[583] Can't. Believe. Nothing.

Another 5 hours, another decompression and deconstruction of Jordan Peterson lessons. If it hasn’t caught on by now, I’m in love.

I thought I might start this blog out doing what Jordan said Dostoevsky did in writing his fictional characters. To truly be thinking, it is contended, you can’t just go around talking to people who say what you already believe or seeking out information you find agreeable. The truest form of thought is to take up a position you don’t believe and give the argument in favor of it as thorough an explanation and defense as is possible. Avoid all caricaturing and make it the actual man you need to attack and leave the straw at the door.

I was going to do this with the word “love.” The problem for me is that I don’t take my arguments or explanations for anything more than they’re worth to me in my organization of the world. I’m not convinced there is no love because it’s a fundamentally fluid and arbitrary construct I attack from the vein of how it is abused. I don’t dismiss your ability or utility in adopting the word for the informal discernment of your place in society or your relationships. Fundamentally, your defense of the word is equally valid if you suppose it’s a good thing to placate the details and carry on well enough, perhaps echoing the pragmatists.

So I’m not going to write a lengthy defense against something I don’t even fundamentally believe.

This speaks to another way I thought I might start the blog. What do I believe? I think part of my basic struggle is having rooted myself so deeply into a point of open skepticism that I barely know how to behave. My dithered capacity to build or recognize a construct I respect induces a sort of paralysis. Of course I still get up, go to work, engage in routine-like things for the “normal functioning adult,” but none of it seems to really matter to me. Or, I’ve moved so often or so quickly through experiences that are no longer novel that my life might as well be taking direction from random choices from a hat.

It feels this way because of my leaning towards behaviors and environments I never thought I’d be attracted to. How many times have I referred to my plot of land as “cousin-fuck Indiana?” It’s many. Yet I feel like I could spend all day painting a fence or digging a pool out there because it represents a kind of “idea ownership” I’ve lost in my regular day to day. I can perhaps rediscover important things about me that are being repressed in my daily life. I can rediscover the capacity to believe in something.

Something that underlays my confusion is how I react, or don’t, to stressful or traumatic events. I’ve accelerated the phases to acceptance. If I do it fast enough, I turn it into a kind of sycophantic game. I got tagged by an IRS lien two days ago. I go from $1200 in the bank to $1. I call the people up, look for a way to negotiate and am flatly denied. After a fair amount of yelling at the person on the other line about their capacity to be a human being and the immorality of stealing from the, literally and technically, impoverished, I get moved up the chain after a few passing references to the pills I might as well down or neck I might as well slit because they’ve practically killed me in taking away my resources to live. This got me a call from the police department asking if I was indeed going to kill myself.

Now, I’m sure this is going to read like “typical crazy person” to the psycho who “checks up on me,” but I think there’s a deep moral failing and cultural blindness here that is at bottom why we’re going to destroy ourselves. Not everyone can survive it. The manager actually argued with me about “just how poor I really was” and how I should find someone to borrow the money from. It’s an infinitely sick thing to do. It’s like putting someone in a fighting arena with broken arms and saying something akin to “you can always kick you idiot!” This seems about the posture we adopt to poverty in general as we deny how many of us actually live in it and demand drug tests, work hours, and austerity in the face of abundance and greed.

I’m lucky enough to have been born in a cohort and country where poverty looks different than it does globally. I have a handful of resources I can tap into that means I’m not automatically in the street even when my money goes to zero. I still have 3 jobs with paychecks coming in suggesting an anticipatory capacity that acknowledges the potential likelihood of “tax lien-esc” occurrences from the results of my behavior. I don’t routinely allow things like this to happen to me, but I’m certainly smart enough to have tried to mitigate it sooner. The problem seems to be that it’s an issue that bumped right against something I genuinely believe. I think it’s unbearably immoral for people in my position to pay a quarter of my earnings, which qualify as poverty even before we act wise and discuss inflation, to the state, particularly in our current political environment. So I danced around for as long as I could.

I play a game of tradeoffs. I would not have my land if I paid those taxes. I would not have been able to satiate some other need at the time is likely as well. While it was a shock to the system to see my funds depleted, my gamble paid off in the long run, and it taught me something else I need to do to not get pinged the same way in the future. A point Jordan Peterson often brings up is that you don’t grow or transform unless the world hits you in a very real way and you pick yourself back up after the disorientation. It’s a much bigger issue than the simple question, “should you pay your taxes?” And then answering in the affirmative to avoid the obvious foreseeable consequences. How you answer depends on your goals and perspective. Mine is to live a life approaching independence and freedom from slave systems. That’s closer to happening with land and zero dollars than it is no land and a few hundred or thousand even.

What you fundamentally believe carries you through trauma. I can think about breaking up, as Peterson who sees many clients dealing with divorce or poor communication will often reference. It was within days of knowing my ex was falling for me that I told her she’d end up leaving me. And this didn’t come from some condescending, hateful, or fatalistic place. I was trying to prepare myself and remain compassionate and aware of our fundamental differences. The idea that I still think I did and would do work to try and remain friends or see us together years from now isn’t me trying to be a creep who won’t let things go. I still believe in communication. I still believe I liked her for her. I still don’t respect sex to the degree that our instincts about it shouldn’t be fought harder against. I believe them so much that I wouldn’t sacrifice them to be back together when I know they’d only cause her harm.

For as paralyzingly open to new experiences and feeling like I’m on a desperate search to unpack some corner of my mind or discover some enabling person, my beliefs shine when something dramatic brings the world into focus. Maybe a problem then is I haven’t found a way to induce a significant enough shock to trigger the necessary focus. A terrifying thought really when combined with a propensity for compulsive decision making. Is the flirtation with the idea enough to satisfy and stay my hand? Or do I keep doing petty teenage things like continually throw around the word suicide and arbitrarily flirt with the truth as a faux exercise in control? Honestly, I’ll probably keep doing those for shits and giggles and because I employ them on people I’d kill and eat if we were jungle dwellers.

Peterson talks a lot about how the brain figures things out in dreams. You can interact or discover constructs that can’t even take verbal form, and depending on your awareness lucidly question your bizarre circumstances. I feel like I engage in writing to take the perpetual day-dream I experience and try to tie things together. Tonight I listened to him for 5 hours, but it’s 4 or 5 things that made me think “I could probably expand on this” or “this fits in nicely with an idea from earlier.” I also do a lot less interpreting of shapes or environments and can say explicitly what does or doesn’t come to mind and whether I feel a particular way about it. I think as a consequence of the sheer amount of self-reflection I’ve stifled my capacity for wildly creative and abstract dreams worth interpreting. Usually they just revolve around sex or that frustrating feeling of not being able to run or punch something. Not hard to infer.

Something that’s starting to creep up a little on me is what happens when I finally find someone or something I vigorously want to investigate or listen to. I learn what it is or what they have to say, and then I don’t have to anymore. I’ve heard the same analogies. I recall the gist of the story. I anticipate the “Piagetian construct” and why it’s fundamental in understanding the way behaviorists think, and then I get distracted and bored. Something a week ago (well, I discovered Peterson years ago, but haven’t decided to exhaustively investigate until recently) that took my mind completely away from the menial tasks of my bullshit job becomes this plodding feat of concentration and wishing for him to speak faster. It’s part of the reason I read so much across so many topics. I need to believe there’s something to look forward to in digging up the details, because when I decide to, that shit goes up quick as a fire to dry leaves.

This makes me think about the non-relationship I have with the district manager of Kroger who’s perpetually blown me off. I know I’m better than him. That is, I know I’m more motivated, intelligent, creative, and driven. He knows it too. There is absolutely nothing in it for him to ever speak to me again. Thus we ask ourselves if I “learn” (already knew) from our interaction and massively downplay myself to wriggle into a bureaucratic structure somewhere else. Do I seek that realm of “stability” in order to fund my creative ends and perhaps free up some time 10-percenting it around a bunch of comfortable fat white old people? Just because I theoretically could doesn’t make it feel right or worthwhile. It doesn’t mean I won’t try either.

Generally speaking though, my life lacks meaningful structure. I sit nowhere conducive to my demeanor or capacity as far as dominance structures are concerned. I’m not the center of attention to any consistent enough group of friends. I’m not running a project or team. I’m not mastering new skills or information in any sort of way that garners recognition or participates in competition. I don’t take particular pride in the mere ownership of material things, so parading around looking good or talking about some purchase registers nothing. I hold practically no respect for anyone and feel myself perpetually on the brink of burning bridges I never wanted to cross in the first place.

I’m paradoxically lost because of how rooted I actually am. What to do in a system fundamentally designed to decay well before belligerent hateful greedy ideologues molded it to actively attack and kill you quicker? What to seek out in relationships when you’ve exercised your best, and empirically backed, methods for engaging in the most healthy ways, and can’t find anything but pathology to ignore, scare away, or play with? What to seek in business when even if you got 99 things right, 1 underlying truth is all it took to undermine you or that others will focus on? What to create when it starts to feel like a burden bred of desperation and guilt instead of focus and inspiration? The world is not designed nor even remotely focused on the things I’ve discovered or tried to practice to function as the hero of my own story. And as a social animal bred to mirror and assimilate, I’ve essentially conditioned myself into a form of perpetual suffering, leaving well aside what your favorite stoic or nihilistic philosopher might have to say on the matter by the way. What a fucking moron.