"LastDay, Gemini 68... Year of the Corporation, 2012...
Carousel Begins..."
After a decade of building fascinating projects and working with some of the best people in the industry, I have decided to retire from Microsoft. 2011-2012 was a year of trying circumstances. perhaps the single most important one was the passing of my best friend of 30 years, Kevin Mulvihill. When you have been best friends with someone since you were both 13, their sudden and unexpected passing gives one pause to consider many things. For me, beyond the immense anguish and sadness of losing someone who knew me better than I know myself, was the tacit recognition that everyone's time is finite. It struck me with a clarity and force that I have seldom experienced. You only have a allotted span to dream, build and define something truly iconic: something that is simultaneously beautiful, useful, and unique.
This notion of human being as finite and temporally grounded goes back to my early reading of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. For him, human being (he preferred to use the term Dasein), was defined by its historicity and cultural setting, interpretative relationship to its surroundings, finitude in the face of death, temporality, and care (Sorge). In this view, a core part of what and who we are it the set of people and ideas that we care about in a deep way. This is a vastly different foundation to human being than many thinkers, theological and philosophical, have tried to ground human being. I tend to side with Heidegger: one learns far more about the essentially human by understanding what people care about and how they relate to themselves and others as historically grounded beings.
History, culture, shared life experiences, and language form us: they are not incidental and extrinsic.
I thought a lot about some of the dreams and aspirations that two adolescents had while waiting for the Summer of 1982 to finish so that they could start as Freshmen at Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose, CA. We had a blast trying to imagine what our future selves would be like and what they would tell us if they could send us a message backwards down the timeline. Remember John Carpenter's film Prince of Darkness and the "subconscious, tachyonic projection" employed as a dramatic device by the Brotherhood of Sleep? What would I tell our younger selves given the opportunity?
Seek hard challenges, deep emotional connections, self-understanding, and experience the beautiful.
Everything else is dross and amounts to utterly nothing in the longterm. I consider myself a Stoic, and the writings of Epictetus resonate in my adult mind in much the same way that Foucault and Heidegger did in my younger mind. As adults, we are faced with obstacles, problems, and tragedies that we experience only abstractly and intellectually when we are young. It is remarkably easy to be flippant, cynical, and sophistical when there is apparently so little at stake. Everything appears infinite and imperishable - the ego's false immortality. The picture changes dramatically when the ineluctable forces of biological time, economic realities, and encroaching presence of senescence and decay become everyday occurrences. Things get real, to paraphrase a common expression. The Japanese have a profound aesthetic-philosophical concept: wabi-sabi. I translate it as the beauty of decay - the experience of the beautiful in the finite, impermanent, and transient. The opposite of this way of seeing is the Greek concept of beauty. Both are valid aesthetics and each focuses our attention to a different aspect of the lived experience: the temporal and material versus the formal and the perfected. Time versus form.
Human life is wabi-sabi. It is self-aware and aware of its intrinsic finitude. In our lives, we are presented with trying and wrenching circumstances and events, we have little ability to alter their facticity and inevitability. How we react, though, is entirely within our power. This is the deep thought within Stoicism: you control your reaction, not the event. These must be separated in your mind. Too often, one easily elides into the other. This is a categorical mistake. "Circumstances do not make the man, they merely reveal him to himself." (Epictetus)
For me, 2012 was a profound moment of self-revelation. The sleeper has awakened. It took mind warping trauma and the passing of someone very close to me to make that happen. Still, I am glad that it happened. I have returned full circle to the beginning and see it truly for the first time. That reminds of the poignant, final scene in Yukio Mishima's last novel: fate, memories, and emotions suspended in a pristine moment without catharsis.













