Month: April 2019

Being raised in the world of art and activism means that I grew up learning to frame everything I do in the scope of social service. My art has been cultivated with the belief that the stories I aim to tell are bigger than myself – whether that has meant representing identities or beliefs on the margins, or harboring a message that can serve to benefit the collective consciousness. My community organizing has also been about pushing fields and visions further, emphasized even more so working at an institution whose sector literally labels me a “public servant.” One would think that following a life in this direction offers constant checks and balances to keep one selfless, to avoid becoming narcissistic – but I’ve learned that this isn’t necessarily the case.

When everything you do is by default “for others” it can become a slippery slope down a superhero narrative. You start being convinced that doing for yourself is automatically doing for others. Indulgences become necessities for upholding your mentality, physicality, morale for doing the “good work.” But this is how preachers end up with Benzes. It’s how Silicon Valley CEOs justify massive bonuses. It’s how activists end up undermining or holding themselves above the individuals within the communities we’re supposed to uplift. Such faults, we tell ourselves, are overwritten by all the good we do – in fact, we can even tell ourselves that these are the tools, boundaries, vehicles of self-care that are needed in order to be as selfless as we would like to believe we are.

We all need to treat ourselves. But sometimes I wonder if creating a binary in which our service is “work” and our contradictions are “play.” It not only puts us in dangerous territory where harm unto ourselves and others are justified, but we also lose sight of the ways in which the work we do can be, in fact, the treat. We start seeing the art we make, the connections we build, the stories we tell, as the giving. We fail to recognize how the audience inspires us, the community feeds us, the actions themselves keep us holistically tone.

I’ve been thinking about this over the past couple of days while here in New Mexico working on Ways of Knowing. It has been more and more difficult to frame this project in the conventional terms of service as stated above. We are not some group coming from outside merely to benefit the Navajo community. Each time I leave a session with someone here, I leave so satiated, evolved, touched, that I wonder if I’m actually the biggest beneficiary of the project. I then wonder if that’s wrong. I then question the entire dynamic of weighing who benefits more.

Is it selfish of me to be able to more tangibly recognize the ways in which this project has deepened my own relationship with the earth and my vision of the world? Perhaps only if I see projects like this as a one-way dynamic of servitude. But if I recognize the nature of exchange and sharing that exists in communities like the ones we’ve been encountering – and find inspiration in the ecosystem around us, things might look different. Neither the bee nor the flower see themselves as the “public servant” in the process of pollination. There is hardly even a recognition of the “greater good” or the “natural balance” that is being maintained by either, they just simply are doing them. I feel that this is the biggest challenge that I’m facing now – to unravel the categorizations that parcel collective growth. To not think so highly of what I do, and allow the things that fill me up to simply fill me up.

One of the points in Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens that has stuck with me is the notion of the “luxury trap.” A quick googling of it offers some article titles that sum it up quite succinctly – When niceties become necessities, reads one. A deeper dig reveals the nihilistic sentiment often provoked – “as we all know, those who do not rape the environment today will not be able to afford to buy canned air tomorrow,” reads a Reddit post. The topic as described in the book looks at things from a more humanistic, mile-high view. As technology and wealth increases, delicacies become staples. Occasions become regimens. Fantasies become expectations. From this view, the debate is about whether greater access to industrialized food is worth the pollution caused by the meat industry. If advancements in transportation are worth the pollution. Each of these threads can spiral in their own ways.

Then, because the internet is the internet, there is a host of writing about how the luxury trap applies to one’s self. The top hit for the phrase goes, How it works at how to avoid it. This is maybe more along the lines of how I’ve been chewing on this topic, all while being mindful of my very human tendency to try to beat the house at its own game. The ideal, of course, is to enjoy all the perks that luxury affords, without falling into its trappings. To be able to indulge while being above it all. To take a hit without getting addicted.

This kind of view can be problematic, because, like everything else, it’s all relative. I can easily compare myself with others and feel myself for not feeling the need for expensive jewelry, new cars, a big house, even premium cable. I can recognize that flying first class is something I can live without (ask me again after I somehow get bumped up on an international flight one day tho), and that indulgences like VIP seats or bottle service are not the kinds of things I’d like to spend my money on.

But luxury doesn’t always come with a high price tag. The luxuries that I often worry about getting too comfortable in are those that are like the proverbial lobster in the proverbial pot. The micro-upgrades in life that are the difference between getting somewhere on foot, versus bus, versus subway, versus Uber. It’s the appetizers I didn’t use to have room for, the extra 15 minutes to myself I didn’t use to need each morning for peace of mind. And then there’s just some things that come with getting older – like not couch-surfing anymore. But even in those cases, I wonder if “my back can’t handle that” or “I’m not in my twenties anymore” are valid justifications that do easily make the difference of hundreds of dollars after a few nights. Getting my own room instead of crashing in someone’s pad, or my own ride instead of hopping in a carpool, or generally expecting loads of privacy and agency in an existence that has long been built on communal activities are where my luxury traps lie. There are things I used to never expect that now I demand – the trap is described as that which is easy to accept as an upgrade, but difficult to downgrade back to. Perhaps it’s a question of shared value, collective definitions of convenience, standards of beauty. It’s awakening from the American Dream, and being okay with how life looks in the light.

As far back as I can remember, I’ve filled my hours with daydreaming. It’s one of the reasons nightdreaming has never thrilled me much. Both kinds of dreaming require a suspension of reality, daydreaming just still lets you sit behind the wheel. It’s lucid by default.

As a kid, I spent my afternoons doing the typical kind – interrogating my molecules in hopes that I could defy gravity or teleport. In my teens, my daydreams were dedicated to my crushes. Entire lifespans shared with a stranger before the bell rang. My twenties made way for aspirations of fame. I envisioned performing at Madison Square Garden, I craved legacy. Phrases like manifest your reality gave me an excuse to inject capitalism into my daydreams, to make them action-oriented. This was a stark shift – as a kid I wanted to teleport really badly…but I never felt like I was entitled to it.

I don’t know if I daydream anymore these days. I’ve been grounded into the reality of short-term to-do’s and long-term goals. Many would argue that this is a good thing. Pragmatism is seldom an insult. And meanwhile – I can’t teleport but I do jet around the world. I didn’t end up with any of my high school crushes, but I’m madly in love with my wife. I’m not famous, but I’m surrounded by more good friends than I can keep up with. I’ve been told – and I tell myself – that I’m living the dream.

But what does it mean to actually live a dream? Why do I still wake up with anxiety? Why do I stress the fuck out? The key might be in what I no longer genuinely daydream.

The magic in daydreaming, and why it’s distinct from “goal-setting” is that daydreaming allows space for fantasy. Not the “one day this could actually happen” kind of fantasy, but real-ass “this definitely could never come true” fantasy. It is a recess of the mind, one where calculations don’t calculate and conclusions don’t conclude. It’s a scrimmage in what-ifs, with no championship at the end. It’s an exercise that I’m recognizing that I’m out of shape for, but that may be exactly what I need right now amidst my overdose of reality. It’s a welcome escape, it’s a return to who I am.

When I was living in Oakland, before moving to New York, one of the many ways I romanticized the East Coast was the earlier timezone. Being a full-time artist in my 20’s in California meant that there was little to no incentive for me to wake up before 10am, which is 1pm EST. By the time I was up and ready, people on the other side of the country were already wrapping up their days. Meanwhile, I was hungry for the hustle but felt like I kept coming to the table late. To be an East Coaster was to be among the early birds, to leave behind a life of slacking-by-nature.

These days I feel like I’ve eaten myself sick. The hustle leaves a bad taste in my mouth and I want nothing more than to fall into a food coma. I’ve begun my transition back to California with a short stint in the Bay, and two mornings in I already feel like I’m at a crossroads – do I rise with the sun in the way that I was unable/unwilling to as my decade-ago self, or do I shed the burden of being three hours ahead and allow myself to be swallowed by the Pacific Standard? I am abhorred by the notion of CEO’s and CEO-wannabes who wake up at 5am just to have mornings to themselves, but what I like about life in EST is that I can sample that, even at 8am. But the past two mornings in California, despite getting up earlier than normal, I open my eyes to the pressure to check my texts and emails to see what East Coast concerns are left pending for me.

I learned long ago that so much of life is about managing expectations, and I’ve witnessed so many people who have managed those expectations of them such that they are constantly catching up. Common knowledge says that the way to escape that is to get head starts when you can. But what if I just stopped running the rat-race? What wild exists for me in the detours?

Yesterday was my last official day at the office and I felt completely, utterly unemotional about it. There was no trip down memory lane, no final tweaks to leave my desk tidy, no long hugs. I just dipped. Much of it probably has to do with the fact that the place I left was just a shell of itself – last month, the office that I actually worked at had been vacated during my Aotearoa trip. I left all the sentiments there. During one of last days then, Lovely and I trekked from the Waterfront Fish Market, through her old offices at DOE, and munched on hushpuppies and crabcakes in the SmithsonianAPA lounge. Her memories there are deeper than anyone else working there now. When we both wore suits and took shit more seriously, we would break from our government jobs for lunch together. We were younger, DC was a new terrain, and now I wonder if the knowledge we’ve picked up living in this town will transfer to our next journeys forward, or if we’ll leave them on the Hill. If they’ll be washed away by the next few administrations. If DC will from now on be another city that I return to regularly only to gawk at how dramatically things have changed. All the restaurants and shops that are there now but won’t be then. All the people who have left and come. Indeed, in a city as transient as Washington, D.C., moving out is a part of the local experience.