Persistence of Cloud Storage

Hi Patricia,

Today I forgot, and I didn’t fight it. Forgetting without a connection. I believe this is the second of the great modern emotions.

I watched one of those internet videos. It seems to be all I do. And it was Louis CK talking about being sad. But there was a twist to it, he became emotional without picking up his phone. The first very modern emotion. Sadness without disconnection.

It’s a fantastic story, and one that I highly recommend. What I find interesting is how we append certain attributes to emotion these days. I was happy…without laughing at a gif. I killed at a puzzle…without looking it up. I was sad…without looking at my phone.Today I forgot. And I didn’t fear it.

There’s about a half dozen scenarios that I find unbelievably terrifying. Particle accelerators consuming the world. Earth *clunk* hitting the edge of space. And a few others that I’ll leave to the imagination.

But they’re all a subset of one thing: being forgotten. The idea that we are in the box, likely with a cat, and when they find us we will all be dead. All the things we were thinking, gone on in our heads, unspoken, unpronounced, unconsumed, gone in a whisper of a whisper. The screaming mushroom on the tree falling in the woods. (sorry)

What is the most hidden of deaths we have today? Folks with cancer bravely speak until the death. Movies are made about AIDS patients. We even have messages from those in terrorist attacks. (unlinked, because) But we did not see Ronald Reagan for a decade before his death. Terry Pratchett is a rarity. The inner life of the Alzheimer’s patient is left silent. They are trapped and forgetting. Therefore, forgotten. And feared.

Today I forgot. And I was okay with it.

I was walking home and I built myself into a towering rage about something that I just feel that should be taken into account and … I completely forget. It was one of those train car thoughts, where the locomotive pulls out of the station and starts barreling to its destination faster than new cars can be hooked up. Gone in progression, the cars are very logical. But a moment in, you’re focused on the next car rather than the place the locomotive is heading.

And dammit, I forgot what the locomotive was. There was some impetus to this line of cars, and I simply could not backtrack from where I had arrived to where I started.

I reached for my phone to start pecking in notes to myself. I do this a lot, to make sure that I know what I was thinking.

Of course I have an excuse. Given the distance between the girls and the rest of our family, I make a solid effort to shovel good things onto the internet, and tag them for the family to see. It’s gotten to the point that Facebook recognizes our daughter as my wife, for all the Electra complexes that will be in the future. I also think I’m witty and folks are entertained by me. So they NEED my insight. And I need to store my memory on the interwebs.

But I didn’t take out my phone. No reason but that I felt I should fight whatever was compelling me to write down whatever it was I was thinking and to feel the sensation of forgetting.

And I forgot. All the memory of that leading edge of reason is now trailing out to wherever it was going. I simply don’t know. There’s a hole in my gut, pulling my shoulders down and begging me to concentrate. To pull out whatever shards of memory there are. And I’m not going to do it. Not tonight. I’m going to let the things I saw and the things I was thinking about whither into the ether. And I’m going to try my damnedest to not worry about it.

Maybe, after sadness and forgetting, not worrying about it is the third great modern emotion. I forgot to take pictures too. Please forgive me (which may be #4).

Cheers,
Ray

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Hi Ray,

Wow, what a great topic.  I'll never do it justice in a single blog entry. Nonetheless, I apologize in advance; this is gonna be a long one.

So, to make sure I am getting this right, the Great Modern Emotions, per The World According to Dubicki, are:

1. Sadness without disconnection
2. Forgetting without a connection
3. Not worrying about having an emotion
4. Needing forgiveness for everything 

These are all intimately connected, facets of the same diamond, sharp enough to cut glass – and skin and bone and sinew if you let it sink in too deep. 

Sadness Without Disconnection 

That Louis CK clip is brilliant; it was the only thing I’d ever seen him do when I first saw it last year and it made me an instant fan. And not just because I haven’t bought my kids cell phones, either (a fact they equate with child abuse). His point about how the growing need to be constantly engaged undermines the development of empathy is well made. As is his observation that we are not only losing the ability to connect with others, but also with ourselves.

People, particularly kids, are devolving – losing the capacity to just be. To be in the moment; to be present in the moment; to not be doing something. To be in public without a device to hide behind, technological camouflage shielding us from face-to-face human interaction while providing us asynchronous life. We watch YouTube videos from folks on webcams, calling out to the crowded void of cyberspace – their recordings, evidence of existence. We have emails for review and response – documentary proof of life. Text messages memorialize that for a moment, someone thought about us – reinforcing that when they hit send, we were definitely, certainly, really real.

But we're mostly just keeping ourselves occupied and distracted. There’s an app for that! We're playing Temple Run so we don’t have to admit oblivion. So we don’t have to sit in that excruciating quiet place where Louis C.K. pulled his car over and was alone – mindfully alone – and cried. We want to be too busy to face what he described with brutal eloquence as the knowledge that "underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty. Forever-empty. That knowledge that it's all for nothing and that you're alone… Life is tremendously sad, just by being in it."

We'll do anything to disconnect from the sadness: alcohol, drugs, sex, shopping, prayer, crusades, karaoke, working ourselves to death, Flappy Birds… I see why you dubbed this one "the first very modern emotion." It’s a biggie.

People didn't used to assume happiness. Life was hard; survival, not guaranteed. Memes joke about The Struggle because we know we don’t engage in it. Our first world problems presuppose a life of ease. We feel compelled to insulate our kids from hardship and thus create generations who expect to be continuously entertained. We’re creating a whole society that decries quietude as boredom and solitude as loneliness. They rule by divine right and demand a court full of jesters, minstrels and fools. And we oblige them because to deny them, we glimpse our own mortal abyss of sadness. For kids who have never learned to handle disappointment, when it comes, it is devastating. We haven’t taught them to stand firm and let the quiet wash over them; to face the Forever-empty and survive it; to make their lives meaningful in the present moment.

Because that's the best we can do, right? Make our own meaning and purpose in life, however evanescent, because it’s what we’ve got.

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Sigh. My depressive prattling on The First Great Modern Emotion has gone on so long I feel it's only fair to close now. I suspect this will be as exhausting to read as it was to write, so I'll spare us all Emotions 2-4 for the nonce. It may be slightly against The Fugitive Lex Rules of Professional Conduct, as described in our Brief, but I may continue with the Emotions in a future volley, particularly since by attacking them numerically instead of by order of appearance, I have completely failed to respond to your primary subject: the terrifying beauty of forgetting. Oops.

Until then,
Patricia

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Hi Patricia,

The "crowded void" is a perfect thought. So many people surrounding us, all feeling like we're floating alone. How do we overcome that? Noise.

A professor, the incredibly insightful Audrey McFarlane, once talked to my class about the "narcotic use of alcohol" in communities and families. All the things you list could fill the narcotic bill. It's not about the Flappy Birds or the sex or the Flappy Birds sex. It's about the why. Why did an entire day disappear into this game? Why don't I remember making it home last night? Too many times, the answer is "because not wanting to feel kind of got away from me."

And too many times, people don't even ask the question. That would be far too active. Self reflection is an active state. Fundamentally, The Connection is passive. I have shown up. I am demanding you serve me happiness. Or, as was said about twenty years ago:

This is really hard for me because I've always argued that I am an active watcher. Consuming media, particularly film, is a hobby. I watch for story, for mood, for connections and reflections to other films I've seen.

But I am just watching. It is passive. Is it narcotic? I can see how the routine of going to the movies, including the rigamarole of food and drink and walking and all the other stuff, are just detachments or ways to keep me from thinking about other stuff.

Now I'm kind of sad because I might be using movies as a drug to forget my problems. And I can't go to the movies tonight, so I'm going to have to stay sad for a little while. Dammit.

Let's continue these in future posts. I look forward to your thoughts. Between the two of us, I'm sure we can come up with a way around these rules.

Cheers,
Ray