Tag Archives: Adolescence Interrupted

Like Spinning Tops

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“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.” —Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Human beings are so destructive. I sometimes think we’re a kind of plague, that will scrub the earth clean. We destroy things so well that I sometimes think, maybe that’s our function. Maybe every few eons, some animal comes along that kills off the rest of the world, clears the decks, and lets evolution proceed to its next phase.” —Michael Crichton

To say we tend to be in general disagreement about the purpose and meaning of life and the overarching point of human existence is a wild, laughable understatement. From the moment Homo sapiens had the cognizant ability to register self-awareness, we questioned the very foundation of our biological creation…and why we sprouted from the evolutionary centrifuge like a random Yahtzee toss to haphazardly land on this giant spinning blue ball in space.

Religious scholars looked to celestial evidence that blatantly contradicted the work of their existentialist philosophical counterparts, and the biologists posited theories born from the base building blocks of our DNA—which sent some anthropologists reeling. 

Our purpose, our motivation, and our utility have been debated for thousands of years. But we never seem to arrive at definitive resolutions or settle on any hypotheses that help quell the incessant, nervous race against the clock to make our mark before our bones turn to dust and history forgets we ever occupied a short-term rental on this rocket ride to nowhere.

So, do we suppress our thoughts and simply make peace with the undivulged mysteries of the world? Do we try to peel off the blindfolds and seek answers in the vast, unknown expanse of space? Should we look to the ancient past to find answers in the present?

Or do we continue to spin like tops, unaware of any grand design or decipherable blueprint that might provide a road map pointing to some attainable objective for this seemingly meaningless, ceaselessly repetitive dance into interminable monotony?

Adolescence Interrupted

It’s Good to Be Great

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A half-assed, low-energy path of least resistance culture has produced a stagnating, lethargic, and apathetic society. Effort used to be something celebrated, and an eagerness to excel was applauded and lauded. Someone willing to go to extreme, sometimes unorthodox lengths to constantly create, tweak, and perfect was seen as an innovator worthy of respect and admiration.

Now, the people who are labeled as “excessive,” “obsessive,” or “unrelenting” are often ridiculed and mocked for their unwavering focus. A nagging irony exists that those who spend their lives consumed with problem-solving are precisely the people who deliver the technology, tools, and medical advances that exponentially benefit society. We desperately want the ends but can’t seem to respect or appreciate the means.

We are drowning in mediocrity, and it’s become impossible to walk down the street without running into a never-ending procession of Joe Schmoes, necks permanently drooping toward the bug-zapper blue light of the planet’s most addictive time suck. We seem to be perfectly delighted wasting our lives consuming nonsensical content, permanently affixed to the back seat of our own journey, happily and readily relinquishing all agency or even the notion of reaching for the wheel.

We far too often choose easy, simple, and fast over compelling, challenging, or complicated. Instant gratification and a zombie-like adherence to endlessly refreshing feeds have made us lazy, boring, and sad. Passion, for anything, is in dangerously short supply. Someday soon it may cease to exist altogether. 

You can’t force someone to be interesting or interested.

So what’s the solution? More of the same is obviously only leading to further mind-numbing isolation and an even greater reluctance to engage. That’s how problems are created, not solved. Left unchecked, this planet will continue to burn and decay, and we’ll be too enthralled with our devices to take notice or take action.

But we can start by appreciating and lifting up those who still have the will and courage to dedicate their time and attention to something bigger, heavier, and more consequential than app updates or comment notifications.

Adolescence Interrupted

Off the Radar

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In a sea of spotlights, where are the shadows?  With social media stalking, tireless geo tracking, and flashbulb-fanaticism waiting to pounce at every turn, the modern notion of privacy is a laughable replica of a bygone era. We are constantly held accountable to a faceless cyber public without even accepting the terms of the contract.

Our moves and minds are followed and noted. Our decisions are recorded and our secrets are revealed. We’re forced to tiptoe on top of vanishing ground, built from equal parts quicksand scrutiny and rash judgment. We cover tracks, erase browser histories, delete texts, and modify passwords. But is any of it necessary? Does anyone else really care what we’re doing? Isn’t everyone simply too busy tending to their gardens to keep track of their weird neighbor’s harvest? Our adherence to secrecy is probably born more from personal insecurity than driven by the fear of some blind existential bogeyman, waiting in the shadows to expose our various peccadilloes and indiscretions.

So what’s the fix? How can we shed the weight and stress of running away from prying eyes and curious ears? How do we ditch the peanut gallery gossip to find refuge in safer pastures? How can we quiet the static and silence that incessant buzz humming from every invisible corner of our lives?

Slide off the radar.

If you don’t want attention, stop asking for it. If a sense of peace is paramount, construct your foundation from the concrete of sturdy self-assurance, courage, and mettle. Muffle the critics by exiting the circus.

There’s a world of balance waiting inside the tranquility of an uninterrupted moment.

Don’t fear the off button. Embrace it.

Adolescence Interrupted

Strangers in a Strange Land

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The rules have been rewritten. The destination is hazy. The compass is hiding.

We are a people lost in the desert, on a search for solutions, seeking the meaning behind the motivation. But separation sits at the heart of the aimlessness, and a world that promised constant connection has failed to deliver.

With eyeballs perpetually fixed on blue light screens, we have chosen the velvety warm hug of cushioned insulation over the highly unpredictable and uncontrollable task of thorny socialization.

Even the most gregarious of today’s butterflies couldn’t come close to flapping wings with any of the prior pre-phone/pre-internet generations. Technology was supposed to shrink the isolation gap. Instead, it only widened the chasm. We falsely believe we’re all inseparable, but we couldn’t be more distant.

Rates of depression are skyrocketing, and a youth culture subjected to a daily barrage of hurtful slander and forced comparison is rotting our self-esteem at its core. Humans are bonding with machines and filling days, weeks, and months with passive entertainment. Get up and go simply sat down and stopped.

Apathy, avoidance, disengagement, laziness, rapidly deteriorating health, hopelessness, and general malaise can all be traced to a simple, obvious starting line. When we collectively plugged in, we all tuned out.

Looks like Timothy Leary was Nostradamus.

Adolescence Interrupted

Target Practice

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The infighting. The discontent. The disrespect. The degradation. The carelessness. The greed. The grab. The garbage. The crooked eye. The cold shoulder. The single finger. The dismissal. The impatience. The blind acceptance. The blind refusal. The blinding inaccuracies. The stranglehold. The manipulation. The lack of empathy. The lack of sympathy. The lack of hope. The accountability. The detachment. The illiteracy. The false expectations. The absence of momentum. The ritual. The routine. The handcuffs. The spinning. The perpetual dance along the edge. The folding cards. The misdirected energy. The zombie impersonation. The indifference. The distance. The dispassion. The vitriol. The venom. The vindictiveness. The spite. The grudge. The resentment. The poison. The hurting. The incessant accumulation of things. The gluttony. The materialism. The ego. The skewed perception of self-importance. The myopism. The fallacy of focus. The shaky grasp. The shaking fear. The indignation. The fury. The rage. The fire. The bitterness. The pettiness. The pervasive sloppiness. The diet. The death. The disease. The prison. The pain. The cages. The theft. The misappropriation. The fraud. The falsehoods. The subjugation. The exploitation. The hedonism. The excess. The waste. The ignorance. The false sense of security. The constant compromise. The deliberate trivialization. The subversion. The animus. The belief that there is never a way out of the maze.

A new year. A new day dawning. Let’s be better.

Adolescence Interrupted

A Grind Against the Grain

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“Get your money in when you have the best of it. Protect it when you don’t. Don’t give anything away. That’s how I paid my way through half of law school. A true grinder. You see, I learned how to win a little at a time. But finally, I’ve learned this: if you’re too careful, your whole life can become a fuckin’ grind.”  —Rounders (1998)

The daily grind vs effortless ease.

Push against the grain or go with the flow?

We are constantly confronted by the question of which path will ultimately lead to some semblance of peace and happiness. Play it safe or swing for the fences? Security or scintillation? Gravity or grandeur?

As a creative person who lived for a long time among a sea of artists, performers, and divergent thinkers, I watched the exhilaration born from imaginative achievement as often as I witnessed the crushing weight of defeat when those targets missed their marks.

There is an inherent “survivor hardwiring” in the bones of those who are willing to literally lay everything on the line for the chance to blaze their own path and express what’s simmering at the core of their soul. The idea of any looming extinguisher rarely factors into their plans or motivations. If those inevitable roadblocks were visible at the starting line, the meritocratic marathon would never begin.

But there comes a time when those ruby slippers are sent back to a black-and-white closet to live out their remaining years far from the Technicolor glory day glow of center-stage spotlights and endless applause.

Is it white flag acquiescence? Dour defeatism? Or is there a certain level of relief knowing that some steady predictability can often fill a void we may not have known even existed?

There is a consistent comfort in certainty, even if the adrenaline rush of diving into the dark without any knowledge of the depth pales in comparison.

At least there’s less chance of impact when we realize the pool has been drained.

Adolescence Interrupted

The Karmic Price Tag of a Failed Human Experiment

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“Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to a man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not to die, so do other creatures.”  —Dalai Lama

“There is little that separates humans from other sentient beings. We all feel joy, we all crave to be alive and to live freely and we all share this planet together.”  —Mahatma Gandhi

“Man’s inhumanity to man is only surpassed by his cruelty to animals.”  —George Bernard Shaw

“Anyone who says that life matters less to animals than it does to us has not held in his hands an animal fighting for its life. The whole of the being of the animal is thrown into that fight without reserve.”  —J. M. Coetzee

A relentlessly shameful and detestable practice of constant mistreatment, imprisonment, and consumption of innocent animals has physically and psychologically destroyed human beings and their environment. Still, a species dead set on self-destruction refuses to abate or even entertain the notion that what is generally presented as casual, habitual behavior is akin to torture and slaughter of the highest order.

While obesity buckles our knees, air-polluting ammonia deflates our lungs, and the scorching unfiltered sun sizzles our skin, we blindly force line after line of overcrowded, diseased, and terrified innocent, deeply sensitive creatures toward their inevitable demise at the hands of a stony-hearted, uncaring butcher.

There is no greater greed than that of profit over compassion.

We jam needles into delicate infant animal skin and smear burning chemicals over the eyes of lab monkeys so ugly people with ugly faces can walk around playing make(up) believe. Then we shove toxic, hormone-laden poison down our throats and scream about the excessively increasing rates of depression and cancer.

We incarcerate thinking, feeling, and suffering souls behind glass walls, iron bars, and miniature tanks so we can watch them slowly go mad in what we call their “natural environment.” When the lab results return, we can’t seem to understand why the dolphins are being eaten alive by stress ulcers or how debilitating zoochosis could have possibly developed in an elephant that was most likely twice as intelligent as its handler.

It pains my heart to witness this level of agony.

The prattling pro-life propagandists are more than comfortable murdering certain defenseless souls while constantly preaching about saving others. It’s a master course in hypocrisy. A wildly injurious, manipulated book of mistranslated fairy tales governs their lives by shackling them with the false notion that humans are any more valuable or worthy of safeguarding than any other living, feeling creature. It is a fallacy of unparalleled proportions, and this blind piety to the prison of organized religion is far more detrimental to the public psyche than abortion could ever dream to be.

I welcome the impending, inevitable end to this heedless, self-serving species. Finally, the perpetual war waged on wildlife will cease and the rightful inhabitants of this planet will live out their days in a peaceful, balanced equilibrium and well-earned harmony with nature.

We are the raging virus that selfishly squandered and eviscerated the beautiful gift we were given, and it’s high time for Mother Earth to heal the hurt by ridding herself of the unremitting, punishing plague named humanity.

The end of this utter failure called the Homo sapiens experiment can’t come soon enough.

Adolescence Interrupted  

The Genuine Article

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In a world of artificiality and pretense, there is a heavy value placed on authenticity. Pull back the curtain, peel off the filter, and slide down the mask. Let us see who you really are. Be brave enough to shine and showcase. We’ll all applaud your courage and welcome you into this incessantly judgmental society with wide open arms. No one will snicker or jeer, roll their eyes, or whisper a whiff of denigration. Climb into this giant velvety warm blanket of unconditional acceptance and approval. You’re finally safe. You’re finally home.

Then the alarm sounds and the dream ceases to exist.

It seems as though we want “realness” only when it settles comfortably into our preconceived concepts of conformity. When boundaries are blurred or the delineation between normal and abnormal gets a little fuzzy, we get antsy.

A degree of flexibility is needed to achieve cultural balance, and those muscles only get looser with the deep-stretch duo of time and education. It is a gradual, steady progression. Any significant historical change is measured in millennia not minutes.

The prescription is not to abandon the trek but to find more forgiving terrain. There is power in the plodding and nothing worth achieving is ever accomplished quickly or without pain.

So keep pushing, keep fighting, and keep exploring ways to solidify the concrete around your feet. Stay connected to the earth and remain grounded.

Keep it real.

Adolescence Interrupted

When I Used to Run into People

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“I hear it said of somebody that he is leading a double life. I think to myself: Just two?”  —Leon Wieseltier

We contain multitudes. Personalities are pieces of fabric sewn together with layers and layers of sometimes seemingly incongruous materials. But deep beneath that mismatch, the essence of our true nature thrives. Unwinding the knots of complexity reveals the building blocks of that Frankensteinian Voltron we call identity.

We’re able to manage striking dichotomies in our youth that become far more rare and much less tenable with age. But that’s what made each day feel like such an adventure.

I used to run into people.

As a wily teen, I spent many weekend nights cramped into poorly ventilated, overheated gyms, VFWs, and dilapidated all-ages music venues to watch punk and hardcore bands scraping together an existence by tapping into the abundant adolescent angst of mostly males looking for an outlet that didn’t live on football fields or wrestling mats.

We screamed along to PAs blasting distorted, indecipherable lyrics about clean living, distrusting the government, and animal rights. We slammed into one another, dodging haymaker fists and stomping boots. Spinning circles in some manic ballet, we were on an island of our own creation, and that independent spirit was the fuel that powered my rebellious little engine. Drenched in sweat and drained of frustration, we retreated from the battle in some state of earned euphoria, grateful to have survived another night in the trenches.

It was music specifically designed to elicit rage and defiance, and I soaked up every second.

Then, on Monday, I returned to my madrigal choir and a cappella chorus where my meticulously tuned tenor 1 voice endeavored to reach the highest of high notes. Hands clasped. Shoulders back. Wide eyes. Wider smiles. Bathing in the beauty of perfect harmonious balance. A wholly opposite community. A vastly different shared sense of accomplishment. But equal elation.

Was I a punk rocker? A chorus kid? An envelope-pusher? A strict, disciplined member of the collective? Yes. I was all of these things…and many more. They were some of the very best moments of my life, and I wouldn’t trade a second of that seemingly odd discordance to snap into some perfect mold of the typical, expected teen experience.

We do not all fit into boxes, so let’s stop building them.

Adolescence Interrupted

Everything Will Never Be Okay

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“Everything in your life is explained away as part of a process that holds you back.”  —Fiction Plane

We are on a constant journey of perpetual incompleteness.

Regardless of the minutiae inspections and indefatigable detailed plotting and planning, there are endless sidewalk cracks sitting, waiting for us to drop morsels from our meticulous arrangements, letting the overloaded armfuls of structured checklists and neatly arranged ducks fall to the ground in pure, unbridled scattered chaos.

Just when it looks like the track is straight and navigable, an unexpected train comes rumbling from the fog.

Dive for the dirt or accept your fate?

Some of this is inherent programming, and genetic wiring that savors the sweet, sweet taste of tidy order doesn’t do well with romper room pandemonium or slipshod assembly. But there are always compromises that must be made to account for the unexpected variables and curveball ruses that kick us back on our heels.

Everything will never be okay…and it’s a tart lesson that needs to be tasted.

It feels like being draped in itchy wet wool or sliding sandy bare feet into bowling shoes. But accepting the unpleasant reality that no amount of painstakingly rigorous preplanning will ever be a wide enough tarp to cover all the bases is a skill we would be wise to acquire.

As I set up and arrange every item on this desk into perfect equidistant right angles while alphabetizing my digital photo albums and categorizing my Notes app in order of pressing priority, I may be the last in a long line to offer advice on this topic. However, this is not a forum to preach, but a springboard to start conversations about shared idiosyncratic musings and our mutual head-shaking confusion about the reasons we walk around this planet, completely unaware of how or why we’re here.

Maybe the occasional rejection of order is just as important as its worship.

But that’s a sticky band-aid to pull…and it’s never easy exposing an open wound.

Adolescence Interrupted