Just another entry in the “collecting evidence for my future self” series. There’s no subheadings in this one so prepare yourself for some stream-of-consciousness.
Since moving to Perth five years ago I’ve seemingly been unable to keep myself away from further tertiary study for very long.
In 2020/2021 I enrolled in a BA and studied two units of philosophy at Macquarie University.
In 2022 I enrolled in a BSc and studied two units of chemistry as well as electives in philosophy and political science at The University of Western Australia.
In 2023 I studied individual units in game design and creative writing at Curtin University.
(In 2024 I finally gave it a rest and instead focused on getting married and buying a house!)
It is now the latter part of 2025, and I have begun a Graduate Certificate in Data Science. The data would suggest that I’ll abandon this after a couple units like I have all the other ones, but there are some key differences between this and my past endeavours.
The early 2020s were a period of deep and sometimes painful soul-searching for me (if you’ve read this blog you know all about that). I was seeking far and wide for passion, for meaning, for healing from past hurts, for a cause to devote myself to, and I was also seeking alternative career options. That’s a lot of pressure to put on any one aspect of life, and of course in hindsight nothing I could ever study would fill such a void.
I have learned some very key things and gotten some substantial answers that have primarily crystallised over the last 1-2 years (details in past blog posts). My Graduate Certificate (and potentially Graduate Diploma and/or Masters if I choose to progress) is not about that. My reasons for studying this are far more practical.
I’ve been doing software engineering for 10 years this year. I probably have at least 20 more to go. I don’t want to be doing the same thing I’m doing now for 20 more years. Data science sits very nicely in an intersection between my current work, and a new area of expertise to dive into. It can either amplify my existing career throughline or open sideways/diagonal transitions for me. It’s a relatively new field that still has plenty of things to discover within, it’s very practical to study alongside work, and it’s fast (only 1.5 years for the Masters). This is a rejuvenating career move, not anything else.
My prior study options were investigative and curious, and each of those areas have had different outcomes.
I do like reading about philosophy, but it’s something that I would like to be interested in more than I am actually interested in it. Reading philosophy forums online keeps that part of me satiated.
Game design and creative writing, well, I gave that a serious go for a solid year both with study and with writing and developing my own game. If my career takes me in the direction of game dev I’ll happily partake, but it’s not going to be the “side hustle” I imagined it as when I was in the throes of it two years ago. I channel this part of me into my TTRPG campaigns now, which require both game design and creative writing skills, come with a built-in appreciative audience (the friends you’re playing with), and can be worked on in a relatively low-effort, iterative/episodic manner. I do still have game ideas and story ideas every now and again, but being more familiar with the sheer amount of work that game dev requires leads me to burn through these creative drives in a different way.
And finally we come to chemistry. I adored chemistry when I was in high school. If there are alternate universes, there is a moment in my life that is undoubtedly a branching point. In late high school I went to a careers information event hosted by the school where you could speak to people from different careers to evaluate your own prospects and interests. I sat down with my chemistry teacher, Dr. Joyce, and told him how much I loved the subject.
He asked me, “Well, have you ever considered it as a career?”
Now, keep in mind, I had decided I was going to become a software engineer in about year 8. For a very large part of my adolescence I was absolutely certain I was going to become a game developer. So, in that moment, I mentally put away the question and told him of my existing plans.
What if I had properly considered the question? What if I hadn’t discarded it and actually thought about what I enjoyed doing, and where that could lead me? I’m convinced there’s an alternate universe where I give that proper consideration, and end up diving deeper into chemistry straight out of school.
This pivotal moment, I will be honest, is something I regret sometimes (not the outcome, because life has turned out pretty great, but the decision making process), but back then I was a heavily religious kid, and was used to fleeing from questions that made me uncomfortable or challenged my existing ideas. Also, I continue to firmly believe that as kids we’re forced to make life-spanning decisions far, far too early.
So I don’t live in that alternate universe. I live in this one. And chemistry keeps coming up. My 2022 studies in it gave me a taster, and I came out of that not wanting to continue, but that’s because I was looking at it from a career perspective. Chemistry is never going to be my career, but diving back into studying this year has made me miss it, and the feeling of understanding that comes with it.
I can just study it because I want to. For instance, I could do some sort of postgrad coursework degree that’s quicker than another undergrad and doesn’t waste my time with unrelated electives, and if I haven’t had enough by then, potentially go into research. The motivation would be to do a piece of research, make a contribution, and then return to my regular scheduled programming (wordplay!). Some people have kids, some start businesses, apparently my thing is studying. It would be something I do for my own fulfilment, without putting career pressure on it, and it would be for a limited period of time.
Of course, it is well known that I get excited about stuff and then fizzle out after a few months, so that’s why I’m writing this down now, so I can refer to it in a year or so when I’m done with data science study and compare my feelings then.
To conclude, I just looked it up and Dr. Joyce retired from teaching in 2016. I hope he’s doing well. Do people dedicate their theses? Maybe I’ll dedicate mine to him.
In my previous post, I resolved to examine the data accumulated in the contents of this blog to discern what experiences have so far made life meaningful and satisfying to me. In what was at the time a startling, true epiphany, I realised that my past efforts in documenting these things could be used to infer general principles that I could use in the future – my past self had unintentionally gathered data for me to use now. In the eight months since that post, I decided to sit with these pillars of meaning, and let them lead me. I decided to actively focus on cultivating experiences that leaned into them and feel the results, as well as recognise the relevant experiences that already exist around me and mindfully, intentionally focus on them.
The results have been quietly satisfying, at once subtle and deep. I listed the pillars of meaning in my previous post, but those were one-sentence descriptions. Let me expand on them somewhat.
My connections to the people I love. This refers not just to the obvious one of my love for Kiara, my life partner. I’m mostly referring to platonic love, since platonic relationships are the most frequent ones we have (unless we are incredibly lucky, or incredibly isolated). The connections should preferably be two-way, ones where I can put in effort to love and support the other, and in turn be loved and supported by them.
Travelling and seeing new places. When routines start to become stale, when the everyday experience of life starts to turn monotonous, travel is the best way of injecting a flood of novelty into it. Travel enables new experiences, new perspectives, which is of itself valuable and meaningful. Crucially, it also revitalises my enthusiasm for my “normal” life – by divesting myself of my normal routines and comforts, I learn what it is about those that I value, and therefore appreciate them more.
Music – the ordinary listening experience to form the foundation, and live shows as the capstone. Most of my creative expression tends to be word-based, or roleplay-based, both of which have rules and structure and a certain linearity to them, at least the formats I practice them in. Music has this as well, but its way of enabling emotions requires far less elaboration – music doesn’t need to introduce a relatable character for the listener to invest themselves in, spend time building that character up, and then have something perilous happen to them to make the listener fear for their life, just as one example. A song can hit you with a twenty-second arrangement that bypasses all of that and strikes directly at your emotions for no reason you can name. I value music for this so highly because it encourages me to break the bounds of my own storytelling. As for the impact of live shows, see my previous posts for exhaustive detail on this.
Creating and storytelling, on my own but especially with others. Stories are fun. Making up worlds and characters is incredibly fun and rewarding. Doing it with your friends makes it doubly so; books exist to be read, after all. But there is a deeper value cultivated by storytelling, or the consumption of stories: empathy. Stories allow us to imagine and put ourselves in the place of people we wouldn’t normally identify with, and in doing so humanise them. I don’t mean to imply that my storytelling does or even aims to do this on a regular basis, but it is a reason that I value the practice over just the entertainment and escapist aspects of it.
You may have noticed that these pillars have some overlap, and indeed they can play off of each other and intertwine. Storytelling with people you love hits pillars 1 and 4. Travelling to see a music festival or concert hits pillars 2 and 3. I had the unique experience last year of travelling with Kiara to see Coheed and Cambria, a band we both love that creates album-length scifi stories with their music. This incorporated all four pillars of meaning to varying degrees, the travel perhaps the least since we were only going to other Australian capital cities which we’d seen before.
The last eight months have had many incredible experiences, including my own wedding and, just recently, Kiara and I buying our first home together. These do potentially skew my perspective on the intervening time somewhat, especially the wedding – have I been getting such emotional satisfaction from my relationships with the people around me because of this huge event that highlighted them all, or has the event served merely to amplify what was already there? It is probably, hopefully, both.
By far the pillar that I’ve directed most of my attention to is the first. I would say my musical and storytelling habits and immersion are already well-trained and quite deep (though I have picked up my guitar and dusted off my amp for the first time in a long time and that has been quite fun). Travel, of course, requires organisation and funding that makes it more discrete in implementation, whereas social relationships can be continuously nourished by small daily or weekly steps. Some of these have borne more fruit than others; relationships are of course two-way, and require compatibility, response and effort from both sides. If they are not reciprocated, there’s little I can do beyond remaining open to that reciprocation in the future.
I am calling them relationships because the last few months have broken down my categorisation of friendships somewhat, and I am starting to see relationships as existing on something of a spectrum, or a grab bag of behaviours that apply differently to different people. Obviously certain of these behaviours are restricted to Kiara, but take, as an example, hugs. Hugs are great. I hug Kiara, and I hug my family, and more and more over the last year or so, I hug some of my friends. Some of my friends welcome hugs, others are more reticent, and I’ve been taking care to observe their reactions and whether they initiate hugs or not. Is my friendship with those that don’t prefer hugs lesser because of it? Of course not. Some of these “non-huggers” include Adelaide friends that I’ve known for many, many years. Video games often express progress in relationships in a linear manner, and physical contact like hugs tends to be a milestone in those. Real life is not like this. Relationships contain an assortment of different ways of showing affection that need to be tailored to the particular person, and not all those ways can be neatly categorised.
One of the things I miss about Antioch is that people there were not shy about showing physical affection in platonic contexts. It was not uncommon to witness people cuddling up while having a deep conversation. In the last year or so I’ve started to miss that. One of the things I’ve learned from my therapist is to ensure that I’m not “dead from the neck down”. Most often this refers to exercise, but I apply it here as well. Laughter and sharing stories are great, but sometimes you just want to hug your friends. It’s the music thing again – some things have a way of bypassing more cerebral expression and hitting the emotions directly. Hug your friends, y’all (if they want you to).
Let me return to the point. I’ve focused on cultivating relationships to varying degrees of success, and it’s made me pay attention to how I feel about different friendships not just in terms of the person on the other end, but in the length of the friendships. It’s been a long time since I’ve made a new one-on-one friend, and for a good while that novelty was exhilarating. I would get nervous before meeting up, dwell in gratitude after they’d left, and impatiently look forward to the next time.
Contrast that with a gaming session with eg any of the Adelaide crew, which has a drastically different timbre. There isn’t that nervous excitement, that not knowing, that unpredictability. Instead, there’s total comfort, familiarity, safety and trust. I can be my fully authentic self around them with zero filter and know that I am safe. And Kiara is basically an extension of myself at this point – we are of course different people, but our lives are so entwined that it is like we are two minds in the same body, or two planetoids orbiting a common centre of gravity, so that they form a single gravity well.
That sense of novelty is starting to ebb away from the newest friendship I’ve made, and it is beginning to morph into something a little more familiar. I have mixed feelings about this. That novelty, that not knowing what to expect and the thrill of uncertainty around whether our friendship would solidify is what heightened my awareness of it in a way that I haven’t felt in many years. It has been delightful to feel again, and I’m going to miss it when it’s gone. Does that diminish the appeal of the friendship? Of course not. When I think about the faces and voices of people that surround me my heart fills with gratitude, whether I’ve known them for a mere few years or for a significant portion of my life. But it has been delightfully interesting to see what my emotions have been doing as this new person has entered my sphere.
Novelty, then, and diversity of experience has been a keystone of the months since my last post. I do wonder frequently if this is an overriding factor, something that influences satisfaction and meaning as much as or even more than the pillars I’ve already identified. Novelty does come up in the pillars themselves. Travel, obviously, is that, and social connection and storytelling contain it as well. But I wonder, if I didn’t travel, didn’t make new friends or nurture existing ones, listened to the same music (which, to be fair, I tend to do anyway; it’s one area that I like to dive deep and narrow), and didn’t do much storytelling but experienced novelty in other ways, would I still feel like life was satisfying and meaningful? I struggle to think of how novelty might be introduced without hitting those things that I’m deeply interested in. New, single-player video games that don’t have significant story components, maybe. A crazy change of diet. A new job, maybe. I don’t know. I am certainly not going to discard the pillars so soon after I’ve discovered them in an attempt to validate this; that sounds miserable, and while I like to be a little bit scientific in my pursuit of meaning and joy, a lot of this is driven by emotion and instinct, not analysis. Still, it’s something to keep in mind and pay attention to.
I don’t consider the question of meaning and joy solved, and I doubt it ever will be completely. I have found parts of the answer that sustain me for the time being, but I remain open to future changes.
Time
A final anecdote, and another digression. I have, for the first time (and this is a novelty of a distinctly more neutral, or perhaps even negative variety), noticed my age. More specifically, I am now frequently associating with people significantly younger than me. When they tell me about some of their experiences and feelings, it is tempting to put them in an “I’ve seen that before” box, and I can imagine that impulse only increases the older one gets. I can think back to how I felt at that age and in that context; I can imagine that I understand how they are feeling now. We have all had the frustrating and demeaning experience of an older person acting as if they understood how we felt. Offering advice and suggestions when they are asked for is one thing, but presuming to understand how someone else feels, regardless of age, just because you have experienced something you believe is similar, is presumptuous in the extreme and an urge that needs to be moderated.
When we are tiny children, every minor setback is the worst thing that’s ever happened to us, which is why we bawl and scream (apart from not knowing how to communicate otherwise, having undeveloped brains, etc). This doesn’t stop as we get older, and so something that is happening to someone for the first time (a breakup, to take a contrived example that I have never actually experienced) that we have gone through many times over will feel completely different. Again, we’ve all had the horrible feeling of our feelings or perception being dismissed by someone older who has seen what they think is the same thing one too many times. I have been surprised by the urge not to dismiss (I would hope I have more empathy than that), but to think I understand by only hearing a general situation. I have offered unsolicited advice a couple of times and have only realised afterwards. An awareness of the age difference between me and another person is to some degree inevitable, but I can serve not to exacerbate it by not being an ass, even accidentally. It’s something to note.
Popular culture puts the spotlight on people in their teens and 20s as the stars of the show of life. People far older become mentors and wise teachers, especially in fantasy. People in between this are far less clearly depicted (or perhaps I just need to expand my sources). I would like to fully accept and be at peace with the passage of time and its effects on me, but I won’t lie and say that I’ve reached that point, or even that I’m actively working on it. I’ve noticed it, and the media’s messaging around this does needle me and affect my self-esteem, but it is something that I’m trying to put aside for the most part and just focus on doing what I aim to do: live a satisfying, meaningful, and joyful life.
Well, here I am again: compelled to write, to express, to feel, after seeing a band I’ve listened to for years in the flesh.
I had the strange but incredible opportunity to see Unleash the Archers two days in a row – once in Adelaide and once in Perth. (They added a Perth show late, after I’d already booked everything for the Adelaide one.) They were amazing both times, but what set the second show apart was I managed to get into the very front row. There was no barrier between me and the stage, and the band was literally centimetres away the whole show. At any point I could have reached out and touched them.
When this happens and when the artist leans into it, you become part of the experience. We made eye contact, fist bumped, and looked at each other while we sang the words together. I would never have expected the difference this would make, how it elevated an already fantastic show into something so much more personal. I’m going to be riding this high for days. At least three times while I was recording a video on my phone, the singer Brittney Hayes noticed and sang to the camera. I’m not much of a celebrity person, but being noticed and acknowledged by someone whose talents I admire has me completely giddy.
It’s the most viscerally and strongly I’ve felt in months. A metal show is a unique place where you can absolutely let go: you can scream, flail your arms around, dance or jump, cry, whatever. It doesn’t matter what you look like or what you do because everyone else there is there for the same reason: the love of the music, and they won’t judge you.
This has been a difficult year in many ways. Planning a wedding is equal parts exciting and stressful, not to mention the aggressive saving we’ve been doing for it. My game development successes from last year have unfortunately not carried over, and I’ve had two different game attempts gutter out into indefinite hiatus, which has been incredibly discouraging and draining. I didn’t realise how much I’d settled into a numb, day-by-day malaise, mobbed by a thousand everyday irritations until this trip, though short, completely shocked me out of it all and reminded me that I am a person with dreams and likes and aspirations and that I can feel, not just think. That there exists a world outside of my apartment’s walls – I hadn’t realised how much my outlook had shrunk to the four rooms I live in and the screens I stare into for most of my life.
The trip I’ve just been on was packed with so many great experiences: seeing my best friends all together for the first time in months, seeing the new house that a pair of them have just bought, meeting the child that a different pair of them have just brought into the world, and examining the first results of the new hobby we’re all getting into. I want to continue to be present in their lives, to be a part of their journey and have them be a part of mine.
And of course the shows. For these musicians to journey across the world from Canada, and for this weird tour schedule change to allow our lives to intersect twice in two days is something I’ll forever be grateful for. Seeing an artist you admire live is the crown jewel in the listening journey. A rare experience, but one I will always treasure.
I need to do this more often.
I’ve consistently said that this blog is a lesson and a reminder from me to myself. Reading the past few entries has been humbling, because I’ve come to similar conclusions before, and yet this year I failed to learn from past lessons, and fell into the same struggle I’ve fallen into before, chasing the same immense and misguided goal of becoming a video game developer, when this is not what gives my life meaning.
Here’s what gives my life meaning:
My connections to the people I love,
Travel and seeing new places, particularly natural wonders,
Music – the “ordinary” listening experience to form the foundation, and live shows as the capstone,
Creating and storytelling, on my own but especially with others. Not just the result, but the process, the experience.
This is the accrual of things I’ve written in this blog before. It’s practically scientific. It’s time to learn from this.
In 6-9 months’ time when I get restless again and think that the solution is to upend my life and change my career, I need to reread this list and do the things on it. Go for a trip. Go see a show. Get in a mosh and feel myself into existence again. Go hug my friends.
Memory is so fallible.
In my Antioch youth group days, one particular talk that a member gave was about experiencing, and being present for things like music shows or other (usually) one-off experiences. She criticised the desire to want to record these things instead of just being present and letting yourself be immersed in the experience. It’s one of the only individual talks from my years in the group that has stuck with me all this time, and it’s a very valid point.
However, there is a flipside. Without a record, without a memory aid, even the most intense experience we have will eventually fade in our minds. We can’t stop this entirely, but we can help ourselves a lot by making and keeping a memento. That’s why I record at least a bit of every show I attend. I don’t overdo it, because yes, being present is the point of being there, but in 5 years’ time I can rewatch my video of Brittney Hayes looking me in the eyes as we sing Ghosts In The Mist, and I’ll definitely remember what that felt like better than if I had the memory and nothing else.
It’s also why I keep updating this blog, even if only once or twice a year. Part of it is that I just have the unsuppressable need to put these thoughts to the page. But the lessons that I’ve explicitly listed above only emerge after looking at what I’ve written over a timeframe of years.
There is a period of time, during and after travel, where I find my habits and mental patterns change. There’s a lot of research that shows habits are strongly tied to place, so it’s unsurprising that after returning home I can already feel my thoughts slipping back to how they were beforehand. This will be accentuated when I return to work, and otherwise resume all the usual maintenance of life.
This blog has always been primarily a series of lessons from me to myself, and so I want to write down a few of the changes in my mind that I’d like to carry over or preserve going forward.
Perhaps it’s the nature of being on a cruise ship that makes spurious concerns vanish, as cooking and cleaning are completely taken care of for you, and you can focus purely on experience. In everyday life, I’m context switching constantly, jumping from one thing to another. I found during my holiday that I was able to loosen my mind, not be so tightly wound, and able to focus on one thing for a long period of time. I didn’t feel the urge to flick from concern to concern. This removal from distractions also really helped me think about life from high above, a feature of travel that I’ve talked about before on this blog. I would really like to maintain this feeling, if possible, or achieve it more easily, and I want to write down some of the factors that contributed.
No social media
Even though I had internet access and could potentially be on social media, I found my use went down to almost zero. A couple of things influenced this:
My subscription to the app I use for Reddit expired, and I didn’t bother to renew it.
I started reading a humongously long web serial, and that completely replaced any desire to scroll.
Social media greatly accentuates the feeling of constantly switching that I described above, the jumbled mind. By removing it, I both helped clear my head and gave myself time to read something longform, extending my attention span and letting me do something I actively enjoy, as opposed to the passive timewasting that social media generally is.
The key to preserving this one is twofold:
Uninstall social media apps, or limit their use.
Always be reading, or playing a game.
The combination of these two steps will replace the easiest outlet for the urge of “scroll through my phone” with something more enjoyable. If, when I undoubtedly turn to my phone for some distraction, the next chapter of whatever I’m reading is right there, or a proper game is available, then I’ll go for that instead of opening up Instagram.
No news
I don’t make a habit of following the news in general, but during my workday I check up on tech news sites in case something relevant pops up, and I read video game news because it interests me. This falls into the same bucket as social media if left unlimited by shortening attention span and increasing context switching, and it also serves as a form of procrastination for me. This one is harder to dispense with, because it’s not a matter of uninstalling a couple of apps on my phone – all I have to do is browse the internet, which is always available.
Being honest with myself, I don’t think I’m going to be able to maintain this one – it’s just too easy and too available and it serves as a great outlet for a 5 minute break during the workday. I’d sure love it if it was possible, and perhaps I’ll experiment with some site blockers. We’ll see what happens.
Far fewer possessions
Nothing makes me realise just how stuffed with unnecessary things my home is than leaving it and living out of a bag for a while. Of course, some of that is the nature of travel: eg on a cruise ship like I was, you don’t need a kitchen or anything for food preparation, or any cleaning supplies, because it’s all done for you. Nevertheless, with a suitcase full of clothes, a bag of toiletries, and a phone charger, you can go and do an enormous amount without needing much else.
This isn’t necessarily something that needs to be “solved” per se, especially because I live with a partner who wouldn’t appreciate me declaring us a minimalist state and throwing all her things out. One day, I’d like to explore this further.
No work
It seems obvious to say, but not having to work for a couple weeks really helps the brain decompress. Every time I travel I get the feeling that this is one of life’s great purposes, one of the worthiest reasons for being and living. Without needing to toil for survival every day, I can think about deeper things.
Counterintuitively, towards the end of 2-3 week holidays, I often find myself beginning to want the comfort of a familiar place and to stay in one spot for a while.
I also find that I start to get ideas.
Ideas and motivation for personal projects, things that I’d like to explore and accomplish, things that well up from deep inside me when given time and space to do so.
I would love to find out what I could do if given time and space to actually explore and accomplish those things. I would love to find out what boredom brings out from within me – when the frantic cycle of working for survival day to day is removed, what would I learn about myself? What would I do? Would I do the things I expect – read, write, play and make games? Or would I find that when not pressed by human societal constructs to work, other interests would wake up?
I graduated from university in 2014, and I started working as a software engineer in 2015. I saved and bought a house a few years later. I never had a gap year, never took an extended holiday, never took more than a few weeks at a time away from the default, expected life path. 2024 is the beginning of my tenth year of working as a professional. For years I’ve wanted to devote myself to telling stories, in both written form and others. The time is approaching when I feel I will benefit extremely from taking extended time away from software development, to spend time with and to discover myself and the world.
Many years ago, I was very into a band called Northlane. There’s a particular song of theirs that has this line as the opening hook:
I am what I create
Colourwave by Northlane
This is a motivational idea, but also a venomous one. The world at large tries its best to convince us that our worth is in the value-add, what we bring to the table. It defines humans as resources to be used and exploited.
Now, of course, creation and creativity can and do lead to happiness, both for the creator and those that witness things the creator makes. But creation is not simultaneous with happiness.
Creation, or consumption, or participation, or whatever verb describes the act intended to obtain happiness, must be followed by feeling.
Happiness is feeling.
It is a feeling I am experiencing right now, all through today, the day after I saw Evanescence live. They’re a band that means a lot to me, as they do to so many people, and witnessing their music in the flesh was an extraordinary experience. I am filled with melancholy and contentment in a delightful mix that I haven’t felt in a long time. The melancholy is because it’s over. The contentment is because it happened. In this moment, I want for nothing, nothing at all – all my normal yearning and striving and too-large awareness of existence is at rest. All that matters is the feeling.
This is mindfulness, and this is happiness.
I have spent the last 6 months both frantically making, and studying how to make, in the hopes that it will lead me to a desired career path, because I had deeply and subconsciously bought in to the idea that I am what I create.
Peeled out of darkness and tempered in glass I fracture in light and I spread My thund’ring voice crackles, my hands and feet grasp My wraith is a stormcloud struck dead
I ponder in raindrops that flail as they fly My noons do not redden, they blaze Starving are the shadows I leave in the sky Tempests are the marks of my gaze
My murmuring throat is a harbinger roused I split into foam on its blight I decay into sparks, I seep through the ground Forgotten like music, like night
On the 20th of April 2023, I saw my first total solar eclipse.
Immediately after the end of totality, I started writing down my memories and feelings of the event. I’m posting an excerpt of what I wrote, both to record it for my own future reference, and in an attempt to convince whoever’s reading this to go see a total solar eclipse if you ever get a chance.
Here it is:
In the lead up the edges of shadows became hazy, like they were motion blurred even when still. Light became dimmer and redder as if there was smoke in the air. Like wearing sunglasses without sunglasses. A distinct coolness, and even though you’re not supposed to look at the sun, in the tiny glimpses when taking off my filter it was somehow less harsh.
During totality, the sky darkened past twilight, a deep purple-navy like the sky at the beach after sunset. Stars became visible. The moon was absolute black and the sun’s corona was absolute white, a hazy effervescence that drifted out like ink through water, but the absolute essence of brightness. Beads of diamond brilliance marked a few points around the corona, piercing and blooming through the star’s haze.
Transcendental. Cosmic beauty and brilliance. The total assertion in my mind was not of insignificance or of distance, but of beauty, the glory and wonder of the universe.
The end of totality was glorious as a point of pure light bloomed outwards into a crescent – and then its brightness was too much and a filter was required once more. If the beginning of totality was twilight, then the end was a second dawn – the horizon’s light shifted to the 5am blue of a misty beach before sunrise, and it is as if the sun rose again over the next few minutes.
This is probably the closest I’m going to get to the overview effect – why do people spend time fighting each other and working against each other when the universe contains such beauty?
All of existence is raw and quivering. I have not felt a glory like this since before I renounced religion.
I hope those words convey the magnitude of the experience. It can’t be communicated in pictures. The thing that struck me the most was that this was the opposite of the classic cosmic horror experience – it was cosmic wonder. The distances and scales involved didn’t matter in the slightest. All I could think about was how beautiful the universe is, and how lucky we are to be alive and able to witness it.
After this, it is of no surprise to me that people chase eclipses. Kiara and I are already looking at seeing another in a few years’ time, hopefully 2026. We spoke to one person who had seen 25(!) eclipses, though half of those were annular, not total. 100% totality is essential to the experience: without it, you don’t get the sky going dark, stars coming out and being able to look at the sun with the naked eye.
I’ve written before about my trip to NZ last year – there was a particular moment there that had this sort of incredible natural beauty to it. I consider that the absolute highlight of my 2022. This eclipse is probably going to be the equivalent for this year.
Whenever I experience something like this, for a brief time the purpose of travel becomes clear. It is to fully experience the natural wonders of the universe. Human ingenuity is a marvel in itself, but those things that we did not create have for me always dwarfed the work of our hands. Perhaps one day I will see something that upends this. That prospect is exciting too.
A million dollars isn’t what it used to be. 1 million Australian dollars in 1973 (50 years ago) would be worth over 11 BILLION AUD in 2023. Certainly, nobody would complain at receiving a million dollars whenever it happened, and it would be enough to set you up for life if you were smart about it, but it’s not the immediate “quit your job, do whatever you want” ticket it once was.
So for this thought experiment, I decided to take a more corpulent number in today’s terms, a billion, and think about what my life would look like if that amount of money magically appeared in my bank account, no strings attached.
What would I do with it?
Pay off loans, buy houses, gifts to friends/family, travel around the world, live in the lap of luxury. Let’s get this one out of the way. We’ve all fantasised extensively about the wonders we could experience with an unlimited budget, and I think anyone who earns a huge windfall like this would undoubtedly relax and live it up for a while. I certainly would.
But that isn’t the focus nor the thesis of this blog post, because I contend that for many, myself included, there would come a time (maybe months, maybe years down the line) where even the most magnanimous of consumption wouldn’t be enough, in the sense that I would want to give back, to contribute something and make a mark on the world, make it a better place.
Now, the big caveat here is that this first phase may well change me enough that the remaining items on the list change as a result. I hope not, but it’s entirely possible. But let’s assume that I emerge from this phase of pure experience enriched and energised, but with much the same dreams as before.
Invest. This is another no-brainer, but the remaining items on the list are not going to be started with the aim of making a profit. With a billion dollars I can easily make a self-sustaining fund from which to sink huge amounts of money into the things I care about and not have to care in the slightest if they make a profit or not.
Now, onto the good stuff!
Defend the world’s forests. Over 80% of New Zealand used to be forest (source). A chunk of my money would go to buying up all the forests, particularly old-growth forests, that I can get my hands on, world-wide, and either keeping them privately-owned or handing them over to conservation organisations to protect and nurture. Forests hold a special mystique and wonder for me as they do for many, and too much of the world views them merely as a resource to be exploited.
A fiction magazine dedicated to unpublished authors. Many fiction authors are encouraged to start with short stories before they tackle novels, and many professional-paying short fiction magazines won’t even consider you until you can say in your submission “my work has previously appeared in A, B, and C.” Getting that first credit, that first paying published piece, is a stepping off point for authors, and a source of validation and encouragement that they can make their dream a reality. I would start a short fiction magazine that only accepts submissions from unpublished authors and pays professional rates. I want as many people who yearn to become professional fiction writers to succeed, and giving them a destination that accepts them with open arms will help them on their way.
If I like how this goes, I could even double down on this to establish grants for aspiring novelists, or even make a full-on publishing house for novels.
A record label. Just like with writing, there are people out there with ideas for music that can enrich others’ lives but can’t commit to making those ideas real because they have to contend with holding down a fucking job. I want to break those people out of the heinous cycle of capitalism and give them album-and-tour deals with complete creative control at very generous terms. I don’t care about making money off this – I want to kickstart these bands and music artists and send them on their way so they can inspire others and make this world a better place.
Because this is a private venture, all the people I hire to help these bands along will have to share the ethos. This is not about making albums that will make money back, this is about giving aspiring artists a chance to make their vision real. Certainly the artists can seek advice from the staff (who will hopefully know about the industry etc), but in the end, what the band decides goes.
This label will probably lean towards metal music, especially metal music that tells good stories (because that’s the music I like) but I’ll do my best to be flexible.
The Mythic Tales Festival. The name’s a work-in-progress, okay? This is a music festival that goes all around the world, and exclusively features bands that have written concept albums playing those albums in full from start to finish. I can’t believe no one has done this already.
It’s hard to overstate the impact concept albums have had on my life. From American Idiot by Green Day, the very first album I ever listened to properly when I was maybe 13, to Deep Blue by Parkway Drive, an album that both soothed and exploded my teenage disillusionment and misanthropy, to practically everything by Coheed and Cambria, to Vessels by Be’lakor, which I have already written about extensively, to The Forest Seasons by Wintersun… concept albums, collections of songs that together tell a story, speak to my soul in a way that nothing else does. These need to be celebrated so much more than they are, and I would be willing to sink a lot of money into a festival that brings these juggernauts of musical storytelling together so the world can experience them.
My game dev studio, Fallen Studios. I have my own ideas for stories I want to tell, and a few of them are written fiction but a lot of them work best with interactivity. Fallen Studios would be the venture I would personally spend the most time actually working in since I have relevant skills – I know programming and I have the vision for stories. I don’t know how to make art, and I don’t know game design. Certainly I could learn, but with money effectively not being an object I’d love to hire people like a game designer, an artist, a music composer, and maybe even a writer to help me hone my ideas. We could work as a little game studio making games that exalt nature, challenge eldritch horrors, and tell heart-wrenching tales. If it goes well, I could take more of a directorial role, hiring more people to do the day to day work with me being responsible for the vision. I’m unsure how much I’d want to keep doing programming itself, but I’m always of the view that executives need to understand what goes on in the day to day of their companies, so I’d probably continue doing that to help keep me humble and to keep my skills sharp.
Fallen Studios would have a strict no crunch policy and overtime would be scrutinised. Salaries would be high. Flexible working arrangements, the whole deal. I want to make games with enthusiastic people and I want us all to be happy while we do it.
Conclusion
You can see the shape of where all this is going. The billionaire version of DJ turns out to be a huge patron of the arts, with a side of environmental conservation. If anyone has a spare billion dollars lying around, I can promise I’ll do good things with it.
What would you do with a billion dollars? After all the travel and gorging and sleeping and partying and experiencing was done, if ever, what would you do then?
People want to live meaningful lives. For me, meaningful means protecting Earth and promoting the arts. I am not unique. If I would take these unbelievable riches and use them to start businesses, help others pursue their dreams, and help the world, then lots of other people would too.
There is an album by the metal band Wintersun called The Forest Seasons. It contains one song for each season, starting from spring and ending in winter. Even disregarding the contents of the songs entirely, there is a lesson in the fact that the song for autumn is named Eternal Darkness, while winter is named Loneliness. It seems to say that eternal darkness is bearable if you can do it with others, while the soul’s true winter is that of being unwillingly alone.
I’ve had several experiences in the past few months that have driven this lesson home for me.
In late 2022 my partner and I took our long-awaited trip to New Zealand. It’s a land of incredible beauty, and we had some unforgettable experiences that I hope to remember forever. I am not saying by any means that experiences had alone are less valuable than shared ones – anyone who knows me knows that I need my alone time and my personal space – only that there was a virtuous cycle in that this amazing travel experience enriched our relationship, and that in turn deepened the impact the trip had on me as an individual.
In 2022 I started a tiny Youtube channel. I learned that I unexpectedly enjoyed the audience interactions on my videos as much as making the videos themselves. Responding to people’s comments and incorporating their suggestions into future videos made the whole thing more rewarding. It’s the flipside of the experience I had years ago when attempting to write novels. Having to work for months over something before another person could lay eyes on it, and having to commit to the entirety of a long story without incorporating any feedback was immensely draining and I never finished more than a first draft of anything.
The roleplaying games I participate in reinforce this. I get so much more joy out of telling stories and building worlds when I can do it incrementally and with friends that I like and trust. In the D&D game I run, I live for seeing the expressions on players’ faces when they uncover something, or their reactions when I describe how well they succeeded or how dismally they failed at something they attempted to do. This is what I think about and plan in my spare moments, this is what my mind drifts to when it’s vacant. I’ve spent so many years trying to find my “passion” when something I’m clearly passionate about has been staring me in the face all this time.
It’s delightful when I’m on the receiving end too. My best friends in the whole world put together a birthday RPG session for me, and throughout it all I felt loved: in how our characters riffed off of each other, in how the people running it took the unspoken but implied goals of my character and wove them into the story, in how we were able to spend 10 hours telling this story together. I want this to be a part of my life forever.
I read a lot about the experiences of digital nomads, because I’ve wanted to experience that lifestyle for some time, and the downside that I read about most often is the loss of connection, loss of friendship, and how quickly people move on when you’re not involved in their lives. I still want to travel extensively – the whole world is out there and I want to see different cultures and places. But I also want to make sure to maintain and honour the friendships I’ve built so far, to be there for those people so that we can continue to enrich each others’ lives.
Solitude is not the same as Loneliness. It’s vital that we are okay with spending time by ourselves, since it will only increase as our lives go on. However, I’ve realised how important it is to treasure and nurture the connections we have with those we love, so that when Eternal Darkness comes, we have the option, should we choose, to weather the storm together.
is that I cannot lose myself in a world of my own making.
I can create for others that which I’d love to experience myself, but I must hope that someone else can give me the immersion and the adventure I long for.
Dominik Jarco 