If I had to summarize what I’ve learned from YouTube over the past 3 or 4 years, I would say this: Life is short; the world is big.
I still have a soft spot in my heart for those tall geography books, with pictures from across the world, maps galore, and interesting facts. But honestly, these just can’t compete with Google Earth, urban exploration videos, and those addicting “top 10 weird places” videos. I once watched a time lapse of a freight carrier as it traveled to various ports across the world. I mean, holy crap, this is the sort of thing that only a relatively tiny number of people ever got to see in their lives before we had video cameras in our pockets.
For a long time now, I’ve been watching urban exploration videos, where people explore abandoned houses, factories, and buildings of any and all kinds. Some of these places have really deep histories, and the best YouTubers take the time to do the research and share that in the video. It’s haunting and fascinated, to step back in time to people’s lives, to step back into old technology that made the world go round. And it really opens your eyes to the natural decay all around us.
Many of the abandoned houses once belonged to old people who died and whose relatives never bothered to clean up the houses after them. A lifetime of memories, of collected things, lost aches and lost joys. It’s not that I needed any convincing that you don’t take anything with you when you die, it’s that these videos put that so powerfully in your face. There is a greatness to the exploration, to see and to inquire and to break past the social divides, to view places of beauty and remembrance, wrapped up in the greater cycles. You can’t help but be fascinated at these glimpses into the lives of other people. The haunting piece is that the time has already past, and the meaning is already lost. How can that not change your perspective on life?
Back when I wanted to study the ancient world for a living, I was always haunted by this. So you become learned and brilliant, you establish your identity on this or some such subject, you work for years and make a name for yourself, you amass books and contacts and rapport. But then what? You die, and your old dusty books get shelved into the dank, musty basement of some college you will it all to (and I know about dank library basements). You’d better hope your life was worth something in the midst of that because at some point it all passes away.
A lot of my time is spent strategizing how to live the life I really want to live. I write about this from time to time, and it does pretty much encompass most of the things I write about money, as well. Instead of buying dumb status symbols to impress equally dumb people, wasting my life, so to speak, storing up treasures and putting work on a pedestal, at the price of my soul, to satisfy the gods of culture, I’ve chosen a different path. It is, in some ways, an obsession, this desire for freedom. I’ve always wanted to explore, and there is so very much to explore, but I keep getting pulled back into complacency and the mundane. Sometimes I really envy these YouTubers who get to spend their lives…exploring. I say I would rather do that than spend 80 minutes commuting and 8 hours working every day, but the great struggle is proving this to myself. It’s not for lack of enjoying the simple pleasures, and no matter where you go or what life you live, there will always develop some sense of normalcy. It’s for lack of fully cultivating an examined life, and feeling so distracted from this endeavor.
I miss the sap of life. I remember how awed I was as a child. I remember the sand station in kindergarten, back when life was tactile. I remember how everything became about productivity, and these nasty, shriveled souls told me, like some great authority, that the feeling of sand between your fingers was for vacation, which you earned after work. Arbeit macht frei. I was told to admire the old people who had lived quiet lives but probably never had the guts to tell you they had hated it. Even worse, those who fell in love with meekness and servitude to pointless duty. The midlife crisis must be a sickness of soul. To be so discontent with the life lived, that is now past the half-shutting of the eyes!
I knew a guy and a girl in my youth group who were seriously dating at the time. We were all in another friends’ car when the guy said to the girl, “At this rate, I’m going to HAVE to become a doctor to keep up with your spending!” Ah, if only spines could be grown in the laboratory! – man, it would seem, might have no need for self respect.
The most beautiful place in this house is when you’re sitting on the can on a warm breezy day. The remodel on the bathroom was actually quite nice. The sun comes in through the window just right: it spackles across the textures of the wall, dancing across the other, and there but for a time you are captive to the branches swaying in the wind and the sun.
For now, I suppose, the compromise is dreaming. It helps to unwind at the end of the day to a relaxing drought of vicarious adventures. This is not a bad thing, in itself.