Facebook Is Reminding Me That My Life Sucks

So I joined Facebook, and now I feel like I used to at a certain kind of house party, where everyone else was chattering away and moving between the kitchen (drinks) and the living room (music, people) with great purpose and many nods of recognition. Everyone else, not me. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing there. So I hung around the edges for a while and then either got drunk or found someone to talk with. Or I just left.

The difference between Facebook and the house party is that I could and did get drunk at the house party. That was the point of going to parties: to get drunk, to get laid, to get fed and to get away from home. Meeting people? Maybe a little, for a while, but the only people I really wanted to meet was a girl I hadn't met before and probably wasn't going to again. Later on, of course, I made a point of meeting Jack Daniels and Jim Beam and all those other guys. 

Turns out I'm a career number-cruncher. There aren't many of us: most people who bash SQL and non-financial numbers aren't actually really any good at it, and don't really get the fun, and fall sideways into jobs that are about "project management" or "account management" or "engagement" or some other such soft stuff. Anyway, I fucked up my life and this is the only way I know how to make a living. So I work with people who are mostly between twenty-five and thirty-five, and I enjoy it. They keep me sharp and stop me getting complacent. I like them, and I'd like to think they like me, however odd they think I am, but we don't invite each other round to our places, go on holidays together or any of that stuff. If I was handed my P45, they would be upset for me, and not miss me by the same day the following week. I'm not being harsh here, but realistic.

They are, however, all the life I have, other than my family of origin and a couple of friends left from the Old Days. My only LTR finished about three years ago and there's been nothing since. I can remember the last time I had sex because it was the only time in the last seven years. Yes, you heard me. Seven years. That's what staying in an LTR that's lost its intimacy, but still seems to provide something, does for you. When I call my good looks "fading", I should probably say "vanished": my face is like a rubber death mask that can contort into a few stylised expressions. I look at it in the mirror when I shave, otherwise I don't want to see it. I have no idea why anyone would want to spend time with it. Are they all humouring the "old man"?

I'm fifty-eight next birthday. I have no money to pay for weekends and hotels, and nothing by way of a life to offer anyone. Sure I'd like some real sex^TM, but at my age I have to bring a life or the things money can buy. There aren't many people "like me", I know that because I never saw another single guy my age in the restaurant lunchtime on the Cote des Basques reading Hegel's Aesthetics, or anything close: wherever I go, I don't see another me. Almost all men my age are either married, materially comfortable and living in smug denial, divorced and living in dingy flats making two sets of maintenance payments (one for the flat, one for the ex-wife), or they are weird cranks you wouldn't want in your life either. Non-married women my age? Either long-term single like me, and therefore as suspect as me, or looking for replacement fathers / husbands / first partners. 

You think I'm talking myself into a corner here, but you don't see the world from where I stand. There's a lot of it, and it's all a long way away, just like it used to be, but now I know that since I can't get drunk at the house party, it really isn't worth me going. I never went to the kind of house parties where you might meet the co-writer or the hot girl or the guy who can introduce you to the guy who can back your venture. The house parties I went to were full of regular suburban kids like me.

I'm feeling down, and some of the descent is for good reasons. Right now, I look at the world and there's nowhere I want to be. The only place I've ever wanted to be is somewhere I don't have to come back from. Plenty of places I don't want to be, but nowhere I want to be. Not even here.

Oh. Facebook? I could ignore it, but that wouldn't change the actual facts of my life. I'm sure there's some creative way to use it - especially if I could stop all the junk coming to me account whenever I "like" anything.

True Force... All The Kings Men Cannot Put It Back Together Again

A couple of Fridays ago, I went to the gym after work. I do that regularly, except I don't usually get utterly breathless after running 800m at the sedate pace of 11kph. I had to stop three times in the mile-and-a-half I usually do on Fridays. My legs weren't there, and my breathing was tight and shallow. I went swimming about twenty minutes later and didn't have any problems, so it wasn't about having a cold or cough or whatever. No. It was about having eaten the wrong stuff at lunchtime: too many carbs cooked in too much fat disguised as a kind of pancake. Plus I hadn't had a decent walk all week: the previous two weeks I've walked from Waterloo to St Paul's and hopped on the Central Line to Liverpool Street there. Not the fastest way, but damn good exercise.

I'd spent the day trying to find data in the wreckage that is The Bank's MI since a project called "Release C", which was supposed to bring the data from the two merged banks together, but actually does nothing of the sort. Our Bank databases are still there and being updated, but Their Bank data is segregated in some ghastly 1990's attempts to produce a suite of normalised data tables, which has actually produced a set of tables called "I don't mind if it goes into ****** as long as it goes somewhere useful as well." In my circles, that line is a consistent laugh-getter. I am not making progress with the project I'm working on, and I'm spending more time repairing the damage done to our neat, easy-to-use, data environment by those vandals who ran Release C. I am waking up and wondering how much longer I have to keep going into work. I know the answer to that: I have to work until I die, because my pension isn't worth a damn. This is frustrating.

So gasping for breath on the treadmill kinda did it for me. That's enough. I'm letting this new location and office get to me, and it has got to stop. I need my morning walks. I need to eat right, and after Xmas, have a month on the 1,500-calorie diet. I need to find a way of being able to think straight again. I need to stop being self-pitying, and get a life and a whole load of other things. 

Or as Travis Bickle says: "I gotta get in shape now, from now on it will be 50 press-ups each morning, 50 pull-ups, from now on it'll be total organisation, every muscle must be tight."

This year my challenge was getting into some kind of physically-fit shape, and actually taking holidays. I did both of those things. I was pretty clear about what the challenge was for 2011 at the end of 2010, but I'm not so sure about what it is for 2012.

The Phenomenology of a Day At The Beach

Remember when your parents took you to the beach on summer holidays? How the days lasted forever with a huge gap between breakfast and tea? I'll bet you're thinking "ah the innocence of childhood, wasn't it great?". Going by some recent experiences, it has nothing to do with being nine years old, and everything to do with the circumstances and the way we felt.

I found it happened when we were, or I am, on the beach. Some of it is the sunshine, the blue skies, the sound of the waves, the sand and the process of playing or walking on the beach, which requires you to surrender to the present moment. Living in the present for even a couple of hours puts the past way, way behind, and the sunshine, sky, sea and sand make it easy to live in the present. I suspect sailing does something similar and for the same reason. Walking across a moor or through a park or zoo does not have the same effect, even if the weather is the same. Perhaps because moors and fields are already human spaces, colonised by our herd animals and crops. Cows and sheep are always someone's cows and sheep and they are there to provide milk and ultimately beef; fields of corn or flowers are always someone's fields and there to be picked and sold. A wild moor might be different, but it the beach has one huge advantage: turn around and there is safety, familiarity, the car, the hotel, the resort. In the middle of a moor, you're a long way from help or an ice-cream.

I think it's something to do with the uniformity of the colours at the beach and the white noise of the waves - which is why I don't lose touch with time on the Mediterranean or the Caribbean the same way I do on the Atlantic. We can gaze at the seaside, experience it, but we don't need to understand it, interpret it, ask what parts of it are called. Every moment it is different, but the difference does not signify. Until the tide surprises us. And then all it takes is a quick scamper up the beach. A surfer may experience it in another way, with the sea as a source of waves, becoming disappointing, or tremendous, as it does not or does provide waves.

All this is true. Unless, of course, I was sulking or having a family squabble. Then time tick-tocked by. Emotions don't so much create the awareness of time as create something to remember. This is another hour I am hungry, angry, lonely, tired, bored, sad, aroused, excited, lustful, intrigued, interested, puzzled. Sensations by contrast provide a distraction from an otherwise bland or unpleasant episode, or enhance a pleasant one. This is why ice cream never tasted so good as at the beach, or why a whisky is so potent in a tense moment, or why in an hour of tedium, the sudden appearance of the sun from clouds may be so absorbing. 

Happiness and contentment are a kind of satisfaction, of fullness or repleteness, just not necessarily caused by consuming something. This is not what we feel at the beach. Strictly we feel nothing there, except for the sensations of sand, waves, heat and breeze, because we are distracted from ourselves and the world by being there. This is not being in the zone, that much-hyped state of productive nirvana, because we are not productive at the beach, and the in the zone we so occupy ourselves with the task that we cease to notice the world, whereas at the beach, we are so occupied by the world that we cease to notice ourselves.

I Have Nothing Coherent To Say... so here's a song

One of the few bright spots near the new location is that Rough Trade Records (East) is about three hundred yards away and is full of stuff that Fopp and the high street stores of the West End don't have, and I wouldn't think of looking for on Amazon. So I've paid that a couple of visits, picking up three samplers and the John Maus album. This is "Copkiller"

I've also switched from French Radio London to Amazing Radio, which plays a lot of stuff that Rough Trade has. I switched to FRL because I was tired of the sound of English voices and for a while it reminded me of Biarritz and general French-ness. They play cover versions of any song you care to think of and their mixes can be eclectic and yet at the same time French.

It's winter, it's dark, it's cold. It's week three of the move and it's still not home. I have too many ideas for entries that need time I don't have and concentration I don't have. It's also near sodding Christmas, and I don't like this time of year. Only the dog days of January (Britain closed, opens again in February) are worse. I may have a cold. Bleeuuugh.

"Living In The Day" - Don't Do It Unless...

There's a spiritual practice known as "living in the day". It's generally taken to be a part of the AA Programme, but I can't recall it being mentioned in the Big Book. It's one of those phrases I heard in my early days and wondered what they were all talking about, and at sometime over the years, I stopped wondering, because I was doing it. I can't explain what it is, and it's nothing like any of the quotes you may find if you google the phrase, but this may give you an idea.

Living in the day lets me feel emotions. Joy, irritation, frustration, exhilaration, calm, pleasure... all these are emotions that pass in a fairly short time, leaving me able to get on to the next thing I need to do. I wake up the next morning feeling whatever my physical condition is - rested, horny, creaky, tired - but starting emotionally from zero. I don't feel anything else until I load up the diary for the day, when I may then feel various shades of anticipation, dread or irritation. Sounds good so far?

For that to work, yesterday must leave little or no emotional traces. Now think about that for a moment. Imagine not carrying over any emotions from yesterday. No, I don't just mean anger, frustration, irritation and all that other bad stuff we are exhorted to leave outside the bedroom door. I mean, not carrying over any emotions. LIke, you know... Love. Affection. Ambition. Fascination. Absorption. 

Because it turns out that practising the techniques that let me leave behind the bad stuff and the small stuff also leaves behind the big stuff as well. I don't even really remember what it is I feel for whoever's in bed with me: I just give them a chance to show what mood they are in, and react and deal accordingly. That's how you will feel about the woman you're married to or the kids you created, if you "live in the day". And if you're wondering, no, that's not how you are supposed to feel. Not at all. Those emotions about those people are supposed to be always with you - whichever emotions it you'e feeling at the time. 

Love, hate, ambition, despair, enthusiasm, hope, desire, lust, care, revenge, affection, friendship, competition... The emotions that make life worth living, that give it structure, colour and flavour, do so because they infuse our bodies - literally, with hormones - and create continuity and memory, linking the days together, linking this hour with an hour four days or four weeks ago. When I live in the day I feel none of these, not because I don't want to, but because whatever it is that lets the insults and pleasures of the day roll off my back like a duck, also means that the meaningful emotions won't stick either.

One of the things that happened to me as I recovered was that I understood that all I ever really felt was variations on that sick neediness, pain and emptiness that comes with the territory. These are also meaningful emotions that create memory, but none have anything to do with other people, other specific people, as love and hate do. For screw-ups, emotions are endless loops inside our own heads, hearts, bodies and memories. Dump those emotions, deal with the resentments and guilts in the Steps, and it's quite easy to live in the day. 

In the early years, it's a helluva an improvement on being hungover, withdrawn, flooded with pounding adrenals, ridden with undeserved guilt and hearing punishing voices in your head. But in the same way a Japanese stone garden is an improvement on the brambles and weeds that were there. It's clean, it's simple, it's low maintenance, and it's pretty vacant. I'm not sure I have much of choice, just as you don't have much of a choice about never knowing what a co-homology group is (because you gave up maths well before you went to university and you haven't got the time or background to read it up now). Which doesn't stop my body telling me from time to time that it's missing some stuff it needs to function really well, which leads me to feeling a tad empty, directionless and generally de-motivated and lacking sparkle and vigour. That passes, given enough time, but the last few weeks have been just a little empty.

Living in the day, like a lot of the other "spiritual"-sounding practices, is not for ordinary folk. It's for people who are or were severely fucked-up for an extended period of their lives: heroin addicts, alcoholics, children who passed through The System or who were abused or mistreated, not to mention people who have been through extended traumatic experiences that the rest of the world knows nothing of. That is unlikely to be you, gentle reader, and you'll screw your life and soul up if you try it. 

"Workwise" = "Work Dumb": How Not To Move Your Staff

We were moved to a new office a couple of weeks ago. Right next to Liverpool Street station. Some people think that means that we're now in "the City", but we're not. "The City" means insurance, law, merchant banking, some shipping and commodities trading. It does not mean retail banking. I prefer to say I work in Liverpool Street.

The office itself is cheap and slightly nasty. We will pass over the toilets that you would not accept in your home, the dirty telephones we all had to spend time cleaning, the flimsy keyboards that haven't been cleaned since purchased and don't always work, the floors that move slightly if someone heavy walks by, the weak-ass cafe, and the as-high-as-legal people density. The ceilings are about two feet too low, and the soundproofing so poor that the usual level of office chat, informal meetings and telephones calls generates a permanent background noise about the same as a cinema full of kids at half-term. Earphones and some music won't really do it - over-ear noise-cancellers might, but would look a little odd. 

There are deliberately not enough desks for the people based there. At the end of every day we have to pack up all our crayons and colouring books, laptop transformers and laptops, into a plastic box and put it in a locker. Each morning we have to set it all out again, and not always at the same desk either. Any alleged cost-savings are tiny compared with the twenty minutes a day per person to set-up and pack-up. Because you have to re-arrange all the wiring, computer screen and chair to suit you. We have to log into the telephone on our new desk every day as well - but many simply don't. Within the area allotted to a team, we can sit anywhere, and if someone from outside sits at one of "not-our-desks" we can ask them to move if there's no more "not-our-space". They would rather you didn't have your Amazon deliveries sent to the office, but will live with it if you don't overdo it: though you have to go to the post room to ask. Since you don't have a desk, they can't deliver. And they won't notify, either. Leave a jacket on the chair overnight, the cleaners will take it away. No personal effects, no baby photos, funny cartoons, toy animals, special mouse, technical manuals... nothing. Not even the management have dedicated, lockable offices. Yes, that's right, I'll say that again: not even the management have dedicated, lockable offices. 

This alienated condition is called "Workwise" and has the motto "Work is something you do, not a place you go". Not only does nobody "of weight" buy it, they can't even be bothered to pretend to buy it. Taking dedicated offices away from senior management is one gesture too far. Taking their pay rises away, so that they all face a five per cent pay cut, isn't the most sensible move either. 

It feels fake, only this time, it feels like people can't be bothered to pretend it's real. Not even the management. It's occurred to nobody except the workers that if work is what we do, not the place we do it, then it doesn't matter where we do it, or for whom. Way to go encouraging employee engagement there. 

And of course, then there's the Liverpool Street area. Packed. Everyone rushing everywhere. And they're all indistinguishable, no matter what shape and size they are, mere office canon fodder. The CIty / Liverpool Street is a huge industrial estate that doesn't actually make anything. It has a sense of history - you have to chuckle at "Frying Pan Alley" - but largely in the names and the churches. The best thing that can be said for it, is that I can be back in Soho in about twenty-five minutes door-to-door via the Central Line.

Free-Will, Identity, Decisions and Choices

Let's start with the nature of the "I" I'm saying is free.

I don't know about you, but I'm not a ghost of identity passing through the walls of my brain and body, wondering why my material manifestation does so many silly things. The "I" I feel I am is no more one unified process than my body is one unified process. My body is a rag-bag of inter-connected parts, each with its own function, each monitored, loosely controlled and crudely co-ordinated by the autonomic nervous system, and sometimes consciously, and with no guarantee that all of them will work well together. Since the brain is part of the body, this applies to the brain as well. I see, hear, taste, estimate what is about to happen in my world (do I have time to cross the road before that slower-moving car gets here?), judge the people and things in it ("ugh, what a Spring 2003 office block") and a dozen other things, all at the same time, in what used to be called a "stream of consciousness". The human brain is a motherboard with many special-purpose CPU's, only one of which is there to have that conversation in our heads we call "consciousness". All the real work is done in the background, as it should be. The flaw in the traditional way of thinking about ourseleves and our identities, and hence of the nature of our freedom, is to suppose that we are in some way One, that there is one process - a soul, mind, spirit -  that "is" us. We are a bundle of processes, many of which can communicate with each other but might not on occasion.

One of those processes has priority over the others, when it is engaged. This is the process which chooses the other processes get to use my body and the other resources I have. Sometimes that choice is made on a whim, or out of habit, or under the spell of a strong emotion - wisdom literature and guru books, and every book about being an effective manager, stress keeping the decision-making process conscious: do nothing without considering its effects, and do nothing in the heat of the moment. Some people do this better than others, I do it badly, and for most people, you can see the wheels turning when they try. That process is where freedom lives: it is the part of "I" which chooses and decides.

When I choose or decide I am influenced by what I have learned, experiences I may or may not have mis-interpreted, by what I have seen, heard, tasted and felt, by rumours, facts and thousand-year-old ideas, and my thinking is flawed, messy, incomplete, as deductively fallacious as valid and full of leaps and non sequiters. I limit my choices to what is possible, affordable, legal and acceptable, and that perhaps of all the choices, none are what I would do if I had the money, nerve and courage. Some of the thinking is conscious - feels like a conversation in my head, like reading without moving my lips - and some of it, perhaps the bulk of it, goes on silently. Just because I can't hear it doesn't mean it isn't happening, and it doesn't mean it isn't me who is doing it. The idea that thinking must be conscious or it is not thinking is a silly prejudice. I don't know about you, but I need as much thinking as possible to be going on silently, so I can concentrate on listening to music, or gazing at a blue sky. I want to know I will figure out the solution to a work problem without it interrupting my enjoyment of the present moment.

These influences are not constraints, just as reasons are not restraints and faulty reasoning is not a symptom of being human. These influences are, in fact, part of me. I am defined in part by my education, my experiences, what I heard from my parents, at school, on the radio and television, what I read, what I taught myself. Part of "who I am" is someone who can understand a proof in mathematics, identify the major 1950's jazz musicians after one chorus, and absolutely refuses to take part in fancy dress parties. It makes sense to say that "I" make a decision before I become conscious of having done so - actually, I thought everyone did that, it's how you know it's the right decision for you - but it makes no sense to say that the decision is not therefore my decision, as if only what I do consciously is "me". We are what we do, and what we intend to do, and we are the the gap between the two as well.

Reasons, arguments, influences and reasoning are important. It's not a decision unless there are reasons. If there are no reasons, it's an impulse, or a whim, and if being free isn't one thing, it's being at the mercy of every whim that passes through our pretty little heads. An adult may have all sorts of odd ideas flitting through her head, but she decides which one she will act on, if only by rolling a dice, and then deciding to abide by the dice's "decision". (The Dice Man decides to follow the dice, and part of that story is just how much self-control and will it takes to do so. Random living can be as demanding as routine living.) 

(One reason that neuroscience seems so determinism-friendly is that it only looks at, as it must, toy decisions made in falsely simple circumstances. It doesn't look at the long decision-making processes of businessmen, or jurors, or me when my mobile phone contract is coming to an end. In these processes there may actually not be a point where anyone "decides" to do a particular thing, rather there is a drift towards the eventual choice as one by one the alternatives are eliminated for cause. Long-process decisions may include short-process decisions but are not resolvable into a series of them.)

So where's the freedom? You're staring at it: it's right in front of you. Papa Hegel said it, in his Aethestics. Freedom arises because my consciousness stops paying attention to the outside world and looks inwards at itself. (I had to read it over a number of times to make sure I hadn't been dreaming or misunderstood. Is it that simple?) Only the external physical world, including the people in it, can compel and constrain, so when I turn my back on it, I become free - even if I can't put my decision into action for fear of the Secret Police or for sheer lack of energy and money.

I'm free when I stop trying to do what you want me to do. This doesn't mean I act selfishly, become self-centered and ignore the rules and the needs of other people, it means I don't have a knee-jerk reaction to satisfy your every whim and demand. It means I  "stop and think". Learning to stop and think, to not do as we're told or as we think others expect, to ignore our first impulse, and decide for ourselves, is part of becoming an adult. The teenager who doesn't "feel" as if they are free is quite right: they haven't achieved these disciplines yet.

The beauty of this is that it doesn't matter how I do it, or what does it, or even if I'm aware of much of it. It doesn't matter how you got your ideas of why I should do, or how I wound up thinking that what you think I should is so darn important. What matters is that I stopped responding to your priorities, and started responding to mine. The hardware and software I use to do it doesn't matter. It's that I do it that matters, not how I do it or which exact part of my anatomy passed what chemicals and electrical impulses to what other parts. In programming, we call that last bit "implementation" and everyone knows there are a hundred ways of getting the same result from the same inputs. 

Freedom is not, in other words, a relationship I have with the Universe, but one I have with other people. I am not free because somehow I can dodge an hypothesised universal Laplacian causality with some Heisenbergian indeterminacy, nor because I can shake off all my schooling and indoctrination and choose freely. I am free because I briefly ignore everyone else and make up my mind to do what I want, which may or may not suit you, depending on how suiting you suits me. My guess is that there are many people who are so caught up in the race for power and influence, or the search for love and reassurance, or so bound up in their relationships with others, or in the endless reflecting mirrors of second-guessing and people-pleasing, that they really do not experience themselves as choosing, and whose consciousness has yet to turn away from the world, look inside itself and summon the courage to say their first "YES" to themselves.