Some of us get notebooks: Why sharing your reality is important

One of the greatest standup comedians of all time divorced himself from the world. George Carlin found peace of mind by sitting back, as he said, without a stake in the outcome. He chalked up his strategy to this:

“When you're born in this world, you're given a ticket to the freak show. And when you're born in America, you're given a front-row seat. And some of us get to sit there with notebooks."

Carlin had a notebook like few others. In his 1992 special, Jammin' in New York, he joked about environmentalism, “The planet is fine. The people are fucked... the planet isn't going anywhere. We are. We're going away. Pack your shit, folks." Reflecting on this bit, in an article titled Morality, the Zeitgeist, and D**k Jokes, writer Nick Simmons pointed out, “In any other context, suggesting that the extinction of all humanity just might be a good thing would, safe to say, probably not inspire applause. But somehow, Carlin made even this quite literally inhuman point of view--sub specie aeternitatis--not only palatable, but preferable.”

Whether or not you agree with divorcing yourself from the future of the planet, or that global extinction is palatable or preferable, the sheer idea of sharing your reality is important. Because we all have notebooks now.

The Rational Optimist author Matt Ridley considers this phenomenon the reason for the progress and prosperity of human beings. Our world has evolved at a blinding pace because we’ve learned to embrace and exchange our specializations. We’re no longer forced to be self-sufficient in ideas or inventions. We progress from the incremental offerings of billions of other people every single day. Yes, billions.Ridley called idea sex - when ideas meet and mate. 

Think about it. There are tons of bits in all the things we enjoy every day. You couldn’t possibly build your own Ford F-150 from scratch, fueled up with unleaded gas, crankin’ Whitesnake through your speakers. You couldn’t offer your sweetheart the option of eating Italian rigatoni, Japanese sushi, or Indian biryani, hot and ready to inhale in under an hour. And don’t think for a second you could read this sentence without millions of people constructing laptops and smartphones, maintaining wifi signals, and running electricity easily and everywhere.

Beyond the physical trades of goods and services, idea sex is important in weaving the tapestry of our cultural world. We have the ability to imagine what reality looks like through someone else’s mind just by digesting their ideas. You could watch Carlin’s 1999 special You Are All Diseased and shift your perspective to what his mind might be like. Even though he has been dead for years. Or perhaps you can see the world through your neighbor’s eyes. Or your parents. Or even Trump, if you also imagined avoiding exercise and conversations with minorities your entire life.

On the flip side, progress never ends and the work is never done. We have so much access it’s easy to trick ourselves into thinking our version of reality is the truth. This is why we need to document it all. We need to keep swapping our notebooks.

Just this week I experienced glimpses into the lives of a few people I barely knew and it moved me. Tim died of a heart attack, suddenly, and at the age of 34. He had a wife and two children. Jason spilled his guts on social media about how medical bills were crippling him as he fights the cancer out of his body. And through those glimpses of reality, both Tim’s family and Jason’s friend were able to crowdfund more than $5,000 each to help life go on.

There is amazing good that can come from sharing your reality. Even the dark-edged Carlin said that “if you scratch a cynic, you’ll find a disappointed idealist. And I would admit that somewhere underneath all of this, there is a little flicker of a flame of idealism that would love to see it all change. But it can’t. It can’t happen that way. And incremental change, it just seems like the pile of shit is too deep.”

While it might seem like everything won’t change fast enough, sometimes we can be surprised. Sometimes good people you barely know can reach out and help you get through a tough time. Sometimes someone can see your reality and approvingly nod, and that’s enough.

The truth is we’re all inside the freak show, reporting on the madness. We are in this together, exploring what this life is all about. And, perhaps, when it comes down to it, we just need to scribble in our notebook and share.

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If you'd like to donate, you can see Tim's GoFundMe page here and Jason's GoFundMe page here.

Idea Sex

Some of my best ideas have come from storms of conversations in dark bars or while yelling playfully with friends over campfires.Nothing makes me feel more alive than having a discussion where I end up understanding the world better than I did before. It teases me that there is a meaning to nail down. You have the meaning of life by the tail just a bit more when you can bounce your ideas off of someone else. It's orgasmic in a different way. It’s idea sex.

The Work
Ideas may sometimes come as jolts. That's true. But visual artist Ann Hamilton makes a point when she jokes that no one sits down to be creative. There is no punch clock, there is no finish line. 

Don’t be fooled, there is actual work to creativity. It just feels like some big secret. We pretend artists and writers are a special group of people destined to be weird and moody. But as E.B. White, author of Charlotte's Web, wrote, "A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper."  It's not a one-and-done process, it is a meditation, a lifestyle. What Hamilton was poking at is that creativity is not a noun, it’s a verb. It is making the time to open your mind and ask questions. It is the practice you need to produce your best work. We don’t know when it will come and we don’t know if it will come, but you need to sit down and do the work. 

The Good Stuff
The process in and of itself can be maddening. There is an intense pressure of a billion tiny thoughts firing in your brain when you’re trying to create something to move you and the world around you. It’s no surprise some of the most amazing artists of our time have been seriously fucked up.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, beautifully challenged the tormented artist image in her TED talk “Your Elusive Creative Genius”. Gilbert found comfort in the ancient Greek and Roman ideas of a creative genius not being within you but being an external divine presence grateful enough to loan their powers to us mere mortals for some time. It took the burden off the “artist” to acknowledge that his “genius” or divine partner did or did not deliver. No artistic ego or suffering needed.

I’d like to take that idea one step further from Gilbert and the Greek genius. I believe we are all divine partners of one another. You’ve heard the theories. We’re all One. You’re the sum of your five closest friends. And now with the magic of the Internet, we’re all connected, sharing ideas and colliding off one another. 

Every tweet is an invitation to idea sex.

The work of creativity multiplies with idea sex. And we can have it all the time. We can have multiple partners. We can do weird stuff. It is some freaky, tantric sex connection where your ideas and others collide to make something new. It is the pleasure of sex and the joy of birth all in a moment. Sharing anything less is masturbation.

When I write, I need to reference other people. Each of the thinkers that have influenced me have put ideas out into the world for others to take and do what they will. There is no pretending for me that my thoughts are only my own. It is just the unique, swirling combination of my experiences and my days. 

The Result
The trouble is none of this is possible if we don’t share our thoughts and our work. 

You have to make yourself available and vulnerable in a completely human way. It’s terrifying and exciting all at once. And it requires you to sort out your thoughts and make something.

Blackout poet and author Austin Kleon takes the creative process to heart. While inspiration or genius, or whatever you may call it, may not come every time we sit down, Kleon believes in the process of delivering and publishing work constantly to draw that genius closer. Sometimes it hits, sometimes it doesn’t. 

We're meant to do this. Idea sex is the new evolution. As psychedelic explorer Terence McKenna put it, biological evolution ended with language. We have transformed the landscape of the world with our idea sex. And the more we come together, the more complex we get. Matt Ridley points out in his brilliant TED talk that no single person in this world knows how to make a pencil, much less a computer mouse. Comedian Joe Rogan considers the sophisticated level of which our world operates by asking, "If I left you alone in the woods with a hatchet, how long before you can send me an email?" We are nothing without one another because there is no artist without audience. There is no artist without art.

Nothing is original. Nothing is instant. So go have idea sex and you’re sure to change the world in the process.