At work, I finally hit my three-year anniversary at the company, which overwhelmed me. The passage of time's daunting presence loomed over me, and my mind could operate solely in its shadow. Over the last few weeks, I could only see the gaps in my own life, an unending gulf stretching between me and my idea of a perfect life. In this state, I was forced to contend with a latent anxiety I hadn't experienced since I was in my early 20s.
In this anxiety, I was looking anywhere and everywhere for a salve for my stress, even from my subconscious. Does it mean anything special when a phrase appears to you, right before you drift off into sleep? One of those thoughts that you will strain to bring back to awareness the next morning? One night, barely lucid, at the very edge of consciousness, a thought appeared... “I'm already here.”
I was feeling so distant from the versions of myself that I thought I would be when I was finally 27, and the only thought my subconscious could deliver to me was something that sounds like the title of a New Age-y self-help book. Yet, the thought has become flypaper for my attention; I can hardly think about anything else.
What is here? Where am I, anyway? There's the obvious here: two feet grounded into a rug in Brooklyn, a stable design job working in tech, a long-running newsletter, small cabals of friends in San Francisco and New York. But that's too straightforward, the subconscious was made to be overanalyzed based on my cursory readings of psychology.
Where am I relative to my younger self, mentally? Here could also be the position of maturity I am in now, the one that's able to question whether my younger self ever had dreams for the future version of myself, or simply wanted an older version of himself free of insecurity. He wanted me to have tons of visible success to soothe the insecurities of his self worth, large friend groups to soothe the insecurities of his poor social skills, and so on. But now, even without those accomplishments, I've conquered these insecurities through modest successes and a small circle of friends. I've outgrown these dreams over time and have found a place (here) that serves as a baseline of a good life.
Perhaps, this is a time to re-evaluate my dreams (if they ever were dreams), to take an imaginative look at what a perfect life can be. This is a challenge as well. I've never felt very imaginative — I remember dreading creative writing assignments, racking my brain for a hint of an original or interesting idea. I would always end up wanting to copy an existing idea, unable to form any unique ones of my own.
However, it's becoming increasingly clear to me that this is a problem that many people share. I wrote a piece on taste last year, around when a few people were starting to write about it. After that, there was an explosion of pieces on the topic, many of which continue to appear today, nearly always with the same core premise — taste is the basis of creativity, as creating becomes easier due to automation, taste will be the only thing that matters, etc. I wasn't very imaginative with the topic, referencing some of the same sources as everyone else, but seeing the sheer amount of repetitive re-treading of the same topics made me wonder what was happening.
When I decided to explore creativity, I learned that the most effective way to try and be original was to combine different stolen ideas with personal experience to turn them into something new entirely. After learning this, I became a consummate consumer, ingesting vast amounts of content online constantly, under the guise of understanding. It turns out, many other folks took this same approach. In an ideal world, every creative person would have our own distinct combination of sources to steal from, leading to great variety in the outputs of our work. However, this doesn't seem to be the case.
Even if we have access to the sum of all human knowledge, we typically are only scraping the surface with our own personal consumption of it. Despite the gargantuan horde of books, movies, art, and music at our fingertips, we're mostly consuming the same content, a small minority that becomes popular and accessible. The same few songs permeate our consciousness from short-form video, the same few older painters re-surface in a tweet or Substack note every few months, the same films are referenced over and over again. To some degree, these works rise to the top because they are very good, but I know that gems lay just beyond my purview, the purview of most people. There has to be more out there.
All of this has become even more apparent as I've been leaning more into graphic design, overtaken by a desire to tinker around with visuals more than words. Since I'm focused on an entirely distinct set of media to be inspired by, I feel a difference in not only what I'm consuming, but how my brain has been functioning. I've exposed myself to all sorts of visuals and ideas completely outside the realm of what I was familiar with. I'm confronted with pixel art and generative art of plants and fish, variable fonts and long lost posters. All of this visual stimulus makes my brain hum. Seeing an unfamiliar style makes me go into Figma and play around with how fonts interact, thinking about logos makes me consider how much more visuals can communicate than we give them credit for, reading about certain aesthetics makes me wonder if my visual experiments could predict what the future will look like. I imagine myself creating all sorts of graphics and websites, learning new software, pushing at the edges of what I feel comfortable doing.
I've started to take action as well. I saw an image of a stylized water drawing, and decided to try and turn it into an animation for a website. It had been years since I'd created any sort of vector graphic, and my subscription to Adobe had long lapsed. I decided to try and make it work with a mix of software that I barely knew how to use — Procreate on the iPad, Inkscape on my computer, CSS properties that I hardly understand. This idea that I thought would take an hour or two took four times as long and is still not done. It doesn't look very good, it's a work in progress, but the feeling of growth is addictive. I am not the same person I was when I began this project, I have a few more skills and slightly worse posture from slouching over my laptop. By expanding my awareness of other forms of media, I've already stoked my own imagination, made new art with its fire.
Armed with this stronger imagination, the question remains: what should my dreams be? I am inspired by the change possible within me even from such a small shift to my life. Can my dreams be less concrete than a vision of becoming a world-renowned designer or writer? What if it was simply my dream to stay this moldable by my environment and my inputs, adaptable enough to let small changes put my anxieties to rest?
Staying moldable would require a steadfast devotion to not letting myself stiffen against change, against trying new things or consuming new media or making new things. It would need for me to maintain the energy required for repeated reinvention. In a world built for convenience, it would mean going against the grain of society. But this dream doesn't feel far. My dreams don't need to be some distant place for me to travel to because, of course, I'm already here.
💧 Drops of the Week 💧
ALBUM - NEVER ENOUGH by Turnstile - everyone’s favorite hardcore band
POEM - “Dusk” by Georg Trakl - From shadows a wild dance still swings
already here- what a lovely thought! lately i’ve been feeling restless, always trying to anticipate the next thing. also really resonate with your observation on taste- there are trends even when it comes to substack writing
That is some beautiful writing. Reading this one gave me some more ideas of what I can write. Importantly, I understood where I can stretch my creative boundaries to try new ways. This was a validation that I can try many things.