A thing I’ve learned in recent years is that I thrive on momentum, functioning with blinkers formed by the motion blur of my peripheral vision. It’s easier for me to get things done when I’m already in the midst of getting other things done, and stillness can overwhelm me into stasis. I remember hopelessly thrashing around when stagnation would come for me, but have since learned to patiently wait it out. Yet, as kinetic as this year was for me, I feel unsatisfied, disoriented and stuck.
This essay was originally meant to be an act of gathering my bearings around the eve of my birthday, but has since turned into my attempt at understanding why everything “feels” different when, materially speaking, not much about my life has changed. My birthday itself came and went with a profound sense of anachronistic absurdity; like being rudely woken up in the middle of a sleep cycle.
Most of what I’m feeling can be attributed to good ol’ burnout — I did a lot this year — but in addition to that, so much of what I took for granted as “permanent” fixtures of my life seem to have disappeared overnight, leading to a general lack of perspective. The contexts that I depended on to locate myself in culture are slowly fading away.
If the Khaldunian model of civilizations-as-organisms is to be believed, perhaps institutions and ideologies replace themselves every decade just like human cells. New York City has changed (for worse?), and so has my home town. Strange Loop, XOXO and Eyeo Festival have all concluded their run in the last couple of years. The Monthly Music Hackathon feels like a distant dream. Bandcamp has been bought and sold a few times, and is slowly but surely degrading. Ribbonfarm has officially announced that it is over. The era of tech-abundance is drawing to an uneasy end. The most stable of my friends are now jostled around by life, and some of my mentors have passed away. It feels like the end of an epoch, and I’m only now starting to appreciate how extraordinary and transient certain parts of it were. I wish that I had done a better job of living through them.
There are of course signs of something new. I'm cautiously optimistic about ChinatownJS and the tech-art crowd it attracts. Failed Film Festival and Weird Tech meetup are similarly exciting. I find myself increasingly lurking in discords and showing up to reading meetups, coworking sessions and jams in friends' apartments. I've hosted several of these myself and had a good response.
Currently, I’m more interested in catching up with things the that I momentarily drifted away from. I had a lot more Indian food this year than the years before. My rotation of cafes and outings has become more constant, and I find myself revisiting old movies. This is all partially downstream of my newfound quest for comfort and familiarity. Besides, the distance and time away from all of it has served me well in building a fresh relationship free from baggage.
It’s also frightening to realize how tethered I still am to pandemic-era habits and lifestyle, and consequently the extent to which it restricts how I live. I don’t entirely regret the life choices I made in that period; I’m better off in some ways. Running regularly has done wonders for me, for example. At the same time, spending copious amounts of time at home has led to a prolonged context collapse that often leaves me frozen and indecisive. The lockdowns and everything that came with it are still etched in my memory and serve as a constant reminder that it could happen again anytime. It strikes me as a bad idea to move on, despite the obvious upsides.
It is closer to the end of the year as I write this. I have no recollection of the person that I was at the beginning of this year, and nor do I remember being this blank about the future. It is refreshing, but I also feel homesick for my comfort zones. A Murakami quote comes to mind – “And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over.”
If I am to continue living on, I need to do it for a fresh set of reasons. At the very least, I’ll need to intervene and reanimate the stale but relevant motivations from my past. Adulthood is starting to feel like a recurring lesson on what is temporary and what isn’t. But impermanence doesn’t necessarily imply insignificance – probably the opposite. Perhaps now is a good time for me to jettison some of the things contributing to the clutter, and make space for something new. But first, I want to rest. I’m tired.