[1143] Deep Breath In

 Ok, I’ve tried to ride it out, but shit isn’t passing.

Around 3 PM, I got a very, it would be comically sad, email with [insert client name] not even auto-filled with my name to be rejected for a job. This is boring by itself. But, I’ve worked for the state of Indiana before, and this job would have been in the Monroe County Jail. I’m speculating, but I think someone, somewhere, has marked my file in a way that prevents me from working for the State anymore.

Why do I think this? Well, it’s recently prevented me from even volunteering to be part of CASA because, “My testimony would be in question” given my voiced disapproval for what I witnessed and was subjected to as a DCS assessor. Who cares how engaging, insightful, and meaningfully contributing I was? Who cares if I was actually fucking correct in my concerns and had genuinely exhausted my options?

Let me be extremely clear for the stranger on the street. I’ve committed no crimes. I’ve threatened nobody. I’ve never violated a policy. I’ve never even cussed-out a supervisor. I’ve never raised my voice.

I wrote a letter. I was in direct communication with the head of Indiana’s DCS, we had lunch once, for months. I was sharing concerns in a deliberate and respectful manner with management up and down the chain for months. What did I get? An extreme cunt supervisor, a complicit boss above her, and broader DCS regional apparatus situated directly against me when I finally broke and wrote my letter. Naturally, it got passed around beyond who it was sent to.

I wrote about specific examples of negligence. We’re talking life and death levels of disregard. I’m not complaining that the storage closet is out of pencils. I’m upset that you’re directing me to bring police into environments that don’t require it, tell parents to escalate the drama in their home after they’ve reached out for help, or make up and over-hype allegations to paint a damming picture that doesn’t exist.

From that point on, I made the enemies list. I attempted to start my own casework company and get contracted. The people we talked to said a dozen times “Oh my God! That’s so good, we need providers! We’re lacking so many resources!” The day before we were to get a contract? Radio silence. Flooded with new paperwork and expectations and told to bid against multi-million dollar cabals that monopolize the service space. I think Laura, specifically, accounts for that.

The lies and slander Natalie was willing to put into my mid-term review I’m sure flag my state profile in some kind of way. Natalie who I worked under for 2 fucking weeks, who was allowed to “evaluate” me at the end of my 2 year rope of service in that role instead of my actual fucking supervisor who I never had even a hiccup with.

You can make the argument that I eventually threw all “professional” respect out the window, and you would be nominally correct. What you’ll have a hard time answering more completely and comprehensively is what the fuck else I was supposed to do. You won’t find me unjust in my outrage at their behavior, lack of response, and then targeting of me unless you’re built like them. I don’t think you need any particular sympathy for anyone who gets embroiled with the State to not what someone with the power to break up your family to do so in a consciously deliberate and malicious way.

One of my supervisors argued we’re worse than the police; we won’t just shoot you, we’ll drag you through hell and make you dance for us as we leverage your children.

That brings us back to today. I don’t want to work in a prison environment again. I would have found a way to put up with it for $37 an hour. I would want to be rejected from that role because I was unqualified or unfit or unreasonable. Because I’m being haunted by negligent Mean Girls shit? This brings up my existential anxiety about the absurd conditions I’m trying to operate under altogether.

I’ve mellowed considerably in my ambition and feverish drive to set examples and do the vague outlandish goals I set for myself as a younger person. What does mellow look like? Continuing to develop my house, go to 2-5 shows a week, watch all of TV, and now begin learning how to record music. I’m not too old. I’m not too tired. I’m not just so outraged and exhausted by how fucking stupid everything is to self-destruct. But my fucking god, people. It shouldn’t be this hard.

I’ve got an interview tomorrow (well, later today) for a job that won’t call itself a job, requires an hour commute, and would pay me approximately $400 a month after bills and gas. It’d be on par with plasma donation before those cash cows got stingy.

I reflexively, now, pivot to the conversation about how much bigger the world is than these petty bitches and this kind of bullshit, but I’m not sure it is. I think part of the reason I, if not us all, suffer this kind of posture indefinitely is because it’s baked in. It breeds and morphs and manifests until it’s the self-justified norm. It’s hard not to see things through the analogy of addiction having been counseling people the last couple years. The universal drug is self-righteous bullshit, and far too many are huffing away.

Happy birthday to me.

[1142] Best Friend 2

My relationship, or lack thereof, with my  “best friend” has been on my mind. I listened to a Saosin live performance where one of the band members said something to the effect of “squash that shit, whatever it is, even if you’re not responsible for it.” He was describing some difficulties he was having back in the day with the band that spoke to how long it took for them to get back together and make music.

It’s a fairly common sentiment. Put it in the past. Forgive and forget. I still think about the drunk mom at the wedding where I was a plus-one to and with strangers. “Let it go!” She exasperatingly said under her breath as I shared a short story lamenting the wasted money of college to the person I was with, not even looking or talking to drunk mom.

The “wise” awakened and enlightened place you’re supposed to arrive at goes something like this:

Life is short. You’re only hurting yourself. Are any of us blameless or without faults? Don’t throw away all that time. Wouldn’t you want to be forgiven? The good outweighs the bad.

Later, maybe 5 minutes or 5 years, it moves into downplaying, denial, and eventually pretension. It wasn’t that serious. It doesn’t matter. Who you really mad at, bro? I couldn’t live like that.

In the modern era where seemingly all the talkers and influencers fashion themselves armchair-psychologists, you hear a lot of psychology terms used incorrectly all the time. I don’t see a concept get used more often than “trauma.” The “abuse” people suffer from “gaslighting” and “narcissism” and yada yada, a ton of people have pointed out this broader point.

I prefer to think of things in terms of “taking advantage.” For most people, I suspect they would only and ever claim to be “enjoying the advantages” of whatever their relationship, family, or friend dynamics are. It’s logical and reasonable to be with someone for different things you enjoy, and provided you consistently speak and understand in those terms, there’s little else to think about. An unconscionably rich person says every day, “I’m just enjoying a vacation!”

That lack of a relationship is on my mind because I’ve been spending a considerably larger portion of my time with other friends and my dad. I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel or join a bunch of new groups. All I had to do is shift my attention towards people already in my life who have, not for a single day, taken advantage of me. They’ve supported my entrepreneurial efforts either physically or financially in ways my “best friend” never did, and still has not chosen to. They’re down for the hobbies and shows in a way that was pulling teeth or needed to coincide with established interests otherwise. I’m feeling myself looking forward in a way that doesn’t also feel wary of impending betrayal.

That’s the thing to stay conscious of. It’s not dissimilar to how I can maintain such a negative opinion and snappy things to say regarding my mom after maybe 10 or 12 years? since I’ve last spoken to her. There, in about 30 seconds, you’ll experience the betrayal of any hopeful or romantic ideals you might disingenuously maintain about reconciliation or people’s ability to change.

When you have what you’ve been playing apologetic games with for decades, it’s a lot harder to see if and when to draw deep boundaries and contrast. It’s very easy for me to describe the benefits and practical take-aways from my dynamic with my “best friend.” It’s good to have the person who will pick you up when your car shits the bed in the middle of the night. It’s good to have someone more “normal” in their professional and job prospects to get you in the door. It’s good to have overlapping senses of humor and jokes that might go back to childhood. I’m not unwilling or unable to tell the positive story of our dynamic, indeed, I was telling it for almost 30 years.

I think people even vaguely acquainted with me register a certain “hunger” and excitability I have. I spend a lot of time trying to be plugged into different realms. I can talk pretty fast, I will start a project or pursue a goal that minute, and I’ve been carrying on about my largest dreams and goals my entire life. I am primed and eager to be doing and moving every second, which carries a certain vulnerability because the wants are so obvious.

In the span of a few weeks, I’ve had one friend instinctively, consistently, support where I’m coming from in a way that my dad, Hatsam, and Wendy have and a way my “best friend” hasn’t figured out how to in going on a year and a half? This is if we’re only counting past the point where the dynamic got particularly egregious.

Now, of course, you don’t have to spend money on me or unduly burden yourself “just” to hang out. And I’d be a shitty friend if I didn’t recognize putting you in an unfair position to “meet my needs” or more accurately, squeeze what I needed out of you.

Here’s where you need the key piece of self-awareness. What do you need?

In my “best friend” dynamic, I think I can reasonably speculate that he needed license and justification. I know enough about myself to recognize my capacity as gasoline on a fire raging already. The fire may come across as subdued, colloquial, “normal,” but I promise you, my “best friend” is raging. Like recognizes like. I’m almost certain he read one of my blogs explaining the proper tragedy of what was lost between us, so he used our other friend as an excuse to call and try to capture. You know why I think that? That’s what I would do if I was still suffering what was catastrophically wrong with me and not trying to be accountable or genuinely helpful.

You know what I don’t have to speculate about? Not a single person who was also either responsible for the kid or has a stake in how my “best friend” behaves was told the truth about the extent of the kid’s behavior. When you’re willing to lie across the handful of people who might otherwise hold you accountable, you’re the one in the wrong. You’re lying to yourself, first. Therefore, I don’t expect you capable of maintaining an honest dynamic with or about me. That’s why I mostly treat people as the addicts they are.

That said, to avoid pitying and unironic pretension in reactionary turn, that’s why you set standards and boundaries. Can you behave like the people who don’t take advantage of me? Can you regard me in the same esteem that I do my friends? It’s not about the ups and downs of aggrieved feelings on any given day at that point. It’s not about encapsulating and insulating narratives to protect shivering self-conceptions and broken senses of well-being.

I have people who support me so I’m able to offer free counseling and casework services every month. I have people who are investing in me being able to learn and do more woodworking. I have people who get drunk and go to shows with me, and who will buy me dinner for my birthday tomorrow. I have people who come with me to play my hobby sports and invite me to theirs.

My own brother wouldn’t drive me 15 minutes up the road to an Airbnb before he took off on a 9 hour drive. My uncles have stolen $20,000 or more from me. My mom has weaponized every ounce of her self-loathing and malicious intelligence in artfully abusive ways. Why not my “best friend” letting his demons attempt to turn me into one of his lost-boy toys like I forgot who I am as well.

[1141] Shadow Band

There’s been a decent shift in my energy and disposition since I’ve started applying and moving in the direction of returning to work a “normal” job. My sleep schedule has gone all over the place. I’m finding it harder to focus. Broadly, “adrift” and “pensive” have me in a hole of speculation about how to conduct the next few months of my life.

At the same time, I’m still attempting to consume all of media, so it’s a continuous string of podcasts, music, and TV shows. 99% of approximately 95% of my days are spent in self-reflection/conversation with those. I have a couple people I text each day. Fleetingly, I talk to someone who operates in some professional capacity. If you’re curious, 14.4 minutes is 1% of a day. I don’t spend 14.4 minutes speaking to anyone most days nor 14.4 minutes speaking out loud to nearly anyone most days.

I get this impression, pretty often, that even when a conversation is breached, there’s an insistence to “wrap it up.” I speculate it’s because there’s an underlying fear that things will get “awkward” or someone might get the wrong impression that you, I don’t know, might become too friendly? It’s not that there aren’t the natural talkers and “everyone’s friend” types that you can run into, but it feels very accidental when that happens.

Anyway, I suppose that felt relevant to bring up when I think about the large amount of information I glean from these nerds and their podcasts. I’m struck by how often a theme emerges. We just fundamentally talk past each other.

It’s weird to me because the dance of a conversation suggests there’s a shared space or reality. But the closer you listen, or if you do so at an “overwhelm yourself” kind of rate, you realize each player is kind of doing their own thing and more or less looking for validation. I pause every time I hear someone say, “I think that’s exactly right.” Do they? Do they dozens of times throughout a conversation on whatever the topic freely flowed into?

The same thing happens when you get people on different “sides.” A Conversations with Coleman episode really highlighted this for me. Coleman strikes me as an autistic-type. He wants the facts, details, history, data, etc. and will sincerely try to explore a topic in good faith. He’s willing to entertain mouthpieces for nonsense in the spirit of actively mitigating the development of his own idea echo chamber. It’s a laudable goal, but it’s his and his alone, and the strategy for achieving it feels fundamentally flawed by inviting characters in who don’t so much care about Coleman’s ability to reach truer truths. They care about being seen as legitimate by eliciting any exchange from people like Coleman.

I think a lot about what Michael Shermer points out with regard to smart people being able to construct these extremely compelling and convoluted ways to believe dumb shit. I think people like Elon Musk and Bret Weinstein are poster children for this complex or propensity. The deeply unwise thing to do is presume that just because you’re good or accomplished at one or a few particular things, it automatically translates into broader license for drawing conclusions. Fuck, add Jordan Peterson to that poster.

I don’t think I’m getting “smarter” in my hours of listening to nerd people. Whether they criticize books, describe history, or dig into the weeds of ideological and political projects, they’re all seemingly being driven by a similar pretense. Their particular lens is worthy of your Substack subscription. Their particular insight is novel in how it compiles and describes the subject. Their experience of “this historical moment” is capable and “helpful” in getting a handle on…certainly not what we should do…but maybe we’ve laid the foundation for our next intellectual foray calling out for scrutiny and contextualization.

I’m getting this sensibility that’s empathizing with people who know absolutely nothing about politics, history, or pretty much why anything happens anywhere, and don’t feel obligated to try.

This is in conflict with my baseline disposition that, of course, sought out all of these nerds and subscribed and has been listening to for dozens if not hundreds of episodes each. But when I engage in my Coleman-esc sincere effort to not sound like a fucking moron, who am I sharing it with? My dad and 2 or 3 friends extremely occasionally? I’m not converting my time and energy spent into an infinitely regressing meta-analysis in search of my own following and Better Help sponsorship. I’m not writing digressions like these for official publication. I’m not galvanizing democratic support and solidarity to push new better-informed policy agendas. What’s going on?

My mind jumps into thinking about social media influencers, particularly the pretty ones. You can get millions of people to look at you every day by just putting your hot self on display in different outfits at regular intervals. You can be dumb. You can be naive. You can be vapid and very much a product of your carefully maintained bubble. But guess what breaks through? You’re fucking hot, and eyes equal money. It makes me think of McDonald’s. They aren’t advertising to you, they’re normalizing the very essence and idea of Mcdonald’s as food.

So, today, it’s normal to have strange hot people you scroll through with regularity. It’s normal to engage in “debate,” as though the exchange is at all concerned with what debate actually entails, or that it could be considered an exchange altogether. “Binge” became something of a badge of honor. Ceaseless professing of values and virtue signalling stepped in for civic engagement and meaningful sacrifice.

I’m also struck by how much I don’t really see a “fix,” to what I’m experiencing. You set yourself up for a trap if you conceive of something as a “problem,” more than a simple state of things or small description from your perspective. Say I want to “be more social,” so I’ve attended adult game evenings or been to hundreds of concerts and comedy shows. Do you make friends there? The performance is still ongoing. Volleyball is 35 random lonely dudes, 5 married girls, and dispositions possibly less adept at handling being alone. Softball was people seemingly seconds from changing the rules to allow drinking and smoking on the field.

Are these cunty ignorant observations of someone unwilling to even try? Maybe 5%, but they’re not inaccurate nor coming from a place of disgust or hatred. Add to the mix that I know I’m an aberrant personality who routinely and immediately turns people off to entertaining what I might have to say or joke about. Where’s “my people?”

I’ve never been good at finding a home with a group based on superficial qualifiers. I don’t feel “Serbian” despite my last name being a literal Serbian word for smoked meat. I don’t find solidarity in adopting sky-daddy ideas. I’m technically a Cubs, Bears, and Bulls fan and couldn’t tell you a single player on any team nor when they’re playing next. I’ve watched thousands of hours of “okay” television voluntarily before I’ve made myself look at a game at a bar for longer than 5 seconds. I can’t put together what they’re doing has anything to do with me. My sense of fulfillment and identity isn’t a function of group-think or proxy pride.

Different sports teams I’ve attempted to join as an adult started to drift. The ultimate Frisbee guys wanted to start taking the fun games we were playing to more “professional” levels. The dodge-ball crowd drifted to disorganized chaos. I’d also now have a built in 1.5 hour round-trip drive to most anything I might try to join, and I don’t get enough emotional or physical gratification in exchange for the gas and impending car issues to bother with a sincere pursuit or commitment.

“Disassociation” is a word coming to mind. None of it means anything. It’s all to fill the air and kill time. Whether I get fit or fat, I’ll be mostly alone to do whatever it is I’m doing any given day. Whether I know every sordid detail about Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, or Russia, or never even whisper their names again, I’m not going to speak on those subjects and “move the needle” on entrenched belief heuristics about power and identity. Even on the pages of my “friends,” facebook isn’t going to show you my thoughts and work to stay sane. It’s not a happy picture or doesn’t match your algorithm preferences. This, if it wasn’t for me, would be one more in an ironic fruitless exercise to toss more into the void.

I’ve dug myself such an isolated hole on social media, that even when I share work I do home renovating, my pets, the concerts with the artists tagged, or anything that you’d think would play the “look at me and how happy cool I am!” game of social media, I have literally never gotten more than 5 likes for any reason. The spam bots barely even fuck with me. I’m like not even part of a fucking hashtag community? I watch people get 30 likes for asking what to make for dinner.

I find these feelings, or lack thereof, especially curious because I have non-trivial and non-superficial friendships and family dynamics. They’re in no way the majority of my daily life. They play an outsized role in orienting how and why I think about how my time is spent. A perfect fool would read any part of this as some form of indictment about them or my inability to appreciate and celebrate “enough.”

But then, isn’t it the case for almost everyone to consider their family and friends non-trivial and non-superficial? Isn’t that the way we perpetuate horribly toxic and stressful family dynamics because they’ve been our Mcdonald’s for the whole of our lives and species’ evolutionary history? Our fruitless exchanges and familiar roles providing a comforting feedback loop in their predictable flavor. Do we ever get “enough” of whatever we believe we’re getting from our families?

So much of the make-up of your mind is there for you perfectly independent of whether you have the awareness or intention about it. As you grow more aware and make more decisions, it feels like an invitation to the kind of alienation I feel like I’m describing incredibly terribly from bizarre or seemingly arbitrary angles. My mind returns to my “Older woman who’s been 3 times divorced or had spouses die, has enough money, a long braid or butch cut, hiking boots, a glint in her smile, and knows what she wants by now.” Is she ever rolling 20-deep? She doesn’t need the noise or errant opinions about where to go next.

I don’t socialize like a woman. I haven’t had a vastly fulfilling professional or relationship dynamic for so long that it’s time to rest on my laurels and indulge. I’m not soliciting unwanted attention indefinitely. I’m not seeking solidarity with niche groups, co-opting a fetish or hobby in lieu of an identity. I’m also, if you can believe it, not attempting to hold people to some high pretentious standard of engagement or expectations, particularly when I’m just roaming about the world. I just don’t fit, and I never have, and I see no path to a place where I might.

I’ve been in “desperately maintain” or “work exhaustively for forlorn dream” or “see how much I can get away with before it breaks” modes my entire adult life. The attempts to build things with people are, sometimes weirdly violently, rebuked. My attempts to build competing or parallel ways are wrought with complications. If I “pull out” too far I get stuck in abstract write-forever space and eventually a deep foreboding that nothing matters anymore. Who wants that?

[1140] Bob The Builder

How do you eradicate an idea?

While I think very few conceptualize their behavior this way, I think it’s vital to understanding human history. Science is a process of elimination. Genocide is too. The goal, make it so your ideas are “proven,” insofar as they are the lines of operative behavior we follow.

Science is falsifying. You are trying to be proven wrong. Aggressive physical behavior is trying to “own” or “win.” One ignorantly asserts, the other tries to account for the consequences of ignorant assertions.

If you’re going to take the question seriously, you have to have a grounded concept of what constitutes an “idea.” This is an incredibly complicated task that, when compounded, invokes every science and often begets infinite philosophical regress. An idea can be, literally, the infinite series of forces that a determinist thinks dictate your every moment. An idea can be an amorphous probabilistic potential for collapsing through observation and choices.

To me, as neither a determinist nor sufficiently studied to grasp what it even means to really collapse a wave function, it’s appropriate to look inside. I don’t know if I’ve ever had the capacity to eradicate an idea that wasn’t simply forgotten. And then, “forgotten” is its own bag of worms depending on your understanding of how we embody and encode information.

If I’m like an elephant, and never truly forget, then how have I managed to “cope” or “move on” from ideas that might lend themselves to my undoing, if not outright death? Here we arrive at the word “incorporate.” This implicates much of the dialogue around religious and philosophical works. Isn’t god “everything?” Once you get high enough or meditate deep enough, don’t you lose your sense of individual being and simply observe how you’re embedded into the fabric of existence itself?

I’ve done enough acid and shrooms to colloquially agree with the sentiments, even if I could put on my falsifying and begrudging hat to dismiss a lot of the extra woo-woo connotative baggage associated with “transcendent“ experiences.

It’s here you can diverge wildly on ”norms“ and ”cultural values.“ My concern is about processes or ways of engaging the world and dialogue that incorporate them all. If we created an avatar for ”culture,“ and called him ”Bob,“ how could be interrogate Bob in a way that meaningfully accounted for every difference one might posit between cultures?

We can hark back to a recent blog and simply ask, ”Who, what, where, when, why“ and then watch ”how“ it plays out.

Importantly, here you have to pay really close attention. We’re treating Bob as an individual. The only individual we have any real purchase on understanding is ourselves. If we want to make broad, increasingly incoherent, proclamations about ”them“ or ”the world“ we pack a different bag of characters who more or less dogmatically align. They might align through superficial caricatured characteristics, or they might align in their apologetics, but they ultimately align to service our narrative for illuminating something about them or drawing a contrast between them and us.

If we can maintain Bob as an avatar for our own individual sensibility and culture of influences speaking to how to navigate and describe the world, we have a chance of genuine incorporation and a persistent coherent sense of our motivation. That is, if your Bob is at the mercy of dozens of different ”interpretations,“ and errant opinions, ”you“ never get sussed out and defined. You can no longer be measured against a coherent existential baseline. This makes invocations of ”ists“ and ”isms“ like ”postmodern“ and ”Marxist“ feel tempting and invigorating.

”Ok, Bob, who are you?“

”That’s silly,“ says Bob, ”I’m me, I’m just Bob.“

It’s a deceptively simple answer. It’s both exactly right and infinitely incomplete. Bob is making an existential ”I think therefore I am“ claim without pretext or irony. Bob is Bob, as far as Bob can conceive or is initially begged by the question. It’s not circular because Bob is ”all culture“ condensed and made into an avatar. Bob is a set of incorporated things conceived of in a particular way, right now, the Bob way.

”Hi Bob, so what happened?“

Never forget, Bob is all cultures, so we might infer we’re asking him to explain any/all phenomena. Whether Bob gives a bloated apologetic answer for the metaphysical, a convoluted and contradictory epistemological history, or a somber ”42,“ the answers are united by presumption. They are united by the presumption that there is an answer, the answer can be understood by the entirety of culture, and it is a just and coherent mode of existing to ask, answer, and accept the answer altogether.

By virtue of Bob’s existence at all, and any exchange with him, we’ve laid the groundwork for observing whether ideas fight or incorporate.

”Where,“ ”when,“ and ”why“ are the purview of infinite subjective apologetics. ”How“ turns us to more we can observe both subjectively and objectively.

I’ll play Bob. I can make a statement like, ”I feel terrible about the idea of returning to a normal job, getting back to a 9-5 grind, and subjecting my time and attention to a system I think is almost totally corrupt and inept.“

This is an incredibly complicated sentiment rife with assumptions, feelings, and connotative baggage that may all be entirely useless in determining what either of us needs to from it. Whatever else might be said about the statement, it’s a series of ideas born from the culture in my head. The more I can parse the ideas to their basic or simplest nature, the more I have a prayer of incorporating or understanding them.

”I feel terrible.“

This is wholly subjective. On a scale from 1 to 10, any given day of the week, this ”terrible feeling“ might register from a 4 to an 8, if the extreme ends are clinically debilitating. It says nothing about how long each 4 or 8 lasts, how often it’s a 4 or 8, or whether my ability to cope with 4 or 8 is perfectly suited to do both in perpetuity. All I know is my experience, and barely know it at that. I do not like to imagine myself under the conditions described through the rest of the sentiment. It varies how much that terribleness registers, but terrible is an appropriate approximate summary.

”about the idea of returning to a normal job.“

Here, I seemingly recognize already that it’s an idea first. I’m also suggesting there’s something terrible-inducing about ”normal.“ My cultural understanding, as Bob, thinks ”normal“ ways of behaving in the world are most often and catastrophically destructive. The terribleness is based on conversations, first-hand experiences, and the ongoing observation from my limited window into the world. My bias is informed by lived-experience and, hopefully, reliable statistics that describe why I’ve felt and observed and heard what I have.

”getting back to a 9-5 grind.“

This biased phrasing doubles down and is ever insisting that my terrible cultural feeling gets translated. Can you see the ”how“ starting to manifest? We’ve walked comfortably along the path that’s presuming the truth of my feelings, definitions, and biased phrasing. My bones aren’t getting ground down. I’ve already talked to supervisors at potential jobs about the ability to flex time.

”and subjecting my time and attention.“

The sneakiness is on full display. Here’s where I give up my agency. Here’s where I pretend that every moment is now functionally gone or donated to a caricatured catastrophe of an imagined future. I barely have my attention when I have all the ”free time“ in the world. I can barely sit still and do anything for longer than a few minutes at a time if a compulsive or deeply-interesting arrested sense doesn’t take place.

”to a system I think is almost totally corrupt and inept.“

I’m increasingly of the belief that the messiest things you say come out ”in that extra 5 minutes to speak,“ but I think it manifests in over-long exasperated sentiments like this one too. We’re invoking ”system,“ as Bob, who is ”all culture“ as though we aren’t said system. ”Corruption“ begs for an intimate understanding of how it currently operates, has operated in the past, or what a genuine alternative would do. ”Inept“ suggests it’s so bad it bothered to hire *you.*

Well guess what, as Bob, the ”sentiment,“ ”feeling,“ ”brunt,“ ”thrust,“ ”meaning“ of that statement gets eradicated through the exercise we just engaged in. Upon taking ownership of the culture in my head, and thus the one which I inflict upon the world, I can observe and interrogate my ideas to see if they make any goddamn sense on their face, let alone moment to moment, or across all cultures.

From this exercise I learn that my feelings are so messy and imprecise that they cannot be trusted by themselves. It will never be enough to compel me into one belief or another just because ”I feel it.“

It also teaches me that definitions matter. If I’m provoked by a certain word or description of circumstances, I’m obligated to ensure I’ve truly defined that word for myself and that I understand what someone else means by invoking it. ”Job“ is a huge word. It’s slightly less huge than ”culture“ or ”normal.“ The takeaway is that all words are complicated and imperfect. So the more care you take in how you employ them, the more you might get a handle on the culture you’re cultivating or apologizing for.

Finally, it teaches me how fluidly I can smuggle self-fulfilling language and sentimentality into my performative (il)logic. I’m not being deliberately or maliciously illogical, but I’m not adhering to a logical imperative that transcends and incorporates the whole of cultures encased in Bob.

So, how do you eradicate an idea?

You recognize it’s rarely, if ever, a single idea in the first place. You separate how the idea makes you feel versus what the idea is attempting to convey. You define the words the idea has latched onto. You interrogate those definitions. If and only if they are made robust you can try to exchange those definitions until they can be shared through mutually observable practice.

I can complain all day with my imprecise language, and then get and keep a job for as long as I’m able. I can decry the sickness and pageantry of performative religious morality and pious intellectual spaces, and grant broad utility or normative functionality, and increasingly so as we burrow down into the particulars of how any individual culture exercises whatever we’re presuming to have a conversation about or share an understanding of.

This allows me to say things like, ”Fuck your god, but thanks for feeding homeless people.“ In my culture, you don’t need magic sky daddies and transcendent truth for self-evidently good behavior. You don’t need rewards, gospels, or commandments to feed someone. I don’t need to reflect particularly deeply to know that I would feel bad if I were hungry, or to recall how much food I’ve personally thrown away, routinely, when I worked at a free food pantry. Hunger is easy to subjectively experience, define, and objectively fix. Give Bob food.

If Bob adopts ideas about how much he doesn’t deserve food, or how guilty he should feel as he eats because someone isn’t eating the same as he is, or how not-poisonous the food that’s clearly making him ill is - you either return to the exercise, or develop a chronic coping mechanism, or die.

If you can understand how your culture works, be honest about the details, and engage the exercise in good faith, you start to build a capacity to ask better questions and illicit better emotional responses.

Do I want to experience suffering in how I contemplate my job? No. Can I recognize when the job environment becomes ”too much“ for someone like me? Yes. Am I prepared to write/voice concerns as they arise? Yes. Do I recognize, even if it doesn’t feel like it in particularly dramatic moments, that there are always more jobs and ways to make money? Yes. Do I have a genuine grasp on the level of corruption or ineptness? No, I have persuasive and compelling anecdotes, and limited data. Can I let go of the intensity of my negative feelings and formulate better questions with each new challenging situation I subject to better defining, asking, and answering? Yes. That’s why I’ve continued to write over the last 20 years. I genuinely want to feel better. This is the work of the culture I’d like to enable and see more of.

Because Bob is ”all culture,“ and literally can’t sit in the naked contradiction and discomfort of prima facie ”personal“ or ”religious“ or ”purely subjective“ truths, if you want to be like or understand something in the same way Bob does, you have to work like Bob. You have to build mental and linguistic heuristics that attune to the colloquial missteps that are embedded in how we communicate. You have to recognize when you’re hearing or speaking in bad faith, to yourself, or anyone else.

The alternative is to suffer indefinitely at the ambivalence of your culture’s most painful and consequential ideas. Do you get swept up in fascism, wokeism, any ”ism?“ Are you chanting, screaming, or meme-ing instead of writing your own thoughts? Does your language service a doubling down on depressive and anxious axioms? Do you cultivate a culture of denial and downplaying not just the perniciousness of your environment, but the attitudes that have formed to insulate or cope with it?

Are you Bob, or just living at the mercy of the different houses he’s built?

[1139] Poof

I just had a flourish of a feeling. It was brief but palpable. It happened after I thought about securing a job, in particular, one that would potentially put me at $2,000+ a paycheck.

One of my running criticisms of people is that they are constantly looking for license. Who can’t imagine a scene from a movie, or the drama of their own life, where someone screams, “Look what you made me do!” It’s a popular-enough Taylor Swift lyric. We want to feel justified and like any given situation deserves our behavior.

This is tenuous ground to stand on. But what does having a secure-enough job or incoming paycheck provide? It’s a door to a litany of justified positions and posture. I, constantly, have “the next thing” I want to buy, be it building materials or upgrades to things I have. I psychologically moved fast food into a category of “don’t stress about this” when I was at DCS and essentially forced to eat while driving for 2 years. It was justified, in my mind, because I’m efficient, and had a job.

The feeling was a brief brazenness I haven’t experienced for months having hunkered down and cut my spending severely. Who knows what amount of Amazon stuff will flow through my doors once they say I’m hired? Who knows how many tickets I’m getting nosebleed seats for turn into closer pavilion rows. I want to be able to access a certain proud free-flowing posture with regards to funds, and that makes it something of a dangerous trap.

The job that would set that trap would be another prison/jail environment. It would require a bit of a commute. It would almost certainly be “hitting the ground running” and taking on too many clients. But, if I actually managed to refrain from jumping the gun on order buttons, I’d be out of debt in 5-6 months. I’ve made dozens of professions about my dissatisfaction about debt over the years. At the same time, it’s facilitated a fuck-ton of fun and utility. Do I have viciously competing goals, or a poor understanding of my priorities?

I want each day to be something I’m looking forward to. I can’t know for sure what the next prison job would bring, but I know an immense amount about the field. I know I can eat shit for a few months, and usually start the next job search a few weeks in. I don’t want to be in the business of downplaying and justifying, ironically then in service to more justifying in how I spend to escape my sense of dread and misery. Undue pride and boldness can be a response to that diminished sense of self and agency.

I still don’t know how to break out of this cycle. I’m genuinely trying to not let my thoughts about it eat me alive, and I don’t get the impression anyone I explain my problem to really gives a fuck or feels it in the same way. There’s something of a parallel when it comes to offering counseling services in a world where people generally only want a “harm-reduction” fix. I want you to feel confident you don’t need drugs or medication to live a happy and healthy life. You want license to maintain a perspective that’s at the mercy of your circumstances.

I don’t want to believe I’m stuck here. I don’t see the rest of my life hopping between overwhelming and unfulfilling roles entertaining people’s pathological behavior. I haven’t discovered where I might be more useful or effective. I don’t think the “comfort” I find in a paycheck helps me stay focused on the search. I would say neither does the relatively endless free time I try to provide myself, but I did just get a window installed in a wood-shop I finally put together and have been pretty aggressively yard-working. It doesn’t pay.

[1138] Free Reading

I think a foundational thing you must keep in mind if you think you want/need to “solve a problem,” is that it’s always and forever the same existential one. It gets framed as many ways as you choose to add words to it, but the floor and heart remain.

Take the series of questions, “Who, what, where, when, why?” You could view them as a winnowing down, paradoxically as they broaden, to that floor.

“Who” begins with a presumption of individual person-hood, intention, and identity. You name who it is, or at least who you think it is, and in our short-hand heuristics, many people know all that they have to. Hyperbolic political figures are simultaneous caricatures.

“What” usually doesn’t happen without “happened.” As though we immediately intuit that, regardless of the person or people involved, life is happening to us. There’s and existential circumstance that we’re embedded in, so even if you have highly judgmental opinions about the characters involved, you want to know if it’s exactly as you already thought or some new monstrosity or curiosity.

“Where” is the next broader redundancy to continue shoring up your prejudices and assumptions or contextualize an area where something might probabilistically be more likely. You mention gun violence, The United States is invoked, automatically, if you will.

“When” is deceptive, because it invokes our experience of time. Things, “in the past” get weighed differently than plans for the future. Depending on how far in the past is going to speak to varying degrees of emotional weight or insistence of consequences. There’s going to be a visceral experience of the murder or death of someone yesterday that, while it might echo with discreet acuteness, 30 years later will morph. Whether we should allow ourselves to accept discreet actions situated in methodical time helps us bleed into the infinitely unsolvable “why.”

You can make hundreds or thousands of subjective declarations as to “why.” You can adopt any religious mythology that suits you. You can offer every colloquial truism that’s ever been afforded. But neither you, nor I, know why. We presume our curiosity has an answer, and we’re no more equipped to accept it than my cats. My cats who every day do not understand nor politely accept my answers for not feeding them, letting them outside, or allowing them to sleep on me when they demand.

I spend an inordinate amount of time observing my experience. I notice the deepest contrast in the morning. There’s a very small window where upon I wake up, and I have “no problems.” Stated differently, I don’t feel obligated. I’m not hearing/listening to the dozens of things calling for my attention. I just lay there and feel like the only thing that matters is getting up to pee or slightly adjusting my position in order to keep laying or fall back asleep.

After that exceedingly small window, it starts to build. The cat wants to go outside. The water dish is filmy. The cat box needs cleaning. There’s a dish or two in the sink. I need to prepare to install a window (which is the plan for today.) The show I fell asleep to needs to be completed. I need to make coffee, and/or eat. An itch needs scratched, a pimple popped, and laundry piled up quicker than I noticed. My quick fix for some food storage is asking to be rearranged. My dinner tray is cluttered. There’s cat food crumbs scattered in a way that’s begging the ants to come back. I wonder if I can recapture the flow of my guitar practice yesterday….

And that just goes on and on and on and on until I fall asleep. Is any one of those things a “problem?” To my mind, they only thing they are unified by is my perception of them. My perception that’s informed by an endless list of things. At the top of that list I can find an answer to “why” upon engaging the things calling to me. I don’t know of any other place that I can satiate the “why.”

Who? Me. I “feel better” when there’s a consistency and logic to my space.

What? Anything that calls for my attention. I noticed, I either feel some kind of way about it or not, and then I work on or speak to it.

Where? I like having a mental map of where my stuff is that matches the physical locations. I like knowing where the centers of my happiness or contentedness exist, so when I try to pursue them it feels real and accessible and something I can remain personally responsible for pursuing or maintaining.

When? It’s always now. Tomorrow, most of the same shit is going to call to me at differing levels of intensity, but no less will they exist. I either engage or I pretend, which has consequences on my ability to access agency.

Why? Well, “things” begin to “make sense” and “feel better.” I truly think the evidence for living objectively healthy and well exists, even if it can’t be pinned to a specific diet and certainly not a particular belief system. I’m a significantly different person today having embody my living environment versus when I was dreaming about creating it. At the same time, the parts of me that created it are the same that are about to install a window. I can pretend I need something deeper as to “why” that means anything to me, or I can just install the fucker and vibe with pictures I’m going to take of it.

My universal observation of people is they’re inability or unwillingness to put together the practical and accountable steps behind their “whys.” They get bogged down in the self-serving deceptively detailed weeds of insecure egos asking the wrong questions. “Why” feels irresponsible, if not impossible, because there’s no concurrent inclination to do the work. I think people’s fascination with true crime highlights this. I’m under no illusions about how every level of depravity exists, is celebrated, and seeks justification.

Consider, you might be very busy, but it may not have anything to do with the kind of work you need to be doing. For as much access to things that I enjoy doing that I’ve given myself, I recognize I’m not finding consistently enough the level of meaningful engaging work that sustains me in the “deepest” ways. I’m, begrudgingly, a people person, so isolating is never going to sit perfectly. I’m not a people-pleaser, which means the conditions of how I engage with them need a certain set of rules or order. I think this underpins my disposition to seek positions of leadership before anyone might bother with evaluating my effectiveness.

I need to lead my own life first. I notice my sense of “desperation” rises in direct proportion to how much I “hope” and “wait” and “wish” that “someone will save me” from suffering the infinite void calling to me from a hundred different directions a few minutes after I wake up. You know when I’m never anxious? Any given moment I’ve embodied a decision to do something. This might be a missing piece from my “white coat syndrome” affliction. I allowed my decision to be there to become catastrophically ambiguous and speculative. It was no longer just the necessary next step on the road to anywhere more significant. I didn’t immediately create a new meaningful goal.

Here I need to resist a new temptation to overburden the word “meaningful.” It’s been perfectly meaningful to get the amount of work done I have over the last few weeks. It’s not dramatic. It doesn’t feel like life or death. But each thing I throw away, organize, or set up in preparation for the next day allows me to feel like I’m not betraying the infinite now. It’s like writing. In the synthesis of abstract feelings and notions with these “actual” words, acted upon my keyboard and begetting action in the world, I exist. I’m okay. It’s never and not wasted time and effort. I can find, and relocate, and reiterate the nature and process of existential conditioning. It’s the closest we can ever come to providing an answer to anything.

[1137] You Had It All

If you're seeing this, I didn't delete it after never finding the point or remote satisfaction.

The word "heuristics" is sticking in my head. If you're not a word nerd, you may not know it simply means the process or method that is "good enough" to be practical. It feels almost personal to someone like me. My living environment is mapped along a heuristic of "functional" as opposed to "aesthetic." If in doubt, I want it to work in service to one or more of my goals 100% more than I care if it looks good.

I apply heuristics when I think about conversing or arguing with people, as well as when I register that I'm being lied to. I can't meticulously go through every individual's thoughts and flag discreet lies. I can reliably gauge how or whether to approach my next question or piece of advice based on a dozen different things related to your word choice, body language, and tone. I've watched people turn extra self-conscious when I say the quiet part out loud in what I'm reading from them that informs what I'm going to say next.

I've been watching a few more interviews and drifting into "debates." Familiar themes about the pitfalls of tribal allegiances get referenced and so many times do the participants wax about "what people in such and such circles do" as opposed to just answering the fucking question presented. Even good faith discussions can't resist pedantic urges and infinite qualifiers when it's not clear if doing so even adds clarity as it contorts fluidity.

I'm skeptical of debate at a conceptual level. I think an array of ill-defined metrics need to be assumed and it's any wonder how one goes about evaluating the "benefits" or "achievements" afterwards. When you're done, does it lead to, say, enacting a new policy or provide instruction on how to change minds about a given subject? Are you sure each participant was qualified to talk on the, perhaps dozens, of subjects that might come up? Is anyone flagging logical inconsistencies and straw-men besides autistic onlookers wringing their hands and screaming at the screen?

I think you can engage in a self-evaluative dialectic exercise to something of a greater effect. Or I think you can engage in a therapeutic exercise with someone versed in helping you organize how to better argue with yourself. I can feel immediately when a question I pose to myself is going to produce, essentially nonsense, no matter how I answer. Whose "foreign policy" is better, Trump's or Biden's? It's an insane question. It skips even the idea of an accessible and generalized heuristic that you might adopt for any given country or because of specific reasons related to your country.

Maybe some years "police the world" makes a lot more sense than others. If you operate under the idea of "no war, ever," you might be perfectly comfortable abandoning Israel and letting Putin take Ukraine because "other people" or "Western values" or "irreconcilable strong-man" don't comport with your heuristic for understanding the world. Maybe you shortcut anyone from the middle east as "terrorist," so Muslim travel ban? Yes, please. Either way, it's your personal preferences, prejudices, and blind spots pretending to be evidence evaluators.

For the question to make any sense to me, I want to be presented with the list of policy decisions that were made, broken down by country, and contextualized with the reasoning or history. That's likely several books long and the reason we have career experts informing these decisions. It's also why I think it's performative and unhelpful to get two, perhaps technically versed individuals, by virtue of their popularity or propensity to talk fast, blazing on through the question in any given "debate." Do we try to "contain" Iran, or find any remote common cause with the Ayatollah? It's a better question than "Whose foreign policy…," but it still requires defining "contain," exploring how it is or is no longer working, and maintaining healthy doubt about his intentions.

I argue with myself all the time. There's a temptation to fall into a form of listless despair. I think a little too highly of myself and what I hope to achieve, so literally every moment in which I can't get a glimpse of how that person should operate, I tempt a certain kind of despotic fate. Writing about it is part of my heuristic. The dread never leaves, but it quiets and I can get back to doing one of the general somethings that keep me occupied or contented-enough. I'm always fighting with myself about what the next thing to do should be. Relax? Definitely when I'm lightheaded after working in the yard. Maybe a little when I go up north and hang out with my dad or with a friend. Almost never when I've sat for a touch too long and the white board with its lists is staring at me and my dozens of projects are screaming that I'll never be any younger and I'm not a professional "whatever" yet.

I'm under a delusion that because I've developed somewhat more consistent of principals and actions I take in service to them, and like, one day, "the world" will make sense and "get it" like I do. It's not a delusion I want or practice, it's seemingly built into my broader and base character. I look around at this space that I've had something to say about every inch of, and it continues to make the kind of sense it needs to for me and how I wish to use it. I rearrange and organize things CONSTANTLY. I try to build my space to flow with my intentionality that whips around with a disorienting viciousness. I don't think I start a single thing, ever, and just do that thing all the way through. Movies and shows? Paused and stopped, or done with Candy Crush or brushing my teeth. Weed whacking? Better stop real quick and pick up trash or fight with random thing that needs to be moved over there exactly now for some reason.

You can chalk this up to ADHD if you want, but I do have the capacity to focus, and focus extremely deeply, when I "truly give a shit." What do I give a shit about? That's anyone's guess. Sometimes it's a particular guest on a show like Real Time with Bill Maher. Sometimes it's me desperately trying to experiment with some disingenuous money-making scheme. Sometimes it's a particularly engaging discussion with someone on the brink of breaking through a particular point regarding a chronic condition. Sometimes I'm drunk and the band is playing the song I know all the words to. I hyper-focused on books I was reading as I was mining them for argumentative ammunition during the god v science years. I obsessively focused on the injustice of depraved "leadership" targeting families, and then me, at DCS.

There's a certain ironic freedom from your ego when you can make it about anything else. It's their fault. It's the messiness of "the world." It's the isms and ists. It's some born-with deficiency I insist you write off, but also never demand an apology for. I think I'm just tired of never feeling like "it's enough."

I'm staring down the barrel of another meaningless, low-paying, unstimulating, and time-wasting job. The thought alone would be suicide-inducing if I didn't have so much I enjoyed living for. Hello again irony. You can continue to live for the things you enjoy provided you sacrifice functionally all of your time in service to what slivers of it you can cut off. Give them your time, your mind, your luck, your chance encounters, and let them box in your dreams and expectations. If you let your head and heart get too big, you'll not only alienate your supports, but yourself.

I don't think I accept the implicit argument of modern life that we need something of a perpetual humbling and modesty regarding the amount of wealth floating around. I don't think we're made better when "the struggle" is over whether we can describe literally anything as "essential to human flourishing," let alone a decent basic healthy and hopeful life. We start at the question of, "Who do you want to be in debt to?" Your followers as you bank on captured attention? Your sponsors? Your overseer because your health insurance is on the line? Your hospital when you don't have said insurance? Your credit card? Predatory home lender? Info-tainment-bubble-makers?

I try not to see just an utterly foolish child when I write something like, "I'm trying to live my values." Any random reader is surely going to scoff and say, "Yeah, aren't we all, asshole?" My extreme doubt after thousands of conversations aside, we come full circle to whether or not the question posed makes any kind of internal sense as stated, and then whether it can be parsed and defined at book-length detail. What are my values? In what order? Do I value my free time more than my horrible mood and thought process when I feel trapped in a bad job? Every day? Every hour? I played my last job day by day and left consciously and deliberately when "it became too much." I'm confident I can do that again, it just feels so pointless.

I was in debt before I ever chose to get more. I'm operating under systematic heuristics that have captured our imaginations. If I do something, like live in a shed, or try to start my own business in direct competition and defiance, my projects are already under water; drowned out by the noise of opinions, egos, fears, judgments and condescending "good luck" sentiments. What I want to do is continue to access and celebrate a feeling that I don't often get from other people, and when I do, it's overwhelmingly betrayed. I keep the faith, do the work, iterate, and crave the next failure so I can learn. I get left to my own devices to do so.

But I've committed one of the biggest sins in the eyes of a system heuristic. I'm not a part of the group, the family, the fan club, or the company. My values don't map to colloquial conversation as I'm not trying to get along and fit in. In fact, I'm trying to destroy much of what you instinctively hold dear. I'm trying to live, and work, and create in such a loud way you find it fucking impossible to unhear or unread me. That's what different writers and thinkers have done for me over the years.

I can cope with failure. I can cope with chronic uncertainty. I can cope with the pain of learning curves and financial burdens. I can't cope with an insistence I performatively shit on my values. I don't care if it's in the form of polite passive aggression from someone disinclined to fight with me about it. I don't care if it's the company I work for trying to hijack my language to justify their negligence. I don't care if it's lazy policy prescriptions and laws designed to nudge you away from adopting agency or holding people accountable.

But I can only viscerally feel the hatred and remain sensitive to when I'm under attack because I want the truth to win. I want the priorities to make a certain kind of sense regardless of your born-to disposition. I want it to be easy to identify when someone is being a lying lazy piece of shit versus utterly hamstrung by a culture of myopic ho-hummers pointing fingers and neurotically rocking in anxious safe spaces. I want us all to have reliable heuristics for bloviating suicide-inducing posture that makes even entertaining the concept of fascism as a governing prospect too stupid and boring to even whisper to your best friend.

Most things don't, and shouldn't, require us to get into the weeds unless we've wholly forgone some shared notion of why we bother to stay alive. Is it to wake up every day eager to find the next person to get shitty with online? Is it to exhaust yourself with endless punditry about who's on the verge of destroying the world? Is it to work so much you tell everyone "I would, but" or you only find solidarity with a tribe you simultaneously can't escape?

I need to stay escaping. I need to feel the connection between my choices and my well-being. I will begrudge every system, of thought or otherwise, that continues to fuck me. I will also continue to strive for those feelings of possibility, stability, and sense that I can barely, if ever, find in my corner of the world.

[1136] Calculus Drift

I have a tough nut to crack. I'm really excited to see where this goes.

I just made a new friend uncomfortable. We've been talking for a couple weeks in a quasi-therapeutic way about her last relationship. We've gotten friendlier, and even less formal, and started talking about other areas of our respective lives. She just did a ton of yard work, cutting down tree limbs and making 20-odd bags of trash that can't be conventionally picked up. Over the last few days I've been pitching to my friends and family to put me to work doing things like "yard trash haul" for a "pay what you can or think it's worth" in the form of a tax-deductible donation to my nonprofit. She got stressed over whether the amount she paid was appropriate.

I'd do nearly anything for free in service to things I care about or people I enjoy or wish to help. Life bills give no fucks about that, but it's a key thing about me I wish to embody more deeply and broadly

I'm working to live a values-based life. Can I center what I actually care about as the driver of my actions, creative energy, and words? I value my time more than anything. When it's mine, I can use it in service to family, genuine friends, or hobbies and media. I value eating, and being healthy-enough, and maintaining access to information and resources that allow me to advocate or experiment.

I'm also not a dumb hippie and don't try to survive on vibes, luck, or goodwill in and of themselves. I have assets, bills, and debt. Most people in my circles have a similar circumstance. They're not "poor poor," but they're certainly not $175/hr for indulgences or inconveniences. They may not know the exact price of every food item they put in their cart, but they do know it's not going to feel great if they spend $100 more than they were anticipating. Pretty much every major issue with a car or home appliance is going to involve a credit card no matter the makeup of the suburban backdrop.

Basically, the "true value" of a dollar is constantly in flux. I've spent thousands on business experimenting or hundreds on friends just because I had it and they were friends. I've stressed out about $0.30 increases to "dollar menu" items I ate almost every day." That is, I get it. Sometimes, maybe often, you don't really have the cash to get the level of utility or help you need.

I've personally worked way too many hours that, in no way, matched what should have been the dollar amount on pay day. I also observe in a large plurality of people a propensity to work themselves to death for almost nothing monetarily, and explicitly nothing spiritually/meaningfully, only to consider it "normal." They "have to pay the bills" or "feed the kids" or "deal with it." The hard-working, empathy and care for family, and resilient values have been hijacked by our miserable exploitative systems.

Well, I don't run the systems nor am responsible for the decades of policy and psychology that molded them. I run my system. My system recognizes how captured we are, how exhausting it is, and how distracting if nigh impossible playing along makes it to live, let alone even articulate, our values. You can't trust a slave who says they "believe in hard work."

I believe I "work hard," like millions of people. I don't need to believe I have a track record of doing things well across different areas in which I've worked. I don't need to believe in how I've developed the land, or got the coffee shop, or grades, or promotions, or strength to lift heavy shit. I exercise the belief system.

I believe I would work until my muscles gave out in service to people and things I care about. I don't need to believe when that literally happened to me during the coffee shop days, or in my throbbing muscles after a day of home renovation. I don't have to believe in the pallets, bricks, and tires stacked in my yard.

I believe you should have someone qualified to talk to who you can build a long-term trusting environment from which to organize your thoughts and find relief and control. I don't have to believe in the thousands of hours I've spent listening to people, professionally or otherwise, and the sentiments they've offered in thanks or praise. I don't believe that should cost anywhere near what most people are charging.

I want people to believe in me like I attempt to them. If I'm worth $5 to you for what's "on paper" worth $175 to the company-guy you Googled and is happy to come out next week, then it's my responsibility to adjust if our dynamic is equal-enough for me. I'm not going to resent you. I'm not going to dial back my desire and propensity to work or "help." I'm not going to play passive aggressive games about what you "should" do when a "friend" or "family member" is willing to step in and save you cash. None of that bullshit.

I'm going to tell you, truly, meaningfully, what I'm trying to do and what you mean to me, and ask you to do the same. I want you to assess your circumstances and how you prioritize your time, funds, and words, and feel whether they align. It's not a perfect science, and it might even feel kinda rude and ridiculous. Here, you bump into more of my values, because I believe in honest exchange, reflection, and creating the right kinds of discomfort. If you think it's too much or too little, it's too much or too little. I know how to adjust my behavior and trust myself to respond as needed. I know my ultimate goal is to provide my time and energy as "freely" as I can engage with people free-enough to sustain the floor. I want to exercise the privilege as though I'm already wealthy, because I am.

You're taking something for granted. I think it's a whole mountain of things, but when you're as rich as we are, it's hard to remember what made us that way before "stuff" entered the equation. Before you got turned into a number and reduced to a commodity, you just more or less lived in whatever the moment was providing you like every other animal in existence. Today, you have to fight, celebrate, dictate, demand, and define in perpetuity. If you can't do it for yourself, you'll get swept up in "it is what it is," as if you know what it is.

Whether I spend 20 or 60 hours counseling or yard-working or drywalling or something else in service to someone that needs it, I want to move past the discussion of an hourly rate. Surely, I'm worth more than $5 an hour and probably no one is worth $1.9 million , right? Modern inflation-adjusted minimum wage would be around $25. In 1971, with my degree and credentials, right out of college I would have expected to make $40 or more today. Those times aren't coming back, but I don't think either of us are any less valuable nor need to pretend Bezos is a god-genius.

The consequences of income inequality and greedy corporate capture notwithstanding, my project feels all the more pressing. If A.I. does what I absolutely don't think it will do and nearly everyone is put out to pasture, won't you be left with your values? Won't the consequences of what you really believed in start to be felt in a swift and dramatic way? Millions of people give their money to organizations that butt-fuck their children because they don't value their children as much as they do the story about their place in the cosmos. Try convincing them of that, and then return to this discussion about centered values.

I like the idea of you telling me, explicitly, what I mean to you in any given moment. I'm stuck doing it by default. I was born this way. I don't know how to cry "Hallelujah!" with my finger in your kid's ass without saying the quiet part out loud; it was all about the power to ass-finger with impunity to begin with. The quiet part is we're living pallid dystopian ironically "comfortable" nightmares of shredded mental health and decency brought about through myriad forces seen and unseen with nary a prayer of how to begin "fixing" anything.

Cut through the noise. Join me for a chat. Send me on an errand. Donate $10 or $1,000 and then reflect on how it feels. Fair to you and your circumstances? Fair to me and what I say I need and want? Indicative of your values or "beliefs" in what you see me do with the money? You can always send more. I can always refund you. Regardless, it's tax-deductible, and I don't know about you, but I certainly don't think the government is reflecting my values.

I need to keep the bills paid. I want my time to be utilized in ways that are meaningful to both of us. I don't register as feeling particularly meaningful to many people, and I don't even really think that's their fault. That's just the nature of the environment we're in. I'm trying to break the environment. You're going to find it very uncomfortable, and I don't care, but in like the most caring way I can conceive and practice.