“I got a lot of things going on.”

Doesn’t everyone? I feel like I’ve been hearing multiple different people use the phrase ‘disoriented’ lately. I’m working on an essay for a friend’s publication and one of the central ideas in it is that modernity is disorienting. It has been disorienting for centuries now, but it keeps getting more disorienting– because we keep moving faster, we keep getting bombarded with more information, we keep confronting more contexts and more varied contexts simultaneously. Dickens wrote “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” 166 years ago, and he was writing about about the late 1700s, or a lifetime before his own time.

So people have been disoriented for at least 4 or so lifetimes, and really, we could argue that it goes all the way back to the beginning. The transition to agriculture must have been incredibly disorienting, and the written word even more so. We could almost think of the story of humanity as the story of increasing fragmentation and disorientation over time. How much of it can we tolerate? We collectively push the frontier of that the same way our Olympic athletes continue to break records that were previously considered impossible. And as we expect more of ourselves, there are always others who struggle to meet those expectations. We could think of this as a kind of psycho-social-cognitive rat race, maybe. I remember reading old newspaper articles from the 1970s already complaining that Singapore’s education system was too relentless. And of course, there are far older posts and articles from the 1800s complaining about the pace of modern life being too much too bear.

I have a moderate amount of interest in putting together a good model of the disorientation caused by modernity– I think Baudelaire and McLuhan in particular had interesting thoughts worth revisiting– but if I’m honest with myself, I would much rather make progress in understanding and addressing my own disorientation. It seems probable that the two have a yin-yang relationship, in which case it doesn’t really matter which thing I choose to focus on initially. It makes sense to just focus on whatever is compelling to me.

One ‘obvious’ question that feels worth exploring is– what is disorientation exactly? What do we mean by it when we say it? In the most literal sense, it’s being lost, being overwhelmed, ‘losing one’s bearings’. I find myself losing interest. That’s too… removed from my experience. I haven’t been physically lost in a pretty long time. Google Maps takes care of that. The frequent mundane experience of disorientation for me happens when I accumulate too many tabs, too many notes, too many intentions, and then it all gets cluttered. Ah, and here I get to bring up an image that I’ve been saving for years to use in a substack post… how am I going to find it now? I know I have it on tumblr, and I also think I might still have it in one of my drafts on here…

Actually, fuck it.

I think there’s a ‘focus on what you want to see more of’ issue here, where trying to think and talk about disorientation doesn’t really help me very much when it comes to getting oriented. So how would I like to be oriented? There are some clues from Pericles and Lincoln and Nietzsche… situate yourself in history… see the bigger picture… I am a 35 year old extremely-online Singaporean who grew up on internet forums…

people complaining about overthinking… it’s not the real issue

people complaining about doomscrolling… it’s not the real issue

you don’t get very far by just trying to address symptoms. you have to know what you actually want. well what do I actually want? I want to write and publish essays. be more specific. about what? why? here part of me interrupts with, we’ve been here before, it doesn’t really work… why didn’t it work? tired…

/abandoned