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. 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 reflection around the time 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 anachronism; like being rudely woken up in the middle of a sleep cycle.
Some of this feeling can be attributed to good ol’ burnout but also, 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 most stable of my friends are also now jostled around by life, and some of my mentors have passed away. The contexts that I depended on to locate myself in culture are slowly fading out.
If the Khaldunian model of civilizations-as-organisms is to be believed, perhaps institutions and ideologies replace themselves every decade just like human cells. The era of tech-abundance is drawing to an uneasy end. 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 went from being the indie darling to a corpse reanimated by private equity. Ribbonfarm has officially announced that it is over. While there was no one single clear demarcation, 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 in the city. Failed Film Festival and Weird Tech meetup are similarly exciting. I'm slowly transitioning into the cozyweb myself, lurking in discords and showing up to reading meetups, coworking sessions and jams in friends' apartments. I've hosted several of these myself and liked it.
This tendency towards coziness is seeping into other areas of my life as well, and I’m now more interested in catching up with things that I had 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. The distance and time away has also served me well in building a fresh relationship with these things, free of baggage.
A byproduct of all this is that I now see how tethered I still am to pandemic-era habits, and consequently the extent to which it restricts how I live. Some choices have paid off — such as running regularly — while others, not so much. Continuing to spend copious amounts of time at home, for example, has led to a prolonged context collapse and indecision. The lockdowns and everything that came with it could happen again anytime. It strikes me as a bad idea to move on, despite the obvious upsides.
Adulthood is starting to feel like a recurring lesson on what is temporary and what isn’t, though impermanence doesn’t necessarily imply insignificance. I am homesick for my comfort zones. I sense that I'm at the end of a 7-year cycle, and it is starting to become clear that I need to do this *gestures vaguely* for a fresh set of reasons. I’ll need to reanimate the stale motivations from the past, jettison parts of the clutter, and make space for something new. First, I want to rest. I’m tired.