Alive On The Electric Boat

My friend Brady sent me this story 3 or 4 weeks ago, and I’ve been thinking about it probably once a day ever since. If you switched the references to North Carolina out for ones pointed towards Georgia, Jeremy B Jones’ grandfather would become my own. And if you abstracted either of them even slightly, they’d represent an America which has been decaying for decades amidst the emergence of the Internet Age and the endless self-commodification that’s come with it.

At this point, it would be goofy and grotesque to even try to deny the ever-escalating addiction we have to mattering. Our ancient ancestors’ attempts at proving they exist or explaining their places in the universe now seem quaint and archaic when placed alongside the self-aggrandizing luxuries of our smartphones, tablets, or computer screens. The latter offer us a world that’s about us, complete with evils waiting for our involvement before they can be vanquished and advancements in humanity’s social, political, and even spiritual evolution that can’t move forward without our input. An RPG-adjacent bacchanalia of possibility where you could be anything if you tried hard enough and the people around you serve as vehicles or obstacles for your success. The former offers us only a world full of difficult joy which asks for our lives in return for its splendor.

Last night during a pre-wedding boat party for one of Sloane’s friends, I was thinking about Zizek’s thing on how capitalism creates new appetites and then commodifies them to death. Expanding ever outward until it has nowhere else to go, then returning to where it began and beginning again. And it left me at a bit of an impasse with Jones’ story of his grandfather. On the one hand, it’s a reminder of reality in a capital R sense and serves as a testament of the fundamental disconnection between digital visibility and a life well lived. And on the other hand, it’s possibly another example of the way in which we’ve continued to commodify the quaint, as if a forgotten life filled with hidden, localized meaning is something we can overnight to ourselves if we decide to. It’s at least hard not to read it and want to be more like his grandfather, and even harder apparently not to write about that feeling in my weekly newsletter.

And this I think is one of the legitimate difficulties of modern online life. Its accoutrements can be both insightful and distracting, worthwhile and worthless, depending on the person or the setting or the intention. Which means the sermonizing on all sides of it is infinite and the market for providing a certain type of steadiness amidst its storm seems equally endless. And that indicates to me that the burden for each of us is less about what we decide to do either online or off and more about where our heart is as we do it. I laugh every time I see a post of Mary Oliver’s “What will you do with your one wild and precious life” somewhere only because she spent most of hers wandering around in the woods gathering berries for dinner and hanging with friends. It is not an anthem for financial exceptionalism or self-optimization, and it is not an indictment against your present self. It’s just a question directed towards the soft animal of your body and how its enjoying its time in the afternoon sun.

I miss my grandfather, and the way he’d sometimes ask me to explain computers or my latest ideas to him. He’d say sometimes over Dr Peppers on the porch that he couldn’t keep up with me, which felt ironic given his past 18 hour shifts at Waste Management and the house he’d spent so many years building mostly by himself. And I think what he meant was that he didn’t understand what I was talking about but he loved me, and last night that felt perhaps like the answer I was, for some reason, searching for amidst the party conversations and two-thousand-teen anthems blaring from the speakers of our electric boat. I can’t have any life I think I want in the moment. I would hate being a bus driver in the woods without a computer, and I would hate all sorts of other arrangements that can feel vivid and magnetic behind my various screens for a moment or two as I read about them. But thankfully their lives aren’t about me, and a window into their joy doesn’t imply that I’m separated by a pane of glass from the heart of life or some similarly gloomy conclusion. And further, their life experience isn’t a product I can purchase or a home I can renovate. To Zizek’s point, the real tragedy of self-commodification and the endless appetites of capitalism is that both of them push us to believe that we can buy or attain anything we think we’re missing at any given moment. When the reality is that much of what makes each of us beautiful is our incomplete, asymmetrical selves. And that, perhaps, is the real wisdom lurking in Jones’ story. His grandfather’s disciplined awareness of what he cared about most and not moving beyond that, mixed with an invitation to the reader to remember that all of us will amount to a few paragraphs at most in the end no matter how we spend our time. There is no value in believing you’ll be the one who escapes that inevitability, and no virtue in trying to.