venturing backward: the empty slate (October 2011; written November 15, 2014)
the first post from my old blog “venturing backward”
When I found out Steve Jobs died, I made an entire pot of coffee. It was about ten at night. And I had Russian class the next day before eight in the morning.
I sat down on my apartment's balcony with my first cup of coffee. Alone, I sipped at it quickly. I kept drinking the coffee until I could feel my tired brain awakening.
Steve Jobs… the man behind the MacBook Pro on my bed. And what was I behind?
I watched the planes flashing their lights over the Potomac and descending down toward Reagan. All of those planes filled with people for whom I made no difference at all. I looked at the moon and thought about its age. I imagined all the billions of other people who looked at that ancient moon and on whom I’d never made any impact at all.
The blackness around the airplanes stretched out for millions of miles, into the emptiness of space, until the Earth was just a fragile piece of sand.
My life meant nothing to almost anybody. And there was no cosmic plan to make it matter. There was no purpose that was inherently mine. There was no one to pray to for help. There was no reason why I should have any value or worth. There was no one who knew how many hairs were on my head.
There was no book I could open to tell me the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. There was no Judgment Day when I would have to account for my actions and ethics and morality. I could do anything I wanted to anybody. I could invent my own right and wrong. I was on my own; I was terrified and angry and scared.
And one day - no matter how I chose to live - I’d just be dead like Steve Jobs.
And after that, no one would hold me accountable. After a while, no one would even remember or care or worry about what I had done.
Because in the end there was no objective moral difference between a Steve Jobs and a Saddam Hussein and an Andrew Jelinek. There was only whatever the rest of humanity made up in their heads about our value and worth and meaning.
But still I thought - Look what Steve Jobs has done... What have I done? But why do I even care? There isn't even a point - he will be forgotten.
For my second cup of coffee, I relocated to the reclining rocking chair in my bedroom. I put my feet up and looked out the window at the moon – and I drank, sip after sip, until it was time for a third.
Looking out that dark window, I felt the pressure of impending non-existence. I felt the pointlessness, the shortness, and the infinite freedom of a godless world.
I wondered why I was learning Russian. I asked myself why I was a student at the School of Foreign Service. I tried to understand why I had done an internship at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, why I had done an internship at the Atlantic Council, why I had studied International Relations (IR) at Michigan State.
There was no inherent, objective reason for me to be alive. So why did I fill that life with these things and not something else? Why even fill it with anything?
Then I remembered my last crisis – in 2008, when I was considering switching my major from IR to English.
What stopped me? I had gone to Bosnia and Romania and Kosovo and so on in 2009. And after seeing the bombed out buildings and the chronic poverty and the land mines, after speaking with survivors of genocide and concentration camps and Communism, I had decided that IR was a subject through which I could make real impact on the world. If there is no God, I had decided, then it is up to us… And I can help….
But so far it was all just cubicle work, academic journal articles, weekly readings of The Economist.
I saw myself in the future that night. I saw myself working in a cubicle somewhere stamping visas. I saw myself writing analyses about foreign policy that no one read. I saw myself coordinating events and fundraisers at a think tank serving corporate donors.
I saw myself in my 20th year in the Foreign Service, carrying out the mission of my superiors.
I thought about the people in Bosnia and wondered how this path would ever do anything for them.
It's up to us, I knew. Only we can decide to create a world with value and purpose and meaning.
This was just one of many times when I stayed up all night that autumn. On each occasion simply alone in my bedroom – writing, reading, drinking coffee, talking on the phone, staring at the moon, watching the planes, wondering what the universe would be like if there were a God. And all the while wondering: why, why, why?
Eventually that night in October I made a second pot of coffee. I stayed up until six in the morning and I didn’t go to Russian.
Later that week I applied to Teach For America.