Oh No! I’ve been Derailed, Banished and Plugged into a Parallel Fetaverse! And other Heartwarming Life Updates with some Mildly Interesting Advice about Reinvention Slipped in There
Don’t feel like reading this (long) post? Well, you don’t have to, listen to the podcast (below) and wherever you get your podcasts. * [Mild language warning.] *
The Sharpener has been to some dark places recently, including death, loss and disease. Here, You’ll find an update, because, let’s face it, it’s been a while since we caught up, and I also want to lighten up the gloom, and share my path of reinvention through the pandemic and the birth of the virtual revolution known as the metaverse. If the past couple years have been about adjusting to the ‘new normal’, the road ahead will be about adjusting to a world of constant readjusting. Perhaps my story and thoughts through this will mean something to you as well, for whatever they’re worth.
the brink of success
I was on the cusp of that thing called success. At least, success, the way many people I knew had defined it. Such a strange word. Everyone wants it, but few truly understand it, and even fewer actually achieve it, leaving everyone else yearning. Like Marlon Brando said, “I coulda been a contender!” But who exactly gets to be a contender? Who decides? And is that fair?
I had hustled away in New York for years, shopping my portfolio around to ad agencies and other companies in my wing-tipped shoes, sold on the idea that I could become an overnight big deal on Madison Avenue with a book of pictures and a dream. Silly me. But soon after, the door opened to Columbia University. It was incredible, I met dazzling people there and landed an exciting communications role at a big company. I would finally be paid to tell stories. Credibility and satisfaction in what I did was around the corner, finally my degrees would make sense to someone other than me! Glory Hallelujah!
Home in A hall of mirrors
Enter COVID—the story may start to sound familiar to you after this point because just about everyone has some version of this story—COVID neatly snuffed out those opportunities one by one (with some exceptions like the internship at Mount Sinai, an incredible experience, especially at this moment). So I stumbled into spending more time in Greece, adapting to new opportunities , and adjusting to life there all over again, like a kind of mental physical therapy, while the country was under lockdown. I felt a strange combination of pride in my heritage and fatigue over the distortions of time that COVID has inflicted on Greece and everywhere. The whole process felt like stumbling into a hall of mirrors that displayed warped reflections of places I knew.
Movie still of Bruce Lee in a hall of mirrors in Enter the Dragon.
What a moment it’s been , ( I am tremendously grateful for every moment as I know many have not been fortunate in these times), watching the country enter its bicentennial under these conditions, with what feels like a second wind against all odds. Watching trap music race up the Greek streaming charts. Anticipating the launch of the latest nation branding efforts, with the expected references to the glorious past and idyllic Cycladic beaches, and new initiatives like the digitization of ancient Olympia through augmented reality (which seems fitting given all this talk about the metaverse, which I recommend be renamed fetaverse, effective immediately) and the campaign’s brilliant vision of Greece as a digital nomad’s paradise that in my opinion needs tidying up in its execution (and, by the way, Greek tourism, if you’re reading this, I’m totally available).
a tumble into academia
Somewhere in there, I began my research. Various people had recommended I do a PhD for a while, and by then the only thing I had a degree in was the gentle art of nodding and pretending to agree. But the fallout from the pandemic strangely foregrounded everything I had relegated to the background, and research was one of those things.
When I was in design school at SCAD and later working for startups and nonprofits, I paid very close attention to the process of generating the insights behind the campaigns that we pitched to clients. Often the designers I worked with were more concerned with the craft of the stuff we made, the look and feel of the stunning videos, infographics, animations (which are the driving force behind our booming visual culture). The importance of process or execution is an ongoing debate, and the answer is probably somewhere in the middle. But the conversations revealed that research is a strength of mine.
The feeling nagged and persisted. And here we are: Dr. Sharp, Marketing PhD. It sounds like the name of those TV doctors, like I advise on baby names or foot creams or something. What you’ve heard is true: The doctoral process is an agony and an ecstasy rolled into one. There are days of electrifying progress and desert-like stretches of nothingness, and it seems like good practice in the research world to let the energy of the good days power me through the bad days. Queen Margaret University has been an incredibly stimulating and supportive university environment. My supervisors have been a constant source of inspiration, encouragement and patience, which seems critical to success and momentum throughout the process.
Lost, or IN CONSTANT TRANSFORMATION?
After all the chips fell into place, and I navigated this new reality, I looked back at the opportunities that fell apart and asked myself, why is this so hard? Why is it so damn hard to get back on track? But, then I realized, perhaps there was never a track to get back on. Perhaps I am on a larger journey of reinvention that has no beginning and no ending. Perhaps that path can only truly be understood in retrospect. I’m oversimplifying, I know, it makes my realization sound like a bathtub epiphany like I’m a direct descendant of Archimedes, να πούμε! (which, unfortunately, I am not). For me, my realization was the first step in a larger mental work in progress.
My realization was by no means an easy one, or one that I am happy with every day. After all, traditional ideas about life and career paths have deep roots that persist to this day, and leave me questioning my path at times. Psychology researchers in the 20th century understood life and careers as linear and developmental, attached to early, mid and late ‘life stages,’ including “growth” and “exploration” in childhood and adolescence, “establishment” in young adulthood, “maintenance” In middle age and “withdrawal” in later adulthood. these ideas entered the mainstream. The influence of these models remains intact to this day. You can feel the angst from Andrew Garfield’s character in Tick, Tick…Boom! as he sings about desperately dreaming to do something great as his 30th birthday approaches.
There is validity to these theories, but do they tell the whole story ? What if someone has not ‘made it’ by young adulthood? What if someone makes a comeback later in life? Some artists fit the career / life / fast track mold like the Beatles, who recorded all their albums as a group before any of them reached the age of 30 and some had families and children by then. But there are those who defy the models. Japanese painter Katsushika Hokusai did not draw his famous seascapes before the age of 70. By most critical accounts, Cavafy did not get to his greatest poems before the age of 40. Julia Child’s first cooking show aired when she was 50.
More recent thinking accounts for people with discontinuous careers and lives, like contract workers , people who take career gaps, and —famously under COVID—remote workers. What I like about the more recent theories is that they understand development as lifelong, continuous, or “boundaryless” rather than something that ebbs and flows in preset cycles. These cycles of reinvention can happen throughout one’s life. Look at David Bowie, who transformed and iterated on his persona every few years, from the Goblin King to the Thin White Duke and of course Ziggy Stardust (a role he played for only one year!). There are also examples of ‘second act’ performances, stars of stage and screen who became members of parliament, athletes who became managers, on and on.
David Bowie’s shape-shifting personas.
The emergence of the multi-hyphenate individual is another thing worth mentioning. People who can’t or refuse be defined through a single description or title. One example may be Clint Eastwood (actor-director-producer), and you have others who don’t just shed one identity and wear a new mantle, they collect their identities over time and become a composite of those identities like Michael Jordan (father-basketball legend-baseball player-team manager-actor-philanthropist-author) and the further we go the more intriguing they get, and I’d love to hear your own titles in the comments or on social media!
meta-opportunities
I know I’ve cracked a few jokes about the metaverse (which, by the way, is presented as a kind of immersive internet, clear definitions are still elusive) and healthy skepticism abounds, this new virtual environment appears to have the potential to create opportunities for careers, the economy, culture, entertainment, etc. Self reinvention may well be one perks of that landscape, offering opportunities to build digital identities, collaborate, create, and speak truth to power more than was possible before. The metaverse could further reconcile the increasingly slippery borderline between our ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ selves through avatars, commerce, multiplayer gaming, NFTs and so on. It may also contribute to protecting and multiplying our identities even beyond the ‘hyphanated’ identities we inhabit today. In fact these new worlds offer unexpected platforms for those who have struggled to find their place or their voice elsewhere.
Still gleefully perplexed about the metaverse? Me too! Here’s a helpful video.
nobody said REINVENTION would be easy
Any time of change and transition is hard and emotionally taxing, and an ongoing global pandemic (and the related crisis of digital literacy and misinformation) occurring alongside a technological revolution are both causes for and obstacles to to reinvention. What to do? Reinvention is thought to be an active process, not something that simply happens to us. According to acclaimed psychologist Walter Mischel who conducted the groundbreaking ‘Marshmallow Test’, actively envisioning and manifesting our future selves is shown to increase our likelihood of success in achieving that reinvention. In her novel Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion wrote, “I have already lost touch with a couple people I used to be.” That’s definitely part of the actions we must take.
But the other part is beautifully expressed by Arthur Schopenhauer in one of his lively philosophical reflections, “each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.” So if every day is a new incarnation, then tomorrow is a chance to get started.
I’ll see you then.
Wishing you happy, safe Holidays!
P.S. If you’re struggling on how to begin envisioning your reinvention, perhaps it could be something involving giving back to others or your community? After all it feels good to do good. If you need somewhere to start, consider purchasing an original piece of digital art I made specifically for this piece. All proceeds will go to the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. Why? So Glad you asked! I believe that the great challenges that face our world often have underlying scientific debates, and resolving those debates will be not about moving the ‘opponent’ from their side of the argument to yours, but from “once upon a time” to happily ever after; the winners of the future debates will have the strongest stories. And I believe the scientific community can learn a great deal from organizations like the Alda Center.