It’s difficult to talk about my struggles with myself because one of them happens to revolve around pride. On one hand, I want to share everything going on in my mind, just open up like a floodgate and let it all pour out. But not here. Not in this way. There’s something I find vulgar about exposing oneself like that, without even the decency of a fictional or philosophical pretense. I suppose it’s linked to years of digesting Protestant guilt, wearing clothes, not flinging my feces in frustration…
But really it’s pride. I’m too proud to admit I have any real problems. I’m too proud to admit that I’m struggling all the time, that sometimes I wonder if I’m even a good person. It shames me because, deep down, I realize these are everyone’s problems and it’s embarassing to realize I am not the beautiful and delicate snow flake I was always told. No matter how nice our clothes, our perfumes, our vehicles or homes… we are still the same naked, emotionally-driven apes that crawled from mother earth’s dripping womb. The fact that there are 6-billion of us now doesn’t change the schematics.
You remember that part from Fight Club where Durden’s wimpy alter ego can’t continue going to the group meetings because he knows someone else in the group is faking? Just knowing that someone else is faking makes him feel so self-conscious that he can no longer let go and cry, which is the only way he can sleep. Or have you ever seen a baby bawling its eyes out, but stops the moment another baby starts crying. The first baby looks at the new baby like, “Hey, stop honing in on my racket!”
We’re all like that, jockeying for the same bandwidth to be seen, heard and validated. We all want to be acknowledged for the invaluable, indispensable asset that we are. This goes back to our ancestral mind; the one that originated in tribal life when everyone’s acquaintances could fit into one camp. In such a situation, it was much easier to be the fastest, the brightest, the best with tools or a the best cook. One’s value could be determined practically.
However, as the size of our social units increased, we found that it was much more difficult to determine one’s value. So we came up with more complex systems involving money, hierarchy and property laws. No one person can entirely explain how we determine why one person deserves a $100-million bonus and someone else has to make due with $15/hour with no benefits. The reasoning is so deeply embedded in our system that it requires none. We take the dollar value of a person as the empirical evidence of their worthiness.
This is so vastly different from how we are set up as animals. The social bonds that unite us establish trust and cooperation, but the further outside of our network we venture, the less certain trust and cooperation become. Money is how we abstract trust and cooperation; in exchange for money, we give our cooperation, with the trust that our efforts will be rewarded with cooperation when we need it. That is, if we have the money.
Money is also how we abstract importance. The more money a person has, the more they should be listened to, the more respect they are entitled to. We don’t always know why this is. It isn’t because they’ve earned our respect. It isn’t because we have deep knowledge of their moral character. We give them respect because we are conditioned to understand money demands it.
Having depersonalized our value to such an extent, there’s no wonder so many of us wander in despair, grasping after things to make us feel real and important. We plaster our cars with bumper stickers announcing our interests, we dress in branded clothes, drive branded cars — everything to associate ourselves with something realer, more lasting and important than we are. After all, there are many Bobs, but only one Saab car company. Driving a Saab says so much more about you in our society than being named Bob.
The same goes for working at a certain company. God knows I felt so proud to work for Apple. Apple is a brand that everyone knows and, as everyone knows without knowing, the more people know about something, the realer it is. Nyaze is barely a ghost in the machine, but Apple is a machine unto itself. From its holy corporate ark flowed strength, meaning and purpose. This type of infusion is addictive, even more so than the money. The grand sense of moving across the world stage is intoxicating.
Going back to being just one ordinary person can be quite a blow. I mean, who wants to be ordinary?
Ordinary.
What a word. Commonly meaning “of no special interest,” “the usual.”
Funny how things in this category wind up being the most important substrate of our existence. Not often do we think about the air we’re constanting sucking into our lungs. Or the light that allows us to see. These are perfectly ordinary things. Just like the ground we walk on, the sky above us, and all the people we’ve ever met.
It’s precisely this consistency that makes life bearable. We would soon be driven crazy if life were constant flux. It’s approximated via television sometimes, but we hang on by a nail.
The Tao is master of all because it serves all. It is utterly and totally lackluster. It’s so plain it can hardly been seen, heard, touched or smelt. It’s blander than water. It’s emptier than a hole. It’s lower than bottom.
All things know it without knowing, all understanding flows from its darkness.
Dammit, you see, there I go rhapsodizing again.
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