I am an old guy, retired, finding myself in a mildly desperate financial situation, a situation brought on by my own actions, an old guy desperate to exploit my creative mind. That often leads me into fantasy, and not the fantasy in which you might expect a man to indulge, but in the fantasy of living a better life, a life provided by an imaginary source of funding, usually some sort of lottery.
Living a portion of my life inside that fantasy can relieve the drudgery of real-life, but it also can sometimes butt heads with my real-life goals and expectations. I often find myself considering the possibilities of life-enhancing purchases using a dual-perspective process that involves what is actually possible within the limits of my budget and what would be possible if some life-altering financial windfall should manifest itself in reality.
Although I have always managed to keep the fantasy and the reality separate, from time to time I will briefly catch myself confusing life’s possibilities within those two realms. That is especially possible when the thing that I am thinking about is particularly complex. An excellent example is my desire to upgrade my camera system, and, consequently, my computer system. Both those things would require considerable financial outlay, mostly within the realm of possibility, but significantly outside the realm of financial feasibility or logical justification.
In simpler words, there are things I want to buy that can be purchased with monies I now have, but make no sense, considering how they would affect my remaining finances. “Make no sense” is a phrase that bothers me, tasks me to consider it’s absolute truthfulness. This is where reality and fantasy want to beat the hell out of each other.
Because of how the not-to-be-explained but previously mentioned “mildly desperate financial situation” actually affects my life, or more accurately, potentially affects my life, it is within the realm of possibility that spending the money could actually be the best thing for me. I realize that does not make sense without further explanation. But further explanation is not forthcoming. Suffice to say, it might be better that I buy the things I want and enjoy them while there is time left in my life to do it.
That does not make the decision any easier, mostly because there is no way for me to know what the future holds, a fact that tends to push me toward spending more time in fantasy.
Assuming some version of my financial windfall fantasy was to come true, assuming I managed to purchase all the things that I currently lust after, how would that actually affect my life? A new computer system, a new camera system, new software to take advantage of those things, my current writing projects which are falling farther and farther behind, my unpredictable stretches of low mental energy, my bouts with anxiety, with mild depression, my age, my previous exposure to agent orange, a likely late-in-life onslaught of deadly diseases from that exposure … all those things factor into my quality of life. And even the good parts might overwhelm me, given my mental and emotional status.
You would think that a fantasy world would be immune to the harshness of the real world. I guess that’s the problem with being able to know the difference. My most powerful fantasy is still affected by, somewhat governed by, what happens in my real life. That is by design, in an effort to better enjoy a fantasy that has even the minutest chance of coming to pass.
Over the past few months, I have been salivating over buying a new and quite expensive mirrorless camera system. Then, several weeks ago, the folks at Apple began to leak out information about upcoming computers. Although I’ve never owned an Apple product, I have often been intrigued by them. And right now, the Apple hyperbole machine is working at full blast, sucking me in to another fanciful vortex of real and imagined possibilities.
The new camera system is a whiz at video, something I’m interested in, while being mostly ignorant of its complexities and its requirements on my time. The new Apple Mac Studio appears to have the horsepower to edit any sort of video that gets thrown at it. Apple also has Final Cut Pro, a video editing software that looks learnable, although not easy for an old brain like mine. I have attempted to do videos with my smart phone, and been totally displeased with those efforts, as with my attempts to edit them on cheap Windows video editing programs.
It is within the realm of possibility that making and editing videos is beyond anything I will ever be able to accomplish, given all the current unknowns, and the knowns, for that matter. And the harsh reality of that is this: much of my interest in the new camera and the new computer are based on their ability to deal with video creation.
Holy hell! What if I buy all that stuff and then eventually give up on the idea of creating videos? To consider that question, I have to step into the painfully complicated real world. And once I do that, the first thing I have to accept is that I don’t know the answer. Even in fantasy, I don’t know the future, especially if that future will be lived in reality.
I have imagined all of these different types of videos that I would like to do. As imaginings, they seem quite satisfying. But there’s such a long and bumpy road between imagining something and bringing it to fruition. As I look back at my history, I see strewn across time a multitude of things almost done and then discarded. Those things seem so much more fun than they proved to be, so much more entertaining to think of … than to do.
And then there some things that were loads of fun, but eventually proved impossible to continue. An excellent example is my music hobby, a hobby I have spent thousands upon thousands of dollars on, for software and hardware, fantasizing about monetizing my efforts, then being faced with a reoccurring issue of tinnitus, which made just listening to music uncomfortable. And somewhere in the middle, an actual possibility of making money with music evaporated before my very eyes, just as the incoming-money part of the process had begun.
Technology is important, especially for creatives, of which I am one, although a somewhat unproductive one. A reasonable question would be this: in this 1000-word rant have I learned anything, come to any final conclusions, purged myself of this flawed relationship between fantasy and reality?
Not really.