I keep repeating a line in my head. “It's evolutionarily adaptive to have an immense irrational confidence in everything you do.” I didn't hear it anywhere, but it's the thought I had about myself with regard to the different things I want to create. I started to think about religious people. The infinitely forgiving and uplifting spirit to justify or excuse away all hardship. Why is belief in something “higher” ubiquitous? It's the most likely scenario where you'll push through or reproduce in spite of literally all reason not to.
Attempting to discern the line between overbearing or undue confidence, and the only game reproduction cares about, is explicitly messy. How much is maligned “ego,” and how much is “perfectly fit” for passing on genes? Either makes more or less sense depending on what context you choose to adopt. A strict “naturalist,” who pretends to want to live by the rules of the jungles and plains will see the brash or boast as indicative of health and competence. A feel-good inclusive appeaser will consider the same person downright inhumane.
I find myself in this vein of thought when I think about what it might take for me to embody many of the people I interview. What would it take for me to just abandon all sense of responsibility? Where would I be when all I can do is point fingers? If I wanted to spur of the moment burn down my future job prospects for ever working with The State again, or erase any goodwill that might act as a reference, what would that place look like? Why don't I let my mechanism for despair and complaining win, finding every possible place to inhabit that makes it about something external instead of internal?
I make the shift into talking about my talents, ideals, or history. I also attempted, for relative to most things, a brief period of couching that mechanism in my associations and friendships. I thought about trying to physically sound out the words I hear that make me reflexively gag or angry. Then it occurred to me, I don't have to imagine these things. I already attempt to occupy that lowest of the low place psychologically. I've already sounded like these people during points of my life I don't revisit for fun. The next step, or slog, or stumble, are always me after I've spoken as if I've just been set on fire, or remember what it feels like when I was.
It might be another psychological protection feature, but I forget I exist “at bottom.” I'm always where I am after I've roasted in what I consider abject failure or someone else's hell. The series of failures are what each aspect of my current reality is speaking towards alleviating. The conservative living arrangement. The capitulation in my dress and manner to fit into the “real world.” The disposition that certainly doesn't remove the swear words, but greatly reduces them when I interact with other people who certainly aren't experiencing their highest highs (ha!) when I arrive.
I'm an extremely curious person by nature. Anyone who's watched what can happen to an animal who espouses curiosity for its own sake knows it doesn't always consider the consequences. Already knowing them doesn't stop the temptation from existing, anymore than trying to eat better means cookies won't call to you. This curiosity combined with a kind of resting anxiety and guilt; a guilt I'm ever-more convinced was beat/bred into me by my unhealthy and desperate society, means that things can go excessively well for me on paper, and I still want “more” or to “change” in some radical way.
I was told a lot growing up that “he's not stimulated enough.” I'd get bored and disrupt class. A combination of immaturity and genuinely needing a bigger challenge is arguably the same problem I have today. I'm a 30-year-old child for sure. I'm impatient and petulant and presumptive. I need the kind of challenges that allow me to get overwhelmed and tired verses frustrated. Frustrated is when you're given inadequate tools to fix something. Tired is when you're working through as many options as you can conceive or learn about.
At my current job, there's plenty of tools always changing and to be made aware of. But, and I predicted this, I'm normalizing it. I have a pattern. I'm repeating the party lines. Sooner or later, everyone's “big, dramatic problem” is a speak and spell combination of the “service” we should provide them, or the extra form or two I'll need to get signed in order to close and leave. I was already adept at jumping into people's lives and conversations before it was my occupation, so there's a diminishing thrill at seeing what new drama I'll be plopped into. I'm no longer curious as to the staying power of the scent from your cat's litter box.
My thing is to not go so far as to completely self-sabotage, but to start letting things fall through the cracks in order to build up a kind of “more complex” scenario I need to navigate. Maybe I'm a touch less on top of trying to hunt somebody down or record something. Maybe I take a little longer to get a report written than it should have taken. Maybe I talk myself out of the simple hour or so of overtime that would put me in a comfortable spot. It's a horrible strategy, but it speaks to an immediate need. It may analogize to people who become emotionally withholding in order to gain attention. “Notice me! So fuck this thing right here that doesn't need to be fucked with!”
The right layer of complexity is a deeper ambiguity combined with the option to do things the “wrong” way. There's relatively clear and consistent expectations for what it means to “ensure child safety,” and none of them involve playing it fast and loose with a disrespectful teenager as you alienate the soft-spoken appeasing women in the room, as I flirted with the other day. When someone needs a kick in the ass, I want to be able to provide it. When a situation involves years of perspective and subtlety or tact, I want that built into my organization, not paid lip service to in marketing meet and greets.
Another fairly consistent thing I hear is people appreciating my “focus” or “clarity.” I get immediately confused. If I ever felt like I had those things, certainly I wouldn't write so much. Then, as a natural consequence of spewing, the things that remain look like focus and clarity. After I explore that which I no longer have to imagine, it's not a real question my reasons or motivation. After I try to attack what I'm thinking or pick apart my behavior, the confidence to continue on as one thing or another is reinforced. The degree of my belief in anything I say or do is simply at the end of things I've yet to show how they fail.
When I reflect on having my own, humble, first approximation of a rent-free home base, every single time I talk about it, I can't make myself feel bad about a 45 minute drive. I'll just be watching TV or listening to an audiobook I would be wanting to listen to anyway. There are specifics to be navigated no matter where you live, and my unfamiliarity with country living is not tantamount to them being “worse” than what I've experienced in town with shitty roommates. Rock dust on my car, the children of the corn, and even some imagined hillbilly confrontation where I answer the door with a weapon all pale in comparison to the stress of “keep paying or be evicted,” or “can you please turn down the TV.”
When I discuss my disposition, I'm not just shitty for shitty's sake. You have to trigger pretty specific “I'm a shithead” indicators before I drop the veil. Did you know that you can exhaust your boss, sincerely, and without being unreasonable, when their instantiated pettiness or pedantry rears its ugly head? I can be more meticulous than The State and not break a sweat. That doesn't mean it's the kind of pissing match I want to be in, but it's nice to know it about myself and hold in mind when I'm trying to explain to an indignant addict that the “choice” is theirs in how we're going to proceed. My frustration is theirs, but they're imagining a fight can win, while I've realized and conceded the loss.
“Fail forward” is the kind of catch phrase for eventually getting to a place that people seem to envy you for. The most successful people always have the longest stories about all the shit that went wrong. In keeping with the intertwined chaos/order and probability understandings of life, I think it's something of a hard and fast rule. The genes that survive an infinite sea of failure were in keeping with the environments on offer. Our environment is a huge soup of people who will never figure it out without being compelled, for better or worse. “Society” is built on the exploitation and subjugation of many millions of intertwined things that are practically impossible to understand, and as such, provoke an extremely personal narrative about “individual liberty” or “sovereign rights” or “divine souls,” or maybe just the particular title, pride, and dignity you take from your job or familial responsibilities. This also speaks to the danger of adopting victim narratives, but that's a whole several blog discussions unto themselves.
I think this is why I don't begrudge people the things they suck at or whatever flaws they may identify in their character, and just hate the living fuck out of dishonesty. You're not the only one failing, infinitely, trying to figure out how to walk the edge, but you can be the only one describing the nature of your journey in wholly unhelpful and dishonest ways. This fucks up the larger empathetic grand narrative for the rest of us. This is why, try as I might, I never want to be on the receiving end of my own bullshit, so I try not to get lost or persuaded there's anything to be gained in doing less than relating my experiences as honestly as I can. Everything has the capacity to send you down the wrong path, especially if the person trying to sell you on it knew it was bullshit from the onset.
You can always come to ground. When I panic, I'll get to panic with a paid-off house. When I'm disillusioned, in theory, I'll only have to navigate it or explore options over the course of a month or so, without having to make too many last minute dramatic decisions to try and fix something. Importantly, with each new hole plugged over something to worry about, a new leak springs forth somewhere else. Thus, the goal has to be about how you orient your process, not merely that you've prepared a landing pad. Why are my finances always “even?” I want my money to be working for me, or go into building something, or speak to the enjoyment of good food or entertainment. My process is capable of sitting on reserves, but it'd rather be processing. The future I've built in my head costs more than I'm making now, and I simply haven't irrationally believed hard enough through all of the coming failure in order to achieve it.
As such, it's important not to tie your character to any one spot you may choose to acknowledge you're inhabiting. You're many places and can choose many more. You're also completely ignorant of the paths trending around you that you'll have to ride in spite of yourself. Don't let that be the fodder for losing the narrative of who you want to be. To want to be isn't irrational. Finding a consistent method for sustaining that want, spitting in the face of the irrationality, suffering, and randomness, is an impossibly difficult task without accepting the nature of things into your process. Maybe that speaks to the capacity for forgiveness. Maybe that's what they meant when they said, “Work sets you free.”
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