I got linked somehow to Justin’s video of his own dark night of the soul (Justin is the world’s first blogger, has a breakdown and records it on camera). The basic premise is that he has a breakdown because he can’t relate. His life is spent publishing his intimicies and daily intricacies online for all to see. But as an adult (after doing this for ten years), this is clashing with his sense of privacy and desire. All in all, his attempt to connect with others has left him hollow and alone.

So I got to thinking how terribly, painfully true this is. Yes, in a Dateline NBC shock-journalism way there could be prophecies of doom and gloom about a generation of people raised like this…a generation taught to take snippets of daily life, churn them out in pulp fashion, and think/expect/know that a world of viewers is reading along with you. A generation taught that to experience life is to just re-express it in a post that accepts comments. A generation taught that personal expression is wholly their IM profile, blog entry, interesting-links posts and 20 questions email survey answers. A life reduced to inarticulate, awkwardly written entries. A generation that thinks regurgitation is interaction.

But further, isn’t this the basic premise of any artistic expression (forgive me, for I’m not connecting blog-writting with any sort of art)? I mean, for any artist…let’s take a painter for stereotypical purposes. A true “artist” is one who lives to communicate through the synergy and combination of form and color. It’s almost as if they express autistic traits in being able to communicate better through this alternative means than through actual human, verbal dialogue which most of us seek. Is it not true that someone who spends their entire life expressing themselves, pouring every ounce of being, their love and their worth into this faceless “product,” loses sight of the act itself? If the purpose of this painting is to communicate (either to others directly or just what’s inside you), does it not seem ridiculous that the painter has most likely lost what relating to others really is? (Becoming so immersed in the act of conscious expression perhaps negates the purest form) Is that why the path of many artists starts with tangible expressions that are more easily discernable to the untrained public—that later in their career spiral further and further into avant garde, almost cold and emotionless “high art?” Is it that the deeper the relationship with your expression (art), the more fractured life becomes in terms of truly relating to the world and others? Perhaps this is a dance with beauty, only to be seduced into a life of being alone. The cosmic sucker-punch. Seek me and be left as a shell.

It’s hard to express the hopelessness and saddness that these thoughts bring (irony?). For anyone who’s ever written a song, published a written work or completed a painting, it is not foreign though. The pain and struggle of expressing something in a way that is not natural to humans, the difficulty of creating something from absolutely nothing — this is pain. You have something inside that needs to come out, but you are unable to express it fast enough, purely enough, or perfectly at all.

What Justin went through I’m sure is indicative of the inner battle that many people face. Be it from true artistic expression or just daily relations in blog format. I just hope that a Dateline-esque prediction never comes to fruition. A generation of pseudo-emotional/less zombies publishing content all the while feeling more alone than ever. That is a true nightmare I pray we don’t see extend into reality.