States of Mind

I came home from a week-long solo trip to Utah a few years ago anxious and a little bit irritated. And though it had primarily been the prospect of the trip being over that had caused this, what I was really irritated about was my own inability to enter the "vacation mindset" more than I had on the trip. You know the one - the state where your everyday worries like work disappear from the back of your mind. In this state, you can have experiences like laying down to sleep in a tent at night and experiencing the ambient sounds around you, or thinking of the day's experiences, without additional narrative. To me, this means that the world comes to act merely as a canvas against which I can enjoy the nature of existence.

After the trip, I lamented how hard that state of mind had gotten to enter. Now, in 2019, I could assume I won't enter it again for many years, if ever. A strange thing has happened in the last 20 years, since I graduated high school. Even as I have gotten much richer, and my skill set has grown - both ostensibly making it possible to work less and worry less about whether I could work later - I've observed my degrees of freedom seeming to shrink, not expand.

I'm not claiming that the world has clamped down on me somehow - rather, that by misunderstanding what that state of mind requires, I have built my life in a way that makes achieving those circumstances nearly impossible. But it's not like there was some "golden age" of the freedom to inhabit the states of mind I wanted - at least, I don't think so. In my early 20's, I had the time, but not the mindset - I spent all my time depressed, feeling as if the world owed me more than it had given me. The only states of mind that linger with me from those times are the ones I used recreational drugs to enter, and those were exceedingly small proportions of my time (it's to their credit, I suppose, that I still remember them so vividly).

In my later 20's, and specifically from the last couple years that I lived in the Dewey house, until I started working again after going to Europe, I was probably in as close to a happy equilibrium as I have known. I was often busy, but I didn't care enough about work to worry about it when I was gone, and nothing else in my world registered. I had already taught myself how meaningless things were, and thus I never worried about what I didn't have or what I could lose. It was nice to travel, in part, because it didn't feel like anything was being left behind. Though it's probably an exaggeration, my mindset was essentially: "worst case, if I couldn't return, so what?" That was essentially phase one.

At some point after I met Merry and had gone back to work full time, I found myself fearing a particular change in myself. I told Merry about it at the time - I remember saying to her, that what I needed to succeed at all the new goals in my life was to apply my work mindset to my personal life. I predicted (fearfully) that this would not come without side-effects - and now I can see that I was more right than I could have then guessed. When I started applying analytic and project management principles to problems in my personal life, I opened floodgates that I couldn't re-close. Soon, those approaches overtook whole domains of my personality, where a sense of gestalt had alone thrived. My fixation on aesthetic experience was replaced with "measurable outcomes" and "continuous improvement."

The effect this had on my ability to access different states of mind was to make the hurdle to access them progressively higher. Eventually it became something of an oddity, even on a week-long trip, that I would enter a state of real relaxation. More likely was that I would spend the trip acting as I did in my everyday life - my thoughts jumping rapidly between half a dozen concerns, both immediate and far off, planning and optimizing and re-planning and re-optimizing the trip as I went, trying to "maximize enjoyment", as if such an equation not only existed, but required continuous monitoring.

If this wasn't the death knell of such states of mind (and maybe, in time, it still would have been), then having Signe was. Having a young child to care for essentially ensured that I will *never* part from my anxieties, just as it has ensured that I will never have any sufficiently long stretch of time to try, anyway. The thought of being away for a week feels like a pipe dream - but let me be specific. It's a pipe dream for two reasons - not just because her presence practically prevents it, but because I wouldn't want to be away from her for that long, either. Emotionally, having a child is like buying a house that you will never sell and never pay off the mortgage on - it consists of both an asset, bringing immense joy, and a liability, demanding your time and energy - forever.

Today, I seems to possess only one state of mind - the multitasking, hyperactive engine that wants to suck in problems and spit out answers aligned against a broader world view, rinse and repeat. This is true even when I'm doing something I consider recreational, like writing. Perhaps the best I can hope for in those circumstances is a temporary focus, where five of the six concerns-of-the-day drift off for a little while. There seems to be little such thing as an aesthetic mindset left in my life. And though I might have once thought that this "grand unified" mindset could be the best of all worlds, today it feels more like a prison that I am trapped within.