THIS OR THE APOCALYPSE Blog
By Ricky Armellino
Pushing Forward
Mainstream American news. It’s garbage. Everyone knows that with the exception of people who actually watch it. You never hear someone who doesn’t watch it ever say, “Yeah, I wish I got around to watching CNN or FOX News more”, you just don’t. It’s a constant stream of complete nonsense perpetuated by the narrow selection of personality types that would ever bother to end up on TV in the first place. If you turn on any of the big news shows you’re going to, at some point, hear about how many people in America are freeloading, just looking for a handout. That’s always something that’s so troublesome to news pundits. They’re just constantly degrading everyone from every different lifestyle that isn’t hyper rich and using really poorly constructed claims. It’s always anecdotal evidence; never the kind that proves anything. It’s stuff like, “hey watch this one video of some guy doing something while we free associate the broader implications from this one instance” or “many feel that something is something”. It’s just easier to make people feel and appear worthless than to address the problems that bring it about in the first place. A culture that hates one another is also infinitely easier to control.
The funny thing is that out of the thousands of people I’ve met over the years of traveling America, the freeloaders are a lot harder to find than you think. If you think someone is a waste, at least try getting to know them. People naturally like to throw their efforts into things. We have a sense of autonomy. Everyone wants to sit down, look at something they’ve done, point at it, and announce, “Me. That’s me. I did this shit.” It’s just a natural human instinct. We all want to do something. We just get tripped up and stuck. I think that the stagnation is just from feeling helpless. People start to think their efforts are useless or that someone else is going to do it better. I don’t even blame them. Propaganda is intense, man. Every day in the news, the facebook comments on your friends’ sites, the political conversations at the pizza shop, all day, we all just push blame around. The idea that blame is to be outsourced to everyone else. Blame the government, bad parents, liberals, the wars, the current head of state, your school for selling you on a immobile degree, your work for paying you minimum wage, the house of representatives, video games, the tea partiers, somebody’s religion, the lack of free market principles, the illuminati, whatever you want. It’s so to get sucked into it and apply that mentality to your own life, the things you actually have control over, to experience self-inflicted helplessness. We watch people fighting the same points over and over and see no results. If we believe that they’re actually addressing the real problems, then our lives can immediately seem unchangeable themselves and nothing feels “worth it”.
So if you’re having trouble pushing forward, you’re totally in my boat and a lot of other people are in it, too. Our economy is just in one of the stupidest states it has ever been in since the Great Depression and there isn’t a lot of the “immediate rewards” we need to feel super awesome about whatever we’re doing. It’s especially rough for people who want to have control over their own lives, to live off their own ambitions and efforts, when there isn’t a lot of capital to invest in or have invested in them. It also doesn’t help that we are sort of programmed to worship the idea of accumulating wealth to degrees where everything gets distorted and we get really suspicious of one another. You go through stages of feeling completely worthless because of unattainable goals and totally mistrusting of everyone else because of the notion that one person’s success is supposed to be meaningful in some way to everyone around them.
I go through stages where I just feel like I can’t get anything done no matter how hard I throw myself into it. I’ll feel like I’m in the process of mastering something right before I hit a wall and simply terminate whatever I’m working on and I just can’t ever stick to one thing. I will program beats, work on my novel, spend time researching new trades, try to pick up a new language, read the news obsessively, etc., right before I decide there’s something else more worth my time. Sometimes I can last a few weeks on one thing but it’s huge hindrance on figuring out how to complete something.
So when I was working on a full length in a band I’m in on the side, Century, Carson completely blew my mind by pulling out ideas he had written 7 damn years in the past. He pulled it off some hard drive and said, “Ah yeah, I made this stuff a while ago, maybe it’ll work.” Honestly, it did. Whenever we were working it seemed like he always had this vast collection of past ideas to pull up to get things rolling; just anything to keep the process moving along and never experience stagnation. It was brilliant to me, re-using inspiration from years back.
So when we got into it, I gave it a shot myself and dug around for old recordings and scratch tracks I ditched. It felt weird because I had decided they were totally obsolete and always sort of had that “oh, this stuff’s old, it sucks” mentality about it. But getting a chance to sit down and talk about them made a huge change in my perspective; like I was finally finding the reward for something I did back in the day. There were all ideas and efforts that didn’t seem worth it because I never received an immediate gratification for them.
I think what keeps us from throwing ourselves into something new is that we’re hardwired to ask when you get the paycheck. If it’s not necessarily on the horizon, it just doesn’t seem worth it because there’s no payoff. It’s really hard to convince yourself to do anything informally but you can apply some “practical” principles to pursuing a new hobby: The job market sucks right now we’re all putting huge amounts of time into perfecting skills we don’t even want simply because our own ambitions just seem impractical. With all of that down time, I say, “fuck it, just do whatever”. Get good at composing big band musicals. Write a movie script. Learn how to make a cabinet. Figure out how to finish your basement so your house is worth more money in the future. Stalk Tina Fey. Don’t even finish the project; just come back to it a few years later if you want. You never know when you’ll end up in a situation and you can pull it back up. I know this probably doesn’t seem like the most efficient use of your time, but you can’t hang a clock in front of your face all of the time and put yourself under all of that of needing to be perfect.
People in our generation take a ton of flack for taking smart phones everywhere and sitting on them all day, so why not just keep an app open and write down everything? A note for all of your to-dos, all the businesses you want to start up, a note with all of your bizarre dreams, a note with your girlfriends middle name and favorite horror movies, a note with your joke rap lyrics, a note with your favorite insults, etc. Just write them down, save them. You never know. Maybe if you have a kid one day you’ll need some really good insults to use on them or something, who knows? They’re your ideas and you have to stop thinking they’re not as good as the next persons. You have novels inside of you. Really good pick up lines and jokes. You have plans for a new form of long-board. Stop putting it off, just jot some notes down and move on to the next thing. Write one chapter in a book, decide it sucks, read it again in a few months and add some paragraphs to it. Add it to this other book you tried writing that sucks, maybe it’ll suck less. Let your life be a work in progress that you enjoy being a part of and for the love of all that is holy, STOP LISTENING TO THE RHETORIC OF KNOW-IT-ALLS AND ELITES ON TV WHO ARE PAID TO TALK DOWN TO PEOPLE AND BELITTLE THEM. Just learn from the people you work with and confide in them when you lose the desire to move forward on a project, maybe they can help you out. Doing something cool is worth it and it sometimes requires so little of your time you won’t even feel like you’re sacrificing anything.
