At some vague point in the history of civilization our ancient ancestors ingested a heaping dose of technological psilocybin. Thousands of years later and the silo walls of traditional industry division are now melting into a puddle around our feet.
As the geometric disbursement of data accelerates exponentially, our perception of reality is morphing further and further out of our control, forcing billions of people around the world to simultaneously confront an uncomfortable spectrum of oscillating thoughts and feelings regarding the purpose of their own precarious existence!
Through the passive acceptance of one version update after another, across countless pieces of interdependent technologies that have been gradually woven deeper and deeper into the fabric of our individual lives—compounded over days, months, years, and generations—we’ve inadvertently created a world that we no longer recognize!
Why am I here? What am I supposed to be doing? What is a job? What is work? What is money? Where is this going and when do we get there? What is happening! Why is everything melllllting!
In the privacy of our own minds, these are the sorts of questions that we are all asking ourselves.
And while some like to argue that a simplified version of society was better—that we used to be healthier and happier before all this chaos and abundance and innovation and consumption consumed us—that debate is purely philosophical!
Instead, one must consider what an improbable point in the timeline of the universe it is to be an individual human, standing on the ground of this rotating planet, capable of having a debate with another human about the subjective quality of past eras!
Yes! I am alive! I am human! I have a brain!
And that brain is a sophisticated biological supercomputer! As I move through the world, it continuously absorbs a complex perceptual interpretation of my dynamic environmental surroundings. Some of this information is stored in various depths of memory while some of it is simply overwritten in real time.
My brain then draws bits and bytes of information from this churning ocean of mysterious data to both consciously and subconsciously influence the individual components I choose to work with, and the particular structures that I attempt to organize them into.
This computational process translates down to something that I refer to as, the cutting edge—the nuanced form of work, experimentation, construction, learning or play that my attention is primarily focused on from one minute or day to the next. My brain uses the assimilation of all past, present and future sources of information to auto-calculate instantaneous psychological pivots!
Like early explorers who built ships from wood, sailed the seas, and discovered the lands that we now inhabit, I am intrinsically motivated by the cerebral adventure of discovering the deconstructed patterns that I know lay dormant beneath the surface of this growing puddle—music notes waiting to be divided, numbers waiting to be cooked, colors waiting to be launched, subatomic particles waiting to be smeared, ingredients waiting to be played, concepts waiting to be tasted, words waiting to explode!
Because I know that the complex systems, processes and infrastructure used for converting the atomic particles of uranium into a manageable flow of electrons which can then be distributed into your home and throughout the circuitry of your mobile device, enabling you to read these very words, is at its core, no different than the words themselves—which is to say, 26 unique symbols and characters, organized into words, into sentences, into paragraphs, into pages–into a cohesive idea which will occupy an obscure constellation of neurons inside your brain for a variable duration of time!
I’m driven by my own generative reserve of totally irrational curiosity about whether or not it can or cannot be done—transcending all real and perceived constraints imposed upon me by an arbitrary currency that was invented by a group of men no different than you or I!
My entire life is lived on the cutting edge!
Like the combustion point on a bomb fuse racing erratically through a black sky. I protect my right to abandon ideas, zig in new directions, reverse thought processes, abandon conclusions, and make updates to my entire operating system based on all of the navigational pathways that my brain has both traveled and not yet traveled.
Society, though, is not prepared for any of this. They don’t understand what is happening. Society doesn’t understand the cutting edge. Some people even get outraged and demand—demand—that I provide justification for my mere existence!
“Who does he think he is!” they shout at me.
And to this outraged mob, I beg of you to please forgive me! Please, please try to understand—it is not that I don’t care. It’s that I simply cannot!
Because despite my deepest empathy for the psychological affliction that my mere existence and uncontainable identity evokes within the collective mind of an increasingly fearful and confused society, it’s through elementary mathematical calculation that finite time to pursue an infinite number of ideas, unfortunately leaves me with precisely zero amount of remaining time to concern myself with the preservation of a rigid neurological structure that my four letter name happens to represent within the mind of another mortal!
I have no final version. I have no destination and no place to be. There is no arrival. I came from nothing and my existence on this planet has no justification. It has no explanation and subscribes to no obligations. I’m just riding along the cutting edge until the combustion point on my fuse fizzles into the abyss and there’s nothing left but a silent puff of smoke.