The Tyranny of the Plan

Having been unemployed for some time now, my nights and weekends are my busy times when I'm out and about, precisely because all of my normal cohorts have jobs during the day time. For me, social interaction happens then because it cannot happen during the normal work day hours and because I don't have a job to sap my strength during the week, I look forward to the weekend for different reasons than I suspect my working friends do. However, when I was working, I used to cram my weekends full of stuff I couldn't get to during the week or fun stuff to do in order to decompress and relax, but which ultimately left me sitting at home on Sunday nights being unrested and dreading going back to work. Sure a lot of the things were fun, but they were still more things to do. We're so obsessed with doing in this country so as not to be perceived as wasteful or unproductive.

Why is it considered weird to do solitary things on a regular basis? So many of my people complain about how busy they are and yet we all do everything we can to fill up any spaces we have in our schedules with other things so we can feel like we've done something. I remember when weekend plans consisted of nothing more than heading down to a friend's house to watch movies all day - usually some TV series on DVD or some long movie trilogies. There was no plan, just a goal of watching as much of it as we could. That is a supremely lazy way to spend a day, and yet that was acceptable because it was done with two or more people. If someone called me to go to dinner and I said, "no, I'm going to stay in and watch all of season 1 of Battlestar Galactica", I'd be weird. My tradition for the last couple of years has been to buy one or two of the latest hot video games to come out on Wednesday before Thanksgiving and then spend the entire weekend in my apartment playing games - for 4 days, my only times to come out are to get food if I don't have any at home. Believe me, that has gotten some negative responses. But why?

I then started thinking about the classic "loner" character, someone who typically wouldn't have "big weekend plans". Are they victims of circumstance or focused individuals who don't have time for anything else? I think of Blade Runner's Deckard; Matty Roth or DJ Random Fire from DMZ; the solitary man and woman depicted by my In Passing vignette; the author going to the proverbial "cabin in the woods" to write his next novel; the hacker or video gamer who lives in a cluttered apartment with little social interaction; the solitary figure backpacking her way across Europe. Are they focused on what they're doing so much that they exclude others are are they just tragically pitiful characters?

I'll admit that there's a certain bit of romanticism that I apply to characters like this, and there are a fair number of times when I wish I could be like them. In recent years I've had gloriously romantic visions of holing up and doing nothing but drumming for hours on end and becoming as wickedly good as my body and skill will allow, or hitting the town with nothing but a small daypack of books and my trusty phone to see what kind of trouble I can get into, or burrowing into my place to do nothing but play video games until they're completed. To me, there's a certain glamor to being alone and working on your own timetable rather than anyone else's, being able to pick up and go where you want when you want for as long as you want, much like Jason Bourne or a character out of a William Gibson novel.

The problem is that practicing rudiments is boring, gas and copious amounts of beverages at coffee houses all cost money, as do video games (and I suck at them anyway). I don't have the patience to learn a new programming language or go through the examples in a tutorial unless I'm forced to do so. I don't have the ability to focus on something enough that I choose it over social interaction. I don't have a lot of personal resolve and I get bored quickly so if there's not any assurance of any long term success or resolution of a goal, I generally end up not finishing things and they fall by the wayside. My "todo" list is continuously being added to without much coming off of it (a lot like my reading and listening lists, actually). I tend to live in the present and the future doesn't impact me much unless there's a known quantity or event coming (e.g. saving up money for a probable layoff, which then happened). I don't like to waste energy or time and so my experimentation quotient is pretty low in most areas and strangely high in other areas. There's a lot of downtime between those experimentations and experiences, and sometimes they can be few and far between - so what to do in the meantime between those experiences? How does one stay motivated?

I'm finding that the line between tragedy and focus depends entirely on the individual - if the person is seeking companionship but cannot find it, that is tragedy; if they forsake companionship for the sake of the cause, that is focus. If the person is happy being by themselves, than it's a good thing. If they're seeking the presence of others but cannot find it, that would then be a bad thing. There is such a fine line between focus and tragedy. I believe that there is a certain balance between the two that needs to be struck for people to feel happy, and thus I need to find out what that balance is for me. Not that I'm unhappy, mind you, but I have found myself being a little more restless as of late and I'm trying to figure out what to do with it without blowing all my remaining savings in a week and a half. If you were to graph the experience of a planned life versus that of a loner life, I think you would find the planner curve to be a lazily bouncing sine wave that pretty much hovers right around the baseline - a lot of experiences that are fun and not so fun, but that are operating within expected parameters. The loner life, however, would be a jagged, sawtooth life of high highs and subterranean lows, for with great risk there is great reward but there is also great failure. When the only one to rely on is oneself, it's all or nothing. The experiences are so much more vivid and exciting when they're unplanned and can be savored to their full extent because there's not any set plan to limit how long they can be enjoyed.

So, when next you decide to ask me if I have any big plans for a specific time, don't be surprised or saddened if I say no. I'm pretty good at making things happen if I really want them to, and so if I don't have any specific plans that's probably by design and I'm operating in the "looking for trouble" mode and being wide open to things that come up at the last minute - because things invariably do.

I'll be looking for my sawtooth graph.