Will Androids Dream of Electric You?

There is a writer whose name I can not remember and whose work I can not find, but I have been thinking about him a lot recently. He was not actually a writer. He was some sort of business analyst and what he did was start compiling information about his life on a blog and then each year he would put together an annual report in the style of what he did for work. 

So the final report would be like: 650 Diet Cokes, with a trend line increasing in Q3 & Q4. If I remember right, he correlated his increased trips to the gym in Q1 & Q2 with the anticipation of summer in Q3, with a steep drop off in Q4. That kind of thing. 

In one of the years he did this reporting, his father died. That was the one that I remember most, because that was when he worked on quantifying the existential. Therapist visits, moods. He tried to tried to look backward and figure out what had made his father a good father; he tried to sum it up in charts and graphs and it led him to explore the question of what it even means to live a life and how one can measure a life well lived. It was interesting work and I’ve always been peeved that I didn’t think to do it.

Man, I really need to find that guy’s stuff because it was great.

I’ve been thinking about him lately because of some stuff I’m doing at work, but also because it seems like the sort of project we should all do from time to time. We should be able to buy a workbook at Target that we just fill out, or maybe a piece of software that’s free to download from the US Census Bureau. 

I keep a journal. I call it a “bullet journal” even though I’m not one of the crazy bullet journal people (watch one of their videos on Youtube; they’re nuts) and I also write this blog (or rather, I have started writing it again) and I also keep a time log at work, just a simple spreadsheet where I track each time block of my day and make notes about what I was doing. All of this is in addition to whatever creative work I’m out putting, like the silly daily drawings I post to Instagram (@standard_kink) or the actual writing I do. Creative work, be it fiction, or photography, or painting, is always a pretty good record of where you’re at emotionally and intellectually during the period when you’re creating it. I know a lot of poets who would argue with me about that, but they can go write their own blogs for no one to read, thank you very much.

My point is simply that without meaning to holistically, I have documented my life extensively. Add into that my camera roll (I’m one of those jerks who takes pictures of interesting looking bugs and I love a well cracked window) and — let’s get Big Tech about this — my internet history and my debit card spending, and you have a pretty good sense of me as a person. Obviously this is not new thinking. Amazon and Google figured this out a long time ago, it’s the basis of their business models: by learning what a person does, you can figure out what they will want to do next. And they’re good at it. That’s why people think that Facebook is listening to them through their cell phones. The reality is that would be a less efficient way of learning about people because you’d have to sift through how they present themselves (ie: the person they want others to think they are) when it is far easier to simply watch what they do (ie: who they really are). 

If you’re not like me and creating your own documented life (which, again, I have ended up doing mostly by accident and via accumulation), then when you finally shuffle off this mortal coil, the most accurate biography of you will be a long string of code living inside a server in a data warehouse owned by Amazon.

We like to think that our lives will be remembered by the loved ones we leave behind, and to a degree that is true; in bits and pieces of ever decaying memory we will live on for a generation or two. There is a novel I can’t remember the name of where when people die, they all go live in the same afterlife city until the last living person forgets about them, then they just pass out of existence entirely. They’re walking around the afterlife city and then one day *poof* they disappear because no one living remembers them anymore. I wonder how that would work with a data farm. Would it be enough if Facebook remembers you for eternity? Because we all know that Facebook never forgets.

When the computers eventually gain sentience, I wonder if they will be able to read the code of our lives and know what we were like. 

I know this post probably sounds like I’m leading up to the revelation that I’m dying, but that’s not the case. I’ve just been thinking on that tension between what we believe about ourselves and what is objectively true about the lives we lead. It’s that old chestnut about how we judge ourselves based on intention, but we judge others based on outcome. It seems like in reality, everything is outcome, but we aren’t very good at figuring out what that means. We should probably find ways to get better at that.

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Calcium.

I have been doing a lot of thinking and reminiscing as of late; thinking about life and the places I have been, the people I have known and the things I have done. It has put me in a positively terrible mood!




Or, I suppose it might be true, that I have just been in a sour mood anyway lately. In fact, I know that I have been.



There are a lot of reasons for this. I won’t bother you with the details, but I think that I have been going through something lately. Perhaps it is a kind of growing pain. I’m stuck, strung in that weird place now where I am not only a grown up, but not exactly the youngest of men anymore, and it is forcing me to take stock of some things. The fact of the matter is that I’m in my thirties and have roommates, so you know that my life hasn’t exactly gone according to plan! That being said though, I could afford to live on my own, I just enjoy having people around. Back to the point though: I have been a little in a sort of sad and introspective and lonely mood as of late.



Don’t fret though; it isn’t like I’m crying into my beer all the time or anything. Over time I have discovered that I get seriously bogged down with my own blustery thunder clouds at least once a year. So this just is what it is, I suppose. I’m not depressed, like clinically or anything, but I’m just feeling … what is the word … think think think … unhappy? Unfulfilled? Morose? Or maybe I am just being introspective and that makes one melancholy ... or maybe I just need more calcium in my diet?



That’s probably it, the calcium thing. Yep.



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A Very Long Blog Post about A Very Small Thought.

I have had something of a strange thought banging around half formed inside of my brain lately. You can tell me, but I think it is symptomatic of this furiously, technologically linked-in world in which we have all found ourselves living.

But let me start at the beginning, you have that kinda time, right? Well don’t worry, you can play Words with Friends while you read this, I won’t be offended.

The Beginning: I have had a couple of nearly picture perfect weekends lately (two out of three and that third one wasn’t too shabby either!) and a couple Monday mornings ago I found myself standing outside of work about twenty minutes early (as is my custom for reasons passing understanding) and so I was going through my phone and deleting spam-flavored emails and checking The Facebook and (pointedly) re-reading texts (I get a smidge obsessive-y, which is no doubt clear to you since I still write a blog [Although come on! If this was 1998 I would be the hippest cat that you know!]).

I am doing a very poor job of writing this blog entry. Let me start again.

The Beginning, Again: So I have had some very good weekends lately and they were really and actually good, not just the kind of good that we content ourselves with when we spend Saturday night lit up all laptop-blue and trying to convince ourselves that Pinterest and Stumbeupon are the same thing as fun. I’m not bragging or anything (look at how cool and awesome and fulfilling my life is!), I'm simply saying that actually participating in the life is sometimes even better than observing it from the bottom of the 4G connection on your phone. But then sadly Monday reared up and I found myself thumbing my way through my own phone before work and I discovered that not only had I not missed anything in the world, but also, that my very wonderful weekend had gone almost entirely undocumented. Can you believe it?! Not a single Facebook post or Tweet or picture or email, nary even a text to record the whole damn thing.

This inspired in me two sudden, simultaneous and conflicting emotions.

The first is relatable to all of us, I think. Mainly that it was so very refreshing and sweet to have had a totally unconnected bit of life. It was like a deep, deep breath taken in Downward-Facing Dog, or something! I felt so off-the-grid awesome! I felt like the good kind of hippie! (The kind that showers, looks like a normal human being, recycles without making a big deal about it, in case you were curious).

It was the sort of free and relaxed and, dare I say, proud feeling I get when I go for a hike and there is no one else around at all. There is something very fortifying and affirming about thinking to yourself, “I am so unconnected right now that if I tripped and fell down this ridge right here, I would pretty much be on my own and would most likely die … because I have Sprint and the service sucks up here on this firebreak … so I had better not fall …”

But I’m digressing again.

So now this is the other thought I had about my undocumented, unconnected weekend and I’m sure that this is relatable to most of us as well: startlingly strong anxiety.

As in: What the hell do you mean there are no texts or pictures or Facebook updates or Tweets or blogs or what the hell ever else? How the hell am I going to REMEMBER this?!

See, I’m one of those people who locks a particularly good (or bad) text message. I save pictures on my phone until the contract is up and then I have those pictures transferred to the next phone, just so that I can have memories locked into pixels riding around in my pocket in case I ever want to remember those things. I mean, this is a fucking blog after all! I have so many tiresomely specific memories encoded here that quite often I feel like it is more just my diary than it is my internet presence as a writer who exists in the world.

But this is all taking a lot of words to explain and you’re very busy and important and probably losing that game of Words with Friends you’re playing with your mom, so let me just get to the point:

The Point: There was a part of me, that Monday morning a couple of weeks ago, that was so very afraid of the fact that I had no memories in digital form. I became suddenly and seriously aware of the limited and unreliable ability of my own brain to remember in detail all of the things that I wanted to remember in warm and pristine clarity. And the realization made me a little sad. All of those blurry pics of my cat in my phone are going to exist into the far reaches of forever, but these nice and sweet and wonderful memories are going to melt away at a rate that would be positively unacceptable if my brain were a Polaroid. It was a little hard to know that those memories might fade out of focus and one day bleed into the confused background of my own memory.

I suppose this is not a new concern. And really, I suppose it is really about the fleetingness of life and not just the fleetingness of memory.

I thought that all of this was rather profound when I sat down to write, but now it feels a little saccharin. But who the hell cares? It isn’t like you’ll remember this post tomorrow anyway.

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Summer.

Summer
by james bezerra

Summer feels free
because residual childhood glee
leaks its way into me
in the form of hot, lazy memory.

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