Why Am I Creating JoKno?

I was recently told that I’d be giving an interview soon to someone interested in the project, which inspired me to really dig into the answer to this question.  At the most concrete level, I know that I am creating JoKno because I want to solve the career search problem, a problem that I struggled with greatly myself.  But, why do I want to solve this problem?  This is my attempt to peel back the layers of my motivation.

 

I watched a great documentary recently called I Am, and it asked, what is the essential problem, the underlying problem from which all other problems of the world are derived?  The answer was that I am the problem.  And this notion was teased out and supported throughout the film by first showing the growing evidence that as individuals we not only affect the world materially through our physical actions, we affect it through our consciousness, and through our emotions.  We are, on every level, co-creators of our world.  Our perceptions really do, at a fundamental level, shape the world in which we exist.

 

Second, it showed how this clashed with the current story driving our perception of the world.  That is the story of competition.  This is a distortion of Darwin, who believed that cooperation was the biggest part of the story of evolution, to a narrative of progress being driven by competition and individualism.  This story led us to believe that we are all separate, and to perceive the world as a collection of separate individuals.  It is this lie, that competition drives progress, that has led to the profound loneliness of our private-property hoarding society.  This narrative has colored our perception so thoroughly that we can’t help but see ourselves as fundamentally separate and alone.  Our loneliness is a symptom of the underlying disease of perception from which all other problems derive.

And when the movie got to this last bit about loneliness, something clicked for me.  That word describes completely what I felt during the career search: a profound, debilitating loneliness.  Here I was trying to answer one of the most fundamental questions of my life, and it felt like for all intents and purposes I must discover the answer alone.  Whether it was the career centers telling me to figure out what I liked, articles telling me that I needed to first figure out how I was wired and use that as a compass, to adults telling me to pick a career where money was a certainty, to professors telling me to network, in the end I was alone. 

Yet this matches the ideals of the present society completely.  Even the job search out of college is a kind of competition.  Each individual college student pitted against each other, and those best able to leverage their individual resources (family network, natural gregariousness, luck, etc) are the ones able to land jobs.  But, my question was an even more complicated one than simply how can I get paid to do something.  I wanted to know, how can I do work that makes me happy?  How could I, a priori, determine the answer to this question?  I felt doomed, doomed to travel aimlessly through the job market, a single explorer hoping a path would magically reveal itself.

JoKno is my attempt to cure this loneliness.  At the core, I think, that is what I am trying to do.  It is my attempt to bring this one thing into alignment with the fundamental truth that we are not alone, but in fact, are connected.

There has been this thread within my thought, and the thought of many others, that true evolution is accomplished through cooperation and empathy.  The human being is itself an example of this fact: we are a cooperative system of atoms and molecules and nerves and neurons, all working together to create the magnificent potential that is each and every one of us.  How does the human mind transcend the existential loneliness of our own consciousness?  By evolving into the societal mind, the societal consciousness, just as the molecules that make us up transcended themselves through us.

The internet may be one of the greatest tools we have ever created to accomplish this evolution. What is the internet if not a communal brain?  But just having the information stored where people could get it isn’t enough.  It needs to be made easily accessible to those who need it.  What good is a memory if we can’t recall it?  That is why there is a specialized portion of the brain specifically for recalling memory from wherever it is stored elsewhere in our brain matter. 

That is what JoKno is!  A specialized societal brain, meant to retrieve our collective experiences about the job market.  With this resource, a college student is no longer alone, like I was.  They are in conversation with all the alumni who went before them.  Our trials, our elations, our regrets, and our learning are available to each other.  JoKno is our chance to each transcend the limitations of our individual selves, and approach one of the most fundamental questions of our lives as a cooperative.  And I believe, with all my heart, that we will all be happier because of it.

The last sentence of my tattoo says,

“The world I create will be populated by Gods, and together we will create a story of joy.”  

I hope that Chapter One of the story we create together will be entitled: JoKno.

The Back Tat: Explained

I wrote this long, esoteric, quasi-philosophical, quasi-epistemological essay on the image I wanted to create for the tattoo I ended up getting on my back. I’ve realized that the way I explained the image in the essay was so clunky and out there that it wasn’t much help when I tried to remember how to explain it to real people in casual conversation. So, I’m going to write a more conversation-friendly explanation here.

The first concept at the heart of my tattoo is that of “layers of awareness”. Sometimes I try to explain this by referencing Eckhart Tolle and his theory of the Watcher, but very few people have read him, and in all honesty I came up with my concept before reading him as well. What I want you to do is look out at the world around you (out the window, at your wall, at the people around you). You can perceive sights, smells, sounds, you can perceive how things feel if you touch them, and if there is something socially acceptable to put your tongue on near you can perceive tastes. If there are people around you, you can converse with them, verbally, and non-verbally based on your perception of their words and their body language. This is the most common layer of awareness that we think of when we consider our “consciousness”. It is the level at which we interact with the world around us.

Now, think about that voice in your head that analyzes your interaction with world. That voice that judges your interactions with the world. The voice that tells you something you said was stupid, or that a view from a hilltop is the most beautiful that you’ve ever seen. This is a second layer of awareness, a second level of consciousness. (Incidentally, this is the level that Tolle was referencing with the notion of the Watcher). You could say that this layer is deeper in the mind, one level removed from direct interaction with the world. It is the level of consciousness, which I write about, with which we attribute meaning to the events of our lives, from minute experiences to broad swaths of time. Whether we remember something as good, bad, silly, sad, funny, etc., is based on the judgments of this level of awareness: you could call it the Adjective Giver. And this “attribution of meaning” is the concept at the core of my first tattoo. So you can see how my second tattoo actually builds upon the first, and is in conversation with it, which I think is pretty cool.

Anyway, this next part is where it gets tricky. This act that we have both engaged in (me by writing, you by reading), this act of looking critically at two levels of consciousness and analyzing how they interact, is all done from a third level of consciousness. This level is even deeper than the second, even farther removed from interactions with the physical world. At this layer of awareness, we are essentially analyzing our analysis. We can judge the implications of the way we judge and remember our interactions. We can decide if we approve (assign an adjective!) of the way we attribute meaning, and attempt to change it if we don’t. The crazy part is that we can exist at all three levels of awareness simultaneously. We can interact with the world of experience, can analyze that experience, and judge our analysis all at the same time. What’s even crazier is that there is no limit to the levels of consciousness we are capable of experiencing each moment. Consider, once we are aware that there are three levels of consciousness, three layers of awareness at work, this means that we have moved one step back. It is like we were in the picture, looking at a picture. Then we take a step back to look at the picture we were just in, which is of us looking at a picture. And what if we step out of that picture!? As soon as we are cognizant of a layer of awareness, it means that we are now viewing all the previous layers of awareness from an even deeper level. We can go as deeply into consciousness as we are capable of imagining.

The main point being, this is what I was trying to capture with the hands within the hands within the hands. I was trying to capture the idea that there are different levels of consciousness, each aware of all those that are below it and how they connect to the ones below them.

A common thread that has run through my thinking behind the first and second tattoos is the perspective nature of reality. Meaning, the reality we live in is the reality we perceive. The connection between the reality we perceive and objective reality has been a Holy Grail sought after by philosophy and science since the beginning of thought, and there are serious questions as to whether there can be such a thing as objective reality. Even within physics, there are widely accepted theories that state the perceiver changes the nature of the perceived at fundamental, subatomic levels. But really, this is neither here nor there, because the only reality we will know is the one which we perceive. Perception is a function of our minds, conscious or unconscious. So, the reality each of us exists in is actually created by each of us. All the levels of awareness play a part in this creation of reality.

This perspective nature applies to the tattoo because it introduces an uncertainty to reality. Uncertainty causes many dangers. Metaphysical uncertainty, the fact that we can never know for certain if our lives and our deaths have any purpose leads to nihilism. You can move beyond that despairing view of reality without meaning by recognizing that you in fact are the creator of meaning for your own existence, and through your attribution of meaning you create your reality. Time, life, can be given meaning that originates and finds its end in you. Your life can have inherent meaning simply by being, if you choose. But our minds are fickle by nature, and we are full of mental demons that can

destroy any positive meaning we try to attribute, and any positive reality we try to create. Doubt, self-hate, fear, past pain, and future worries, these can insinuate themselves into the various layers of our consciousness, color our perspective, and blacken our reality. All because we can never know for certain if the present moment is divine because our imagination is capable of conceiving of reasons that it is not.

The divinity of each moment cannot be protected by certainty, so in the end, faith must complete the circle that certainty cannot. This can be metaphysical faith, or this can be faith in yourself, or faith at any level of consciousness. Yet it is only through faith that we can protect our awareness from the demons of the mind, and perceive the holiness of the each and every present reality. And this is what I was trying to capture with the wings encircling the hands within hands, the wings are completing the circle. The dark and menacing aspect of everything outside of the wings was meant to represent those mental demons. And if you pan back, you will see that the entire image together is an eye. The wings and the hands make up the iris and the pupil, and the darkness around it makes up the “whites” of the eye.

It is with this eye that I strive to perceive the world with and create my reality. It is both the eye of the war that rages within the human mind, and, when that war is kept in balance by faith, it is also the eye of God who perceives itself in all things.

Searching for Eloisa’s Nun

"How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

Each prayer accepted, and each wish resigned;" 

“Eloisa to Abelard”

Alexander Pope

I’ve seen through the pages, I’ve heard behind words,

the insane echo of Father Time’s surge, 

sensational news, just witches and fear, 

steroids and terror, crusades far and near.

feudal fueling of futility’s despot,

I fight for nothing as my ancestors taught.

shift consciousness, expand us and evolve?

what a ruinous riddle to have to solve.

my mind screams and shouts but a single thought:

how happy is the blameless vestal's lot!

must I cry for the kids of Chenegai

as their true value Boston justified?

yet political rooks cannot be blamed

that the NRA is greater than they,

that in the global board Hobbes still holds sway.

happiness is all I have ever sought!

but empathy blackens the sunny sky,

or lies of blindness sear my mind with lye,

I envy your rest in virginal rock,

the world forgetting, by the world forgot.

how did you grasp Lancelot’s holy prize,

unaware as all my searches went awry?

oblivion, nirvana, villain, hero,

maybe it’s the perfectness of zero…

ignorance is the path to the divine!

unless, it’s cultivated by design?

I must study your path, chart your pathology,

I know it’s entombed in your psychology,

and perchance in this monastery find

eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

aren’t such prayers denials of Nietzsche’s truth?

do I have the strength to live beyond proof?

to fight for joy, and to enjoy the fight,

accept failure as mortality’s right?

to be responsible for humankind,

to paint beauty with blackened skies, a sign

of the Advent of empathy’s reign seen.

I don’t need to enter and dream your dream,

of reality neglected, of hope confined,

each prayer accepted, and each wish resigned.

Vowing to Dream

I wrote these words not knowing who for,

And never spoke them aloud until I was sure,

Now I know they are for you to hear,

I hope to your ear they are simple and clear:

I wrapped a circle around the universe without and within,

And placed on your finger my hope of salvation from Ego’s false sin,

That together our souls might take flight,

Soaring through this fantasy of color and light,

A dream of the pain of birth and the loss of death,

Of old age, when reminisces of friends now gone is all that’s left,

Of the joy of adventure and of daughters and sons,

Until hand in hand, we return to where it ended before and was begun,

And we awake, the memory of our future fading to an eternal white,

Beyond smell, taste, touch, sound or sight,

Beyond time we will walk as one, until I ask that we sleep once more,

Just so that I may tell you I love you again, as I loved you before.

Life After College - Part 2

                 Now on the surface, it might not be extremely apparent why getting laid off would be a good thing.  It has left me with little money saved for rent.  I got severance, which added a month or two to the fuse before “making it on my own” blows up in my face.  I got unemployment, which could add a few months on top of that.  There was the fact that I was miserable at work, so the good in being free of that is clear.  But, that doesn’t change the fact that being laid off left me with a small window with which to find out what comes next.  Saving money for the adventure I’d dreamed of after college?  Back at square one, and the clock is ticking.  It took me 9 months to find a job I hated, and I had no better prospects of a job I’d like better.  So, you could say that I was back to the middle of senior year, in need of a job, this time with the pressure of impending financial implosion on top of it.

                Yet as a left the China Basin for the last time, I smiled.

                Somewhere in the darkness of those final weeks I was working there, a small light was born in my soul, even as it was being crushed by my situation.  One night I was lying in bed, trying to avoid thinking about work.  And honestly, if you were to ask me to pin point the thought that started it all, I couldn’t.  I was half asleep, and all sorts of random thoughts were floating through my head.  One of those thoughts, my brain latched onto.  And in that daydreaming way we have when near sleep, I started building, semi-consciously.  I thought I was just building a dream.  A dream of how to keep other undergraduates from experiencing what I had just gone through.  A dream of a resource I wish I could have had, and wished I had right now.

                My sleepy mind took a step back to look at what it had built, and laughed at itself.  I wasn’t an entrepreneur or a social activist: I wasn’t the type to make a website.  Where had any of this come from?  And then I looked closer, and I was like, “Yo...yoo...YOOOO!”  This shit could actually work!

                Then I shook my head, and went back to sleep.  I resisted the urge to get up and write the idea down.  I told myself, if it is as great of an idea as you think, it will still be great in the morning.  But when I woke up, my mind began running on the idea immediately.  I started to flesh it out.  “Okay, it’s going to be a website, and it’s going to function like this…and in order for it to function like this it is going to need this”. 

I got to work, and instead of taking notes on my sales conversations, I was scribbling ideas down in my notepad.  I did this for almost 3 days before I told my mom about it.  I think part of me understood what this idea meant to me, whether it had potential or not.  I was like someone who had been abused, and found a kitten.  And in that kitten I saw a chance for the redemption of my soul.  I saw a way to rebuild myself from the ashes of my battered psyche just from the act of nurturing something pure and good.  I didn’t want anybody to ruin my certainty that what I was nurturing was pure and good.  I didn’t want anybody to tell me my kitten was really just a stuffed animal, transforming what had been pure into a sad parody of nurturing, further evidence of how hopeless my case really was. 

                I wanted to hold onto that feeling of purity so badly, but eventually I had tell my mom, show her this spark that had been born in me.  And to my immense relief, she told me that it was real.  But she told me that the true beginning of making this idea real was to share it, to create a community around it.  And I curled up around my spark protectively, instinctively.  I couldn’t bring it outside.  Not yet.  I still wasn’t convinced, and I couldn’t take the chance.  This spark was what I lived for.  It was how I got through the days.  I could stomach a day of work if it meant I could come home and scribble more ideas down in my afternoons.  “What were the key questions the survey would ask?  You could search by these categories, but what would be the potential options within those categories?”  No, I couldn’t risk that joy, small as it was.

                Then, a week after the spark was born, I was laid off.

                It was like the monster that had held me captive, the real monster I was hiding this spark from, just let me go.  I’d been hobbled, and suddenly I was free.  Free to stand, to stretch my mental muscles.  Free to roll the shoulders of my swagger.  Free to trust myself again.  And all my instincts were telling me one thing: go for it.

                And that’s what I decided to do.  I wasn’t going to try to find another job that paid me well enough to say I was young and successful.   I wasn’t drinking anybody’s Kool-Aid but my own.  Maybe I wouldn’t be able to save enough money to live abroad for a year like I had hoped to do.  Maybe I’d be foregoing some adventures.  But, at least I’d be foregoing them for another adventure.  At least I wouldn’t be sacrificing any more of my present for dreams of the future.  

                It was time to share this spark with the world.  It was time to make it real.

                But, how the hell was I supposed to do that?     

Life After College - Part 1

              It has been a long journey these past eight months since graduation, so I feel like it is finally time to sit down and document it in some way.  If you read any of the essays that I wrote leading up to graduation, and into that summer, you will know how I was feeling.  I felt a tremendous amount of pressure to find a job.  This pressure was unique in that I think I gathered the weight from different sources than others, but I think that the general pressure is one that all undergraduates share upon graduation.  

 

Personally, mine came in part from my prospects.  Either I found a job and started providing for myself immediately, or I would have to ask for someone to pay for a plane ticket to get me across country to the only family I had available that I thought could handle taking me in.  The pressure also came in part from a perceived lack of time.  There were things I wanted to get done by a certain time before life got too serious, my duties too heavy, and I didn’t have time to screw around.  The longer it took me to find a job, the longer it took me to save the money I needed to do the things I wanted to do before I had I jumped back on my career arc of academia. 

There was an air of desperation about my job search, so when I broke through before the other shoe dropped, so to speak, at the end of summer right before my free housing was about to run out, I couldn’t have been happier.  I thought to myself, “I did it.  I pulled a fast one on the corporate world”.  They didn’t know that I had no plans to stay, and that I was only joining to squeeze some money out of them so that I could do something cool before going back to school.  Somehow I had finally talked my way into a position that I had never planned or prepared to do in college.  I was going to be white collar, middle class on my own by 22.  Young and successful.  I let out a breath that I had been holding for an entire school year.

I get into the company, and I’m excited.  I’m ready to soak up everything, be great at my job, and bring creativity to it that they had never seen: I was going to Shake-Things-Up!  It’s an inside sales job, so they start talking about the art of the sale, controlling the conversation, overcoming objections…I’m like, it’s a game, and I’m going to be great at it!  All through training, there was nobody better.  Every game, every role play, every test of product knowledge, I was killing it.  And so management start to leave little bread crumbs in my mind.  “Hey, with your pedigree, if you kill it here you’re the type we like to promote.”  “You got all the skills to be as good as the best guy here.  Listening to him, and listening to you, there’s no reason.”  I was the chosen one, and it felt good.  Felt right.  I got my first paycheck, and I go get some clothes, a watch, some earrings…Life was pretty damn good!

And then the game ended.

I get into on the phones, go live, and I realize…these are real people that I’m talking to.  I’m having trouble asking them for money because I believe their objections.  I’m perceptive, I understand people, and I can’t say that all of them are going to get good use out of the product.  I realize that nobody around me is telling the truth.  I remember talking with a co-worker about how much we hated the phones, and I said I didn’t like lying about discounts, and she said, “Those lies are ok, I mean you have to”.  And I was like, damn even you?  This was business?  This was what the incentive structure required us to do?  Red flags started jumping up.

But management was good, they stayed in my ear.  The whole environment played on my pride, and I didn’t like doing worse than my peers.  I was the chosen one at first, and now I was dead last.  When it was a game, I played it better than everyone.  When it became real, I felt too much and couldn’t treat it as a game.  I didn’t want to fail, so I spent months struggling to make myself see the situation as a game again, to get back to winning, like I was supposed to.

And then I started to look bigger picture.  I started to think, I have had this same conversation now for the past few months.  I’ve made a 100 calls a day, talked for over 2 hours a day, having the same 10 minute conversation over, and over, and over again.  People did this for how long?  They worked within one company, made a career, made a life out of perfecting this one, stupid, inane conversation?  And of these, a lucky few were given the chance to become management, where they could convince other people to find it within themselves to perfect this one, stupid conversation.  There would be the glory of getting your team to drink the company Kool-Aid, after being there long enough to know full well what terrible chemicals were really in it.  Once there, someone would feed you the Kool-Aid that if you toughed it out for long enough, and a spot happened to open up, you could finally climb out of the drudgery of middle-management to the rarefied air of upper management.  There, at least, the decisions were abstract enough that you could get back to using your brain to solve abstract problems.  There, maybe, your intelligence would be required once again.

I started looking at the bigger picture of corporate life in general.  Two weeks of vacation each year for the rest of your life.  40 to 50 hours a week, if not more, spent doing something that was either mildly engaging or downright soul-sickening.  And finally by this past December I realized, yo, I don’t want to do this anymore.

But I can’t leave the pay check, I need it for my rent, or I’m right back to flying across the country hoping for extended family to take me in while I lick my wounds.  I didn’t want to have to say, “Life in the big city, couldn’t make it.”  So I dragged myself to work each day, and frantically searched for another job.  IAtfirst all I could seem to come across where sales positions.  I interviewed half-heartedly for a few, hoping that once I got inside I would see something different, something better.  All of the people seemed cool, the companies on the rise, said their sales culture was actually enjoyable, and the opportunities for money were through the roof!  And all I could seem to hear was, “Do you drink Kool-Aid?  Do you?” 

I looked into other corporate jobs, and it was more of the same.  Entry level PR, “Kool-Aid?”  Entry-level marketing, “Kool-Aid?”  I was getting desperate.  I would sit in front of my computer fighting the urge to just quit and go home so I didn’t have to spew out the nonsense that was required of me to one more customer who didn’t want to hear it.  It had taken me almost a year to find my first job, but I needed this one by tomorrow.  By yesterday. 

It was probably one of the lowest times of my life.  I wanted to curl up inside my head, pull the curtains on my awareness, and sleep-walk through this phase of my life until I could find a way to be free.  I felt like my plastic personality at work was bleeding over into the rest of my life…my mind was caught in muck, and I couldn’t remember how to relate to people, how to have the energy to care.  Things that came naturally were drifting away…And I thought to myself, “Is this what becoming an adult is?  Is this all that is left in life?” 

And then an amazing, wondrous thing happened. 

I got laid off.