Dan Pak

“This very moment, this very world, this very body is the point. Now. You see? But, if you’re seeking something beyond all the time, you never get with it. You’re never here.”

January 2016.
10 years ago, I moved back to NYC after 10 years away. A big snow storm hit the week I was settling into my apartment in Gramercy Park. I have a very distinct memory of eating a sh*tty meal at Orion Diner late one night because I hadn’t gotten any groceries yet and it was too cold to go further than a block or two. The food was terrible, but the memory is nice. But I also have learned since then that memories aren’t real. We just piece them together like movie montages to make footage we need. I sometimes feel like I just got back here even though 10 years have gone by and a lot has obviously happened. I got everything I wanted in those 10 years, everything I came back for… and it turns out that maybe I didn’t actually want any of it. Maybe there was some sort of metaphor in that snow storm 10 years ago and I wasn’t paying attention.

Y2K - “They say 2000 zero zero party over”

We really thought the world was gonna end back then. Maybe not literally, but likely in some sense of catastrophic mayhem or a reset of some kind, a page turn. The looming threat was mostly exaggerated but we chose to half-believe it anyway. It was absurd but felt real. Banking systems were going to go haywire, internet would have a meltdown, systems across industries would be tricked into thinking we had reset to 1900; a real large scale disaster. And we responded by making jokes and throwing apocalyptic themed parties. It was as if we had a collective subconscious fantasy to see society spiral into chaos.

And for better or worse, on January 1, 2000, of course the world did not end. Here we are, over a quarter century later, trying to keep our heads above all of this information, these zeroes and ones. Here we are, trying not to drown in a conflict between nostalgia and nihilism, trying not to get swept away in this mudslide of information. Seems like the only thing left to do to survive is to swim out with the current, to know and consume all the right and cool things. Otherwise, you’ll be left on this island alone.

And so… welcome to the Matrix and thanks for the Prozac.  At least the parties were good along the way.

Happy New Year 🎉🥳🍾