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At the end of our lives, what will we think about? Will we remember those ‘important’ projects at work that diverted our attention from our children as they struggled to get our attention? Or will we remember what it felt like when our kids were old enough to no longer have time for us either?
Chasing Space
I saw a reel on social media the other day that tore me up, as the main message was that the majority of what we focus on in our daily lives is not only forgettable but damaging. Is the fact that AI exists and can perform half the tasks I do every day exciting, or does it underscore the futility of my own existence?
What am I chasing? What are any of us chasing? Do any of us even know? The more I chase this idea I have in my head as to what constitutes the ‘better life,’ the farther I am from this better life and, in fact, myself.
I once had someone refer to me as a ‘PR guy,’ as if the whole of my existence could be encapsulated in that term. That characterization made me ill then, and it makes me upset today.
This is the best I can do? I’m a PR guy? This is my contribution to the world? To write marketing pieces about products or services that may or may not be that worthwhile or great, but I am paid to tell a story, and so I spin someone else’s ideas into a 350-word structure that is as forgettable as it is forced?
What am I doing? I am chasing space.
Finding Space
Now, I am the space doctor, armed with a doctorate and an abstract concept that I peddle through various digital marketing channels to people I think I know enough or I would not put proverbial pen to paper, right?
What do I know? How do I know it? Where did I acquire my knowledge?
I took the academic pathway, too afraid to state an opinion and most certainly too uncertain to take a stand on anything. Perhaps that is my white privilege. I am unsure.
With the onset of fall, I feel myself more reflective, perhaps bitter that summer went too fast. Perhaps I am bitter, however, at my choices in life that I diverted my attention not just from my kids when they were 8 and wanted to play catch with daddy but from the journey into myself, which is the ultimate unknown.
Everywhere we turn today, someone has an answer to something or to a question we eventually believe we must have asked at some point. Yeah, I want to know the 5 secrets to develop great content. Sure, I want to create viral reels that people remember for a whole ten seconds before scrolling somewhere else.
Where has the time gone? How on earth am I on the other side of 50 years? This is impossible. All I ever wanted out of life was to live forever. Is that too much to ask?
Changing Space
When I talk about space, it is not an abstraction. Space is historical, and it invites an inquiry into the past and the lives that preceded our own. Space is literal in that we have bodies that move, dance, play, cry, and laugh. Space is metaphorical only in the sense that there is nothing that it can not not be, and so where does that leave us?
Like the Robinsons in that wild 60’s TV show, we are lost in space, spinning on a rock that circles a sun inside a galaxy that circles other galaxies in a universe so large that it takes 13.5 billion years to cross it if we were to travel 186,000 miles per second. That is not 55 miles per hour or 10,000 miles a minute, but 186,000 miles per second for 13.5 billion years.
At the end of our lives, what will we think about? However you and I answer that question, let’s agree to start thinking about that now instead of later…
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