There’s this adventurous spirit that felt alive when I was younger. It felt alive in everyone. And it’s since been dying. I’m not sure why, exactly. Sometimes my mind generates the answer “aging” as though it’s some inevitable thing. Like some global explore parameter is slowly shifting to exploit. Sometimes I think it’s because coming into contact with the world is sort of depressing -- most jobs seem lifeless, adult routine is boring and lethargic. Sometimes I think it’s because the possibility space seems to narrow as time goes on.
And sometimes I think it’s because we’ve chunked so much we can’t see the details anymore. Large swaths of reality overlaid with tiny, static concepts that don’t have much room to grow. This is why Hofstadter thinks the years seem to go by faster as we age -- we literally perceive less of them, because we catalogue them into what we already know, into our routines. Days get chunked into weeks, weeks into months, months into years, until it’s all passed by, unnoticed.
Well I don’t know exactly what causes it. These are all guesswork. It’s probably somewhere in the middle of all of that, there are probably hypotheses I haven’t thought of yet. But this post isn’t all about that. This is about the spirit itself, what it felt like, that aliveness. What I still pine for, and want to make manifest.
There’s this whole cluster of memories that all feel very alive to me. Sneaking out at midnight to drive to In n Out with my friends, roaming around our intensely boring suburban streets, the parking lots with HomeGoods and BestBuy’s and still finding ways to laugh for hours about the most inane stuff, climbing roofs, wandering around the coast at night. But I think the thing that was real there, was that the environment didn’t need to be interesting, or conducive to “adventure.” The adventure was in us. And it came out everywhere we were. Just walking around a strip mall was the cause of years of inside jokes and hours of side cramping laughter. Just driving around was hilarious.
Mischief was in the air, and it made things that seem sort of stupid, like scaling a statue and taking silly pictures, alive. It made them feel like the height of human experience. It was ridiculously fun. And there was absurdity too -- things we did just because they seemed weird and weirdness was fun. Things like developing an obsession with our econ teacher, an obsession because the way he taught was absolutely hilarious, and that was the focus of a lot of our attention that semester. We made so many jokes, immortalized in photoshopped pictures. Little things like the way he would forget to turn off the microphone attached to his lapel during movies, and his soft grunts and chuckles would broadcast to the whole room and everyone would pretend not to notice. Now, it would be a little funny. If I had a friend nearby we’d probably exchange glances. But back then it was bigger -- we’d talk about it and laugh about it for hours and hours over that semester.
We latched onto everything, and made it into something special and hilarious and fun. Everything was ripe for adventure. Anywhere we went, it came. And hilarity ensued. And what is it, exactly? Like if I imagine one of my high school friends picking me up now to go roam around the coast of my hometown, it somehow feels a bit vacant, like we’re trying to do something that isn’t natural anymore. I know everything there, now. It doesn’t really have that spark to it anymore. Writing all of this down makes me want to cry. That sense of aliveness, I’m not sure that I have it anymore. I have aliveness in other ways, and in general I think I’m better off at 27 than I was at 17, but still. There was something unmistakably special about that time, something I feel like I can’t get back.
Everything felt exciting, every time I got into the car it was full of novelty and adventure. New places, new sights, new interactions. A whole new world unfolding, like I was just coming into myself, just figuring out what it all meant, in tandem with everyone around me. This collective meaning making that was so pervasive. And it hurt often, too, it was painful at times. Breakups were so intense back then, but new love was, too.
Adults often speak in this distant fondness of young love. This sad sigh, this “oh what it was like to be young.” I felt things freshly back then. Pain and sorrow and joy and love -- all of it played out in crescendo, all of it in these emotional arcs, so big and unwieldy and beautiful and true. And part of it was because it was new. Part of it was because I didn’t know what was happening to me yet. Now there is rhythm to my days, a sort of rhythm that blends and obscures, that chunks the vast emotional landscape that I could be experiencing, if only I let myself touch it. Now I can look at what it was like to be young with that adult sensibility, because I can understand it, because I know it, because I’m up and away from it. Because I’ve chunked.
I have it less now. I get it sometimes with partners. My boyfriend is really good at adventure in so many ways: waking me up at 4am to set off to some desert in his van. And it is fun, and I say yes to those things. But it’s still, I don’t know. It lacks something, like I’m too attached to the world, like I can’t fully lean into this thing because it’s just this little subsection of my life, it’s not my identity anymore. Drugs help a lot. Drugs get me out of my head and into the desert, and it does feel special then, also, but again in a different way. Getting high makes things seem magnificent and meaningful, sometimes hilarious, but not quite absurd, not quite that roving madness that lit up my youth.
Getting drunk pushes me the closest to this state, now. But it often feels like it falls short. I think it’s because the people I’m around don’t have it. They want to get to sleep early, for work, or are trying not to drink too much because it’s bad for you, or are just adults, or something. Their orientation to parties is more like “socializing,” whereas my orientation is like, “let’s get shitfaced and be roving mad and get into all kinds of shenanigans.” Because it’s the only time adults will do it, it seems. When they have a cover story for it. And even then it’s difficult.
When I was 17 my friends and I would do all kinds of things that I can’t imagine doing now. Like hiding in the middle of those clothing racks in the big stores, trying to scare each other, or just generally being mischievous. Like scaling public facades. Like just driving around town, listening to music, because it’s fun. Because being around people is a goal in itself. The core beauty of being alive.
And I don’t think that anymore. It’s still a big part of me, much bigger than most I suspect. But it doesn’t feel core to being alive, other things do: things like art and discovery and deep love. But that unmistakable connection, that love of the road and adventure and absurdity, that’s not the whole thing anymore. And in not being the whole thing, the beauty of it has mostly vanished. There’s no longer a container for it, no longer a sense that this is what it means to be alive, it’s left the collective consciousness, moved and shaped into other things, other wants and desires, other forces of meaning. I still get bits and pieces, but part of the thing, I think, was that it was all of me, for those short years. It was all of everyone else I surrounded myself with.
It was meaningfully inside of me and outside of me, reflected in my friends and the world because we made it that way. It was a spirit that moved. Simple, straightforward, pure, whole. But you can’t have wholeness as you age, experiences splinter the soul, carve out different parts, different reactions, different wants. And that is beautiful, too. Our souls get bigger, in some ways. They grow up and feel differently over time, they’re more complex. And that complexity reflects truth about the world, it lets in more and more of what exists, lets you touch reality in more ways, and in doing so one matures.
Maturity is this weaving together of different threads of time, of learning how the world is. It is a loss of innocence, of naivety. It is contact with more complexity as your mind slowly takes that on. But it is not whole, not pure. Integrated, maybe. But that simple straightforwardness of childhood, that rich reality through the lens of fantasy and adventure, cannot be all that is there. It shapes and molds and breaks and grows. And we try to reel it in, try to chunk, to make sense of all that happens, and in doing so we aim to tame that complexity, and we mostly succeed. Days go by faster at 27 than 17. I am more complex, I have more parts, more experiences, more frames. But I also gloss over experience more, I am not in such close contact with the world anymore. I let it fly by, because nothing beckons me to stay with it.
Misty days do, that soft touch, those mountains, feet picking up and landing back down, dance. Some things do. But by and large I am up and away from the days, untethered from time because time is meaningless now. Time doesn’t quite pass anymore, or rather it passes so quickly it's as if it wasn’t there. I don’t see its motion, only these glimpses of calendars, of clocks, telling me it has gone. When I was 17 I did. I was in motion, in motion with time. Days and minutes and seconds filled with that longing and intensity and beauty. Every bit of it, full. I was in the details, filling my mind with that texture of reality, that novelty, that pull towards the world, and pulling the world into me.
Now I let it pass me by, more, like looking out of train windows. My understanding of life is a bit more removed, a bit more abstract. And in some sense it has to be that way. I am not one thing anymore. The entirety of my being doesn’t sit in the grass so much now. There are wisps. When the beauty is so overwhelming that it has to come in. When I’m high. But for the most part I am tying those threads together, and in so doing I sit above all of them. The weaver of time. Taking together all of what I see and spinning it into some coherent dome covering my existence. And I see more now than I did at 17.
Wake Up is a great song by Arcade Fire. Lyrics always mean less without music, but I like it so much and it feels relevant so I’m putting it here anyways:
Something filled up my heart with nothing. Someone told me not to cry. Now that I’m older, my heart’s colder. And I can see that it’s a lie. Children wake up! Hold your mistake up. Before they turn the summer into dust. And children don’t grow up. Our bodies getting bigger, but our hearts get torn up. We’re just a million little gods causing rainstorms, turning every good thing to rust. I guess we’ll just have to adjust.
In particular, our bodies getting bigger, but our hearts get torn up. I guess we’ll just have to adjust. This feels like the thing I am trying to gesture at. This innocence lost, this increasing complexity, as we come into contact with other parts of the world, as our bodies get bigger, our souls splinter. And not necessarily in a bad way, not like horcruxes, but like parts forming -- different aspects of ourselves that respond to different conditions. And souls can get bigger that way, in a way that is beautiful and good. But in a way that is undeniably more complex, undeniably less straightforward than in youth.
And there was this intimacy to it, too. Intimacy in youth. This feeling of sharing in something really special together. I texted my friends near constantly, we were always on the phone, laughing until our parents told us to get off. I could go over to their houses whenever, they were always down for hanging out and embarking on these adventures, always up for having an experience together. It was the most important thing in all of our lives, for those few short years. It was special. And I think we all knew it, too.
Those friends, they didn’t turn out to be particularly good friends. They turned out to leave when I needed them most, to hurt me in large ways. And I think this has obscured the fact that this was a product of my youth, not of the particular people involved. For a long time I felt like my innocence was taken away by their actions, like all the beauty in the world was gone because they left. But now I wonder if that was already fading, as we aged. Looking at them now, I doubt we would share the same sort of mystical adventure that we used to. And that realization -- it’s bittersweet. It means that pining after those people is misguided, and that seems good, but it also means that something real and special was lost, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get it back.
That intimacy was beautiful. And yeah, they turned out to be shitty friends. But there was something about it that was true nonetheless. Something about it that felt real, that I don’t have anymore. That ability to call people up whenever something’s going on for me, big or small. To share in the intricacies of each other’s lives, to laugh on the phone for hours, to show up at their doorstep and for that to be natural and fun and lead to all kinds of adventure. For sitting in parking lots listening to Adele to somehow be this meaningful, hilarious thing.
When I type this out now I feel like it surely can’t be completely lost. Surely many people still want this. I don’t know, maybe I’m just poking around the wrong communities. “Making friends” as an adult has been an extremely depressing endeavor. And maybe I’m doing it wrong, maybe the thing isn’t going to meetups (so weird! so fake!), maybe it isn’t getting a job (gah!), maybe it’s being open and receptive and going to burning man or meeting other people with the same things that light them up through art and writing and music. I don’t know. All I know is that it’s hard. And I think the numbers are thinning by the year, of the people who still have this kernel alive within them. And it scares me.
Well, I want it. Even with all of that, I still feel closer to it now than I did at 25, and that seems hopeful. I feel close to it when I dance, I think because when I’m in creative flow it takes over my being, and that wholeness, that thorough aliveness, that electric contact with reality, that novelty, it’s all I know. I feel close to it in the mist, in laughter with friends. It’s there when I hold my boyfriend. That feeling of aliveness. Little wisps of it rise up when we roam through deserts and swim in lakes and scramble over rocks outside of superfund sites.
But I want it to surge forth from the people I know. I want it in friends. Friends that make you cry from laughter. Friends that are there when you call, that are up for adventure when you arrive at their doorstep. Friends that feel music and beauty and help you get caught up in the world, experience time as it unfolds, making it bigger, breaking down routine and static concepts, that help you feel truly alive in the world, as if it were pulsing beneath you, as if you and the road and the radio and your friends are all that is, as if you were really in the world and not looking out at it from a train window. Friends that roam, delighting in the absurdity, finding that hilarity and beauty in everything, because it is in them, in you, in whatever magical string it is that binds you together.
I feel it in me, still. The propensity for it. It’s not here, now, not to the extent that I long for. But I think I can see the inklings of how to pull it back in. That openness, receptivity to the world, to saying yes, to taking off wherever the wind blows. To meeting people and finding others who are similarly pulled, similarly in touch with it. That kernel still alive, still beating, still full -- that eternal call to adventure. The call to the wild, to the touch of the earth, to hilarity and beauty and audaciousness and novelty. I think it’s still there. All that’s left is to turn whispers into roars.