..that we sometimes choose not to

Meaning-making is an artisinal activity.

I jumped off a plane earlier this week. From 15000 feet. Had a freefall of about 60 seconds and then a few minutes of flight under the canopy. It was good, had a few moments of intense experience, including that of fear and exhilaration, but for the most part it seemed a pretty normal affair. I wasn't nervous or initimated before, nor stunned or deeply moved after. The same happened with the bungy jump and rafting in a river with apparently grade 4 rapids. Not that I had spectacularly high expectations nor an anticipation for epiphanies before signing up. After years and years of seeking life-transforming enlightenment from every unusual activity, over the last couple of years I've stopped worrying about that and started enjoying activies for their immediate, visceral pleasures. But that feeling of, if not quite meh then, only naice prompted me to question my motives for signing up for activities like these, and the marathon and the upcoming Spartan Beast. After a couple of days of mind-wrangling, I arrived at a seemingly sensible conclusion.

For starters, at this point I'm not bothered by the gap between what people portray on social media and the reality of experience itself- that is zameen aasmaan ka faraq. It is not always that the poster or the responder wants to exagerrate or embellish but I think 1. instagram, among others, is a spectacularly unsuitable medium for genuine human connection and communication, and 2. we have so corrupted our vocabulary and cultural milieu by calling many, many things awesome or incredible or amazing that in some perverse way our lives have become stunted and incapable of seeking and identifying the truly magnificent. Not that that wasn't always the case with language anyway- the gaps between what people truly felt (if it could even be stored and accessed accurately), how they communicated (both the conscious and inevitable corruptions) and how the receiver understood it (with their biases and imaginative vasanas)- but in a sense modern social media, the way we publish and consume with a proclivity for touched up images and a certain type of YOLO captions, seems to have fucked up our Bullshit Detection apparatus. Thankfully, I also think we are adaptive as individuals, and in groups, and we've managed to upend The Algorithm's hold on us by creating tools, both intellectual and social, to help us cope and thrive in those limited spaces.

Anyway, back to the point. There are atleast two aspects to my lacklustre responses. The good part is that we've advanced so far as a society that activities as mind-boggling as jumping off a plane from 15000 feet have become so commonplace that millions of people have done it. There is ofcourse the immense advances in science and engineering that have made the activity safe and predictable. But there are also advances in economics, management and philosophy, that have led me to trust absolute strangers with my life in doing such risky acts. This normalisation is not to be taken lightly. For the good and the bad, we are in many ways a hive mind. The standardisation of protocols across the globalised world, that initially made trade, then communication, now finally movement of people so seamless, interoperable, has led us to a place where people are able to plug and play their skills, ways of communication, and money to make things happen cheaply, efficiently and safely. Over the last few years of readings and listenings, I've come to appreciate and embrace trade. 

Now, to the deeper concern- If even jumping off a plane won't excite my jaded sensory, emotional, intellectual and, is this the only word?, spiritual facets, what will? Again, let me clarify. Its not that it wasn't fun or exciting, especially the bungy because there I more or less had to take the plunge myself. Its that the bang for the buck, if even that's the right way to approach it, was far lesser than what I'd been led to believe from other peoples' narratives and images. Yes, it is a problem with my expectations and seekings in life but I suspect the same is true for many other people. That led me to question why I travel and sign-up for activities like these and seek art, food and other experiences. It is undeniable that atleast one part of it is motivated by public-facing narrative-making: for some as images on instagram, for me as ramblings on this blog. What Budugu recently referred to as a Social Media Resume. That is the performative aspect. But I think there is also this attempt at meaning-making and transcendence that is provided short shrift by a certain exaltation of these activities. I don't think our lives, atleast my life and my activities, will somehow make more sense by embracing what advertising, both the industry as well as people regurgitating those tropes, is constantly exhorting me to. I was clear about it with respect to buying a house, a luxury car, starting a family etc. Now I'm beginning to think the same applies, if only to a lesser extent, to the experience-industry. It is a difference only in order not in kind. Again, I'm forced to repeat, its not that this wasn't a great holiday or I didn't have a great time. Its that when it comes to finding whatever it is that I'm seeking most intensely (In typical millennial fashion, I don't know what it is but hope to recognise it when I find it), this is not the way to go about it. Investigating that a bit further, I think that at some point these things held something more than just pretty pictures and simplistic tropes but they've been sucked dry because of commodification.

This connects with my earlier point. If things are cheap, easily available and reliable because of commodification, then they also lose any semblance of personality, serendipity and mystery because of the same process. It is not a bemoaning as much as observation. Maybe it is not the smooth processing as much a residual desire for something magical that is the culprit here. Yet, if I do want feel something rawer, unprocessed, as-yet-uncommodified, then the onus is on me to leave the comfortable contours of the socially acceptable and celebrated (atleast my social-circlely lauded), and move into the deeper, unmarked waters. Ofcourse, it could end up horribly wrong (was my stumbling upon Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild in a Queenstown bookshop yesterday a beacon or an omen?) but that is the nature of that journey. 

In an appearance on Infinite Loops, Venkat Rao said that all the lamentation about the loss of meaning and a desperation for spiritual succour that people feel and that sends them to shrinks and gurus is, for the most part, a failure of nerve. To truly walk the uncharted path, one must be willing to be brave, to be wrong, to be reviled. That is where truly radical acts and new narratives come from. Ofcourse its worth questioning why I want to end up in places where no one has before. While there is definitely signalling, there is also the prospect of finding something valuable. For the most part, it is about touching something unsterilised, unpolluted, something firsthand rather than the normal way where I'm doused in people's opinions and judgements before even approaching the activity at hand, where I'm not walking in with my head, to use Sheldon Cooper's memorable phrase, preblown. 

Maybe it is a problem that only I have and everyone else is able to intuitively solve or mitigate it; Although I don't think other people don't see what I'm trying to get at here- it does seem like a pervasive feature of our culture. Be that as it may, I'm coming to the realisation that making sense of my life, finding clarity for my actions in an attempt at self-fulfillment, is a highly artisanal act. All the conveniences and mechanised productions that society has to offer will not solve that problem. I do think it is a good for society as a whole, we're better off as a species after every discovery, but as an individual, I'm forced even more to confront the interchangabiltiy of my being in the whole. Sometime ago, I said only half-knowingly that, "We are defined not by what we do but by what we resist". Rationality is a wonderful thing but by nature it can be transferred into a machine. It is irrationality, my particular kind of irrationality, that I have to embrace to remain an individual.