What Life Should Be Like

Two Parts.

Part One.

Life should be easy to sustain on a labrynthine planet with a population of two, me with my life and somebody else with there's. And we spend our lives playing a game, trying to catch eachother out, trying to destroy eachother, or push eachother to new heights. A game so involving I can't tell if it's destructive or creative because I'm simply having too much fun. Too much fun to notice time going by, or what I'm doing with my life.

Life should be like that.

Part Two.

I enjoy reading my friend Yalei's blog, albeit it is usually much deeper and much wordier than the other 250 art blogs that I subscribe to. This post is in response to her profound post (forgive me Yalei if I am editorialising or misrepresenting) inability to complete the exercise of writing 'What Life Should Be Like'. Which is worth reading, Yalei has a very profound honesty about her creative process and a very generous honesty in posting it on a blog for anybody who is interested to read.

I can’t get over how difficult this question is. It’s really asking you what your ideals are. What your ultimate ideal life is. Why the hell do I find it so hard to answer this question? Once ideals are involved, rationale is 100% obliterated. So why is it hard when I have an open road to idealize away on?

I am fascinated by the differences between Yalei and myself. And for fear of appearing to preside in judgement over her, I am well aware that the only information I have is like you what is in the post. Rather I sit in judgement of myself.

I found the exercise pretty easy to do, in part because it is kind of premeditated, I imagine like most people I have spent a great deal of my cognition trying to imagine what life would be like. I also see an exercise as an exercise, so my response in part one is a 'hyper-efficient' version that I think Yalei really captures how the question captures what your ideals are.

With that aforementioned premeditation, my response reflects ideals that I have been forming over a long time. Thereby with past behaviour the best predictor of future behaviour you could expect my ideals, what I'm searching for unlikely to change.

And yet, I find committing them to paper - or computer pixels or whatever - not much of a committment at all. I just assume I'm free to change my ideals whenever I like. I can reanswer this question, produce as many drafts as I like. I probably wont, because of time constraints.

I mean it's an exercise that allows us to write anything, and ultimately with these exercises I take the view that we only have to produce something. But at the same time, having had the horriffic and debilitating experience of an existential crisis, I know too well first hand the pain of having everyone thinking you can do anything, and how hard it is to figure out the something you should do.

soooooooooooooooooooooooo... I dunno, why Yalei and I are different. But I'm glad we are. It's more enriching out here in blog world.