[1127] Moving Right Along

I felt myself getting a little heated in today's CASA group discussions about "trauma." For every 10 times you'll hear that word, "resilience" will come up maybe once. I think most of us are aware of how arm-chairy and buzzworthy trauma and therapy have become. It's one of the latest cultural trends that facilitate a fluidity to presumed-more-informed conversation, without the practice of developing finer lines of understanding and distinction.

On the basis of your invocation of "trauma" you can rush to provide "help" and "services" and begin blaming an incredible amount of "mental health issues" or "unresolved childhoods." It's literally the cliche of a freshman's behavior after enrolling in their first college psychology course on blast. They've already invoked unsubstantiated pseudo-science and pop-culture explicitly not psychology as tools to provide frameworks for understanding your families. When someone infers substance abuse from a story just because the accusation was levied or any kind of drug was referenced at any level, their conclusions or assumptions go unchecked. It's predictably baking a recipe for an unnecessary mess on top of whatever the family is going through.

You can feel the tension every time you speak in "checking" ways. This happens to me routinely. One of the presenters spoke to the biased and incomplete ways that foster parents or aggravated family members might speak to the nature of the case or anyone's character. I pointed out that case managers can leave out details and massage stories to fit their ends as well. That got ignored and we moved right along. It's a real concern, and you need to know how to protect your relationship with someone who might be specifically directed to undermine your effort to advocate with the evidence.

But it doesn't feel "pleasant" or "decent" when you "want to believe the best" about your colleagues. Is it less true? Absolutely not. I was literally forced into that position from predatory supervisors and watched dipshit coworkers skip along those disingenuous lines without hesitation. Anecdotes fawning over better-inclined and capable FCMs do nothing to erase that.

So I started thinking about "discomfort" broadly. Another concept that's been wholesale abused. We needed to be way too on guard for what or whether we said might be a "micro aggression" or would cause someone to feel "unsafe" or "uncomfortable." Again, our pop psychology and propensity to overstate the noisiest out-ragers, made it so critical thinking and doubt became sinful in and of themselves. Facts don't matter in that space. "Being heard" is afforded only if you're claiming victimhood, but then, only victimhood of a certain type. The own-goal that is reactionary politics when you forgo any genuine attempt at taking someone's, almost certainly mostly irrational but nonetheless real, concern seriously is the ongoing consequence we get to suffer.

I think the more you practice observing conversational patterns, word choices, and trends, you can start to see previously "abstract" things considerably more acutely. One thing I notice is a propensity for "moving right along." I don't care what the topic is, there's a "normal" pace and pater that is preferred. Violate that, and it's time to move on. Point out the failings of the people you're supposed to trust most or even ingratiate yourself to? Let's move right along into the next module, as we all know there's nothing much more to say about that.

Another pattern I notice is the "taken aback pause." It's not precisely a reaction to being "offended," but it's a stark enough detail or way of relaying information that who you're speaking with was not prepared to engage that intensely. If they're quick, it'll be a brink-of-condescending acknowledgement before moving-right-along, or if they're not quick, it'll be a placating obfuscating of what you said to "even things out."Again, these are imprecise norms of conversational behavior around the particulars of one culture at one point in time, but they're real and of consequence whether or not you can see them.

When we use the word "bias," we let ourselves off the hook on the myriad ways it manifests. We let "bias" obscure in the opposite way that we let "trauma" obscure. Trauma is abused to over-explain what should be considered a necessary series of responses or consequences. Bias is abused to overlook how deeply it colors your propensity to engage that over-explaining behavior. You are biased, first and foremost, to your subjective experience of reality. In my experience, almost no one is that clued into their own flow of experience. Even the ones that are, or are showing the most growth and evidence, struggle, and will struggle indefinitely. This includes myself.

That's the point, though. You need the struggle to keep your wits about you. You need appropriate stressors against the things that will help you grow and incorporate. By definition, norms put that insistence to the side so we can all find a baseline mutual understanding to move right along down. The more cliched you sound, if you don't have a reflex to pause and pull back, the more you're training yourself to believe and act on "just whatever it is you say." You're a circular and totalitarian monster by default.

Add to that, you may not have any real ability or willingness to recognize how many cliches you truly are under the spell of. This is what the unironic attempts around discussions of "privilege" do a generally miserable job of explaining. We all have privileges up and down hierarchies and competencies and dozens of other metrics we fluidly transition through all day. None are necessarily going to jar you awake or indicate there's anything worth examining on their own. Your cohort speaks your language. Your education taught you the "right" things. Your hobbies and interests conform to a person of your state and stature. "It's just how things are done."

This provokes people's insecurity as a standing state of a lack of readiness. When you poke people, you'll find they don't have "real" reasons for their behavior, beliefs, or words. It's all been handed to them. They're a series of unconscious forces they're more or less molding to because that's how our brains work. Your brain doesn't care what it forms a pattern around, just that it can do so. There's survival reasons for this, as well as a story of basic capacities to function regardless of the nature of the environment that's all-but certain to otherwise kill you if you can't figure it out.

I, routinely, provoke that insecurity. I've learned to show considerably less ambivalence about the person after they've been provoked, but it happens just as an ongoing and predictable course of my practice. This is my practice. I analyze. I pull back. I try to identify and speak to patterns, even if they're abstract, but certainly concrete enough for me to anticipate them and work with or around them. I know what kind of response I need built into what I can reliably anticipate is going to be yours. I know how to piss off and get ignored by "the internet," and I know how to illicit a thousand likes. What's important to me is that I'm speaking as closely to my real perspective or agenda as possible, and not being driven by an elusive brain chemical game subject to the mercy of algorithms or inarticulate desires to unhealthily fit in.

I want to fit in, but with an ever-winnowing type of person. I want to be less-wrong in the information I share, but not at the expense of someone's capacity to hear it or learn from it if I can't be bothered to temper how I say it. I want to grow in my capacity to accept people, but not at the expense of their obligation to better account for and relay their own experience. I've been told my whole life that I'm not allowed to expect the same things from other people as I might of myself. I think this is fundamentally wrong and condescending. I think I should maintain the expectation while doing everything in my power to reduce the barriers to any one person getting to whatever heights you think I've managed or been born with.

Here again, we stay lost. How do you remove barriers you can't see or might even be dispositionally against even acknowledging can exist altogether? How many "boot straps" types can even be bothered to acknowledge the impact of the villages they're living in? How many "deeply empathic" people would entertain pairing their sensibilities to the word "toxic" under any circumstance? It's pretty easy, now, for me to see when my forthright manner acts as too blunt an instrument. Can you see where your baseline disposition and sympathies cloud your judgment and capacity to act more accountably?

I feel like "accountable" itself is poorly understood. Just count! Count the disquieting contradictory thought. Count the intensity, frequency, and severity of the feelings. Count the attempts to mitigate or times you recognized forgoing to do so. Accountability doesn't mean wildly wielding an axe to bring down dramatic consequences upon everything and everyone that wasn't noticed until now. It's just asking yourself, over and over again, what can I control about this situation? What can I act on that speaks to my values and perception?

Let's take the real world example of me and Byron. I can't control his perception of what he thought he was doing in service to the kid. I can't control his awareness of any creeping mental health issues that might have arisen. I can't control whether or not he responds affirmatively to my new boundaries. I could control telling him what those boundaries were altogether, so I did. I can affirm that I'm only going to communicate along the lines that hopefully help the boundary conditions get met before I'm willing to get more colloquial or back to friendly. I can respect that he told me our friendship is "invaluable." I can't truthfully say I think we'd be using that word in a mutually understood way until I see practical, tangible effects upon my life that counteract where I feel I am as a direct result of my expression of friendship getting grossly taken advantage of.

Until then, I'll treat him like I would any client. Show me. I'll patiently-enough nod along, provide whatever perspective or reframe that I can, and remain open to demonstrated behavior changes. I don't have to throw myself back into his fire. If I'm going to claim a desire to protect and maintain genuine friendships or care for those in my life, I'm not going to treat myself with the ambivalence I see others suffer from themselves every day.

I choose that level of discomfort. I only mildly complain today, as it's gotten dramatically better, about doing things alone and never having anyone to hang out with. Byron was my go-to spot for killing time or hanging out. Not once in my free time have I said, "You know, fuck my boundary, let's hang out there!" How could I look myself in the mirror? How could I advocate for you establishing better boundaries with people in your life? How could I ignore what I would characterize as gleeful and willful defiance of doing "better" than playing out battered-wife excuse making? I will not play-act friendship with someone who can't be bothered to work as hard on themselves or in service to me as I've been for them. That's not the kind of friend I am, so it's not the one I'll let back in lightly.

What's normal, though? No matter how bad someone fucks you, forgive and pretend to forget, right? They're "family." Life's too short. It is what it is. They didn't mean to or weren't aware. That's not who they were in the past. Holding grudges is unhealthy. Your insecurities around being isolated or alone betray you. Your obligation to play along and appease your mutual network takes over. Whether any real healing or mutual understanding comes into the equation is perfectly mute because we need to just move right along and "love each other."

I watch that dance justify literally every conceivable level of atrocity. It is the exact same self-servicing motivatedly ignorant pattern. From your god's behavior right on down through your secret satisfaction and smirk at punishing your pet a little too aggressively just that one time. What you don't account for counts on you to carry out its consequences. And you are, every day, in big and small ways, and it's predictable and fixable, but only with stuff like this. You have to own it. You have to "yes, and" like it's an improv class. You have to perpetually entertain the thought that you are a misguided monster, but that fact doesn't have to dictate your behavior going forward nor need to illicit some special amount of stress or talking in circles.

Then you might have a prayer of genuinely helping anything, because you see how you're otherwise fucking it up within yourself. You can resist the insistence to move past meaningful details. You can point to specific repeatable demonstrations of your values. You can see other people responding to your confidence of relatable recognizable capacity, and not the shadow game of peacocking virtue signaling and mantra echoing.

I will spend thousands of dollars, use all my tools, and spend every waking hour I have trying to help. I think most people I've met would say the same thing. Who is actually doing so? And in service to whom? Do you trust what drives them? Do you see equitable put in get out dynamics? Or is it codepedence? Or insecurity? Or some noble story of infinite sacrifice and unconditional love?

I'm willing to set the conditions because I expect better than what's normal of and for myself. Were circumstances reversed, I wouldn't treat you as I've been treated, and most importantly, have the demonstrated behavior from myself to trust. I've spent the time and money. I've opened the conversations. I've challenged the mismanaged powers and privileges. I've risen to the challenge of creating circumstances that inch me closer to what I actually want or think is better versus what's expected of me. It never ends. Every second you pretend otherwise, you disappear, and I have to fit your abstract abdication into my specific constructs.

[1126] System Processing

This may be more outlining different things in little blurbs to talk about later.

I think about what would happen if Biden lost on the basis of Israel/Hamas. Typing that sentence alone will get this post banned from /r/self on reddit. You know, the self page where you can only reflect on approved topics if they don't get too "political." Trump, who enabled Israel in dramatic and unprecedented ways, who also happens to be trying to overthrow democracy, is your alternative? And alternative, not to what is actually happening or a deep understanding of the nature of the conflict, but alternative to your new religious fervor in service to your miserable concept of what a victim is. It's almost too dumb for words, but then, so is all religion.

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I got some stuff done today. Not a ton of stuff, but some gross stuff, some stuff that won't properly complete until probably around midnight tonight, and some stuff that's been flirting with paralyzing me in an ADHD stupor. I'm happy about it. This is the 2nd weekend this year I don't have a pre-scheduled show to head to. I noticed the surge of energy I had upon waking up almost immediately dissipated after I ate. Usually I forget to eat before I get in the middle of some yard work or project, so I deliberately tried to fuel up, and it worked against me.

I'm almost through the 4th episode of 601 shows, or that's the closest approximation, with some much further along, and some I just added to my list. I went from feeling stuck and overwhelmed at the prospect of watching the shows I had backlogged to feeling energized to add more and more now that I'm approaching them like TV of old times. There's 20 of those 601 I've put on their own playlist to watch sooner. There's 60 that are currently airing that I'm staying on top of. I've used ChatGPT and Advanced Renamer to give me code to make the titles easier to sort, name, and pull from shortcuts. I've been recording clips that either make me laugh, I think I can send as inside jokes, or I imagine I might use if I had a commentary/clip channel. I also signed back up for Drumeo for a 2nd time due to El Estepario. I should spend a lot of time practicing tonight and recording lessons so I don't have to keep paying.

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I'm deep enough into the woods of CASA to start having stronger opinions. It's filled with Lisa Simpsons. If you're curious why volunteer organizations that require high-level organization and competence can work, it's because the already overworked, brilliant, but deeply insecure people who run 1,000 miles a minute to avoid working at their core issues self-select. I say this having been born and bred in that same vein. The problem, and I can't really overstate this, my job is literally, one-for-one, what an assessor and permanency worker, if they were competent, paid enough, and properly supported, would do.

I'm not learning anything new. I'm not getting any special powers. In fact, I'm learning just how over-burdened your average DCS worker is from a new angle. This program takes what I'm finding to be an unbearable (not really) amount of time to over-explain what your life should look like with one case. One singular family. In a month of one day, three hour, online learning courses together, some modules to barely fill out, and a couple in-person base touches, and you get sworn in to "advocate for the child."

They go head over heels to pretend your job isn't actually to be an assessor or permanency worker. But you are doing literally the exact same things I was doing, just for free, and for one family instead of 12-15 at once every week, or maybe 20-30 on your permanency caseload. There's 725 kids who don't have CASA representatives. The existence of CASA altogether is a judge's response to inadequacies he saw in the system back in the 70s. I advocated for children's best interest my entire career. That apparently comes so not-naturally to so many people that no one is willing to hire and pay anyone enough to do so in a sustainable way, and the only way we can even pick at the correct solution is wait for the MCATS-taking, master's graduates with 3 jobs, and wildly successful retirees to step up.

I think I can do more of my inside stuff now and fire back up the squawk box.

[1125] 10 Paces

What's the argument you wish to have?

I find myself exasperated. Incidentally, it's not regarding any one thing or because I've come off some nonsense exchange online. I'll start just discussing the variables feeding my thoughtful moment.

I watched a documentary called "Uncharitable" about the hole nonprofit organizations got dug into after bad reporting and mischaracterizations about how funds are used. Macklemore released a song about the Israel/Palestine conflict. I had a session with a client yesterday in which she reported being more or less cured of the reason she was referred to me. I've been helping a friend navigate how and what to communicate with herself and her partner. I've began the CASA training and am about a month away from maybe starting groups funded through the health department.

It's a series of seemingly disparate sources of influence that at least provoked the opening line wondering what the argument you wish to be having really is.

I find a sickening reassurance when someone with maybe an advanced medical degree says something I do, or have said, in one of my analytically complaining blogs. For all of their brains, time invested, and connections or resources I haven't discovered, they're fucked by the exact same forces, at a larger scale, and are as flabbergasted as I am that this is how it works. Their funding runs out. They're criticized for budgets no one is interested in genuinely scrutinizing until years later. Bureaucratic or capitalistic entities with even minor stakes in your given mission find ways to obstruct.

What's been clear for decades is that we have the technology. We have the money. We have the manpower. We look at the totalitarian things China can accomplish in a decade as an antagonistic ongoing proof if we could only be persuaded to forgo a chunk of our individualistic pathology to manifest destiny.

The nonprofit person is arguing for something broadly conceived of as "obviously good." It's self-evident when you watch a child drink literally shitty water, if you can install a well for less than your coffee budget that month, everyone could have fresh water. It's not a thought experiment, for your average genuine do-gooder or resident of The West, whether or not veterans should have health care. Most people grasp immediately the consequences of pollution, threats to food supplies, and mass migration when you draw the seemingly stupid-proof arrows of what's been happening as a result of climate change.

The kind of person described above lives in an entirely different universe from the naked "capitalist." It's several worlds away from the malicious psychopaths and narcissists we know tend to rise to power across influential realms. They don't know, until it smacks them soundly, the nature of "the problem" that interrupts their ability to do obviously good things. Until relatively recent history, most might be forgiven for this as levers of government have previously demonstrated a capacity to actually demonstrate the will of the demos, if only briefly.

When you give a TED talk, what's your goal? If you think it's to "convince" the random asshole like me who's going to watch 200 TV episodes for every TED talk, you're probably at a TEDx event and don't understand the assignment. You're there to talk to all of the richest and most influential people in the room. You want them to engage in trickle-down propaganda. You want to ignite an evangelical belief system around your cause and perspective. You're a culture warrior, and you fight with words and compelling mildly enlightening and chuckle-inducing stats and facts served as sermons.

I get "comfortable" the more I contemplate my "real enemies." I have an almost-zero desire to argue with anyone regarding Israel/Hamas. Why? Don't I have the will, brain power, or basic human empathy to listen to their "points?" No. They don't have points, and it's not an exercise for your brain.

The mismatch begs to run again. There's people who wish to genuinely fix things against people who've never figured out how to fix things. People who fix things are hungry to learn, grow, and change. People who never figure our how to fix things scream, chant, and share empty anecdotes. You can't pretend to have a reasonable perspective on something you're unwilling to break open and contextualize. You can't claim to concern yourself about "human rights" when you pick the popular thing that flares up every few years, but have no regard or concern for the ongoing atrocities anywhere else.

It's co-opting and peacocking versus doing the work. You could be getting aggressively aggrieved by the actual forces that perpetuate the kind of violence you pretend to be incensed by. You know what fuels violence? Magic sky-daddy beliefs. You know what fuels violence? Cultures that bag their women. Your language, in the right setting, causes things to escalate. Your resistance to other forms of power causes friction. You, using your energy to fight and argue with the wrong things makes the entire exercise a parody and performance. It fuels the worst habits of attention-seeking media, and your ego, and the hopelessness that ushers in fascist "fixes."

My enemy is the willfully indignant, impatient, irrational, and imprecise. It's not been my worst bosses in ambivalent or capitalistic machines. It's not the power any one police force exerts sometimes disingenuously or disproportionally. The idiots chanting Jew-hating mantras aren't my enemy, necessarily, nor are the most liberal women and children positioned as bullet barriers Gaza has to offer.

When the in-crowd chanter attacks me for telling them where the saying came from, now they're the enemy. Now, the argument shifts from direct confrontation to an internal one about whether or what's worth it in service to the asymmetric influence on culture. I'll keep writing, sure. It doesn't cost anything but time well spent and it makes me feel better. When a religious fanatic (who certainly doesn't feel fanatical) asserts "There is no debate!" Hello, new enemy, who's actually just a weak approximation of the behaviors I wish to holistically influence through other practices than continuing to talk past or inflame further.

Gang violence gets better when you get kids enrolled in after school programs and provide support to their parents at home. Illiberal children screaming about issues they don't understand need to be surrounded by educated, patient, and persistent people. Institutions used to stand for something they no longer seem to. Debate and conversation are literally the only option if you care about the inevitable violence that will follow otherwise.

My enemies are timeless. The sin-system bores them out fairly well. I don't want my misdirected pride going viral. I don't want to be high on my own supply of mod-approved opinions. I can't figure out how explicitly not conservative I am, and yet, it's the crazy anger-inducing people "on the other side" that are bothering to entertain new information. They proceed to shit all over it in the forms of Kellyanne Conways, Ben Shapiros, and Candice Owens', but the remotely reasonable thing will slip out of their mouth that were you more patient with those types than me, might genuinely help you construct your argument or behavior. I wish I lived in a world where those idiots could speak and I trusted 95% of all who heard them would know explicitly how batshit they were. My argument includes striving for that kind of world.

You're under a spell. You have to be to function. It's not necessarily a malicious spell. I still think very highly of myself no matter how many days I spend mostly watching TV. I'm not installing the next shit-free well somewhere in the world. I'm not flooded with needy families I'm doling out sagely advice to. I'm not doing something akin to "training in the off season" so that when I get lucky "one day" i'll neatly fit into the mold of some dreamlike opportunity I always believed was coming if Just…prayed? enough. That's not the kind of spell I'm under anymore. I can fix very little, ever, especially if it's beyond my current level of awareness or concern. I can scratch the itch on my arm. I can talk to a friend in need. I can budget, if never really afford, potential steps for a later date. I can enjoy the last of my port wine.

What is my argument? Every day you're alive is a gift. Of all the things available calling for your attention, are you aware of what you're using for inspiration and why? I think you should figure out what you actually want to fight and why. I think we're all cliches who rhyme with patterns that either build or destroy. You can build your self conception and capacity to meaningfully speak or work across topics. You can crash like a drunken elephant into town after town you barely registered where even there and certainly didn't care who they consisted of. My enemy is "religious fervor" and "deeply held personal beliefs" that make it impossible, at specific points of contention when you try, to fix anything.

A volunteer is getting paid. Maybe they only know how to spend the currency, but it's not because they're especially moral or better or less blind to their motivations. Maybe it feels good. Maybe it looks good. Maybe it gives you a chance to formulate your asymmetric attack on a problem you couldn't begin to fix other ways. You're volunteering yourself to all sorts of shit at all times. In my experience, it's in service to getting taken advantage of. It's in service to someone else's pathological allegiance to their insecurity and immaturity. It's to the "hive mind" of the attention for its own sake and internet clout. The ones who can use that energy and misdirection will keep you spinning forever.

[1124] Anomaly

I'm "weird." I know I'm weird. It's been apparent my entire life. I do and say the things you won't. The fact that I'm writing is weird. The fact that I've been writing for nearly 20 years is weird. I live in a weird house. I approach normal things like TV in a weird way. I'm in a weird field and trying weird ways to attempt to do business. There's something(s) about what I was born with that differentiate me. It's more than something like brown eyes or curly hair, but it's also no more than "boring" attributes like that put to work over time.

I'm still in the woods of Peter Boghossian and his interviews with people who have been bitten by reactionary forces. He can get exhausting in how much he lets on, but I think his core perspective and points are sound. He wants evidence and reason. He wants conversation. He wants to figure out how we protect institutions from the human propensity to devolve into tribal incoherence. He's weird.

I'm increasingly aware of how weird it is to want to "do better." A growth, evidence, and accountable mindset are the exception, not the rule. I happened to have watched the first episode of The Imagineering Story. Walt Disney was a weird generator from which the whole of what we know as amusement parks has followed. It took dozens of imagineers and thousands of people to put it all together, but he pushed everyone over the cliffs. It makes me think about the first time I heard that it's something like 5% of overly-motivated and radicalized revolutionaries that overthrow something or kick off new eras. The vast majority of the population is living in the wake of a relatively small handful.

To be sure, I have serious doubts about the "great man of history" narratives. I do not think they take away from my own sense of weirdness nor the impact of small deliberate pushes where something hasn't been pushed before. I don't think the future is inevitable, and the choices and focus some maintain in their realms have an enormous spill-over effect. We see this in medicine, the leadership of certain countries and companies, and in the wake of the death of the stabilizing force in our own families.

What constitutes the difference? Why am I weird? Why, and this is from Boghossian, do pretty much all people fall for the latest trends, political waves, language hijacking, and others just seem constantly skeptical and impervious? Why am I willing to see the reason in J.K. Rowling, yet the people who know her will spend years voicing pain and concern? Why do I care about gun violence statistics, but most will belabor the worst anecdotes devoid of 95% of the context? Why can I understand why Kyle Rittenhouse was deemed not guilty, even if I think he has the most cunty punchable Ben Shapiro-esc face that I've seen in a while, and question the motives of anyone carrying around guns?

I want, genuinely, to not believe incorrect or dumb things. That's the weird difference. I want that more than fitting in. We're a tribal species who does not inherently see the dangers of the tribal wisdom that maintains a certain internal coherence. Whether or not that internal coherence comports with reality, evidence, or consistent accountability does not even enter the conversation sometimes until it's litigated or there's concentrated sustained outrage.

For the longest time, I did not understand why trans issues were even part of the political conversation. As I've listened to more and more of these interviews, it's becoming clearer the lanes of disingenuous outrage and language being used to hijack our understanding. I was perfectly unaware of how deep the corruption went or how it manifested. As a liberal, leftist, generally "live and let live" person who vehemently hates religion, barely tolerates guns, and wishes we had drive-through abortions, I'm going to instinctively say "Yeah, trans, whatever, let them do what they want."

Oops. Except, the science wasn't there. The journals purporting to have the science were publishing literal garbage invented by Boghossian himself to prove a point. The "it's not dangerous to block puberty" and "children know what they are" narratives are just lies. The stats on people who de-transition, who turn out just to be gay or have autism, or who have some often well-documented mental health struggles overwhelm the actual data and story of what it means to be pursuing "trans rights."

You say something like that, you get labeled. Not by the data or the scientists or the people with direct experience who might testify. You're a "terf" or "transphobe" or "hateful" or whatever damming epithet is trending that month. You're silenced, and depending on what place you occupy in society, punished. We've been doing this dance long enough that those punishments are getting reversed after lawsuits, and the adults in the room have woken up to the liability of riding trends instead of science.

The battle wasn't about whether or not we should accept trans people. The battle is about language and facts of biology. I don't think anyone sincerely gives a shit how you wish to dress, modify your body, or present in the world. I think everyone who is reasonable cares about male bodies beating the fuck out of a woman's in a physical competition. I think we need to protect the facts of sexual dimorphism, know the numbers behind exceptionally rare intersex conditions and what that constitutes, and be of the general constitution of taking claims seriously, investigating them with evidence, and opening debate in service to policy.

Is it actually a good thing to build into a curriculum for kindergarteners to entertain the idea that they're trans? It seems not. It doesn't "feel" wrong or right to me, the evidence suggests children are dumb and confused. That's what it is to be a child before we even introduce longitudinal studies, which exist, and we could talk about, if we actually gave a fuck about raising healthy children. Is it actually a good thing to erase the differences between the sexes? The evidence suggests there's a catastrophic impact socially, psychologically, and disproportionately bad compared to any given individual who wishes to insist they are different than how they were born.

Doubt shouldn't be a death sentence. Questions are not harm. Doubt and questions are not hatred, erasure, denial, or evidence of some immutable destructive power complex.

I was absolutely fascinated the day I got railroaded by 15 people on facebook under a former friend's post. She talked about binding her chest and I think was entertaining non-binary? I was already sympathetic and on the crowd's side, but all that was on offer was incoherent hatred. The attempt at a conversation wasn't about her as it was some spin-off related to hormone blockers or something. I was a transphobe, ignorant, impatient, unwilling; anything but a sentiment that was trying, engaging, or sharing the evidence of what was forming my view. I literally hooked up with the friend in question, but somehow I'm "afraid," but my dick wasn't? I "hate" her for being uncomfortable with her femininity or sexuality? I'm antagonistic or evil by referring to her as "her" when I have no clue what she may or may not wish to be called today having not interacted for pushing a decade?

I fought pretty much everyone I could find about religion versus science for 4 years of my life. I read every book. I watched hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of debates, lectures, and panels. I was as detailed and evidence-based as you could get about the 30-odd things tangential to "the debate" the New Atheists kicked off. That shit was my world. I persuaded no one. Evidence mattered to me, not to the faithful. "Evidence" was merely a fungible concept to them, not the preponderance of probable reality. They were not foundationally situated to hear me, nor was I aware of the nature of the game I was really trying to play.

The same rules apply in counseling. I persuade no one. I'm speaking a different language. I'm trying to get them to turn the insights of evidence into their own working practice. You don't know the same things I do because you're not practicing the same things I am. I say sometimes there's a difference between knowing something "intellectually" and knowing it "in your bones." It's the difference between physically working to create something, and telling yourself "Oh yeah, I could do that." You almost certainly can't, not as you are now, but the hours, weeks, or years it takes to get there, what you could do starts to manifest in reality. What "I can really play" manifests frustratingly as a direct proportion to how often I'm practicing my guitar.

You can get to a place where you're not as emotionally reactive and self-justifying. You can read that and profess to be a certain way, but I guarantee there's a large majority of people who read the names Kyle Rittenhouse or J.K. Rowling and have been running their prepared-for-them speech the entire time they've not-read everything else here. The reaction is dictating, not reason, not curiosity. You know how I know? Because I still feel a certain kind of way talking about Rittenhouse. I've never held animosity towards Rowling, as I found it self-evident that women need their own space free from dicks.

I've got some broad rules. The name-callers are wrong. I say this as an incredibly inventive shit-talker. If your "side" is stuck on labeling someone, and cannot be moved to offer data, reason, patience, or listen to a divergent point of view, you're just wrong. I'm someone who calls his state senator a Nazi every few days. My state senator wrote a letter saying he wouldn't certify the election. If tomorrow he sponsors a bill that raises the minimum wage to $30 an hour, I'll tell you my nazi senator has a great grasp of faux predatory inflation and the needs of his broke-ass constituents. I'd call him a Nazi to his face, and give him credit where it's due.

The silencers are wrong. There is no "platform." You have a voice. "Crazy" people have a voice. You're crazy about something. If you're uninterested in learning how to identify and incorporate what makes you or them crazy, you're wrong. If you can't talk and articulate, or more likely just refuse to be bothered, you are wrong. You hurt the project of long-term societal sustainability and undermine whatever underlying liberal ideals that keep you comfortable.

Boghossian does a series where he breaks down NPR segments. It's been widely acclaimed by people, also weird, but like me, who genuinely want to learn and do better. If you don't have it in you to be perpetually swayed by what's popular or normal, when you hear endless reams of propaganda or unscientific superficial takes, it frustrates and bores you. I think we're so unsophisticated and dishonest, we think the Candace Owens' and Ann Coulters' of the world are fundamentally different in their instantiated absurd propensities to dodge and obscure a subject while professing their independent or critical thinking capacity. Crazy fucks make shit up and don't hear words for what they actually mean. Why would you ever want to emulate them?

Your god forbid you ever read a blog of mine echoing fear for fear's sake. Pretending there aren't people doing the work compiling the data on whatever the subject might be. I entertain the idea indefinitely that I'm wrong. I want to be less wrong. Why don't you? I want to be articulate. I want to have a real shot at accomplishing the things I profess to care about. I want us all to feel more understood, capable, and alive in what connects us. That cannot happen if you "disagree with biology" or "those aren't MY numbers," or you "don't feel that comports with your experience." Ok. Well. Your experience, like my experience, is infinitely small, corrupt, and comprised of seemingly contradictory forces. I'm willing to ask if my feelings make sense. Why aren't you?

I used to believe in the Southern Poverty Law Center statistics. I would previously have said of course you can trust The American Academy of Pediatrics. I would say listen to NPR or VICE. It's not "merely inconvenient" about who does crimes, in what neighborhoods, and why people die. You're allowed to worry about wildly divergent cultures poorly integrating into yours. You're allowed to believe you're the superhero of your own life with your weapons and grudge against authority and state influence. You're obligated to suspend every reactionary posture in service to another question. You're obligated to maintain a certain level of integrity in the face of any claim. Go on, simply disagree with that and scream at me. Let's keep getting exactly what we deserve.

[1123] Be All End All

I don't know what it means to accept something unless it's being put to work.

I'm not above getting into an internet pissing match. Most often, it's going to be about a TV show, or who is a literally-defined fascist with a stranger. In the past, I've lost "friends" arguing about religion, trans stuff, sexual assault, or pretty much any topic where there's a cultural wave of bullied undue confidence that the conversation is settled and "everyone knows" how you should or shouldn't respond. If I were emotionally invested, I know the 3 "friends" right now who would be happy to never speak to me again if I brought my concerns related to Israel/Hamas to their memes and shares.

I believe in conversation and argumentation. I believe in debate. I believe in freely exchanging ideas in a way that doesn't see you silenced, ignored, or shunned. I believe it so much that I've functionally alienated everyone who might, but only in theory, profess to believe in the same things, until it gets real. They don't want to work to defend their position or get more articulate. They want to feel correct. They want their definitions of words to hold without scrutiny. They want to be validated by the tribe who can't be bothered to think any deeper about the topic than they care to, and not suffer the fate that I've chosen.

The breakdown happens the same way regardless of what you're talking about. I've been going on several 3 or more hours-long drives over the last few days consuming over a dozen Peter Boghossian interviews and street epistemologies. His experience appears to be precisely mine, whether he's discussing abortion, trans, academia, cultural statistics, or anything that we've been insisted upon to stay quiet about because of the "harm" that's allegedly caused by even talking. The concept of "woke" gets put through its paces to see how it manifests and the real consequences of following the logic through, once you've actually defined and boxed in what you even mean by "woke."

We can make it easier, maybe, by thinking about a TV show, like Star Trek, which kicked off my desire to write. A few weeks ago I responded to someone criticizing Discovery for "not being Star Trek" and I asked them what they meant. I ask them, and probably a dozen other people because "this isn't Star Trek" is the most ubiquitous "criticism" I see when I read posts unhappy with any given Star Trek series. He responded, and then I responded, point by point raised.

It took only 3 responses for the breakdown to happen. No longer was he entertaining my answer or evidence as a response to something he specifically said. If I tried to refute that updated camera work "wasn't Star Trek," well now he introduces a point about the way the Klingons look. That's not what we were talking about, but it feels like it to him. Something changed about a look he didn't like, so it's fair game to bring up whenever it feels appropriate. He instinctively doesn't want to acknowledge or simply disagree that unless you shoot modern shows the same way you shot shows in the past, you're missing part of the heartbeat of Star Trek.

It doesn't have to be "serious" or a "hard" point. But the same move is made. It's pretending there is no potential for a shared truth, definition, or understanding and insisting in iterative ways that your feelings can cohere more than you're willing to work to reasonably justify or translate.

He argued Star Trek doesn't have "a main character." I told him Picard exists as its own series. He told me he hasn't seen and won't even watch Picard. He doesn't need to for the point I'm making, right? Some characters are certainly more "main" than others, and you can perhaps arrive at what constitutes that main-ness. But that's not his goal. His goal is to vibe on hate for Michael in Discovery. When she's featured, too prominently for his tastes, therefore "Star Trek doesn't have a main character."

The thing you need to accept is that you, not only can be wrong, but are infinitely wrong about everything. You're missing details and subtlety. You're missing an appreciation for the stress and work of incorporating difficult and conflicting pieces into your worldview. In developing my land/space, it started more idyllic and hopeful. Until you spend the day digging up saplings, dealing with heat exhaustion, and improvising tools you can't afford yet, a desire to move "off-grid" doesn't really translate. What I had to accept about my ideas was that they were going to take a whole hell of a lot more time, work, and help than I had, nor ever have, in any given moment. But then I get to work anyway.

If you're going to be understood or taken seriously, the same rules are going to apply. There's someone with the power and resources who is making an incoherent point that feels right. You're not going to logic them into submission. You're going to have to build your own resolve and asymmetric approach. You're going to have to work in ways you didn't realize were going to take so long or so much effort and sacrifice.

My Star Trek guy doesn't speak my language, and my "goal" is not to persuade him. My goal was to try and understand if there was serious concern/criticism about what constitutes "Star Trek" altogether. As with most things, again, the answer is "no" to "not even fucking close." We start with radical, in their selfish minutia, opinions. We recoil and lash out when they can be shown as paper thin.

[1122] Innit To Win It

What motivates you?

Increasingly, I've been thinking about incentives. When you move away from the idea that everyone is immediately and personally culpable for "the way things are," it opens space to investigate their environment. Indeed a major portion of my counsel to people is to spend a considerable amount of time examining who and what they are plugged into. If you have no context or underestimate its influence, you can take on unnecessary guilt and stress. You also fail to frame whatever your problem may be in a way that allows for it to be fixed or a real solution to be discovered.

Money appears to be one of the biggest incentives for an array of questionable, if not downright abhorrent, behavior. In fantasy, how many plots are motivated by the antagonist's greed? Cash wildly flying through the air as a masked bad guy flees a scene with a giant duffle bag are ubiquitous whether or not you've seen that actual scene somewhere. It's not a secret. It's not hard to understand. They want money, so whether it's fashion a complicated Ocean's 11-esc plot, or put a gun in someone's face, they go in and get it.

A deeper-layered story starts to unpack that antagonist's relationship to power. They often have money. A supervillain will be super smart, or maybe have a super team, and none of them can put their heads together to figure out how to live well and leave things alone. What's their motivation? "Power," in and of itself, is incomplete. Even the ones that do manage to take over the world or achieve their goals, are they ever depicted as "happy?" Was it "enough?" Thanos didn't keep fighting to preserve his "perfect balance."

The story you tell yourself is the foundational incentive. The ability to maintain a familiar, predictable, and, even if it's self-destructive, reliable self-conception. There's so many things built into the formation of that story, and almost zero cultural cues to attend to them, that you maintain the unhelpful habit of pretending "that's just who you are."

I'm someone who has been told his whole life he's smart, good looking, talented, yada yada. That's certainly a story I wish to keep. Who wouldn't? Younger me felt very alienated by any commentary related to my looks. I cut off my hair. I never wanted to be in pictures and definitely wasn't smiling when I had to. I've never been a particularly "cut" or in-shape person, so even a little fat made me think I was "too." I resented the narrative otherwise until it started manifesting as success with girls. I didn't start growing my hair out until college. It took a while to realize I wasn't fat so much as surrounding myself with runners and rock climbers.

There's a running story we have to maintain. At least, it feels that way. The nature of your sacrifices. The goal at the top of the hill. The things about you that mirror your loved ones or echo what you want to believe deeper about yourself, but might struggle to. The closer your behavior and your words match that story, the more you carve out a "safe" psychological home to live in. Whether or not the nature of that story is more or less true doesn't even enter into the discussion foundationally.

What disrupts the story? I observe the consequences of chronic punishing conditioning. I have a friend who's so stressed, he can't lift his left arm above the shoulder. He can't sleep. He ruminates and repeats stressful events dating back years and takes on new things he can't get organized and achieved. I have a friend who habitually takes on more work than she has to. (That's the most common thread I see across friends and clients.) They say, "I wish I had time for…" or "It'll be fine if I can get to next week/month/August" or "They're counting on me! I have to!"

The lie is built into the foundation. You don't "have to" do anything. It's instantaneous the moment you go from the language of potential agency to helplessness. The presumption when you tell someone you "have to" is that they'll nod along knowingly and throw up their arms in concert, because we all know what we have to do. Of course, we don't. We don't know shit about shit. We don't spend any time trying to. And when someone comes along pointing that out, we seek to punish or silence them.

So, I ask again. What's your motivation? What incentivizes you?

They aren't the same question, and each is their own big bag of words the closer you look.

I'm motivated by the idea of scaling up things that have worked for me. I know the visceral experience of less stress and more freedom, and the conscious long-term deliberate acts to get there. I know what I had to focus on. I know why I chose to focus on those things over others. I know what I'd like to enjoy as a result of seeing the efforts and practices carried forward and manifested through others' interpretations. I'm curious about what that looks like, and I don't think it happens often. I like believing I have both the capacity and awareness to achieve something many find it hard to even conceive. I feel good about that story. I can draw practical steps along the road.

I'm incentivized by feeling understood and being communicated with. Those things generate positive emotion and a feeling of being engaged. Even if I'm feeling "unmotivated," when you have something to communicate to me, or you are making a genuine effort to understand something I'm saying, I can engage in that exchange almost indefinitely. If I'm in an environment that's force-feeding me bullshit, I need to leave, like so many past jobs. If I make a genuine effort to articulate and seek empathy, and you ignore me, I keep my distance. I'm, by default, a major turn-off to those, and this includes friends, who are "too tired" or disinterested or distracted to genuinely communicate and seek mutual understanding.

Thus, "friendship," by itself, isn't the incentive nor is it necessarily a "motivator."

You can frame any relationship this way, be it to your child or romantic partners. If you're unclear with yourself and are unduly motivated by superficial things, you'll find the deep dissatisfaction of introducing as many of those unhealthy relationships into your experience as you can find. You'll spend a lifetime developing apologetic language to justify the abuses. "Hell is just a fun way God shows us he loves you!" "Well, he pays the bills and I get fancy vacations, what's a backhand and shout now and then?" "My friends and parents tell me how lucky I am; surely I'm just confused about how much I really love my child, boyfriend, job, circumstances…" etc.

If you don't know that you're motivated by confusion and fear significantly more than a desire to own and understand, you'll grow the plants of confusing and terrifying consequences instead of taking pride in or capitalizing on your garden. If you engage the narratives around the nobility and utility of money, fancy products, and fantasy posture, you might be well-consumed by the idea that you give a fuck what strangers on the internet think. You might align your morals to an imperative to post, lie, and curtail a raw opinion, if you bothered to form one at all.

I, always, feel the pull of "normalcy." Every day I spend consumed by media, I think "I could be…" What? Answer the question. Driving to work? Wearing down my car? Sitting around waiting for a meeting to start? Resenting getting paid half or less of what I'm worth? Spending time taking direction or instruction from someone wholly captured by corrupted systems, obligations, and narratives that bleed into your awareness and make it hard to believe in anything? What could or should I really be doing that isn't patiently waiting for the narratives I truly believe in to get their time in the sun? I think you should be bored more often. I think when you work, it should feel meaningful and useful, not obligatory. I think you should write songs, and talk with me all day about TV or who's left that can reliably report on the world. I think we should be building something together.

But, I know my motivations and what incentivizes me. I don't trust that you do. I mainly don't trust that you do because you all sound the same. And if everyone is saying the same shit, where are "you?" Is it where you belong, or where you've stuck yourself? Are you fighting the correct fight? Are you fighting at all? Or are you laboring under a narrative of your victimization and circumstance? Are you suffering the delusion that tomorrow is guaranteed? Are you pretending you don't matter?

I've started to go overboard in my TV consumption having mildly shifted my approach to it. For how many hours I've spent sorting and separating things, it dawned on me that I don't want to sit for hours and just watch cartoons or sitcoms. Each story or style registers in approximate lanes of intrigue or interest, and my motivation for engaging heavily depends on what my environment is otherwise incentivizing.

If I need to "kill time," it's a stream of shows I have either a passing familiarity with, or ones that have been popular that I never cared for at the time or don't interest me anymore than a random painting might at a gallery. I'm not anticipating an episode of NCIS or Law & Order is going to put me in a particularly thoughtful place about compelling narratives. They're safe and familiar, that's why they never die, and are wholly uninteresting.

If I want to challenge myself to think deeper about why something is catching my attention or what makes it different, I put on a different set of shows. Maybe it's cast chemistry, the joke timing, the way it's shot, drawn, or paced. Maybe it's having a compelling heartbeat and message. Maybe it's an individual's kick-ass ability to sell what's otherwise unsellable. Maybe I'm delusional and certain works just click with those delusions. I think shows like Legion and Scavengers Reign flirt with transcending the medium entirely. I'd feel absolutely brilliant if I could achieve the humor of Shameless, The Great, or Airplane!. If I could transport you like I've been transported to Cinema Paradiso and Dogville, I'd feel I've put in the right kind of work.

I think I connect with creators who tap into the incentive space that can barely pronounce "money" or the words "I don't have enough." I think there's a craving and unyielding desire to connect and be understood at a transcendent level. It's a level that exists only when you start from the right place and weave together all of the pieces that inform the message. That's the music, the glances, and other gritty details that are both absolutely necessary and hopelessly insufficient on their own. "I would have made a better movie, but the budget!…" "I would have called you for dinner, but I've been so busy!…" 100 million dollar movies have been made for $15,000. I can eat in 10 minutes, if that's what you really need from me.

I separate my desire to feel useful and needed from what the evidence needs to look like in order for me to claim I actually am. I'm not a good counselor when I can juggle 150-200 people on my caseload. I'm a good counselor when a plurality of those people say something like, "When I started practicing what you said, I felt better, people noticed, and now I'm able to do this next thing." I'm not a "good person" through merely refraining from going out of my way to cause harm or a few bucks I might toss to a charity. I define "good person" as a useless concept first, and focus on being comfortable existing altogether in whatever manner my personhood brings forth. I then try to notice when what I do or say makes me feel good or seems to result in what I deem good generating from others.

Christians think it's good to indoctrinate contradictions and capitalize on mental weakness. Muslims think it's good to ignore the consequences of normalizing radical hateful mantras. Conservatives think it's good to control women and enshrine greed and grift. Liberals think it's good to pretend they don't have their own totalitarian compulsions that have destroyed important pillars of speech and science. Most people think it's appropriate to use as broad and incoherent ever-changing labels like "Christian" "Muslim" "conservative" and "liberal" to race away from any real discussion about how any given individual abuses the terms to their self-serving narrative ends.

Every layer of your life incentivizes you to speak and operate in a manner that protects you from crashing too hard against normative practices. Right or wrong, good or bad, true or false, useful or useless, constructive or destructive…familiar binaries that arrest our capacity to investigate what's underneath or beyond the traps they set. It's a place of your subjective and yet removed observation of your experience operating under their spells.

The more "normal" I try to be, the angrier I feel. The more I've tried to be like the "friend" people wanted, the more alienated and like a liar I felt. The more I was begged to "love" as others professed to love, the harder things crashed when the truth was finally allowed to be spoken. The "work" I took so much pride in was never recognized or rewarded. The things I was "afraid" of had nothing to do with their actual consequences or my deep understanding of their nature. The people I thought I looked up to were brief ideals painted upon the infinitely fallible. The expectations I built for myself were bred from spite, naivety, and insecurity. The story I was telling myself was stuck, and I was pretending I wasn't obligated to continue writing it every time I needed to.

[1121] The Friendly Ghost

Today feels like a day that could be described as "crazy-making."

Am I sick, hurt, or otherwise dramatically impaired? No. There's been a theme and a confluence of forces though. Let's go.

This week, literally everyone has canceled on me. For work, for fun, for things I was anticipating to use to feel useful and good. I spend pretty much all of my time alone, talking to no one, blazing through TV, playing my instruments, reading, or getting myself into some trouble playing with something I shouldn't because I can't stand feeling idle and useless anymore.

I lay this at no one's feet. I could, theoretically more than practically, invest a considerable amount of time attempting to connect to other people, organizations, or things to do so I don't feel as reliant upon others and their consistency or capacity to manage. And, in fact, that's what I've done in getting started with CASA, and hopefully seeing that spin-off into more first-hand interactions with clients, other volunteers, and the inevitable messes that will bring.

First, one of my attempted hires to fundraise ignores my outreach. I thought she was on the verge of stealing $1,200, tracked her down, got a brief invitation to her life's blow-up, and she's since refunded $500, on what she's proposed is a schedule to refund the whole on her paydays. In the meantime, I patiently idle and refrain from catastrophizing her silence, and now 6th missed scheduled discussion, and who knows how many ignored texts.

Ok. I got an early text that client 1's phone is broken and needs to be rescheduled. I attempt to call client 2 around our meeting time, no response. I text if they are okay. I get a "Not at all, can we talk later today?" I text later in the day, no response. That whole day was designed around another person supposed to come out and talk about plans to upgrade my space. They had other life complications with family illness to deal with, so the project lingers.

I'm left with more idle time. We need to be incredibly clear that whatever I feel about that time, it's not being laid at the feet of "everyone" or anyone I refer to. I do not blame a single person ever for focusing on their sick loved ones or deprioritizing whatever we had planned.

I proceed to go about my days. I go to the symphony for the live music playing of Star Wars as the movie runs. An entire section of kids talked, crinkled pop cans, and just generally made it about them for the entire film. No usher told them to shut up. No seething patron closer to them said anything. They just took what could have been a pretty straightforward enjoyable experience, and my inability to mute them turns them into a few aggrieved lines in another bitching blog.

Before the show, I walked around the continues-to-be-miserable city a bit. There's "cowboy" bars with country music that mostly surround the symphony. There's healthy servings of homeless people ranging from decently aggressively shouting to sleeping in places it's hard to tell if they've closed early or closed permanently. At one point, I'm almost certain a dude was following me. I'm in a "major" city, wandering, feeling isolated and arbitrary, and oh, look, there was also a pro-Palestine protest on the circle where they're screaming an anti-semitic chant and parroting empty party lines.

On the ride to the city, I was listening to some of Peter Boghossian's videos. He's known for setting up hot-button questions and agree/disagree lines he asks people to stand on and defend their position. He's, in a world that made sense, simply trying to remind people that we're here to engage ideas and should have a remote sense of what we're talking about or what might change our minds. Overwhelmingly, the people who brave his exercises are not that articulate, nor claim they can be moved, at least in the moment.

I'm now back home, where a comment I wrote on, arguably one of the worst places on the internet, reddit, was removed because I described getting into a "pissing match" in a comment to another person who was asking for feedback on what people might want in a new TV-related website. The term, in and of itself, I was told is the #1 rule that's not allowed and the person wrote "p - - - ing" like that as though it's particularly aggressive language or like I said, "I'll piss in your face, cunt!"

It just echoes that ideological capture and perverse power dynamics that I feel plague pretty much every level of my experience.

I know, as much as I know anything, that no one holding a sign on that boring and sad circle is persuadable. I know that no elderly usher at the symphony feels they are obligated and empowered to insist and correct inappropriate behavior. I know those who are eager to belong, be it through their status as a victim or the oppressed, are going to die on a hill that transcends parody when mocked up against real life. I know that my clients who cancel have a vastly different concept of "get better" than I do. I know the "innocent enough" obligations and life circumstances that relegate time someone might spend with me to be practically incidental.

I also know that I feel that I need to escape this overwhelming belief that I can't trust or look forward to things. It's a feeling that stifles my capacity to invest both in myself and in what I can only speculate others get to feel for what's captured them. I don't believe it's worth it, whatever "it" might be, that I'm going to plan, try, or work on for more than a day or so. It's a hollowness that haunts whatever I might do to prepare, or when I stifle one thing and rearrange another, trying to be there and be present and not suck you into this ever-hollowing sense. I can't fill it with the manufactured drama and concern that appears to fuel so much of other people's experience.

Whatever I do or think I can create, I can't erase the context I'm working within. The world's best talker in a country where they don't speak the language is flirting with homelessness and starvation. The shared values and understanding that comes with an ongoing relationship or dynamic of cultural expressions and sets of experiences I just don't really have. It's not "never," but is 6-10 times a year I might get to spend time with my dad or a friend doing something fun count as the kind of fabric I'm trying to weave?

I'm like a ghost. I feel like I just kind of haunt things or memories. You have to think, I'm drawing on my experience of the last decade. It's not just been a particularly lonely or disappointing week or something. This week was just the same record blasted about as loud as I can take. But also, I clearly don't know how to "fix" it. I don't really believe it's a thing I can fix because my efforts to do so only seem to teach me ever-nuanced ways in which the problem compounds and reinforces itself.

You can't afford it? I'll pay. That doesn't matter, it wasn't about being able to afford it. You don't have the time? I'll come to you, work around your schedule. That doesn't matter, it wasn't about not having time. It doesn't interest you? I'll do whatever you want to do, I'm open and amenable like that. That doesn't matter, it wasn't about their lack of interest. When you're feeling good and fun and free, I'm not the one on your mind to call or invite. You were desperately waiting for that window so you could "catch up" on the "fun" you're otherwise indefinitely denied. Every moment where you can feel remotely human or "free" is not one you're trying to interject a bunch of Nick P.-ness into.

There is no striking-up conversations with strangers and informal friends anymore. Maybe that's just a problem with me? Feels bigger, but I don't know. My "best friend" I gave my terms to and they still haven't been met, so I'm not lending myself to get back into his spin. My business partner, who I also see maybe once every 3 or so months, has been barreling towards a crash for probably over a year at this point, refuses to slow down or establish better boundaries or utilize me in any way but to - very maybe - decompress an inch when he bitches about something? I have to tell clients all the time there's a difference between indefinitely complaining and still being a ball of stress and actually coping and incorporating whatever it is that's getting at you and changing your behavior.

I have another friend I see maybe once every 2 or 3 months whose dad might be dying, and she has her own health issues, so it's like where would I get off thinking we should bowl more often? lol I don't know, it's this weird thing where you're invited to pit your desire to feel like you belong or have a friendship against their given tragedy or circumstances. It feels like it would be infinitely unwise and unfair to "blame" as though they're any less stuck within their contexts than you are, but you happen to be the loudest example of anyone you know on how to defy circumstances and work towards what you might actually want and need.

Blame language is overwhelmingly a move to adopt nonsense framing, but emotionally, you're like, am I just supposed to kinda glide through the air until I happen to crash into you? To be extra clear, this feels like an existential thing with everyone to some degree or another. I do not get the sense there's any remotely deliberate care and focus to cultivate and protect a mutually beneficial dynamic. It's like every hangout is getting away with murder or their mind is physically unable to be present because it's been captured by the superficially "chosen" drama.

I mean it in a more damming way than that, which implicates this litany of sick family members. I think we're also gluttonous. When you're not choosing the drama, you're feeding on the familiar sensibilities of your relationship to it. Aren't you needed? Doesn't that maybe scratch the itch that I'm taking 9,000 words to articulate? I'd like to feel useful and needed and like a "good boy" for doing what I'm supposed to by way of expressed care. I don't. No matter how much people tell me I help or what I say makes sense, it does nothing for me, and I don't think a single person has even tried to articulate to me they understand why.

It's pretty easy to disregard everything you're not doing to gain control or a sense of personal responsibility and agency by attending to everyone else. There's also the unyielding irony where I'm witness to what appears to be people who will go to the ends of the earth for especially the ones who don't deserve or can't truly receive what's being offered. Almost like each party knows what's on offer isn't made of what either of them needs, but this perverse Munchausien bargain is struck. What kind of massive deserves-to-be-alienated cunt would try to turn your lovingly devoted heart into the problem!? You're right, I see it now why no one wants to hang out lol.

[1120] You Gotta Work

As someone who has earned the privilege of an excess of time, if there is such a thing, it can be hard to make peace with how much of that time I feel is doing "nothing." It's the worst possible phrasing and first pass at the idea, but I think it's what we collectively feel instinctively when we're not "busy." Whether that busyness is accomplishing anything meaningful, fulfilling, worthwhile, or helpful is another gigantic question after we succumb to the compulsion to be "doing something" regardless.

If you try to analyze the tea leaves of memes, there's a bigger sense of pushback regarding "grinding" and "hustling" and "enriching shareholders." Whether that's translating effectively through "quiet quitting" or exercising some muscle of infantilizing nostalgia is anyone's guess. The pull of chasing the next dollar, or title, at bottom, feels absolute. If you're not trying to "provide for your family," or "prepare for the future," or "capitalize on the trend so you don't get left behind," there's something wrong with, or at least missing, about you.

We've heard our entire lives about "productivity" and having more resources than we know what to do with. You can read about how much food gets wasted and the next industry to do away with people as A.I. gets better (or doesn't, and no one knows how to argue otherwise.) Proposals for a universal basic income are getting their experimental time in the sun for different small pockets of people. We've absorbed the nature of the wealth-siphoning to the rich, paying more in taxes each year, getting price-gouged and scapegoating "inflation," and swallowing Ticketmaster fees because we never know when our favorite artists are going to die so why argue with the greed machine?

It's one of the most counter-intuitive things to do to attempt to pull out. Almost no one is doing it. You need gains! You need growth! You need norms of doing business and modern human, so low, expectations to anchor yourself to. In all of my time to plot, sleep, watch, or otherwise, it can be easy to forget just how long I've played the "normal" game. Was I ever paid "enough?" Hell no. Was my effort ever recognized in a way that didn't get me exploited? Not once. Did the vast majority of my bosses or supervisors care, in any real tangible way, about behaving in sensible and decent ways? Were they going to fight for the right things? Their whole working model to sustain their lives incentivizes otherwise.

This isn't abstract. Recall, I'm currently a counselor. I get word from clients or colleagues about how other counselors conduct themselves in group. I hear of their mental health issues getting laid at the feet of their clients. I hear of their laziness. I hear from the counselors themselves how little they're willing to take responsibility for what they bring, or don't, into a group. A new mom supervisor will hire the deeply unwell counselor to fill a gap if that counselor can perform the dance of saying the right things. Being long-term accountable to what they say? That's not the job or obligation. Unfortunately, that's precisely the the work you have to do if you want to maintain sober thinking. Good luck.

Sober thinking. It's not about refraining from substance use. It's about building, maintaining, and exercising an informed perspective. Once you get out of your own world and recognize the extent of your potential or impact, you find a way to maintain a standard of behavior and pursue goals that show yourself and the world you know what you're talking about. You need to build trust in yourself as much as you might wish to be able to trust anything else. If you can't figure out how to trust yourself, you can't maintain the right expectations that protect a sober thinking environment.

Most people are not thinking from a self-reflective and sober place. They are addicted to the pursuit and ridiculously unfair and captured expectations of modernity. They are addicted to levels of immature emotional drama because there's little else that feels equally as accessible and personal. They're addicted to some version of the same conversation every single day about what they "have to" do because they're baked into the cake of their insisted upon obligations. Little "escapes" here and there are pre-prescribed as well. Your few-days vacation fits neatly into the begrudgingly-allowed request off allotment. Your indulgent bling matches business casual.

It's not your fault until you know better, so there's an endless loop of narratives and distractions to justify pretending not to know better. You could watch a 20-hour set of interviews from old people insisting you shouldn't be so laser focused on sacrificing your life for xyz. That's too long, no one's gonna watch that! I can't tell you how many times a colleague has complained about the absurdities they've witnessed only to default to something like switching roles, giving advice to just ignore or avoid - it is what it is! - or finding some cliche about things evening out over time. Of course, they don't even out. They compound and embolden and normalize iterative ways of self-destruction.

I'm seriously perpetually struck by just how much time there really is. If you feel like you never or don't have the time, here's your sign that you're spending an inordinate amount of it doing or on your way to doing something that isn't serving you like you think it is. I struggle to figure out what I "should" be doing in any moment, often as the residual fallout of otherwise guilt-tripping myself if I don't feel "busy." What's the adult functional equivalent of always being in a classroom? My instincts seek that out. Is the teacher good? Am I learning anything? Am I actually getting prepared for what I'll need later in life? Shut up, sit down, and listen.

I get frustrated by influencers who say things like, "You really can change your life. You just gotta"…fill in the blank with their vague and empty prescription. We've just as egregiously been tricked by ideas of virality and interconnectedness as we have by the velvet bars of normalcy. You exist in a constant state of change, influenced by a literally infinite amount of forces. The "change" needs to come in how you observe those forces, not pretend you can become master and commander of them all. The person so enthusiastic about making a personal brand out of fortune cookies is overwhelmingly hot, already kind of rich, or otherwise plugged into the kinds of infrastructure that would see them having some measure of success had they chosen a different path. They're also almost perfectly corruptible and content with doing or saying whatever it takes to maintain your attention.

To them, and most people, every aspect of their life is a story of their decision-making, not their luck or capture. I do believe we need to be responsible for our decisions. I do not believe we have any grasp on the nature of how we arrive at decisions. I do not believe we have any grasp because I spend inordinate amounts of time looking for the myriad things going on in my head that speak to why I live in a shed, pursue entrepreneurial frustrations, or find myself interested in the music or TV shows that I do. How often do I like a given piece of art more than my sense of novelty in my experience of it? I'm constantly seeking novelty. It speaks to my attitude towards relationships, why I have dozens of half-completed projects, and why no job, ever, will be "enough" for me to feel at home or like I fit if it doesn't change and challenge me.

There are a lot of familiar beats being a DCS assessor. Every household is different. Every kid or tangentially relevant adult a new variable. I don't know who is about to call. I don't know what horror is about to be unmasked. Whether I do or don't have a "passion" for social work (I don't), you don't get a more novel environment than trying to plug into the minds of other people. My pursuits in the social work realm are the evolved drift of my novelty-seeking and trapped circumstances. Some of my goals are to protect the time I have to wake up when I please, sit down and write, hold a counseling session, and then decide on what to do with an absolutely beautiful day. If I can do that in perpetuity, in this field or otherwise, that's going to express my values and demonstrate my sober thinking about how to act on my priorities.

[1119] Improvised & Explosive

It's been a struggle to write the last few weeks. I've started, stopped, erased, and just moved on 6 or 7 times. Almost nothing I've done or thought about has felt "worth it." I've had annoying things happen. I've been mildly inspired by a handful of things I've watched or read. But, what's the point? I usually write because I need to feel better. If I'm not really feeling one way or another, what then?

I've been considerably more observant of myself. I'm watching each beat of a situation as it might elevate. When I'm hungry, begging to get even more frustrated about my dead car, annoying service agents, and prices to fix things, I'm feeling each decision on the way to saying something shitty to someone who can't shake themselves out of call-center mode. When I think I want to be social and interject myself into a random conversation at the bar, I pull out immediately when the polite signal to fuck off shows up, then go home almost as quickly as I decided to try being out.

Yesterday, I went to a comedy show. I drove my truck, and was quickly reminded of the gas cost disparity against driving my Scion. I get parked, and Parkmobile with it's defaulted to my Scion information, takes my $7.25 and does not allow me to change the vehicle I get parked. Of course. Their chat "person" cites policy, kicks the can to Indianapolis parking, and when I called them, they told me to email someone else as they also couldn't be bothered. I get a response this morning that says they can only refund with a confirmed meter malfunction and that it's the responsibility of the driver to indicate the correct parking spot. I did indicate the correct parking spot.

It clicked with me the nature of the shitty soup we're all swimming in. How quickly and "reasonably" we take these kinds of scenarios for granted and "normal." Of course, it would take nothing for an entry-level program to let you select the right license plate, but 1,000 or 10,000 oversights a day or week or month is capitalism. In a world with common sense or decency, this would never be a conversation I needed to have with anyone, let alone 3 or 4 people over several days, and only likely getting them to capitulate through some level of fraud or exhaustion. The "peace" I make with losing the $7.25 is going to look like a measure of ongoing property destruction or defiling of Indianapolis.

That's my bargain. I refuse to go quietly into the night of getting taken advantage of. You want to talk about the immaturity or disrespect, save your breath. I'm not choosing violence, I'm forced to contend with the policies of violence that are designed to make us all feel like we're helpless. Institutional theft and laziness is not a standard I'm willing to live by.

Any time I get a cog to break, you might be tempted to call that "hope" or a win. But the point is that I shouldn't be prompted to and training for how to break people. Yes, I've, fairly routinely, exhausted people into doing the right thing. That's not sustainable.

I think I feel perfectly desperate to live along some pretty basic lines of fairness and common sense. I know how complex that "simple" statement really is. To this day, the incidents from my life that I'm most incensed by, I never get push back on. You don't want to pay twice for a parking spot, whether you "have the money" or not. I, technically, don't, having been in debt the last few years, or my entire adult life, depending on your frame of reference. How can a college-educated single person who lives in the middle of nowhere be in debt? We've normalized the grift. Those with the power feel entitled to capitalize on your innocent missteps, ignorance, or desperate circumstances. You're too busy, tired, or blind to bother with how deep the hooks have set in.

I'm not. I have the time. I have the autistic superpower to make the "trivial" my number one priority until I'm satisfied. Again, it's not sustainable, but it is possible, and I've succeeded enough to feel like it's worth it every time I try. Also, trying in and of itself speaks to the broader principle and point. We don't lose the world through millions of people just turning evil and burning everything down. We lose it through negligence. We lose it through taking things for granted and refusing to protect timeless basic shit. That battle is never over.

I'm in the nonprofit business of teaching "coping skills." The catch in attempting to teach such things is that they need to be translated into your own individualized language. I write, for example. But, if I write to "feel better," I'm the only one who knows whether or not I'm writing in a way that gets there. I'm writing with a purpose to expose myself to difficult or trying thoughts and circumstances and hopefully get them incorporated. I want to think about and find the focus for the hundreds of things I care about or would prefer to do. A large or chronic problem has a habit of totalizing my awareness. Instinctively, luckily, I was able to discover the light at the end of many meandering tunnels into my thoughts.

If I conceive of the world as a series of chronic and unhelpful problems, fixes range from elusive to impossible. I observe the consequences of what I perceive to be chronic conditioning, and I locate courses of action within my agency. You don't want to provide a reasonable refund? Ok, I can choose to behave unreasonably and in a reactionary way until I'm satiated. It's not the preferred fix, but it's on the table. I've bemoaned "capitalism" and the pathologies of American myopia as much as anyone, so I rearranged my entire life to spend more time in the void and in search for asymmetric attacks.

Coping is complex because you don't even realize you're doing it. I see people who have next-to-zero capacity for recognizing how they are or aren't coping. Then, I see people who are utilizing refined and specialized versions of basic coping skills ultimately against themselves. Say you have a supportive family, money to indulge indefinitely, are well-read on the chronic behavior patterns you emulate, and exercise, eat right, and sleep just fine. Great recipe for working yourself to death and downplaying how much the capitalist machine is eating you alive. This appeared to be the fate of all of my smart-enough middle-to-upper-middle-income and management types I lost contact with from college. Why pay too much attention to a thousand injustices 5 days a week, when 2 you get to sip expensive whisky and climb a rock!?

I think about all of the paths I didn't follow as a result of my demonstrated classroom ability I hesitate to call "intelligence." I read a lot. I read about how people succumb to the miserable echoing trends culturally that manifest in unique ways for their field. Previously "sacred" or "exalted" paths riddled with horrifying modern realities. Doctors experiencing a suicide crisis. Researchers publishing "popular," and unscientific, crap to keep the grants flowing. Nurses getting screwed by traveling nurses who essentially function as scabs who get paid more to eschew long-term benefits and undermine unions. A lack of leadership in the trades selling out members and cutting corners. Lawyers living 3 and 4 deep and still barely affording rent. "Teachers" not even needing degrees. Pick an industry, you'll find the rot immediately. Anyone else still mourning what DeJoy's done to the post office?

How do you cope? How do you learn that's what you're currently poorly doing? Who tells you that all of the best things about your have been weaponized against you and exploited past the point of you even being able to recognize how they were supposed to function in an environment that wasn't originally designed to kill you? First, you have to accept it's your responsibility to listen to and respond to the persistent antagonizing voices. You don't have to become obsessive and compulsive chasing down your $7.25, but this paperboy understands the principle in demanding his two dollars.

[1118] But, Like, What Do You *Do,* Exactly?

My first instinct is that this will sound like an errant complaining session. I hope that's not the case, but I don't know yet.

Very bluntly, I do not believe we give a shit. I don't think we care about each other. I don't think we look for ways to account for our worst tendencies and behavior. I don't think we have any instinct or take any time to denote what those worst instincts and tendencies may be. I think we carry on each day essentially apologizing for the way things currently are and we presume will always be. It's suffer, share meme, desperately look for an out in the form of an unfulfilling vacation or expensive toy that never fills the void.

Now, none of that description matters to me. I don't need "us" to give a shit in order for me to. If I think we live in an insane system that is greedy, tired, and deliberately blind, I created a way to live in contrast and work to scale that up. That's all well and good and easy to understand.

But, I am still a cog in the overall system. I need those people who control the money, or who work for the institutions, or who consider themselves as shit-givers with their own agenda on how to address or fix anything to understand where I'm coming from and compliment my effort.

I, literally, could talk or write for hours about the impact I've had on the people I've worked with. I could do the same in talking about Hussain and his clients. It doesn't fit in "neat" 5-minute videos. It doesn't have a fancy program name. In fact, the more I try to elevator-pitch it, the cheaper it will register and the less you'll understand it. Why? People are complex. The nature of fixing their issues is not something you should pretend is happening in a back-of-napkin-esc kind of calculation.

Also, the things people need and praise are fundamentally abstract. If you love that I "hold you accountable," how does that translate as a specific line on a grant application? Seriously, do you have any idea? Because I can claim all day that is the nature of the feedback I receive, but is that a "specific outcome" the money wants to see?

I saw a work-a-holic get better at structuring his day so he could spend more time with his kids.

I saw a client stop speeding on his drive home from work and go to a concert in Texas he never would have previously.

I've seen a dozen people start making lists to help them stop getting overwhelmed.

I've cleaned hoarder homes.

I've seen people lose weight and start hobbies as we focused on self-care.

I've seen people bridge conversations with family regarding chronic stressors.

We've helped many people not lose their children to the state.

I've helped give people the courage to taper down or off their Suboxone.

I've connected people with resources to get home supplies, baby stuff, and emergency funds to account for bills.

I've provided ways of breathing and topics for writing about that people report back helped them stop spiraling.

I've given people ways of engaging their children that allow for conversation and avoiding pointed judgment.

I've connected people to mindful practices that encouraged everything from drinking more water to refraining from yelling at their family.

I've helped people budget and get a direction out of credit card debt.

I've helped people set boundaries with their work environments.

I've helped people realize that difficulties they're having today coincided with traumatic moments or shifts from their past.

I've helped people make career shifts and build confidence in creating things they enjoy artistically.

I've helped people joke and laugh more deliberately.

I've talked people down and got services to people who were suicidal.

I've built and organized meetings/teams to address the needs of children suffering the lack of communication and organization.

I've supervised visits and driven 5+ hours for months just for one family in service to them being able to see their children consistently.

I've been counseling for functionally free to ensure the incentives and expectations can stay pure.

We've helped people get off probation earlier than they anticipated.

I've helped people understand and drop the guilt of things they did as children to survive growing up in the unhealthy environments they had.

I've graduated people through RWI and helped them get released from prison sooner.

I build confidence. I make it okay to talk about chronic and painful things in ways that start to feel accessible and like things you can be accountable to.

I've helped people navigate the DCS landscape and know their rights.

I've helped people stop qualifying what they say or think with, "I know that sounds dumb" or "I'm such an idiot," or "I'm sorry" about things they shouldn't be sorry for.

I cheerlead, remind, redirect, and celebrate - consistently.

I show people what it means to be approaching things in a deliberate, non-judgmental, and accountable way that is better than chronically complaining or getting complacent.

I know the difference in what it feels like and practically when you either are working on yourself, being honest about your constraints and strengths, or aren't. I clue you into your contradictory nature and point you in the direction of what it looks like to feel better and do more than you currently take for granted. THERE IS NO FUCKING BUMPER STICKER FOR THIS!

[1117] Down!

I'm something of an angry person. That statement alone doesn't mean much, but it's the one to kick off with. I have a standing steady state of anger that's waiting to be provoked. I've learned where it comes from, so it's infinitely easier to name and manage as an adult, but it's no less there. I think it was a School of Life video that helped round out my perspective of the underlying "hope," so to speak, that lies underneath it as well.

I'm someone who is very quick, and keen, to see the potential in something. I can see the catastrophe just as quickly as the celebration and implications of doing something well. It's "obvious" to me like watching someone's muscles grow from consistently lifting heavier weights and maintaining a proper diet over time. There's also an intuition born from experience either physically attempting something, or in speaking with thousands of people. Over enough time, I consider myself to, literally, "never have a good excuse."

Yoda said, "Do or do not, there is no try."

I think of the many lessons we're abjectly failing at culturally, this is one of the biggest. I don't think we see our potential, good or bad. I don't think we're living for something. I think we're reactive, addicted, and compulsively doubling-down on inadequate responsibility-obscuring coping methods.

I don't care how old you are, "professional" or "educated" you consider yourself, accomplished, monied, or socially ingratiating you may be. I care about what you do and your ability and willingness to account for its consequences. You either lock the flood victims out of your church and unironically beat your Christian chest to hear a righteous tone, or you feed, clothe, and house people.

I'm not a "dreamer," per se. I draw a straight line from the available funds, opportunities, working backs and tools until I reach a place the resonates as "healthier" or "stable" or "feeding even more potential" into my life. I hesitated for a very long time to even use the word "hope" because I never felt that's what I was doing. I was working. I wasn't "trying to work," I was literally working. I was stating my goals, putting up the money, putting in the time, and piecing together each part of a greater whole.

You can do that every day as an individual. You can account for something. You can build on questions you ask yourself about your fears, anxieties, or behavior. You can act as though everything you do and say is "just," or you can recognize how you're not living up to your potential and act definitively to contradict.

Much of what used to drive me was pure spite. I, compulsively, needed to refute your opinion of me. At least half of the drive to get good at my guitar was an off-handed comment from an acquaintance in high school that I'd never be as good as him. Teenage me can be forgiven for not recognizing his myriad drivers of behavior. Adult me would have a serious problem if I had to "one-up" everyone who lazily threw a faux challenge or comment my direction.

When I evaluate spite deliberately for its potential, it eventually runs dry. If I give myself permission to ignore people, particularly unreasonable and immature ones, it's silly to invite them into the disingenuous internal fight I'm looking to have to get something done. I must ask, can I feel good without riding this spite wave? That wasn't clear. Thankfully, the answer is yes, because I do in fact feel good doing a wide array of things.

What if you don't feel good? What if you're depressed? What if you're trapped and antagonized by an environment or family that undermines your capacity to pursue feeling better? What if that doesn't feel possible from the jump, let alone the wildest possibilities of it compounding? I think this is precisely where the majority of people find themselves, consciously or unconsciously. I think this is the entrance to an unhealthy spiral and compulsive reiteration of our exhaustion, confusion, or fear.

If you can tap into and anticipate a pattern, you can break it. That's the potential. You can tap into patterns through speaking about them, writing about them, reading about them, or literally just recording each instance you notice "the same thing" is happening. Every single feeling you have operates this way. There's an infinite list of occasions that might provoke the pattern, but at bottom, it is still a pattern. My anger pattern runs when my hope is betrayed. My anxiety pattern runs when I'm thinking about wasting time and money. I get sad the more I'm inclined to talk about the big bad abstract "world," and all its failings, instead of practicing asking myself what my responsibility to it might be that day. I practice contentment in watching shows, playing video games, playing music, and reading. I can get excited getting drunk and going to an energetic or funny show.

To the extent I feel any given thing is the interplay of my standing health, the environments I plug myself into, and the actions I take in any direction. I can't control whether I wake up with a headache, but I can stretch the muscle that likely antagonized it, take the Advil, and write about how the headache is making it hard to consider what I wished to obligate myself towards that day.

What I witness people do doesn't look or sound like that last paragraph. I witness people "blame God" for their headache. That is, it's often "just the way it is." Period. Or, it's so-and-so's fault because of what they said last night. Or, it's because of a dozen perfectly hallucinated reasons from the weather to 5G. "Why, me?" They ask. "How could my head deserve to suffer such a fate?" It is not that a headache is a human universal to be handled in stride. It is the latest thing to be used as a weapon, an excuse, to not handle it effectively.

We're dual creatures. We're infinitely mysterious, and nearly perfectly predictable. We're our best stories of care and accomplishment, and genocidal. If you choose to accept the project of piecing together your dual nature, you must be prepared to accept every level of superficial contradiction. It's superficial because if you actually contradicted, you couldn't exist. You're alive or dead, as far as we understand life and death. Your feelings and your words will be indefinite gross approximations of where you're "really coming from."

To act is something I consider sacred for this reason. Barring all else, you get a chance to leave an indelible mark on the world that others can utilize or be scarred by. You can't know for certain what your impact will be, but you can know as well as you know anything that planting an apple tree is going to be better than slipping razor blades into apples. If you don't know that, you're lying, and you're practicing a disingenuous self-serving game to stay smug and sarcastic in your complicit laziness. And you live in a time where you're one click away from a whole family of people who will make you feel good about that. Then you've an algorithm that recognizes what to feed you so you can seek that feeling unconsciously indefinitely.

As much as my betrayed hopes might piss me off, I act to contradict and defy the automatic places my feelings may land. If I catch myself saying "I'm too tired," I get up. If I know the process is going to be complicated and take "forever," I ask myself what I can do in the next 5 minutes. Sometimes that looks like doing an initial search or opening a spreadsheet. Sometimes it's 2 or 3 few-sentence emails. Sometimes it's digging one hole in the remaining daylight, staring down the barrel of 14 more and incoming inhospitable weather.

I'm not powerless. I, always, have a choice. Sometimes that choice feels as impossible as anything ever has. The next action resolves the contradictory feeling. That doesn't mean I feel "good" or "happy." It just means I set an example of my potential. If I was conscious and deliberate, the example speaks to my values and hopes more than my words ever could. The more I'm objective and articulate in those values, the more potential they have to survive in a world that is otherwise forgoing to express and defend what I think we need to survive and live well.

A real example that highlights this for me is around "pro-life" ideas. I don't hear pro-life arguments that concern themselves with what the science says about embryos. I don't hear pro-life arguments that care about DCS or adoption statistics. I've not heard about longitudinal studies pro-life people tout regarding care and consequences of unwanted pregnancies. Pro-life doesn't entertain your life as an individual woman once it believes you've loaded yourself up with their concept of a baby.

If I was "pro-life," here's all my choices. I choose to flatly ignore the science. I'm going to choose to call that ignoring "disagreeing." I'm going to choose to ignore statistics. I'm not going to adopt myself, but I'm going to choose to use someone's story of adoption in my argument. I'm going to choose to "blame god" for your whorish nature, but not for the neglect inflicted upon the child throughout its life. In fact, I'll choose to co-opt that suffering as even more evidence of God's plan. I'll choose to vote for politicians who bankrupt social services. I'll choose to decry the importance and sanctity of my deep and personal feelings about this issue, and treat you as though you don't have deep and personal feelings.

This is a caricature, as all mind-reading exercises are. But, I don't have to mind-read the actions these people take and consequences we're currently suffering. It's the exact same self-justifying process that empowers and emboldens them as disables you. It's riding the ambiguity of disquieting feelings into an abysmal abyss where anything can happen because we're all pretending choices aren't being made.

I promise you, in more ways than you are paying attention to, you're locking flood victims out of your church and calling yourself a Christian. You have a lot of complicated fancy ideas about your value and potential I challenge you to draw a straight line from your day-to-day actions to its realized manifestation. Closing your eyes, and crossing your fingers, and wishing real hard is getting us all killed. Whether you want to call someone like Putin pragmatic or psychopathic, anyone willing to exploit how we condition ourselves will, and literally is, killing everyone in their path.

People accusing Israel of "genocide" are decrying "That's God's baby!" like a pro-lifer about the jizz in your uterus. How do I know this? They aren't interested in the actual definition of genocide. They aren't interested in what Israel is or has been fighting against since its inception. They aren't going to let things be complicated and comprehensive enough to talk about religious extremism and psychological conditioning. They're at the mercy of their spite engines, compulsively reacting to a visceral sense of indefinite and inflammatorily defined injustice.

Big and small, hot or cold, an infinite list of issues can all be scrutinized similarly.

"What emotional pattern does touching on [this issue] kick off in me?"

If you don't understand or can't define that pattern, you're at the indecent mercy of propaganda and "arguments" that fuel your preferred emotion. If you don't care to understand that pattern, you'll compulsively double down on it until you're exhausted, interrupted, or forced to abstain. Broadly, we imprison indefinitely repeat offenders and punish harshly those without the means to control and account for their most violent potential, especially if you're poor. Shittily trained dogs bark at any and everything for no reason, except the barking feels like the right thing to do.