Standard disclaimer for ones I think
will be mostly random and an odd attempt to tie very disparate things
together.
Shared depravity. While I don't recall phrasing it that way, that's often where my deepest connection with people lies. Jimmy and Gretchen in You're the Worst portray it well. There's a constant sort of joke made out of just how horrible you are on the inside, and the ways you can't seem to expel it from how you conduct your life. You think by making the conscious choice to open up or attempt to connect and build something “normal” or “mature” will win, but at some point, inevitably, you find yourself getting your dick sucked in the bathroom after goading yourself into proving a point about your fundamental absurdity.
There's both a wise and desperate point to be made here. The wisdom is that the absurdity is actually there and is as real and consequential as you on your best behavior. The desperation comes from feeling like a slave to it or being unable to account for the fallout when it comes out to play.
The most obvious example to me seems to be in looking at open relationships. I think it's dumb to think you don't want to fuck other people, even if it's rare, and just as dumb to think one person could possibly be all things to you at all times. You acknowledge your limitations and can potentially work out a system specific to your relationship needs and goals. When you're desperate to ensure a perfect happy picture or story related to your relationship is what's on offer, the enslavement by your other proclivities increases.
One place that I look for new ways to think about things is in science shows or documentaries. Some theoretical physicist has a way of understanding the world I'm never going to hear in my day to day. I heard the line, “Everything likes to live where it will age the most slowly, and gravity pulls it there.” In Quark Science, Kip Thorne explains that somehow the difference in how time flows is 1 second in 100 years between the surface and high altitudes, but that such a small difference is enough to account for massive differences in how we experience acceleration and gravitational pull. If you don't know what to make of that sentence, trust it took me several replays of the clip and attempts to word it to make it that far.
I take a much simpler point from it. Enough small over time means big. Evolution speaks to it. The reason things fall apart or get more complex are a build up, not generally a single dramatic event. Notably, because things are probabilistic and not easily predicted, you can't know what the complex iteration is going to look like, but you can make it trend a certain direction.
So take the kind of person you are. Is it one who avoids things? That can build on itself. Are you someone who white lies all the time? They're probably grayer than you think. I'm slowly eating my way into a heart condition I'm sure. The messy pieces of the life I'd like to be living are still scattered about my floor and yard and moving truck. You can't reverse the flow that's carrying you to more probable places in life that you had no vote on, but you can stake the ground at places that flow is going to have to bump into and work around.
This is why I look for voices and individuals. This is why I'm an active participant in trying to protect or dig up what my actual voice is in the sea of memes and complacency. This is why I'm happy to be “alone” and state frequently, “I have no friends” or am found to be annoyingly consistent in the things you consider wrong or right about me. Blogs are stakes. Relationships are stakes. The unshakable anxiety or condition your brain has been molded into is a stake, and it needs to be accounted for in the little ways it helps or hinders you every day.
It's only just so lamentable that I consider myself something of a chaotic and annihilating force. I'm not a slave to it, but I can feel its pull. I always recognize the boundary I'm always tempted to push. If I didn't introduce measures of chaos into my life, it would manifest in spite of me. Last minute steal finding a couple hundred pound engine hoist that needs to be transported in a wholly inappropriate vehicle for the task? Sign me up. Job that introduces me into stranger's homes routinely as we discuss whether or not their children require a different kind of oversight? A snore compared to the stress relayed by those frequently in and out of the field. An unjust ticket? I'm just emboldened enough to face my accusers, cops or otherwise, in court.
I believe it's from the kind of controlled chaos that our best versions spring forth. A certain degree of conservative regimentation is required to exist, but to flourish and commune, you need to find yourself on slippery boundaries. This is how lessons get instilled verses lectured and ignored. This is the field of insight that can find peace or motivation. This is where you can come to accept things “as they are” and decide what about the flow you can use, and what needs to be staked.
Chaos is by definition a threat to an ordered and understood way of doing something. It feels dangerous no matter how objectively real and in-built to the structure of everything it is. Therefore, it's avoided and denied. Act chaotically, you're wrong or bad. Introduce something new, and be prepared for retaliation. Look as though you can't garner the support or likes, and be presumed guilty, maybe they're not even sure of what, but damned if you're not guilty of it.
Consider the chaos of feelings that lurched for the “strong man,” if nothing else a stable archetype and cliché. Or how about the identity politics and “social justice” that wants to damn perfectly innocent descriptions of how you look, and paint them as an ordered list of blanket privileges and historical atrocities. One wonders if racism and its consequences were invented in The U.S. a few hundred years ago. How about the chaotic “media,” now a hodgepodge of voices spanning whatever you're looking at on your phone at any given moment, causing a retreat into safely held familiar beliefs or fueling biases via sympathetic baiting for your attention. Where should you plant your stake?
I think people simply refuse the obligation. I think a bashful dismissal of the charge to participate in a loud way against “small” points of corruption or failure are the reasons the world looks the way it does. Wars don't start overnight. Fascism doesn't foment in a vacuum. Inoperable cancer starts with a few cells. I'm 30 years old. I'm “old” in every conception I had of “old” people when I was kid. Already. It's happening, and has been doing so for 7 months! Things look as good or as bad as they do for every reason I chose to do or not do something in the days leading up to this moment. It only feels bleedingly obvious until you consider the amount of times you didn't plunge into the chaos to try and shape the world to look a little more like you'd prefer. Think of the chances you still have that you've already forsook.
I think to bond over mutual depravity is a kind of foolish game you play when you haven't really figured things out and you're under the illusion that you're responsible for writing someone else's story. When I simply count, the amount of my “friends” who were/are seriously depressed, lazy, self-involved, or persistent liars gets up there. This isn't to absolve myself of my depravity, but it does mean I didn't “surround myself with motivation and accountability” as the popular catchphrase suggests is a key to transforming your circumstances. I'm literally playing the same game I've accused everyone else of for years in peacocking empathy and “shouldering the burden” of ensuring those less well-off than myself are fleetingly safe and accounted for, and I still know, if not even louder, that it's not enough to sustain what I really am alone.
If everything likes to live where it will age the most slowly, for me, that's dancing along an edge with injections of randomness and obscenity. Time has flown and been an utter dragging suffocation simultaneously, and the more I lose myself in the tasks rooted to “practically” make “enough” money, the more I feel things have slipped past me. It's the most kind of horrifying to think I could lose myself to the background noise.
Shared depravity. While I don't recall phrasing it that way, that's often where my deepest connection with people lies. Jimmy and Gretchen in You're the Worst portray it well. There's a constant sort of joke made out of just how horrible you are on the inside, and the ways you can't seem to expel it from how you conduct your life. You think by making the conscious choice to open up or attempt to connect and build something “normal” or “mature” will win, but at some point, inevitably, you find yourself getting your dick sucked in the bathroom after goading yourself into proving a point about your fundamental absurdity.
There's both a wise and desperate point to be made here. The wisdom is that the absurdity is actually there and is as real and consequential as you on your best behavior. The desperation comes from feeling like a slave to it or being unable to account for the fallout when it comes out to play.
The most obvious example to me seems to be in looking at open relationships. I think it's dumb to think you don't want to fuck other people, even if it's rare, and just as dumb to think one person could possibly be all things to you at all times. You acknowledge your limitations and can potentially work out a system specific to your relationship needs and goals. When you're desperate to ensure a perfect happy picture or story related to your relationship is what's on offer, the enslavement by your other proclivities increases.
One place that I look for new ways to think about things is in science shows or documentaries. Some theoretical physicist has a way of understanding the world I'm never going to hear in my day to day. I heard the line, “Everything likes to live where it will age the most slowly, and gravity pulls it there.” In Quark Science, Kip Thorne explains that somehow the difference in how time flows is 1 second in 100 years between the surface and high altitudes, but that such a small difference is enough to account for massive differences in how we experience acceleration and gravitational pull. If you don't know what to make of that sentence, trust it took me several replays of the clip and attempts to word it to make it that far.
I take a much simpler point from it. Enough small over time means big. Evolution speaks to it. The reason things fall apart or get more complex are a build up, not generally a single dramatic event. Notably, because things are probabilistic and not easily predicted, you can't know what the complex iteration is going to look like, but you can make it trend a certain direction.
So take the kind of person you are. Is it one who avoids things? That can build on itself. Are you someone who white lies all the time? They're probably grayer than you think. I'm slowly eating my way into a heart condition I'm sure. The messy pieces of the life I'd like to be living are still scattered about my floor and yard and moving truck. You can't reverse the flow that's carrying you to more probable places in life that you had no vote on, but you can stake the ground at places that flow is going to have to bump into and work around.
This is why I look for voices and individuals. This is why I'm an active participant in trying to protect or dig up what my actual voice is in the sea of memes and complacency. This is why I'm happy to be “alone” and state frequently, “I have no friends” or am found to be annoyingly consistent in the things you consider wrong or right about me. Blogs are stakes. Relationships are stakes. The unshakable anxiety or condition your brain has been molded into is a stake, and it needs to be accounted for in the little ways it helps or hinders you every day.
It's only just so lamentable that I consider myself something of a chaotic and annihilating force. I'm not a slave to it, but I can feel its pull. I always recognize the boundary I'm always tempted to push. If I didn't introduce measures of chaos into my life, it would manifest in spite of me. Last minute steal finding a couple hundred pound engine hoist that needs to be transported in a wholly inappropriate vehicle for the task? Sign me up. Job that introduces me into stranger's homes routinely as we discuss whether or not their children require a different kind of oversight? A snore compared to the stress relayed by those frequently in and out of the field. An unjust ticket? I'm just emboldened enough to face my accusers, cops or otherwise, in court.
I believe it's from the kind of controlled chaos that our best versions spring forth. A certain degree of conservative regimentation is required to exist, but to flourish and commune, you need to find yourself on slippery boundaries. This is how lessons get instilled verses lectured and ignored. This is the field of insight that can find peace or motivation. This is where you can come to accept things “as they are” and decide what about the flow you can use, and what needs to be staked.
Chaos is by definition a threat to an ordered and understood way of doing something. It feels dangerous no matter how objectively real and in-built to the structure of everything it is. Therefore, it's avoided and denied. Act chaotically, you're wrong or bad. Introduce something new, and be prepared for retaliation. Look as though you can't garner the support or likes, and be presumed guilty, maybe they're not even sure of what, but damned if you're not guilty of it.
Consider the chaos of feelings that lurched for the “strong man,” if nothing else a stable archetype and cliché. Or how about the identity politics and “social justice” that wants to damn perfectly innocent descriptions of how you look, and paint them as an ordered list of blanket privileges and historical atrocities. One wonders if racism and its consequences were invented in The U.S. a few hundred years ago. How about the chaotic “media,” now a hodgepodge of voices spanning whatever you're looking at on your phone at any given moment, causing a retreat into safely held familiar beliefs or fueling biases via sympathetic baiting for your attention. Where should you plant your stake?
I think people simply refuse the obligation. I think a bashful dismissal of the charge to participate in a loud way against “small” points of corruption or failure are the reasons the world looks the way it does. Wars don't start overnight. Fascism doesn't foment in a vacuum. Inoperable cancer starts with a few cells. I'm 30 years old. I'm “old” in every conception I had of “old” people when I was kid. Already. It's happening, and has been doing so for 7 months! Things look as good or as bad as they do for every reason I chose to do or not do something in the days leading up to this moment. It only feels bleedingly obvious until you consider the amount of times you didn't plunge into the chaos to try and shape the world to look a little more like you'd prefer. Think of the chances you still have that you've already forsook.
I think to bond over mutual depravity is a kind of foolish game you play when you haven't really figured things out and you're under the illusion that you're responsible for writing someone else's story. When I simply count, the amount of my “friends” who were/are seriously depressed, lazy, self-involved, or persistent liars gets up there. This isn't to absolve myself of my depravity, but it does mean I didn't “surround myself with motivation and accountability” as the popular catchphrase suggests is a key to transforming your circumstances. I'm literally playing the same game I've accused everyone else of for years in peacocking empathy and “shouldering the burden” of ensuring those less well-off than myself are fleetingly safe and accounted for, and I still know, if not even louder, that it's not enough to sustain what I really am alone.
If everything likes to live where it will age the most slowly, for me, that's dancing along an edge with injections of randomness and obscenity. Time has flown and been an utter dragging suffocation simultaneously, and the more I lose myself in the tasks rooted to “practically” make “enough” money, the more I feel things have slipped past me. It's the most kind of horrifying to think I could lose myself to the background noise.
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