Bringing the World Closer

My resolution for the coming year is to simplify living and business arrangements as much as they will allow. Yet, the more I consider this objective, the more presumptuous and foolish it sounds. Yes, it is a noble, self-preserving ambition, but utterly futile, given the amount of cooperation I would need from so many other individuals trying to simplify their own lives. What hubris to believe I can coax the world into accommodating my failing memory, flagging energy, dwindling patience! What will I propose next? To slow the earth's rotation to give us that extra hour we only borrow during daylight savings?

This resolution of mine plods hopelessly against the riptide of the zeitgeist. Thought leaders and moral authorities will enjoin me to embrace complexity, accede to time management strategies, learn meditation or a martial art, get a better attitude, overcome my neuroses, become more supple in body and spirit. I will be expected to comply with and even master the edicts of society--to become smarter, stronger, more self-reliant, slimmer, more youthful and more fit--even while time and age work their silent sabotage on my feckless efforts.

My humble life, so small in scale and simple by contrast with those who race across this country and the world in their own vain pursuits, has become so complicated that I can barely keep it in order. I find myself devoting increasing amounts of time and intellect devising schemas for staying organized and functional--otherwise I would squander days and weeks seeking or replacing things lost or misplaced.

My everyday affairs must be tied to my memory by strings of verbal reminders. For instance, I have a cheat sheet on my desktop with every ID and password that I need for various aspects of my life. Various accouterments must be kept in specific places for me to remember them. And I must follow a protocol or risk omitting a crucial item. Some of the passwords differ by a mere keystroke. If I add or subtract a character from any of these passwords, or mistake one for another, I will lose a good half hour, any serenity I had, and call computer-literate friends, and rack my brain for alternative solutions. And this is only my computer.

Even when something good comes to me, it comes at the price of complicating my life. I was at a store yesterday, redeeming a coupon for 25% off a single item. I had brought in the advertisement, not realizing that in order to obtain the coupon, I needed to click on a small red message in the center of the advertisement. The worker at the cash register was congenial and allowed me to use someone else's coupon. I said ruefully that I must have done something wrong. No worries, he reassured me, many customers did not go that extra step. I felt like an idiot for not reading more carefully; on the other hand, why should I have to read an ad more carefully? This was not fine print--it was 24 pt type. It is unjust to expect someone to open your email and click a second time for a coupon.

But this is the status quo. You must be willing to solve puzzles at every turn. And you must be willing to endure growing complications, unless you wish to pay others to do so for you. To live simply today is to abdicate a large portion of what is considered a life worth living. To live simply is to eschew the possibilities of ownership, success, fame, power. To live simply is to live outside society.

Yet to be caught in the endless nuances of identities and passwords, surcharges, percentages, roll-overs, warranties, acronyms, helplines, deadlines, peak-times, off-line, exclusions is to barely be alive at all. Since I devote so much attention to holding my own against the present, large tracts of the past and future are left unattended, dreams are relics in perfect condition but unusable, and future plans are jettisoned. Who has time to pick up an old story when EZ-Pass must be corresponded with several times about a toll mistakenly unpaid and a parking ticket must be fought against?

In trying to avoid variations of human contact that bleed me of precious time--physically going to offices and stores, talking to people in person, waiting in lines, etc.--I find myself losing equal amounts of time wandering farther for everything, even into a world of greater abstraction. Are people easier to deal with when they are e-mailing or talking from across the world? There is no greater feeling than when someone on a phone call solves your problem, but no worse frustration than explaining your problem to someone who cannot understand you regardless how hard you both try, and lacking the contact or concrete reference point to bridge the gap.

In the new year, I want to become more provincial, more grounded, more aware of my immediate surroundings. I want to break the internet addiction that makes me crave the news every ten minutes and I want to stop feeling that I need to be connected to a greater world that exists out there. In fact, I want to disabuse myself of the idea that there is a greater world than the one I experience first hand. Because ultimately, even if there is such a world, where people live and die and suffer more dramatically than I do, I don't know if I trust the news media to deliver it to me in any semblance of what it really is. The news seems more like the gossip of a door to door salesman--they're telling me something I don't need to know in order to sell me something I don't need to use.

In the year that is passing, I have worked at a distance, shopped at a distance, purchased major items at a distance, I learned at a distance. Gradually I have started to draw these activities closer to home so the they become tangible again, because if I continue to conduct the essential business of my life at greater distances from myself, my participation in those essential acts will be minimal, leaving little memory of these transactions. The past will become as abstract as the present and I will be reduced to a noun, a few adjectives-- and no verbs...surrounded by other nouns of uncertain origin. When this happens I will have lost not only activity, memory, and connection with others and the world--but language, as well.