Brenden Matthews

Imagine you work really hard, achieve what most people would consider “success”, and now you’re left with a big pile. What have you achieved? What is your legacy? Is this something you’re proud of? In my case, I’m past the point of caring about dollars and cents. Without question, more money makes life easier, but beyond a certain baseline level of comfort it adds almost nothing in terms of happiness. And I make this statement from my own personal experiences. I’m not speaking for others, though I’m sure many would agree. The thing, however, that I really crave but lack is real human connection. I don’t know how to make friends with people I want to be friends with, and no amount of money can help with that.

I like to stand right on the edge of the subway platform. I stand right atop the yellow tactile paving they install at the edge of the platform for blind people. I stand there, facing outward toward the trains, staring into the abyss. It’s my morning ritual now. And evening. And whenever I take the train.

Images are interesting because, in the digital world, it’s trivial to alter them, and yet we still tend to treat images—photographs, video—as a kind of proof. If you see a photograph in a news article, most people don’t really stop to ask whether the thing actually happened. The photograph is the thing, or at least it stands in for it. Light hit something, a camera was there, therefore this event occurred. That association feels almost automatic, and it’s been reinforced culturally for a long time.

If a “true” self exists at all, it probably only appears when no one is watching. The rest of the time, we’re adapting to context. At work, we perform the professional self. With friends, we’re relaxed, funny, interesting. With family, something else entirely. Online, where the audience is abstract and potentially infinite, we often project an idealized version of ourselves—the highlight reel.

What exactly does it mean to be present? It’s a question I’ve written about before, yet here I am again—writing another version of it. Maybe that’s the point. Presence isn’t something you figure out once and move on from. It’s a practice, a remembering. It’s a tricky concept—hard to describe, slippery to pin down. Presence seems to have layers. So I keep ending up at the same place: noticing what pulls me out of it.