Every Trend Has Its Day

Literacy, we're told, separates the haves from the have-nots. The more people who know how to read and write, the more people who become eligible for computer literacy and thus able to create and maintain blogs. Lots of idle chatter. Lots of electronic power and digital data. Where are we going with all these blogs? In times past, we might have kept diaries and journals on a desk or in a drawer at home. Now, many of us gladly share our thoughts and stories on this public forum.

Blogging is both elitist and proletarian. Blogging is a private function on a social stage. I'm sitting here typing by myself knowing that the text I post is available to the World Wide Web.

In my experience with facebook, I found myself quickly getting bored reading about the minute iota of other people's moment-by-moment snapshots of their lives. I know the feeling is mutual. I tried twitter for a while but was overwhelmed by the inanity. Self-importance is fine. I understand our need for a bit of vanity - "look at me," "look at my wonderful offspring," "look at the impact that I've had on the people around me," etc. However, I saw this socializing behavior when I was a child and found it unnecessary to enhance my daily habits.

Our electronic networking methods vary, from SMS to twitter to email to facebook to blogs to ... what else? All the other similar stuff like myspace, baidu, video-posting sites, etc. Even plain ol' websites and electronic message/bulletin boards.

What's next? The VCs of the world are always looking for the Next Big Thing in electronic social networking. Everyone wants that billionaire to cling to.

What about the have-nots? Cell phones seem to level the playing field somewhat, offering SMS and texting services, as well as some Web browsing, as long as someone has a few dollars to spend every month.

What about the want-nots? Part of the human population, whether literate or illiterate, has no interest in any electronic communication forms.

I'm looking for a simple, non-monetized solution. I see trends that shy away from mass merging into commercial viability. Like meditating in a garden. Or Tai Chi sessions with a group of strangers. Or biking on a trail with acquaintances. Quietly fishing from the edge of a creek.

In other words, self-rejuvenation, alone or with others.

I can depend on capitalist/communist interests to keep pumping money into my portfolio. I know that others want to make lots of money. But I don't have to spend lots of money myself, giving me a net worth higher than the person beside me who gets drawn into the earn-and-spend, gotta have more, mindset. To be sure, I participate in the local marketplace, buying goods at retail prices (usually discounted, of course, so I feel like I'm getting a bargain) or shopping at used-goods outlets like the Goodwill Industries store, the Unclaimed Baggage Center or Mike's Merchandise (a damaged goods store).

As much as I enjoy spending a day by myself, wandering the unpaved and untrodden woods, I find happiness in seeking simple solutions that I can share with others. The human population will continue to grow. I don't care how much it ultimately changes the environment in this current round of expansion because I know that the global ecosystem always changes, neutral to the effects caused to a specific species. As a species, we want to believe we have control of our future but our species will eventually disappear. In the near-term, though, we can enjoy ourselves on this ride through time and space on planet Earth.

Unfortunately, the trends I see before me tell me that humans will continue to build walls around their thoughts, giving groups of people the secure feeling of exclusivity. Our warlike battle with nature that propeled humans into the forefront of their local environs has turned us against each other as our world seems to close in on itself. We still carry the feeling within us that we're only one step away from catastrophic disaster, threatening our survival in the next moment. We tend toward complexity rather than simplicity. We cannot transcend our animal tendencies, despite the extragenetic creations before us like this blog. We collectively rush forward into the next moment without stopping to think what we're doing, assuming that weekly planning substitutes for thoughtful consideration of doing nothing for once.

Today, in my local culture, millions of people climb into metal-and-plastic boxes, apply power to internal combustion machines, and transport themselves along flattened tar-and-rock paths to large brick or metal structures where they gather and discuss practical applications of the written words and actions of people from thousands of years ago. Some of these people will be killed or permanently injured before they reach the large buildings. All of these people will gladly justify to you their use of millions (if not billions) of tons/gallons of fossil fuels for this gathering, proudly declaring their celebration of Palm Sunday. Tens of thousands of trees will have been harvested to produce papers on which weekly lessons and church bulletins have been printed. The cumulative trash thrown away today and picked up in the next few days would easily fill a small town. The majority of these millions of people will tell you that they consider today's activities part of their self-rejuvenation.

I cannot instantly change people's perceptions of themselves. I don't expect others to instantly change my perception of myself. We are who we are, and change at our own pace.

As a person who finally convinced himself to become a habitual blogger (reducing the entries in my paper journals), I wonder about the next social trend I will follow. Not every trend fits me like a glove. Tweeting on twitter and gabbing on facebook were not my things.

In a moment of vanity disguised as social responsibility (looking for something to justify my existence while I had nothing to do except build my retirement portfolio and live off my wife's income), I posted dozens of pictures from my primary/secondary schooldays for former schoolmates to let them enjoy on facebook. But my days of forced socializing with them ended long ago. While looking at their facebook profiles, I saw my former schoolmates tended to create adult lives that aligned with the personalities of their teenage years. Most of them did not maintain friendships with me over the years and now I can see why. Their lives, important as they are to their friends and family (as well as for capitalist/communist barons to build their empires upon), have little to no immediate impact on my life. They never really did. We just filled seats in schoolrooms and walked the hallways to meet the demands of our community. We were experiments for educators looking at the effects of forced social interaction between young people classified by age. We did not associate with each other by choice but we did divide up into cliques or groups after we were forced together agewise.

As my schoolmates now post pictures on facebook of their children during their primary/ secondary school years, I see the same cliqueishness emerge. Of course, we are a reflection of our upbringing, a combination of nature and nurture. The FHMS trends of my youth continue on to the next generation. Proms. Socials. Band concerts. Sporting events. We perpetuate these sorts of things for many reasons - tradition and such. I even hear parents brag about the level of achievement their children reached in these events ("best-looking dress," "fastest swimmer," "first chair oboe," ...)

No matter how much I abhor these trends, I sit here and find myself talking about them, thus giving them importance, do I not? Well, I know that I was a product of these events and the kids of the next generation are products of the same events, no matter whether their memories of the events will be tied to digital cell phone pics as opposed to 110 camera film pics of my day.

So, as the human animals climb back into their horseless carriages and fan out on the road, looking for watering holes or returning to their permanent huts to devour slabs of slaughtered animals, what to make of all this?

I don't rightly know. I have no vested interest in the future of humans so I've given up my concern about preserving wild spaces for the next generation. Even more so, if those with children don't care about their children's environmental future and show it by flooding the roads by the millions for weekly rituals, then I'm going to stop worrying about saving the possibly rare sedum and stop mourning the future loss of the field of wild shooting stars on the hill behind me. Human history has shown me we as a species don't care about plant and animal diversity.

I come to the part of my life as a blogger where I question what I'm doing here and why. I sit here because I enjoy the comfort of the keyboard as a convenient means to record my thoughts in hieroglyphic/alphabetic form. I know that posting these thoughts in a blog gives me nearly universal access to them whenever I want to read them again. It also preserves them as a backup, whereas if I posted them in a Word file on my local hard drive, I give myself one point of failure if the hard drive stopped working, unless I devoted more time to backing up my local electronic data.

Therefore, I'm here because I'm literate in writing/reading and computer technology comprehension, and I like the convenience of the Internet for portable access and data preservation. These are the trends in which I participate gladly. Writing is a form of self-rejuvenation, my religion of the self (I am the only One who matters, because without me, there is no you or You or Her or Him or Us), a trend that many are adopting, as we find massive trancelike gatherings unnecessary and wasteful when we understand that the self is all and it only takes 10,000 hours to make yourself an expert as long as you know your limits so most of us are able to have kids and take care of our family when we devote time to ourselves and not somebody else's desire for our time/money.

When did I become wealthy? When I freed myself from petty human materialism and peer pressure, stopped doubting why I grew up in social conventionalism but have no need to belong, and learned to enjoy me. I'll throw one of these social conventions out - "Je pense donc je suis" or "Cogito, ergo sum" - and decide to stop writing blog entries. I have written all I have to say and all the rest is just repetition of repetition to infinity. I retired from work. I have cut all my previous words free. Time to cut myself free from words and free from time. You sit still for a day and watch the leaves of a maple tree grow out of their buds - you'll free yourself from time, too, and see why words no longer suffice. Whether you try it or not, I don't care - I'm free of trends. Time to retire from social interaction. Adios. Adieu. Adeus. Auf Wiedersehen. до свидания. 再見. さようなら.