I think I've fixated on a fragment of words as of late (late being since ~2023). The fragment is "sense of wonder". More to the point, it's always in the context of "losing my sense of wonder", "my sense of wonder is dying", that sort of thing.
The blog is called lost in headspace. I'll always have rants about tech and consumerism, I'll always have things to say about music. I have a lot I'm yet to write about Barber Beats and about the machine-generated hell that has been unleashed in a lot of less refined music spaces online. A lot of weird walking simulators deserve my attention here too. But lost in headspace was an intentional name. This post is more like what it says on the tin, for better or for worse.
I reflect on the childlike curiosity that so dramatically defined the early years of my life. The internet did exist, and it had already started evolving and commercializing by then, but being a kid - and dialup being the only option until like 2009 where I am - my primary windows into the wider world were static media. Or as we called it at the time, media.
I may have spent more time in front of the TV - it was still the king of entertainment at that time, and there was so much more funding being put into a wider variety of things to see. Mythbusters as a kid was fantastic. But rewatching it as an adult? Especially the earlier episodes when they were still finding their footing? My appreciation for these quirky people and their ridiculous antics has only grown. But even if TV got the most time out of me, I read pretty voraciously. Mostly kids' books, but still. I listened to the few dozen songs my parents had on the computer and the few dozen CDs and tapes in the house. I played games on the venerable PS2.
But the medium I look back upon the most, especially when contrasted against the information-body-horror-monster of modern digital society, has to be magazines. I wasn't reading the most high-brow stuff, almost all I read was Sciences et Vie Junior, a French science and tech mag aimed at younger readers. It felt superior in every way to National Geographic Kids, the other one I also actually subscribed to. Physical subscriptions in particular - what a concept, for someone living in a country that still has no discernible mail infrastructure. Once a month, I'd receive an issue, wrapped in plastic and haphazardly thrown at my door, and I would dutifully shred the most interesting few articles within two hours. Then the articles that didn't jump at me whenever I was bored at home over the next two weeks. Most of what was left after that was more about society and culture. SVJ and NGK were windows into French and American society, once you look past the sciencey stuff. I did read those articles, though. They did probably make a difference in how I looked at the world. But it's interesting how they didn't jump at me at the time.
(As I'm writing this, I saw the news of the airborne wind turbine platform tests - I first read about these as theoretical tech over a decade ago in SVJ!)
Magazines, like movies, syndicated television, poems, newspapers, and what have you, give a specific slice of the world, as told by their creators. In the case of kids' science magazines, a lot of editorializing was necessary to make the world seem just a bit more exciting and a bit less violent. But the element of curation, what seemed like the limiting factor of traditional media when I started exploring the web, that's the thing I find myself missing. Now, I don't get a curated slice of the world around me through the eyes of some faraway publishing house. I get an information monster designed to be addictive, designed to seep into the cracks in my worldview. Maybe, the fact that "content" can be algorithmically fed to me based on my interests should be a good thing. Objectively, this has not been the case.
Even by getting a subjective snapshot of the world that is at the very least a month out of date - I was getting to see a bit of everything in a focused way that I don't anymore. Trusting a publication and its editors to mix some tar and lay a brick in the fortress of your mind, in a weird way, is totally different from an onslaught of information that doesn't respect your time. One is designed only for you to look more at it, the other, designed entice you into buying the next copy a month from today. You've got plenty of time to change your mind if you have thirty days. Your deeper judgment is a much, much bigger part of the latter.
This all might be a factor. I can probably articulate what I miss about magazines better if I give it a proper effort. I have a lot to say about airport newsstand fodder, about the specific sophisticated gutlessness of a Monocle, about the distance between the different worlds described by the real NG and NGK. I have a lot to say about the specific French mensuel culture of the 2000s. And about how much fun it is to be the one to let Americans peer into the bewildering double life that classic Disney characters have led elsewhere in the world - the American mind simply cannot comprehend Picsou.
This is not that post. This is wonderlessness. It is a grim attempt to distill a soup of bad vibes into a block of text. To take what is certainly alienation, depersonalization, self-exile from agency, and general driftlessness - all ideas that I can feel but find hard to beneficially describe - and to force them through the sharp mesh of language, in an earnest (if admittedly naive) attempt at finding beauty or clarity in the words that burst out the other side. All from the perspective of natural curiosity, joie de vivre, the yearning for vivid experiences of beauty and purpose in our short lives, and specifically, the abject horror of not feeling any of it. Maybe my windows into the world as a child were part of why I didn't feel like this before. Maybe they didn't matter. I just wanted to talk about them for a bit first.
I miss excitement.
I can remember very well the swells and ebbs of seasons. Winter rains felt like they would hang over my life for weeks. Humidity, experienced as acute and invasive cold, would poke at me and harass every gap in my layers. Rainy car trips felt like adventures into mild danger. Winter warmth felt distinctive. Summer was its own thing entirely, a tug of war between laziness and just shooting the shit outside - the heat, the way people would live - all different. None of this feels particularly compelling so I'll cut it here.
Winters in Lebanon have become weird. In 2024 specifically, I could step out in a T shirt in most of December. The rare snows have all but disappeared where I live. Climate change aside, I don't look forward to a continuous vacation from school anymore, it's more of a reprieve from work after the worst part of the year. The holidays themselves seem a bit less meaningful year after year, as if the cultural significance of Christmas has been completely eclipsed by a vacuous yet mountingly desperate marketing onslaught. The ads never meant anything - but they feel shittier, they feel slimier, I feel dirty for being advertised to now. The family (this word represents an order of magnitude more people than you likely assume) is as good as ever, sure, and yet even as I learn to appreciate them more, the gatherings seem to fly by faster and faster, they feel more and more like a duty - like واجبات - the word for "duties", usually the duty of going to offer condolences after a funeral. And yet there's more layers to the confused holiday. Outside the window, there is the sound of a distant chainsaw in the sky. There are neighbors, heads through the window, looking up from their Christmas lunches in Santa hats. I crank up the Bublé. The buzzing passes. The kids seem used to the sound of the drone. That does not fill me with comfort.
Winters have become warm enough that it contributes to the year feeling flatter. Sure people live places where the weather changes less than in Lebanon through the year, but for me, this is part of my internal calendar. So when winters feel like summers, and when summers feel like Summer 2, it really all slurs together, it adds to the feeling of time escaping between my fingers.
I no longer look forward to Christmas. I no longer look forward to the summer either. It doesn't feel all too different to me anymore. I never felt like someone who cared too much about holidays, but seeing the world around you change, like a tide that you actively swim with or against, is part of experiencing the world around you. If I'm refusing to process this, consciously or not, this is a refusal to participate in this experience.
Obviously, everyone goes through some form of this. The passage of time is no longer as rigidly defined by the academic year for everyone who steps out of education. But looking forward within a rigid system of breaks, always knowing when the next big one is, that's something I no longer have, and it's something I wonder about. Would I be in the mindset of "Hey, summer starts in exactly x days - I'd better start planning what I want to do this year!" if I still had this schedule? It's just as likely that a rigid schedule would make me feel a bit more claustrophobic and not much else. As a kid, as a student, I always knew what lied ahead: weekend in 3 days, exam in 5 days, project due in 8 days, public holiday in 4 weeks, full holiday in two months. As an adult, as someone with a nominal independence with my own time, I don't really have anything to look forward to that way. Sure, work commitments are there. Work deadlines and schedules, of course, are the main way I interact with the idea of time. But the environment is quite different, as is the mental significance of this work-driven sectioning of time ahead. Most of my time is spent working, and yet I mentally keep my work as a concept at arm's length, like I'm insisting to float above it at all times. The work pins in my mental timeline are therefore, intentionally, not very important to me.
This is all laughably hypocritical. I say I don't care about my work, at least not more than it deserves. I don't think of myself as attached to my work. But I am, again, mostly doing work. Most of my thinking is done for work. I've even looked at relocating to Dubai or Riyadh for my job (they magically pay you more if you're no longer doing your work remotely - even if you're, humbly, very good at your job). And yet I keep insisting that it's not important to me. As much as the idea disgusts me, people are allowed to be workaholics. Fine. I'm not that. What am I, then?
I see this in the people around me. I don't think I'm unfairly comparing to others when I talk about this, but I'll see people talk about work and then pivot to everything else. Work done, okay, it's the weekend now, time to go party, time to go get lost in the woods, time to eat an overpriced salad with a stranger an algorithm convinced you to hang out with. That doesn't sound like a bad time to me at all. People get together to make music, or art, or kibbeh, or just conversation. And they don't wait until the weekend either. There's a whole world to experience and we are hard fucking capped at 75 odd years before becoming too infirm or too dead to.
I'm very uncomfortable. Because I know these are things that appeal to me. I've done them, I've enjoyed them. I yearn to do more of it. I maybe don't have all the time in the world for it, sure. But time is something that people make. I watch people in my life make plans and then follow through on them like one would watch a matador or a a deli shop employee at work. Because I don't make plans. With others or without. Mostly I content myself with last minute hangouts, or last minute whims on my own. As a consequence, most activities that require planning are activities that I don't do. The discomfort is from knowing that I do want to partake in more than just the work/sleep/chores cycle, and from knowing that the only thing missing is a light application of agency. The discomfort is in reaching for my agency and not finding it.
Over time this has gotten more extreme. The threshold of discomfort has slowly receded. Enjoying myself has become a weird battle. Something as simple as a trip to the movies alone will dip below the event horizon, and I'll just stop doing it. I can, of course. I just don't feel like it. I don't feel like anything. One by one, the activities that I feel confident in deciding to do have moved out of reach. This has lead to some frankly ridiculous moments, like sitting in front of my computer at 7 PM on a Friday, with no commitments, with a strong desire to play Blue Prince, with the Blue Prince page in my Steam library taking up my entire screen, with that green PLAY button giving me a suggestive look. My notebook is ready. My pen is full of ink. My neighbors are quiet. My time is free. I have no immediate material needs.
And yet.
Instead of playing the fucking game, I ruminate about not fucking being able to decide to play the fucking game. Agony. And just as suddenly, guilt. People who look and talk and live like me are being bombed to dust not very far from me as the drone flies. And my problem is that my job is too cushy and my video games don't make me jump with joy. The rumination continues.
I remember one distant summer, in my hometown in the mountains, some local guy set up a paintball arena. I don't know why, but when all the cousins were excited to go - I really was not. I was afraid, for some reason. Yeah, guns, yeah, brief pain. It's not impossible to see why I wouldn't be up for it, especially as I was on the younger side of the group. I remember calling my mother, asking her to whisk me away before we go. Being a landline call, one of my cousins quickly got on another handset, listened to the whole thing, and eventually directly told me there's nothing to worry about and that I'll love it. Word got out that I was chickening out of the plan, and besides the usual ribbing when something like this happens, I heard a line that's stuck with me to this day. One of my cousins, she was (and is) half my height and a few years younger than me, said this sentence:
"Don't you like having fun?"
Do I? Do I like having fun?
I've always thought of myself as a creative person foremost. Some of the best days and nights of my life were spent on a stage making immature dick jokes, or under a tree with a guitar. I've felt the delicious mania of crafting sentences I find beautiful, of banging out code I'm proud of, sometimes in a frenzy. I've experienced cooking as expression and it beats the ass of cooking as chore any day. There are plumbing fixes I've done that made me feel like Leonardo Da Vinci. I'm no stranger to creation. I've been on record saying that creativity is the bleeding edge of experience, that it is what makes us people. Not sex, not chasing storms, or yelling into valleys to hear the valley say hello back. Not even struggle, including capital S Struggle, the kind that is best described by a word in Arabic that is now verboten. Creation, application of art, be it writing or drawing or music or film, manically bashing out code, cutting wood or etching PCBs, redneck engineering, whatever. Is driving a car art if it's skillful enough, by my definition? Efficiently stacking pallets with a forklift? How about the storm chasing and valley yelling I just mentioned? How about the sex? You're not Marcel Duchamp, we're not further derailing this magnificently derailed trainwreck, go to your fucking room and think about what you've done.
I have not been creating. My most recent great creative endeavor was a stage play that was last performed seven (!) years ago. I haven't recorded any music in five, or even played regularly in... more than five. And though I do write a lot for work, I feel like that has made my writing sharper in only a very specific way. Sure, I'm better at writing business bullshit. I'm significantly better at fitting information into limited space and all the technical and editorial tricks that requires. But has my writing improved for it? I feel like the topics I used to write about are (obviously) a little less important, but that the quality of my writing has declined, on a technical level. Maybe laying off the zealously dramatic faux-smartass le enlightened Redditor™ style of writing is indeed better, but I don't know. I feel like I fall back on way more conversational forms, and employ less smartalecky, but interesting literary forms. English is my nth language and I learned it from reading, using literary forms for 10% of my writing wasn't pretentiousness. The extra 20% on top of it though, definitely pretentiousness.
Do I like having fun is a tautologically stupid question. Fun is by definition something that is liked to have.
But I don't seem to chase fun, even if the stakes are low. I kind of don't chase anything. I feel too important to, maybe. I look somewhat down on people whose lives are "dominated by their career", and yet these people also do more activities, and decide to, and have fun. And here is where we look beyond simply fun: they make big life decisions. They move. They change jobs. They get into and out of meaningful relationships. None of these things are impossible for me to do. But I feel as though, even as I yearn to do them, I don't have a meaningful impetus within me to push myself to do them. It feels very normal to me not to chase a thing that I want.
I... think I like fun? Please?
I'm normally one to shy away from labels. I don't like putting words to uncomfortable ideas, I like keeping things swirling in my head until they sink to the bottom and out of the drain. But every so often I'll stumble upon the word anhedonia. Or depersonalization. Chronophobia is another one. Can I get an executive dysfunction in this crowd tonight? I don't know. I don't want to have a list of problems to list, or a clown hat of diagnoses to pull from. I certainly don't want to find community in these problems. I don't want to browse anhedoniacore memes and think about chronophobic discourse. I want these things to not be in my head.
I haven't really touched on wonderlessness as a concept. I don't think I have to. I think I've conveyed it by talking about the haze that surrounds it. I feel no sense of wonder. I want to feel wonder. I want to feel awe. I really just want to feel. I want to stop referring to my life as 12 hours of Excel every day until you die or don't jump challenge, even if those were always only jokes. My childhood was blessed with a thorough and indefatigable curiosity, and this was a big part of why I am the person that I am; in no longer experiencing the world in this way, I really can't shake off feeling like a deeply fundamental part of myself is not there. In totality, feeling like I live an experience of less than a person. I haven't really talked about it enough, but this is surely part of why I find it hard to connect with people, especially new people - I'm not experiencing properly, so the experience of me has been lacking.
Personhood, to me, like agency, has become a bit of an unseen, impossibly colossal monster, looming over everything from a distance the human mind cannot parse. I no longer think of personhood as something intrinsic to people - or more precisely, I do, just not to me. To me, my own personhood feels like a mantle that I have to assume, something intangible and mystical, almost mythological. Something sitting right in front of me with no pressure or urgency that I can pick up right now. And I'm not. I'm not doing that.
I've been reading much less focused works like books, and most text in front of my eyes is work or scrolling. The music in my life has gone from emotional, at the very least musickable songs, to the numbing and brooding world of Barber Beats, disposable streaming house music, and vaporwave offshoots that cannot exist outside of digital playback. I don't browse art, or make it, or see much of it in the world around me - yes it can get smoggy in Beirut, or in a number of Gulf cities when I have to fly in, but the world is just... greyer than the smog. The smog is in my head too. My world is grey. Emotional music feels saccharine, insincere. Delicious food feels like hollow, brief, physical pleasure. The smog is inside my everything.
Lebanon in December can be scary as an indicator for the climate catastrophe we are living through. But it's also another thing. Everyone and their dog comes back. Lebanon's primary export is our friends and family, and one day it will even include me. But during the holiday period, the country easily fits 50% more people as hundreds of thousands fly in - many of whom don't even celebrate Christmas. The country feels alive! It's great fun, and it's a small country, so you can always see someone if you both make a very small effort - and if they're only here a week out of the year, it can be hard to schedule things, since they have so many people to see!
This last December, I had a few hard conversations. At the end of it, as I was preparing to go back to work, I felt like I was hit by a truck of emotion, something I had not been feeling. I must have cried more in one night than I have in my entire adult life; I'd kept a lid on things and this is where it has led me. My friends, who I had grown alongside, have continued to grow in faraway places, into amazing, fascinating, deeply complex people. They have chased and witnessed so many highs, they've continued to make art, they've experienced so much life, both in its sublime ecstasies and its depraved cruelties. I have not. I have exiled myself from a lot of life by subjecting myself to a career path I don't really care about, for much less than the fortune many around me think it affords me, and by shaping my life entirely around it, ostensibly for just a limited time. It's really not simply a matter of envy, or comparing myself to others. My own relationship with these friends is fundamentally different because of this. My understanding of the world has delaminated from theirs, and probably from the world itself. The situation I'm in just is really unhealthy.
It's not just the work, of course. Even though I've understood for years that I need a change of scenery, a change of job, and of course like anyone from the Global South, a change of passport, I have gained a sense of urgency in these past weeks that I have not felt in a long time. This is not a pleasant feeling. It's actually very stressful. But it is feeling. There are gears turning in my head that have laid cold and unmoving for years. And maybe I change my scenery. And maybe I fucking get on with it and start living a little. And start making art. And work in something I actually care about. And start growing and evolving again. And maybe, just maybe, I take a sabbatical and finally play Blue Prince. I still really please want to fucking play Blue Prince godfuckingdamnit-