Living the dream

what it means to be awake, without exceptions

Photo by Donald Teel on Unsplash

I am thirty, I think to myself. The couture of the world is less beckoning. Paris is less Paris, Spotify less Spotify, and my neighbor’s flaxen toy poodle seems stuffy. It feels as though the colors are bleached off from the surfaces of people, foods and sunsets. Birds, I admit, remain equally alive — and classicist architecture.

It is, of course, a problem of depression. When stress begets anxiety, the black dogs of melancholy are just around the corner. It is no one’s fault but my own. And I am bitching just a little, because I know that I, unlike many other poor bastards out there, will resurface from the minor death, with the experiential thrust under my belt.

At the same time I am pondering wakefulness. Why should one wake up to the falsity of phenomenology?

It is a fact: you can never do anything twice. One, you are someone else by the next time you fold laundry, go see the movies, or smile at a woman. Two, the systems have changed. Doing something twice is impossible.

Still, some fall asleep at what they perceive is the monotony of life. Certain jobs and family roles are too demanding or boring for people remain sensitive through. And so they fall asleep into mechanical slumber.

What is it that makes us let boredom chew off our very pilot light? Most of us dream at night. In dreams, we are never bored.

Nietzsche admonitions about this. In life oneiric, every single thing is interesting, and yet, we argue, we are not even awake.

Let this apprehension carry over into wakefulness, says Nietzsche, or do not bother waking up at all.

Bungy jumping is not inherently more visitable than knitting or even dish washing. It is a contract with ourselves we’ve signed that says it is. In each glissando of the finger or the wrist, a new sensation awaits for those who are awake.

Boredom is simply falling asleep unto the nooks and crannies of quotidian life, where novelty hides. We think we know better, we think we know what knitting or doing dishes is, and so we black out into micro sleeps, impervious to the interims of evolution taking place right then.