Driver’s Seat Freestyle: Turning the Volume Down
On restraint, parody, and learning to believe in tomorrow
I have this obsessive-compulsive thing with volume. TVs. Cars. The number has to land on a multiple of five or my body tightens. Something feels off. Like a chair leg shorter than the rest.
Like damp socks.
But recently, in my car, I’ve been leaving the volume at 22.
Not 20. Not 25.
Twenty. Two.
It feels like a calmer version of loud. It is to 25 what 25 is to 30.
Less insistent. More controlled.
I don’t know when it changed. I just know it did.
I pay attention to things like that and immediately wonder, “why?”
That question allows my curiosity to browse through the card catalog of life’s library.
22.
In the movie Soul, there’s a character named 22. She doesn’t want a spark. Doesn’t want to be rushed into her purpose. She resists the idea that meaning arrives cleanly and on cue. Opposite of her is Joe Gardner, a jazz musician desperate to arrive somewhere definitive, somewhere that proves his life added up.
In numerology, 22 is considered a Master Number. It suggests alignment. Trusting intuition. Building reality with intention. In Soul, 22 learns that life itself, with all its imperfections, is the gift, not a specific achievement.
Is it all so simple? To be like 22 in true purpose. Balanced.
Instead, a lot of us live as parody.
That’s an interesting word. Parody.
I’m starting to believe parody shows up when parity doesn’t exist. When the field isn’t level, we imitate instead of meet. We exaggerate instead of exchange. Performance becomes necessary when access isn’t real.
So much of what we call culture now feels like this.
Not conversation.
Not communion.
Just mimicry layered on mimicry.
Sampling the sample of the sample until no one remembers the source. Or who it belonged to.
Some of us know who it belonged to. We see ourselves in the trends sold back to us.
Water to whales.
While we might be the source, we still find ourselves living as parody.
Parody becomes armor.
It lets us participate without risk.
Without responsibility.
And eventually, the performance stops being ironic. The mask sticks. We forget we’re acting. We forget why we started. The imitation becomes the thing itself.
I keep wondering where the performance begins.
And where it’s supposed to end.
And what it actually gets us.
Because performance without parity doesn’t move us closer to power.
It just keeps us busy.
Keeps us loud.
Keeps the volume at 25 when 22 would have told us more.
Back in 2020, a friend asked me this question:
What would you do differently if the world were waiting on you to change?
Think about that for yourself.
We all get stuck behind the mask at some point. Speaking from that perspective leaves us stuck.
Identifying with that stuck self leaves us empty.
Last fall, during a conversation with a different friend, I said something out loud that hasn’t stopped echoing since:
Innovation is only possible when we believe we have a future.
Making anything new requires faith.
Not religious faith.
Faith in time.
To innovate is to imagine a world that doesn’t exist yet and reach toward it anyway. That’s not a present-tense act. It lives somewhere ahead of us. Between now and next.
When belief in the future erodes, innovation goes with it. We stop experimenting. We start preserving. We recycle ideas. Archive aesthetics. Treat the past like a museum we’re afraid to disturb.
Why risk anything when tomorrow feels uncertain?
Who builds a bridge to a place they don’t believe they’ll reach?
Every so-called golden age was powered by optimism. Not naïve optimism, but insistence. Even in crisis, the breakthroughs that mattered came from refusal. Refusal to accept that the story was already over.
Which makes me think the real engine isn’t creativity or intelligence alone.
Every new idea is a quiet vote for tomorrow.
A way of saying: we’re still here.
And we still believe there’s something worth building.
I don’t have a thesis or a conclusion.
Just a sense that something is shifting.
It starts small enough to miss.
In preferences.
In restraint.
In where the volume lands.
I believe 2025 was our 25.
We are learning to accept and become 22.
Our masks are coming off slowly.
No more parody.
Process Notes
While driving up to my parents’ house for the holidays, I told my sister,
“22 is ok for volume.”
She knows about my quirk.
That sentence felt like something to work with.
I let it marinate for the rest of the week, and somewhere on the drive back, everything started falling into place. Slowly. Quietly.
This piece is all process. A kind of spiritual companion to Rainy Day Interlude: A Study on Blue.
Around the same time, I was scrolling through my reading list and noticed I’d saved Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People. I haven’t read it yet, but the idea must’ve lodged itself somewhere in my subconscious.
Anyway.
Three songs were key while writing this freestyle:
Kendrick Lamar - untitled 01 | 08.19.2014.
As always, thank you for reading.
See you soon.