(Experi)Mental Divergence

For those of you who don't know me, I'm an avid coffee drinker. Tea, too. I used to drink lots of sodas, energy drinks, and other sugar-caffeine concoctions, but at this point, I'm mostly down to the two main vices: straight black coffee (4-6 cups per day) and iced tea with a hint of lemon, no sugar (2-4 20oz. glasses per day). On a whim, though, today I've decided to launch an experiment. A test of my willpower, and a measurement of my ability to function without the benefits (and drawbacks) of caffeine in my system at all times, with more along the way as the day goes on.

Today is day one. I promised some folks that I'd try to post the results of my first day; so, without further ado ...

I notice first and foremost that I make more typoes that I have to correct as I go along. My fingers are slower to react, my brain just a little bit more behind itself, making it more difficult to get everything down the way I'd like it. Not too impairing, really, but a little annoying. I also feel pretty tired, but I suppose that's how you're supposed to feel after 10 hours at the office. On the whole, my body feels pretty good; to replace my normal coffee-and-tea regimen, I've been drinking water all day, and I expect this is going to help clean me out a bit, get my body more "in tune" with the way that it's supposed to be according to nature and/or hippies, whichever is more correct. While my mind is a bit dulled, it's also pretty focused; I'm finding it easier to focus on a single task, though more difficult to process that task efficiently. Overall effect on my efficiency in regards to work is minimal to nonpresent. More on that as the week drags on.

So, why would I put this up here, post about how I'm cutting some certain beverages from my life for a short period? Because I use this digital soapbox as a means to chronicle my endeavors, as discussed before, and to push myself to do it. I don't care if anyone's reading this, the fact is that the chance that there are people who might be means that I've got some obligation, self-invented though it may be, to stick to my game plan, if only so that I can accurately and truthfully report the results to whoever might be interested. Most people who know me haven't seen me after I've gone a week -- or, in many cases, even a day -- without caffeine. It's an exploration of myself in a way that is generally unseen and unknowable even to me.

The other reason is that because this record of my thoughts and journies is, in fact, another similar test. I've historically been a pretty closed-down person, keeping most things to myself and sharing only when I felt it was truly necessary. Now, though, it seems that more and more people expect, or desire, me to share more, to put thoughts into words, to put words into blogs, to put blogs into cyberspace, and so on. It's not just me, either; it's a whole global cultural revolution. Watching the page-view analysis of these few pages over the course of the last several months has been an interesting look into just how that works. The way that I "advertise" my blog is purely social; I don't pay for endorsements or advertisements, I just spread the word to my family, my friends, my coworkers, and urge them to do the same. The more I push that, the more I see an increased number of viewers; I know I've gone well above the relatively small number that I first informed about my encroaching endeavor to write.

So, experiments in mind, we travel into a new week. I will chronicle the progress of my decaffeination as they arise, probably two more posts this week to analyze and finally form some conclusions before diving back into the energetic (and delicious) pool of caffeinated beverages.

I'm thirsty already.

(Experi)Mental Divergence

Conformist Nonconformity

"Well, why do you go out of your way to look like a bum?

Wouldn't it be more of an act of rebellion if you didn't spend so much time buying blue hair dye and going out to get punky clothes? It seems so petty. You wanna be an individual, right? You look like you're wearing a uniform. You look like a punk."

 -- "Brandy", SLC Punk!

The above quote, I think, defines the very reason I've failed to ever truly identify with any subsect of society; there are so many subcultures, each concerned only with their capacity to differentiate between themselves and "those people" (whoever "they" may be) that we forget that to seek individualism requires an effort of the mind, of a free-thinking self embodied not within a certain fashion, a certain musical taste, a certain communal passtime. We become so very caught up with making sure that we're not something we wouldn't want to be that we forget what it is we do want to be; we cast aside the true flavor of ourselves, replacing it with shock-value driven adherence to something that marks us as being something else -- forgoing any sense of satisfaction that should be gained from that same self-expression. We engage ourselves in efforts to identify with a group of people that we feel are, on some level, like us, either physically, emotionally, mentally, or through whatever shared trait we can cling onto in the hopes that we're not alone in the world, in the universe, that we have this connection with people as forged through the chains that bind each of us to our own personal indulgences.

The most famous expression of this desperate irony comes in the phrase, "I want to be different, just like everyone else" -- something I first encountered in the 1990s when the cynical mood of the grunge era took hold. This became a motif amongst those disenfranchised youths who sought to leave their mark not on the world, but on themselves; they recognized the futility of the other subcultures around them adopting their own uniform, and they developed a uniform of their own based on noncompliance with the existing templates; in so doing, though, they found themselves trapped by the same lack of identity-crisis as all the rest, and this seemingly-inescapable truth brought with it the ennui that has afflicted the formative years of each subsequent class of fresh young faces waiting to find their place in the not-so-hallowed halls of our education system, spurring the resurgence in more recent days of the shock-heavy, overdone uniforms of the new social strata -- the neo-punk, the emo, the nerdcore, etc -- now reliant upon not a sense of individualism, but an intense dedication to the masses, to the culture with which one finds oneself identifying.

Each generation of humans (okay, I'll admit it, I'm mostly talking Americans here) seems to identify itself most strongly by adopting something which defines itself as separate from the generation before it; that is, rather than adopting a unique culture to themselves, they attempt to focus on forming a counter-culture, a contrast to the existing structure meant to stand stark against that structure so as to grasp at a lack of structure entirely; this is evidenced in the Mods of the late 1950s-1960s, the Hippies of the 60s and 70s, the punks of the 80s, and so on; each seeking to find a self-expression through being an entity wholly separate from that which came before it. Even so, these subcultures often find themselves fight for -- or against -- the same ideals as their predecessors, in some grand attempt to overthrow the same system that seemed to oppress the younger years of their forefathers who sought to rebel against their parents, and so on.

Thus, we become an entire culture devoted to nothing more than embracing the taboos of our forebears, eventually assimilating those taboos into the same corporate structure so that we can have the capacity to build a legacy of this "new ideal", bringing about an oppressive structure which will, of course, be the bane of our own progeny as they grow into a world where the system keeps them from expressing themselves as individuals by clinging to outdated mores and archaic customs built on the refusal to succumb to the wisdom of our fathers.

But what else is there? Our only method of distinguishing ourselves is to reject the identities which came before us; we find ourselves becoming that same thing we fought to reject, all the while failing to recognize that at the very core, this system can be nothing but self-replicating. The entire culture of counterculture relies on the principle of breaking new ground when comapred against existent models. We attempt to hash out new ideas by breaking apart ideas that were present before any of us, before any of our progenitors, before any of their parents even knew what ideas could come to be in any given direction, but we can only find frame of reference in the systems that we seek to overthrow; is this cycle the only way we have of experiencing any form of individuality and uniqueness in the world? If the advent of any new era is only capable of rising from the ashes of the prior era, then how could we ever hope to become something other than the same socioeconomic phoenix rebirthed through our own desire to self-terminate, rebuild, and then preserve? We, today, are the suicide of the hippies; not the death of them, but the voluntary compliance of their ideals to the realities of our culturo-economic significance, adherence to which constitutes our only known means of survival.

How long before we can truly find a new way to exist, to survive, to thrive?

Conformist Nonconformity

Damnit

This once-a-month posting thing has got to go. I've been trying to hard at other things to even remember that I need to write from time to time to anchor myself to sanity; coping mechanisms have been one of the things I've spent a lot of time thinking about lately, and frankly, there's a lot to be said for having those things to which one turns when the weight of the world itself seems too much. With so many terrible things being splayed out across the globe and transmitted to us direct by satellite in High-Definition, it's easy to be overwhelmed, to find oneself lacking in means of dealing with the harshness of reality.

And so we cope. We drink, we gossip, we catch up on celebrity dirt. We write, we read, we go for long walks on the beach. We listen to music too loud, play sports with our friends, slice our flesh with razors; we cry, we laugh, we crack jokes that we secretly revile for their content. All told, everyone comes out equal in the end, and we're all just trying to make it through the day; the most confident man is still inspired only by his drive to succeed, and the loneliest still held together by the hobbies that fill his time to keep his brain from realising that it isn't pleased to be where it is.

What's curious to me is the variety of ways that people describe their coping mechanisms. Some people say that they just do what comes naturally; others fret over whether what they're doing is avoidance of issues. Some pursue their interests out of a stated goal to be healthy, or wealthy, or happy, while some prefer to maintain that they're only interested in making it through another day by whatever means necessary. We rationalize and analyze and break everything into neat little segments to make them easier to mentally digest; we all offer our own take on the things that we do, and we all have our own way of brushing off the descriptions that others use ("He says he just does that for fun, but it's obvious he's just trying to keep his mind off of what happened...") -- we invent labels for the actions and intentions of ourselves and others, because they're more easily tied down than the people themselves.

Actions can't lie; they can't be made to be false, even when the motives behind them are false or they are being done for reasons explained only in untruths, even when one is doing things that they would rather not be doing for whatever reason -- such as fitting in, or seeming calm, or just keeping up appearances -- the action itself is a pure thing, a thing which cannot by its own nature decieve. Whatever the reasons, whatever the justification, whatever the consequence, the action simply is. It displays itself without remorse and breaks the mold of simplicity in so doing; whenever one does something, that something becomes an expression of the self, which reveals some part of oneself. That facet may be conceived through falsity, but the action remains the same, and continues to remain the same, to carry the same result within its own confines; the difference is in how the world reacts to the actor.

So it is with coping with reality, for, like action, reality itself is intrinsically unable to lie. While I know from experience that my brain can lie to me about what is real (dreams, imagined sights in the corner of one's eye), reality itself is not the one at fault. What exists is what exists, depsite our best efforts to cloud our perception thereof, to make of any situation what we wish, to see only what we want to see and damn the rest. We lie to ourselves about reality and actions both, as a coping mechanism I think, because we need to be able to bring the whole affair that is what we experience into a cohesive focus, into a picture that is painted by our minds for our own eyes. To see the world as another sees it for even an instant could break even the most steeled mind.

How many times do we rewrite the past to arrive at a present that we can accept?

Damnit