“Prove to me you can do it without any concrete examples of success?…”
Bleecker Street.
I spend a lot of my spare time in the gym. It’s not to compete in the “juicehead” competition at the Jersey Shore - it’s to keep structure in my life.
Life throws audibles at you by the second. My gym routine, for the most part, is one of the only constants I have in it. You could say the gym is my haven. It’s where at times, I think the best.
With any constant, one can develop a tendency to be stubborn. For years, I have suffered from chronic shoulder pain, a result of a collarbone break when I played lacrosse in high school. It affects my lifting, but I work through the pain. Not once have I consulted a trainer about it - as i said, I’m stubborn and persistent and often feel like I can work through the pain myself.
Yesterday, upon watching me lift, one of the trainers at my gym approached me. I usually shrug advice off from the trainers at my gym. ”Hey guy - I’ve been doing this for years now - what can you teach me that I don’t know?!?” He asked me if I have a shoulder injury. I let him know that yes, there is pain from an athletic injury but I fight through it. He then showed me a simple adjustment to my benching and showed me how I was favoring one shoulder because of the pain. Reluctantly, I listened to his advice and proceeded with my workout.
Today is one of the first days in a long time where I feel no shoulder pain.
In life, it is easy to ignore advice and continue on your daily routines - that is what feels safe and comfortable after all. But sometimes, all it takes it a slight tweak to make a huge difference. You may be able to find that tweak yourself, but don’t be afraid to listen to others. You aren’t always going to be right - it’s taken me almost 26 years for me to be able to admit that. Others are there to help. After all, you can’t carry the weight of the world on your shoulders alone. (See what I did there?)
A little change can make a huge impact!
It all starts here.
I woke up this morning to snow-covered New York City. Minus the bizarre winter storm we had on Halloween, this is the much appreciated first snowfall of the year for us New Yorkers. It will also be the last appreciated snowfall of the year for us New Yorkers.
I love that first snowfall - it’s Mother Nature’s way of disrupting the grey landscapes of wintertime in NYC. Snow causes a shift in our surroundings that causes us to pause our daily routines and adapt. Hat, check. Gloves, check. Snow boots, well sort of check - I hate rocking snow boots so I find the shoes that have the thickest leather to protect my feet from the cold.
I have a soft spot for disruptors in technology. Today, as I uploaded my snow photos to Path, checked-in at Washington Square Park on foursquare, and now created this post on Tumblr, I’ve discovered my soft spot for snow. Snow, after all, is Mother Nature’s way of showing us that change to the daily norm can be a good thing.
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There are two things simultaneously occurring related to tech that leave me thinking one thing - old dudes don’t get it.
The first is the fact that we are even discussing the possibility of the SOPA bill passing. To quote Seth Meyers from SNL’s Weekend Update, “Really?!?!? Really Congress?!?!” You want to pass a bill that would basically give U.S. authorities complete control to censor everything on the Internet and hence kill freedom of speech. It’s 2012, not 1984.
The second I’m reminded of every night when I try to tune into the Knicks on MSG (yes even at 4-4, there’s finally a reason to watch the Knicks again). Unfortunately, Time Warner Cable has “rejected” my attempts to see if Melo and Amar’e can lead the Knicks back to a title, as the cable company has stripped New Yorkers of MSG and MSG+, a decision fueled by a fee disagreement with the Dolan family. Granted, I’m not a biggest fan of every decision the Dolan family has made (see: ISIAH THOMAS, STEPHON MARBURY), but I’ve had a rather lousy experience with Time Warner Cable overall (fees, nebulous charges, lack of functional supplied equipment) so I’m pointing the finger at them for this one.
Both the movement to pass the SOPA bill and the suspension of MSG from Time Warner Cable signal one strong message to me - those currently in the positions to make powerful decisions that affect consumers of technology are so out of touch with two things: consumers and technology.
Whether we are talking about browsing/hosting content on the Internet or kicking back and watching Carmelo Anthony drain a three pointer, consumers should at the very least have the ability to consume without massive restrictions in place. This seems so basic to me, but clearly is a foreign concept to some.
Luckily, we live in an age where dissenters of such leaders can be heard loudly. The NY Tech Community in particular has done a fantastic job leading the rallying cry against SOPA. I’m fairly optimistic that SOPA will not pass.
My chances of watching the Knicks at home this year look bleaker. What is the Knicks fan who has Time Warner Cable to do? My apartment building is wired only for Time Warner Cable, so I cannot switch to an alternative cable provider. While I am seriously considering getting rid of cable and looking at other solutions such as Boxee, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get past blackouts imposed on sports games. Surely, someone will figure out a new solution, right?
In times like theses, I can only hope the new guard of tech (aka the startup community) can figure out a way to solve this new “MELOdrama” plaguing every New Yorker with Time Warner Cable. Only innovators can solve this dilemma. Fred Wilson makes an excellent point in his #screwcable post:
I’ve long believed that piracy is largely a business model problem not a human behavior problem. If you give people a legal way to consume the content they want, they will pay for it. But when you make it impossible to legally consume the content they want, they will pirate it. That’s what happened last night and that is what will happen every night there is a Knicks game on TV for as long as MSG and Time Warner Cable continue to figure out how to screw their customers.
To borrow from Walt Clyde Frazier (whose voice I can no longer here), both the invention of the SOPA bill and the Time Warner Cable dispute with MSG clearly demonstrate that consumers of technology and those with control over it are not “thriving and jiving” together. I blame the old dudes.
I’m 25 and I’m an existentialist. Or maybe I am terrified of existentialism.
Regardless, as I begin to finally face the reality that yes, I am an adult, and more so, I’m not going to live forever (yet to be proven), I have come to the conclusion that life is a non-stop journey in answering one question:
Who am I?
Simple enough, right? Absolutely not.
Think about it. From the very beginning of one’s existence, we are thrown into a gauntlet of situations that constantly work with one another to help define who we are. Was my decision to take my first steps earlier than my peers influential down the road influential in building an overall independent attitude - I’d argue to some degree yes. I’m sure there are countless psychological studies to help back this theory up (feel free to weigh in and comment), but to be honest, I’m not even sure if I crawled until I was 2. Ask my mom.
The point is simple. In life, we make hundreds of decisions on a daily basis that collectively define our character and identity. Each decision is a building block of a foundation that only completes construction when you die (yet to be proven as well).
So with this basic understanding and rudimentary definition of life, I pose the following question: why are we comfortable with streamlining our lives on Facebook?
What do I mean by streamlining life? Facebook’s interface alone encourages users to depict their lives through Facebook’s version of life (i.e. basic info, wall posts, photos, comments, connections). Do not get me wrong, Facebook has done an incredible job in creating a template for sharing our lives - my praise cannot be high enough for Zuckerberg and co. in this respect. However, one of Facebook’s greatest appeals in terms of easy-to-use user interface (UI to some of you in the in) is also in my opinion its Achilles heel (besides privacy concerns, its other Achilles heel - we have two heels, after all). Life wasn’t meant to be dictated by a template.
It’s so easy to create our own online personas on Facebook. We choose what to post, what to “like”, who to “friend”, what to make visible on our wall - you get the point. We live in a world now where upon meeting someone, it is very common to “friend” him/her on Facebook and we are instantly fed with a sense of who someone is based on the way they depict themselves on Facebook. To borrow from the wise words of Sir Charles Barkley, that my friends, is “turrible.” With Facebook such a critical part of the way one represents oneself to the public world, I’d argue many are making decisions in life based on how it will look on their Timeline. We live vicariously through our profiles.
But is Facebook to blame? No, not entirely. Facebook has simply (well, not so simply but for the sake of this post’s length, simply) built an incredible platform to show off who we are and share our experiences with others. We’ve taken that platform and turned it into a system where “showing off” reigns supreme - and it’s way too easy to do so. And in this process of building our Facebook profile (now Facebook Timeline to us early adopters), we have in a sense, lost our own personality as we have bought into the Facebook way of telling life’s story and sharing our identities.
I’m not quitting Facebook any time soon. In truth, that would probably be social suicide, as I find out about many of my invitations to events though Facebook. But I am decreasing my time spent on the network, and more importantly, my time interacting on Facebook.
Somewhat ironically, part of this been ushered on by an increase in use of other social networks that are a) more private with less clutter and noise and b) more focused on a specific theme, such as location check-ins with foursquare. Sure, one may argue that foursquare is just as much, if not more, about bragging about one’s “social status” by checking into certain locations over others and building a “location profile” to show off. To a degree, this is true, but I find the location discovery aspect of it to be my own driving motivation and the overall appeal of using the network.
Most of my decision to cut down on Facebook time has been inspired by a desire to find more open ended ways to show off my personality, viewpoints, inner thoughts, etc. such as Tumblr. (This is sooooo meta right now.) Tumblr is an intellectual social network that while certainly easy-to-use, challenges me to post different forms of content (blog posts, photos, videos, etc.) that broadcasts not to audience not made up of those who I have friended, but instead, the world. I could pretty much put up anything on here, from self-labeled “deep posts” on streamlining life through Facebook to clips from my favorite movie, Jerry Maguire.
At the moment, Tumblr is like an unexplored jungle, one in which I find myself posting photos I’ve taken which I consider to be art. Such posts would probably be lost on Facebook in its current state, but have a home here on Tumblr. Even as I post gifs of “Bananas in Pajamas”, I am much more thoughtful of what I post to Tumblr. Over time, I expect Tumblr to more accurately depict who I am than my Facebook profile.
I’m not trying to start a fight here with Facebook, nor completely provide an explanation as to why I think Tumblr is the future in self-discovery. And hey, I could be completely wrong here.
To quote Neitzsche:
“All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”
As I continue to ask myself who I am, I expect platforms like Tumblr to have a huge impact of answering that question over time - both to the outside world, and more importantly, to myself.