I stumbled across a potential title for this audio paper that is giving me so much trouble:

The Unspoken Agreement, or rather; this is how we’re doing life now.

This is in reference to a subject that I feel is integral to my life but is such a frustratingly difficult thing to explain that it makes me wonder if it’s just blindingly simple and the fact that I can’t explain it very well means that there really isn’t much to it. Focusing too hard on it sort of makes it slip away, like trying to pop a tapioca pearl on a flat surface using only your index finger, whilst both the finger and the pearl are covered in a generous quantity of extra virgin olive oil.

The root of the matter is how peculiar everything is. But examples of this seem to fall short of the mark; I feel that these things are wondrously gleeful and ironic, but I sometimes think that this attributes say more about my own outlook on life rather than intrinsic features of the examples. An example I’ve been providing recently in conversation with people is call centers for tech support; people are employed to work in these places, often at low wages and with bad hours, working in cramped, busy, noisy environments. It is safe to assume that the workers do not want to be there. The customer calling the support line equally despises having to make the call, and would (in most cases) much rather have a comprehensive and well written guide on how to solve their (often tech related) issues. In fact, the call centre worker is often just reading from a handbook and relaying the information back to the customer in real time. Instead of having a simple solution to these issues, we now have a situation where two humans are begrudgingly talking to each other, which I see as a symptom of the unfathomably complex bureaucratic spaghetti that we are drowning in on a daily basis.

***THIS SECTION ADDED LATER***

This blog post has been sitting in the ‘drafts’ part of the site for a couple of weeks now, and I considered deleting it as it seems as though it doesn’t relate to my current feelings about my audio paper – I am still yet to stumble across a simple solution or even a thread of ideas to pull at with regards to the above concept. It also feels supremely dismissive of human thoughts and opinions, casting human emotions as just another pawn on a field of mildly amusing misfortunes about modern living – this, I definitely don’t like. And thus the concept is relegated to a strange limbo, still dwelling in my mind but having no logical conclusion, no satisfying journey of exploration. However, I decided to post it (despite it being an unfinished set of ideas and written in a slightly clunky and quite unsympathetic manner) because it serves as an illustration of my thought processes, and records one of the ideas I considered before landing on the final one.

Process, after all, is everything.