What do we choose to focus on, and what impact does that have on our daily lives? For a month and a half, which includes the time from mid-November until the end of that month when we were on vacation in Oregon through the entirety of December, when I was preparing the lengthy blog posts that I shared here, my focus was on the details that surrounded that trip. Along the way, I learned more about the geology of the coast, the fungi, the sea life that calls the shore home, and a few lessons about perspective. Each day while traveling, my sense of happiness in spending time with my best friend was reinforced, and afterward, on each day prepping photos or writing I bumped into impressions of her that often had me smiling at my computer screen. Mind you, this was but one trip of the 19 that we took during 2022.

Now consider those whose gaze is attached to routines that only rarely waver. Sure, many are drawn into the experience of travel when so fortunate to be able to indulge in those pastimes, but it is what we do outside of those kinds of singularities that also matter. Are you dreaming of what’s next and celebrating what has been or are you bored with the same old stuff you’ll wallow in this evening and dreading the approach of bills you’d rather avoid?

When jobs and routines define much of who we are, where do we turn to force a perspective shift? What do we give up, alter, or intentionally move in order to discover something about ourselves with a mindset ripe for a break from our fixed ideologies and expectations? Is such a process even possible?

In a recent blog entry titled Stages, I posted a list of my interests over time, roughly grouped by age. Some things remain ever-present over the course of my life but they’ve been evolving while others were discarded. Looking at that list while writing this now, I am wondering what the main constants were that stayed with me and grew; I added those at the bottom of that post. Not that I want to refer you to that entry, but it was an exercise for me to think out loud that much has come and gone in my life, and while the decision to abandon something is not always a conscious one, it’s possible to leave parts of ourselves behind. I don’t know if leaving something is really an intentional act or just something that is bound to happen when we bring in new stimuli and grow beyond the utility of what something else had once offered us.

This, then, would appear to be the formula for change: always be open to bringing in new information, experiences, and challenges. Each time you alter a pattern, there’s a ripple into your past that allows you to understand that you are moving beyond that part of you that once served a purpose. We intuitively know this when it comes to playing with toys at 30 years of age it might be awkward to take a date to our place to play with dolls and model cars, though that might be cute the first time. And yet, this is exactly what we do when it comes to many of the activities and interests we gathered from the age of 15 to 30 years old. Just consider how many people still watch the same sports teams, listen to the same music, or watch their favorite teen movies well into adulthood. I get it; there’s room for nostalgia, but what I’m describing are those on a treadmill of life repetition.

We must, at times, take inventory of our progress, or lack of it, and foment a personal revolution that questions why we are on a trajectory that likely stalled out. It is the job of capitalism to blind us or at least take away the focus of seeing ourselves clearly enough to desire change. As creatures who tend to develop repetitious behaviors, we become beholden to those who parse out happiness through consumption, but this is not a path to real happiness. To paraphrase German philosopher Walter Benjamin, self-revolution is the emergency brake saving ourselves from cultural self-immolation brought on by capitalism.

I continually contemplate what is sustainable. It is an engrained natural attitude that is as second nature as wearing shoes when I travel away from home. But, like wearing a pair of shoes beyond their lifespan and then developing foot pain, I don’t always do what’s in my best interest. Amazon is an essential service in my life that offers things that are not easily acquired within 15 miles of where I live, and so being cognizant of the environmental impact of the packaging material, I allow the number of items in a shopping cart to collect, so what might have required 3 or 4 trips to various places in my car, I can have delivered as one larger bulk of items. Part of me can justify this use of Amazon because I also know that their vehicle will be delivering multiple packages to the neighbors in our apartment complex. We live in an apartment of 836 square feet because the two of us do not require a 1,600-square-foot home. Certain foods I buy in bulk if they are perishable but can be frozen, we have a vacuum sealer to extend their fresh date, or if I’m purchasing ingredients for making my cereal, I buy them online, typically from a family farm that will send me 8 to 10 pounds of the nuts or seeds I require. Our air-conditioning is never set to cold but hovers around 78 in the summer and 64 in the winter. Our car is a hybrid that offers us a wonderful 47 miles per gallon, and if an electric car offered us 500 miles of range, we’d rather own that.

I fail to present a reusable cup at the coffee shop; I’m still using plastic bags at the grocery and justify them because we need trash bags. I feel horrible when we replace car tires or change the oil as they are ugly reminders that we produce far too much waste, but we live somewhere that has a horrible public transport system that often acts as an air-conditioned homeless person shelter on wheels. We travel too much, which uses a lot of gasoline and then requires others to use natural resources to clean up after we’ve used motels, dishes, and various other services that produce waste. On the other hand, neither Caroline nor I buy much in the way of clothes; even our underwear becomes an embarrassment as we try to maximize their use.

But there are very selfish reasons for our mindfulness about sustainable practices: frugality breeds a kind of luxury that we thrive with. The reward for consuming less is found in our travels and ability to live experiential lives. We are not easily entertained by pop culture as it’s known by the masses; we need books, tools for making music, fabric, socks, and art. Those things can easily be tied into our travels as Caroline reads to me in the car as we drive along while on occasion, I have brought an instrument with me, and at a minimum, I have my computer that has a ton of music software for me to doodle with if I weren’t so busy working on photos and writing. Caroline is never far from knitting needles or a small drop spindle used for making yarn. If you could look at our search histories, you’d see a near-daily search for definitions of words, their etymology, the history of a place or thing, or following a literary reference of something we don’t know about, so our phones are most often used as tools to enrich our lives.

The less we waste, the more empowered we feel walking down a beach.

If you don’t want the Chinese to know precisely how collectively stupid we Americans are, ban TikTok. Our grotesque level of ignorance was used by Cambridge Analytica utilizing harvested Facebook data that helped propel Donald Trump to power and England into Brexit. Knowing the weak points of a population allows those with the right tools to guide the misguided into traps by exploiting the dumbest things they believe. The American policy influencers are aware of this, of course, and many have been using this to further their own agendas. Theoretically, though, it could work the other way, too, where the exploitative force uses its data to move people away from their profound ignorance, thus subverting the agenda of those who gain from the stupidity of the masses.

I’m not saying TikTok desires either scenario, nor can I suggest that some agency or group in America would want to see the continued dumbing down of its population, but I do know that we are doing NOTHING to negate our right to believe whatever level of crazy we choose to cultivate in the name of freedom.

I started this post in early November, and just now, on November 15, 2022, FBI Director Christopher Wray was quoted saying he is “extremely concerned” about TikTok’s operations in the U.S. and continued with, “We do have national security concerns at least from the FBI’s end about TikTok, including the possibility that the Chinese government could use it to control data collection on millions of users. Or control the recommendation algorithm, which could be used for influence operations if they so chose.”

For me, this translates to, “We don’t need a foreign government knowing precisely how stupid and easily influenced our half-educated population is.”

I’ve had a good share of thoughts about how plague and war displace people and alter the course of culture, but I’d never considered the unintended consequences that accompanied World War II when so many artists and writers fled Europe. I am well aware of the scientists brought to the U.S. after the war and the ones that left Germany prior to avoid being caught up with the anti-intellectualism that was occurring and subsequent persecution.

Here we are today. America is on the cusp of redefining itself in ways no one can quite predict yet, but the old America will never again be what comes next. Tragically, those who take advantage of becoming ex-pats typically do so for lifestyle and economic reasons, hardly for the intellectual conditions they are leaving behind, though they may voice their disdain for the gross stupidity they perceive.

When particular intellectual classes of people had to escape Europe or perish, they left privilege and were forced to adapt to circumstances where they were now the outsiders without much merit, though they were likely respected even if somewhat suspect.

While I should certainly leave, the countries in which I could consider living don’t have more intellectual curiosity either. There is only economic interest in what might create jobs. In any case, I would not arrive with the credentialed papers recognizing my contribution to any school of thought; I am merely the average person without a grand formula of how a people, country, or planet could escape the trajectory into the stupid that we are barreling towards.

Should I ever discover an answer to even a small question regarding anything at all, it might arrive in something written here or maybe an attempt at a thing more ambitious than a simple blog post, but that rubicon is yet to be crossed.