Lower and more apathetic than I've ever been...doesn't seem to be any point in doing anything at all. Yesterday enough coffee and a nice New Mexico sunset brought the answer to me. If you don't perceive reality then of course you don't give a hoot about anything real. Even though it's all a fog, I feel dimly as if I'm on the cusp of something, as if the very next step I take will be down one path or the other, from which there will be no turning back. I could renounce the plugged-in life for good and try to find something real to interest me, or I could just withdraw into a state of full-blown computer geekdom. Seems like it's one or the other though.
Too much thinking, too little doing. I lead a contemplative life in which all kinds of ideas pour in and out but nothing leads to action. But what, after all, is the point of contemplation if not action? I complain about my life having no drama, no narrative, but this is just the result of not taking action. They don't call a guy a "man of action" for no reason; taking action is practically a definition of what it is to be male.
But action without purpose is equally as bad as inaction (borrowing this idea from Rand now). Purpose, however, presupposes a goal to be reached, which must be a goal both perceived as worth attaining as well as perceived in the first place. So the problem here is once again not perceiving reality.
In my plugged-in life though I am a man of action, I do have purpose, and I do have goals worth achieving. Somehow though everything in my plugged-in life seems, ultimately, totally inferior to things in real life. Is this because most people around me are living real lives rather than plugged-in ones, and all this a simple case of feeling like the odd man out? Maybe so--and if I arrived at this conclusion you know what path I'd take.
But I've got some internal dissatisfaction with the plugged-in life that I can't shake. I imagine it's the sort of uneasy feeling that in a drug addict eventually grows until he voluntarily commits himself, no matter how great the alternate reality was for him, in order to rejoin the land of the living.
Posted by Alan at December 28, 2002 01:53 AM