Resolute

I dislike resolutions for the new year. I think it's silly that a specific, arbitrary date is forcing us to make changes in our lives, when we should be making those changes every day. I also think this temporal quality of the resolutions contributes to the terrible success rates these resolutions tend to be met with.

And yet, my life has pivoted entirely in an astonishingly short amount of time, and it dramatically all unfolded in perfect timing for the new year. So I feel compelled to brush off this blog I haven't posted to in almost a full calendar year to think about the coming year.

I just accepted an offer for a new job, and will be signing the paperwork to begin as soon as humanly possible. I'm optimistic about the company, and a large part of that is the speed with which they sped me through the interview process. I IMed the CTO on 12/27 about the position. He replied and told me to forward them a résumé. He read through the résumé, chatted a bit with me, and set up a Google+ Hangout with the executive team for 12/30. I woke up on 12/31 to the job offer. I told them I liked to be in a culture that valued getting things done; they gave me an interview process of four days. That's fantastic.

I haven't officially mentioned it to anyone at the school yet, but I'm leaving college. I doubt I'll be coming back. College does not have a culture that values getting things done.

I'm not sure where I'll be for the foreseeable future. I'll be discussing it with my family during the next week, while in Syracuse. I may just stay in Syracuse, living with my family as I try to reverse the damage being in college did to my depression. I may continue to live in Buffalo, combatting depression the best way I know how: doing what I love. That decision won't be mine to make alone, and I'm afraid of it.

I don't have a resolution this year. I don't want to resolve a past issue in my life. I want to take this pivot and run with it, building the best future I possibly can. As I fall asleep tonight, this will be my mantra:

There are over 7 billion people on this planet. By the time you finish this thought, 250 new people will be born, 250 new lives will begin. That is 250 chances for you to change a life, to meet someone great, or to meet someone who will change the way you see the world. Every minute, 105 people die. That's 105 chances you most likely missed. That's 105 less opportunities in the world.

You are not unique, you are not special. Those are concepts that are limited to a time when the earth was large and empathy was small. There are people out there who are smarter than you, better than you. There are 7 billion people out there, and each will make you feel like an idiot about something. But that just means 7 billion people who are qualified to make your life better, and 7 billion people whose lives you have a responsibility to improve. Being unique or special is a sad, stale, and stagnating way to see the world. There is nothing worse than being the best thing you encounter on any given day.

Good night, moon. Good morning, 2012.

In the nineties, we sang angsty and angry ballads about changing our world, about the decay of life around us. Ironically, we were never more alive. How do we document real life, when real life's getting more like fiction each day?

It's 2011. Nobody wants to document real life anymore. Real life is getting further and further from fiction. We won. We changed things. Dichotomies broke down, things lost some clarity, lost some of the "us" and "them". But at what cost?

It's wonderful that we're moving away from all the terrible things we do to each other. It's great that there's become less of a "them". But in doing so, we've lost the "us", as well-- it was defined by the "them".

What these Zoloft-fueled, 3-in-the-morning thoughts really come down to is, if someone were to document real life today, what would they say? They'd tell an empathetic story of mixed feelings and compromises.

Give me back my absolutes, my caricatures.

I've been thinking a lot for the past couple of days about blogging; how it's done, how it was done, how it should be done, and how it will be done. This was probably an escape my mind came up with to be able to ignore the fact that I've consistently failed at anything remotely resembling academic responsibility this week, failing to show up for classes and work on a frightening schedule (1/2 the week thus far, gulp). That's an interesting idea that should be pursued some more; hiding in things we're good at to escape things we're bad at. Learned helplessness much?

But back to blogging. I am convinced, largely thanks to Say Everything by Scott Rosenberg, that links are the end-all-be-all of blogging. Comments are silly; links are how conversations happen. Tumblr came close with its reblog concept, but limited itself to just the Tumblr community. That, my friends, is what we in the industry call a "circlejerk".

So, like everything that annoys me, I'm considering whether or not I should set out on a quest to fix it. Make a Wordpress/Tumblr-esque service/open-source software combination that will follow this links-are-king paradigm. Ignoring everything else I have already taken on, this is a daunting project. And yet, I'm the proud new owner of tangl.es, because our links are the tangled web we weave.

Yes, I'm a little insane.

I picked up a new book about a week ago when my ex-boyfriend was visiting me (that weird occurrence seems to be a common one, for us) called "say everything" by Scott Rosenberg. It's just a story of how blogging began, and it is actually a rather fascinating read. I recommend it.

But I'm sitting here tonight, in a rather glum mood (sleeping for 24 hours straight seems to bring those on), mulling over that ex-boyfriend I mentioned. And I have to ask myself: why do we feel the need to say everything? Why does the human psyche give such a damn about being heard?

I don't really have an answer, but I do have a guess: It's therapeutic. That's the long and the short of it. Saying everything is a therapeutic endeavour that we all should try at one point or another. It doesn't even matter if anyone's listening, as long as we believe they're listening. This is what blogging, then Facebook Status Updates, and now Twitter is all about. (On a side-note, I'm being blessed with people who are listening because I have a kick-ass group of Twitter followers.)

I think that, from the time when we were keeping diaries, we have had trouble knowing ourselves. We have no idea how we sound, we forget what used to be important to us, and we cannot seem to get an outside view of ourselves. Writing things down helped that; we could recall that, at one point, the pants we wore to a party was more important to us than who went to the party. We could view something we wrote a month ago, and realise we were kind of an asshole. We could (maybe) consider whether we were still an asshole. For once, we could step outside our bodies and really get to know ourselves.

I think, over time, we've been developing simpler and simpler ways to do this, and simpler and simpler ways to share it. The act of making it simpler to do makes sense to me, and seems in line with the therapeutic self-improvement the form is meant to accomplish. But the sharing? I'm having trouble deciding why it's so important to people to easily share their thoughts, ideas, feelings, and things that should leave them feeling vulnerable with the world. Why did I challenge myself, not to write every single day, but to make a blog post every day? I can't answer for anyone but me.

I have a history of starting things and never finishing them. A terrible practice I try to get out of at every opportunity. One of the tricks I've learned, over the past few years, is that getting other people involved shames me into doing things. I'm ashamed of myself when I miss a post here. I'm ashamed of myself when I haven't made enough progress on a project other people are working towards. So I think, by sharing our innermost selves with the world, we're pushing ourselves to share more, engage in this therapy more. Writing is work, and even if it's good for us, we still need to get motivation to do it.

Why do you share?