"I've always dreamed of being on stage."

"This job is shit, but I'm doing it so I can eventually buy that harp I've always wanted."

"Of course it didn't work out. A Pisces together with a Libra? Ridiculous!"

We are the stories we tell ourselves. They bind together the insane spaghetti of thoughts and actions into the broadly coherent dish that we call "I" or "we". When these stories stop making sense ("Why did I cheat on him? I'm not like that!") it's upsetting and we need to create new ones to restore coherency and congruency (my new favourite word) to our lives.

The problem for me is that I'm a millennial through and through, constantly bombarded with different ideas, thoughts and ways of seeing the world (and in my own turn bombarding the rest of the world with mine). I find it difficult to maintain my coherent sense of self in this context. I see a post from XR Goma about the new oils gas fields in the Congo and think I should organise an action around this. I hear gyrofield's new tune and wish I was producing. I read a paper was about modeling to generate alternatives and multiple weather years and briefly fall in love with my research field again. I guess this would be fine if I was able to prioritise and did not assume that whatever I'm into at the moment is "the thing" and everything else doesn't matter, but I wouldn't know.

How much of this inconsistency is due to The Fucking Internet™ I'm not sure, since even simple matters can throw me into a hurricane of existential angst. When asked if I want a cup of tea I can take a good 30 seconds to ponder whether I do, whether I deserve one and shouldn't I anyway try to wean myself off it since otherwise it will be a shock to my system when the apocalypse comes and there isn't any tea left?

Of course, I'm not schizophrenic. I don't wake up some days feeling fascist and others convinced of the medical potential of homeopathy. A lot of the changes in priorities and beliefs I've experienced have also been gradual. It took me about 8 years to become woke enough to cringe at some episodes of South Park (most of it is still pant-shittingly funny thankfully).

Still, a bit more coherency would be appreciated. For example, I'm currently reading Pablo Serigne's "Comment Tout Peut S'effondrer" and I have a burning desire to learn how to grow my own vegetables before it's too late. Perhaps that's because I haven't fully internalised what it means to believe that you'll live through the collapse of civilisation, and even then sometimes I'm not so sure I will see it collapse (but only because I will smoke myself to an early death first).

I'm feeling surprisingly serene having written this. Perhaps its the writing, perhaps it's just a serene kind of day. I also recently had a thought which made me feel more justified in my lack of direction, which is that I could (with considerable effort) convince myself that I am like my musical idol, Bop. Bop started off making weird, ambient glitchy Drum & Bass back in 2010, continued in this style through the decade though with progressively more defined beats (think for example of 'Spiral' from 'Punk's Not Dead'), started his own label Microfunk and Abstract Elements (with Diagram) which made some pretty bloody hard bangers like the remix of 'Spiral', made a bunch of ambienty garage stuff and now he's been bossing the '80s synthwave DnB with Subwave which I'm of half a mind to make my alarm because it's so uplifting. My point is that he's always stayed fresh in smaller or bigger ways but there's a read thread that runs through his sound (in particular the spacey pads and the reverb are very characteristic of him). I like to think that he finds that there are too many amazing sounds and styles in this world to limit himself to just a few of them and I'm the same but with, well everything (apart from, again, fascism and homeopathy). And that suits me just fine, I'll muddle my way through this shitshow aimlessly as I please.

Some thoughts: I think this was again a very confused article, confusing life narratives, the attention economy and the ability to prioritise. Then again, I guess a certain level of fogginess suits these sort of subjects?

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