everything, part one

You look out the window at the beach at sunrise and you see a prescription drug commercial. It’s low tide; a middle-aged couple is walking by, dressed in white, hand in hand. Your brain starts listing side-effects.

And this is itself a side-effect. The residue of countless childhood and adolescent nights spent parked in front of the TV, pleasantly buzzed, awash in its glow. Knowing intuitively what the ad execs, with their huge paychecks and strategic plans and focus groups, didn’t understand: commercials were just low-level entertainment. Or a sedative. No one was listening.

Christ, the things we have to be nostalgic for these days, you think to yourself, turning away from the window. (You’re not religious, but there’s something about the epithet that feels powerful.) Lying there, staring at a screen, having no idea what’s coming on next but just letting it happen to you because you don’t want to look for the remote. Or sitting through whatever drivel your parents or siblings or roommates felt like watching.

Those were the days when people could rail against mass culture. Intellectuals, brooding anti-heroes. They would look out at the suburban streets lined with strip malls and fast-food restaurants and movie theaters and fantasize about burning it all down, or leaving it all behind and finding something more authentic. Now that sentiment seems quaint, outdated.

Now, the strip malls are slowly shutting down, one store at a time, like the lights going off in an office building at the end of the day (an office where the workers don’t talk to each other, where each one does his or her work at his or her own pace and leaves once it is done.) They are becoming ghost towns. And thinking of this, you start to miss them.

You’ll probably miss sitting in traffic when all the cars are self-driving, when everything is efficient and optimized.

            
You miss these things the way you might miss a cold. When you have a cold, you can blame everything on that. I’m sick, you can’t expect me to give my all at work. I’m sick, you can’t expect me to be nice to people. I’m sick, you can’t expect me to write.

            
The coffee maker must have brewed at least enough for a cup by now. On your way to the kitchen, you see your book sitting on the end table next to the couch where you have been sleeping and try to remember what you read last night. You can’t. You figure it will come back to you when you start reading again. Or maybe some random snippet of conversation or thought will jog your memory.

            
It’s got to still be in there somewhere.

            
You choose one mug from among twenty identical siblings and pour some coffee into it. You consider picking up the book again and completing the wholesome image of sunrise, beach, porch, book, coffee. No one else is up yet, but you like the idea of being caught in such a picturesque pose.

            
You don’t post pictures to social media, and mock those who do, but you are just as shallow and image-driven as they are. The difference is you understand that posting the picture looks bad, looks desperate. Looks like trying. And that overrides any actual aesthetic. No image is strong enough to overcome its own deliberateness.

            
You open the fridge and take out the carton of almond milk. (You tell yourself it’s for the taste, or for health, or for the cows, but it’s really just trendy.) As you top off your coffee, the refrigerator beeps at you because it’s been left open what some engineer once decided was too long.

            
You tell it to shut up. It sounds playful, but there is real passion behind it. You hate that beep. First, it was on principle; now it’s almost Pavlovian. You hear it - or the similar but distinct beep the microwave makes when you leave your food in there too long - and you tense up. You feel like you’re being programmed, controlled. It makes you want to leave the door open even longer out of spite.

            
Spite for a refrigerator.

            
You take your first sip of coffee and decide you don’t really want to read that book. But then the perpetual question arises: what do you want to do? You wish you could just “follow your instincts,” but you can’t even tell what is an instinct versus a compulsion versus a fleeting impulse that will evaporate in a second. Those are all labels we give things afterwards; in the moment, they all feel the same.

            
Sitting down at the kitchen table, coffee in hand, you remember your list of topics that interest you, things you want to know more about, created for occasions like this. Aristotle; the British rule of Hong Kong; how exactly the stock market works. But what can you do? Type Aristotle into Google and skim his Wikipedia page? Pretend you’re going to buckle down and read the Nicomachean Ethics all the way through, the way you did with Paradise Lost earlier in the summer?

            
You’ve done all those quixotic things before and they’ve never made a difference. It turns out that all you really need to know about Aristotle to get by in real life are the basics: Greek philosopher, student of Plato, tutor of Alexander, empiricism, Nicomachean Ethics. That’s enough for Jeopardy; that’s enough for the crossword puzzle.

            
You spot your phone sitting on the counter. You tell yourself you are just going to check to see if anyone texted you overnight. No Facebook, no Twitter. You’re trying to avoid social media this summer. You walk over, press the unlock button. Nothing, which is unsurprising: it’s barely past six o’clock in the morning.

            
But now the situation has changed; the phone’s already in your hand.

            
And so the bargaining stage begins:

            
Atticus Finch read the entire newspaper every day after work, so it’s okay for you to scroll through Twitter.

            
You’re well-read enough to remember that Atticus Finch read the entire newspaper every day after work, so it’s okay for you to scroll through Twitter.

            
You’re self-aware enough to realize that you’re just coming up with absurd, bullshit justifications for something that you want to do just because you’re an addict like everyone else, so it’s okay for you to scroll through Twitter.

            
You open Twitter.

            
Your feed is a Frankensteinian creation, a patchwork quilt: a handful of your real-life friends; people from college you haven’t spoken to in years (most of whom you had to follow for some class or other: half your professors seemed to be obsessed with Twitter); various writers, journalists, and comedians (whose posts mostly just make you feel guilty for not being a writer, journalist, and/or comedian (the lines are blurred) yourself, but they’re also your main source of news); a few bands you really liked a few years back. You should really purge and update your following list at some point - or delete Twitter outright, like God flooding the world after humans screwed it up.

            
But you also kind of like the idea that each account you follow has a history to it. Your Facebook feed is similarly hodgepodge; it’s just inhabited by the ghosts of a different era. High school acquaintances and family members, mostly, with a sprinkling of random (mostly older and/or lower-class) coworkers who decided to add you (you can’t quite bear “friend” as a verb) for reasons of their own in more recent years.

            
The first post you see (calling them “tweets” is slightly more palatable than saying “to friend,” but still not something you can fully own, at least not without scare quotes or an ironic tone), incidentally, is a link to an article about Facebook, shared by one of those journalists-comedian types. The headline informs you: over two hundred million users’ data is being stored on some government server, a clear breach of the company’s claims regarding privacy. You assume your data is included in this, but it doesn’t bother you. It’s kind of nice to be part of something.

            
Besides, is this really even news? The headline frames it as egregious and shocking, but you think - didn’t we already know that? Didn’t you read or watch something about it a few months ago? In the spring, in the early evening, sitting in that uncomfortable chair on your porch while you were really just waiting to hear back from Sarah about dinner plans . . . ? Or was that something else?

            
(You don’t even really like Facebook as a social medium (everyone seems to be using “social media” as a singular noun these days, but you’re a holdout, even though you know it’s pedantic) but deleting it would make you elitist and out-of-touch. Like refusing to shop at Walmart or eat at McDonalds.)

            
Now: do you click the link or keep scrolling? You feel both desires (impulses, compulsions) simultaneously. They play tug-of-war for your attention. Breadth versus depth. An angel and a devil on each of your shoulders - but which is which? To click is to engage, to follow the thread, go down the rabbit hole; to scroll is to accept the headline as sufficient.

            
Hamlet was wrong: this is the question. Or, rather, Hamlet’s famous question is just a higher-stakes version of the same basic human conundrum. When an idea arises in the mind, how do you decide whether to turn it into an action or let it remain an idea? It’s not something that can be dealt with in the abstract. You can’t follow every impulse; you can’t turn down every side street that catches your eye. Nor can you refuse to act entirely. You must make these decisions all day long, every day, and so must everyone else - that’s what life is, you’re pretty sure - and so must everyone else - but understanding this does nothing to actually help you decide.

            
You look at the source of the article: the New York Times. One of four sites you’re willing to follow links to (the others being The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker. You can’t remember when, why, or how exactly this list was created, but it’s become a more or less inviolable rule and you’re grateful for it.) You look at who shared (you’ll say “retweeted” with less distaste than “tweeted,” for some reason) it: some writer from New York. (You really should be living in New York at this point in your life, shouldn’t you, or is that just the cumulative effect of nineties sitcoms on your psyche?) You imagine the details that the article will give you: the name of the whistle-blower or the specific government agency that is holding the data (all of which are opaque indistinguishable acronyms to you, anyway connoting only authority and bureaucracy.) Of course, there’s always the possibility of incidental learning from an article like that, too. You may encounter a detail about Zuckerberg or the name of some Senator who is quoted, and that may stick with you for some reason (and when you think of it later, you’ll remember you first read it at this kitchen table on this morning) or it may remind you of something else you’ve read or thought or experienced - maybe even the book from last night, which part of your brain is still trying to recall, in order to prove a point - but that’s unpredictable and could happen scrolling through your Twitter feed, too, and now that you’ve given the idea a few seconds to settle, it occurs to you that you really don’t care about the subject of the article, so you keep scrolling. You stab Polonius.

            
That is how decisions are really made, you reflect, which is why life can never be planned for. You remember the moment - years ago, but clearer in your memory than yesterday, even - when you were sitting in the couch in your old living room, trying to read Heidegger, and all of a sudden it just welled up inside of you, rising from your roots right up to your hands, and before your mind had even registered it you had closed the book, and it was decided: you’d never be a great philosopher. You were a philistine, through and through.

            
The next Tweet appears: the president said something stupid, made it obvious he didn’t understand who Harriet Tubman was, and this particular writer (who happens to be black, and who you certainly didn’t follow because he was black, but once you had considered following just as certainly couldn’t not follow, because then what if you were not following him because he was black, even if that was on an unconscious level (you always say and even think “unconscious” when you want to say “subconscious” because you remember hearing that Freud disliked the word “subconscious,” even though you are also pretty sure that a lot of Freud’s theories have been debunked)) is irate. You, however, feel nothing but mild amusement. The current president’s idiocy is a given at this point - like the weather, an easy go-to when conversation falls flat, a lingua franca among everyone you know. How effortless to say, “did you see the thing where he . . .” And now you mentally finish the sentence “. . . didn’t know who Harriet Tubman was?” a phrasing borrowed from the black writer. You put it to the back of your mind for later, a squirrel hoarding nuts for winter.

            
There is a civil war going on in Southeast Asia.

            
Your acquaintance from college doesn’t understand why weddings are so expensive.

            
A singer you don’t particularly like (or dislike, for that matter) released a new album overnight.
            

There have been a certain, large-sounding number of police shootings of unarmed suspects since some date.

            
Someone else shared the Facebook article. Another journalist (white, male, forties.) You are reminded of its existence and are forced to re-evaluate your previous decision that you do not care. The fact that someone else shared it pushes you a little bit back towards clicking it, but you don’t yet. But if it turns out to be The Story (capital T, capital S, which you pronounce differently in your head than “the story”) of the morning, you realize that you may have to, as a statement in favor of a world where we do all read the same news - even if it’s propaganda, even if it’s lies.

            
There is a fly buzzing around the room. There will always be a fly buzzing around the room, you think, not quite knowing what you mean by it but liking the sound of it . . . (to be continued, onward and outward, to infinity . . .)