Idleness

 There was a time when it looked as though the world were built on idleness. Leisure was some kind of goal to achieve. When I was young, we ended up living in a nice townhouse. I thought of school as something that I just had to get through, so that I could live my real life, which was most likely a life of leisure. We were in good schools, but back in the day, I just did enough to keep my head above the water. Back then, I thought that I was smart enough to get away with studying less than other people, but now I think that I'm the guy who probably wouldn't grasp something the first 9 times I read it, and suddenly on the 10^th time, I would grasp it completely. It created some kind of illusion that I was a difficult genius. Which was terribly unfair, because, when I looked back on it, the struggle was quite real.

A lot had to do with us having a headstart in life. Some of us were given the time and space to do well in the school system. When I look back on the school system now, so much of it was about gaming the system and getting the foot into the door for better things. I think about having a privileged childhood, and receiving benefits that other people would take a lot of effort to earn on their own. We were encouraged to go to university, because a degree would confer upon you a foot in the door, that if you didn't have that degree, it would be hard to earn.

Also, I think about the kind of future that people thought they were going to have: the internet future was supposed to be an idyllic one: one where a lot of your menial tasks were done by computers.

I remember that when I was in my 20s, I became a bookworm. I read a lot of books - not voraciously, because I was never that good a reader, but a lot of books. I was entirely not discriminating about what I read. There were even times when I read whatever was in front of me, whatever I could find from used book bins. And as a result of that, I have quite read quite a few books purely for the sake of reading them... maybe I did that to while away the time? In middle age, this expenditure of time started to feel a little unconscionable. 

I started this practice when I was in Snowy Hill. I think that I bought into the idea of the leisurely scholarly pursuit, of walking around a beautiful campus with gothic architecture. Maybe this was some sort of dream, I don't know if this dream still exists. Did this dream turn sour? It was one big reason why I went to "Mexico". I liked the idea of dark academia: of being a wizard who enjoyed flipping ideas around in his head. I always thought that I could have it both ways: I could live and work in this enjoyable environment, and I could still be very useful to the world. But it doesn't work like that. 

Now I see that around the time that I had decided to move to "Mexico", the world was about to change. I think about the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, and it changed the western world. Big megastores closed down - Virgin Megastores, Borders. Now I marvel at how there were some businesses that operated: Starbucks operated cafes which charged you more for a cup of coffee, but they gave away - for free - a public space for you to hang out. When real estate becomes more expensive, the public space turns out to be the most expensive part of the deal. In many ways, virtual reality is a failure, because you cannot replace the sensation of being live and present in some kind of a public space as an experience. 

In 2011, there were a few changes afoot, and taken together, I'm starting to realise that they are as profound as the mid-nineties dawn of the internet age. Social media came up. People stopped accessing the internet through laptops / desktops and ended up accessing them through handheld devices. Handphones turned into "devices". Shopping at shopping centres went down, and instead we had online shopping. There was the rise of video streaming. The rise of Facebook and the downfall of Blogger - meant that the internet ceased to be the exclusive domain of bookish people, and the social dynamic completely changed. 

All this meant that the world of my young adulthood was starting to crumble. Gone were the days when I could just spend one whole afternoon in a library or bookstore, and kid myself that I was "getting ahead in life through knowledge acquisition". Life became more active and interactive. Being a knowledge worker was less of sitting back, reading books and contemplating the universe, but it became something more active - coding, investigating, learning crafts. It became more hands-on. 

Something truly significant was the fall in music as an art form. It is crazy to think about places like HMV, Tower and Virgin records, which were basically large cathedrals dedicated to not just music, but music in recorded form. I remember that when I was a kid, there was this big craze over MASK and Transformer toys. And maybe for 2-3 years I was obsessed with collecting those things. But then there was one December Holidays when I bought quite a few of those toys, and then I realised that I was reaching puberty, and I would no longer be playing with them. I had to throw them away barely a year after I got them. That was the first time I realised that acquisition of material goods was kinda crazy. Recently I went on a long binge of collecting CDs. And I'm starting to wonder if I'm going to get over these crazes. 

Music is quite a leisurely activity. People listen to music, and they don't do much. They don't help the economy much: you could buy a CD, and spin it for 50 times, if it contains your favourite song. And then you'd make very little money per listen. It is not economically productive. The incredible amount of time and effort that goes into music production is something that would make economic sense in a bygone era, a very different era from ours. 

But these days, it's been replaced by something even worse - at least something I like less. There's spotify or Apple Music or whatever music platform. And the platform has taken over as the focus of the listener. People actually will say "I'm listening to music on Spotify". They used to say "I'm listening to Michael Jackson" or "I'm listening to Green Day". Could you imagine people saying "I'm listening to the CD Player" or "I'm listening to a Warner recording" or "I'm listening to Deutsche Grammophon"? It's crazy. 

On one hand, this idleness is taken to a crazy level. People will play computer games to immerse themselves in virtual worlds, and this is one level above listening to music - at least with music you know that you are still in the real world even though psychedelic music pushes that to the limit. Elsewhere, you have people on twitch livestreaming themselves playing computer games. How many orders is that removed from reality? You are vicariously watching somebody escaping reality through playing computer games. But it works, it's cheap to produce, and it generates ad revenue. And that's compared to the arduous work of creating 1 hours' worth of music, together with all the work that goes into crafting the perfect sound combinations. But music was meant to be spiritual and uplifting, even when you think about the unsavoury connotations with rock and roll or jazz. Whereas I don't really know what the point of Twitch is. Unfortunately we're living in a world where counting eyeballs on the product is considered of much more importance than whether the "content" is any good. 

There is also this thing where the product has to be validated by saying that it took a lot of effort to produce. Hustling now means going to the gym to craft the perfect body that more people want to spend idle time gawking at, never mind that this is profoundly unintellectual activity. 

I acknowledge that a lot of music is in a way idleness, because the "work" of crafting the perfect sound is so removed from the nitty gritty of everyday life. Writing a novel is also very removed from real life. Whereas being an influencer forces you to relentlessly focus on the return on investment. Everything has to be tailored to the algorithm: any video that has thousands or millions of views will have one or two product placements, and will nag at you to like, subscribe or set up the notification bell. Content is tailored to clickbait or search engine optimisation. Perhaps it is the business-mindedness of it all which is so offputting. 

Music is decorated time. And that's why we have sex and drugs and rock and roll - sex and drugs are also decorated time, so it makes sense that this is a trifecta. Music, wandering around, idleness, dark academia, dreaming, relaxing. These were the guiding stars of my youth, what I sought after. I once thought that I could be a "content creator" and that would count as being a productive member of society. 

It's a sign of the fucked up world we live in that in many ways this is no longer desired or possible. That is because when you measure things, you actually "unmeasure" other things. The system will change so that it will optimise what is being measured at the expense of all the intangibles. 

But it's unsustainable to be always going after these things. Art and beauty is nice, maybe even great. It's not growing up. It's some kind of matured adolescence. It mostly doesn't bring home the bacon. It's not making a living. The prospect of being able to go to a place like Snowy Hill is some carrot you dangle in front of a kid to make him follow the right path in life, but when that guidance is removed, what have you got? 

One of my old bosses was so exasperated at me: you love knowledge so much. But why do you not pursue things like technical knowledge, engineering knowledge. Why do you like music and literature so much? It was so jarring to hear him put this across so starkly. That was the world we live in - one that denigrated the humanities to such an extent. Yes, graphic design for marketing and publicity was fine. Creating jingles was fine. But creating fine art? Great works of music? Having literary ambition? God have mercy on your wretched soul!

Maybe that's what people would call the "God-shaped hole". I recall somebody preaching to me about Landmark forums. That was when I was maybe around 30 years old, I said, confidently, I've figured out the meaning of life. It was a lot of hard work, but I managed to do it. I'll be fine. But now I'm not so sure. Maybe that's why people advice you to prioritise money over love: love will come and go, but money is something that's more tangible. 

There's also something else that I might want to think about: that is the idea of permanence. When I was 18, I had just graduated from school. I had spent 12 out of 18 years - nearly my entire life up till then - being a student. In many ways that was the only reality that I knew, and that would be the last time I would know any form of permanence. But I still clung on: I picked the college of arts and sciences, and I went to Snowy Hill which was more than 100 years old. I imagined myself learning the wisdom of the ancients, that would never be changed by age. But while we may not be entering the age of the singularity, we're definitely entering an era where time is speeding up. 

I thought that I would learn basic principles and I would not have to learn them again. Well, working in tech is a constant hamster wheel of learning and relearning. I dreamt of an adult world that looked like a more privileged version of childhood - basically it was childhood with more privileges. Suddenly it's a lot of headaches and responsibilities. I thought that knowledge and beauty would make me happy forever - well, no, if you can't manage to make a living. And the joy you get from these things might last 20 years, which is a long time, but is not forever. 

There used to be a vast divide between the "developed world" and "developing countries" - no more. Being a part of a developed world is no longer a birthright, but it is conditional and it has to be earned. The "wall" that MAGA people talk about is the "wall" of the imagination. It's a wall that separates the privileged from the under-privileged. Some people want it up, and others want it down. 

(Some parts of rich countries now look like the third world, and some parts of the third world now look gentrified and gilded. And the West is in trouble, because it truly doesn't understand the Global South. It doesn't understand the kind of hustling that comes with playing catch-up with the more developed world. They don't understand the acceptance of inequality, that bread and butter issues take precedence over the bill of human rights, they don't understand that society is composed of more traditional forms of kinship. )

And some part of me will always want the luxuries that the West used to have, but are now being removed in this newer, more hypercompetitive world. 

In this new age, the hustle and bustle of the business environment is always there. The race against time is always going on. The world is made of systems whose main goal is to snatch away from you whatever little you still own. There was a time when I did figure out that wealth was tethered to luxury, and also tethered to the luxury of time. Wealth was tethered to a more liberal form of thinking, a more relaxed and contemplative manner. Youth and beauty were also forms of wealth. But we don't have those things anymore, and they are ebbing away. There are plenty of rich people out there who are nevertheless slaves to money and time. That is not really wealth.