An Oscillating Rollercoaster; Pole to Pole

During the day I look up multiple personality disorder, schizophrenia, autism, the collapse of civilizations, biological decay, social network and innovation dispersement theory...all of the extremes in an attempt to put together the pieces.

I probably shouldn't be doing these things on company time. But I am irresistibly compelled to search, to rationalize these burning convictions...so much that I am much less productive sitting there trying to nod away these questions anyway.

I wonder how they do it. How they give themselves completely to a manufactured set of beliefs. How they smile day by day and watch the years go by. I want to ask one of them if they don't believe there is something else to life, if their smiles are simply rehearsed to be used as tools to tell the boss everything is OK, but I don't for fear of unnecessary scrutiny.

All of this is probably an over-dramatization. They are all probably happy with the houses they can eventually buy. Sure their lives are signed away to other businesses. They'll be working someone else's dreams until retirement, but they'll be happy with the possessions they've acquired. They are fortunate enough to still buy into the American Dream, even if it is fashionable to say on the surface that the American Dream no longer exists.

I feel as though I am a ghost in that place. I can tell they sense something strange in me, something distant. They avoid contact with me because I don't reciprocate theirs back. And that's alright. I don't expect it. There's always a subtle flash of sadness, when that old human instinct for companionship is frustrated. But I've learned to deal with it, because I don't have to lie to myself any longer that I even have the capacity.

I constantly have moments of clarity (or complete obscured vision) when I realize that life is strange. I stand in the kitchen looking out the window, listening to the air conditioning and I wonder, how did I get here?

Strangely, it feels as good as it always does to purge these thoughts by getting them down on paper, but when I read them over again, I wonder what it is that I am, which returns me to the beginning of the cycle in which I am hunched over the computer, leafing through electronic documents. Searching.

What Can Ya Do

I'm stuck in a series of endless loops trying to anticipate how other people will react. An endless attempt at prophet, trying to piece together a concept that was shattered years ago. The concept of social interaction. I'm trying to rebuild a model of the social world but it doesn't work like it used to.

It is hard to tell whether my own faculties are fragmented, or the conventional social order itself is fragmented. Or both.

Some thinkers talk about the atomization of society into individuals. How men are becoming unique islands only able to interact by improvised procedures. How the individual itself is fragmenting further. Are we learning to stick together by weaving technology between us? I suppose we do feel more comfortable with pixels in front of us.

I wonder if these trends really are symptoms of a collapsing civilization. Even if it were the worst case scenario, destruction can be as beautiful as creation, as much as we hate to admit it. After all, isn't destruction the birth of the tragedy?

How would a song like that go?

"The world is terrible and that's aaaaaaaalriiiiight." Something like that.