“Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?”

Charles Bukowski, Charles Bukowski: A Little Book of Essential Quotes on Life, Art, and Love, 2019

The world makes us into things. Some become twisted, some not, but we all become what the world demands of us – or we are made to believe we are broken, and maybe we are. Maybe we’re not.

The society we live in demands of us as we demand of it. It writes upon us as we write upon it, though as individuals we do not have as much opportunity to affect society as we would like to think. We face the inertia of tradition, the peer pressure of those dead, combined with the inertia of those that are comfortable with the way things are or believe they are.

We tend to not apply our own knowledge to ourselves frequently, but we are in our own way a medium of society as much as society is our medium. In that regard, we’re also a message, but one of many and easily lost in the shuffle of chasing red dots – because society demands a toll, and this is the toll that has been negotiated in our interconnected world, even at the cost of broken time. We should decorate time.

This is a sort of problem. Inundated with interruptions parading as reminders, our lives are a pattern of hopeful decisions in a world we didn’t define, and the only way to change it is to define our world.

That means defining our inputs – what we take in and how we take it in, questioning what comes our way and interrogating it with rubber hoses and bright lights if necessary. It means defining our outputs, what we put out to the world.

And at the core, it means redefining ourselves.

Having lived a while, I don’t think that’s going to happen. But there is hope between the syclla and charybdis.