When I was a child I had a vague notion of history. I remember trying to comprehend it.  History looked like an expanse of stained and yellowing paper with a dark timeline running through the middle of it. Cars were invented sometime in the past…sometime after knights fought for kings but probably before the TV was invented. The Revolutionary War was just before the Civil War because thats how we learned it in school–not much happened between so the times became condensed in my mind. And surely it was a long long time ago that people didn’t have light bulbs, air conditioning, toilets (seriously, how did people live without toilets!), and cars. I mean, at least they had trains for a long time before cars. And telephones too.  All of this was in some grand past long dead and incomprehensible. Just a timeline.

Some quick facts. It is 2010. The personal computer did not exist thirty years ago. Schools were still segregated 50 years ago. World War 2 was some 70 years ago. The great depression was some 80 years ago, and World War 1 was about 90 years ago. Slavery existed 150 years ago.

The lightbulb was invented in 1880. Before that everyone used candles and after that it took many many years for lights to become widespread.  That was130 years ago.  Think about that for a moment. The lightbulb changed the character of our existence forever. We could go to sleep any time. We could work at night, live at night. Before, darkness was impenetrable except for our feeble attempts with fire and our prayers to the stars and moon that they would shine brighter and light our way. Now we live by the lights we have artificially created.

Right around the same time, 1885, the first widely recognized internal combustion engine was built. Again, only 125 years ago. Before that you hardly could leave you town. When you did you had to travel long distances slowly or expensively. You had to get on a horse or ride in a carriage or walk. Your neighbors were the people you knew because you couldn’t know anyone else. Think of how much time we spend in cars. Think of the places we go, with such speed and consistency. Take all that away. Only a 125 years ago. Two average lifespans. And of course automobiles weren’t even common until after Ford, in the 1900s, and didn’t become a real part of every day life until even later. Yes, we had trains before but they were still quite different. And this is saying nothing of airplanes, which allow us to travel across the world in hours instead of months or even years.

Should I speak also of telephones and the fact that before we could only talk to people whom we had traveled long distances (quite slowly) to see or had carefully written to? I won’t even mention computers. Or the thousands of other integral technologies in our lives that we don’t really notice but which readily shape our lives. Polyester. Plastic. Air conditioning. And so on.

The industrial revolution occurred around the late 1700s, with the invention of the cotton gin, steam engine, and the use of iron. It really picked up steam (no pun intended) around the 1850s. 160 years ago. How long is that for a world to completely change character? In such a sense as it has…such an extreme sense. Its incomprehensible. Life as those people knew it is gone, perhaps forever. We either find ourselves entirely unable to comprehend such an existence or completely aghast at the thought of it.

Such a short time and such change. The whole nature of our experience stands altered by what we have created.

This is, again, the sort of thing I seek to study in my life–the way that the life we have created for ourselves frames and shapes the nature of our existence. Trying to comprehend the existence of pre-1850s in nearly impossible. I was fascinated tonight by Pride and Prejudice for that reason alone, nevermind the fact that its a Jane Austen romance. The world of then is not the world of now and a mere 150 years (200 in the case of Austen) separates us from that existence. How things have changed. How all of life has changed! What is this existence that we are living now!? How absurd and how fascinating!

I’ve thought about questions like this for a long time. I spent a long time on “What is happiness?” This question is almost as complicated and interesting as that one.

I speak passively, even coldly, but this is obviously something thats been bothering me for a long time, something which I feel very passionate about. The question was there through my whole relationship with Kayley and has weighed heavily on my mind since it ended.

My first thought is to wonder whether the concept has any meaning at all.  But of course it does. We use it all too often. We mean something by it. The word “love” puts a name on a desire, just like the word “happiness.”  Happiness entails the desire for purpose and for a positive (subjectively so) experience in our existence (this was my conclusion before). What desire is love? Why do we seek it so diligently and so desperately?

Love, of course, is a social desire. As I am coming to understand it, love is born out of the intense loneliness of our existence. Our experience entails that we can only know ourselves, and even that somewhat hazily (as we constantly recreate and redefine ourselves in our every day lives). We cannot be someone else, i.e. we cannot experience their experience, seeing the world as they do, with their set of knowledge and memories, with their train of thought, with their bodily experience, and their social situation. So we can never fully comprehend another being. All we can do to connect, to comprehend another being, is to use our limited and woefully insufficient tools–words, physical contact, imagination, art. Thus loneliness is born, an intense feeling of disconnect. These people around us appear like objects, unknowns, unable to be comprehended.  Likewise we see others and know that we are not comprehended but are constantly misunderstood and mis-characterized. We desire to be comprehended and we desire to comprehend.

While our mediums of communication are, in the end, ineffective at completely knowing another person they are enough to give us a sense of another’s existence, a hope for the intertwining of two existences, for the beginnings of a mutual comprehension of another’s experience.

Nature has built for us a physical counterpart for this philosophical desire. We call its sex.  But in a broader sense it is the whole sense of attraction that we feel for family–for children, for lovers, for parents–all of which are either a part of us or which we exchange physical intimacy with in–all of which is physical

So as far as I can see there are three reasons we love, which essentially makes up the three elements of love.

1. The desire to comprehend another’s existence, and to be comprehended
2. The overcoming of loneliness, to share one’s experience
3. Sexual and physical desire

These are the reasons we seek relationships. Elements of these three are what form love. The second involves the sort of thing we have when we say that someone is “really fun to be around.”  The first is more implicit, involving knowing the other person–on a simple level their likes and dislikes, on a more complex one, their deeper desires, feelings, and preferences. Both one and two involve the sort of thing we share when we help each other out and listen to another’s thoughts, concerns and feelings.

Thats my basic conclusion. I have some more questions about the role of sex in relation to the first two but that is an issue for another moment. Specifically, I wonder about the classifications we use in “friend”, “lover”, “boyfriend/girlfriend”, “fiancee”, “husband/wife.” What do all these labels mean given the three reasons that people love? How does relationships change between each? What use do these labels have for us? I have some thoughts on it but I’ll wait for another post.

This is just a partial list of some academic projects that I’ve had in mind and may or may not pursue.

• An exploration of the socio-cultural changes that occurred around 1990s, specifically the way that the world prior to 1990 is incomprehensible to those who live now, especially ppl my age (historical cliff, historical apathy)
• The rhetoric of the past, future, and alternate realities–living in fictions. ie, Reverse-historical Narratives, the recording of the past, appeal of alternate realities
• A historical study on the “futurism” that has existed at various points in time, with a focus on the rhetoric of the future
• A study of the rhetoric of emerging technologies today
• The difference between reception and philosophies of emerging technologies between the west and Japan.
• The role of metaphors, narratives, and framing in emerging technology discourse (the one I put in my personal statements for grad school)
• An ethnographic study of the way that advance technologies are incorporated into developing countries in new and interesting ways, including how they are viewed. (Of course this might not be within my level of expertise and ability.)
• I’d like to work with some psychologists studying the way that children are socialized into technology, especially the kind of kids that are skype-ing from the time they are babies (like my nephew). Of course, this one is also out of my jurisdiction. Maybe I could just help out with it.
• A technological account of the existential dilemma (my technological existentialism)
• My account of experiential existentialism (a far off project of mine that doesn’t necessarily relate to technology specifically).

I think thats it for now. Those are huge projects in themselves. This could take my whole life.

Last night I watched the Borne Identity. I remember that movie coming out as well as its three following. It came out 8 years ago. Eight. Years.  The cars look different, the people dress differently, even the movie quality is different.

When one is young the past is a black hole, an ineffable unknown. The Beatles, Casablanca, even the Cold War, Nixon,  and hippies are just tales we are told, stories recounted, and old recordings that often show up on the History Channel.  As a teenager, coming into your own, there seems like almost nothing existed before. All these things people talk about, all their worries, all their nostalgia, seems so strange and backward. It is because you don’t remember the Nixon scandal, the fear of the inevitable nuclear destruction, or the wonderful excitement of the Beatles at their height.  The childhood you do have is a blur of memories, hardly enough to do more than incite passing nostalgia for Ninja Turtles and Super Nintendo games.

But now its coming to me, history. I remember. Life really began right around 2000 for me, when I entered my teenage years and started to pay attention, started to remember, started to mark the time. Then there were memories. There were “periods” in my life. I recount them now like history. My first girlfriend, my time in the band playing piccolo, my estrangement from the world, my attempt to find a world in Utah, my year of confusion, my leaving the church, my relationship with Kayley–they are there, in my mind, in my past. But they fly away, they move further from the present and I cannot believe the pace at which they retreat. Kayley was already six months ago. My mission fiasco nearly 3 years now. 3 years…

It has been five years since I graduated from high school. And the time flows onward, flies onward. Before I know it I will be here again, five years from now, graduating with a Ph.D and thinking “It was five years since I graduated college!” And it flows on, never stopping. Nor do I want it to stop, only that it becomes untouchable the more it moves. And I can miss it. I can feel nostalgia. I can fill in history. I can remember. I can remember September 11. I can remember Bush. I can remember cell phones, the rise of computers, the introduction of flat screen TVs.

Is this what it means to grow up? Is this wisdom? Or is this merely age and the weight of living onward? What will it be like when I am 80? What if I could live for another hundred years? The distance would grow so long. Would I think back and remember the cute, sweet red-headed girl who was the first to win my heart? Will I recall the existence I have now, the feelings I feel?

Even if I did, it would be as a stranger reading a book, seeing, as a different person, the world of another that has long been past.  So it goes.

What do you do when you are faced with a conclusion, when you really feel that something is right or that you really want to do something? Do you actually pursue it? Does a conclusion have any reality within our lives?

I’m of the impression that it doesn’t really. We realize things all the time. We hear little bits of wisdom and we may even be of the opinion that we want to make something of them or that they are, at least, correct and true. But we don’t tend to make them part of us, to really let the feeling of the conclusion sink into our minds and saturate our lives. “That sounds right” we say. “I think thats important.” But then tomorrow we have moved on. We are always going on, moving on past whatever it was that we encountered, decided, or concluded today. Of course we can do this–as Sartre says, we are radically free and are choosing every moment who we want to be. This, however, is a nonposition, where one lets one’s thoughts have no reality in the world, where there is little guidance in one’s own step, in one’s own choice.

This seems strange to me. But I’ve done this of course. I spent my whole life doing it. Then one day I decided that I was going to pursue what I thought. I’ve tried since then to make the conclusions I reach become a reality in my life. So many people scoff at philosophy as impractical and silly; but perhaps it is simply because these people do not live by the words and thoughts that they themselves reach. I think that so much of our lives are spent following and living by the words and thoughts of others that sometimes we forget that it is our own thoughts and conclusions that matter. Or perhaps in the violent ever going-onward of our every day existence we can only grasp the logic of habit and conviction is something to be rationed and sparsely apportioned to only our most significant of conclusions.

What a lot of people don’t understand about me is that my constant exploration of life, this thing we call “philosophy”, these words I call “thoughts”, they are all an inextricable part of my character. What I conclude is myself–and this self is ever changing. Beliefs are not something that remain solid but change with the change in position, the growth of understanding, knowledge, and experiences to draw from.  What I am saying is that I am by no means a unified “Me” nor do I want to be, perhaps ever, but that this process is the constant process of creating my own existence as I like it.  Sometimes I surprise myself that my “opinions” have changed. But for me they are not merely opinions but the basis from which I act. Why would it be any other way?

I am not the bundle of conflict I used to be. But for a lot of people I meet, words don’t seem to sink in, conviction seems to lack substance. Is this because they have not truly understood what is said, even if they are the ones saying it? Or, to be less demeaning, is it because they have not really concluded it for themselves?

Since I made the choice to abandon the religious question is has seemed absurd to me that others are so unwilling to even consider the thought of doing so as well, despite their objections to religion and their critique of it as an institution and belief system. Likewise, as a vegetarian it is difficult to hear people give lip-service to their beliefs when they have no real object in the world, no real effect on their lives.  I am not lauding my own position as morally superior, I am only saying that it confuses me that people would believe, conclude, and hold to things that they don’t even hold to or which have no effect in their lives. It seems strange. Contradicting. Absurd.