At the time I started writing this in January, a lot of us suspected change if not crave it. Upon a little life audit and tackling my idled Notion pages, I uncover relics of some of my past routines - a Resonance Calendar with 687 saved articles, a Cleaning check-list, a Weekly Reset prompts list to ensure a fresh start every week, a Someday list created pre-pandemic to ‘force’ myself to go out and explore, and an extensive Travel Planner last updated when I thought this pandemic would end by 2020. It is safe to say that life in 2021 existed outside of all these lists and grids, and I cannot relate to this person with elaborate planning any more.
Admitting to myself that planning further than a week is now obsolete, it has relieved me from believing that I can work my way out of being stuck. Seeing people I look up to either struggle, or struggle to be relevant, left me with a goal-driven productivity hangover. I needed a clean slate other than to dream of living the lives of others.
Out of the blue one evening, Ben and I played We’re Not Really Strangers. When the above card comes up, under the influence of three glasses of wine, I gave an honest answer that enlighten me with a lot of clarity. Reaching deep into my ego, I realised I have been skeptical of the aesthetics of a ‘dream life’. For as long as I know, I fantasise the lifestyle of ‘someone working in the creative industry’, fetishise the neighbourhood they live in and obsessing over how their flats look like and what they wear, etc. This is also where the envy for those who ‘made it as a creative’ starts. It’s the kind of envy that’s profound yet frustrating. Knowing there’s more to its facade but don’t quite know how to get there myself. I wonder if it comes with being in my thirties, or being aware of the consumable nature of content - my suspension of disbelief runs short these days. As a coping mechanism, I love/hate watching aesthetic content on Youtube. Then, I caught myself visualising spilled coffee on pristine countertops in house tour videos, and imagining couple disputes in front of spotless panels of floor-to-ceiling windows - denting this fantasy and volatile representation of creative success with my own slice of life.
A big part of how I understand the trajectory of my life is based on the way others understand it. Usually they go for a form I call ‘somebody they recognise’. Like how every couple of years my mum with the same enthusiasm would suggest me to write a book with drawings/ photographs in it, or be an art therapist. Not that her ideas aren’t great, but to her understanding that is ultimately what ‘somebody creative’ does for a living ( sell something!) or what one can do for stability (be a professional!). As masochistic as it sounds, to show her what I currently do with my time studying and freelancing, I’m baiting her to bring up these two validated options. Just to taunt myself for fun.
Recently I found myself nodding very hard to this short mention of why ‘you should not look for heroes in history and look for people that are palatable to you or recognisable to you as good people’. In an episode of Maintenance Phase podcast on Cicely Williams, discussing her colonial past tied with dietitian practices, Aubrey Gordon connotes the urge to put people on a pedestal historically, or now, has not been a helpful one. ‘Because also you're not going to find them, and because there will be a point at which you are disappointed or their views diverge from your views, or they haven't learned something yet, and then they learn it and you read or see or hear something from them from before they learned that thing.’
Given what I knew at the time, I based my ambition on doing life like that recognisable ‘somebody’. It was a natural way of pathfinding for so many of us, and for some people it pans out. On my part, many things existed outside the materiality of that ‘somebody’. They were implicit at times, yet as life goes on these unrecognised parts turned into reoccurring self-doubts, interrogating an identity that is complex by nature. Well then, what shapeless, formless hopes and dreams am I left with?
Speaking of a degree of latitude in How to Do Nothing : Resisting the Attention Economy , Jenny Odell describes it as a margin of being able to afford the consequences, individually and socially. In setting goals and accomplishing them, I am defining what latitude I have in refusing to be a version of someone else's dream. By that I mean replicating someone else’s desire by being that recognised ‘somebody, then to imagine myself being on that pedestal while others look to me for their dreams and aspirations. I can’t imagine putting up with the imposter syndrome just to be someone else’s goalpost. While I am enjoying the level of autonomy financially and having the privilege of safety, I can dream differently.
I have been staying home a lot, and to my surprise, accomplished loads. While it felt like the world is finally at a pace I can catch up with, there are fleeting moments of feeling stagnant (who hasn’t really). While not dreaming of labor is an oversimplified approach to refusal, and the advice that hobbies is the answer to over-extraction is farfetched - I dream of commuting. I crave the sense of solitude specific to being a passenger. It was this exquisite pocket of time that is free to be idled, and let momentum do its job carrying me somewhere. All I need is a destination to get me on that train. Yet, the destination was just an excuse, the commute is where I want to be. The journey was half the fun, or something cheesy like that.