The Dopamine of the Daydream

Hello, and welcome to Ducks of the World Tree, the podcast that waddles across the manicured lawns of suburbia, flaps wildly in front of a speeding Tesla, and dives deep into the tepid waters of some kind of pompous drainage ditch masquerading as a natural water feature.

In today’s tales of neurodivergent, animist wanderings through end stage capitalism, we’re talking about daydreaming, art, and the absurdity of modernity.

So, I moved back to Asia in September, and it’s taken me a lot longer than I anticipated to pull myself together to do anything creative. It’s December already, and the last three months have passed with the same kind of slipperiness and insubstantial *swoosh* as draining noodles and having half the pot escape down the Dispose-all.

This time-disconnection is pretty typical for the neuro-fancy tribe, but sometimes it hits me that huge chunks of life have slipped away and I’ve done nothing but work and watch trash TV and read and daydream.

This thought hit me: that it is SO MUCH MORE FUN to daydream than it is to just do the thing.

I can daydream all day about creating one-woman plays, I can make endless concept albums in my mind, build complex plots for novels that will never be written.

Daydreaming is so fun! — It’s just, I wonder… is it really? More fun? Than actually creating something? What’s going on? This seems… this seems particularly absurd.

Because I do experience joy after a day of actual writing or tinkering on a song. I do enjoy making things with yarn and paint and fabric.

But the days walking around the mountains, reading, daydreaming, making little watercolor notes in a cafe in downtown Taipei. THAT, that is the life.

Maybe capitalism’s emphasis on production is the problem. I mean, we all need time to just be. What would we even produce if we never had time to be still, be unproductive, read, think, meditate — right?

But I think my love of daydreaming is more of a maladaptive coping mechanism. If I explore enough, daydream enough, I don’t have to confront my own dislocation in space, time, or history. I won’t have to confront my own boredom.

Maybe I’m just pathologically restless and unfocused which, I suppose, should surprise no one considering the premise of the podcast is animist ADHD neurospice-ological musings on existence during end stage capitalism.

So anyhow, lately, my unproductive time has been spent reading David Byrne’s How Music Works, and that, coupled with a side quest down Joan Didion Lane, a quick jaunt down Camus’ dark alley, with a pit stop at the Cafe Nietzsche has me… daydreaming.

A lot.

David Byrne has me pondering What Art Is, what it can be, should be. What defines music? Is it the intangible experience of people making music in a room? Is it the recording, which is static, an object that can be bought, sold, possessed (to say nothing of the reality that we own nothing these days, what with the digital streaming services).

But is art a thing that can serve capitalism? Or is Art a holy communion that might save us from an ecocidal and self-destructive nihilism?

Could art for arts sake save us from the absurd death-cult that is modernity?

If the relentless march of totalitarian capitalism leaves our world increasingly disenchanted, materialized, and commodified; and then we are, as a result, increasingly bored, restless, rootless, aimless, and empty, is Art a way out? A way around? A way to be so radically free that your very existence is rebellion?

An answer, the right answer, to Camus’ “one truly serious philosophical problem.” The question of whether or not life is worth living.

Because yes, we are captives in a for-profit prison. Every aspect of natural existence is compelled into the service of profit. All needs are stolen from the natural world and sold back to us. We are denied even time to dream guilt-free.

Because yes, daydreaming for dopamine to survive a life stripped of meaning by a sociopathic and ecocidal drive for profit IS ABSURD.

Modernity IS ABSURD.

But so is giving in to this fascist regime of capital, saving the corporate healthcare scheme millions in profits by shuffling yourself off the ol’ mortal coil (since they won’t have to pay for you in your old age, right?). How dare these fuckers trap us so vilely, so thoroughly in meaningless machine existence.

The long you live, the more you feel like a lab rat, and the white-coat-lords-above keep shaking our cage so that we’re always off-balance. Always unsure.

But are we really unsure of what Art is?

No. I think not.

Somewhere deep within we know. So do they.

Art is communion. It is unmediated communication. Between our inner selves and the broader community of seen and unseen beings that make the animate, conscious fabric in which we are embedded. Art is reconnection with the world as an enchanted place. Art brings the gods and powers back into the body of the world. Art is healing.

And the true medicine that heals us from the absurdity of modernity can not be bought or sold. That’s why corporate “art” works so hard to convince you that you can’t make art. You can’t sing. You can’t dance. You can’t whatever as well as whatever professional whoo-ha. Crush the natural human drive to create with insecurity.

Failing that, they’ll let you have the tools, the computer, the method to self-publish, but then the rules change and no one can make a living doing art. No one can survive on that income alone, and you’re working two jobs to make rent, so who has the time anymore…

To do anything more…

Than daydream.

So let’s daydream a new world. And let’s steal time to write it. And let’s steal the space to share our ideas. And let’s just live outside of 24-hour clock time that was invented for the fucking factory system, and let us live outside of productivity and outside conventional notions of focus and just be.

Be human.

All too human.

After all.