YEAR IN REVIEW
48 — Be Buster Benson, BBB, Be Be Be, 🐝🐝🐝
My 18th year of annual reflections
Wow, it’s October. For the last 18 years I’ve reviewed my life and posted an annual review around my birthday in May, and have done so for the most part rather promptly. Here I am over 4 whole months later, starting maybe my 10th draft of this damned thing, still at a complete loss for words around how to talk about what is happening in my life. To be honest, I haven’t had much luck talking about my life for 5 or 6 years… maybe since I burned out on tech and publishing during and after the release of my book in 2019. The pandemic came as a relief at the beginning of 2020, I remember, in that twisted way that some introverts and burnouts were able to guiltily confess in private messages to one another at the time. Despite the upheaval to the world and our lives, we all suddenly had bigger problems to fry / better excuses to provide for why self-expression, personal branding, and social networking activity had dropped to record lows.
During that long period of social distancing, remote working, async communicating, and splintering into smaller and more private communities, a lot still continued to happen, but we (or was it just me?) lost track of what was happening to everyone else.
I extended my break from the tech world, and decided the publishing world wasn’t for me either. I got a pandemic separation, then divorce. I doubled down on therapy, app dating, doom scrolling, impulse shopping, stress eating, and nesting in my small apartment. My primary inner circle shifted to group texts and Discord servers, away from the increasingly toxic public social platforms. My personal interests circled around frameworks of meaning-making from tarot cards, symbol systems, clocks and calendars, the occult, internal family systems, nondualism, attachment theory, trauma and healing modalities, psychedelics, yoga, meditation, and the creative pursuit.
The trajectory of my mental state can be traced by the arc of my last four annual reviews:
- 2020: Year of the Amateur (losing bearings, starting over)
- 2021: Year of Reconstellation (getting bearings, take 1)
- 2022: A Blagenflorble Heart (getting bearings, take 2)
- 2023: CHALANT ☄️ (getting bearings, take 3)
The general pattern of which was to dig deeper and deeper into my sense of self and the world until I reached something that could pass as stable ground to build on, safe from all danger. A foundation on which bearings for a sense of self could be rebuilt.
CHALANT served me pretty well. It gave me permission to care about things again, even if they weren’t necessarily approved as things to care about. A quick definition if you don’t want to read the whole post about it:
CHALANT (adj): obviously, the opposite of nonchalant. Whereas nonchalant is cool, casual, etc in an easy but affected way, chalant is explicitly not cool, not casual, and not affected. It’s kinda sweaty and gross and awkward, as well as often feeling embarrassingly earnest. Trying too hard. Caring too much.
Part of the reason this year’s annual review has been so difficult to write was because CHALANT was continuing to be useful in the way I was approaching things. Let me point to evidence of CHALANT bringing back a very real spark of aliveness to my life.
Buying a CHALANT house on a hill
Last December, in a very unexpected series of events, I ended up moving into the quirky house of my dreams! It was built by Christopher Alexander — author of A Pattern Language — and has its own Wikipedia page. More than that, though, is it just feels like I was meant to be here, and I can’t believe I ever had to live anywhere else. I feel like this house cares about us and for us as we live within its walls.
A CHALANT re-acquaintance with trees, birds, parks, and nature
New CHALANT relationship energy
I’m very grateful for the weird dating app algorithmic universe that we live in these days that has connected me to Sarah. She’s a delightful, bad ass, and inspiring human who has already greatly expanded my understanding and enjoyment of many things including but not limited to tree and bird identification, advanced cocktail preparation, mountain cabins, forest care and prescribed burning, chainsaws, neuroscience vs woo, cedar baths in zen gardens, sound baths in hammocks, smutty literature, remote cabins in fjords, notebooks filled with all the lists, trips planned years in advance, long days spent doing nothing at all, sunset appreciation clubs, and more, and all of it is a whole lotta fun.
So that’s happening.
A bouquet of CHALANT kittens
I didn’t plan to become a cat gentleman, but I also didn’t not plan to become a cat gentleman. And turns out nothing is more CHALANT than being attacked by kittens, then immediately being used as a bed for very urgent kitten naps, and then having to post a hundred cat pictures to the internet and canceling all plans for the rest of the day.
A very CHALANT visit to family in Japan with my kids and mom
My mom immigrated from Japan to the US in her early 20s. When I was young, we went back every summer for 6 week visits, and I have a lot of memories with my cousins and uncles and aunts and grandmother up to about the year 1998 when post-college life basically brought an end to long vacations. 26 years later… my kids have never left the US, and my tiny cousins now have their own kids that are older than their parents were the last time I saw them. My mom also hadn’t been back to visit for at least 15 years either. Being able to re-connect with family in Japan across 3 generations was amazing and all the things. A very formative trip we’ll all remember for the rest of our lives!
A strange aside: With the help of translation apps I could communicate with my cousins, aunts, uncles, and other family members for the first time! Getting around on trains was also super simple with Google Maps, and ChatGPT even helped me find a small store where I could buy a replacement micro-USB cord that Louie had lost in the shuffle somewhere. Technology is weird and a mixed bag these days, but when it allows me to visit a foreign country and have substantive conversations with my Japanese relatives for the first time ever, and discover the ins-and-outs of a neighborhood almost as well as any local, I have to reluctantly admit that it kinda felt like pure magic.
All projects abound in CHALANT energy
My home, my kids, my relationship, my kittens, my family, and my creative projects have all come together in a way that is helping me stay oriented to what makes me feel the most alive.
Even as specific projects and jobs end and begin, there are themes and arcs that carry forward from new to old to new again. Last week was my last week as an employee at Medium. And this week, I have begun my 6-month experiment in trying to take 750 Words to the next level of sustainability and fun. At the heart of both of these endeavors is a belief that writing brings us closer to ourselves and to the world. Putting energy behind this, via multiple projects, is definitely worthy of my time and energy and attention.
Life without a center
The theme I want to play with this year that builds on top of chalant is the letting go of having a central organizing principle, or purpose. It’s easy to see why putting energy into living authentically makes sense, but I think in order to really do this well I need to also let go of things making sense.
Becoming more like a sprawling rhizome than a branching tree.
Living without a center is kind of difficult to articulate, but it’ll be fun to make an attempt! Think of how a tree has a trunk that splits into branches, and those split into yet finer branches, and those continue differentiating into leaves. Everything can be said to come from the trunk even if it’s several degrees removed. When a thing has a central organizing principle that captures the essence of the whole, a thing becomes much easier to grasp with our minds and therefore it becomes easier to talk about, understand, build on top of, etc.
Now think of the structure of neurons in our brain, mycelium networks connecting all the roots of trees in a forest, roads connecting cities on a map, computer servers wiring together across oceans and satellites to form the Internet.
Tree-like things just make more sense than rhizome-like things. Planets, solar systems, and galaxies make more sense than galaxy filaments (the largest known structures in our universe). Things-without-centers are less coherent, they make LESS sense (to us, at least), but they are just as real.
When our lives have a central purpose, drive, motivating impulse, etc, they become easier to think and talk about, and this feels like progress in many ways for the simple fact that it becomes easier to think and talk about. Regardless of the content of the central purpose.
Shifting from a life organized around a central principle or purpose towards a life without one probably feels like a step in the wrong direction. But the “wrong direction” is a construct of tree-like thinking.
Yes, loosening the death grip that striving for a central purpose in life has on us is… disorienting. It feels like a phase shift where all the metaphors and reference points have been tossed out, perhaps with nothing to replace them (though you’ll have to pry metaphors from my cold, dying hands). Suddenly it feels like I’m a stranger in a strange land. On the other hand, everything feels fresh and full with life! It feels a lot slower, more wander-y, a little bit as if I’ve been plucked out of time. Generally, it seems, life without a center feels a lot sillier as well.
The seed of this idea that was planted in last year’s post, and has been germinating for a while. It began like this:
🍎 In mask life everything is enjoyed through narrative progress, plot, cause-and-effect, earning status, paying debt, acquiring success, credit, and riches. It fits well with school, career, relationship goals, family goals, politics, sports, games, heroic quests, quarterly results, and battles between good and evil.
🍊 In gooey life, on the other hand, everything is enjoyed through simply having the pleasure of being alive and having this shared moment to participate in the wild chaotic dance of life with everyone and everything else.
So much of my life to date (primarily in mask life mode aka life with a center mode aka tree mode) has been about preparing for challenges, racing up the learning curve, meeting challenges head on, learning from setbacks, course correcting when errors are made, and learning how to get back on track. The meta learning curve of turning problems into opportunities. Of finding the space in the middle of the Ikigai Venn diagram.
In this mode, whether life is “good” is a function of the ratio of preparation to unwelcome surprises, the ratio of meeting challenges vs being bested by them, the ratio of being able to learn vs becoming more rigid and afraid. Society is equipped with a billion ways to assess our value based on how well we are adapted to contributing to it. Like many others, I do okay at this game, and this ego boost tends to keep us playing, if only for the dopamine and sense of accomplishment.
Gooey life aka life without a center mode aka rhizome mode, on the other hand, doesn’t have the convenient affordances of problems OR opportunities. As an inconsistently resourced human, my wavering sense of self will sometimes crave the cognitive ease (and predictable portioning of dopamine and serotonin) of a well-structured problem to hold onto, which life with a center is well-designed to provide. Grasping at opportunities is a base human instinct. The absence of these reference points for organizing life (even if they are problems) can feel like a problem in itself! It feels unfamiliar and weird and even a bit ominous/foreboding to not orient around problems and opportunities. This absence of the language and conceptual structure of problems, I’ve noticed, can create a new distinct species of uNcEnTeReD hUnCh that can’t be grasped or even articulated without down-shifting back into life with a center where narratives and concepts rule.
When I’m able to stay in life without a center mode (and NOT down-shift into convenient concepts as a way to resist/dispel the uncomfortable and indistinct feeling of uneasiness or vertigo or groundlessness) things goo-ily ooze up and usually surprise me in their wiggly but distinctly and incontrovertibly TRUE way. Like a memory, or a flash of feeling, or an old part that was exiled long ago who needs a hug. There’s no side quest offered, no thing TO URGENTLY DO. Nothing to mask the squirminess of the raw and direct experience of being alive.
Along with the feeling an open question hovers without expectation of an answer. Is it possible to welcome this uneasy uncomfortable vulnerable feeling that has just arrived from the deep labyrinths of my being? Or will I push it off to that always lurking warrior-of-problems / wizard-of-opportunities stationed right around the corner? That all-too-familiar automatic reactor in me who’s willing to dutifully convert feelings into stories that are then broken down into smaller actionable tasks that can be more easily processed and resolved?
Can I have the feeling and hold this question and just see what happens, motivated by curiosity rather than intention? Let’s see.
When life doesn’t have a center, I can just be curious about what happens instead of trying to force it into being something I am familiar with.
If 🐝🐝🐝 was my only job
Living without a center, without reference points for problems and opportunities, and spending more and more time re-integrating long exiled parts back into my sense of self, being curious about what will happen next, feeling my face smashed up against the present moment as it is happening… feels alive.
I enjoy being myself. Whatever I am.
Being myself is simple. It’s the simplest thing I could possibly do. It is also unconcerned with “shoulds” and even “coulds” that seem quite desirable from the perspective of mask life.
I should do [responsible, wise thing] because it is responsible and wise.
I should take advantage of [great opportunity] because it is a great opportunity.
I could [solve big important problem that needs solving] because it does need solving, and it’s rare to be in a position to be able to solve it.
The shoulds and coulds of risk and reward, both for problems and opportunities, have lost their shine. The stories and concepts that make them sparkle when looked at through the lens of mask life crumble away as false treasure.
The cognitive ease they afford comes at a great price.
Instead of shoulds and coulds I feel compelled by being in the stream of life’s never predictable surprises. Surprises aren’t interpreted as opportunities for rewards or threats of danger, they’re the pure and raw material of living experience that can’t be traded in for anything because they’re the only things that fully truly exist.
This mode is speaking to me but it isn’t really speaking in words (hence the rambling plethora of words you see here). It’s speaking in energy, in vibes, in magnetism and gravity, and I feel drawn in directions that I’m only beginning to orient around. I feel gooey enough to let it take me wherever it wants to go.
Doing that is what I am calling BBB this year. Being Buster Benson. 🐝🐝🐝 Not any of the Buster Benson facsimiles I created in order to fit into the world, not the center or wings of the Ikigai circles, not the outputs of so many long projects of trying to be understood by others. But rather the me that exists as a wandering wiggling wave within the ocean of everything that is happening, ready to participate in the full, endlessly surprising, whatever it is to be alive.
