F78_020_video
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Neil: This is from 78. It's a podcast all about the subjective experience of time. I am your host, the Voice in Your Ears, Neil Gorman, and this is episode number 20 0 2 0. It is the second episode in the second half, the second season, which when I said it sounded kind of clever in my head. But it's not actually that interesting, is it?
It's just a bunch of twos all lined up, right? One after the other. Three twos. 2, 2, 2. Uh, I'm rambling. I'm gonna stop rambling here. What do I wanna talk about today? I want to talk about something that is probably gonna be a lot of revisiting of previous stuff that I have talked about on this show. If I were to [00:01:00] describe it in the broadest way, I would say that I've been thinking a lot about this kind of psychic or emotional migration pattern that I have noticed in myself and in some other people who I know fairly well.
And that's the, it's that pattern. It's this. I guess migration pattern is what I just called it that I have gone through and that I've seen other people go through that I feel compelled to say something about here. I'm gonna start by referencing something that I spoke about in a previous episode of this podcast where I read a little bit of text from the poem, the Prophet by Collegial Braun.
And there was a line of text that I focused on where [00:02:00] the writer says that your children dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. And that line is something that sticks with me. It kind of haunts me. It lingers in my head. It pops up at unexpected times and it always provokes a kind of experience for me.
It's kind of emotional experience, a cognitive experience. It, it gets me thinking about different things about my own life, mainly about the phase of life that I'm in, how I got there, that sort of stuff. So anyways, I wanna start with that, right? So I think that what has happened in my life, and I'm no for a fact, that I'm not the only one is when I was younger [00:03:00] I could say that I dwelled in the house of tomorrow, right?
That that was my house, the house of the future. I was young. I had this enormous stack of tomorrows and a fairly shorter stack of yesterdays, and I was going to inherit the world. Me and other people who were around my same age, we were gonna inherit the world. And when I was in that phase of my life, when I was living in the house to tomorrow, I.
Took a look outside of that. I looked at the world, the present, what was going on in the world around me or what I could see of it, and I didn't like it. I was, it made me angry. It made me feel just so pissed off so much of the time. [00:04:00] I would think This world isn't fair. This world is. So unjust. This world treats people badly.
And, and I just, man, I was so mad about that. I, I was, worked up, seriously, worked up about it. I was very judgmental. I would see what other people were doing and I would think, I, you know what? You're not doing it right when I get my chance to be in charge of things. I'm gonna do everything differently. I am not gonna end up being like those people, the people who are the sorts of adults who were in charge of the world when I was a young person.
I'm not gonna be like them. No, because they suck. They're idiots. They don't know what's up. That's how I felt about it. And. [00:05:00] You know, time went by and today I'm 47 years old as I say these words into this microphone, and I don't feel that way anymore. I am somebody who does not live in the house of tomorrow anymore.
I am, I left that house. Now I can look back and I can see it, I think, and I can see that there is a whole new group of people living in that house. And I look at them and I think. Wow. Some of those people look really angry. I remember when I lived in that house, I was pretty angry too, and I feel like, yeah, their anger.
I get that. It's not baseless. It's not unjustified. Yeah. I think I know why they're angry 'cause I've been there, but I don't feel that anger anymore. I have migrated away from it. I think this is mainly because. When I moved from dwelling in the house of [00:06:00] tomorrow to living in the present world, it became very apparent to me that it's actually very hard to be somebody who lives in the present world, who has inherited it.
You. You can't just change everything that you want to change. You can change some of it, you can. Live in ways that are better than some of the people who came before you. For sure, you can make a real effort to try to improve different things in your life, in the world, and the lives of others. All that's really true, but I am so small.
When I lived in the House of Tomorrow, I mistakenly. Thought that I was a lot bigger and power more powerful, or that I would be bigger and more powerful than I really ended up being than I ever could be. I assumed I [00:07:00] think that the people who are out in the present world, that they were powerful. And then when I was out in the present world and I was one of those people who I was previously judging, and I came to realize just how much power I didn't have.
It dawned on me that the people who I had previously judged, they didn't have much power when I was judging them either. And there was just this general kind of softening that occurred. I stopped,
I stopped having so much contempt. And this is something else I've talked about in previous episodes of this podcast, the abandonment of contempt for the world and, and for. Many of the people in it. I let go of that and I definitely, I think, started to have a lot more compassion for the world. The episodes, uh, of this podcast that I did where I was reading some of the work of Nick Cave, [00:08:00] really zero in on this because Nick Cave is one of the people who I, I don't know him or anything like that.
I wish I did, but I don't, he seems to be somebody who also. Had a lot of contempt for the world when he was a young man. And then as he went through his life and endured a lot of things, many of them extremely tragic, he didn't hold on to that contempt. He let go of it. And he, I think also adopted an incredibly inspiring, compassionate way of relating to the world, which is a way that I currently am attempting to.
Find my own version of I'm trying to emulate him, but also do things in my own way. 'cause my life is not his life and all that. But that's, that's what went on. That seems really important to me. This movement away from [00:09:00] contempt towards compassion. This movement out of the house of tomorrow, which was kind of a party house into the present world.
Which is has a lot of responsibilities, a lot of things you need to do when you live in the present world and all that. I'm really fascinated by this. I'm thinking about it all the time. I, I'm not literally thinking about it all the time. Of course, I'm thinking about it often. This is something that comes up probably daily in my head, noise.
This noticing of how I have changed sometimes noticing how other people have changed. And I guess that kind of brings me to my next topic here. I've been describing what I've been through [00:10:00] so far. I've been trying to describe, to formulate, to articulate the changes. That I think I have gone through as I have aged, as I have moved through time, as I have experienced my own movement through time subjectively, I've also noticed that there are some people who actually go in the opposite direction, who seem to become more contemptuous.
Or maybe they'll become more contemptuous. Maybe they just stay the same level of contemptuous that I had when I was younger. But it just seems more noticeable as they get older. That could be, but I, I see that there are some people who do this. I think that what happens, and this is not something I can prove at all, this is just an idea, it's a thought, is that when people.[00:11:00]
Have to leave the house of tomorrow when they gotta move out. When they stop being the people who are going to inherit the world and a new group of people replaces them, then the new group of people is now going to be the ones who inherit the world from you. You are going to be passing it to them. It's not you.
It's not you. You're not gonna be the ones who get it. You're the ones who have it, and now you're gonna do whatever you do and then you're gonna pass it on. When people go through that shift of being. Somebody who's gonna inherit to somebody who has, I think they can go through. What I hope I'm going through, which is this move towards compassion, this move towards seeing myself very much as a steward of the world, as somebody who really wants to try to take care of the world so that I can pass it on to my kids and other people who are in.
Their age cohort [00:12:00] or, or who are perhaps a little older than them, you know, that I, I want them to have something good and the only way they're gonna have something good is if I get over myself and get over my own desire to do things that are really fun and interesting all the time, and start doing things that are fun and interesting some of the time, but also spend a lot of time and energy trying to care for the world, trying to make it into something.
That I would want to pass on to them. That's one movement. But then there's this other movement, I think, where people experience this loss of being an inheritor, this loss of, of inheritance. They, they pass from being young people who will inherit the world to being people who are not young, who are now, who have inherited the world and have to do something with it.
And they experience that. I think maybe as a loss. And that loss, I think, for some [00:13:00] folks, turns into this kind of gaping hole that they just like wither around and, and become this kind of like nasty, recalcitrant, bitter kind of person. And. That's really sad, I think when that happens. I don't like it. I, I don't like seeing it.
I wish that there was something I could do to help people who are going through it. Sometimes I try, I don't think I'm actually that effective in this regard, but I do try because I really feel bad for those folks. Those folks who are so bitter about what they have lost. I almost said what they think they've lost, but it's not.
They don't think they've lost it. They've actually lost it. We all lose it. This is what it means to move through time. We go from being young, from being [00:14:00] people who the future is yours, to being people who you know, the past is yours. Uh, your future becomes, your present becomes the past. And that's just the way that it is.
It is a loss. There's no way around that that I can. Think of, I don't know that it needs to be, I, I was gonna say that it needs to be, that it doesn't need to be painful, but it probably does always need to be painful. It is kind of a painful thing, but what we do in response to that pain, that is something that we, we don't have to be, become jerks about it.
We don't have to become bitter. We can, that is an option. That's an option some people will take, unfortunately. It's not the only option. I actually think there are other options that are available. I think one other option that might be available is that people [00:15:00] can become compassionate stewards, I guess.
And you know, I'm sitting here right now in this room. I'm saying these things and
I'm a little worried to go back and listen to it because I feel like maybe I'm sounding a little preachy. A little up on my soapbox. I probably actually am doing that, and I'm worried that doing that is going to make what I'm saying sound kind of insufferable to people. And I don't wanna be an insufferable person.
I don't wanna be some sort of like preachy rah rah, rah, look at me. I'm so old and wise and stuff kind of person. So if I am doing that, I'm really sorry for real. I wish that I wasn't. Um, if you don't think that's what I'm doing, I guess that's good. 'cause I don't wanna be doing that.
So where does that leave us? Where does that leave [00:16:00] me? I think that leaves me with a question, uh, that just popped into my head here at the very end of this thing. How is it that I can occupy? This position that I find myself in now, being somebody who is hopefully a compassionate steward of the world without being a insufferable, preachy kind of dude, I don't know.
I don't know how to do that. Um, 'cause here I am making a podcast, which. As I've said in the past, you kinda have to have a certain kind of narcissism to do this sort of a thing, right? To assume that your thoughts are interesting enough to other people, that you'll put them out on the internet for other people to listen to.
I, I do that and um, yeah. I'm clearly running outta steam here, aren't [00:17:00] I? Yes, yes I am. That was a rhetorical question, and you, whoever you are who's listening to this, it's not like you can answer me, so, you know, whatever. I'm gonna stop talking now. I really hope that this wasn't something that you hated listening to.
If you've listened this far, I'm assuming that it wasn't, uh, if it was something to all those people who found this to be boring and just lame as could be, and they left. I am sorry. You can't hear me say, I'm sorry, but I am. And, uh, yeah, I don't think I have anything else. Till next time folks, thank you very much for.
Having my voice in your ears. I really do appreciate that you lend me your time and your attention. It's really nice of you. If you're somebody who dwells in the house of tomorrow and you look out at the people who are occupying the present world, try not to be so judgmental. You know, [00:18:00] try maybe. Maybe you're in the house of tomorrow and you're not doing that.
If you're somebody who lives in the house tomorrow and you're not being judgemental. Good for you. That's impressive. To those of us who are out here in the present world, let's not be bitter about what we've lost. Let's try to do things and stuff that will make the world into something better, nicer than it was when we inherited it.
Okay, I'm done talking now. For real. You all take care.