In The Meadows of My Deepest Fantasies
A long story about a short life, in search of the next frontier, why instant coffee is the next big thing, and a must read about a woman of our deepest desires
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I have a very clear vision of how I want to live my life: simple and meaningful. It’s been there since early childhood. Yet I’ve allowed myself to get sucked into the matrix too many times, voluntarily been caught up in the wheels of fame and fortune: the never-ending, infinite quest for a sense of belonging through more things and a busier life.
While the outside world cheered on (yippie, you made it to California, young brave and fearless man), inside I felt empty and lost. I was drowning in an abundance of work, friends, and material things. I felt like I had broken out of one prison just to be captured and tossed into another, neither, of course, of my own choosing.
I peaked with my TEDx talk about how organizing your life via the cloud was simpler, cheaper, and better. Switch mindset, I told my audience, from thinking in atoms to thinking in bits. Leave the hierarchy and join the network, breathe fresh decentralized air instead of the stuffy and old authoritarian recycled oxygen.
I had, like many before me, crossed the Rubicon and was now living on the edge of the new digital frontier. I ended my evangelism with that we are all digital nomads now, free to live and work anywhere, free from borders and boundaries, free from everything at last. I hadn’t just thought it, I had goddammit done it.
Two decades of relentlessly searching for the future and I had finally found it. I now had more power than past kings and queens in the palm of my hand: a credit card, a phone, and a passport was all I needed to rule the world (today an Apple Watch and a passport). I had dematerialized and digitized to the point of ridiculous perfection.
And now what, I thought, as I left the podium at the Manhattan Beach TEDx event, surrounded by an astonished audience who couldn’t imagine working remotely or running their lives via their phones, being so dependent on a single piece of hardware. Little did they know that only a few years later my life was going to be theirs.
When you search for something and finally find it, you realize that the value lies in the process, not the goal itself. The point of the search is to get to know yourself, and to find a way to peacefully coexist with that and everyone else. It’s never about reaching port but how well you learn to navigate in the open seas and raging storms.
“And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about." – Haruki Murakami
Everything that had begun as a playful search for the next frontier had now become my daily grind. There was batteries to be charged, emails to answer, texts, social media and my time, attention, and creative energy was again hijacked and filled to the brim with distractions and busyness.