Oracle 1 - Message 1

(Beep. Music fades in)

I don’t know what to tell you. And I want to be able to tell you something because you deserve to hear it. You deserve some sort of comfort. You deserve to, well, to not feel the way I did. But given our circumstances, there’s something inevitable about it, right? Or that’s what I always thought. The guilt was just always going to come up. There was no way of avoiding it. Knowledge is power, but with great power comes great responsibility. I remember that being said to me once. It’s the Peter Parker principle, I think it’s called in some circles, and I like that name. 

I like philosophy and ethics, you know. It was what I studied in college. Or one of the many things, more accurately. I ended up with multiple majors because I was super indecisive about what exactly I wanted to study. And in terms of a career or what I wanted to do in the future, well that just seemed irrelevant: a thought so distant as to be irrelevant. 

There was a time, well, for a while, I wanted to be a philosophy professor. And hold your jokes if you can. I know it’s not a great idea in many ways. But it was partially a desire to pay it forward that led me down that path. 

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

I had good instructors, kind people who invested more into my welfare than I could ever pay back. So it made sense to me. If I couldn’t pay them back, I should pay it forward. At least then, everything is moving in a direction, transactionally speaking. 

But beyond that, well, just to give you some grounding relative to what I was dealing with at the time. Being in college meant more often than not sleeping deeply enough after exhausting myself in any number of ways that I couldn’t really dream or remember what it was I saw in those dreams. And that’s how I figured out the whole sleep cycling thing. Start off by staying awake as long as I could, then power napping for a couple hours, and once exhaustion has truly set in, it’s 16 hours awake, four hours asleep and repeat. Having a 20 hour daily cycle knocks you off the time schedule of the rest of the world right quick, but withdrawal has other appeals. 

And I don’t have to tell you this is dumb. You’ve heard the other sessions. But beyond the physical challenges of my stupid cycling, you’ve seen the consequences of my actions. Or inaction as it were. Wherever you want to put the blame when it came to what happened, there were other things that could have happened instead. There were other options and other actions I could have undertaken. Choices were made, and they were less than ideal. Or the outcome was less than ideal. Life’s a choose your own adventure where you can’t go back to see what the other options were, and yet I still know I went down the wrong path.

Or that’s what I thought. The idea of unpacking things like culpability and inaction had real word applicability for me. It meant potentially sleeping better at night. No pun intended.

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

Of course neither of those reasons are really great for such a life defining decision. I mean, my girlfriend is in that field, right? So I’ve seen that it has its perks and drawbacks as all jobs do, but it seems like a different commitment. It feels like she made a bigger commitment than I did when it comes to employment. Like I’m an administrator, so I can go be an administrator anywhere I want at any time. Management might be different than coordinating which is different than assisting, but somehow I have the ability to shape shift and find a place for myself in any of those realms. For my girlfriend, she’s committed to academia. And that’s where she’ll always find herself.

But I’m avoiding the point. 

Just because I knew this wasn’t the track I was going to go down in my life didn’t mean I wasn’t still struggling. Philosophy is everywhere, even if we aren’t aware of it or know how to deal with it. We make moral choices all the time. We are confronted by the effects of those choices all the time. It just feels so much more real, you’ve noticed. 

Like you’ve had to have noticed, right? It always feels more like a direct cause and effect relationship between your reactions to your dreams and the things that happen to the people you dream about. You made a choice, and even though there are a thousand of little details in their life that could nudge them in any direction, you still think of yourself as the sole author of their fate. 

And maybe because that’s the one detail that can definitively be changed. Others can’t be. You can’t change someone’s work situation. You may want to after seeing them send out two hundred job applications in about two weeks, which was stupidly efficient, but you can’t change that situation. You can tell them, however, that the interview they were able to get went better than they think and that they should not take the job their--I’d say it was outright--abusive dad was able to get them at his company. 

And I get you’re hesitant to call a spade a spade, but I don’t have the patience anymore for that level of thinking. I’m just tired. 

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

It’s not even physically tired, though coffee still helps. But coffee helped because of my job. There’s now this psychological connection between me and the concept of coffee. Okay, bad word choice. I associate coffee with being able to help people or to take care of them. So physical energy aside, it’s still comforting. 

That’s why I started hanging out at that cafe. It was close by. It had coffee. Everything worked out. And that’s when I started talking to the man who knew for a while that his end was coming. It was abrupt to his wife, but you know, she stopped listening to this podcast after her last session. And she’s still subscribed in case her client number pops up again, but she’s not listening. So I can say things like this. That man knew he didn’t have much longer, but it wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have with her. And she couldn’t have handled it either. Even when it finally did happen, she couldn’t fully wrap her head around it. 

She’s normally such a practical person, but then it all fell apart. She’s a researcher and professor in a field far more practical than philosophy. It might have been that she left the philosophy up to him because he loved talking about two things: her and philosophy. And the latter was more out of concern for the field whose terminology was adapted and twisted in sometimes outright malicious ways, and you had a whole generation of people coming up not knowing how to make an argument to fight back or to see what a faulty premise was or when an argument is offered up in not good faith. 

And still sometimes we collectively still managed to land on our feet. We’re still able to make progress, so that gave him hope. And then there was someone like me who did study philosophy and had just made different choices. 

We talked a lot about choices, as a whole, so there’s nothing anyone can say to me that I haven’t heard before. But when we were talking, he never presented a right answer, which was likely the teacher’s impulse he picked up from his wife. But that left my head spinning because the urge to do something was still there. No matter what I thought about choices, I still had to do something, but in many ways, I couldn’t be expected to do anything. I was never close to these people and--you know this as well as I do--this isn’t a believable thing. Dreams aren’t supposed to be predictions, especially when they’re this seemingly impractical, so direct communication wasn’t possible. Which left me wondering why I felt so guilty, you know? That was something I really needed to unpack, but unpacking it took a lot of time.

And I know you want a quick answer. You want to know what to do, and you’re looking at me as if I can tell you, but I can’t. I’m afraid I really don’t have one. There’s some conclusions you have to reach on your own, after a bit of a journey. I’m happy to tell you about mine, but that’s the best I can do.

(Music fades out. Beep)

The Oracle of Dusk is a production of Miscellany Media Studios with music licensed from the Sounds like an Earful music supply. It was written, edited, produced, and performed by MJ Bailey. And if you like the show, tell friends about it or the quasi-friends that are still on your social media feeds because social norms evolved before words did, am I right?