What are you going to do with your life? That’s the question, isn’t it.
I have lots of potential. I know this, because it is what I have always been told, and because I have actualized some of this potential, and it was good. But potential isn’t all that great.
I think inside every humble man rests a man of ambition. In some, he has been beaten into a pulp. Certainly, I have an ambitious man inside. I’m not even sure if I’m very good at hiding him. But an ambitious man cannot be a hobbyist. It seems to me whatever I do, I’ll become a fucking hobbyist, in one way or another, and I’m too ambitious for that.
Leon Battista Alberti was the original Renaissance man. He was an author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher, and cryptographer. These days, he might have been an author who drew up his own house; an artist who got some poems published; a priest who dabbles in cryptography; a linguist whose work once strayed into philosophy of language. It’s not that doing something for pay is the ultimate arbiter of worth or importance, but that it’s no longer possible for a person to excel and be taken seriously in all the things he takes seriously. I do not desire to be a master chef, because I don’t care about cooking—I am happy to make food because I need to eat, and that is the end of it. Cooking isn’t even a hobby, it’s a necessity. But I can’t stand the thought that the activities I actually pour my heart and soul into would be mere hobbies, would be less than serious.
Since June, I have not done anything productive. I have earned a little money doing a temporary job. I have continued to build a following on Tumblr: the people still come streaming in, who knows from where, and I can’t imagine why. Other than that, I have done nothing. I feel like every day, I waste some potential, set fire to a few bills of this invisible currency which I have apparently acquired from the gods. Every day I do nothing, one possible future in which I am something is removed from the pile.
I was going to make art. Ha! What foolish optimism! Turns out it’s really fucking hard to make art in a place where almost no one lives, nothing happens, and no one else is doing anything remotely like what you want to do, and it’s hard in a way that things were not when I was in an environment that encouraged that kind of thing, that was filled with people excited about Art.
I could be any number of things, which makes me completely uninspired to do anything. The longer I waste pissing away time doing nothing, the fewer things I could actually be, until I’ll end up being None of the Above because I couldn’t be fucking bothered to check off one of the fifty boxes that were once open to me.
I’m a cynic at heart, which makes me angry at myself for being disappointed. I’m disappointed that I am actually capable of feeling disappointment. I should have known things were going to turn out this way.
It’s silly to walk around being disappointed in the world. The world owes me nothing and I owe nothing to do the world. I should be feeling liberated by the latter, but I’m too busy being sad about the former.
On a meta-level, I know that this is a passing thing. It must be. Somehow or other, at some point in the future, I will do something, and that will lead me to be somewhere, and then I won’t be stuck in limbo anymore and I will not be sad about being in limbo, and at that point, reading these thoughts will likely be embarassing, like stumbling over a notebook of shitty emotional poetry that you wrote in ninth grade. Oh god, I will think. Did I become one of those people posting about “that awkward moment” or pouring out his heart to the internet, oversharing minor disappointments, hearting cliches about emotional anguish, metaphorically curling up into a ball for the internet to watch.
But there is, as yet, no switch we know of that can transcend the levels of cognition to implement in the reptilian brain the emotional states that the rational mind has decided are prudent.
Reason is slave to the senses, wrote Hume.
The senses are not being very sensible at the moment.
Nov 1, 2011