Let me tell you about a weird feeling I get. I started using this app, Habits. It, very simply, let's you create a habit you wish to practice each day, record how or whether you did it, and that's it. I've set it up to track doing 5 squats, reading 1 chapter, 1 article, and practicing music for 30 minutes a day. I have not been able to pull off those 4 things each day. More to the point, I haven't because of this sinking panicking feeling that just hit me, and does at different points in the day when I'm asked by the app if I've done one of the things.
Why would I have a flash of panic? Why would my stomach drop at the prospect of building on and forming new or better habits? Why do I feel as though I've sacrificed a sense of autonomy or ownership by…capitulating…instead of feeling empowered and in control by working my professed goals? I think there's something at the root of all misery and hell in the world related to the answers to these questions.
I don't think, deep down, we want a choice. I think we're instinctually anti-choice beings. I think that's why we attribute a certain dignity to notions of "conservatism" that practically and persistently just destroy or seek to control in the face of someone else's freedom. I think religious myths are so powerful because you are, by default, at the mercy or lack thereof in a cosmic game. When you do wrong, seek forgiveness. After all, it's sin's fault, not yours.
Rich or poor, you can subscribe to an environmental and cultural narrative that absolves you. You're the victim or the oppressed, demonize the other, justify your course, full stop every day all day. There's no obligation to really feel whatever someone else might be going through. You're not expected to learn or cross pollinate with ideas that challenge you. Even the pseudo-fight for the cultural landscape serves the same purpose for dipshit kids who think dirty looks or naughty words are "violence." You don't have to use words right when you're following the script.
I listened, very painfully, to Bill Maher talk with Candace Owens. I hate her. She's as dumb as a Dinesh D'Souza, Ann Coulter (who Bill also likes), or pick your favorite shit-smearing moron in any realm that draws press, like our newest House speaker. He challenged her to say, quite simply, that the moon landing was real. After some back and forth and chiding and pish-poshing, at bottom she said, "That doesn't even interest me." She didn't say it was real. She said he was asking her about something she's not concerned with, so it's functionally unfair or just rude to ask her for a head nod to what one might consider old-world "common sense."
She's not real, and people like Bill aren't wise to how someone like a Candance Owens thrives and navigates the world. It's not through deep intellectual analysis and differing opinion. It's through cultivating complicated-sounding bubbles of self-serving ignorance. You dress it up by being polite to people who tolerate you and then if you carry on long enough you start to get a veneer of legitimacy. Put out 10,000 podcasts, it doesn't really matter what each one says. There's 10,000 of them, so that counts for something, right? There must be a deep point to a personal truth in there somewhere?
I don't just want to practice, or read, or do a paltry amount of exercise. I want to live as though I have a real sense of freedom to engage in fun activities not at the end of a desperation gun. I think about school. School was fucking annoying. There are a million fun things to learn and do in school that don't feel fun or like you're learning shit. Why? Your teenage brain doesn't turn on until noon. Your teacher is an asshole. You're surrounded by other idiot kids. It's presented at a pace and in a way that may or may not jive with how you best learn. The background condition is a set of societal expectations that have nothing to do with how fun or cool science might be, or useful math might be, or how you could have better gotten into a gym routine before your bloodwork read "pre-diabetes."
My mind shoots reflexively through all of this. I don't necessarily have particularly bad habits. I don't tend to make excuses verses push myself to do the harder things. But I feel desperate. I feel like I'm mocking myself and the life I'm desiring. It also feels like I'm ceding something regarding my autonomy. I really want to just sit here, watch my shows, and go to bed. I want it more, in this moment, than to practice rudiments on the drums or Sum 41 songs on my guitar. I want it more because of that hopelessness and exhaustion that kicks in, because the more I talk about it, the more I want to practice. The more I unpack the feeling, the real sense of identity, motivation, and satisfaction starts to creep in. There's no dread or hesitation, but I have to dig.
I can't help but to tie this to thinking about addiction. You're not addicted to the drug. You're just not. I know your body has sometimes life-threatening physical attachments to it, particularly with alcohol, but you, as a person, as an individual, have an instinctive conservative reflexive narrative that keeps you locked on what is familiar, comfortable, and naively self-affirming. It's only validating that single sliver of your desires or potential. The sliver that wants to maintain a sense of control. So you feel "no" regarding any change, not just the kind that might make you better or push you towards a professed desire.
I've been thinking a lot about how to approach the next few weeks. The shows are winding down. I don't have a job. I still need to make about $12K. I have business goals and expenses looming. The weather is probably going to get shittier. I can feel a certain kind of lifestyle speaking louder to me. It's working considerably less. It's working from different areas of the country or world. It's making something more akin to the bare minimum than it is stressing on how to maximize profit. In the rush of all I feel I need to do, I'm consciously trying to be slow and deliberate so I don't desperately say yes to any new obligation that seems like it will satiate the familiar momentary panic.
I need to get out of social work completely, I know this. I need to stop juggling hundreds of pieces of disparate drama and repeating myself with regard to better practices. It doesn't matter if I'm good at it. I, personally, have nothing to back up how good I am other than the "fluffy" comments I get from people. I have had ZERO come to me after groups beyond a couple texts that have not been followed up. I knew that would happen. People don't want to get "better," they just want to find a new "familiar" or sense of "safety" with whatever it is they're presented with. The Suboxone or the routine and dance of "harm-reduction" does the heavy lifting. I plugged into the Groups routine and toyed with people's levels of comfortable. They didn't plug into me seeking the discomfort of what it takes to change and own and account for the things I'm attempting to.
You hear people profess to "thrive in chaos." That's shorthand for, "I've figured out who and how to exploit in my circumstances to feel stable again." Someone, or several someones, perhaps needy co-dependents, "love" to "help" and account for your chaos. Mutually assured stagnation, self-justification, and personally riotous [hear: "righteous"] truth.
So often my thoughts turn towards how I'm getting fucked, or how something could be a little bit better, or what it would take to convince a "reasonable" person to shut the fuck up during a movie or concert. It's a trap. We're not on the same planet. We don't have the same words. My priorities or goals or questions or jokes do not make sense in the context of the vast majority of people's worlds. They have their personal newsfeed now. They have their information silo. They have the culture of whatever excruciatingly small pocket of their world to draw from. Superficially, you can entertain them or sell them things, but they aren't there. Whatever you're practicing or attempting to show off or relate to can't be done in return. It's just not there.
I think about how the dynamic between me and Byron broke down. I used to be able to rely on what he said. Then, he started drifting into how "normal" people talk. "Hey! I've got this opportunity!" In reality, he's got this liability he wishes to foist the responsibility of onto everyone but himself. He doesn't want to man the food kitchen? Hire Nick under the guise of creating an on-site services coordinator. "You're my best friend, I'm looking out for you." He adopted the language of "best friend" to obscure the series of selfish acts and slights. Every single thing or connection or chance for growth or betterment presented by Byron turned into something that cost me money, a lot of time, or energy spent spinning my wheels and planning or learning for nothing. I occupied this "chess piece" thing in his head that he could wind up and move around, but never be viewed as a king in his own right with his own board. So goes everyone that heedlessly takes advantage and makes excuses and loses sight.
Hussain bemoans all of the "promises" he gets when he applies for a job, and every single one falls through. His clients blow the same bullshit smoke up his ass that mine do, and when he goes to follow up, gets frustrated when they don't answer or follow through. It's the ubiquity of the human condition. I don't know what percentage of "things I say" you'd need to match to "things I do" for it to be at a level that feels individually responsible or trustworthy, but my gut tells me most people are at less than 10%. Why? There's no expectation to be consistent. Your job is a psychological place-filler for that much less personal responsibility. You just have to follow orders. Be they to pollute, take-advantage, lie, stay silent, or kill. You play a certain role in your family. You structured the expectations of yourself around various perceived authorities or professed wisdom.
What are you to do, as an individual with a claim of awareness or meager attempt at diagnosing layers of our innate condition and ongoing conditioning? What am I supposed to listen to when it's not your god, your thought leaders, your pop culture icons, your politicians, educators, or pretty much anyone in too much authority acting in their capacity as an expert at maintaining their power and their narrative relative to all others? I certainly can't always trust myself. Myself wants to panic-pause me away from drum practice.
I have to listen to the flourishes and fleeting moments where someone seems to sound like me and explore why. I have to listen to the violent grading of gears operating against each other when your actions betray your words as they pertain to our friendship, your perception of my work, or professions of our allegedly shared values. I have to listen to the random lines I might hear from a TV show, song, performer, or overheard-at-lunch that give me pause and make for some bizarre inspired connection or insight. If I can't get that to congeal into practicing the goddamn drums, reading the book, or making the next miserable phone call to find an angle on the business I want to start, you shouldn't trust me. You have to be able to recognize and find the willingness to do the same work, or you'll never see mine.
I'm skeptical without getting conspiratorial. I try to use reason without pretending it has every answer to every question. I prefer to say "I don't know" instead of fill in the blank with magic answers. I demonstrate respect, often, through silence. I'm direct, and rude if necessary. I'm willing to entertain counter-narratives to my worst ideas about you if we spend too much time together and you talk too much. I'm open to being wrong, but I don't meet people willing to speak the language of humility and doubt. They'll perform it, but they don't work and feel it. I'm not wrong because you say so, or feel so, or are "just not interested in that" like a Candice Owens struggling to acknowledge the moon landing. I'm wrong when you can state my position, develop your own, and contextualize us both.
If I'm tempted to make sweeping declarations about "culture" or "humanity" it's after taking in the examples people set under many different and seemingly disparate conditions. Every single job I've worked has betrayed it's "mission statement." Almost every single "friend" I've had has needed to be reduced to superficial acquaintance or straight hateful bad influence. I watch people constantly torture themselves with their "dream self" and no, literally none, means of achieving it. Whether they're comfortable with the familiarity of their misery or luxury, I think it's the same mechanism. The Offspring line, "That's okay because I like the abuse," just came to mind. That song goes on to celebrate eventually getting to take advantage of the girl who was doing it first. Low self-esteem serving it's function on both ends.
I have so little power and am constantly getting taken advantage of. I get fucked financially. I get fucked professionally. I feel like I've pissed off the exact wrong people in the past and that's found a way to follow me for years. I can step into environments or conversations perfectly neutral and in good spirits, and in 2 minutes find myself getting yelled at over someone's perspective of my behavior or commentary. It will absolutely never matter who or what is "right" in those scenarios, just that I triggered someone to emote and my unwillingness to reflexively capitulate and share their pain will register as me doubling-down. Again, I'm the other, the monster in their narrative, the thing they can be justified in feeling anything about.
Now say you're a normal person who hasn't articulated all this out so far. You have the same sense about you. "The world" is out to get you. You're incensed and averse to their "judging." How do you cope? You actually double-down. You actually get more selfish. You look to control and constrain your perspective in a desperate race to the bottom. I am and do get routinely taken advantage of, so do you. How bad do you need to make yourself feel about that to justify maybe controlling your partner or child or lashing out at your parent or friend? I've gotten accused of heinous shit and looked at like I'm masterminding manipulative games. How about you? What assumptions do people build into your character that fuels the ways you rebel or bite back? Literally every word, body movement, or detail of your misery-inducing environment becomes a piece of the personal apologetics handbook if you want it to.
I'm going to continue to fumble forward and fuck up every possible angle there is to fuck up. I'm going to look over the sea of cars and lights and millions of narratives I can imagine from my plane seat and try to continue to identify the ones that don't get us all killed or leading hateful and spiteful lives regardless of how "real" their capacity to stoke our sense of dignity or pride in their expression. There's literally an infinite amount of ways to organize these words, let alone the hundreds of thousands that have came before just from me. Are you reading and hearing what you already know? Is that why you skipped this one?
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