COLUMN: Some Time In The Mind

The universe is really so big all of the time. Microwaved hotdogs are satisfying even if they may deliver you cancer in 12 plus different ways. I am always wasted. My laptop doesn’t even cooperate any more. It has Alzheimer’s, or dementia. Maybe it’s just a virus. You’ve heard, right? That people are getting computer viruses these days. F—ing Steve Jobs. 

What’s it like to be thinking all the time? What does it mean even, to just be “yourself?” Because don’t you also have to find “yourself?” And if I’m digesting all of this media geared toward my demographic all the time, e.g. watching and reading about HBO’s hit, voice-of-a-generation TV show Girls, then my “self” appears to have been prescribed exhaustedly. 20-something—that’s what I am/you are, and there are plenty of advice-giving think pieces on what it is to be 20-something, what it means to be 20 something. So many feelings, so much consternation, so much thinking about what you are to become—followed by more thinking about that thinking on your becoming. Eventually, everything is okay though, because your life will move forward and you’ll get older, and you’ll have new and interesting experiences. Do I even believe that? Do you?

 This is who I am—this is who you are. We’re always getting wasted and we’re so self-aware. We’re the most self-aware. It’s part of our historical hard wiring. I am post-post-modern, meta everything. Who constructs meaning? Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, The OC, and Laguna Beach were self-fulfilling prophecies, but maybe also perfectly reflective of culture’s historical development. Philosophers get hired to do that, right? A zeitgeist forms from the trickle-down effect from a grand contemporary philosophers’ brain trust. But really, Twitter accounts are more significant than they are given credit for. 

I need to buy things. But I also need money, a lot of it, and at the very least an upper-middle class existence. Upward mobility is for the birds nowadays. No social security. But I am still entitled to artisanal goods and gluten-free everything. Gluten-free iPhone cases made from rice and Japanese ingenuity.

Everything mainstream is mind-numbing and soul-killing, but I love it. JK. Maybe. Entertainment value triumphs, so too does reliability. We must be entertained. I’m looking at my phone so I can pretend that I’m not listening to you, but am engaged only in my own anxieties. Job markets are impossible. But remember, you and me, we are tastemakers. We know social media—which is profitable, ultimately.

 We cannot be freed from contexts and milieu. Milieu is such a great buzzword, and categories and genres are so important. Climate change, gun control, pipelines, sustainability. The Chinese are going to take over everything with their pollution and manufacturing economy, and this world is totally post-American, Fareed Zakaria. Pop songs and base-dropping electronic music and substance abuse makes you feel whole again—on weekends.

Nothing is sustainable. Definitely not beef, not even a Prius. We need change. All this technology leads a sad existence that is doomed for planned obsolescence. Pay off debt. Save. Retire. Lol. I sent zero snapchats yesterday but received three. I had one tweet that was twice retweeted and three times favorited, which I thought was pretty good. All-time highs in Instagram likes have a positive affective influence on my mood and confidence level. I can’t even be sure if that’s pathetic. America. 

So f—ed up that we can’t just talk face to face, mano y mano anymore. Tindering to meet people—people of the opposite sex just to bang them. Where have traditional family values gone? Bill Gates is going to live forever and Warren Buffet will have given away all his money. Robber barons are corporate raiders and Internet moguls—the men and women who build America. I want McDonald’s. I do not care what’s in a Chicken McNugget. My body will process, then poop out whatever that stuff is. Which is fair and fine by me. I signed the receipt.

I am/you are inundated by media. Popular culture defines me and my friends, and you and your friends. We’re always hipsters, right? Which is a bad thing. I should go to Brooklyn and experience youthfulness, art, craft moonshine, and Fair Trade bicycle tires. We’re on the verge of something, you and I—we just need a few more years, and a startup and a few angel investors. George Bush paints pictures of himself in bathtubs now. Barry O shoots hoops, smokes cigs, and orders drone strikes.

You, me, I, we have attention deficit disorder and should be consistently medicated. That way we can focus on boring and important things like work and school, and reading and Xbox, and improving real estate markets. And Syria and Libya and the Arab Spring—we’ll not forget about those.

Anything goes, everyone is amoral, and everything (including this … I think) is ironic. It’s okay. It’s 2013. The future is luminescence amidst vast darkness. We’ll say goodbye to the last of an analog species. Google used to be a curiosity. I’m all over the place because I have to be. I am recycling platitudes and things that I have heard, which are now my own. I am disinterested, yet totally concerned. 

This is what it means to be self-reflective. This is what it means to be alive and confused. This is the world right now, but we’re not caught up. Everyone is always younger. Maybe this helps, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it makes sense, maybe it doesn’t. Taylor Swift is both wrong and right—22 is newfound teenage angst. Text me, it’s important. I think we’ll get through this. 

 

Editor’s Note: The views presented in this column are those of the author alone and do not represent the views of The Heights.