I hereby resolve to write some posts this trip, because I herein read a post, and it’s pretty funny, and there’s something about writing that captures a concision and a worldview I have yet to replicate with on-the-fly videos:

Volume issues better, but not entirely fixed, in this installment from yesterday:

I have another TH’HEAT video in the wings, but the uploading seems to be going slowly because it’s really long and something about the lighting of it makes it extra-colorful and thus takes a lot of byte space and bandwidth. At least, I think that’s contributing to the issues. In any event, David Yin uploaded our fourth round from last Saturday’s fun tournament at Columbia and I wanted to share it since it was by far the highest quality round of the five we debated. We also got to defend something I believe in, more or less, even though I was accused of being an atheist during the round. It was after giving this LOR that I really felt I was on my game again and had shaken off all the rust from my time not debating.

Debate: “Would You Get Rid of Religion?” from David on Vimeo.

One of the most fun aspects of debate, as well as its most educational and most challenging, is that it mandates one frequently argue persuasively for things diametric to what one actually believes. Here’s a key example, where Dave and I, debating as “Red Dawn” as a nod to our personally socio-communist leanings, argue things like the market solving, the ethos of American opportunity, and even the accrual of debt:

APDA Summer 2011: Round 2 from Storey Clayton on Vimeo.

The first of a few rounds from Saturday’s tournament that Dave and I filmed. This is probably the second-best – our fourth round was awfully awesome and hopefully the other team, who recorded that, will get it online soon. This is among the crazier cases I’ve ever run, but it made for a pretty great round:

APDA Summer 2011: Round 3 from Storey Clayton on Vimeo.

Someone should let me know if this is too quiet to hear. There was some ambient noise and I think the computer was at a bad angle for picking up sound. I think it’s still audible, but it might not be. May use a mic on non-driving renditions of these in the future.

Not to be confused with packing heat.

Happy to announce the continuation of Blue Pyramid Stories, with special focus on my upcoming roadtrip. This project could go in a million different directions, but will at least go north, south, west, and east…

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

There is a certain satisfaction to a loud keyboard, to the drone of unknown engines in the background as one plugs away at creating verbiage in the midst of a building constructed for work. One has to be careful to get the balance and setting right, but the clack-clack-clack of a keyboard that makes noise carries with it the connotations of productivity and purpose and even poise that the modern bepajamaed laptopper knows little of, or at least has recessed in their memories like so many anachronistic episodes of Mad Men. Surely typing should make noise, like the Prius inventors discovered driving should in the wake of tests where their cars snuck up on pedestrians, inducing near-fatalities in their silent stealth.

For all the self-examination I do, I find that there are certain core principles that rarely get dragged into the mudslinging of recrimination and the fiery kiln of retooling along with everything else I think and believe. Among these, it seems, has been the quest to be understood, a core unquestionable bedrock principle for time immemorial. I don’t know how to breathe without wanting to be understood, and so many of my secondary and tertiary assumptions and principles rely on this foundation. And yet I’m coming face-to-face with the daunting realization that what Fish always warned me was right – no one is/was ever going to understand me. They haven’t built me to be understood, any more than they’ve built a refrigerator to walk. It’s just not part of the program. And I could be a sad little refrigerator dreaming of walking some day or I could find ways to get comfortable with stagnancy.

I haven’t made up my mind yet, quite, how to react to this burgeoning conclusion, because I’m still in the wake of grappling with exactly how much of my life is governed by this high-level desire. While Emily was quick to lampoon me as someone who “doesn’t care about happiness,” (Evidence of my inability ever to be understood? Perhaps!), this is an exaggeration. But certainly I would prioritize being understood above being happy. Of course, the desire to be understood might make it a core component of being happy, so it’s hard to precisely put these two values in conflict. We can imagine scenarios, though, and move on from there. But beyond that, it’s just essential to what I even look for in another person. The first question I ask myself is whether they seem capable of understanding me. It is primal. I don’t even know what a candidate for replacement first-question would be. I don’t even know how to undertake the process of evaluating other people on a personal level without that as my compass.

Part of the problem is that, as with most of my high-level principles, there’s a lot of backing for the status quo here, even if I don’t drag it through the fieriest parts of my reconsideration process all the time. A huge amount of literature, music, poetry, and discussion with other humans has led me to conclude that the desire to be understood is close to inescapable. That it seems to dictate most sincere intelligent rational behavior and interaction. Indeed, it seems at the very core of the notion of interaction. If we don’t seek some fundamental acknowledgment of our own experiences from other souls and perspectives, what are we even doing engaging with them? Why be a writer? Why lay down anything, from a silly quiz with some political overtones to a lengthy allegorical novel to this very blog post? If I don’t seek understanding, what the hell is my goal with all this expenditure of language? Why am I even coaching debate?

Now of course there’s a distinction to be made here, to be careful, between what might loosely be termed as “being understood” and “Being Understood.” Certainly if you are following any of what I’m talking about herein or relating to it, then you understand me in the lower-case sense of what we’re dealing with, and there are minor satisfactions to be gained from that, even some positive reinforcement to carry forward. But obviously this is vastly shy of the upper-case sense, wherein you would know me, my perspective, and my proclivities so fundamentally as to be able to predict my future behavior and reactions and empathize with my very way of interacting with the world. And that, my friends, is what is starting to seem unreachable. Already I can hear a lot of you cynics out there decrying that I ever believed in such a height of mutuality in our world and where did I get off being so naive?

Well naive or no, it’s informed countless numbers of my decisions and approaches over the past three decades and change. Or probably short of three decades – it would be interesting to trace the etymology of this desire back to its deepest roots. The fact that no formative experience around this ideal springs to mind upon cursory glance indicates just how essential it is – I can pretty well trace pacifism, vegetarianism, non-drinking/drug use, monogamy, and almost all my other core values and aspirations back to their initiation. But this one just seems prehistoric. I can even evoke instances of it from times when my memory stretches to its utmost, such as the fabled issue I had with how I was taken out of my car seat and how I felt about my parents either understanding me or not based on whether they did it the “right” way without being asked. Jettisoning this desire would be such a transformative change that I don’t even know who I would be or what I would look like without this. And maybe you can add up the last 31 years and say “good,” because I’ve been doing things so wrong that something diametric has got to be right. But I’m not altogether sure, and the precipice looks mighty high from here.

It gets me wondering, though, what other people are living for. I mean, I know a lot of folks don’t spend a lot of time introspecting and seem to be just sort of putting their head down and getting through whatever allotment Earth gives them and still others seem to derive tautological pleasure from the pursuit of happiness. Feeling good isn’t bad, on face, but it sure seems like an awfully empty thing to put all of your energy into. And yeah, there’s helping people, and that’s important, and that’s a high-order principle as well, especially in slightly less personal pursuits (although in personal ones too). But why do we help people? Honestly, there’s probably nothing I want to help people with more than their own pursuit of being understood. As I do, because I’m a human, I’ve probably projected my own priorities and desires on tons of other people (nearly everyone?) and I derive a lot more satisfaction and fulfillment from convincing someone else they’re not alone or that I empathize with them than I do making them happier or digging them out of poverty or something. It’s that poverty of spirit that the lonely have that concerns me most about our experience here. Which also seems fundamental – in believing that the world is a physical metaphor for an aphysical reality, the deeper emotions matter a lot more than the material plusses and minuses. God, no wonder I end up with different conclusions than most other people. Even recent conversations with relatively relatable intelligent people have turned up how embedded in hardcore materialism (philosophical materialism, not capitalist materialism, though there’s probably some of that too) everyone else is.

I’m in a library and I have a list of physical amalgams of pages bound together to try to pick up so I can digest and absorb them, come to a deeper understanding of people I will never meet and their perspectives on invented people who are illustrative metaphors for those I know. Would I even pursue these kinds of activities under a newly adopted regimen of personal goals? Why or why not?

My entire life, I’ve garnered the most hope for our species from the idea that we can learn from each other’s mistakes and not have to endure every one of them on our own anew. It’s a simple idea, much espoused, and is probably the basic principle which ants and cockroaches will utilize to long outlive us. They’re better at it than we are, but this doesn’t negate our ability to use it too. Giving up on being understood would seemingly have a corrosive impact on even this key solace. And yet, if it’s more realistic, who am I to blow against the wind? If only this wind weren’t so particularly cold and, well, unfeeling.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

I haven’t had a lot to say the last couple days, but it’s not for lack of activity. Friends have been in New York and I went to see them, other friends came to New York and I went to see them. So much of me wants to just scrabble up the current life plan and return to a previous one, but I also know that fails to recognize the incredible blessings incumbent in the current one. People still get this wide-eyed look when I talk about the opportunities I’ve got with the debate team right now and I have visions of all the things that I think we can accomplish and I’ve already become really reliant on this community of people. I just so so so wish it were somewhere in the West, or at least not in New Jersey. I have people nearby, everywhere around, but not here, and efforts to get people here seem to be stymied by the fact that it’s New Jersey and everyone else recognizes that too. Next life, I think I want a planet that’s 500 miles around or maybe to be born into one of those feudal villages where a trip to the city walls is a big adventure.

In any case, on this particular planet, I’m staring down an epic roadtrip in less than a fortnight that’s got some event changes possible at the front-end that I’ll update as soon as I know what those are. In the meantime, I wanted to share a tour video from another roadtripper, the herein over-discussed Allison Weiss, who just released a recording of one of the new songs as she played it at the Princeton show I attended! This song, like so many of hers, captures exactly how I’m feeling, but this day in particular. And it’s a rerun of something I already saw. The world is like that all the time, kids. Just open your eyes and your mind.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

It’s not a new thought that hit me while I was working on the Consequences of Capitalism Quiz, but the nature of it probably hit me harder and more profoundly than similar realizations in the past. We live in a society whose fundamental problem appears to be the belief in growth – not just as a possibility or an aspiration, but as an absolute fundamental baseline taken-for-granted necessity. The assumptive reality pervading everything about the United States of America and especially its economic reality is that everything will continue to grow, ever upwards, become ever more efficient and profitable, forever. In short, it gets better.

And while a decent amount of empirical evidence from the twentieth century seemed to affirm this belief structure, the very logic of the notion is completely fallacious. The nature of reality is not to grow infinitely. The only thing that grows endlessly with such abandon in the natural world is cancer. Adapting, perhaps, living in harmony with ones environs, adjusting to the nature of life, possibly. But simply growing and growing for the mere sake of growth, of taking up more space and resources and demand? This is probably the opposite of what we ought be advocating as a collection of people.

The ability of America to get away with this unchecked growth for the latter part of the twentieth century and brief slices of time prior is the result, almost entirely, of hidden exploitation. In the early colonial and expansionist days of the United States, of course, it was exploitation of racial minorities, primarily enslaved Africans and genocided Native Americans. When we ran out of local peoples we felt comfortable oppressing to death, we started exporting, using the Cold War as an excuse to strip-mine the rest of the world, both literally and figuratively, lining the pockets of ever more powerful American corporations while the resources and labor of foreign people were drained. We called it American ingenuity and patted ourselves on the back for how much richer and more powerful we were becoming by the alleged sweat of our brow. By the early part of this century, we’d started ramping up exploitation of our own labor force as well, ever spiraling wealth disparities while creating engines of debt and advertising to ensure that most people would feel wealthier while functionally inching closer to enslavement.

Despite my ability to rant on about the political situation we find ourselves mired in, I’m actually more interested in the personal and emotional impacts of this phenomenon in today’s meditation. Remarkably, they strike me as both directly correspondent and possibly even more pernicious in their overall toll on individuals raised in America. And it is this outgrowth of the belief in eternal growth that I find to be most cancerous, most malignant, most in need of swift and holistic surgical removal. We need a chemotherapy of the soul, something to bring us to the brink of our own mortality if only to see how brokenly we’ve lived.

The issue here is that people are raised in the United States to believe their lives will always get better. That time itself is a magical healing property, that merely by existing over the course of days, one’s lot will improve, one’s fortune will be benefited, one’s ship will come in. It goes well beyond mere hope, for hope is humble and patient, biding its time while American expectation zooms past in a red sports car, laughing maniacally as the wind whips its hair in a million directions. The expectation becomes a birthright, an entitlement, not even a demand, for demand implies the possibility of rejection or resistance. It is simply known that things will get better.

Of course, life pays little heed to the American self-image and its egotistical entitlements. Life, inevitably, doesn’t always get better. People may learn or change over time, but often for the worse, the more cynical, the more deprived. They lose jobs, they lose houses, they lose marriages. They make mistakes. People they love die. The myriad mundane experiences that philosophers and novelists have put in perspective for millennia worth of human beings take their toll on the human souls, yet only in America do we seem to bear it with such profoundly little grace, such massive resort to drugs and despair. This is not to pick on America, entirely, as I am wont to do, for increasingly little of the world bears such losses with dignity or perspective. But this nation, as with most phenomena of the last half-century, appears something of an epicenter, a ground zero from which the ripples of expectation and greed and self-delusion ripple out as we infect the rest of the world with our brand of capitalism and neo-neo-imperialism.

The question becomes why? Why is America this bastion of disappointment, of flight to distraction in the form of quick-hitting media or fast-acting painkillers? What makes us so different that we cannot handle the bends in the road?

I believe it’s because we don’t see them coming. We’re told they won’t come, because the passage of time is supposed to, somehow, inevitably, make things better. And worse than just making our reactions to our unhappiness more extreme, I think it’s actually the cause of most of that unhappiness.

Take a marriage, for example (shocking that I’d start here, I know). If one has the expectation of eternal growth and improvement, it becomes all too easy to become dissatisfied with the course of that marriage. There is not the mere push to smooth out problems and challenge one’s partner to betterment, there is the God-given mandated right to eternal improvement, because that’s the nature of time. Every year should not be a mere marker of stable positive time logged, it must demonstrate tangible growth over time. And subjecting any person, any situation, any element of existence, to that kind of expectation is going to take a toll. Any shortcoming can be compared against the ever-upward stock-market curve of fabled expectation, leading to foot-tapping impatience at how one could tolerate a year when things were the same, even if that sameness was still very good. It doesn’t take long before one imagines that everyone else is growing and one is somehow stuck in unnecessary stagnation, and it’s time to take drastic action to correct one’s disappointing circumstances.

Even more importantly, that same situation is taxed by a lack of appreciation for the present. The very nature of a constantly-improving future is to belittle or undermine whatever values are banked for the time being. The evidentiary documentation of advertising and corporations’ role in dissatisfying people with their present circumstances is too legion and vast to even reference – it is as trivial as observing that people need oxygen to breathe. And yet other, deeper elements of our societal structure serve the same function. Profits must not only exist, they must be ever increasing. Success must not merely be maintained, it must be heightened. This kind of pressure on ever better futures mean that whatever happens in the future doesn’t end up even mattering as much, because we never reach it. When the future is always better, the present it always worse, whether that future actually is better or not. And thus we do not appreciate whatever we have or have been given. Doubly so because everything we gain, if it actually is better than the past, was expected and promised from the get-go. The only surprises are bad ones, never good. And in that, we undermine any tokens of joy we could hope to get during life as we actually live it.

An alternative structure to both society and our lives might be better focused on the nature of life as cyclical, as changing but perhaps not improving. It is a fine line between this and hopelessness, a line that must be guarded carefully and walked closely. Saying that things will not necessarily improve, however, is not to say that they cannot. It is merely to observe the blindingly obvious reality that things do not always get better for all people at all times. Have you ever seen an old homeless person? Have you ever seen someone suffer a loss they could not endure? Have you ever seen someone undergo an injury or a disease and never fully recover? These are daily mundane proofs of the fact that one’s life is not destined to always spiral upward in some magic escalator of rapture. And yet most people persist in the constant belief that they are mandated to ride such an escalator, forever.

Adjusting to the reality, internalizing it, sharing it with others, teaching one’s children: all of this would seem to lead to a more harmonious understanding with our fellow people and the actual circumstances we seem to face on this planet. It would make losses easier to stomach, not adding the trauma of being wrenched from expectations to the already devastating loss endured. It would make happiness more pervasive, more appreciated, less belittled in the face of greater happiness to come. It would allow people to be satisfied with less while still striving to seek improvement and truly valuing whatever they were actually able to improve. It would reduce exploitation, of ourselves, each other, foreign nations, the environment.

It’s time to be anti-growth. It’s time to understand that life is not a linear straight-line pointed upwards, but another game we all played as children: Chutes and Ladders. But no one ever wins. And you know what? That’s okay. Life shouldn’t be about winning and losing. Life should be about being happy to be on square 55 because of whatever’s valuable about that square.

It’s probably too late for my generation in this country, though we can make strides to try to undo a century’s worth of work before us. But some of you have a role in raising the next generation and I urge you to take heed.