Decisions…
Writing is all about making decisions and living with them down the page. So is life. We forget this, I think, too easily. We live in a world of artifice that is intentionally designed to offer everything, reducing the necessity to make profound decisions or live with their consequences. It is the consumer culture of disposable morality. Whatever we want is accessible, and whatever we choose to do is easily forgotten, discarded, or consumed so that we need not concern ourselves with the issue of consequences.
That is it… when we have too many options, we lack the imperative to act deterministically and can basically live life is some sort of childhood delusion of indefinite equipotentiallity wherein ‘you can be what ever you want’ and ‘you can do anything you set your mind to’ become too real, yet never real enough. There we sit, perched on the sheer face of the American Dream, unassailably formidable stone at our face, unfathomably terrifying void at our back, with the voice of the high school guidance counselor echoing at the limits of consciousness until one day you realize that you have done nothing but float in the current for fifteen years. In fact, you haven’t floated at all, since that would imply some degree of singularity and particularity, no, you are the current, the medium of currency, undifferentiated, unremarkable, unidentified. You are nothing, and you have done nothing with that dreamy, idyllic equipotentiality except believe that it would be enough to get you by when all it was sufficient for was to facilitate your assimilation into the Soma Americana.
What now? What do you do now, now that you have had this epiphamic moment of anti-zen? How do you trust anything you know? How can you be sure that your heroes aren’t part of the system – the Deus ex Machina that preserves the appearances of this Never-Never Land of incredibly boring and unremarkable accomplishments, of dreary three-mocha pseudo intellectual cafe solitary Sunday mornings over the New York Times, and mass-produced individuality? How can you see through the illusions to the reality? How can you solve the equation? You choose to. It is choice that differentiates us.
Choose, and choose wisely. Take a risk, make a stand, break the rules. The cliches are the answer, the not-so-booming voice from above, the whisper of existential secret. They are cliches because they are true, and they are true because they are. Being is, being well is a choice.
So, what do I choose?
… I choose to love. I choose to be unafraid of being the smartest guy in the room. I choose to be happy. I choose to have really good friends. I choose to care about the world, not just my little part of it. I choose to serve the interests of humanity. I choose to figure out how to make these things happen.