What are you seeking? Perhaps a more stirring question is, how do you feel about your search?
Our mind experiencing life is like skating on a smooth ice rink — psychological accumulations etch grooves overtime, guiding and thus altering our thinking's nimbleness.
These tendencies then strengthen via externalities in our muscle memory, decisions, environments, and nearby minds. The grooves guide new paths of least resistance as memes contagious to others. We recommend, advise, and normalize. Dregs make their way into our culture and hang onto our agency. These mental concessions grow as we believe in these systems around us, and perceive ourselves stuck in a pincer between expectation and efficiency.
Not even these systems beyond the individual are exempt from their own music of friction. Their subpar performance has led to trust in institutions is eroding worldwide. Just-in-time shipping has squeezed out an ultimate pattern of efficacy, but it seems we're blocked on another kind of fulfillment. We've advanced our purposes with a few levels of abstraction, but what for?
Our individual experiences are still plagued by the same questions this generation around — what makes us feel alive, nimble, and in flow? Recent developments have been beneficial in many material ways — this essay is not an anti-technology, rosy-eyed celebration of the past. Rather, we're pursuing the frontiers where we're just shy of advancing our humanity psychologically.
This frontier beckons our exploration of living different. "Think different" led to minimalism, constraint, and one-size-fits-all paint coats. The picture-perfect blue waters on Instagram are so clear precisely because they are devoid of life. Our approach will begin at the intersection of unexpected, interesting, and revitalizing — we will shed the accumulated psychological deadweight. It's what "youth" aspires to define, but will never touch due to its implication of regression.
Core to being human is desire to be free. We aim to surprise and revolutionize. Any system that subjugates this mental mobility to rust is, in the long term, the worst collective sin possible against our human potential — thus the importance of writers, art, and music. We can always make such magic with what we have — there is always a mental revolution ready on our hands.
In this age of increasing priority-homogeneity and the resulting efficient markets, our secret weapon to unshackle our search is modifying those priorities.
We can start with the the mundane, the arenas of life where our behavior will lead to blazing new considerations. The collective has distracted us thus far with half-measures: "work life balance," "side projects," "breaks." The settling labels contain an implicit acknowledgement that they lack vigor.