There's this dream I'll have, and it haunts me for a few hours after I've woken from it. It is, in essence, a dream where I wake up, almost 20 years ago. It's the final day of school. The hellscape we currently live in was just a really bad nightmare, not unlike the ones I used to have back then (more on this later).
I don't know how your final days of school were. When I was in high school, the final day was really a day of grace: The bell rang on time, but we were not expected to show for class. It was, essentially, a free day. Campus admins and supervisors didn't care and people could just wander the halls. It was a day for reconciling with your friends after the finals had finished, and it was also a time where you could talk with your teachers and maybe get your final grade.
It was the day to get your yearbook signed. To hang out with school friends you normally don't hang out with outside of school.
It was also--to be bittersweet--a day for goodbyes, for some of us only for the summer, but for the 12th graders, potentially forever.
That's the environment I usually find myself in, when these dreams happen. I'm wandering the campus, having graduated by the skin of my teeth in 12th grade. Saying my final goodbyes to everyone, for this is the time when social media hadn't taken off in a big way, yet. Some of us were on MySpace, but not all of us.
It was, for me, a long deserved rest at the end of a brutal school year. It would be one of the final days of childhood, before being forcefully thrust into adulthood. It was a final time to enjoy the company of my friends, many of whom I lost contact with not long after. This is why I feel like my brain cherishes this day so much. It might have been a terrible year, but the rigors of adulthood would prove to be so much worse.
Being taken back in these dreams feels much like when Kratos steps into the Light of Alfheim in God of War (2018), and waking up feels like when Atreus yanked him out. It never feels like long enough, and just processing what the fuck happened takes a minute.
However, the other night, that damn dream visited me again, and it was different in a way that just weighs more heavily than I thought it would. Previously, I'm sure some part of me knew I was in a dream, but my brain was enjoying the temporary bliss such that it didn't want to remember that hey, this is a dream.
This time? I walked to the quad. I sat on one of the benches, amongst others. I stared at the ground, and it just looked strange to me, much like those weird dot patterns you see online that you stare at to see if you're colorblind. In my head, I knew full well this was a dream. And just knew that any feeling of bliss here was to be short lived. My brain effectively said with no real words out of my mouth: "I know what this is. I'm just staring at the ground here, waiting for the end, as to not be let down again when I wake up and none of this is real."
That's how it ended.
Normally, I'm fine with dismissing with the pleasantries if all I'm getting at the end is a shit sandwich. Just hit me with it, stop beating around the bush. But for some reason, this whole thing just stuck with me in a way none of the others have, and I don't mean that in a good way, either.
Could have been a multitude of things that set this off. I mean, I did just start the emotional gut-punch that is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Could also be that I'm doing a lot of nostalgic stuff relating to that era of my life at the moment (I'm doing a vintage computing exhibit centered around early-mid 00s stuff). Could be that we live in a crapsack future where all of the things I aspired to do in my teens have turned into dead ends and I just feel adrift in a void.
Actually, let's talk about that last one for a sec.
Adrift
When I was in high school I was in the zenith of my computer nerd arc, and wanted to expand my horizons as much as I could. I wanted to learn this stuff. I wanted to go into IT. I wanted to work at a tech company. Shit, I wanted to work for Apple, even.
My high school had a fairly interesting tech background, and even offered computing and electronics classes. The drawback here was that the systems repair classes were gated to 11th and 12th graders only, so I had to twiddle my thumbs and wait, patiently. This wasn't put to waste, though, as I did take Electronics (and learned to solder!) and dabbled in video production, both fun side quests.
The fabled summer approached, I signed up for Systems, and finally was on track to the things I wanted to learn. Except it was a really, really slow burn. We started out on the ground floor. We learned about DOS. We learned super basic computer repair before being told that the more advanced stuff my brain craved for was only covered in Systems II, so I eagerly awaited, only to get rewarded with nothing.
You see, in parallel to all this, we were in the middle of the Bush Jr. Administration, and No Child Left Behind was doing some damage. Curriculums were getting thrown out and rewritten mid-semester. It was a total nightmare and a half. As part of everything going on, systems classes were completely cut from the budget. Systems II no longer existed.
Fuck.
The Systems teacher (who I had been with for every year at that point, as he also taught Electronics and Video Production) had an idea, as he took a liking to me: Electronics II hadn't been cut, so I'd just sign up for that instead and he'd send me to the back of the media lab every day to continue studies.
This did not go according to plan, as instead of doing more advanced Systems stuff like I thought I'd be doing, this took a hard left turn into networking with Cisco stuff. At the time, I had next to zero interest in networking, and this clashed with what my brain wanted. But I tried to stick with it. And ultimately failed.
What resulted is me doing a lot of hard looking in the mirror, as this year was the year that would absolutely destroy everything I held dear. As part of NCLB, all of the special needs classes were cut and we were thrown into the Thunderdome and left to fend for ourselves. My grandfather's health had started to deteriorate rapidly at this point so we had to move into his house to care for him (and a lot of this responsibility fell on me). This was also the time my mom met someone new (as my biological father had passed away a few years prior) and went from being fairly hands off with me to being immensely strict.
If you want to imagine a typical job where your boss will try to punish you/have a go at you if you look like you're not busy or just idling/catching a breather, that's how home life became this year. I wasn't allowed to enjoy myself, catch any kind of breather, nothing. It was nose to the grindstone, 24/7.
It's around this time I began having the inverse nightmares I spoke about at the beginning. Going to sleep, and waking up in a crapsack future. Everything is grey, the soul has been sucked out of absolutely everything. The environment is fucked, the opportunists have burned everything down for the sake of capitalism. Blue skies have given away to drab grey, the colors of our youth having long since faded.
Much like the dreams where I'm catapulted backward, these nightmares would fuck with me on a deep level for a fair few hours after waking up. I didn't want to imagine a world where everything feels faded. I didn't want to imagine a world where the adults who raised me (both parents and older friends) were either dead or on death's door.
To quote ABBA: Sometimes I wish that I could freeze the picture, and protect it from the funny tricks of time.
But The Wall was quickly approaching, and I felt--to reference ABBA again--time slipping through my fingers. The Wall being, well, that boundary you cross into adulthood, when you graduate high school and when you turn 18. (If you're someone who turned 18 after you graduated and not before, like me, I like to say that period of time when you've graduated but you're still 17 is like standing on The Wall before descending it. You can see adulthood, but you're not yet in it.)
Landing in adulthood started rough, but got better. We had The Great Recession to deal with (and thankfully I made a great move by getting a grocery job, which was fairly recession-resistant). This would result in me getting kicked out not long after I turned 18, because it didn't agree with the vision my grandfather and parents had for me (which was to go to college on student loans and scholarships).
But the future soon began to brighten, because of the 2008 election. If there was another time I wanted to relive, it was that. Because I remember wandering downtown when the election was called and people were in the goddamn streets celebrating. The energy in the air, the optimism that we had just secured a better future, finally? I would give so much to feel that again.
But the dark clouds began to form. Farther back than I realized.
It all burns down
I never gave up on eventually wanting to work for Apple. They seemed like such a cool place to work, and the Apple Stores actually seemed cool too, if only because it felt like Apple held themselves to a much higher standard than everyone else and wasn't solely out to profit at all costs.
By that point, it was 2012. Steve Jobs had been dead for a year. Tim Cook's leadership style, I feel, hadn't yet fully set in. Things weren't looking too great at my current job. So I took the shot, I submitted a resume to Apple. Imagine my shock when I got a reply back. They wanted me to go to a group interview. Holy shit.
I wish I could tell you things went well. They didn't. I cleared the first round of interviews and got a call back to do a one-on-one with several of the area Apple Store managers. The first one asked me some super deep philosophical stuff I had no idea how to respond to. The second one was out for blood, having done some research into my online presence and he made it exceptionally clear he didn't like what he saw. The last one was much nicer and much more what I was expecting, but I fully expected the first two were going to torpedo the whole thing and that's precisely what happened.
But when I say "it all burns down", this isn't what I'm talking about. I dusted myself off, went back to my normal job, and continued living my life as usual...until I was fired, as it turns out the store I was working for was getting shut down due to--I'm guessing--being unprofitable with increased calls from leadership to upsell more aggressively to make more money. Cool.
No, not even that was burning down. When I say burning down, I mean Tim Cook's leadership taking hold. He famously torpedoed Apple Retail not long after, turning it from the cozy, cool place it used to be to a profit-first machine staffed with people who don't know the products they're selling. Essentially, it became a fancy-looking cell carrier store.
The Genius Bar suffered this fate too, going from employees who were damn awesome at their jobs to people who knew only how to plug your device into a diagnostic and spit back whatever that diagnostic tells them to say. Can't plug it into their diagnostics? Sorry, using your troubleshooting brain isn't allowed,
please pay us money to replace your device. Even if it's something simple that most techs in this space would know how to handle.
I could go on, but the point is clear: Under Cook, Apple became what it sought to destroy, and became a company I no longer wanted to work for.
Alongside that, the entire IT industry felt like it was burning down, too. No longer were devices trending toward being repairable. The industry was in a rush to copy Apple's moves with devices like the MacBook Air and retina MacBook Pro, by soldering every goddamn thing down and making it so you'd need an act of Louis Rossmann to have a snowball's chance in hell at fixing your device. What the fuck.
(And don't forget serializing parts, too!)
At the same time, I was also dealing with my health: I'm type 1 diabetic, and when I worked grocery I wrote a hell of a lot of rain checks against my health to keep that job and a roof over my head, and now as I was entering my late 20s, those rain checks were coming due.
Coupled with the 2016 election and the subsequent threats against the ACA (which would have protected me if I was able to return to work), I pretty much got forced into a position where I couldn't return to work. Between my health having declined significantly and risking going bankrupt trying to stay alive because insulin is expensive. (and due to the lack of the ACA back in 2008, there was a time where I had no insurance whatsoever. If it wasn't for my grandfather stepping in and fronting the cost of my insulin, I'd be typing this through a Ouija board.)
Fucking. Hell.
The final nail in the coffin? I really wanted to dip into photography and graphics. Seemed cool. The friend who mentored me through much of my teen years did this for a living and I wanted to be like him. I learned some Photoshop on the side. I got camera stuff. Got kinda okay at it. Even made a little bit of cash selling prints at an art show.
I'm sure you can guess where this one ends. As we speak, this whole industry is burning down due to AI, which is just wonderful. Generative AI feels like a thing just pushed by execs and suits because they don't understand the value of human creativity and refuse to pay human artists and photographers what they're worth. This industry was already hard enough to break into without selling your soul, now it's much, much worse.
Generative AI is just a means for these chucklefucks to save money in a way that looks good on the company financials. All it is. And every company is falling over themselves to shove it in our faces.
Lost in the void
This is why I refer to myself as being adrift, lost in a void. All the things I planned to do, I wanted to do? Dead ends, now. All of it. IT is dead, all the friends and people I know who worked positions I wish I could have are getting out because there's nothing left if you're not working IT for some big megacorp.
I don't know what my calling is, anymore.
This is also ostensibly why I'm deep into retrocomputing, specifically the mid 00s era. It really felt like the last bastion of tech being developed to be a net good for society before all the Business Idiots (hat tip to Ed Zitron) came in and ruined it and shoved AI down our gullets for good measure.
Windows XP? Windows Vista and 7? Early Mac OS X? It all felt like it had a soul to it where there now lies a soulless void in the likes of modern macOS and Windows. Android and iOS are much the same in this regard, with older versions feeling more welcoming, more friendly than the cold, hard modern UIs we have today.
But this, unfortunately, cuts another way: Being neck deep in retrocomputing can feel like holding a ball of razors, because yeah, some things have improved! But it also feels like taking a glimpse into what could have been, if maybe technology could have stayed on the path of being a net good to society rather than actively working against it.
It's a glimpse back to myself, even, when I had these ambitions of finding my calling in life and having this whole thing figured out by now, but instead it just feels like we gave up another five years to "surviving the atrocities thrown at us".
And I know, life doesn't end when you're old. But having to sit with the fact that I'm going to be entering my 40s before we even have a snowball's chance in hell at a better future right now just weighs on me in a way that's extremely hard to describe.
