[1193] Housekeeping

Round and round we go.

The reason I take any job is because the alternative reaches an unsustainable turning point. Whether or not I can maintain the kind of fire that sustains entrepreneurial efforts, I still maintain a value for my time that keeps me investing and trying to protect it literally until the last moment where things break. I didn’t dream about being any one of the 20 or so roles I’ve occupied since I was 15. I’ve only modestly enjoyed the perks of privileges that come with each one, and certainly have dozens of pages detailing each nuanced way in which they’ve exhausted me.

It looks like I need to, again, leave a position. I’ve only been here since November, but the cracks showed themselves immediately, and the friend who got me in the door exposed them even deeper. With her now on the way out, the groundwork I was laying to try and turn the job into something I could invest in is functionally dead. What I’m struck by is her perspective, because it so closely mirrors my own across all of my work environments, but it seems to be like a shock or something new to her how she’s been treated and what she’s been met with from her colleagues’ dispositions.

I’ve grown to expect unyielding complacency, excuses, double-speak, placation, condescension, failing-up “leadership,” resentment, undermining, and given I work primarily in fields dominated by women, enough gossip for 100 terrible TV shows. My friend, apparently, has only worked in supportive environments who allowed her to use her brain and skills in ways that could meaningfully contribute to her former work environments. She’s got plenty of general life things on her plate that are well worth her attention that would make any amount of the bullshit she's received acutely painful, but it still feels like it’s even moreso, or like she’s been experiencing a depth of betrayal akin to what I had with college.

Because I took this job out of desperation, I’m not heartbroken about the prospect of leaving it, but it just reopens the wounds that had me desperately searching for any job to begin with. I felt a tingle of panic earlier today at the prospect of returning to the thousand-spam link job boards and wasting hours of my life applying to incorrectly-described jobs with ambivalent leadership and high turnover. This job I’ve described as a bait-n-switch, and my experience is shared by many who have occupied my role and others within the organization. I’m a babysitter, full-stop. And I’ve got people who make it their job to try and dress that up while punishing those who would call for maintaining a standard or growth mindset.

Is it “easy?” Everything is easy if you can shut off your brain and do the arbitrary self-inflicted wounding necessary to meet their demands. Is it “worth it?” I do prefer having an incredibly little amount of money versus zero money, but of course it’s not worth it. If I wasn’t born into this system, it’s not one I would have chosen for myself, and the sacrifices we culturally perpetuate as matter-of-fact I’ve rejected from the moment I could choose drug studies for cash and to live in a shed-house.

Each new work environment I occupy helps round out my perspective as to why “things” work or don’t. Most of the time, I have absolutely no one with any power or inclination to change anything to even discuss the prospect of doing so. I’m about the only person who can even pronounce the word “union,” let alone feel any type of way about what organizing would or could mean. If I do find someone approaching my headspace, they’ve often got their own emotional baggage or family obligations that preclude any appetite for risk or consequences. They’re smart, say, but that also makes them anxious and depressed. Invariably, they’re “normal” with normal expenses and obligations like affording the medicine that allows them the ability to keep walking their psychological razor’s edge.

Here, there was a chance. A slim one, but a chance nonetheless. It was predicated on using the full extent of our respective positions of power to begin saving money and making moves with the blunt instrument of numbers and story of consequences when you actually follow policy. The “stuck” corporate-speakers and dead-eyed overwhelmed or incompetent middle-managers who would disrupt it could have been over-ridden by my friend. Without her, I’m again a baby fish swimming in murderous shark waters of the stupid, unwilling, and afraid. I’ve laid a lot of groundwork with my people about how things could be, and demonstrated the effectiveness of my perspective at my individual site. It’s over-stating to say it might amount to “nothing” now, but it feels that way.

At scale, we’re also at this inflection point culturally. Are we going to stay and fight? Are we going to resign ourselves or the business-as-usual chaos of those incidentally in charge of the “most feelings” they’ve violently weaponized against all sense and order? It’s hard for me not to mourn any loss of potential where I’m a player in the game, but it takes on an extra brutality when I map it onto why “things” at the cultural level feel like they’re in perpetual failure. Again, my curiosity about my friend’s experience shows up. What has, so far, been so insulated from the decline? Or is it perhaps just easier to mask in different settings? Me doing “poor people” jobs meant I never got too much of the hoity-toity posture as part of the culture I was working within more than from its “leaders,” forever in quotes. The types that all read the same 4 most popular business books about how to be a Good Human Manager.

I ran from my computer today. I went and got food and parked in my work parking lot hours early to listen to podcasts and write this. I don’t want to feel marooned looking for work again. I don’t want to spend months endearing myself to a new crop of listless and dejected chit-chatters who have no fight or broader sense of responsibility to themselves or the world. I don't want to tuck another crop of names and faces into a, “I’m sorry I don’t remember you even though we saw each other every day for months” folder. Because at this point it’s hundreds of clients or co-workers who would never text me on a friendly level or to do anything like eat or bowl.

I'm destined to keep looking. I refuse to be the person waiting for someone like me to show up. Those "nice-enough" or "well-meaning" husks who would be just as content following the mind-control of a Tiktok algorithm as they would whatever you propose. There's a ton more to say and this has been incredibly rushed, but I need to go.

[1192] Babble Babble Bitch Bitch

I need to try to identify another pattern. A few days ago I felt I had good examples at different scales of what I was looking for. Of course, I got busy or distracted, and now I need to try and claw away what I thought I had from my latest mental fog.

I’m often curious about “transformation” or “evolution” in people. Elon Musk is someone I felt immediately drawn to when I first saw him on like 60 minutes back in college matter-of-factly talking about what society needed to do to not kill itself. As someone who considers himself an adept reader of people’s bullshit, I didn’t sense that he was coming from anywhere insincere, and at the time, the proof was what had so far been accomplished at his companies.

Jordan Peterson also occupied a prominent spot in me being interested in what he had to say or how he arrived there. There’s hundreds of hours of him not being a Christian or fascist apologist, notably, before his star began to rise out of control and the peaks of his illness were reached.

In my life, I reflect on what brought me together with girlfriends, my best friends, work cohorts, or what I thought constitutes my family.

We’ve gone through, at least a rhetorical revolution, as it pertains to the fluidity of identity, the loci of power, and the nature of harm or what will save us.

Meanwhile, I feel like I’ve, overwhelmingly so, pretty much staid the same. That isn’t to say I haven’t “matured” or “tempered” or found ways to better emotionally regulate. It doesn’t mean I’ve continued to fight as vociferously for causes or actions I was particularly naive about. It just means my broadest lens has focused around the same things in spite of my environment.

There’s something that feels stable in me that I don’t recognize in the same way from other people.

The thing I do recognize in others is what we’re witness to from the likes of Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk, or our exes, but specifically the ones that, on paper and emotionally, made the most sense. The nature of the transformation feels almost impossible to account for, and people seem to only try decades later or after all the major players have died.

The word that keeps creeping in is “honesty.” The nature of the change I believe has to do with how you understand that word. I think most people understand it as some extension of the phrase, “Your feelings are valid.” It’s a very complicated and disingenuous phrasing that hides its arbitrary redundancy. I would say instead, “You have feelings.” When I see people struggle with what to do with their feelings, it’s often they wish to automatically suppress and obscure them. Perhaps that first phrasing is trying to make a persuasive argument that ignites your capacity to feel them altogether. I don’t know that it’s working.

I honestly don’t believe Elon Or Jordan started evil. I think they believe they are “deathly” honest. I think I had the same complex when I was younger, thinking “harsh” or “real” expressions of my opinion were the same thing as being honest. I would apply one exacting mode of determining the “objective truth” of a situation, and let the consequences be what they may. I wasn’t feeling necessarily insecure or scared or much of anything at all. I just didn’t care, because I was “right.” I wasn't prepared to accept, let alone be interested in embodying, the depth of my existential ignorance.

I think each step on the path to evil is the avoidance or ignoring of your conscious. You avoid and ignore by leaning into emotional expressions that act as justification. Whether it’s John Oliver tearing up on air, Jordan Peterson’s snarl, or your car-ranting TikTok star wanna-be, it’s the same dance away from what a more honest and accountable expression would look like. I think Elon knows the math doesn’t add up in crippling federal institutions for anyone but himself. I think Jordan knows it’s an embarrassing fascist inversion of the X-Men to compare them to Trump acolytes. I think the daily devotional resigned sentiments offered to me about the nature of a work environment, the future, or our responsibility to fix or work differently are driven by the same mechanism.

I don’t get the impression people know what they can trust about themselves. Or, they only trust the worst things about themselves. Or, they only trust their woefully incomplete conception about how the worst things about them actually play out. They know their anxiety is going to win. They know if they try they’ll fail and it will all have been a waste. They know which thing after thing doesn’t matter. They know they’re going to get too tired, or distracted, or someone in their life is going to object and dissuade. I’ve had thousands of conversations about what isn’t possible or what someone isn’t really like or capable of for every one about limitless potential for anything besides chaos.

I feel they’re all fundamentally dishonest. I think we’ve achieved our current levels of decadence because critical masses of people dragged perhaps their own predilections to lie to themselves kicking and screaming into a future they otherwise believed could be worked and fought for. I don’t think that internal investigation or discussion even has to do with the future. I think it has to do with asking yourself, what else are you missing from “right now.” What isn’t making its way into your conversation that’s just as true as the details of your complacent or complicit rut?

I think for Elon there’s a discussion about compulsivity, the coldness autism can inspire, and the danger of ego. I think for Jordan it’s his desperate longing to fit into something greater than he’s achieved through being an intellectual or via accident in bonding with his wife as children. I think he knows his story isn’t remotely typical or realistic, but he sounds so sure of himself when he’s excoriating modern attitudes and practices, no? At home, it was fairly easy for me to see the differences in disposition and, let’s say moral core, as to why a relationship wasn’t going to work. With family, I can see the placating apologetics employed to keep the peace. The catch-phrases at DCS and now the YMCA are all to do with “care” and “safety” devoid of discussions about demonstrated betrayals.

Capital or attention-based “success” is a unique form of capture. We’ve never had the kind of chance to transcend the lanes we’re born into that we do today, and we’ve never been able to witness the transformation so closely. Mostly, we’ve just been captured by our family, region, or work culture. Now, with so many new avenues competing for our attention and our unwillingness or inability to articulate how they work, I think we default to angry ambivalent animalistic survival modes of expression. That’s “me and mine.” That’s apologetics for sin. That’s cliches and average days because nothing more could or should be expected.

You can go back to my first writing, deeply emotional and angst-ridden 15-year old me lusting and confused and still find the things about me I consider my stabilizing core. I tread in obscenity and trying to be light-hearted. The title is:

“If You’re A Girl You Better Fucking Read This”

I’m curious and constantly asking questions.

“Okay, so this is like a call-out for the inner workings of the womanly mind.”

I’m responding to what I see as a self-destructive pattern.

“Over and over, I talk to my friends who have been in relationships that do nothing but fuck them square in the ass, and despite my warnings and suggestions, they still fawn over the assholes that fucked them over.”

I’m offering concrete examples of the behavior I think is wrong.

“If your boyfriend makes you cry, orders you to do things, or makes your friends and family uncomfortable... leave his ass now. It's plain and simple.”

Today, I stop being so prescriptive, and have had hundreds more interactions with people about domestic violence or emotionally manipulative dynamics, but at bottom, it speaks to a core belief I don’t think is unreasonable. It’s not evidence of a healthy dynamic to me if that’s the nature of yours.

I continue to lay out my “answers” and “harsh truths” about 90% of guys being in it for the pussy, and attempting to anticipate the feedback that often comes in from questioning girls as to why they’re excusing something.

I didn’t know the word “limerence” back then. I wouldn’t have copped to the writing being a passive aggressive way to trigger some form of introspection in my targets or side-building as I looked for ways to air dirty laundry. I knew my feelings were intense, I didn’t know how to address them, and it was occupying my thoughts in an unsustainable and compulsive way. Something broke, so I started to search through writing. I didn’t find a way to talk her into dating me. I found the world of information that wasn’t yet informing how I could understand myself against or in service to that world.

The fervor and fascism of pop-cultists and apologists rides the kind of energy I was on at 15. It’s totalizing. It’s self-reinforcing. It’s an artificial motivation bred from untempered inarticulate ignorance. It’s probably where the wisdom of “hate the sin, not the sinner” comes from and why so many are compelled by the idea that they have to give up their pathological behavior to something external. What’s juicier than the idea that the absolutely necessary sacrifice to find salvation is His problem, not mine?

I had to give up being “convinced.” I had to stop pretending I knew the truth in any form that I wasn’t actively manifesting or participating in. As long as I work, then the “deepest” or “most practical” truth is that I will more likely get the consequences of that work. If I’m working on the wrong shit, I will compound my problems. If I “believe” that which I’m unwilling to fight for or achieve, I’m playing a rhetorical game with myself in order to avoid responsibility. If I’m unwilling to define the nature of that work, from writing, to advocating and speaking at all, then I’m at the mercy of the people or plans that can account for my chaotic drag on the future.

No one is coming to save you. I don’t think you could recognize who’s even trying. They also can’t hammer for you what you need nailed to a cross. It’s not immigrants or trans people. It’s not the concepts of diversity, equity, or inclusion. It’s whatever is keeping you from being consistently curious, concerned about those getting fucked with, or capable of building the case that doesn’t depend on how passionately you can scream or cry through it.