I’m back home now, and I’m feeling something I haven’t felt since the last time I returned from a big trip.

Friday night I came in the door, dropped my bag, sat on the couch out of habit. Instead of the relief I had looked forward to from the plane, I felt an intense uneasiness. My apartment is clean, spacious, utilitarian and unlike New York City in every way, and to this moment it makes me queasy.

It’s no wonder, either, that feeling so comfortable in the crowds of Manhattan (“like a warm bath,” I kept saying) I feel quite out of place in a city that is so starkly different, even if I do call it home.

What is a surprise, though, is that I’d been enduring some measure of this restlessness all the time without recognizing it. My living situation is nearly perpendicular to my actual values, and I didn’t realize it until I fit so well in a place so dramatically different than here.

It was a revelation to me that I crave a buzzing social life, walkable shops, dinners with friends, art and art people, cafés that aren’t franchises, buildings that are older than my parents. Yet I live in a dull park of two-level apartments at the edge of the city, with nothing in its walking radius but box stores. This is not a neighborhood.

One afternoon in Manhattan I was in a museum and I had to find a way to write something. I’m sure a lot of writers feel it. It comes on with the same kind of urgency as having to pee.

I quickly ended up sitting on one of the viewing benches in a room dedicated to Kandinsky, typing on my phone.

Things I have learned in ny.

Read more. Get healthy. Get calm but stay playful.

Create something everyday. Poem, stream of consciousness, article, drawing or narrative.

Find your people. Get close to the action.

Absorb art. 

Read much more. Master the language.

Walk more. Make plans. Eat out with friends.

Let yourself be overheard. Let people react.

Read a good periodical.

Do stuff but don’t worry about what you’re not doing.

Finish more, start less.

You’re okay.

No, nothing about being home is relieving, except that I remember feeling exactly like this when I got home from New Zealand – unsettled in a way I had never been while I was living out of a backpack. Like important parts are missing.

It does go away though, and that is worrisome. I knew early in my trip that I was going to be transforming certain aspects of my life when I got home, but it needs to continue to feel uncomfortable until I start the wheels turning, or it won’t happen.

The main offender really is the location. I’m planning to stay in Winnipeg, at least for now, but I need to get out of the suburbs. My apartment is cheap and unlovable. I generally don’t invite people here. I want a home.

None of this is to say I am not grateful overall for where I am. The people I met in New York, as much as I envy them, stirred up in me a very specific gratitude about the space and potential I have back home. For all the dazzling cultural opportunities their city offers, people generally have less personal space and less budget space in which to shift things around.

I have the makings of what I want. I’m young, well-traveled, kind of talented, unencumbered by debt, single and pretty damn handsome. I’m well-paid, I like my job and have freedom to travel in winter.

So the space for transformation is certainly there, but I have to harness this precious distaste for my “home” while it lasts. Complacency is never far off. Things get normal in a hurry, and when “not good” gets normal, time eats up the years fast.

Upon my return from New Zealand I didn’t quite know what to make of that queasy feeling. Travel does this, I see now. It shows you what you value, and when it’s over you feel certain deficits in the life you’ve built. You feel physically off balance. The inputs that nourished you while you were away — whether it’s the sight of the ocean every day, or the way strangers talk to each other so easily — leave a sharp hangover when they get cut off.

It’s a good thing though. It’s a healthy, natural impulse — a slower, calmer version of the feeling that makes you want to kick to the surface after you’ve been under too long. It moves you the right way.

Anyway, the trip was incredible, better than I could have imagined. And I have the people to thank most. Landmarks are cool, but it’s people that make it magical. Thank you everyone, especially Christopher, Allison, Susan, Leeat, Kent, Lisis, Danny, and the lovely Nicole. You don’t know the half of what you did for me.

Apologies to those I didn’t meet. I had completely overbooked myself. Originally I’d planned to visit about ten different cities in the same timeframe. Completely unreasonable, and I ended up redrawing the whole thing. I love the northeast though and I will be back. Of course, you should drop me a line if you’re going to be in Winnipeg.

And thank you all for bearing with me while I was gone. Writing gets difficult and disjointed (and maybe a little too self-reflective) while traveling. Raptitude will be back to its regular articles next week.

I love you all,

David

***

Click here for Home.

 Photo by David Cain

Mother Nature’s running a trial-and-error business, so sometimes our programming doesn’t make a lot of sense.

We come out of the box tuned for self-preservation and conformity. Not self-expression, not self-actualization, not happiness. But that’s what we want. Our genes want rock-solid, redundant systems for survival, nothing more. We want to have fun and feel good about our lives. Not the same thing!

The bulk of human activity is still driven by our oldest impulses — to secure, to acquire, to indulge, to conquer, and to reproduce these motives in one’s children. They were around when that first fish-monster fin-flopped onto the land and began our extended family, and still sit at the centre of human motivation.

But we’re quite far along from that now, and while we’ve developed some great new tricks and some new desires, it’s all built on the same bedrock of high-strung survival impulses that kept sea creatures flourishing hundreds of millions of years ago.

So by now, for humans, the basic survival motives are still prominent in our consciousness. You feel their influence whenever you sense a mannequin’s presence, or when weird people get into the elevator with you.

They come in a thousand forms and the reactions they create are all quite normal and quite unconscious. But because they’re normal, they’re generally unquestioned, and because they’re unconscious they can be really destructive. Nearly every instance of conflict you read about in your newspaper is somebody’s base motives leading them to create trouble for themselves or others.

We do have newer impulses though. They’re more complex, more delicate and a lot more interesting. We exhibit capacity for creativity, mindfulness, curiosity, wonder and love. We want to arrange things in certain ways, beautiful ways, and we want to see them arranged that way. And not necessarily because it helps the species survive. We just want to do it.

Those impulses don’t have a lot of driving power in the biological evolution game. But this is civilization, and we’re not really playing that game anymore. It is still running in the background, but let’s just say that if you don’t survive it’s probably not because you’re not quite as jumpy as your fish-monster ancestors.

Today, you can survive just as easily, maybe better, if you’re not a sharpened killer or an insatiable hoarder. So with survival now fairly easy, our higher faculties finally have a chance to air themselves out.

That is, if we’re listening when they ask to be aired out. They’re subtle. They aren’t rude like our survival impulses — the fight, fuck or flee systems that commandeer our entire bodies when they get set off. Our newest sensitivities are liable to be drowned out if we’re preoccupied by the more familiar, older, closer-at-hand impulses of survival.

On the grand scale, it amounts to an awkward stage in human development. We’re still almost overwhelmingly obedient to the three desires of the animal kingdom — for security, sense gratification and power. Yet we’re feeling increasingly compelled by relatively new human sensitivities, for curiosity, creativity, peace and gratitude.

But the loudest call prevails, and so we get conflict of the most asinine and irreconcilable kind. Mind-numbing partisan politics, environmental devastation as a normal business practice, opportunists getting rich at the expense of their grandchildren, religious wars, bad TV.

On the street level, it creates personal tension about what we decide to do with our lives and our time. We often feel torn between our aspirations to do work we love or to let our inhibitions down, and the impulse to be practical and save for a house and get some kids on the way before the spouse market dries up for your age group.

The older motives are deeper and more invisible to us. But they lead to security and procreation, not happiness and peace. Nature’s goals — not necessarily our own.

I keep meeting people that are really airing out the higher faculties. As much as I’m interested in them — in creativity, mindfulness, love — compared to some I’ve really just been dabbling, afraid I might lose sight of what’s practical.

But what’s “practical” is always on the survival end, the end that’s already pretty sewn up. The old roadmap. It’s not that survival isn’t important, of course it is. Everything else is contingent on it. But civilization makes it way, way easier than it was for most humans who lived with the same set of impulses.

Yet old Mother Nature still wants us fully preoccupied with it, rather than just keeping it mindfully on the radar. She thinks we’re still cavemen who need to be altogether consumed with self-preservation in all its forms — physical but especially social — which leads us to conformity, more than anything. And conformity leads to boredom, recurring sinking feelings, periodic where-is-my-life-going crises — and ultimately — deathbed regrets.

Living only by the lower motives is the definition of going through the motions. The forces of life will still move you, but where, and for what?

Defiance is necessary — defiance to the strongest gravity in the human world, the pull of security. That’s the force that sucks you into the couch to watch TV, that tells you the safest thing to say is nothing, that tells you to stay in tonight, not to wear red, and to wait for the other person to call.

Nature made us this way and the only sensible thing now is to defy her. We know how important this kind of defiance is. Even people whittling their hours away on Facebook still post the odd picture-quote championing the idea of really living before you die.

How exactly to do it is rarely discussed though.

Clearly, we need to harbor a certain suspicion towards impulses of self-preservation, especially the social kind. We’re so high-strung about saving face, even though nowadays there’s nothing remotely fatal about being cast out of a particular clique for saying something unpalatable to the others. This isn’t the savannah anymore.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on it. How do you live before you die? Do you feel like you are ? Do you feel like you’re always about to?

***

Photo by Grufnik

Most things don’t work. Ever since my early twenties when I found myself inexplicably unhappy, I’ve been looking for things that work. Resolutions and experiments. Things to do.

Quality of life is the only thing I was ever after. Not happiness exactly — because being happy all the time is impossible — but a day-to-day existence that creates it pretty easily.

A lot of things seem to work for a while, but then wear off or have a different effect. Some things have conditional or circumstantial effects. But there are five simple things to do that I’ve found to be consistently, disproportionately helpful in moving towards a more fulfilling life.

I’m not claiming mastery of these five things that work. But I am claiming that there is no question that they work. If I had to speak to a graduating high school class, this is what I’d tell them. If a meteor was about to hit earth and all I had time to do was shout advice to the people lucky enough to be allowed on the getaway ship, this is what I’d shout. I never have to puzzle about how to make life better, if I’m not already fully exploiting the outstanding benefits of these five things that always work.

1) Killing conspicuous silences

What makes life good, more than anything, is other people. The value of what those people bring to your life depends on how easy it is for you to be with each other. With almost everyone, we start from ice cold.

Alienation is born in uncomfortable silences. A part of my mind has a stubborn hangup about throwing things out there just to see if they trigger a dialogue. But that hangup has never served me.

Violating it has. It’s nearly always better to say something.

I do like silence, and I think sharing a good silence with someone you know can be empowering, but conspicuous silences do seem to be invariably harmful when you’re getting to know somebody. If a silence comes with tension, and they usually do, it’s best to interrupt it.

Whether I choose to let the silence fester, or take a swing at it with a dull question about how school’s going or whether a particular movie is worth seeing, I learn the same thing — relationships of any kind grow best when words are exchanged, and sometimes it takes a little push. Language is the best fertilizer, and if a generous application of words doesn’t help it grow, then nothing will. I am convinced nearly all of my friendships and acquaintances could have been halted in the beginning by a divisive silence at some point, had nobody offered something. As a rule, say something.

2) Keeping everything clean

I mean this mostly in terms of your physical environment, but there’s no way to clean up your home or workspace without feeling cleaner inside your head. Most people just have so much needless junk in their lives, and believe that each possession is only a possession because it’s necessary.

Things are useless except for the experiences they can provide, prevent or improve. But pick a random possession from your house and ask yourself what experiences it really is improving for you. Not what it could improve, but what its presence actually does for you.

Everything — on your desk, in your closet, stacked on your mantle — has a tax on the mind. If you don’t believe me, get rid of most of what you own, find a proper place for everything else and see the difference in how the day looks — in how life looks — when you wake up.

3) Having a big thing on the horizon

A trip, a major purchase, a move, a project. Something you know will happen, and will leave life different. An impending big thing is a lifeline that makes rough moments softer.

These things do often involve an exchange of money, but the net cost can still be zero. The decision to reallocate your time and money is free. Give up one thing for the other, that’s all you can ever do anyway. Bring your lunch every day, and know you’ll be visiting Italy. Kill your Starbucks habit, and take up watercolors. Cancel cable, buy a camera.

It also softens almost every disappointment between now and the big thing. Your presentation didn’t go well, but you’re still going to Spain next summer.

The big thing on the horizon reminds you that routine days don’t only add up to more routine days. Shakeups are on the way. Always have a big thing on the way. Write them all down and you have a bucket list.

4) Stopping and sitting

The most convincing proof that I am a totally irrational being is my relationship to meditation. There is no question of its benefits — not only does it have direct effects on my mood and physical state, but it leads me to better decisions, it leaves me more observant and grateful, it shrinks anxiety and self-consciousness. It’s been years since I’ve had any doubt that the greatest contribution I can make to my quality of life (not to mention the quality of life of others) is to stop and sit down and cultivate attention.

It’s an enormously high-leverage activity, yet I always seem to have something more important to do. I’ve chastised myself for not being disciplined enough to reserve 20 or 30 minutes for proper sitting meditation, but even a minute of committed sitting goes such a long way. It’s no-brainer if there ever was one. It helps absolutely everything.

5) Seeking out the like-minded

This is another thing that seems like it should happen organically, but doesn’t. No matter who you are, there are specific sensitivities in you that may not be getting the stimulation they need. We don’t pick our families, we tend to fall into friendships and courtships, and so the haphazard group of people that comes to populate your immediate home and social life is not necessarily going to nurture your finest sensitivities.

Nothing is better for your creativity, for your capacity to find and express what only you can express, than to find people whose artistic and ideological values you share. I’m not talking about making more friends, but that might be inevitable. Your friends don’t necessarily share them, and the people who share them might not necessarily be your friends.

I’d guess almost everyone has an artistic or intellectual interest that has been driven into hibernation by the values and expectations of the people around them. I wonder how many people would take up design, athletics, painting, photography, calligraphy, yoga or martial arts if there were only one other person in their lives who was already immersed in it.

***

Photo by bitzcelt

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When I try to describe how I feel here, all that comes out is clichés — there’s a certain energy here, it’s a buzzing pot of humanity, it’s so diverse, so rich with potential experiences, too vast to comprehend, a city with ten million stories, or any other inadequate language you might find in the intro section of a Lonely Planet.

I heart NY, I really do. So many have said so, and with words as my medium there’s little I can add that isn’t already a part of your consciousness, whether you’ve been here or not. I hope that photographs, though, might begin to relate something beyond the cloud of familiar superlatives that surround anyone’s account of this amazing place.

Take your time. Enjoy.

***

Photos by David Cain

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NEW YORK, NY — Last Wednesday, thousands of students of all levels of education woke up to find their sole source of knowledge gone.

Visitors arriving at Wikipedia were greeted by a black screen, with a small number of words on it. The words, if read, explained that Wikipedia had temporarily shut its doors to protest a congressional bill that could shut it down permanently.

Having left their assignments until two days before their Friday morning due dates, the nation’s students had no time to read the forty or so explanatory words and instead made heartfelt appeals to Twitter, demanding it inform them of why they could not access Wikipedia.

Suddenly finding that they had no access to knowledge whatsoever, mass confusion descended on the student population, and the finger pointing began. Everyone from Julian Assange to the Soap industry was indicted.

After much investigative texting and all-caps ranting, Wikipedia emerged as the prime suspect in Wikipedia’s disappearance.

“I think Wikipedia planned this shit,” says class president hopeful Daniel Ornelas, having outdone his fellow students by skimming the three explanatory sentences on Wikipedia’s blackout page, or perhaps even clicking the “Learn more” link.

Once the perpetrator was identified, the outrage was emphatic and palpable as the students recognized the abject injustice in Wikipedia’s temporary refusal to continue to provide invaluable information for free:

By diligently studying volumes of text-message sized broadcasts, the more astute students learned that Wikipedia’s disappearance was due to a conflict between political forces and some manner of activism — but for the throngs of desperate classgoers, a day’s worth of Wikipedia access proved to be an unthinkable price to pay for any sort of protest, regardless of what it hoped to achieve. Assignments could be set back 24 hours or more, grades on the coming test could suffer dramatically.

Yet most students, too distressed by their impending assignments, gave up trying to decipher the complex motives behind Wikipedia’s inaccessible condition, and had no alternative but to continue shouting their grief into the surviving social networks.

Enraged at Wikipedia for not being there that day, students harbored no patience for the day’s other development — rumors about a possible connection between the catastrophic effect of Wikipedia’s temporary absence, and the reason it decided to make itself temporarily absent. Crucial schoolwork had to be done, and Wikipedia was not upholding its end of the unspoken agreement it has had with students since 2007.

Though it seemed like it might last forever, the horrific day eventually came to a satisfying close. Service was restored at midnight eastern time, and a nation of beleaguered youths were finally able to resume their educations.

As relieved students everywhere pushed aside their respective stacks of almost-used of library books and got to work, a Palo Alto senior addressed Wikipedia with a forgiving tweet, summarizing his generation’s sentiment almost perfectly: “As long as you never let this happen again, I don’t even wanna know why you’re being such a bitch today.”

****

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Photo by theexhibitionist

New Year’s Eve, for the first time, I had an alarming moment when I realized spaceships really were watching me through the ceiling. They knew where I was in the house. I was troubled by it and said so to my friend, but by midnight I forgot, and felt much better.

Rewind a week or two. I was taking adorable pictures of my toddler nephew typing on his grandmother’s iPad, when I had one of those bewildering, revelatory moments.

I realized I was photographing a member of the first generation that will be able to revisit its entire life in sparkling, high resolution. Between me, his parents and his grandmother, there are easily more photos of him than there have been days in his life.

His brother is six months now. In 2081, when they’re both old men, they’ll be able to access their childhood in extraordinary detail. They’ll see their first Christmases, their first bike rides, their graduations and wedding days all in high resolution images and HD video, and it might seem strange to them that previous generations did not have much access at all to their pasts, aside from memories and a few grainy photographs.

Contrast that with my father, (1947-2008) of whom I’ve only seen one or two pictures of as a child. In those pictures he’s someone I don’t know. He has a smooth sepia face that could belong to just about anyone except my dad. He wore a moustache from the day I was born to the day he died and I couldn’t recognize my father in any other face.

The kids born after about 2007 constitute the first generation that’s younger than Facebook. Today, it’s fairly normal for human beings make their first appearance on the internet when they are less than a week old. Think of how many newborn photos you’ve seen posted by your Facebook friends this last year.

The generation growing up now will be the first one for whom the internet has always been around. For them there will have always been a virtual world of data that follows and documents everyone and everything they know about. Every person they know has an online profile, every object they own or place they visit has a wikipedia article.

They will take for granted that everyone they know has information about them — photos, dates, quotes and other data — floating around in the ether, accessible from anywhere, and virtually indestructible. 

I’m still getting used to the idea. I have an app on my phone that lets you take a photograph of something, and it will tell you what it knows about it if it recognizes it. It works about 80% of the time. I can take a picture of a book and it will return the Amazon page for it or the Wikipedia article for it. I can photograph a business card and it will show me everything Google can find on that person. It can recognize public landmarks, art, photographs, and publications. It can recognize famous people in photos, by scouring Google Images for similar photos. It takes about ten seconds and it’s free.

It’s still fairly experimental, but it’s easy to imagine where this technology will be five or ten years. I’d bet any money that before today’s todders graduate high school, they’ll be able to point their phone at a person walking down the street and find out at least their name and a host of linked information, most of the time. Probably well before that.

This speculative article was big on StumbleUpon four years ago, and at the time it seemed so far away. Now it doesn’t.

When I was a teenager, all internet was dialup. You had to turn it on and off, and it occupied your phone line. Search engines were atrocious, virtually unusable. You couldn’t even find out the score to the Giants/Packers game last night. It probably wasn’t even on the internet at all, and the search engines of the day only had the vaguest ideas what you were on about.

You had to take what you could get, which was never quite what you were after. When you were done poking around at whatever decent websites you could find, you turned it off and went back to real life. Today, online and offline no longer have a clear boundary, and this coming generation won’t really understand that there ever was one.

Anyone born into a high-tech society at this point in the game will be totally, irreversibly accustomed to information served up on command, like my generation was born without it occuring to them that there was a time before TV.

When they’re teenagers they’ll be able to ask their phones “Did Mom smoke weed in college?” and instantly have pictures and third party accounts, if the data is out there somewhere. And there will be lots of data out there somewhere.

I was on Facebook before I ever decided to be on Facebook. Four or five years ago, I was at a pub with some acquaintances and they started talking about Facebook. Being a staunch holdout, I tuned out and waited for a new topic, because I had nothing to do with Facebook and wasn’t interested in it.

Then while I was spacing out, one of the girls poked me in the ribs. “There’s lots of pictures of you on Facebook, you know.”

Oh?

I did eventually cave, as many of you know, and now there’s more about me online than you could possibly want to know.

There’s really no going back now. Once something’s online, there’s no way to get it off. That’s a 21st century maxim that warrants some pondering:

Once you put it online, it belongs to everyone, forever. Thank you.

The three slippery slopes

I think we sometimes underestimate how much of us is out there, and how easy it is to find.

Whenever someone contacts me for an interview or some other request, if I don’t know who they are I Google them. I search them on Facebook, which almost always yields a picture of them even if they have an unusually tight set of privacy restrictions. If they have any online presence, I can find pages of what they’ve written or said, what online personalities they associate with, and what they’re into.

None of this is done with any sinister intention, I only do it because it’s easy and helps me understand a bit about who I’m dealing with.

If I wanted to get really nosy, I could find out what name they use to comment on blogs, and thereby find out their political positions, what makes them angry, major life events they’ve mentioned, what causes they support, who they vote for, what they believe their personal weaknesses are, names of many of their friends, and of course their age, place of birth, marital status, probably the names of their children, and if they’re especially careless or trusting, their home address.

I could do this all from a park bench, legally, with no exclusive tools or hacker knowledge — all just by examining what they’ve volunteered at one point or another. The only things stopping me are that I have better things to do, and that I’m not a creepy stalker. But not everyone is the same in those two respects.

If that’s not creepy enough, know that we’re only getting more exposed to the online snoop as technology improves and we use it more. Three other information-age realities promise to make us even more accessible to prying minds:

1) Putting data about ourselves into the public sphere is only going to get easier, faster, and less conscious

2) Expectations about how much can and should be found out on the internet are only going to increase

3) Finding any given bit of information is only going to get easier

We’re accelerating toward a society where it’s normal for our lives to be largely public. People who don’t want bits of their history and personality floating in the ether have to go to increasingly greater efforts to stay offline, simply because the internet is becoming more integrated into how we do everything. We use it more, we feed it more personal information, and we expect more information from it, and we think about it less. I only know a few remaining Facebook holdouts. They’re an endangered species.

Spaceships are watching me through the ceiling

I was part of the also-endangered “dumb phone” demographic until New Year’s Eve. While I was testing out the features of my new Android, there were a few moments in which I experienced that peculiar emotion that’s equal parts fascination and horror.

Among other features that are neat enough to be scary, I discovered that I can zoom in on Google Maps to the house I am in, until the house is nothing but a fuzzy brown shape, and watch a tiny blue triangle move back and forth inside that fuzzy shape, as I walk between the dining room and the kitchen.

In a surreal, horrific moment, I realize am the blue triangle, and unmanned spaceships are tracking my every move through the ceiling. Now, I know I can turn off the GPS capability at any time. But while it was on, I was sharing some frighteningly intimate information about myself, and I don’t really know with whom. As time goes on, the shape is only going to get less fuzzy.

We send data out to faceless databases and networks all the time without thinking about it, and anything that is broadcast can potentially be recorded. There are privacy policies and other corporate promises that claim to protect you, but really we’re just constantly throwing information into a giant black box that might as well be labeled, “Stuff I told the internet.”

Amazon knows that you start your Christmas shopping late, that you read left-wing authors, and of course it knows your credit card information and your street address. Google knows you want to learn more about auto-erotic asphyxiation, that you keep replaying My Heart Will Go On on YouTube, and that you probably have irritable bowel syndrome. It’s all circumstantial evidence about who you are, it might not be traceable to your legal name, but it’s all out there and someone’s definitely hanging onto it.

Let’s assume that we can totally trust those big companies with all that. Honestly, at this stage of the game, I do. I think. And it seems like we’re mostly protected from inadvertently becoming too public because what we broadcast is ultimately voluntary.

After all, we choose what we type and what we post. You might reason that you can curate your online self quite carefully, if you can just stay aware of what you’re sharing, and remember the world is listening.

But “voluntary” might be too simplistic a concept here. It’s not always so easy or simple to say no.

For example, I’m sure you’re aware by now that Mark Zuckerberg is imposing his vision on the Facebook world by converting every profile to a Timeline — an automated chronology of all the bits of your life you’ve put online, whether you realized you were doing it or not.

If you don’t want your life so readily chronicled for others, then no problem, right? Because it’s ultimately voluntary.

You just have to delete your Facebook.

Are you going to do that? A few will, and meanwhile the vast majority of us will continue to use it because it’s a big part of life, it has a lot of advantages, and we’re accustomed to them. If it means increased publicness, then I guess we’re game for that.

It’s getting a bit creepy when Facebook remembers more about my life than I do. It can tell me (or any of the other 500 people on my account) what day I became friends with so-and-so, or what was on my mind at 1:31pm April 11th, 2009, even if I have no clue. It seems to know where my photos were taken, even though I’m pretty sure I never told it.

Yet I can’t quite imagine opting out.

Why not? Because there are definitely parts of it I like. I can interact with the like-minded, learn from them, and watch their lives unfold from a polite distance.

So we let ourselves become a little more public, and it keeps us honest and keeps us connected.

But truthfully we have no idea what this tradeoff really amounts to — what liabilities we’re creating by making our details so accessible. If it seems like a fair price to pay, maybe it’s because we haven’t paid it yet.

***

How do you feel about your life becoming more public? Do you think it’s a healthy trend in general? Do you take steps to keep your information offline?

Wonderful photo by Gato-Gato-Gato

Stars, if you leave them for long enough, will eventually come up with the Mona Lisa.

And not in a hypothetical way, like those non-existent, proverbial monkeys who are always typing up MacBeth by accident.

What I’m talking about has already happened.

We trick ourselves into believing it doesn’t work like that, but it’s true. Star systems can and do eventually produce great works of art, and we’ve observed this. The great Alan Watts makes this interesting property of the universe clear using a simple analogy.

In his example, an apple tree produces apples every summer. As a botanist might say, at a certain time of year the tree fruits. An apple tree, more specifically, apples.

Imagine that aliens cruised by earth a few billion years ago. They checked for signs of intelligence, found only rocks and oceans, and they left.

Then they came back last week sometime, and found that there was a lot more going on. There were people, and a lot of other unfamiliar stuff that doesn’t look like rocks. Earlier they had seen that it was just a bunch of rocks. But in the mean time, the rocks peopled.

You leave rocks for a few billion years and they just might people. Evidently. As Watts puts it, we grow out of this world in exactly the same way as apples grow out of that tree.

But we’re usually a little prudish about saying it that way. We gloss over the fact that a dead earth became a living one, because that would imply that somehow intelligence does indeed arise from rocks, and something about that offends our normal way of thinking. We like to compartmentalize nature’s phenomena as if they work cleanly, like billiard balls – they can strike each other in the most complex ways, yet always be ultimately separate.

At worst, we apply a supernatural explanation to the whole show, because otherwise we’d have to recognize intelligence as a natural extension of the things that happen on a barren, unattended planet. For some reason we often insist nature couldn’t be that interesting or potent on its own. There has to be a super nature, to keep nature in its rightful, humble place.

It makes us feel special I guess, maybe that’s why we don’t give nature the credit. We’re special either way, but we don’t need special rules to explain how we’re here. For that matter, we don’t necessarily need to explain ourselves to ourselves at all. Whatever happened, we got intelligent at some point, and that’s great. It’s okay to wonder aloud exactly how it happened, but clearly it did. 

In any case, once a rock begins to people like that, you can check on it again in a few thousand years and you’ll notice an unstoppable profusion of buildings everywhere.

People, evidently, will begin to building if left for some time. They’ll building all over the place. And they have — look outside. In two weeks I’m going to be exploring the most buildinged place in the world. Nothing can stop people from their natural propensity for building once it gets started.

The people growing from this rock have indeed buildinged all over the place, maybe a little too much. Roading too. We’ve roaded the hell out of a lot of the landscape. This doesn’t make us distinctly special though. Spiders do something very similar with their silk road networks. They silk all over the place if nothing stops them. Check your attic. It just happens.

I don’t mean to make us sound so one-dimensional. People do much more than building. We wonder. We language. We family. We love.

And as it turns out, people eventually begin to art, and that certainly makes us special, if anything does. If there’s anything that redeems us from our propensity for violence and small-mindedness, that’s it — an inexplicable appetite for the deliberate creation of beauty and meaning.

At first it’s probably only the eccentric person that arts. Cave paintings. Eventually, though, nature takes its inevitable course, and people begin to art as profusely as they building. They art in public, and in private. They art on their desks at school, they art on retaining walls along the railroads, they even art their buildings. They celebrate art and those who art. They just can’t help arting. Try and stop them.

It may not always happen that way. There are people out there that don’t art. There are certainly rocks that don’t people. But clearly nature allows it to happen, and clearly there are places where nothing can stop it from happening. It’s not some violation of the rules. It’s fair game for certain corners of nature to art.

And again, it would be arrogant to assume that nature is not self-directed here. Many people just can’t stand that notion. They insist that nature must have an owner — someone commanding it to produce Guernica or The Beatles — but I don’t see any reason to believe that. Besides, whatever intelligent hierarchy there might be behind nature, there’s no reason not to call it nature too.

Whatever part of nature it is that allows Sgt Pepper to occasionally develop from cooling planets is exactly the part that allows trees to apple profusely, and rocks to people profusely. If evolution means anything, it can’t be only an isolated part of that process.

Evolution can only be the endless network of phenomena creating phenomena — and every conceivable part of life is its product. Using the generous amount of time they were given, the seas produced Old Man and the Sea, and the stars produced Starry Night.

We make a divide between man-made and natural constructs as if it really is two different systems, as if one doesn’t play by the rules of the other. We exalt ourselves by imagining we’re isolated from the system that created us and comprises us.

So it’s encouraging to realize that nature does produce the odd Guernica or Guangzhou Opera House now and then, and that your species is apparently the way it does it. But first some rocks had to do a lot of peopleing to get that level of arting to happen.

On that note, it gets a bit impersonal. Nature churns out people by the millions, and the odd masterpiece gets arted into existence. Most of those people weren’t necessary for that. It’s just part of a the same shotgun approach nature uses when it has mosquitoes give birth to 200,000 babies to give you a chance of getting bitten once or twice.

Think about your role for a moment. You are one of millions, and though it’s rude to say so, the universe doesn’t particularly need you in order to do its thing. But as of right now you certainly do have an extraordinary opportunity. Nothing is stopping you from being a conduit for some of the finest forms the universe ever created. Really. You may not be interested in anything people normally describe as art. That doesn’t matter. Speaking can be an art. Parenting can be an art. Sport can be art.

You don’t need to make masterpieces, but who better to do it? Masterpieces do come from the ingredients you have in you at this moment — the buzz in your bones that won’t let you sit for too long, a mind that can’t stop making inquiries, the desperate need to finally be understood, and whatever capacity for intrigue it took for you read this far into such a bizarre article. These qualities appear to be some of the universe’s rarest and most potent elements, and you’re riddled with them.

These are thoroughly human traits, and they grow in people like seeds grow in apples. Some people can’t bear not to put them to serious use, and would even court poverty to do it. But many people do manage to get right through to their grave without employing them, riding distractions and fleeting pleasures the whole way. It’s easier than ever to do that.

And from nature’s perspective, that’s fine. There are lots of people, and some pretty amazing things will get created no matter what any given individual chooses to spend their time on. But I suspect the human drive to create is more forceful and urgent than we typically give it credit for. The urge for a human to art isn’t a fringe thing or an alternative-lifestyle thing. It’s as vital and fundamental to us as socializing. It’s for everybody. Repressing it may be what’s bothering you all the time.

You have it in heaps. It may be nature’s greatest gift to you. One day that same benefactor will snuff you out like a candle. What a shame it would be if your gift was still in the box.

Yet we all experience a lot of resistance to exploring it, and that resistance comes from many angles. We worry that our work sucks. We makes excuses about talent levels. We see artists who we think suck and we don’t want to be looked at like we look at them. We worry our mothers will shake their heads. We wonder if there really is anything in our own heads worth saying. Throughout life we’re warned by unimaginitive people that it’s not useful to make art, that it doesn’t pay bills or help anyone.

So it’s easy to justify avoiding it, even though some part of you will never stop nagging you to get those seeds out of you and into the ground.

Photos by itonys, wazuluwazu, All Chrome, and Panoramas

If you’re already going strong on a New Year’s resolution, then good for you. Run with it. Don’t let me get in your way.

If you didn’t get around to making one, you didn’t miss anything. In fact you might have dodged a bullet. I’ve made a lot of resolutions that did work out, but none of them began on a January 1st. I figure just about any other day is a better day to make a real change.

The problem with New Years-ing your resolution is that it gives undue weight to the idea of a clean slate. It seems like January first really does reset something, and that it’s important to harness that rare chance.

But of course, it’s just another tomorrow. There are no clean slates. Past failures will still visit you in your head, from whatever year. Bad internal dialogues will still occur, and you’ll still have the same preconceptions about yourself and the kinds of outcomes you can create.

All of this stuff is real, and it doesn’t respect the Gregorian calendar. The glowing Times Square Ball doesn’t have any special powers to obliterate your weaknesses. Making a change must include confronting certain patterns and personal liabilities. You have to take them on willingly as a part of the deal — you can’t trick yourself by pretending they only exist in 2011.

So if you think you need a clean slate to make a change then you’re going to have trouble once you realize a new calendar year doesn’t really clean anything. Self-doubt will appear in 2012 too.

Most people use January 1st because it seems worthwhile to exploit whatever whiff of an advantage it seems to offer. They gravitate towards it as if they recognize that their chances aren’t so good to begin with. Admit you don’t need it, and pick a different day. Pick one that has no sentimental significance, no false help. Don’t even use a Monday.

Of course, if you’re serious about making a change, you know that it isn’t a matter of improving your chances. It’s all up to you, not the fates, so you don’t need to line up your plastic trolls and rabbit’s feet like the old ladies at bingo. You’re much better off if you don’t hang your hopes on anything you don’t plan to control. 

If you pick a day like, say, Thursday, January 12th to mark a new stage in your life, then clearly you intend to build your new beginning right where you actually stand, rather than some mythical “clean” day. If you’re serious about your resolution, you know you don’t need the phony advantage of a fresh year.

In fact, it’s worth avoiding. Too many other people are at the gym for the first time, treadmilling with an an affected kind of determination that won’t be there in February. Too many other people are teetering already, about to relapse and have a cigarette or a drink. Share your resolve with those people and it will feel like you’re all on shaky ground, doomed to fail sooner or later. February is an excellent time to buy almost-new exercise equipment off Craigslist.

Distance yourself from that whole cultural meme and its ever-fading energy. Decide you’ll make a serious effort that doesn’t need a special calendar day.

Most importantly, make it temporary. Thirty-day commitments are doable for almost anyone and they leave you with something real. Unlike lifetime commitments, you can actually get them firmly under your belt, for good, and when you’re done you’re in a truly stronger position to decide how to live. Lifetime commitments to new habits are impossible and unnecessary.

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Experiment No. 12 — 30,000 words

I’ve never written on an everyday basis. I’m closing in on three years of writing for Raptitude and there has never even been a week in which I’ve written every day. It’s still something I avoid out of habit. I get quite a bit done in a short time when my deadline is looming, but I know that my best writing happens when my deadline isn’t pushing on me.

So I will learn to write every day. A thousand word quota, every day for 30 days.

Sitting down is the hardest part of writing. The second hardest part is to work through the urge to get up. My plan is to sit down early every day and get a thousand words done.

I won’t overcomplicate it like I did my last experiment. Just sit down and write, every day, and don’t get up until the quota is reached.

The experiment will begin Wednesday, January 4th. Keep track of my progress in the experiment log.

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Brooklyn Bound

Another announcement. This month I’m going to be heading out to the east coast for the first time. The plan is to work through my bucket list, meet a lot of people and take a lot of photographs. My primary destination is New York City, but I’m also going to do a bit of wandering in Vermont, Boston, and Washington DC, then hit Toronto on the way home.

Dates aren’t quite set in stone but it looks like I’ll be arriving in New York January 20th, and leaving for Toronto February 11th-ish.

If you’re in one of those areas and want to meet for coffee and teach me a bit about your home city that would be excellent. Better still, if you can help me do something on The List I would be very grateful and will credit you on the site.

Happy new year.

-David

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Click here for a good song.

Photo by Barry Yanowitz

It only took about ten Christmases before I realized how quickly the new-toy feeling wears off. I knew by the time New Year’s came around, I would lose that feeling I looked forward to all year — getting up to a dazzling world of new stuff.

Then one Christmas Day I felt that same predictable boredom, the same fading of abundance, creep in by dinnertime. I had eaten more chocolate than could actually be enjoyable, and played with everything once.

I felt like I had definitely lost something substantial since that giddy first hour of the day. Obviously I didn’t own any less by that time (not counting chocolate), but it absolutely felt like I did.

Of course, no matter how I felt about my possessions at different times of day, I was always rich and rarely realized it.

The same is true for me today, probably you too. Average income across the world is about $7000 per year. But that’s just a mathematical mean. The vast majority of people make far less than that. Only about twenty percent of the world’s population lives in countries with an average income that high.

So no matter what class you are in your society, if you’re sitting in front of a computer with some blog-reading time on your hands, you probably outclass (financially anyway) a sizeable majority of people alive today, and certainly almost all of the people who are no longer alive.

But that’s just money. Wealth includes power and privilege too, and not just because you can buy more of those things. It’s reasonable to say that someone with a thousand dollars is less wealthy than someone with a thousand dollars and access to political connections, say. Ability, knowledge, and privilege all contribute to wealth.

You’re probably not doing too poorly on that front either. You’re unlikely to be reading this if you live in North Korea. All sorts of people read this blog, but statistically you probably have the right to vote, the right to protest, the right to say what you like, the right to travel, the right to practice your spiritual tradition, the means to contact your political representatives, the means to practice your chosen art, and the means to self-publish your thoughts. Extraordinary and exclusive privileges, if you have any of them. 

These are riches, if the word means anything at all, and most of history’s humans certainly did not have the level of wealth you do.

It’s unlikely, though, that you would describe yourself as rich, or particuarly that you feel rich.

An iPhone! My Kingdom for an iPhone!

High technology has given superhuman powers to almost all of us, and these are riches of the most enviable kind. Today’s technology extends privilege way further down the economic scale than ever, so that a much wider swath of people can have incredible powers. You certainly have superhuman powers if you have internet access, even if you have to walk to the library to get it.

Imagine if you could transplant your life, and all its advantages, into an iron age society. Your house or apartment gets plopped down on a hillside at the edge of a farming village. All your devices work, you get internet and cable, water and heat. Don’t worry about technical issues like where you get your electricity from, or how you’d get cell service. Assume it is freely available to you within your means, as we tend to assume today.

Outside your doors, humans who are otherwise just like you are getting along with the powers they have available to them — just like you do today. They keep warm with wood stoves, they can work only by the available light of the day, they repair their tools and clothing themselves. They aren’t lesser people by any means, but even the most privileged among them couldn’t even dream of the powers and freedoms you have within arm’s reach right at this moment.

Imagine how they would feel toward you once they learned what you’re able to do with your lot in life. What do you think they might pay for even the simplest of the advantages you have? For walls that easily keep out the worst of the weather, for an accurate timepiece, for a machine that can perform basic math functions instantly without error, or even for a glowing blue cell-phone screen to find something in the dark. Undoubtedly they would be willing to toil an extra day per month to bring these advantages home for their families. Maybe much more than that.

And those powers are nothing compared to what else you can do with your riches. What would they pay to be able to:

• speak to someone across the sea

• have the knowledge of thousand encyclopedias in their pocket

• watch segments of the past (or someone else’s past) unfold in moving pictures, in real time

• see the face or hear the voice of a dead loved one

• heat the house without stoking a fire

• cook food in thirty seconds

• clean and dry their family’s clothing with ten minutes of actual work

• suck the dirt out of a rug

• get all their water from inside the house at whatever temperature they wish

• access instructions on how to do almost anything that can be done by humans

These are insane powers, which most of humanity could never have dreamed of, and they’re all yours, right now. Do you really think more money will make you feel rich if you aren’t blown away by what you already have?

The rich members of past societies may or may not have had more than you in terms of monetary wealth. Yet, it is undeniable that the age you live in gives you access to powers they could never have had, or even imagined. The contents of your crummy apartment certainly would have been worth more to them than all their piles of furs and gold.

And all of this is to say nothing of the intangible privileges you have, just by being alive here and now — rights, freedoms, moral advances, literacy, public education, and modern medicine.

The Makings of Being Rich

You’d think gratitude would increase alongside advantage and privilege. If you have more to be grateful for, you become more grateful. But clearly this isn’t true.

We’ve all heard stories of tycoons who couldn’t be happy, or lottery winners that end up ruined a few years later, wishing it had never happened. I can understand the possibility that having amounts of money that seem copious to you and me might bring certain problems we’re ignorant about. But I still always find myself thinking that these people must be particularly foolish or naive not to be able to make millions of dollars work for them.

But this kind of thinking is what’s naive. We do the same thing. Almost all of us are in an extremely high percentile of material and social wealth, even if you only consider the people who are alive today.

If our standards for wealth are where we sit on that spectrum — and what other standard could we have? — then we’re certainly rich, but how often do we feel rich?

That’s a totally different question. And clearly there is no real value in being rich by any material standard, if we don’t feel rich — if we don’t feel like we have more to be grateful for than most — and of course we do. That feeling of abundance, the opposite of the feeling of lack, is what makes riches attractive to anybody.

I think it’s important to reiterate that point. No matter what material things we pursue, we’re only ever looking for certain feelings. Money is attractive to us because we believe it will come with the feelings we want: abundance, security, power. That’s all the good it can do. Stuck on a desert island with a billion in hard currency is a terrible place to be, because you’re poor in all the things that matter.

How rich we’re able to feel does depend a little on what we do have in terms of privilege and material wealth. It’s hard to achieve feelings of autonomy if you have no clothes or no home. Yet it seems to depend more on what we feel entitled to, what our peers have relative to us — and most importantly — whether we think more about what we do have than what we don’t have.

The Manhattan investment banker who only grosses $96,000 a year probably feels like a have-not when he goes out to lunch with the big dogs. But he probably feels differently about his level of wealth and privilege when he’s being asked for change outside the train station.

How rich he is depends on how rich he experiences himself to be, which is quite independent of his financial bottom line. It’s dependent on how he values what he has and how he values what he doesn’t have, which changes from moment to moment, day to day, year to year. Depending on his perspective, there is a huge range of possible levels of happiness within his means, and that’s every bit as true for you. The influence of our material holdings on our ability to experience wealth is actually quite small.

“Rich” is clearly a relative, emotional state, and your life almost certainly contains far more material (and social) advantages at your disposal than a random human life picked out of a hat. So for most of us, what we need to get rich is not more money, it’s to cultivate a shift in perspective. More money would still leave that necessary perspective shift ahead of you. Chances are you do have the makings of being rich.

If we break it down, the makings of being rich are:

1) Enough stuff to survive in relative comfort. I’m talking about the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid here: food, shelter, water, and decent health.

2) Some extra stuff, beyond the essentials of survival. Some toys, some technology, some art, some tools you could survive without. Most of us have way more than some of this.

3) Some friends. I don’t think this is optional, if you want to feel rich. Humans are highly social and I expect there are few people who can exist in a generally grateful state if they are alone in life. Luckily it is easier than ever to meet other people with like interests. Facebook.com. Meetup.com. Millions of forums worldwide. Use your superpowers here.

4) Some freedoms. Chiefly, to speak your mind and to do your own thing. This varies hugely across modern societies, but if you’re reading this you are probably near the better end of the stick. By the same token, everyone does live under some measure of political constraint, but most of us are still left with an amount of room to pursue happiness that would make most of history’s people envious. People have made rich and worthwhile lives with much worse.

5) The capacity to keep perspective when it comes to assessing a) the value of what you do have, and b) the value of what you don’t have. This is a skill and it can be developed.

Those are the makings, as far as I can see it, and for most people reading this it’s just a matter of working with the last one.

Here are a couple of ways to get better at that:

“Caveman gratitude” – Whenever you use a material posession, think of how valuable it would be to someone who didn’t live in a highly technological world. Remember that you are still only a naked animal, surrounded by a lot of stuff, and even the crappiest of that stuff confers powers that most of the past’s humans would find extraordinarily valuable. What would medieval serfs make of my “crappy” Panasonic point-and-shoot? Yet I have a mid-level Nikon DSLR, and I still salivate over the top-of-the-line stuff. Whenever you feel like a have-not, mentally drop your home and your stuff into an iron-age village and realize again that you live like a monarch with magic powers, right here in the far future.

Own fewer things, but better things – Respect your possessions. Get rid of low quality possessions. Get rid of any possession you don’t respect or use. Have a home for everything in your home, or get rid of it. If you don’t respect your lot in life materially, then you can’t feel like you have a lot worth having, and that’s what being rich amounts to.

Picture losing what’s important to you – This is one of the most worthwhile things I’ve ever learned to do. We just cannot have the necessary perspective to appreciate what we have until we understand what it would mean to lose those things. Do it with your possessions, your rights, and most powerfully, do it with the people you love. Those links will explain how.

Make 2012 your year to get rich.

***

Photo by Maczter

The world’s most famous war photojournalist, Robert Capa, swam ashore with American troops as Life magazine’s official photographer of D-Day.

From the midst of the battle itself, Capa took 106 shots of one of the most famous and important days in history. At the earliest opportunity, the four precious rolls of film were whisked back to London and sent to be developed.

To this day nobody knows what those pictures looked like, because a fifteen-year-old lab assistant set a dryer too high and melted the negatives. Only eleven blurred images were saved from the final roll.

There’s a unique flavor of heartbreak that only comes from your work being destroyed for no good reason. Now, I know it doesn’t carry the same historical magnitude, but last night I think I felt at least a hint of what Capa felt when I saved over today’s article.

While I rewrite it, enjoy an ad-hoc time-constrained installment of The Revolver.

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One of the more interesting Twitter feeds out there: An Oxford history student is tweeting moment-to-moment updates on the unfolding of World War II, as if it’s happening right now. It’s so compelling because we tend to think of the war with full knowledge of how it turned out, yet the people living it had to watch it unfold day by day with no idea what was happening to the world.

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An interview with me at WriterViews.com, a site about writers learning from writers. The interview is about 40 minutes and is mostly geared towards bloggers. During it I drank a beer stein full of coffee, and it shows.

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A video of North Korean child guitar virtuosos that I find absolutely terrifying and perverse. Yet I can’t look away.

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The great journalist Christopher Hitchens, who died Thursday, giving a powerful and timely lecture on freedom of speech, and the insane laws that threaten it. The second and third parts are easy to find in the sidebar. It’s about 20 minutes all together.

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If you want something even easier than reading tweets or watching videos, take a look at my winter photos taken in Winnipeg’s exchange district.

 Photo by Robert Capa