I once referred to “progress” as working things out of your narrative. I think the culture, in the United States particularly, raises you to believe that accumulation is key. Get degrees, get stuff, and get promoted. If we start to cobble together what a “world culture” may look like, it’s accumulating “friends,” attention, and vast swaths of wealth. It’s best to go viral, find your appropriated personal style and voice, and touch or take a picture with everything.
I’ve been thinking a lot about suicide. I don’t mean in me committing suicide, but the general symbol, power, and almost mythical lore attributed to it. In my own life, the only times I’ve genuinely thought I needed to die were when I was so disastrously sick I felt like I was never going to get better. The idea of never escaping. The mercy life would be bestowing upon me. It’s in being totally honest with myself in those shitty moments that I started to empathize and respect “right to die” groups.
At that point, you only really serve the people around you’s insecurities. You’re essentially suffering for nothing. They won’t put on their adult hats that knows death is coming for us all, and a few more months or years of your pain isn’t going to make their life any better. To die then becomes a noble acceptance and respect for reality and your limitations. To regard that as some kind of perverse fetishizing of death or “playing god” are the immature and petty reactions you find any time a childlike mind approaches something they are uncomfortable with.
The broader theme is perhaps more to do with death in the abstract. The death of how you talk about yourself or behave. The death of your relationships or friendships. The death of your interests or certain things you used to worry about. When do you allow something about yourself to die as opposed wishing things around you would? Take an easy example in considering politics. How do you switch from “all the old crazy racist bastards need to die!” to “I’m willing to pop and bury my bubble of hatred?”
My instinct is it starts with exhaustion. You’ve just cared too much for so long that your body gives up even if your mind would like to keep lying. This could be another way of considering your familiarity with things as well. Does the person who vividly remembers hiding under their desks over the threat of nuclear annihilation really give a shit about a Trump presidency? Or how about people who’ve been shot at and maybe kinda sorta played a role in committing war crimes? They’re likely going to have different priorities, no?
When I go back and read old blogs I see so much that I’ve cut out of my concerns after becoming too exhausted. You can only bang your head into fundamentalism for so long. You can only employ battered-wife analogies so many times before you remove yourself from the conversation as you start to believe they deserve it. I see how many conclusions I’ve come to years ago that still influence how I write today. Much of the same language, if not better clarified and expanded, is employed. I get to watch just how convinced I was of some proposition or problem that I might now have to approach in a roundabout way.
Do you feel you change because you’re learning or because you’re giving up?
I suppose it’s important to qualify what you’re learning and how. One of my favorite things to do is look at relationship subreddits and watch these clumsy immature tales of woe put every “dramatic” thing that’s ever happened in my life into perspective. It humbles the mind regarding ideas related to progress. In this society, you can stumble into a corner of the internet apparently dedicated to sharing your story and maybe finding useful advice at 35 while you display the perspective and writing skills of a 14 year old. You can say, “hey, he’s trying and has access to a tool.” I say, “how much has he ignored in 35 years to end up here and why does he think this tool is adequate?”
To whittle things down seems the only route to “true progress.” You can think of it like this. We start as “everything.” We’re atoms. We’re a micro-biome. We’re water. Peel away the larger distinctions and you begin to feel like you have a personality or responsibility. You feel intentioned and perhaps we traverse into the language of “free will.” The more you regard yourself in the abstract and at the will of an endless confluence of forces, while some like to pretend it offers a kind of nihilistic and fatalistic relief, I would argue you move away from any dignified claims regarding a distilled person.
I think this is why you abstract out problems. How many of them really have to do with you? How much can you shed in your approach to “problem” as a concept before you allow it to become you? At what point can you be reliably responsible for taking ownership? I suppose this is another way of stating you should be concerned with your little corner of the world. I’m pressed to think your little corner has wildly larger meaningful consequences than people want to give it credit for.
Let’s think about what happens when we approach a problem. Say the situation resolves poorly. The wise thing to do seems to ask, “What did we learn?” This is an ever-fleeting ideal. Every time I get into some form of confrontation with friends I “learn” the same thing. I just shouldn’t bother. I seem to only ever piss them off when I’m genuinely hoping and trying. My next option would be to get really angry which would help no one. So how to maintain friends? Smile, accept, shut up. Ideas that make me feel terrible, but the lesson is very loud.
You could also say I should learn “how to approach” or “how to speak their language.” Here I see a problem though too. Their language is incomplete. Their language is angry and judgmental. Their language is pretending to understand. So should I drop my “pretension” rooted in boring procedural language? Is that really the lesson? When discussing things with students, do teachers just go “fuck it, you’re not understanding, so I’m going to contort this concept into the language of gossip related to the Kardashians and call it a day?”
I want to work out stress and anger from my disposition. I don’t want to just be exhausted. I want to work through every point of contention and believe I took something meaningful away from whittling down all that isn’t. I think that project applies to my hobbies and habits as much as it does to my relationships. How do I call someone friend who refuses to talk to me? Who am I to a person that I only make angry when I appeal to some “higher” form of discussion or connection we may have experienced in the past? To me, after having every outstretched branch cut off, the wise thing is to let the butchered and naked tree die.
I can’t stress enough the difference between murderous intent and mercy killing. I cut off friendships because I feel sacrificing my time and stressed out brain for the sake of it is unwise and unfair to myself. I don’t hate the people, but I recognize and respect that I don’t really mean to them what I did in the past and that doesn’t become an opportunity to throw around blame. Even with something less volatile than relationships, I consider old fashion sense. I don’t hate my old wallet chains or goatee. My relationship to them just changed.
I wanted to discuss more how we make the decision to kill things in ourselves. Why people talk about sacrificing dreams for kids or their spouse. Why they “grow up” and adopt conservative cliches related to embarrassment and high-class sensibilities. When I approach my dreams at 27 that were the same at 16 that I conceived of first at 10, am I accumulating skills and perspective that will help me achieve them? Or am I shedding ideas from 10 years old I was previously unable to appreciate how deeply they rooted into my mind; ideas about the rush from getting attention, the power of money, and the satisfaction of besting some academic problem. Will those make me happy about pissing people off I thought I could get along with as a “not human” who’s accused of every character flaw under the sun?
Or do I let the goal of relating die? Do I regard my ideas as a 10 year old’s and let them die as well? Have I made progress keeping my “sociopathic” relationships strong and steady while I take some ill-begotten “pride” in leaving a sad sea of “feelers” in my wake? That begins to bark at the annoying confidence assholes have from every rich white male archetype.
Who and what are we killing ourselves for? The idea of a “project husband” comes to mind. “Oh, you know, I had to train him.” What if we regarded every act as one in service to death? Every step a decent into death. Where are we walking and why? If you regard me doing drug studies as dangerous, what would possess me to risk my life like that? For the money? Kind of, but I’m saving way more of it than I’m spending. I’m doing it in service to my creativity and time. Would I still do them if they scared me as much as they do you? Let’s remember, we’ve all had to approach things for the first time, and I promise you have no idea how close I was to leaving.
I think it’s important to give yourself the permission and power to die. People don’t want you to. They want to believe that they’re worth you hanging on. You have to remember, they’re looking for a statement about them, not you. It’s why I’ve so endlessly stressed myself out about who I was going to have in my circle and why. I’m not defined by my ability to maintain or amass friends, and god help you if you desperately need me for some dose of “insight” or “real” or whatever paltry qualifier has been employed to dignify my shitting on the carpet. It becomes unbearable to watch people sacrifice themselves for a pittance elevated to “compromise.” I won’t watch the language of murder disguise itself as noble self-sacrifice. If I hate watching myself beat my head against a wall, at least I’ve learned how to persuade myself to stop.
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