Dear Diary,
Yesterday, while relaxing in the packed Žalgiris Arena pool jacuzzi, I mused about the topic from the previous entry – the endless spinning of stories based on images and sounds about oneself in one’s exhausted little head – and what is essentially the goal of watching your life and its larger or smaller fragments, situations, over and over in your imagination like a film? As is known, one of the most popular activities of our times, engaged in by practically everyone with small exceptions, is content creation. Audio content, video content, photographic content, illustrative content, written content and every other kind – which, to be honest, is exactly what I’m now all concentrated and busy doing. And, of course, everyone, now without any exceptions, eagerly consumes that content in one form or another. Juxtaposing this fact with what usually happens in our imagination, especially during a freer minute, it becomes quite obvious that human nature is programmed with a drive to live life in such a way that there is as much valuable content in it as possible, as much valuable contendo as possible. Why? To share it with others, of course! If a person lived on the planet all alone, they probably wouldn’t be spinning that moment in their imagination for the third day in a row when staring at a starling they bonked their forehead full force into a pine – there would be nobody to share it with, so the need to keep the event “fresh” and garnish it with new tiny details also wouldn’t exist. Meanwhile, living in society there’s an endless sharing of life situations and stories, so there naturally arises a competition-stimulated need for those situations and stories to be somehow -er than those of the people around. A small car, a poor dwelling or a low salary saddens not because it’s uncomfortable to drive, there’s no coziness to live in, or it would be impossible to have a very tasty lunch for a very small sum of money, but because with such a life you can’t show off to anyone. Hence the desperation, anxiety and anger – what to do, what to change in life so that my story, my purchased items, my tales about them evoke unspeakable admiration and somewhat concealed black envy in everyone else.
Relationships, positions held, standing in society – all of it also saddens if it’s impossible to show off with it, to present it as attractive content, if they’re not better than those of the majority. And, most interestingly, they become cozy, fulfilling and pleasant if we keep them for ourselves, if we distance ourselves from the need to demonstrate them to others and create from them content accessible to a larger or smaller circle of people.
So what happened with you throughout your entire life, what happened with you in the last twenty, ten, five years, what happened with you this month, this week, today and this hour is your content, which you chew over and over in your inner dialogues, deciding how worthy it is to be publicly broadcast through mouth or technology to known and unknown persons. And if it’s not worthy, you spin in imagination alternative versions of it where it would be much more valuable, if only this and that hadn’t happened, or, conversely, if this and that had happened, thus causing yourself an additional avalanche of pain and regret. Meanwhile the ability to put this usual but pointless activity aside and plunge into a moment without content, into a moment without the need to remember, analyze and later broadcast to others, is a return to something real, natural, pleasant and innate. To a state where along with the content dissolves the main, successful or not, character performing in it.
So that’s the kind of content for a calm Sunday evening, born while bubbling in the jacuzzi. I wanted, of course, to bring back different content from the IQ Battle semifinal – the kind with prize places and triumphantly raised hands of all sorts – but what can you do now – it is what it is… :-)
