Another year? What of it? Do we live and grow by the hour? Do we not in a moment sometimes age years through an experience? Do we not in a year sometimes move not a step further than we stood before?
Anais Nin
I originally started writing this late at night around new years eve. I was staring out at the lights of Los Angeles from high up in Laurel Canyon, taking in the warm December air, some Campari, and a full week off of work. The city was burning internally with overrun ICUs and the most predictable, and impending wave of new covid cases and variants.
I returned to this the next morning on January 1, but as I continued to write, I realized that I hadn’t felt a sense of completeness about the prior year or what it had impressed upon me, nor had I given it time to properly breathe. It felt unfinished.
I can’t say that now, at a house in Hollywood on a late-march Sunday evening, is materially better, but I feel like there’s some importance in having these thoughts fully written before whatever comes next. These letters, which I try to send at least 1-3x per year, are as much for my loved ones on this email, as they are for myself to capture what goes through my head at various points in life.
The one caveat I’d like to say is, being reflective is not an exercise in ego or depression. I write these for me, for you, and for Us. The one thing I’ve come to appreciate (and am trying my best to properly invest in moving forward) is that documenting and paying attention to your life and its surroundings is important both when things are going great, and when they are not. If not for honesty, but for your future self to truly have an understanding of who you were across those various states and times.
I feel like all that has happened from February 2020 (when I sent Inertia, Mortality, and Friendship) to March 2021, evoked lots of feelings as we head into a re-opened and possibly new world.
So sitting here I guess I’ll classify all these thoughts as feelings of anxiety, of hope, of excitement, of introspection, of recovery, and of transition.
Memory blurs, that’s the point. If memory didn’t blur you wouldn’t have the fool’s courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.
Joyce Carol Oates
Humans have an incredibly short memory span. We over-optimize for the things we feel or remember in the short-term, while not being aware of the blurred feelings we have stored deeply in ourselves.
About 3 years ago I was in a bar in the Mission District. My friend Kevin looked up from his drink and said “you can only deal with mass volatility in either your work life or your personal life, but I’ve found when you have both, things can get really bad.”
Over the past few years I’ve taken this to heart as my life’s volatility has see-sawed back and forth between personal and professional. I always had Kevin in my head making me be thankful for this strength and counteracting balance in my life.
Ironically, that night I just mentioned above, Kevin had met up to consume many cocktails with me in a dark SF bar, as I had just broken up with my girlfriend (for the second time).
Humans are beautifully volatile.
My professional life has generally prepared me pretty well in understanding the pros and cons of volatility. You make high risk bets, with high variance, to have high rewards.
We don’t often think about our lives in this way because of their day-to-day stability, often looking up and only then realizing that days, weeks, or months have just passed us by. In reality we shouldn’t expect to live with massive highs, and strive for those massive highs, if we aren’t willing to deal with the lows.
I don’t think people internalize this enough. We celebrate happiness but we don’t really look sadness in the eyes. As a society we’ve gotten to a point where we empathize and at times romanticize extreme versions of these things, like depression, but sometimes you’re just, sad, and that’s…okay.
If we seek the levels of joy, breathless laughter, and painful smiles that we all do, we also should be totally okay dealing with the other end of that spectrum, whether that’s “I can’t be alone and I just want to be distracted” to “I can’t see a human and just want to feel the pain” and everything in-between.
Saying to be prepared to deal with highs and lows all sounds great but our world is rapidly changing and our lives are filled with volatility creating machines, which sometimes can lead to unforeseen levels of volatility or worse, black swan events.
Put another way; sometimes you just get fucking blindsided by a global pandemic.
If I were to classify 2020 into a single word I would say it was blindsiding. The thing with being blindsided is there are plenty of post-mortem thoughts where you in hindsight see everything that led up to the blindsiding moment. And it fucking kills you.
Regardless of the million things that you end up telling yourself during that post-mortem, the only way to really feel better is to realize that no matter what, the future You will once again miss something. Knowing that it’s a matter of when not if something will blindside you. And maybe we should take comfort in knowing that.
I remember coming back from San Francisco on March 6th, 2020 after talking to Jacob and thinking “well this COVID thing really is going to be bad.” The existence of the pandemic or even first quarantine length wasn’t blindsiding to me, but the mental overhead it would exert on my life sure was.
I am not an easily stressed person. Neurotic and easily annoyed? 1000%. Stressed? Not really.
My massive amount of privilege and luck until this point has caused me to generally believe in my ability to put myself in positive sum situations. But let me tell you…once I read a few early papers out of China on the impact of COVID on people with heart issues (~2-5% fatality rate) I realized I was spinning a proverbial gun chamber, playing Russian Roulette with this pandemic that we thought was a lung disease, with seemingly every interaction.
As a result, I haven’t hung out with anyone indoors for months, only being inside for more than 5-10 minutes with a very low number of other humans since March 2020, including some anxiety inducing hangouts in the aftermath. Exhausting.
Also exhausting, being blindsided by a former relationship. Again, it was probably when not if.
Sometimes seeing that person can destroy whatever you are feeling by making you realize the overly rosey state we hold past lovers in relative to reality. Other times, it can bring back all sorts of other nostalgic feelings, or it can do both at the same time. Our past selves contain multitudes.
As time has passed and things have normalized a bit, it mostly turns into a softer and duller pain that pops up randomly. A moment that flashes when you’re doing something totally irrelevant that brings you back to a place you will never be again. Seeking resolve, different people can float in and out of your life that make you temporarily forget about that feeling until you wake up one morning and it’s just…gone. Sometimes totally removed from you, sometimes just tucked away, letting more and more time pass each time it rears its head. It’s peaceful.
Ultimately, in every one of these moments, we sleep at night knowing we have always been our full selves and we must strive to continue to show people are fullest, most true selves.
COVID & Losing Our Full Selves
Pop culture has been obsessed with the idea of how a given protagonist manages to find themselves for some time now. That summer at sleep away camp, semester abroad, solo trip, move to a new city, and on and on we eat, prey, and love.
But what happens when we go through something that causes us to lose ourselves?
The canonical example of people losing themselves in my mind is when they enter into destructive or suboptimal relationships. We’ve all seen it. The person we know enters into an all-encompassing, suffocating relationship, only to become a shell of themselves in an eternal effort to prove available/worthy/”right” for their partner. Their sense of self becomes stripped away as it morphs into their constant surrounding of the other person.
But what happens when that sense of self is instead stripped away because our constant surrounding is now a quarantine, pandemic-driven hellscape1(is that dramatic enough)? I worry that many people will have lost themselves due to COVID and its impact on what we value, and maybe more precisely what we forget we value.
Remembering that us humans have a tendency to over-optimize for our short-term feelings, the question we have to ask ourselves is how much have we truly lost ourselves during this past year?
For the past year, our life has been a shell of itself. Pre-pandemic you could have a myriad of activities you enjoyed and instead quarantine has lowered the saturation on all of the color of your life, and caused you to remove 80% of those things and do watered down versions of the other 20% (dinner in the cold outside just sucks).
I think a large % of people are mistaking what they have become comfortable with, with what they will ultimately want when the world opens back up both because of internal and external pressures. There are life choices that we think we want now, but only because the excitement, stimulation, or other vectors of impact that our normal lives have on our personalities and relationships has been gone for so long that we forget their effects.
I felt this early on in my LA stint. I quickly had feelings of relief and calmness for the first time in most of 2020 when I got here, and started imagining my future life as an LA citizen. But when I stopped and really thought about how much I felt myself changing in a short period of time, I realized that at 30 you either can 1) be truly, at a breakneck pace, radically changing via a once in a lifetime event that impacts who you are as a person, or 2) be having an overreaction to a variety of things. Being pragmatic has been my downfall in some parts of my life so perhaps this is just sensible old Dempsey, not chasing every single emotion that comes at me, but we’ll see.
As I think about this, I only have one piece of wisdom which my friend Dylan once told me which is, don’t make decisions when you’re sick. And whether you want to believe it or not, right now we are all sick in some form.
We are forgetting a lot about what makes us who we are. It’s not isolated relationships with friends or loved ones, or the time we spend mostly behind a screen, or the happiness we get from JOMO (joy of missing out). Those things are all bankrupt without the gesture and thoughtfulness that applies to both sides of every interaction during normal times, which is;
In this moment in time, there are a million other things that this person could be doing with their finite minutes left on this earth, and they are opting to spend that dwindling time with me.
Don’t let inertia push your pandemic life into your normal life, and don’t let these pieces of our pre-pandemic selves slip into the ether.
The Great Acceleration
I feel like each year that goes by I’m writing a cliche about a boy growing up into a man and figuring out how the world works, while every adult could have told me this over and over again. Last year I challenged the choices we make about the proverbial mountain of life that we climb, in pursuit of our Quan.
Early on in the pandemic, a lot of my friend groups had settled on the notion that we were fairly lucky/in a perfect time in our lives for this quarantine. We were in our late 20s/30s, had experienced college and being young and dumb, and were starting to settle down a bit (in multiple ways) in our lives, left enjoying the weekend dinners with drinks, maybe one late night out per month, and very much content to be at home by midnight.
A year later this conversation is now more of a debate as to who has it the worst. It’s very clear that there are possible long-term impacts for children being essentially sheltered in place for a year’s time, during incredibly socially formative years. It also would suck to have a year of your finite college time taken from you, or that last senior year of high school summer.
Many people also think about how awful it must be for those just out of college or younger people, to that I say, value perspective. For 20-somethings I hope that this past year ends up being a gift. A gift of perspective that this life and decade is not infinite or to be taken for granted. In an upside scenario, some of them were perhaps given a year of saving more money than normal, a year with more time with parents that likely will only dwindle, and a year filled with perspective, while all being largely on the same path upon The Restart.
I turned 30 in September and I feel like this year being ripped from my peerset’s life will be more about the narrative of what I call The Great Acceleration.
At 30, you begin to see your friends fracture across social behaviors, scales of ambition, wealth bands, and committing to their proverbial Quans. The writing is on the wall as we begin to settle down with our potential life partner, some begin to talk more openly about where they want to raise their families, and a few of the first movers decide they have had enough of (insert expensive coastal elite city here) and head for more affordable, balanced, or different lives.
How can you tell you’re in the good old days before they are the good old days? We did.
Conversations among friends were not taken lightly about just how little responsibility we really had relative to where we all would possibly be in 5 years time with loved ones, kids, or who knows what else. And that knowledge was comforting and awakening. But instead of being able to see these last few years play out, COVID has mostly accelerated a lot of these decisions in people’s lives. If something is inevitable, is there really a need to fight it for the sake of an extra year? I had a large number of friends move out of NYC/SF/LA and likely many won’t come back.
I hope so much for these friends, of which some will fade. I hope these decisions are all great ones for them, but the great acceleration of life seemingly unnecessarily, needlessly ending a chapter of our lives a bit more abruptly than I had hoped for, is something that I think about a lot these days.
Suspension
There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you’d been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place, and for a moment you’re suspended, knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself.
Ann Patchet, The Dutch House
Last year, I also talked about how people just “float” through their lives and how much that confuses and pains me in a world in which I deeply long for a level of intentionality from everyone I will likely never get.
Sometimes I think a lot about the techies who are obsessed with space travel and pushing further and further out of our galaxy, and I wonder what are they searching for? There’s a very noble pursuit in this, which is the continual advancement of the human race, and the search for other intelligent life to better improve us and our chances of survival. The other is the continual search itself, always being focused on floating through this unknown time and space continuum, in order to “be in pursuit” and never have to land.
In late October, I loaded up a rental car one-way and drove across the country. I stopped along the way in DC, Nashville, Tulsa, Santa Fe, and Scottsdale before finally arriving in Los Angeles. I drove for very long stretches, listening to Norwegian Wood, a bunch of podcasts and articles, and a ton of music, surrounded by varying degrees of nothingness. It was as Covid cases had begun to rise, and it was during election week, so the country was in a weird spot, thus I would quickly stop 2x/day for gas, to use the bathroom, and a meal, before settling into an airbnb or friend’s house for the evening.
I was dreading the drive largely because it was 47 hours and for some reason I expected something to go wrong. My slightly older friends all said they were jealous. They wanted that type of time to think and be with themselves, and felt it would be incredible rewarding. I felt like people usually over-romanticize these types of things. We both were right.
It wasn’t until I was about 4 hours outside of LA that I realized I no longer had to kill time and this possible introspective moment had just passed me by. 43 hours down, 4 to go. So I turned off my music and just drove. I was in some ways facing what I had been ignoring for the past few months, but also settling into this next stretch of fake life that would be living by the beach, or in the hills, with great weather in relative isolation for the next few months.
This final month in LA I’ll enjoy and cherish, but in the back of my mind I know I will also be in suspension.
In March 2020, I flew back from San Francisco and hunkered down. I spent the next month basically locked in my apartment by myself, until eventually fleeing to my parents house for the majority of the Summer.
The last time I “walked into my apartment for the first time in awhile” it was in August and it was about a bit more empty than I had left it, featuring an extra set of keys on my dining room table. Those few months in New York were interesting, but they weren’t real life. Summer and Fall 2020 was some in-between of grasping for fragments of what my real life was, while knowing it wasn’t really going to be the same again.
I’ll be back in NYC in May and alas, now is time to essentially figure out whatever real life is. I wonder about how much NYC has changed and how I’ll feel about it, and also how much I have changed and how NYC will feel about it. I wonder if the things I’ve come to cherish and value will be the same after having lived in houses, in nice weather, with a car for 6 months. I wonder if this next chapter of our lives will be about a reversion to the mean, or the creation of a new baseline.
My first boss ever, Rich, once said to me “you have all these grand plans for life, and then life beats you down and you just try to survive”.
I’ve stolen that phrasing for the past decade and in a year where our lives really were about survival, it’s interesting to see just how true it really was. As I’ve been writing this tonight, the past 15 months have played through in this moment. We’re all now staring into the abyss of 2021 and onward and wondering if we are indeed picking up the proverbial pieces of a shattered puzzle, or instead looking to build an entirely new work of art. That is both exciting and terrifying.
It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.
Albert Camus, A Happy Death
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