Sometimes I think I think too much, but every once in while, those thoughts provoke some interesting questions about life. On the way home from attending a talk at PSU, for example, I sparked an interesting discussion on Facebook/Twitter with the tweet: “Technology has made the world smaller, yet we’re more alienated than ever: how can I feel so alone when the world’s at my fingertips?”

The next morning, my friend, Erica, commented on Facebook:

Our monkeyselves need meatspace, no matter what we can sit and stare at.

While humourous, her reply hit upon an idea echoed by friend, Matt, on Twitter:

“Different medium, same old problem. Connecting with someone still requires effort from two people.”

I replied to both:

And therein lies the dilemma. Sometimes I think we’re like galaxies in an ever-expanding universe: drifting off into oblivion. As the world appears to get smaller with advances in technology, we seem to be drifting farther and farther apart.

And then added on Facebook:

I don’t know. Maybe I just feel that way because I’m so socially awkward, but as I was sitting on the bus last night — watching all the people listening to their MP3 players and playing with their cell phones (not to mention me with mine) — the alienation was palpable.

Perhaps I’ve been reading too much Marx, but I can’t help but feel this invisible barrier between me and my fellow bipedal primates, a barrier that doesn’t feel natural at all.

I feel like the cow tongue of meatspace; nobody likes cow tongue, they’d rather have their Matrix-steak.

Less than 10 minutes later, Erica responded with:

Well, 20 years ago on the bus folks were doing their very best to ignore each other in an analog fashion (newspapers, books). I really think the invention of the suburb and the television have done much more to isolate ourselves.

I think a lot of us feel that barrier, just not everybody admits it. I think it is a common longing of a social animal that no longer lives in communal spaces. That’s why I throw myself into whatever food rituals I can, get out into nature whenever I can, go out on a limb to make connections no matter how minor (smiling at the grocery store at the smallest end of the spectrum, having a child at the greatest end). You do what you can. Most of us have cow-tongue and are relieved when we find out the truth, that others do too. Matrix steak just doesn’t have the nutrients.

I was kind of taken aback by how much she seemed to get where I was coming from. At this point, my friend, Brian, got involved by pointing out the role technology has played in connecting people with one another:

You can’t blame technology; I know many people whose social interactions and lifestyles have improved because of increased connectivity. Think of how many new friends YOU personally have BECAUSE of technology and the internet. It’s probably in the high dozens, perhaps hundreds.

Your friend Erica nailed it: It’s always been this way, as long as we’ve been a society of suburbs. It’s not like there were these rousing and engaging conversations on city buses or subway cars before cell phones, dude.

He brought up a great point, one that Matt had also touched upon via Twitter in response to my “ever-expanding universe” comment:

Says he who didn’t want a mobile. We Twitter / txt more in 2 days than we communicated all last year between your visits.

I couldn’t argue with either of their points, but then again, I wasn’t referring to simple connectivity as much as what I saw to be an erosion of meaningful social interactions and relationships in general. Attempting to address this, I wrote:

I completely agree. And just to be clear, I wasn’t blaming technology, simply commenting on the fact that I can still feel so lonely despite having the “world at my fingertips” via technological advances that have made the world so much smaller. (Seriously, it’s hard to get all philosophically complex in just 140 characters. You know how I usually write. :p)

For example, just being able to communicate with others via things like the internet doesn’t necessarily make those interactions truly meaningful on a deeper, more intimate level. I think there’s more to it than that (e.g., being able to tear down those invisible barriers, etc.).

I mean, I’m not denying that increased connectivity has improved the social interactions and relationships of certain people (hell, I was at ICOK: meaningful social interactions were off the hook!), but I think it’s also made some of them more artificial (for lack of a better word), and even somewhat shallow.

As for the origin of the kind of alienation I was referring to, I didn’t mean to imply that technology was the cause. In fact, I agree with you both that no longer living in communal spaces is one of the major causes. But I also believe that there are other factors involved, factors which have directly contributed to our no longer living in communal spaces (e.g., Marx’s Theory of Alienation).

In the end, I still don’t have any concrete answers, but at least I’ve been reminded of some things I forgot along the way. The most important one being: we’re all more alike than we often realize.

Like Erica said, we’re social creatures, and we all feel isolated at times, even if it’s not always easy for us to admit it. But that shouldn’t stop us from doing what we can to reach out and make connections with other people, whether it’s by smiling at the grocery store, starting a family or creating a place like this where people can come together and discuss all things Buddhist.

I’m a serial entrepreneur. I’ve been self-employed for over half of my working life. I’ve started three businesses, and learned a lot along the way.

My first business died a quick death because of youth, inexperience, and rapid life changes (marriage, babies). The second became moderately successful (financially), but was undermined and ultimately destroyed by a number of factors, including a massive drop in my state’s economy, as well as plain bad luck and lack of planning for such.

The third was born of passion, however. I am fervently passionate about what I do, and I can truly and honestly say I love my job. I love my job.

The problem is: it doesn’t remotely pay the bills. Not even close.

I have reached that point that any entrepreneur in the audience will understand: Jump off the cliff.

I am standing on the cliff that overlooks the land of dreams. Jumping off of cliffs is scary. There’s no safety net, there’s no guarantee of a soft landing, it’s far, and it’s painful. I could, I should, turn around and walk back to safety.

But behind me is a life of unhappiness and misery. Behind me is a life that I cannot lead. I have accepted and resigned myself to the fact that I am not cut out for that life. I’ve tried; believe me, I’ve tried, to be a member of that world, to live that lifestyle, to play that game. I do not have it in me. One of the things age and wisdom brings is the gift of self-acceptance; I accept that I cannot be that person.

I’m at that point again. The bills are piling up, money is not coming in, and things are looking bleak.

I have found, however, that this is when the magic happens. If I had never gone through this before, I’d be terrified right now.

I’m not scared. I’m tired. I’m introspective. I’m a little sad. But I am not scared.

I’m jumping.

Reflecting on the events of this past weekend, I’ve realized many things about myself and the world around me. One of them is that things aren’t as solid as we often perceive them to be. This is, of course, common sense, but I don’t think that it’s something we intuitively realize in our day to day lives. For example, most people understand that we’re biological organisms that change and grow our entire lives — that we’re not static entities independent of, and removed from, the material conditions that surround us — and yet we tend to cling with an iron grip to many of the most ephemeral and artificially constructed concepts. And the most insidious of these is identity.

I’m more confident than ever that identity is a phenomenon that’s influenced by a myriad of internal and external conditions and experiences, and that even some of the most seemingly concrete aspects of our identity are little more than shackles that we as a society unconsciously place on ourselves. That’s not to say that certain things aren’t beyond our control, but I’d argue that what’s in our control is a lot more than we might imagine, that much of our identity is fluid and malleable.

One of the things that I’ve been learning about over the past few months is Marx’s materialist conception of history and the idea that “the nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production.” While Marx’s theory was set within a specific context — that of the complex relationship between the production and reproduction of material requirements of life and the historical development of human society — it has much wider implications. For example, I’m of the opinion that things such as identity are conditioned, at least in part, by the historical and material conditions that we find ourselves in, and that changes in those conditions can fundamentally alter our identity and the ways in which we express ourselves, and vice versa. Not in a rigidly deterministic way, however, but in a complex and symbiotic way.

This idea isn’t necessarily new. The Buddha, for example, developed similar ideas about identity in his teachings on karma, dependent co-arising, etc. In short, he viewed our sense of self as a continuous process—something which is always in flux, ever-changing from moment to moment in response to various internal and external stimuli. Furthermore, he observed that there are times when our sense of self causes us a great deal of suffering, times when we cling very strongly to that momentary identity and the objects of our sensory experience on which that identity is based in ways that cause a great deal of mental stress. But his focus was primarily on how to relieve the suffering of the individual by mastering this process of “I-making and my-making” while Marx’s focus, the bodhisattva that he was, was primarily on how to relieve the suffering of society by changing the material conditions that support it.

What really got me thinking about all of this, though, were the potential contradictions I saw inherent in “identity politics.” The Socialism 2009 conference had a fair amount of talks centered around LGBT rights and racism, and I completely support equal rights for, and treatment of, everyone, regardless of their gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. But during some of the talks I started to feel a bit uncomfortable.

The main reason for this, I believe, was that many of the speakers and audience members were separating people into classes based on their gender, race, sexual orientation, etc., and I started to feel alienated by my own gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. being that straight white males have historically been the most exploitative and oppressive class the world has ever known. I began to feel as if I couldn’t relate to others because I was on the outside looking in — even though politically we shared the same views — simply because of being born a straight white male. I even felt attacked at times when people attacked these aspects of my identity in an indirect way. I mean, I know that they weren’t talking about me personally, yet being a part of the very class that has systematically exploited and oppressed blacks, women, gays and lesbians, and whole plethora of others classes caused me to feel alienated nonetheless. It wasn’t that “I” was being attacked, but by clinging to my identity of a “straight white male” as a fixed thing, I found myself becoming alienated from the very people I was supposed to feel solidarity with. It wasn’t an omnipresent feeling, either, but it was strong enough for me to be aware of its psychological impact. And these feelings lead me to question who “I” was.

Pragmatically speaking, I see the need to differentiate between these things for the sake of communication, and as long as the words themselves don’t become fixed entities corresponding to permanent realities, there’s no problem. But when these labels become representations of things which we then habitually cling to without acknowledging their limitations, I think they can become a serious problem. Hence my wariness of identity politics.

The way I see it, identity politics that separate individuals and groups into various classes run the risk of becoming antagonistic due to the contradictory nature of the various classes themselves, especially if these distinctions of class become solidified and clung to as concretely, independently existing things. In other words, identity politics can actually reinforce the barriers in society that alienate one class from another by artificially segregating them into separate classes to begin with.

Case in point. When I was young, I came home from school crying and I asked my Mom why I wasn’t black. Although I don’t remember any of this myself, she told me that when she asked what was wrong I told her that I was upset because the kids at school said they wouldn’t play with me because I wasn’t black. Up until that point, I grew up in a hotel in Detroit with a very diverse mixture of tenets. Being the only kid in the entire hotel, I got a lot of attention from everyone and I was never really exposed to the racial conflicts that existed in the outside world.

For me, in my little world inside that hotel, we were all the same—black, white, men, women, American, Filipino, etc. Almost everyone treated me as a part of their community and I saw them as part of mine. But I imagine that the kids at my school — kids who were exposed to different and less sheltered circumstances — were already acquainted with the harsh realities of racism. So even though I didn’t know anything about “race” at the time, and all I wanted to do was play with the other kids and have fun, the idea of race as a class had the unfortunate effect of setting me apart from my own community.

For the majority of my life, I never truly understood that identity wasn’t a fixed thing—that my “white” identity wasn’t something I was born with, but something which arose out of the historical and material conditions I was born into. And now that I’ve begun to questions these things, I’m beginning to see that my sense of identity and subsequent feelings of alienation are being perpetuated, at least in part, by the very set of identity politics which seeks to destroy these kinds of social barriers.

I can’t change the colour of my skin (well, not easily anyway), but I can just as easily identify myself as a “human being” as I can a “straight white man.” Of course, doing so isn’t going to make me classless, but it’ll at least help me to avoid falling into an essentialist trap in which I’m not able to explore my own sense of identity in a fluid and dynamic way—a way that won’t alienate me and prevent me from connecting to all of my people.

Remember my Misery blog post a couple of months ago? Wait, here’s a coincidence–it was exactly two months ago; anyways, yeah. I had that night again, except in bike form.

The pattern was the same; I was bad with my water intake, I had a beer tonight, I had a crappy dinner. I knew I’d pay the price when I got out there on the bike tonight. To top it off, it has been pouring rain all day, and now everything is soaked and the humidity is through the roof. My bike is already in bad shape, and now that it got really wet, the bearings are shot and the wheels barely spin. If I stop pedaling, the bike coasts about 15 feet and grinds to a halt. The work to get this thing moving has doubled. In addition to that, just like Misery, my music player for some reason stopped working tonight. I have no idea why.  The stage was set for a bad night.

It doesn’t really matter; the point of this is to sweat, work out, and lose weight, not go long distance or set any speed records. Why should it matter if the bike is easy to pedal or hard to pedal? If it’s hard to pedal, that means I’m working harder to move. That’s a good thing, right?

Still, it’s one of those nights where I just want to bitch about it. It hurt, I didn’t want to do it, and I almost turned around before I even started.

In fact, I did turn around after I got to the end of my block. I turned around, and started heading back, and then got really pissed at myself and went right back past my house and kept going.

All told, I got a two mile ride in, and when I got back I was drenched in sweat. I suppose I should give myself a cookie for completing a hard ride that I absolutely didn’t want to take, but I didn’t earn it because I’m being a bitch about this whole thing.

The next week is going to be extremely tough with the Expo Icrontic here; guests are dribbling in. I will have a friend from Norway here tomorrow and a friend from LA as well, and it’s just gonna be more eating bad and making other poor choices. I’ll try to suffer silently.

Blergh.

Tonight I walked instead of biked; I took my kids skunk hunting.

By hunting, I mean looking for skunks. I see them all the time on my adventures, but for some reason whenever I take my kids out (neither of them have ever seen a skunk) I miss them. Tonight was no exception.

I even went to the usual haunts. The scrubby field by the expressway ramps, the paths along the factories, the bushes and fences they run along, snuffling and searching for whatever it is skunks eat.

Nothing.

My kids think I’m making it all up.

When I go on a long walk, sometimes I pretend that I stepped through a wormhole and instantaneously appeared in another city, another state, another country, or even another world. Did you ever do that? Consciously try to will your familiarity with a place away and try to see it with brand new eyes? Once in a while I can pull it off, and I find myself talking to myself in my head, narrating my fantasy like a bad science fiction novel.

“Where am I? How did I get here? What’s going on?”

“How is this possible? Something has gone terribly, terribly wrong!”

Et cetera.

My younger son said something hilarious though; he must have read it in a cheesy book or a bad video game. He said, and I quote:

“It’s quiet. Too quiet.”

What a strange night.

Okay, I’ll admit it; no exercise tonight: I am sick as hell and I NEED TO GET BETTER BEFORE I GO TO LA FOR FIVE DAYS.

That said, I will still blog.

I had a wonderful conversation tonight with a musician friend. His name is Reggie Smith. He was the lead singer for an up-and-coming Detroit-based band called “Bloom” several years ago, and I was a fan. My wife and I would go to see as many of their shows as we could, as they were one of those bands that you just had a sense about—you know, one of those bands that was just… too good to be playing in this or that crappy bar. They were meant for bigger things.

Things happened, and they broke up. Same with me; things happened, my wife and I broke up. Time passed.

A few years back, as a newly single guy, I saw Reggie again at a local brewery that I started to hang out at. He was now fronting a band called The Afterparty. Again, Reggie stole the show and really knew how to work the crowd. I became a fan all over again.

Over the years, I became friends with Reggie, and we started talking alot. Reggie didn’t know that I was a musician. Recently, I had let on that it would be an honor to jam with him.

Tonight I flat out told him; we need to play together. I’ve got funk in my soul, music that is dying to come out of my fingers, and he is going to help me with this. We had a grand talk, full of ideas, inspiration, and downright badassery. Tonight the foundation was laid for another reawakening in my life; that of the music that died inside of me way back when.

It’s in there. I have been a bass player for 16 years—secretly, clandestinely, privately. I don’t mean to brag, but I have reached that skill level that allows me to express myself adequately through my talent, and it needs to come out. I’ve got music in my soul, and it wants to sing.

So tonight, the path opened up to me, and I’m going to jump on it. So I have begun meditative exercise, so I have begun physical exercise, so I have begun dietary exercise, and so I shall begin creative and artistic exercise as well. The music that lives inside of me shall be free.

I remember a time not so long ago when I made choices for the better; I would go out and decide I was going to do a certain distance, or turn at a certain corner, and then when I got to that point, I decided that instead of taking the easy path I would continue to push myself and go farther, faster, or higher.

That’s where I was tonight; I have a cold (RIGHT before I go on a weeklong trip to LA. Fantastic), and I wasn’t feeling like exercising. Still, I got out there and got on my bike and started up with a one or maybe two mile trip in mind.

When I got to the halfway point, I decided to just say fuck it, and keep going. I ended up going 3 miles, which is my normal distance.

I kind of lost sight of the fact that I was just preaching a month or two ago to make better choices on a moment-to-moment basis. I remember now; I need to make better choices every moment.

My roommate said that willpower was like a muscle, you just need to keep exercising it and it gets stronger, but damn if it doesn’t take a long time to notice a difference. I think that’s where I’m at right now; discouraged by my lack of willpower over the last couple of days, I’m in danger of falling into a rut of going back to my old lifestyle, except I still exercise every night, and I’m still thinking about my food choices, and I’m still drinking far more water than I ever did. I swear, it’s like I got all excited about losing 20 pounds and then boom—my motivation plummeted.

I’ll shake myself out of it; I know that I’ll return from LA invigorated and full of new ideas. Perhaps that will carry over into my personal life as well and I’ll come back motivated to continue my fitness quest.

Day four of being “off”, but I’m sick of talking about it. I decided to jog tonight instead of bike; mix things up a bit.

I jog/walked a mile. I was drenched when I got home, so I know I at least got a good workout. I mean, foodwise, today was better than yesterday, but it was still not ideal. I didn’t eat nearly enough. I really have to remember to eat. I just forget and then I look up and realize I haven’t eaten anything all day, and instantly I’m starving. I also have to seriously cut back on my carb intake, even though one of my meals was almost all protein (tuna), so I’m getting back on track with that. Also: not nearly enough water.

Anyways, I am heartened to see that people are startin’ to pick up what I’m layin’ down, and use the #thingschanged hashtag on Twitter. That is amazing to me, and I am humbled. Each person who uses it makes sure to let me know privately that I’ve inspired them and to ask if they could start using the hashtag. This is something that I never, ever, ever would have seen myself doing. Inspiring other people to exercise? That’s not me.

Three years of my life were spent seething in self-loathing, rage, and madness. I want to erase those by surrounding myself with love, spreading lovingkindness, and with people who are like minded. I find, more and more, that negativity actually kind of repels me; and this is a huge change from just recently when I sought out negative people to commiserate and brood with.

As I continue on this path, I find that the positive people that I should be around are starting to ‘come out of the woodwork’. Actually, scratch that: it is I who have come out of the woodwork, back into the world of normal people who care.

The last couple of days have been really off for me, diet and exercise wise. I ate embarassingly bad today, but as a friend told me; just note it and move on. That’s what I plan on doing; I recognize the fact that I made poor food choices today, I see what the effect of that will be (in this case, a horrible bike ride), I have noted that, and I am moving on. I am fully aware and not in any denial about it, which is still far better than I used to be able to deal with these transgressions.

After a time, one begins to realize how badly in denial they were about things in the past. I used to eat like this every day, but yet I always said my diet wasn’t that bad. It was; I was in denial. How many other situations in my life was I in denial about? How many are any of us?

Does knowing it make it better? Do I remain here, squelching around in new and different forms of denial that I do not recognize yet? Perhaps. I probably do.

I don’t really understand the psychology behind denial. It seems counter-intuitive to self-preservation, yet we use it for this very reason every day. If prey were to be in denial about the predator bearing down on them, they would be eaten. Why should it be any different for us?

I have a long and bitter history with denial; one that spans generations, and more recently as a factor in the breakdown of my marriage.

As you know, my journey these last couple of months has been one to confront denial in the physical aspects of my life. I am facing up to my failures and striving to be more honest with myself. Did I eat poorly? Yes. Did I make a bad choice? Yes.

The difference now is that I am still moving forward.

Things are heating up. There is a definite zero-day by which I want to look my best, and it is fast approaching. For me, zero day is the last week in June. That gives me about a month to drop as much weight as possible, keep up my discipline, and keep pushing my workout routine.

I haven’t disappointed myself too much lately; I’ve been excelling at the exercise, doing relatively well on the diet, and been trying to squeeze in extra workouts when I can. Today I did some heavy shoveling-type of yardwork, and did a 3 mile bike ride; every day I am doing some kind of workout that makes me look back and say “Wow, I kicked ass. No regrets.”

I’ve been displaying an uncharacteristic discipline in avoiding eating like a fat kid as well. There are cookies in the house; haven’t touched them. There is cherry coke; haven’t gone near it. For the most part I’ve been sticking to the proper ratio of carbs/protein/fat. It’s beginning to pay off for real; at this point there is a definite noticeable weight loss and I can see it in many different ways.

The weight will definitely come off; I started to see that tonight as I got into a rhythm; there comes a point when you stop and look at what you’re doing, and you realize just how much you’ve changed. I reached that point tonight. I am actually working out. I am actually losing weight. I’m becoming more focused, more disciplined, and more determined to reach my goal; at this point, it’s just cake. Even if I just kept pace with what I’m doing right now I’d still be doing really well; however, I think it’s just going to get better and better as the weeks go on.

Shenanigans are afoot. I aim to be ready for them.