The Matrix Spat Me Out, and I Love It
I spent years trying to make myself fit a conventional life. Eventually I started wondering whether the failures were not evidence that something was wrong with me, but information that I was solving the wrong problem.
“Trying to become sensible… trying to have the respectable trajectory…”
Usefulness and aliveness are not the same thing.
— Davies Musau
“Somewhere along the way…” through the realization that you became good at surviving structures you never consciously chose.
For a long time, I thought I was failing at life. Not dramatically. Nothing cinematic. No rain pouring down a window while a violin apologised for my existence. Just the quieter kind of failure. Trying to become sensible. Trying to choose the practical thing. Trying to have the respectable trajectory where one decision leads neatly to another and eventually somebody hands you a title, a salary, a chair with lumbar support and permission to feel like you have become a person. I tried. And strangely enough, I was capable of it. That might have been the problem. I could learn the software. Do the work. Solve the problem. Meet the client. Build the system. Design the thing. Fix whatever had mysteriously stopped working five minutes before I arrived. I could keep becoming useful. But usefulness and aliveness are not the same thing. Somewhere along the way, I realized I had become extremely good at surviving inside structures I had never consciously chosen. And the Matrix spat me out. Thank God.
I used to interpret every failed conventional path as evidence that something was wrong with me.
Maybe I lacked discipline.
Maybe I needed to specialize.
Maybe I needed to become more realistic.
Maybe I needed to stop thinking so much.
Maybe I needed to pick one thing.
Maybe I needed to finally become the sort of person whose life could be summarized without requiring several commas.
So I tried reducing myself into something more legible.
It didn't work.
Apparently the system had difficulty processing the file format.
And eventually I began wondering whether the rejection was information.
Not:
“You are too exceptional for ordinary life.”
That is the sort of sentence the ego prints, frames and hangs above its bed.
Something less flattering, and therefore probably more useful:
Maybe I was trying to solve the wrong problem.
I kept asking:
How do I make myself fit this life?
When perhaps the better question was:
What kind of life would require someone built like me?
Those are very different engineering briefs.
There is a peculiar violence in constantly translating yourself into something other people can immediately understand.
You say designer because explaining the rest takes too long.
Developer.
Creative director.
Musician.
Photographer.
Writer.
Actor.
Producer.
Whatever.
Eventually the labels begin fighting for custody of the same person.
And underneath all of them there is simply someone compelled to make things.
Maybe that was always the real profession.
Making things out of being alive.
Sounds.
Images.
Stories.
Systems.
Questions.
Worlds.
Evidence.
Things that did not exist before I became bothered enough by reality to interfere with it.
Maybe my mistake wasn't having too many interests.
Maybe the mistake was assuming they were separate.
The conventional path loves categories because categories are administratively convenient.
Choose a department.
Choose a profession.
Choose a niche.
Choose a five-year plan.
Choose the version of yourself most easily entered into a database.
But some lives do not develop vertically.
They develop like underground fungal networks, which is far less sexy on LinkedIn but considerably more interesting in nature.
One obsession feeds another.
Technology changes how I understand art.
Art changes how I understand consciousness.
Music changes how I understand film.
Film changes how I understand photography.
Business teaches me systems.
Systems teach me structure.
Structure gives chaos somewhere to dance.
Nothing was wasted.
Even the things that didn't become careers became vocabulary.
That changed how I look at failure.
A failed path is not necessarily a dead path.
Sometimes it is material.
Sometimes the thing you thought was supposed to become your destination was actually there to teach you a language you would need somewhere else.
You thought you were lost.
Meanwhile, you were collecting tools.
I also think we underestimate how much courage it takes to admit that the life you worked so hard to make functional is not necessarily the life you want.
There is embarrassment in changing direction.
Especially when everyone has already learned your previous coordinates.
You become afraid of appearing inconsistent.
But a map should change when the territory does.
There is no virtue in remaining loyal to an outdated description of yourself.
Some versions of us were built for rooms we no longer live in.
They protected us.
Fed us.
Paid bills.
Earned approval.
Helped us survive.
We can thank them without electing them again.
The previous administration remains vocal.
Authority revoked.
This is why I no longer hate the fact that some things did not work.
The jobs that felt too small.
The projects that collapsed.
The rooms that never had space.
The things I abandoned.
The versions of myself I could never quite maintain.
I can finally see the possibility that they were not interruptions to the story.
They were the story refusing a bad ending.
Sometimes life closes a door because there is wisdom on the other side.
Sometimes because you're unprepared.
Sometimes because somebody else was better.
Sometimes because life is random and doors are pieces of wood with no philosophical obligations whatsoever.
But sometimes you keep getting rejected by the same architecture because you are supposed to stop asking it for permission.
That possibility interests me.
So yes.
The Matrix spat me out.
And I love it here.
Outside, things are less certain.
There is no predefined ladder.
No guarantee that making art will reward me.
No cosmic HR department confirming that I have selected my correct purpose.
There is risk here.
Real risk.
I could fail spectacularly.
But at least they would be my failures.
Failures accumulated while attempting a life I consciously chose.
There is dignity in that.
Because perhaps an exceptional path is not one where exceptional things are guaranteed to happen to you.
Perhaps it is simply a path that requires you to accept an unusual amount of uncertainty in exchange for the possibility of becoming fully yourself.
No prophecy.
No entitlement.
Just responsibility.
If I believe there is more in me, then I owe that belief evidence.
Songs.
Films.
Photographs.
Writing.
Ideas.
Objects.
Experiments.
Attempts.
Failures.
Finished things.
Not endlessly telling myself I could have been something.
Becoming something.
I spent years asking the world for instructions.
I think I am finally more interested in authorship.
Not control.
Life has made it abundantly clear that control is a premium feature none of us actually purchased.
Authorship is different.
Authorship means I cannot dictate every event, but I can decide what I make from it.
I can decide what failure becomes after it enters me.
I can decide whether rejection becomes humiliation, information or material.
I can decide whether all the strange roads behind me form evidence that I was scattered...
or the beginnings of a language only now becoming readable.
Maybe the great work was never waiting somewhere in the future.
Maybe all of this was already part of it.
The abandoned things.
The wrong turns.
The practical years.
The beautiful mistakes.
The ridiculous ambitions.
The person who tried to fit.
The person who finally stopped.
All of it entering the furnace.
All of it becoming material.
And somewhere inside that mess, something is beginning to take shape.
Not a perfect career.
Not a perfectly optimized human.
Something much more interesting.
A life that looks increasingly like its author.