I have something of a list of “philosophical cliches” that I take for granted when I talk, but that I also apply to my life broadly. It's things like assuming an “ambivalent universe” beyond naive ideas about good and evil. It's that time is an illusion. It's that all conversations are happening at once and about everything at all times.
To someone not familiar with me or my, probably-poor understanding of physics or quantum mechanics, and how it's married to hopefully-not-Chopra-esc ideas about how to conduct myself, the purpose or utility of how I talk about things or why I engage in one thing over another are going to “seem” very hard to understand.
I liken it to the cultural understandings of narratives, and meta-narratives. You might have a narrative about “minimum wage” that says definitively there's a standard or floor that we're all going to agree or adhere to. The meta-narrative is the assumptions built-in about the kind of work that pays minimum wage or the type of people who would “choose” to engage in it. We would certainly get a lot more done and agree much quicker if we just did the math on what it costs to live with the necessities, but someone's always going to start a selfish fight about what's really necessary.
To the best of my ability, I try to refrain from meta-narratives. I ask questions for answers, not because I've built in the question an implication I think you should follow. If you use damning and oppressive language or words in how you orient yourself in the world, I'm perfectly okay with that, if you are also able to maintain a sense of the ongoing forever-narrative that's curious and open to change in service to the facts. For as often as I've been begrudged my “negativity” or negative language, rarely if ever can the person doing so concede that, one step beyond the level of their emotion, is the mere fact that needs to be contended with on its own terms.
My buddy's mom died the other day. It was relatively sudden, and she was only 62. Aggressive cancer infected her entire body, and a 4 day hospital stay ended with her dying. All things about that scene remain true at all times. We could develop the same cancer. The depth of his love and care for her is as true as the depth of my ambivalence and cheering for the death of my own mother. How you're spending each day and whether or not it's with the idea of when, not if, the cancer analogue gets you is an important thing to remain vigilant and contemplative about.
Can you remain contemplative? Are you responsible enough to maintain the level of thought and concern for your place relative to everyone else?
I stay angry. I'm relatively domineering and unsympathetic. Some of that's built in, some of that took work. I'm angry because I'm not represented in the “democratic” country I live in. I'm angry that I'm subjected to the task of money-making in a rigged and violently idiotic game. The anger focuses my resolve to be singularly focused on how to create the conditions that make it so I'm not so angry. I frame that story in terms of “me,” but I intimately understand myself as an amalgamation, a limited window, and an expression of “everything at all times.”
This is why advocacy and a voice is important. One angry person, perhaps disproportionately so, tells us nothing. I could have a broken brain or many bad ideas. I respect shows of solidarity in marches and protest. The problem is forgoing an individual responsibility and sense of agency or accountability in pawning off to those willing to do or be.
If “most” people are ambivalent, and the rest left to “progress” by “the narrowest of margins” as every media outlet likes to refer to the democratic majority, I don't believe we'll make it. We have to be clear and determined in what's right. We have to be defending every day the right to not be subjected to the power-mongering fear-based narcissism of fascism. We have to normalize and cope with our inherent Nazi-impulses and decide, consciously, actively, to reduce them to the numbers, the contemplation, and the work. It's a work that does not reduce us to our story of victimization. It's a work that requires sacrifice.
I think there will be a temptation to read things I write and react as though it's somehow abstract. I live in a country that is over-extended. I drastically reduced my bills, sacrificing presumptions of convenience and comfort. I made dozens of unhelpful, impractical, and mentally exhausting attempts to connect and be friends with people I thought could “do better.” I stopped romanticizing, sacrificing an unproductive and ignorant assumption about the power and utility of mere feeling. I've taken ideas I had about ownership or money and distilled them down into a process of how they do or don't balance with my internal sense of happiness or well-being. I sacrificed the narrative of “me alone” and look instead for how I can build my understanding of circumstance into a more robust and honest picture of the whole. Everyone should have their own sense about what they need to be doing or working in service to. It's an individual exaltation or failure, every day, every moment.
You can recognize that you are the cancer. You are a cascade of multiplying ambivalent forces eating up the resources, time or material, looking for as many host cells as possible. That's every one of your bad ideas. That's every moment of impatience and imprecise “fight” or conversation. That's each moment of ingratitude and presumption. The cancer's going to win, but ours is a story of what we were doing each day to understand it and mitigate it. This isn't something to “debate” with “another side.” This isn't something that can leave you feeling like you've won or spared feelings. This is whether or not you can acknowledge the boring deadly fact and divorce it from the meta-narrative that implicates your prejudices and pithy feelings.
By the numbers, I need more money to do what I want and support my household than what I will make scrapping or side-hustling. I, pretty much hate, my job, but I've aggressively approached it with radical honesty about its relative utility against how I might otherwise be spending my time. For now, cold hard cash speaks louder than old water heaters. I hate that. I hate it so much I've written a blog over the course of an hour to aid in pushing back me starting to work in service to that job again...on my day off, because I hate that fact at least as much as I hate the detailed day-to-day. And now you know. And I'm coping in my way with my words, and whether I stay on for another 2 weeks or 12 months, it's something I'm actively navigating, not resolved to, not heedlessly suffering, and not sacrificing my understanding of what informs that hate to paint a rosier picture than is due.
Do not let yourself be deceived. Do not follow the herd. Do not pretend like dispassionate analysis is the antithesis to really engaging in life and discovering what your place in it might be. You will not be erased by rendering things down into their component parts, you will be a pointed tool for building something only you are capable of. Use it.
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