Everything is Amazing

 To what have we allowed ourselves to become accustomed? Only at divorce time do I ask this more than I do during the Christmas/New Year's season. I have not had the chance (and that word was chosen assiduously) to become accustomed to marriage or its spouse divorce but had I done, I am almost certain that I would have contemplated this question to distraction. Legally it should never come to bear given that to all outward appearance it is within the human nature to become accustomed to wild and obscene extremities like cohabitation and all of its trappings with ONE person for the majority of one's life, having a billion (or to my mind even a million) dollars, or behaving in customary fashion and observing the same customs every day, week, month, year, or lifetime. Why, I guess I'm asking, has it become customary to largely forego the customization of our existence and make customs customary?

Existence is a funny thing, isn't it? We don't exist for an eternity, then we exist for a blip of time before we return to eternity. We're dead forever, live a short time, then we're dead forever again. Life, then, is a miraculous, unfathomable break or separation of eternity. In our mortal minds it would seem impossible to reach the end of an infinitely long road or put a tail on an infinitely long snake or find the beginning or end of a circle. Yet here we are doing it! We're privileged to be experiencing something insanely paradoxical as a break in eternity. The beginning of the solution to the bewildering enigma of infinity has been gifted to us and what have we done with it? What do we do with our victory over the tens to hundreds of million fellow swimmers who accompanied us to the egg and said, "No, you first. I insist." Maybe those aquanaut acquaintances thought we were ready for this. Were they right or wrong?

But back to marriage. Or more to the point the end of it because despite our best (or sometimes our second, third or hundredth best) efforts, unlike that infinitely long snake, most marriages have a tail end. The end of the tale of romance, whatever we customize that custom to be, that comes in a courtroom surrounded by legal representatives whose business it really ought to be none of but who have made it theirs and have made their business indispensable. What the hell can any mortal being do anymore without an attorney? So to borrow a poignant phrase from the movies, the law firm of "This is Mine and That is Yours" tries to judiciously (or if they're not proud (which I mean - ppfffttt - they're lawyers!) GREEDILY) decide to what exactly the victorious party in the proceedings has become accustomed. That REALLY should make us all go "Hmmmmm...." and marvel at this custom to which we have become accustomed. How have we gotten into the custom of accepting anyone, or worse, ourselves saying, "I want the single life that was my former custom, but I want to customize it with as many of the customs to which I have become accustomed during marriage as I can." Just one of the myriad oddities of our customary lives of acquisitiveness I suppose. 

Which leads us to Christmas. If you are not Christian, and to a lesser extent even if you ARE, Christmas, you gotta admit, is an oddity. This holiday season we refer to as "merry," "joyous," even "gay" not long ago though that has become uncustomary, seems to be a yearly heaping of responsibility, expense, traditions, and customs upon ourselves that has snowballed so far out of control as to sap a goodly chunk of that merry, joyous and gay positivity right the hell out of it! 

"Should we have ham or turkey or both; what's ___ getting me; what could I get ___ of equal value; what could I get ___ of lesser value; where can Gramma and Grampa sleep; will they bring their cat; how will their cat react to our dogs; will ___ make her disgusting Jell-O mold; where could I put this garland; where could I put this ribbon; where could I put this wreath; who could I re-gift this fruitcake to; should we visit Uncle ___ and Aunt ___; will I get a Christmas bonus; will I get paid before Christmas; will I be able to work overtime during Christmas; what Christmas movies should we watch; is "Die Hard" a Christmas movie; what about Rambo; who's playing football; who's playing hockey; should I put apples in the stuffing; should we have a real tree; would ___ be offended if we had a real tree; how can I polish the good silver; will ___ notice if we don't dust; how much will the electricity bill be; how are we going to fit everybody in the car; is this custom really worth it any more or should I just go Buddhist??????????

The pressure we put on ourselves! You know who would undoubtedly tell us to relax before we start stroking out? Jesus! Right, the Christ from Christmas. You KNOW he would! While shaking his head and smacking his forehead at how much further from the original observances, traditions and CUSTOMS Christmas can be pushed this year. Has it become a custom to make Christmas more UNcustomary every Christmas?

Over my many years I have observed almost a step-for-step parallel to THAT custom but in reverse. Something that we have made a custom of making MORE customary every year is our use of technology. Is it too soon to refer to it as our "dependence" on it yet? I am starting to think not. I was recently talking about the internet with a young man who has made IT his career goal and is studying it in university now. He reminds me of two quantum physicists I met while working in Victoria. They regularly had coffee and chatted with me. They both realized that the more they learned about the physical world, the LESS they understood. They told me they had originally assumed that studying matter would lead to a greater understanding of everything but for both it led to a greater awe at the miraculous and UNexplainable nature of everything. The one take-away quote that I have mentioned in many a conversation from these two physicists was, "The very rudiments of science are nebulous at best." Today this young tech-savvy student told me that the very building blocks of the internet are just as shaky. So enjoy reading this while you can!

This got me to thinking about what we would do without it. It gave me a warm and cozy feeling all over. I can't say the same for the other participant in our conversation. This is a person who wakes up to her phone alarm, turns on a podcast and listens to it through her Bluetooth earbuds while she pours herself a coffee from a coffeemaker that is synched to her device to brew 10 minutes before her alarm. She texts and answers texts while putting on her makeup. She then loads her son into her vehicle with climate control, tire pressure sensors, back-up cam, semi-autonomous center line and ditch reading and adjustments, and computers controlling everything else right down to the headlights. She programs their destination into the GPS and takes her son to school where he learns from smartboards, computers, and tablets for a few hours. Upon arrival back home she logs on to work where she accrues bits of information and stores them on the Cloud. In her spare time she plays games on her phone and watches TV shows on her TV that has a dozen remotes for routers, boxes and soundboards that are all cyber connected somehow. When I said it would kinda be nice to lose the internet she disagreed. I said I'd miss a few things that I had become accustomed to like one of the phone games we both play, but I thought fondly of the days when people did not need to take their vehicles to a mechanic who was also a computer tech. In fact, some of us could fix our cars ourselves. 

As I reminisced my conversation partner seemed to get more and more freaked out. She was not so young that she had missed the days before our tech dependency but she had become so accustomed to it she seemed to have forgotten those days. She actually asked me how I would print things out without the internet. It couldn't have been more than a decade ago that Bluetooth became mainstream for printers. They still HAVE printers connected to computers by wires I think. I questioned why anyone would want to trust the "Cloud" when they could store stuff on their terabyte hard drives but she disagreed with that idea too even after what the IT student had said, ready to cling devotedly to the technology she had had no need for for the majority of her life. It makes me wonder how crippling it would be to the younger generations who have never known lives without computers or the internet.

At contemplative times such as these I am often reminded of comedy and things that my favourite comedians have said. Louis CK once talked about being in a plane and hearing an announcement... well, I'll just use some technology and upload the clip right here:

Maybe we need some time where we're walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the sides. That's precisely how I was feeling during the above conversation. "How quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only 10 seconds ago." This I perceive to be the problem. We have developed our abilities to become accustomed to things WAAAY too fast and we've become less and less grateful. We just advance too fast to give us time to become grateful. 

To sum up, maybe we need to customize our accustomization to customs. How long do we need to do something before it becomes a custom? I think we become accustomed to things before they even become customs. Everything right now is amazing and we don't have time to stop and appreciated it enough. So my message in this post is simple: In the words of Jesus Christ during this Christmas season, "Relax before you start stroking out for my sakes!!!"

Have you ever thought of giving up the internet? Look how it affected Louis CK's daughter. Maybe we could have such an impact on others. Don't go cold turkey or they won't be able to call you in to work when someone fakes sick. Get your hit from the web occasionally but limit yourself from the things Louis talks about. You have experienced them too. Talking to someone who is on their phone or who is just waiting for you to stop blathering so they can get their fix of screen staring. Louis and Conan describe it as one person thinking they are connecting and then dying inside when you cut off that connection in favor of your device. "They just disappear."

I sometimes approach friends who have headphones or earbuds on and their listening to audiobooks, music, podcasts, whatever and I know that if I want to communicate with them their first one or two words will be "What?" So I have to prep myself to repeat what I want to say at least once. Over Thanksgiving how many of you were slaving away in the kitchen doing pies, turkeys, casseroles, veggies and all the customary trimmings? And how many of you time maximisers had your ear pods in? And how many were approached by someone else in the house like, "Hey, Mom. What can I do to help?" "What?" "What can I do to help?" Takes out ear pods. "Sorry honey I can't hear you. What do you need?" "Never mind..." Then you went back to furiously cooking for the whole house and cursing the custom wondering how it became customary for the women to work and the men to play on this holiday and adding sententiously that it sure would be nice if the ungrateful kids would offer to help? And how many, I'm sure we'll never know, of us haven't had such an encounter simply because somebody knew you were listening to your stories?  

I'm not saying that this isn't a bit of fantastical thinking. I see people reading this going, "Yeah that'll be the day! My kids offering to help at Thanksgiving." But you never know if you can't hear them. I see others reading this saying, "Yeah they only do that to cover their asses. They KNOW I'm listening to my music and take that moment to make an offer of help knowing I won't hear it but also knowing that during my upcoming stressed-out rant about how nobody pitches in during the holidays they can honestly say, "I offered to help but you didn't hear me," with angelic, holiday grins. 

See how it happens? See how the stress builds? I'm not even including the ear pod zombie as one of the many ways the internet and technology have made us less empathetic and less appreciative of genuine human contact. I'm not even including this as one of the many ways the relative anonymity of the internet has made us less courteous or even downright rude. But we are becoming accustomed to behavior that borders on the antisocial. 

Nothing against the antisocial, we need them. We need them to fix and maintain the machines that do the antisocial, repetitive, mind-numbing work humans hate. But our future careers, and our kids' future careers lie in the soft skills - the social abilities that computers will probably never become as good at as humans. The tragic irony is that with increased exposure to the internet and technology comes decreased abilities of problem solving, mediation, creative thinking, critical thinking, teamwork, leadership, and other things we learn from being with other people. We are creating customs, and becoming accustomed to them very quickly, like sitting in groups silently staring at phones, texting someone in the next room, spending several hours at a time with online friends instead of real friends and we may be subconsciously excluding ourselves and our kids from experiences that will be extremely valuable to our futures. 

Imagine a future in which people from what used to be called "developed" countries" have become incapable of living with each other and they need to hire (at great expense) social arbitrators who grew up in less technologically advanced countries to solve the problems we create with our silly bickering. It's coming folks. We may not be able to avoid it but we might delay it a bit by slowly weaning ourselves off the internet. But who knows? Maybe it'll come crashing down like the house of cards it is and save us all. 

We shall see how amazing everything really is shan't we?