John Wise

Everything is perfect. The talk is about business, construction, golf, travel, and stocks. There are no junkies here, no homeless people getting free ice water, the bathrooms do not have coded door locks. The world eight miles from here is in a parallel universe, for while the product and brand are the same, the clientele may as well be from an alien planet.

Here are the doctors, lawyers, managers, engineers, executives, travelers, and tech workers, while over there are laborers, students, alcoholics, the impoverished, and occasionally those from the former list who are lured in by the brand, unaware that only the name and product is the same. In between is the universe of the majority who, should they drop into either of these locations, won’t have time to sit there and busy themselves with these differences. I, on the other hand, have the daily luxury of choosing a coffee shop where I can go write without too many distractions.

Obviously, though, I’m a magnet for distraction, on the hunt for something to write about. Since I was an early teen, when I’d secretly spirit myself away on public transit for the hour-long bus ride to downtown Los Angeles, where I could spy every flavor of aberrant behavior and ailment I’d never considered, I was looking to witness the extents of society. Forty-two years later, I’m able to drive myself to the location of my choosing and I have to admit this has grown old as the cast of characters now easily fit in their box of stereotypes. Each plays their role and works hard to ensure they don’t deviate from the behaviors that ensure their brand of conformity fits tightly.

This reminds me of why I travel: it is in order to escape the predictability of people. True that the people out on these travels are often as prone to the same mediocrity and banality that I see in the city, but there are nature and history to take the edge off my antipathy.

Maybe this has you asking, “Hey John, is that a hint of animosity I hear?” I’ve met the rare person who has a legitimacy of character where you sense they are not playing a role but are genuinely comfortable in their skin. On the other hand, there are the actors who are trying to be a parent, a boss, a friend, someone with street cred, a sophisticate, a muscleman, a proper lady, and the list goes on, even though their facades are thin to the point of transparency. I hear you thinking out loud, “Wow, who gave you the superpower to look into the souls of humanity?” Experience and a lot of time out looking and listening to people have helped, but make no mistake; I’m been wrong plenty of times.

Why does it matter? My sense of the tribe extends far beyond me and those in my immediate vicinity. There is much to learn from those who have the knowledge of things that are interesting. I’ve always loved the stories of exploration and invention and so I keep an ear close to the ground for those occasions when I can meet an adventurer of life. This routine has brought me into contact with many a creative person where others’ timidity might not have allowed a conversation to develop.

Is there a downside? My network is elusive and mostly ephemeral. I drop into it while others skirt on the edge before jettisoning off in new directions. This transitory nature has had the effect of reminding me that I’m probably a nomad by nature. When the economic situation demands that I cannot uproot everything in order to head out on a new exploration, these constant new encounters help simulate the condition where one is wandering the earth and discovering new places and personalities.

So, is everything perfect? Well, that depends on who and what I listen to and what I’m witnessing. Writing among the depraved and impoverished can bring a kind of hostility and sadness due to the extent of how people have not cared for themselves, while at other times, I revel in the absurdity. Sitting among the well-to-do can bludgeon me as I witness the over-exaggeration of their own self-worth while they play with their own grandiose sense of importance. Truth is, though, that I need both extremes and everything in the middle, as my curiosity revolves around the entire human condition and the full spectrum of who we people of Earth are at this tiny moment in the history of our species. I guess then that things are as perfect as they can be.

What is the source of my visceral disregard and even agitation at times towards all things popular? Why, when a plurality of people finds joy in a thing, do I find the banality of that pleasure to be a bludgeoning device meant to wreak havoc upon my intelligence? I cannot enjoy popular songs, television, or works of fiction that the masses enjoy, as my bias has been skewed towards believing that the affinity for the popular is an indication of just how debased the thing must be.

The affected personas of those who have assimilated the influence of the media appear devoid of a true self and mostly reflect fragments of the zeitgeist. Visual externalities and displays of pop culture references don’t convey any deeper intrinsic values of who a person is or how they are developing beyond becoming a cartoon billboard of their superficial interests.

The intellectual playground can only be exercised by conversation, and far too often, I find that many people are playing in buffoonery and don’t have much depth to share. This results in my own isolation and feelings of alienation, where I grow hostile at the status quo. A contradiction arises here where, on one hand I want to belong, but on the other, I don’t want to lower the expectations of myself in order to find common ground with the masses.

Why do I believe I’m so different that I proffer this elevated image of who I think I am? I am curious, but not as much as I would like to be. Every day, I attempt to learn something or express myself, hoping to discover a thought I hadn’t previously known. This isn’t enough, though, because I sense I have more to gain if I could muster a better focus to channel this curiosity into more refined skills. Though I see myself having this curiosity, I fail to glean even a hint of that spirit of exploration in most others that I casually encounter.

Read one of the most devastating ideas I’ve come across in a long while in Michael Lewis’s book, “The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds.” In it, the author writes about Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s studies about decision-making. Along the way, they observed that when people see things, they develop a bias that skews their opinions towards a different likelihood of occurrence compared to if they’d never seen something that created this situation. The specific example that struck me was how if someone sees a car accident, they are more inclined to perceive something similar happening to them.

If this is true, then if I look at people who play video games that allude to a bleak future and they go on to be worried about the zombie apocalypse, or I consider those who spend a lot of time star-gazing at celebrities only to join the selfie world of social media with the idea that they too will famous, then I have to realize it was I who was asleep in not recognizing that these trends are driving us into ever-increasing herds of smaller sizes that may never be rounded up again.

When we are having our senses bombarded by influencers we are being nudged to be biased for or against brands and products, as though they have greater value than things that are not hot topics. While virtual reality was hot, it paid to release a product for that space at that time when it was on everybody’s minds. Likewise, with Bitcoin, for a couple of years, it was the word everyone knew, and just as quickly, it has moved out of favor and lost its shine. Marijuana is the current buzz that is only gaining credibility and drawing everyone in.

These implications are mind-boggling to me because this implies that if I stop paying attention to politics, my bias for seeing them through my filter of panic will subside. Worse is the suggestion in the back of my mind that I either choose to go along with every new trend that comes along so I remain socially relevant and in the now, or I risk not knowing what is important to the flavor of the day social group I happen to be encountering at any given moment. Mind you, I’ve long been aware that moving with the trends meant walking with the in-crowd, which was anathema with my existence, but there was a time when we were more human in a common cultural sense than the nomadic trend whores we are becoming.

So if I’m interested in my own education, travel, and complexity, pastimes of someone with an inordinate amount of free time and latitude to explore the more refined arts, then I’m probably out of sync with the masses who prefer television, absurdity, tragedy, and hedonism a.ka. the in-crowd.

What was I thinking that led me to believe that the majority of my peers wanted to see their situation improve in life? What they really want is to have enough food and bullets for the apocalypse, enough selfies in the best locations to win at Tinder-wars, to be rich as soon as they flip a few homes or sell their holdings in some hot startup, to be famous for nothing, or healthy without effort all because their bias has been triggered by whatever they are choosing to witness and listen to from among their peers or from the media be it television or the internet.

Why was I thinking that all we were missing was a charismatic leader who could unify our efforts to better ourselves? The old school I grew up in is the most likely answer, and being too aware that for the past 2000 years, we’ve had charismatic people who inspired society, though on occasion brought it to its knees too. Instead, today, we are guided by idiots who need to milk their 15 seconds of fame.

This portends seriously horrid things for the future of humanity as we are on far too many divergent channels, building hostilities towards the things we do not agree with. The tribal ties that bound us together as nations and states are being torn apart by individuals intent on defining their reality by biases ingrained by repetition to affirm and validate one’s own brand. Sanity is for the delusional who want to believe we still live in a society.

How could I not see that the glue that binds has grown brittle and is flaking away?

The people of our planet range from barely human murderers to artists and inventors. We represent the gamut of what is possible in our species, from great to horrendous and everything in between. I once entertained idealistic thoughts that we were ascending in our intellectual evolution toward something profound, but here I am, checking that off as possibly a silly thought. True, I’ve always felt the majority of humanity followed a herd instinct, but I’d never considered that a vast number of people may not ever be able to embrace improving their situation.

When I was young I was restless and yearning to know and see more; I thought this was a basic human instinct. Maybe it was dormant in others, but I was sure it wasn’t something unique in me. Most of who and what I am are attributes shared with the rest of the animal kingdom, such as sleeping, eating, procreating, defecating, looking for shelter, and remaining on the lookout for danger. Our ability to communicate, enhanced by curiosity, is what distinguishes us from animals – or so I thought. Many of the animals in my species are apparently happy to live passive lives that afford them some creature comforts, but curiosity and the progress that comes from an exploration of the internal dialog are of no interest to them.

How does this change who I am or want to be? A part of my life path has been trying to discover what it is that nudges people to awaken their curiosity so their paths might grow more magnificent. If I want to believe I already have some of those rare qualities and my goal was to kickstart that instinct in those who likely do not desire such a thing in their lives, then why continue hoping there might be a key that will open that door for them?

I do not have an answer, as I’m at a crossroads. I fear that I am accepting pessimism and futility, which then makes me question if I’m being co-opted by the American zeitgeist. I cannot let go of optimism as it has been my constant companion for nearly 30 of my 55 years, and I believe I have enjoyed life all the more because of it.

We are like billions of tiny tribes intersecting within the wires and across multiple spectrums. Every day, the mass of humanity ventures into their digital routines where each person will likely come into contact with someone else in their orbit, creating a new temporary grouping. One’s emotional being and physical location, along with the time of day, are partly responsible for stitching the experience and trajectory of what this individual is moving into while going tribal. Whatever free will might be mustered in this exercise is the result of previous experiences and education that has shaped fragments of a persona that is hopefully still acquiring novelty from the potential to gain knowledge. This communication encounter originates out of our primordial experiences and is brought into modernity, where we go into our future slightly altered.

Fortunately, our subjective perception of reality is in alignment with that of many others in our relative proximity, which affords us common reference points. This gives rise to a lingua franca where, even when different spoken languages are encountered, gestures and a few newly learned words will typically suffice, allowing strangers to coexist and even help one another. On the other hand, consider for a moment that the landscape of reality is fluid, and you could step out of a jungle into an arctic landscape, never having before understood that such an environment was even possible; then, crossing back over the same threshold, you might step onto the savanna which would be another new concept to your perception of reality. Your ability to adapt your communication skills might be put to task by such abrupt transitions if words and ideas that describe these rapidly changing perspectives have yet to be learned.

Modernity is shrinking our cultural divides using digital media to allow people across the globe to peek into each other’s universes. From texting, photographs, streaming video, emojis, and social media, humanity has moved closer towards a universal language that looks to be an amalgamation of all previous forms of communication. Consequently, we all learn about realities that were previously unseen by the majority of people throughout history.

How might this continue to evolve? Many people are already using voice recognition, such as Siri, Google, and Alexa, to perform tasks or inquire about information. In the realm of Augmented Reality (AR), it would not be difficult to imagine a heads-up display of words spoken between strangers with a definition offered in the display in case they had not been understood. Similarly, when a person encounters an object they are unfamiliar with, a forward-facing camera could snap an image of the object which would be compared to images in a database until a match was found and presented to the user along with use case scenarios.

Extending this to subjects requiring proper lessons, a student could be guided through the learning processes by a digital assistant with visual representations of the activity or skill displayed to the user in culturally relevant terms.

Instead, it appears we are developing AR for gaming just as we are for Virtual Reality (VR). Why are we pandering to the lowest common denominator? It’s a given by now that in so many ways, games and porn drive industries such as home video in the late ’70s, the internet, and to a large extent, our mobile technology. It seems that porn might be the quickest path to adoption, but is that then supposed to define our ambition, and how would that play into training people for jobs utilizing emerging technologies such as AR and VR?

Maybe technology has been moving at a speed that is asking people to evolve their communication and education skills faster than the beast in us is comfortable with, and so appealing to our carnal desires, we are seducing humanity into change through intimacy. The inherent problem here is that we are then extending consumerism without simultaneously starting the initiative of training future users to be producers. For this next phase of economic prosperity to take hold, a training regimen on the scale of compulsory education that only became widespread in the 19^th century is going to have to occur.

We didn’t learn to farm in the cave, nor will we learn digital creation with a swipe or gesture. Storytelling, music, and dance require active participation, and to create a new online electronic universe, we must pull humanity into that reality across the divide. Virtual and Augmented Realities are well suited to viewing and experiencing our baby steps into this new form of data visualization, but at the moment, we are relying on a small cadre of developers to lead the way. We would have never invented rocketry and computer sciences had not a large pool of potential candidates who’d learned the skills required to build those industries made their early efforts.

Just as math and reading skills were essential to the last 200 years of commerce and governance, art, music, writing, and the sciences are going to be required for our path forward. Our current preoccupation with all things absurd is a detriment to embracing our creative sides that are required to harness the complexity at hand. To say we are in need of new tribal leaders found in each and every one of us is an understatement. I ponder far too often the question of what this spark towards enlightenment will be?

We are experiencing a global speed bump that is dissolving the ties that bind society: it is known as technology. While globalization has been taking place at a relatively glacial pace in comparison, the technology at our fingertips is fracturing ideas of cultural bonds. The Marxists at one time were afraid that the influence of a ruling class would put its stamp on the minions, instead, self-inflicted stupidity exacerbated by ego-driven indulgence is running rampant. This is possible due in large part to our lack of emphasis on education while social media drives the push for everyone to be a celebrity. The culture of community, city, and state is reduced from a shared culture to millions of mini cultures that have their cliques of adherents.

Small isolated islands of humanity filled with obtuse people dismissive of outsiders have started to form. This promises to foster new classes of utterly stupid people who no longer have the slightest hint of belonging to a larger group, much less society, a country, or maybe even our planet. We are licensing broad idiocy on a scale not seen since our most primitive beginnings, and that is unfair to our ancestors as they at least had strong survival skills. We are doing this in the name of personal freedom while not recognizing the basic tenets of civility that arise out of the shared community. This must happen, though, due to our headlong rush into technology without having knowledgeable people at the helm trying to parse what this explosion of social media and personal expression might bring to our societies. A counterbalance could be as simple as having serious leadership that would place an emphasis on education instead of conflict and mediocrity.

Could things be different? Not likely unless we’d been striving for broader intelligence decades ago. The prospect of enlightenment and social change hinted at frightened the status quo, which triggered a force to malign education and make it mostly unaffordable. While our tools used for the distribution of information and, ultimately, knowledge continued to evolve, the faculties of the masses to understand their potential have been hindered. So instead of mobile technology being used for our betterment, we are using it for games, porn, dating, sharing photos of our food, watching videos, and ordering coffee.

The things we use our smartphones for are all valid, but it is the imbalance where we eschew learning in order to bide our time due to perceived boredom that would otherwise overwhelm us that is my beef. That we treat education as a kind of malevolent thing is a criminal act against humanity. We should not know boredom if our minds and hobbies were able to engage us with practice instead of the internal pacing of a quiet brain untrained for dialog and further development of our skills. On our hamster wheels, the speed bumps are self-inflicted obstacles of our own making in our desire for an “easy” life.  Our technology should help challenge us, not pacify us into stasis.