Enlightenment smells like white pepper

Our state recently made public transit free. Road traffic seems to be easing. On my way into the office, I see more people heading into the city for leisure, not just for work or school. I sit across from an exhausted father trying (and failing) to contain the physical excitement of his two energetic pre-teens. Across the aisle, four dapper, grey-haired women revel in each other’s company, throwing their heads back to laugh at each other’s jokes.

I step off the train. There’s no slowdown at the gates, because they’re wide open. I jaywalk across Flinders Street into Degraves, the low morning sun catching in my eyes, the smell of diesel making way for the smell of coffee.

After years of COVID-induced asphyxiation, Melbourne is taking a breath.

Restaurant bookings are harder to secure. Wine bars fill up earlier on weekdays. Groups of sardonic teens materialize out of vape clouds in front of convenience stores, and tourists inconvenience locals on every sidewalk. (Nature is healing, etc.)

I saw someone on Reddit say something like “now that I don’t have to spend money on fares, I can come into the city and get a beer with my friends”, which made me quietly emotional.

Call me naïve (I am!), but it feels like a microdose of hope; a glimpse of a government actually doing its job in a cost of living crisis and looming recession.

I left tech last week, after being in the industry for twelve years. Six of those twelve years were spent at my most recent job.

My final hours ended up being a uniquely surreal experience. I was too unwell to go into the office with Jesse to celebrate our last day in the company of others – so on my final Friday, instead of popping a bottle of champagne in the office, I laid alone on the couch, texting friends.

At 5pm, I closed my laptop and walked outside. I felt like Frodo after throwing the ring into Mount Doom: existentially exhausted.

A few months ago, I was almost happy about what AI was doing to my role. I thought I was ready to mentally switch off and execute mindless repetitive work until I was laid off or ready to retire. I liked the prospect of being even more emotionally disconnected from my work than I already was – if anything, it felt like a blessing to be able to focus that energy on myself, my loved ones, my life.

Of course, the universe had other plans: I got a random phone call which eventually turned into a job offer that would put me back into a world of teamwork, craft, strategic thinking, and responsibility. I kept searching for red flags, for reasons to decline and stay where I was. (Known discomfort is less scary than the unknown, blah blah blah.) Instead, all I got were green flags. I accepted, put in my notice, and then settled in to finish up my final few weeks.

As I started winding down, I worried I might regret the move. I like low effort, high volume, reactive work! But it only took a few days of actually doing it to feel my brain atrophying. I got confused about which day of the week it was. Time slowed to a crawl. I started doomscrolling social media apps again for stimulation.

Twelve years in tech, developing a niche skillset, working collaboratively with other people… and overnight, my job was effectively reduced to copying, pasting, and publishing AI generated content, then figuring out how to further automate what I was doing. Like a lot of people in tech, I was building the machine that would eventually consume my job.

I thought I was free of capitalism brainworms, free of the desire to sacrifice myself as a knowledge worker at the false altar of productivity and corporate meaning. But maybe I’m not. If I’m doing something for eight hours a day, I kinda want to be stimulated by it? I don’t want my brain to shut down. I’d rather work on things that require skill, experience, adaptability, and teamwork. With humans.

In the absence of work that has meaning (or, y’know, not having to work at all), I guess I still need to be doing something that makes me think.

Childhood friendship is notoriously simple. Adult friendship is more nuanced and often harder to navigate. Figuring it out feels like a perpetual work in progress, and that’s okay.

I’m the type that can drop contact for months or years and happily pick up where we left off, with no guilt thrown in either direction. Life gets in the way, and it’s good to know there are people that will be happy to hear from you when you eventually reach out.

Years ago, I decided to intentionally nurture new connections – be the adult version of the “wanna be friends?” kid on the playground – but it sometimes means that my time gets increasingly fractured across people and groups. I get overwhelmed, retreat from socialization for a while, realize what I’m doing, then start reaching out to people again.

There are too many interesting, kind, fun, and wonderful people in the world and in my life. I keep saying that I have this never-ending guilt about not contacting or seeing the people I love enough. It isn’t going away, and I don’t think it ever will. I gotta learn to live with it.

I could stop working and spend all of my time hanging out with friends and family, and it still probably wouldn’t feel like enough.

Sorry if I’ve already written about this? But we finally got around to putting up most of our art. Jesse did the hard work of getting everything framed, and over the course of a few days, we mounted most of it.

The first few nails were anxiety-inducing, since mudbrick is a bit more complicated to patch over than regular drywall if you make a mistake. But the decision fatigue got exhausting quickly and we just started slapping shit up wherever. It’s chaotic and beautiful. Twelve years of memories spread across the walls.

The house felt like our home the day we moved in. But now it looks like our home, too.

I believe everyone has a mental list of books, poems, movies, songs, essays, etc. that they want everyone in the world to experience, or that they think will help people understand them just a little bit better.

I just found this, and it immediately shot right to the top of my list:

It is the end of the world and I am here to take you home

It’s astronomically better than anything I could ever hope to create, yet perfectly describes the kind of sonder and mono no aware I live with every day.

Here are three unedited notes from my Google Keep, all written down immediately after waking up from weird-ass dreams:

Enlightenment smells like white pepper

Spelling “scallop” as “sgalloppee” (old English, the g and ee are silent)

Mashup of video killed the radio star and smells like teen spirit

I actually remember that in the first dream, I walked past a monk sitting in lotus pose. He was visibly glowing, clearly having reached enlightenment, and the closer I got to him, the more potent the smell of white pepper was. And I thought “Huh! So that’s what enlightenment smells like!” …then immediately woke up.

We’re not going to discuss the other two.

Suvorexant is fun!

I started running last week, before I got sick.

When I say “running” what I actually mean (right now) is “jogging at Jesse’s walking pace for about 20 minutes” – but given that 15 years ago I couldn’t maintain a jog for 2 minutes, I’m going to be real fuckin’ smug about it.

I can totally see why people get hooked on this shit.

No matter how hard you try to explain it, no one will ever really know what it’s like to be you, to live inside your head. And no matter how much you explain yourself, no two people will ever see you the same way, nor will they see you as you truly are.

I used to find this distressing. I used to have a chronic, compulsive desire to be understood by everyone. Thankfully, that’s fading – or maybe I’m just learning to live with it.

You probably don’t want to be in my head anyway, unless you’re super into Shrimp Quartet and thinking about the inevitability of death.