It’s been two weeks since I uninstalled Twitter from my phone, deactivated my Facebook account, and turned off almost all the social media feeds I spend far too much time on. In just this short amount of time, it’s already been far more effective than my previous attempt. I’ve finished reading several books, in print and on my Kindle, done plenty of writing, and settling into the domestic routine of life in a new apartment with my partner. Not having the streams to distract me has helped me focus. I can think more in long-form, instead of 140-character chunks. After dropping a huge Tweetstorm, it’s harder to re-channel those thoughts into a longer piece.

Before typing this up, I finished reading Dave Eggers’s latest novel, The Circle. It’s a science-fiction satire about a technology company that’s Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon all rolled into one, The main character, Mae, works at the titular company as a Customer Experience agent, and as part of her job, starts to live in the omnipresent hyper-streams of the future network. As one character describes what happens to Mae:

“…[A]ll this stuff you’re involved in, it’s all gossip. It’s people talking about each other behind their backs. That’s the vast majority of this social media, all these reviews, all these comments. Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication. And besides that, it’s fucking dorky.”

Again, this is satire, and the character who drops that quote is pretty much a Captain Obvious Aesop, but there’s a kernel of truth to the quote. It’s one thing to keep in touch, it’s another thing to just spew your brainfarts into the stream with no sense of why. Why do we do it? We want to be liked, fav’d, retweeted… we want to be loved. And it’s done in the form of, as said Aesop describes as “snack food.” I’m sure you all read Mat Honan’s excellent essay about what happened when he liked everything he saw on Facebook for two days. You should also read Elan Morgan’s piece about what happened when he stopped liking things on Facebook, and Anil Dash’s essay on “The Semiotics of Like”. This isn’t even a new thing: Fish: A Tap Essay asked similar questions, over two years ago.

Reading The Circle and those above linked essays has me thinking a lot about what I’m going to do when my sabbatical ends, as it must, and I go back into the streams. I have to think about my relationship with the people on these services, as well as my relationship with the service itself. What data I surrender, where I choose to view and post into my streams, what I post, and what I allow to bug me. I’ll have more detailed thoughts closer to the end of my sabbatical, largely around Facebook, which is the worst offender in abusing my data, and the biggest of my social timesinks according to RescueTime. The only thing that’s allowed me to take action, however, stepping back and cutting everything off, allowing everything to come to a balance, and adjusting accordingly.

When you live in the streams and get lost in other people’s moments, it’s easy to lose perspective of who you are—your dreams, your ideas, your relationships. They all get subsumed in the long stream of data that washes over you every time you launch an app. Regaining perspective has been the greatest benefit of this sabbatical. I don’t want to lose it all when I go back. If I can’t go back with a sense of mindfulness, awareness, and perspective about the role these services play in my life, I may as well just cut them out together. I don’t want to be the anti-social media extremist, nor do I want to drown in the stream. There’s a middle ground to find.

Just over two years ago, I walked away from a job as a clerk with the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare. I worked there for eighteen months, and not by choice. It was the first full-time job, with benefits, that became available to me after a year of unemployment and hair-pulling stress. The job gave me a look inside a government agency that is too often seems like a black box—one with a number of misconception around it. These misconceptions are not only about how the welfare system works, but who uses it. Until I started there, my only experience with welfare was applying for Medicaid to pay the bills for a concussion I suffered in college. The hospital did all the heavy lifting for me. As intolerable as the work was, I learned a lot about the system that must be shared. The time has come to do so.

Nobody walks into the Welfare Office with a smile on their face, as if they would walk out with the magic card that would give them free food, rent, and healthcare. Everyone walks into the Welfare Office with the look of either desperation, or resignation on their faces. The Welfare Office is the place of last resort for many people. Even if you think you’ll take the system for all it’s got, stepping into the waiting room—always crowded—would wipe the smile off your face as you face the obstinate power of bureaucracy. I walked through that room every day, twice a day, until the police came to deal with a violent “customer” who threw chairs and attacked other people in line. I opted to come and go through the back door after that.

My district, Delancey, covered a large, diverse chunk of West Philadelphia. We covered the campuses of Drexel and Penn, the nice neighborhoods of University City, middle class Black neighborhoods, and out to the deep West Philadelphia ghetto. None are quite as bad as North Philadelphia or Kensington, but I would be wary to be out by the office at 58th and Market streets after dark. A cross-section of everyone could be seen in the office: Penn and Drexel grad students, kids doing a stint with City Year, unemployed middle-class families in University City, single mothers of all ages, races, and reasons, men fresh out of prison, the homeless, and more. They all needed help. Every last one.

I know this, because my job was to process applications. It’s your typical bureaucratic nightmare to get benefits: endless forms, documentation, verification, interviews… and if anything is missing or off, the caseworkers will kick it back with a denial of the claim. People can, and often do reapply several times before they get it right. The biggest cause of this is that the offices are understaffed and far overworked. At the time I worked there, Delancey had 35 caseworkers, of which twelve handled intake. One handled hospital applications for healthcare, and five handled special issuances for job training, transportation, and other things. This left just eighteen caseworkers to handle every active case in the district, of which there were thousands. Between the other clerks and myself, we routinely handled over 100 applications per day. Many physical applications came with handwritten notes, begging for help.

Many of these active cases did not require a lot of active work, but the ones that did would be overwhelming. Caseworkers come in every morning to full voicemail boxes. Periodically, I handled the phones for the office, and would get calls from people with cases in other districts. I had to tell them that I could not help them from where I was, and to call their district. The response was always the same: “But they never answer the phone there!” I understood. How can they, with so many people needing help. Halfway through my time there, they doubled the storage for caseworker voicemails. They still came in to full mailboxes, but now they were twice as full.

Once you have benefits, it’s easy to lose them for the same reasons it’s so hard to get them. Forms are sent out regularly for reporting and renewing benefits. Miss anything, and you’re cut off. This was especially problematic for people who moved around, which is common in the welfare system. If your renewal or reporting forms don’t get delivered, you’re in trouble. People wondering why their benefits were terminated were the largest number of calls I had to field by volume alone.

There’s little incentive to fix any of this. For cash-strapped governments, including Pennsylvania, welfare is just a money sink. To cut costs, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett, along with the state legislature, cut the state’s cash assistance benefit, which recipients could use to cover what food stamps cannot. Two days after the cash benefit was dropped, was the last day I worked for Welfare, specifically so I could avoid the horror show of calls and complaints that would come. Money was spent on programs to digitize archives, or improve computer systems to manage applications and cases, but not to add more manpower.

What there is also incentive to do is investigate welfare fraud. The bugaboo of welfare fraud, to root out people exploiting the system, is something that’s easy to get bipartisan support for. Problem is, most fraud in the welfare system isn’t coming from recipients. It comes from inside the system. A few months after I started, someone in my district stole over $100,000 by issuing cash benefits to the card of a dead man. This made the local news, and we were ordered not to talk to anyone from the media: not that I knew anything anyway. In my last months with welfare, the idea was even being floated to drug test welfare recipients. As if the system isn’t emasculating enough already, the idea of forcing desperate people to piss in a cup just to get money for food is worse.

If you’ve never needed the welfare system, consider yourself lucky. If you’ve never needed to have strangers pore over your bank balances, had to pester your landlord for a letter about your bills, your friends and family to document their financial support, or had to face the stigma of trying to buy groceries with a food stamp card, you are lucky. Next week, if things turn for the worst, you could be waiting in line to have the same process happen to you. That’s the biggest problem of all: so many people are willing to support the welfare system when they need it, but when someone else does, they don’t—especially if that somebody is black, a single mom, or both. You can’t have it both ways.

I’m constantly thinking about the future. Sometimes the distant future, though not in the sci-fi sense of flying cars and holodecks. I’m thinking about my future, anything from where I’ll be in 10 years to what I want to have for lunch. I think of the day that I’m making enough money from blogging that I can be independent. I think of the day the band I’ve yet to start, after learning the instrument I’ve yet to pick up, plays on TV. I think about what I’m going to be doing tomorrow, whether it will be fun, or a chore.

I also think a lot about the past—the pain, the emotional abuse of my peers, the times I’ve failed, and the times I’ve been screwed over. I don’t need to say anything else about that.

I don’t often think about the here and now. My mind is rarely in the moment, unless I’m doing something that requires concentration. Writing, for example, is one of those things where I can keep my mind in the here and now, at least for short bursts of making the clackity noise. Writing is also a good way to channel my thoughts of the past and of the future into something that belongs here and now, but that’s more of a loophole to get out of the here and now.

What’s happening now? I’m in my apartment. My girlfriend’s gone to bed. I’m a little sore from the 28 minute Couch-to–5K run I went on after work, and a little sore from assembling our new folding couch. I’m listening to Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, and I’m making the clackity noise. It feels good to be a little sore, and it feels good to be typing and making the clackity noise.

I’m trying to catch myself when I’m not in the here and now, but it’s not an easy process. Mindfulness takes practice, and (with the aid of Headspace) I’m trying to make sure I get that practice in, each day. It’s the only way to escape the trap of being caught up in my past, and the only way to put myself in the place to reach that future I think so much about. To tame the unruly mind that became unstuck in time long ago will take time and effort. I think I’m ready to start.

Know this. We are books. We are united. We think Amazon and publishers of all shapes and sizes have done good things, and also because you are made of humans, some really stupid things. We are books. We are incapable of doing stupid things, because we are Great Art and our mere presence in the world makes you, humans, better.

An Important Message From Your Books

In the battle between Amazon and Hachette, it’s important to know what’s in the balance. Beyond authors and distribution, it’s about access to books. Books that make out lives better, through art and knowledge alike.

“Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.”

— Zen Proverb

I’m not going to pretend I know a damn thing about being “enlightened.” I can barely make time for a ten minute sitting practice. Therefore, anything I say below that touches on anything spiritual should be taken with several grains of salt, as I am largely pulling it out of my butt, despite a couple of college Philosophy courses.

Whatever your chosen interpretation of “enlightenment,” however, the important part of the proverb is the repetition: “chop wood, carry water.” Sure, most of us don’t have to chop wood and carry water unless we want to. Many of us have heating and indoor plumbing in our homes. The proverb isn’t about chopping wood and carrying water, it’s about how we’ll always need to do the things necessary for survival and life, no matter our spiritual state. For you and I, to “chop wood [and] carry water” means to go to work, to take care of our children, to wash the dishes, to do all the day-to-day things that have to get done to keep afloat in this world.

That’s all there is to it, right? Thing is, it’s easy to let these required day-to-day things fall by the wayside. It happens to so many of us. One or more days where you forget to wash the dishes, and suddenly your kitchen smells funny, and you’re eating terrible delivery food out of planet-killing styrofoam with plastic utensils. If you forget about your children, they’ll also smell funny and then there’s someone from the state banging on the door.

As I was thinking about this proverb today, I got an email from Patrick Rhone’s This Could Help newsletter that touched on this very concept.

I find that one of the most important motivating factors in accomplishing any of our tasks is remembering the “why” behind it. And it is here that considering our missions will come into play.

“Why am I doing this? Why is this important right now? Where does completing this take me? What does finished look like? Where does this fit in my life-long mission?”

All of these should be able to be answered by first defining your missions and life long goals. Even the most obvious or overarching ones. Any single task on our list should align with these. Therefore, it is important that we do all we can to quantify them. For, all of our tasks leave an open question as to their value until we do.

To put it another way, “First, care.”

Another thing I ready today is a piece on Medium by Tami Sigmund, “I’m a thinker, not a doer.” It hit home. Her conundrum is so much like my conundrum was when I emailed Merlin and Dan in the early days of Back to Work.

I can never just sit and ‘be’ who I am. My mind is always heading off in some new direction, trying to come up with some grand scheme. I have a sense of anxiety when I’m not actively planning out the next ‘thing’ in my life. The next thing never happens though, because I’m too busy trying to figure out exactly what it should be, and how I should do it, and who would join in, what implications it could have on my life, and what holes I can poke through my plans to sabotage them before they get off the ground.

I could have easily written this myself. In fact, digging through my gMail archives, I still have the original email I wrote to Dan and Merlin then. Here’s the crux of it:

…I’m in my late 20s, working a full-time, menial clerical job along side a part-time telemarketing gig, to make sure I can keep a roof over my head, food in my stomach, and pay off the corporate masters I owe my education costs to. Neither of these jobs fulfills the yen I have to be… creative.

What does one do to find out what one is good at/suited to do/their passion/etc? This is, I guess, the crux of that whole “quarter-life crisis” thing…

The unwritten part of that is my own endless questioning of what I should be doing, whether it will work, and whether I can live with myself if it doesn’t. I’m reminded of a minor meme that went around Twitter a while back about your “Burlesque Name”. Your first name is your favorite drink. Your last name is your greatest fear. So, I’d be either Bourbon Success, or Bourbon Failure. I haven’t figured out which.

Part of the whole journey, since Episode 7, has been about finding the direction I want to go, lead by determining what I care about. That’s the hard part. I’ve got a vague sense of it now, which is more than I did three years ago, but even a vague sense of direction and understanding is better than none. But, to wrench this train back on the tracks, knowing my direction, having a goal, being enlightened to your purpose and design in life is not going to mean you won’t have to do all the mundane crap embodied in “chop wood, carry water.” This is the foundation upon which you can, with a little luck and perseverance, take that journey and reach the goal. It’s all connected.

Yet, it’s the mundanity of those day-to-day tasks that makes it so easy for us to forget what they’re really for. It helps to remind ourselves of just why we do all this stuff, be it washing the dishes, running on the treadmill after work, or sit and think about the next step in our lives. To “be who we are” is to do all these things. That’s what “be”ing is.