Chapter 2 - Part 1 - The Search
SEVERAL DAYS WENT BY. I stayed home in my apartment binge watching TV, becoming more lethargic with each passing day. A nasty trend was developing and I could see it. I didn’t want to be lazy. I didn’t want to just exist. I wanted to be proactive. I wanted to seek knowledge. But how? How was I going to be able to seek and find this knowledge I so passionately yearned for? I could focus on exhausting my warm market—that is, my friends. But although I knew I had some bright friends, I needed to break out past my social circle. I needed to make new contacts, make new friends.
While clicking around on the internet I came across a site I’d never heard of called Meetup.com. It allowed you to join groups based on different topics and attend their in-person meetings where those topics were discussed. I saw that they had groups dedicated to philosophy, science, and a host of other topics. So I joined and added myself to several groups. I had joined an atheist group that had a meeting taking place just a mile from where I lived in the next day. I RSVP'd. This was exciting. I had never met with other people before to specifically talk about atheism. I had anticipation as to what we’d talk about. I joined a group dedicated to Buddhist philosophy, and another dedicated to lovers of wisdom - the true meaning of philosophy, and another dedicated to science enthusiasts. This was my ticket to expand my social contacts and hopefully make new friends, as well as seek the wisdom I so desperately was trying to find.
In the meantime I needed to stay proactive. I remember my sister telling how therapeutic it is to write down positive messages and goals and to allow them to psychologically reinforce you. So I took out a piece of paper and a marker and wrote a list of goals I wanted to make. In no particular order, they were:
- Connect with people that matter.
- Collaborate with like minded individuals.
- Indulge in your passions.
- Enjoy life!
- Stay positive, live positive!
- Don’t be lazy!
- Do not let apathy rule you.
- Be confident in who you are, be true to who you are.
- Go out! Enjoy the summer. Enjoy the outdoors.
- Continue writing everyday and reading.
- Make projects and stick to them.
- Learn a new skill that I did not have time to learn before.
- Make some art!
- Make life your bitch!
I taped the paper to the wall of my living room where I could see it everyday. I hoped this would keep me motivated. I had no idea what art I’d do. I used to paint and draw but that fell by the wayside once I started working full time. I was open to painting again, but I had no ideas. I primarily wanted to meet new people who I could hopefully learn from. I wanted to know what meaning and purpose life had, if it had any at all, in world driven by materialism and wealth accumulation on the one hand, and religious fervor on the other. There had to be something better out there, there had to be a better alternative. And that was what I intended to seek.
So I spent the rest of the day reading online. I had developed an addiction to wikipedia and to YouTube. I could literally spend an entire day on those two sites with no problem whatsoever. I’d vacuum up as much information as I could about anything that came to my mind: history, philosophy, geography, crime statistics, famous people—you name it. Just about everything except sports. I’m just old enough to remember the days before the internet. Back in the early nineties if you had a question, you had to get an encyclopedia, or you had to go to the library and take out a book. That took a lot of energy, and you weren’t given a reasonable guarantee you’d to find your answer. With the advent of the internet we now had the knowledge of the world at our fingertips. We can find out anything we want in seconds without out ever leaving our homes, so long as you were living in a free country. The average person today has access to more information than anyone else at any time in history. I truly believed we were living in the best time in human history. There was no excuse to be ignorant anymore. Anyone with internet access in a relatively free society could find out, for example, the facts of evolution. And I intended to use the internet for shedding my ignorance on a whole host of topics. I wanted to have things to talk about when I got to the meetups. And so I read, and I joined more groups, and I prepared for the first meeting the day. Needless to say I was a little nervous.
