I think I need to write this to figure out if I have any reason left to be considered interesting. The thing is, I've gone and spent about 5 months of my life doing a basic-bitch job, made as much or more money than I've managed to over-indulgently need to live on since...well, ever, and have the prospect of a new job and more money coming in looming. I've bought more McDonald's frappuccinos, shakes, and smoothies in the last month than I have in the last 5 years. I've ordered some of the more “expensive” (~$150) toys from Amazon that have sat on my wishlist for years, and I'm sitting here eyeballing $1000+ purchases for shits and giggles because I still don't have a realistic grasp on whether or not I'll have the people in place, or learn the skills necessary, to get my power and bathroom completed, let alone figuring out air conditioning with mine getting stolen.
I feel very “normal plus.” My money isn't immediately eaten up by kids or loans, so I'm more like the middle-class of old. I have a little extra cash, but not enough to be flaunting. Soon, I'll have a bit more time to do things like adult sports leagues or hitting the gym and bowling in the afternoons. I never think about simply filling up my gas tank or ordering from more than a dollar menu. If the state of Illinois wants to grab $400 in back taxes, or my registration fees come out of nowhere, or my VPN and Planet Fitness deduct fees I wasn't anticipating, I don't really bat an eye. I went to the movie theater and didn't lie about being a student.
I'm interested to see what happens when I have that consistent routine. When I know, for sure, I’ll have 5 or so hours at the end of each day and weekends to focus on something. Right now, I'm in the weird in-between realm where my schedule has freed up some with dumping and passing clients, but a surprise 7 hours of freedom isn't mentally preparing properly to do anything with it. I just feel tired that my quasi-routine has been interrupted allowing me to sleep in or stay up. I certainly see utility in routines, and my body reeling at the prospect of food or sugar after 7 certainly wants to compel me, but I still think they're fundamentally not really me.
I don't know what my first move is going to be. I wish I could “just” get the fundamental work done to live on the land. I don't even need a driveway yet. I could struggle-bus without air conditioning for a spell if I had cold water. I want to be able to sit down and power through a dozen building videos, step outside and try, and then be able to come in and shower off the ticks. I could find the rhythm to add a new room to my house every 2 weeks, presumably faster with better planning and skill acquisition. I know the costs for less-than-pretty but totally functional living. I'll save aesthetically impressing when I have money to blow that reflects my underlying pretensions. In the meantime, none of you are trying to visit.
I was eating today and started reflecting on my map again. I thought about it in a way that gave me the chills. I still maintain full faith that if I collect the information I want and organize it how it looks in my head, I'd have a proper “revolutionary” metric for approaching problem solving and idea transmission. The irony, of course, is when I get the money to commission 50 more hours on it, I wouldn't have the time budgeted to keep it under meticulous oversight. That's a great way to lose money. As well, it's supposed to be human-led individual data we're attempting to correlate and compile. I need the kind of security bills paid well in advance can only bring to fall down that rabbit hole again.
The question of whether or not I consider myself interesting, or whether I should even care about such a thing, seems to speak to the idea I'm trapped in about all experiences being one. I can't shake the idea that every possible thing is, in one manner of phrasing, the same thing. I know I have a poor and mis-remembered conception of different eastern mythologies or modes of thought that speak to this, but it's feeling more matter-of-factually compelling the less I conceive of myself as any potentially worthwhile discreet entity. That is to say, we're all made of the same stuff. Consciousness being “emergent” would suggest that the “subjective” experience of self is merely a word. Say “I'm me!” all you want, there's no rule against it. But no, you're “us” and “all.” As such, maxims like treating others the way you wish to be treated or an “eye for an eye” become more than throwaway “obvious” wisdom, but imminently consciousness preserving proofs.
I treat people like I want to be treated. I want to be presented with the opportunity to discuss my grievances until we've figured out places we can't budge. I want to be approached as if I'm potentially full of the most interesting and consequential ideas. I want to hear the “worst” jokes. I want to treat sex as flippantly as a borderline chronic masterbator might consider their dick. I want to be provoked and given the opportunity to not do just what it is you think I'm gonna do. If you can truly dish out the degree of shit that I'm accused of serving and turn me all inside out, you better. “My” experience was only made as good as I currently conceive of it by putting myself through naivety pains and hopeful pains and darkness and death and sadness and on and on until the part of me able to care that much died. I want that for everyone. It hasn't hampered my ability to have fun or appreciate things or treat people fairly. It just makes the conditions under which I'm going to do those things exacting. It isn't arbitrary when I like something, it's genuinely novel or moves me. I think you are unable to do this when you exercise the “like” button for every goddamn picture ever shared by your friends in the fucking forest.
There's a burden with depersonalization. You have to grow accepting of the crazy shit. You have to think of yourself as “justly” serving out the sentence of the reportedly innocent on the other end of a bomb or outbreak. What if “I” was a Syrian refugee? What about my experience might I want to hone for the sake of everything? A measure of resilience or hope? But, darker, who's to say any expression of consciousness is particularly worth preserving and respecting? We find it in us to kill, arbitrarily, those who violate the general pursuit of life narrowly defined. Wouldn't the death of a handful of greedy oligarchs maybe open the doors for better general welfare? Here I guess I'm trying to do a kind of moral calculus. Surely, an absurd exercise. And what fool would give the keys to the driver who can barely consider the significance of his own life save his passengers?
Here I think about the idea of “evolution” meaning “change.” I'm a fan of the saying, “the only truth is change.” At the same time, stumbling upon “consciousness” as evolution apparently suggests, the nature of the universe can change so radically as to perhaps instantiate a perpetual conscious awareness of a fraction of the expanding parts. I don't need to be “[redacted]” to create the math equation of experiences, genetics, and TV references that would constitute me in my absence. Well, I do, because we don't have the technology to perfectly map brains, but presumably something akin to the advanced Turing test-passer isn't that far off. But think about that. Everything about your being, at its best and most functioning, an engine for change. You change your and a partner's genes into another generator for change. You build institutions of thought into bedrocks to be picked at and stacked upon. The essence of the universe, is change.
Is that intimidating or sad? “You” can't even be you, by definition. You're a process. You're a probabilistic set of experiences. Here I'm thinking Dr. Manhattan, that for all of the particles and potentials, you popped out. You can write about it! I still consider that a miracle. I still think that there's a huge amount of shit we can't or can never know that makes the pursuit of lasting worthwhile institutions and behaviors worth creating and passing on. I'm literally a testament to what doesn't change in the face of the “only truth,” and that seems like a giant hint as far as dictating your behavior and adopting intentionality. I wake up every day with the same things that give me chills to think about. I dream the same dreams. I beat my empathetic head against the wall while proclaiming a fair pragmatic degree of sociopathy that always keeps the jokes coming.
I'm still going to get everything I want. That seems why I don't know if I'm still interesting. It would have been interesting to find a worthwhile person off Craigslist who let me accelerate the process. It would have been interesting to have seen my map come to life and have its implications carry me across sectors and appearances. It would be interesting even to hit the lottery as cheap as that may sound. Fuck, it’d be interesting if YOU bothered to help lol. For the life of me, going to work, being “basically responsible,” working “my” normal of never taking vacation, or sick days, or personal days, endlessly, for years, accumulating money, restricting my diet or indulgent habits, buying the shit I need, just learning “the thing,” and chugging along has got to be the dullest possible way I could consider getting what I want. I genuinely hate being so good at it I can't even consider it a problem beyond philosophically. Any idiot can pay the bills, and I want to be any idiot? No.
Maybe that's my balance sheet though. Maybe I need to generate the karma of uniting meth-mom and child consistently before the universe gives a shit about me staying up all night dicking around in a garage or hyper-reading about some new topic. Maybe I need to introduce myself to the me in other people so the rest of our experience can get a better bite out of what it is I'm actually trying to do. Maybe I fell prey to that insatiable ego metric that's glorified some level of improprietous indulgence I've dressed up. Who's to say? All I know is I have money again, don't feel like I've missed out on anything but sleep I don't require, and every inch I perceive for inserting my brand of engagement with the world, I take. I take it honestly and viciously, for better or worse, because I believe it's the best thing I can do for myself, and, if I'm right about consciousness, the best I could do for you.
It isn't based on some high-minded or convoluted religious principal either. It's just a series of questions. “Do I like me? Do I see a way through? Can I calculate the result? Is the alternative worse? Do my predictions come true? Am I open to feedback and contradiction? If I died today, would my project stand on it's own?” Overwhelmingly, I like my answers to these questions, and essentially never is someone willing to contend with the work it took to get those relative answers. Jordan Peterson has a consistent line about not saying things that make you weak, and when challenged about why he fears weakness, he explains that it corrupts you and turns you into something shit. I remember what it felt like to feel weak. On my worst, horribly phrased or deliberately indignantly picked word-choice day, don't feel weak. Any weakness in my writing is for its incompleteness, not disingenuous deception.
I think I'm gonna sit. I'm not gonna buy more stupid toys. I'm not gonna go out of my way to eat out more than I regularly do. I'll hit that overtime as it seems appropriate, but, I'm not kidding, the psychological shift of constantly calling yourself old really makes you reconsider exhausting yourself in service to “stupid shit” for more money than you can responsibly allocate in limited windows of free time. The “pretend it's not 50 steps” next step is make the house livable. I'm still of the mind that if it cost me everything but the gas money to get me to and from my next task, I'd pay it tomorrow if it'd be done tomorrow. It'd be the first attempt at calling something “home” since the ease with which I could fall asleep at my grandmother's house. Then seems the time to contemplate if I want another room, or deck, or to install a pool, or shed etc. Will you all promise to like and share my Insta pics as I refine and define my space? For the sake of us all, that is.
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