John Wise

The brevity of awareness, fear of enlightenment, and certainty that a kind of contagion will result from knowledge are all maladies plaguing modernity. We drag fear of the unknown from out of our distant past where the dark forest-harbored monsters bent on devouring our souls. Those things unseen and unexperienced would offend our sensibilities and bring disappointment, should we waste our time and money on that which we are certain we wouldn’t enjoy anyway. This is what living in history burdens us with – combined with a short lifespan that may not wake us to the lies.

A generation born of living in the moment and experiencing immediacy has been sheltered from the outside world by parents who wanted to shield them from that which they themselves feared more than living. Then, when their offspring, unaccustomed to face-to-face interactions, adapted to their sequestered existence, parents complained that their children didn’t have the social skills they deemed appropriate. In isolating their children, they cast the mold while the negative patterns were being reinforced by their own preoccupation and titillation delivered by the anxiety engine of television and the numbing of intimacy due to online porn.

Parents gleefully supplied the multitude of screens and connectivity to their children who assimilated the worse qualities of a society enchanted by the narrowing of their focus. Then, these very same parents dared have the audacity to question what happened to a generation as though they were fully unaware of their own selfish actions having an influence on their children. We look to tradition and nostalgia with the warmth that is now unjustified in light of the circumstances of being forced into an evolutionary catapult called technology.

With this type of conditioning, we should expect a deterministic behavior where the comfort of routine is returned again and again. To expect someone to wake from this state is magic thinking at best, but this is what the Boomers and Generation X expect of the Millennials, and Gen Z. We have created computer programs based on old paradigms that require the exact same results of the software to function like clockwork.

Nondeterminism is defined as a program that can exhibit different behaviors on different runs. I’m hijacking the term here and defining Neo-nondeterminism as an idea that people need to explore the intentionality of not doing things the same way over and over. They must get off their self-reinforcing hamster wheel of routine and change the pattern. From home to work, back home, cook, clean, sleep, back to work, and back home should not be fully normalized. Throw a monkey wrench into that routine.

Start some tutorials about a subject you would like to know more about or that you never considered learning. Pick a country on the globe, find a recipe from that country, and make a new dish for dinner. You might want to search YouTube for a list of songs from the same place to listen to while you cook and try these new flavors. Go bowling in drag just because, or start a band even if you don’t play an instrument. You have but this one life to try those things that are not reinforcing the boring potential we all call routine. Stop being so rigid in the outcomes you are accepting as what’s comfortable to you. You learned to poop outside the diaper into a toilet; you can learn to stop pooping on your opportunity for new experiences.

After spending the majority of my life being deterritorialized, I’m now “cursed,” living a glocalized existence. Little could I have understood that leaving New York state as a 5-year-old, being moved around between relatives, moving to California and taking up residence in Long Beach, Monterey Park, and then West Covina prior to moving to Arizona and within a few years of that heading off to Germany, where I’d be at home for ten years, I was being primed to have a nomadic sense of place.

It seems apparent to me now that this type of nomadism works to deterritorialize people. I had no connectivity to traditional social, cultural, or political identities but instead grew adept at normalizing diverse tastes for the various regional attitudes, flavors, and sounds that were integrating me. As I grew older, I desired to bring the hodgepodge of influences from my various stages in life to new modalities where novelty ruled, and traditions were never able to take hold.

Without American football, beer, god, television, Christmas, or guns as foundational cornerstones of who I see myself, I have been able to instead find refuge in the music of our vast world, pleasure in sampling the taste of water, the thrill of exploration, and the celebration of every day as my version of an experiential life. I’m in a state of near-constant curiosity about those things I’m yet to experience. I’m actively localizing my encounter with the globe and growing impatient with the market’s failure to bring me life as I want it to be: convenient and within reach.

For me, the palette of reality I’m able to paint from far exceeds the immediacy it affords me. The desert I live in is not only a physical realm but a metaphor for how I’m trapped in a kind of monotheistic capitalism, meaning there’s a tendency to be forced to pray before the American God of Consumerism. In my perfect world, the taste of Burma, China, and Italy, the live sounds of Indonesian gamelan, German minimalist techno, and the heavenly emanations of a choir singing in Latin, along with the clothes of rural Croatia, the fabric dying of Kumo shibori, or even a dhoti would be easily found and used, though I feel uncomfortable using these things here in conformist America.

As such, I no longer feel like an American in the classical sense of that identity but subjugated by a cultural orthodoxy verging on militantism. From my perspective outside this dominant purview, I feel it’s apparent that fear of losing the traditions and dominance of a ruling class has society scrambling to contain the evolutionary processes that are underway. It’s as though after 70 years of propagating a globalist agenda that was intended to strengthen American allies and contain leftist/communist anti-capitalism, the fruits of this global collaboration are having undesired follow-on effects.

The idea that putting the internet and humanity under tighter control could somehow quiet dissent and stymie attempts at rebellion seems to be futile. Our world shares music, film, food, art, electronics, communication, transportation, resources, and the environment, even when we are flawed in just how we do those things. Many people are well aware of the interdependence on one another, and it seems obvious that this will likely continue to shape our futures. The notion that this cat can be shoved into a box it left long ago is foolhardy at best.