountered in the material world. Surely a collaboration, with the materials and computation available today, could bring us something more useful than information technology. I envy the John Carmacks of the world, the Paul Allens, the Richard Bransons. The ones who proved themselves financially and are now empowered to work on the world-changing ideas. I wonder what dreams they have. Not the mundane ones they fail at now like the rest of us do. The ones they only share with their closest friends. The ones that need a trillion dollars or the collective weight of the world to achieve. Immortality. Extraterrestrial contact. Free energy. Who knows. Who cares. We’ll find a way to achieve them, take them for granted, and move onto the next wonder until we have everything we need to endure until the end of the universe. But then I remember, they are dealing with their own realities. They are every bit as trapped as we are, perhaps more so. “None but ourselves can free our minds” as Bob Marley put it. Their biggest worry is their own demise. Money can’t save them. And nobody is working on the real problems, so we’ll all go down. And that’s ok. Can’t opt out of reincarnation. I write this for a selfish reason. To procrastinate fully, to rid myself of the need to daydream. Work has never been and never will be the problem. I solve problems handily, trivially. It’s the non-problems that get me. The problems of motivation, desire, engagement. It’s all such a waste of time. How do I trick myself into believing it isn’t, just long enough to make some progress? That is the real challenge I face. Maybe I need a new technique to numb my mind as I live out a life devoid of achievement. Maybe the puritans who denounce alcohol, drug abuse and promiscuity in favor of blind faith are onto something. Maybe changing one’s mind is easier than changing the world. Maybe it’s possible to have a life of small dreams and then achieve them and feel good. I wonder what that must be like. I will probably choose that for myself in my next life. Maybe this is my first understanding of conservatism. Or I need a machine that converts my efforts to money, like a treadmill. I could toil on it a fixed amount of time and get the money I require to exchange for the food and shelter that lets me live. We have this machine now, it’s called a job and takes half of our waking hours every day. I want to design one that’s more efficient. Real technology that allows us to get below the 2 hours of day labor that hunter-gatherers expended in survival. As the machine improves, labor drops to 1 hour, then a half hour, then 15 minutes and finally falls to a time period that can be combined with brushing one’s teeth. Then a machine can walk the treadmill and we’ll be free. The why becomes the how. How do I make this happen, so that I can get back to asking the why? What is the shortest path? There is no large payout with a job in a short timeframe, so that’s out. There is the internet lottery, elusive but potentially lucrative. There is no in-between but people are trying. Should I put my efforts into helping to build this labor-saving device? Are there other people out there who have run through this same simulation in their minds, realized that the current reality isn’t getting them closer to their dreams, and yearned for something more? I want out. I want to get back to the why. I have only small moves at my disposal. I have my spirit to sustain me. I have the now. The how is manifesting all the time. Someday I will have the who. I’m willing to do whatever it takes. I’m all in.
