My preschool teacher’s report to my parents was, “Jason is very good at sorting.” It’s true: I like to sort things. Sorting means judging, and judging is fun.

But being a champion sorter is not without its angsty moments. When I was in grad school, I wrote an unpublished novel about a character having an existential crisis via being pinned under a fallen tree. It was called—wait for it—Fallen. One section read:

She looked up at the deepening sky and kicked her heel in the dirt as she thought about organizing principles.

Stay alive, have more kids, keep your head low and eye on the ball. Lawns and decks are good, new trucks are good, the more family pictures the better. Find a good job, do it well.

You find a set of organizing principles, and you keep organizing until you die. Everything that hits your inbox, you organize. This goes there, that goes here. Take that job, sell that car, go on that date, spread your legs and make more organizers. Don’t switch your principles, or you’ll never get anything done.

And then you’re 80 in your armchair, and you’re surrounded by neatly organized stacks of kids and tax forms and cars and record albums. You’re never done organizing, because there’s always more to organize. Hold on to your principles and organize until you can’t organize any longer, then you just have to look at your piles and hope they don’t fall over.

That’s all life is, from the cellular level to the Electric Slide, is organizing. It’s all work. Who needs it? All you have to do is lie there and listen to the squirrels run around, nothing to organize but what’s between your ears, and at some point even that becomes less like organizing than like shuffling a deck of cards.

I thought of that passage a couple of days ago, when I’d spent a long day online, posting and editing on The Tangential, the Daily Planet, and who knows where else. I’d got a lot of work done, but what was the result? It felt like I’d created things, but really, all I’d done was push a lot of binary switches around between ones and zeros. Sorting. Organizing.

Then I thought of the fact that sorting and organizing are all that happens in our brains through our entire lives. Some cells die (whoops) and some are created, but basically, learning and living are all about forming connections among clusters of neurons. Make a connection here, break a connection there. Sorting and organizing, until you die and entropy takes over again.

I wasn’t depressed when I wrote that manuscript, but I could identify with my character who was. In that context, thinking of life as an endless and ultimately meaningless workflow, just sorting widgets of various modality over and over, indicates a sense of powerlessness, a sense of passiveness. A character who was feeling more empowered and optimistic would see life as a constructive process.

But there’s also a certain zen to seeing life as a process. It’s good to create things and to feel good about it, but eventually everything will return to dust—all the switches will revert to zero. What we have is the here and now. I’m about to hit publish and this blog post will “exist,” but if Becky were to empty her checking account on apps and cigarettes and default on our hosting fee, it would all be washed away. And that would be okay. Right?

No, it would suck. Now, excuse me: I’m going to go make some coffee. I have a long day of switch-flipping ahead of me.

– Jay Gabler