February 18, 2023

Affected

I have days where everything feels sad.

I don’t mean that I feel sad necessarily. I mean the whole world — all of it — seems shabby, thin, empty — most of the people in it petty and fake. (Me included, of course. I’m first in line here.)

I know this isn’t true, and I know I should fight these feelings and perceptions — my rational voice tells me that this isn’t a good way to think about the world. But they’re called feelings for a reason — they often don’t make sense.

This week, every day I have driven around my town, I feel like I’ve been hyper-alert to this idea and feeling that everything is a facade. It isn’t for the lack of cars — people were out and about on the roads. But I didn’t feel any life in them. What I saw was people going from point A to point B doing fuck-all, nothing of importance.

I mentioned this toward the end of my therapy session a couple of days ago, on Thursday, and Dr. BW said he wanted to talk about this a little more but we were just about out of time. He suggested I explore it more in a journal entry and we can talk about it next week if I still feel this way.

So here we are.

Since yesterday, Friday, I still felt this way, I’ll work through a few specific memories.

One, in the morning, I get an email from someone at work telling me to do something that is urgent and can we please have a meeting at 9AM to discuss, tx. (obnoxious shorthand for tx used by person emailing me.) Four people are cc’d on this email including my own manager and another director. I look at the so-called urgent thing to do and it doesn’t actually have to be done until the end of April — two and a half months away. Why today? Answer: This person wants visibility. They cc’d important people so they’d get noticed. Maybe this person felt like they didn’t do enough work this week and wanted to finish it by creating a smoking brush fire that everyone would see. So they’re generating all of this extra attention, feeding weeds and green leaves into the flames to increase the density of the gray plumes wafting upward, false work, false urgency, LET’S HAVE A MEETING ASAP.

The people who really do a lot of work don’t care much about visibility and attention and kudos. They email me and me alone and say, hey, can you help out with this? And then we work on it together, maybe via email, maybe via google chat, maybe even on a zoom call with desktop sharing if things get hairy and we want to examine nitty gritty technical stuff together. The work gets done and we don’t have to broadcast it to the entire world. Even if that work really does need to be shared with someone, you can do it on the side – I could, for example, forward an email thread to my manager that illustrated some work item getting done, and put a sentence at the top: Fyi me and Eugene Sheethead are going to upgrade Application X in April to stay in support with the vendor.

It’s the insistence on creating a fake emergency and then shouting it from mountain high that bothers me so much. Calm the fuck down, just do the work, stop wasting so much energy on this bullshit, ok? Every bit of work you do doesn’t have to be televised.

Two, I drove to the local Planet Fitness at noon and saw nobody outside walking around, which reminded me that nobody walks anymore and contributes to this feeling that the world has been hollowed out, like melon fruit scooped from the rind. This triggered a recurring thought, said in my head by someone else, an anonymous stranger voice that represents “what the average person thinks” that often occurs to me. Walking is for poor people, nobody walks. And this triggered another memory. My wonderful friend R and his wife C, over at my house last weekend, sharing a meal, chatting. C is a psychologist who practices, R is a trained psychologist who uses his skills for some corporate entity crunching some kind of employee data. They’re smart, and kind, and caring. C announces that they are getting a Tesla, one of the nice models that cost 90K or so. They’re very proud of this. I ask why, and R says well we got a windfall from a relative and our current car (a nice Nissan Acura) is 5 years old so why not. It’s better for the environment.

That’s it. Why not. Treat yourself. I mentioned briefly that they could get a 40K electric vehicle that’s just as good for the environment but my comment was quickly ignored in favor of talking about how cool Teslas are. And I realized: This is a status purchase. It’s not about the environment, it’s about becoming a member of the Tesla crowd. Then I think: Even my nice friends, my wonderful well educated friends that I am having over tonight and trying to have fun with, even these people are chasing status. They want to look good in front of other people — this doesn’t have a single thing to do with needing a new car, helping the environment, or — really anything at all. They want attention and approval.

I want to give it to them. I want to be a good friend and give them what they need — to fawn, ooh that’s amazing! You’ll have to take me out in it when you get it. I can’t wait!

But I don’t. Something in me resists. I say I’m driving a 2014 Toyota Corolla and I love it. It’s clean, looks OK, super reliable, and costs me 1500 a year to own including insurance and the occasional trip to the shop to fix a tire or get new brake pads. It has the added bonus of IDGAF about it. This is my way of describing the idea that if someone say opens their car door into the side of my own car and leaves scratches — something that happened two years ago — I don’t freak out about it. If that happens to a nice new Tesla, it is the end of the world. I ask if the Tesla will be better at getting from point A to point B than their Nissan. They do some hand waving and say that it’s peace of mind to have a newer car, don’t have to worry about it breaking. Ok. I stop. They have made their decision, they want this thing, they will buy this thing, I am the one misbehaving by not playing the This Is Amazing game.

Later we watch an episode of White Lotus together — they are into it and want Jennie and I to give it a shot. I look at their faces when they think I am not looking, distracted by something on their phones, which they both occasionally look at even though we ostensibly watching TV. They look alien to me. I wonder who they are. I wonder why I used to feel connected to them. This night I feel so little.

Three. I get to the gym. Rows of televisions up. I see Nick Canon and Drew Barrymore doing daytime talk TV stuff and all I can think about is their desire for attention and their pitching of products and their celebrity promotion. ESPN heads talking about sports teams, Stephen A Smith going on about the Lakers, as usual, fake-agitated about something – Fake Agitation is his brand, his on-camera persona – it’s his job to be a pain in the ass about everything, so even when he doesn’t have strong feelings about some topic, he makes something up for show. Fox news hosts fake-upset about Biden’s illegal document possession even though they’ve spent months playing down Trump’s, being fake-upset to promote an agenda, promoting an agenda because their paycheck is tied to it. It is very hard to convince a man to understand something when his paycheck depends upon his misunderstanding it, my brain thinks, paraphrasing an old Mark Twain quote. An episode of Friends on another channel, Ross and Rachel expressing mock horror about Pheobe’s boyfriend. Dr. Strange and Spiderman fighting in space, too — protecting the Earth from… what exactly again? Thanos and destruction?

Nothing seems real — I guess in a world where everything that’s real is trying it’s damndest to be fake while keeping the phoniness hidden, you might as well watch something that has been intentionally created as fantasy and isn’t trying to tell you otherwise.

In the evening my mom calls. I’d been reaching out during the week to make sure she is okay and she hadn’t been getting back to me.

Sorry for taking so long. I’ve been having a hard time, seasonal affective disorder you know. It makes the depression I always have even worse. Happens to me every year.

We talk for a while. She is hanging in there, my deadbeat brother is living with her and life can be a struggle, they are on top of one another, sharing a 1BR apartment in a run-down city in Massachusetts. Bleak. But they are managing. She is watching a documentary on hospice and end of life issues and wants to talk about it. Although I find this topic to be unimaginably bleak, I let her air her thoughts.

Later, I realize that I’m probably also suffering somewhat from SAD. Maybe that’s what makes the fakeness of the world feel so strong and right.

On Choices, and feeling better about them:

My wife J went to work today. She’s a librarian and has to occasionally go in on Saturdays to work for coverage.

I review my options for things to do.

Work on the basement (practical! physical!)

Go to the gym and do my leg/knee PT, some upper body

Write on OD (pointless but also prescribed by my therapist and therefore something I probably should do)

Write something for myself (blog related)

Dust off my guitar and play that for a while

Read

Do nothing

I think I’m going with OD, then gym, then perhaps nothing because this is one of those days where I can’t summon the drive to do anything else. The gym stuff is important for body and self-care. So I’ll do my self-care, have lunch, take a nap, and then maybe go for a walk outside, temporarily becoming part of the real world that I seem to be missing so much lately.

Although I could instead make a carrot cake. J loves carrot cake and we could eat huge slices for dessert tonight after she gets back from work and takes her IVF shot straight to the stomach.

Somehow it feels like by doing this, I’m ignoring other stuff that needs to be done. I have to tell myself over and over again that this constitutes a good day — some self care, some physical activity, some cooking and some time with my wife, some entertainment. I don’t know what else it is that I’m looking for. I don’t think there is anything else, really. I am going to commit to this plan and do my best to feel good about it today.