This is the world we live in (Oh, oh, oh)
And these are the hands we’re given (Oh, oh, oh)
Use them and let’s start trying (Oh, oh, oh)
To make it a place worth living in

• Genesis, Land of Confusion

Hello, internet sojourner! Welcome to my little corner of the internet.

To catch you up to date: In April of 2022, I had a massive panic attack and have been feeling the aftershocks ever since. I have slowly adjusted to living with chronic anxiety since.

One year on…

My past year has been an interesting experiment into what happens when you suddenly cannot stand anything about your life as it presently exists. Its amazing how fast it happened: food tasted like ash, my once happy little countryside apartment (seriously, it was across the road from a cornfield) transformed into an oppressive dungeon that I dreaded coming back to, as I inevitably must each day.

Stuff that used to be fun ceased to be so. I had collected a little online circle of friends during the pandemic and for a time, it seemed like enough. In fact, when the pandemic started in 2020, I honestly kind of looked forward to the lockdown.

A previous me

I’ve fundamentally changed as a person since early 2022. To be frank, I am deeply distrustful of technology, and wonder if I can find a future away from it. With the advent of all the crazy new tech this year, I fear that it may now be impossible.

When I look back, my techno-skepticism began much earlier, probably around the time I gave up using Google chrome in favor of firefox. I had read too much Cory Doctrow, too much EFF news releases… or something.

To be fair, the “deal” we had struck with the big tech companies had also somehow been altered (to shamelessly borrow from Star Wars), and I prayed it wouldn’t be altered any further. I remember when Google Chrome launched in 2008 (seriously, I used it from the first beta release, which featured a cute little comic from Scott McCloud and was offered as a humble improvement and alternative to the outdated browsers of the time.

I also remember other moments of pure wonder delivered by new technology. The first iPhone was a big one. I distinctly recall the rumors of its launch, and people saying it would have a glass touchscreen, and I remember my reaction - I literally couldn’t believe you could have touch-sensitive glass. Of course even then touchscreens already existed; I simply could not comprehend how they worked.

Unfortunate, that back then none of us could comprehend how smartphones in general would change everything.

Now, I’m not going to go full nostalgia bomb. Clearly smartphones have made our lives better in concrete ways. I also recognize the usefulness of browsers, search engines, and social media as useful tools.

But I simply cannot look to emerging new technology with unfettered optimism now. I’ve seen too much. And I have deep fear weighing on my bones about it.

In my darker moments, I feel like we are at the final days of an experiment in progress that started with the enlightenment half a millenium ago. Do I think humanity will be going extinct? No. But I do suspect its about to get significantly less pleasant for the vast majority of us.

LA Honeymoon

In the midst of all this fear, I followed a “geographic cure,” as some call it, deciding to leave my job in Holland, Michigan, to work for (let’s be honest) one of the very companies I’m now so scared of, in Los Angeles.

LA is, as most places are, a mixed bag. The weather (excepting the oddity of this February and March) is pleasant. The scenery is gorgeous. I have already met wonderful people, and I even found a church community that I’ve at last settled into in a way I never did during my 7 years in Michigan.

The food options are incredible, and I’ve loved the freedom to just decide to go to a live improv event and see fantastic artists ply their work.

But the traffic sucks. The “concrete jungle” is very real and I find myself pining for the wide open green spaces that I had, just six months previous, felt so unnerved by. There is also the pressure of a much more cosmopolitan and (on the surface) secular world I am now in.

Its honestly a good thing, I believe, that I am not in a societal bubble like the one I grew up in, and maintained in Michigan. Its good that I daily interact with people who look different from me, believe vastly different things about the world, how it works, where its going, and why its here.

Its good that I see the large, visible homeless population and feel discomfort about it: the challenge is to act in a positive way from this discomfort.

Rearranging chairs on the Titanic

A core belief in my soul has emerged: that this priviledge I now enjoy is temporary. I will not have this job, or this career, forever. The income I make, while actually below average for my field in California, is still enough to live comfortably and, for now, give generously.

There is an impetus to be way more tight-fisted. The fear of the future informs me that I should be saving every single excess cent; enjoying nothing beyond the essentials, giving nothing beyond what is required.

Part of me, I think, gives so freely out of a silly hope that people will remember and return the favor when things get bad for me in the future. That my largesse now is somehow writing a check of goodwill I can cash in.

I therefore try to remind myself in these moments that I must expect nothing. I must give with the expectation of no thanks, no rememberance. I must give wholly realizing I may never interact with the person or organization ever again; and our exchange will be mutually forgotten.

What then remains? Why do I still feel a drive to share and give what I have? The impetus, freed from the hope of a favor in the future, is pretty ugly:

I give out of guilt. I feel like all my life I have been blessed, or at least been lucky: I had a supportive home with loving parents who had good jobs. I had a good social fabric in my church. I was fortunate enough to become interested in a field that is very lucrative, and I have so far in my short career of just under 4 years seen fantastic upward mobility.

Guilt and Gratitude

I don’t deserve any of this. In fact, I don’t deserve each breath I take. It was given to me by God, the Universe, Chance, what-have-you, and it was given without anything expected in return.

If I contemplate this, I sometimes find my negative guilt can transform into a positive gratitude. The main thing about guilt is it reminds me of all those who do not have what I have. I feel bad for it. When this feeling festers, it becomes a terrible thing, ironically causing me to close in on myself more. I have so much I don’t deserve, and I feel guilty, so I feel like I deserve to lose it.

Gratitude is subtly different for me. I think gratitude, in my mind, works from an abundance mindset, as opposed to a scarcity mindset of guilt. They both recognize my fundamental undeservedness, but gratitude carries this further, all the way to the confusing truth that we exist in the first place - and we didn’t have to.

Anxiety

Can anxiety be a gift? Is it somehow changing, molding me? It certainly is a great source of energy; I feel it dance over my skin like an electric charge seeking ground.

With this much energy, it must cause change. I cannot NOT move in some direction with all of it. The default direction, I think, is one of shutting down, of pessimissm, of fatalism.

I’m searching, and from time to time finding, glimpses of a different impulse. Its not the default at all. But the anxiety sometimes pushes me to a place where the beauty and tenderness of all of this stuff, this existence, shines and sings in splendor.

I wonder why we are built in such a way that this is not our default. Perhaps this is that state of sin, or even of hell, that the old religions sternly remind us of. Are we born on a path to misery on purpose?

Is this path set before us a cruel joke, a sad necessity? It touches on the problem of evil: why would a God, if God were good, make this the default?

Choice

I suppose my options are simple, as I can only make choices right here, right now: when faced with evil, or dispair, or self-hatred, I can proceed forward with the stance that life is a burden, a series of challenges to be endured.

Its hard to see, even now as I write this I can’t really see it, but I know I’ve seen it in the past, and I know others have: a second choice; a choice of life as a fundamentally good thing, an unfolding story that’s headed somewhere.

The Future is Change

For now, the only thing I can hold with anything close to certainty is that the future will be very different from today. And I know that humans, including myself, really, really, reeeealllly don’t like change.

We complain about ennui, sure, but there is a core part of us that longs for certain safety in perpetuity. I sure do. I believe, deep-down, that if I could stop things from changing, or roll them back, it would be “better”.

But that is an incomplete and rosy view of the past. Many things “back then” were much worse, and we do a disservice to ourselves to forget that. And the seeds of hope, of things that may be better in the future are by their nature nebulous and invisible today, still under the dirt.

- Quentin

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

• J.R.R Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring