In recent days I've been thinking about how I would survive if my current attempt at "normie life" fails - and no, there's no guarantee that I will fail, but the Markov model says "probably".
I barely fit anywhere, years ago, when I was younger, when I had more energy, more space, to try and to even change. But now? - now I feel like a complete outcast, even among the outcasts. No clan, no tribe, very few connections - a kind of absolute anarchy that defies definition.
I doubt I'm alone in feeling this queer isolation and separation. Social media is filled with sub-groups, castes, cliques, tiny start-up groupings of people who claim a kind of affinity. Years ago, after my sister Nancy died, I made the attempt to use social media as so many lonely people do - as a surrogate for that community that is missing, absent, from this phase of history. But TWITTER, FACEBOOK? - these are thin, porous, poorly constructed options. Social media provides a synthetic human relationship, with very little emotional "nutritional value".
It seems that very little is "sewn together" with much more than the shabbiest of fabric and thread - leaving these tiny, tinny, hollow worlds where people cling to some shared values and perspectives, but are actually only echoes of human bonds.
That's kind of what I'm seeing in my own life and the lives of others: a continuous fragmentation, a social entropy that is reaching a maximum level of disorder, and the crystalline substrates left behind are only quasi functional. Yet, it seems as if life goes on, the world continues to "work", and this lack of cohesiveness is of no concern. As a philosophical and functional anarchist (meaning I live my anarchism within the prison of modern American life), this development doesn't bother me, the growth of these micro-societies, these separate smaller spaces for human life. In many ways it's a good thing, but my own problem is that I have not found a place where I fit. I know there are those who would say (the hardcore Stirner individualist anarchists) I should disregard my desire for community and embrace my loneliness ... and there is truth to this. But as I get older, and feel in my bones the emptiness of "normal life", I yearn for something that cannot be attained simply by adopting some solitary dwelling or "getting by".
I am a social mammal, I do not have the ability (at least not now) to dismiss my loneliness and ennui as a passing phenomena of self, a thing to be discarded without effort. I do not think I am "sick" because I find the "wonderful present" not so wonderful, and promises of the "American Dream" to be jaded without much humanity. I desire a "homeland of the soul" - a place of belonging, not a utopia.
I don't desire the "group think", that is not something I need. But a sense that I might fit in some place? - this didn't used to be an issue for me, but now it is something that my heart longs for.
The only question I ask is where, where is this place? If such a place is real for me at all? It almost seems like an impossible land now, as I write this, wondering how I will live or be, if I am able to get through this current storm. I can't lie, there are days I wake up and the voices inside of me have one common chant "you're a loser Dan, there is no place for you in this world, you are no longer functional". Those voices call out "methods" and "techniques" I could use to cauterize my completely failed chain of causality called "Dan".
I wrestle with this possibility - that I might fit in nowhere at all. That I was simply born broken, or at the wrong time, and the only micro-space of "fit", for Dan, is an empty space of nothing.
No - I haven't given up, despite my morbid obsession with becoming homeless and living in a tent-city some place. Yet, however hard that life might be, there is a kind of honesty and truth to that life - things missing from the middle-aged software engineer paradise I had called home for the last few years.
Any who ...
Some thoughts for a Monday night.