we are all made of stars

So, I went into the office at 10am today, and I stayed there until around three. Darragh and I threw in the towel then, but we're meeting tomorrow at 9:30, and will be breaking the Sabbath, as they used to say, for a significant portion of the day. Unfortunate, eh? After I left the office, I walked into town and had a v. late lunch/v. early dinner at an Italian place that I like, and the spicy tomato sauce almost (almost!) revived me. It wasn't enough, however, and so I slept for a couple of hours when I got home. Now, I need to wrap up some spreadsheet editin' before I go to bed, so that I'm prepped for what we're working on tomorrow. Honestly, there are times when I would like to never see another spreadsheet for as long as I live. I've learned quite a bit about the way that Excel works, but it's all been picked up out of sheer and brutal necessity, and I'm sure that there are more effective ways to do some of the things that I do.

I've been thinking a lot about collective minds recently, and how dependent I've become on being constantly plugged into all of the tools that make it easier for the collective minds that I'm a part of to operate effectively. I'm defining 'collective mind' as a set of memories and goals shared by two or more people, such that the collective functions at a higher level than it would be possible to function at alone. To put it another way, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. At work, I'm benefitting from sharing a collective mind with both Kim and Darragh; it can be tricky since Kim and I are based in different offices, which requires more cyberspace connections than the one I have with Darragh, who sits beside me. Friends and family comprise other groups of shared experiences, although it's less frequent that we're sharing information in an effort to achieve a task.

The miracle of the internet is that it allows collective minds to function regardless of distance, and it can even enhance collective minds in which all parties are located in the same place. Sharing is caring, so to speak, and with the internet I can share any knowledge that I want--pictures, spreadsheets, emails, documents, blog posts, random thoughts, etc. It's not always seamless and it's not always easy, but I can't imagine what my life would be like if I wasn't plugged in at all times. If I could only communicate via telephone with Kim, I wouldn't be able to see what she was seeing; if everything Darragh and I produced remained in paper form, I would never be able to find any of it.

The downside is that all of this contributes to my much-lamented lack of work/life balance. And perhaps I don't really mean work/life balance; perhaps I mean the balance between 'connected' and 'not connected'. Since I'm always connected, I always feel the insistent tug of the ether, the mandate to share everything and learn everything so that my mind and the collective minds that I'm a part of can continue to excel. My blog keeps family and friends updated about my day-to-day life, but it's also an obligation that takes twenty minutes a day away from the 'real world'. When I leave work at the end of the day, the desire to frequently check my email is overwhelming, since I don't want to miss anything; the consequence is that I miss the outside world that my ancestors lived in. Collective minds are built to insulate us from some of the risks of solitude; family units or tribes, the earliest forms of collective minds, helped to ensure that everyone remained as well-fed and healthy as possible, and passed on the collective memories of cultures, gods, histories, and beliefs. But, the more time you spend sharing, and the more time you spend learning from others, the less time you have to truly understand yourself. In everyone, there is a core that no one else can see, that is impossible to share, that remains buried in the subconcious, or the soul, beyond understanding. It is possible to know oneself, or to explore one's dark and murky depths, but the time required is increasingly difficult to find in a world where so much of one's day is spent connected to everyone and everything.

I feel that my consciousness could be divided into a Venn diagram of sorts; my circle overlaps with Kim, with Darragh, with my family, with my friends, with the people who are obsessed with Brangelina, with all sorts of groups that form in the internet and share information amongst themselves. The part of the circle that belongs only to me is small, and difficult to listen to beneath the constant noise generated by the other segments. I've been able to 'hear' it a bit better in Dublin, perhaps because my connections to family and friends have been somewhat quieter (although by no means gone) during my time here. And because I've been able to hear myself better, and because I currently like what I'm hearing even if there will always be some aspects of self-loathing in any examination of the depths of one's soul, I'm struggling to understand where I should draw the boundaries in a world that so easily facilitates living only in the brightly-illuminated, question-free areas of the collective mind. When two or more people are sharing thoughts, they are no longer really secrets; even if Kim, Darragh and I were plotting to kill everyone and take over the world, there would be no need to examine this in any detail, since at least these plans would be known to Kim and Darragh despite the secrecy that would be required around everyone else. The collective mind is filled with brightly-lit avenues and windows open to the sunshine, while the private mind is all dark alleyways and shuttered rooms; the collective mind offers safety, while the private mind only offers the lure of the unknown and the dangerous. Hysterical news reports about online predators aside, the Internet is making everyone safer, through the sharing of information and the fostering of online collective minds. The consequence is that it is now possible to live all of one's life in the brilliant light of the collective, warding off the shadows inside by collaborating with others.

Anyway, enough of that; I should really go back to creating more information for the collective mind so that I can go to sleep and explore the paths of my dreams. Goodnight!