What does it take to "genuinely believe" in something?
We hear things all the time. We say things constantly. We've developed entire systems of law trying to parse how much we "really meant" to do the bad thing. We claim "deeply held beliefs" reflexively and defensively.
I consider myself a deeply skeptical person. There's a deep and abiding irony about that, because to a lot of people I come across exceptionally arrogant and sure of myself. To my mind, they're reacting to a scrutinizing methodology more than accurately diagnosing me. At the same time, I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be skeptical, and the curiosity I lead with often registers as a threat.
I ask questions. I ask a lot of questions, first of myself, and then about the world around me. I get very few answers, but the ones I do tend to be consistent in their character and patterns. I don't land on "right" and "wrong" very often, but if I do, it's because it feels like the answer starts to exist well beyond my opinion of the situation or my feelings. Racism? Wrong, full stop, all the time. Not jokes, actual racism. Actual discriminating behavior based on innate superficial differences is an artifact of our fear-based animal natures, not some defensible thesis to be debated indefinitely.
Yet, you see how I allow for racist jokes in my reasoning? Surely, I'm aware that modern discourse pushed heavily to regard words as violence. "Normalizing" probably popped into your head. And slowly, but surely, the drift starts to happen. The ambiguity of words, intent, and primacy of our subjective experience of the cultural landscape takes over.
Think of the implications! The slippery slope. Am I so dismissive of your lived experience!? To me, we arrive at several answers to several questions in this moment. People will assume your intent. People will react. People will draw dozens of conclusions in a catastrophized vision that summarizes your entire being and the state of the world. Do they genuinely believe in these moments? I don't think so. I think there's real consequences to contend with and behavior they'll engage in that can't be ignored. But I remain skeptical that your reactive self is your believing self.
I think we under-appreciate and are not that aware of how often we're reacting. It's why we feel helpless so often. That's a real reaction to circumstances that haven't been articulated. We haven't seen, heard, or felt our power, so as a consequence we start to believe we have none. We're abused children, battered wives, or otherwise cogs in abstract machines and isms.
I've felt decently politically helpless my entire life. I live in Indiana. No one has cared about the environment here. No one cares if there's money for a good education and teachers. No one's bothered to pressure businesses to pay workers fairly or make healthcare accessible. This state has nearly criminalized labor organizing entirely. I'm pushing 40. My whole adult life is hearing, "It is what it is," about every problem under the sun. You put your head down, work harder, focus on the little things, and move on.
That's psychologically insufferable for someone like me. I don't accept your flaccid reaction. I don't accept that I can't find a way. I want to fight for what I know does or can exist all the time. I'm stuck deeply skeptical that "the world" will bother to stay together moment to moment, let alone conform to your typical cliche truisms at the mercy of your uninterrogated perception. You didn't even ask what could be.
Whether you read one or 100 self-help books, they will boil down to "act." Do something. Move in the world, little by little, consistently, and you will start to see, hear, and feel something that contrasts with how you've been conditioned. Take the small walk. Deliberately smile. Put on the show you enjoy and consciously sit down to take it in for that 20 minutes or hour of your day that can actually feel like it's yours. Agency takes practice. To practice agency, you need to recognize and concede how often you're not acting like the agent of your own life.
Conservatives take this sentiment too far. Liberals, not far enough. This is why both are necessary in active healthy debate over debatable things. I can't decide tomorrow that my job, any job, should pay me enough to live like the middle-class lifestyle of my parents. I'm not rabidly inclined to hoard my privileges or legacy because of my poor preferred judgment about poor people.
I'm someone who likes to employ the words "first-world poor." I have a lot of stuff. I'm healthy enough. I have a degree. I'm fed. I have a support system. I indulge and try to invest at "my level" of, technically, poverty. What do people believe about me when I'm dropping off their DoorDash order? What does "society" believe of someone who is unmarried, chaotically organized, and boasts of watching every episode of thousands of TV shows?
Catch the framing drift? Catch the assumptions?
I'm society. DoorDash is an inelegant solution to several systemic and practical problems. I can count on one hand the amount of marriages I'd consider flirting with "healthy." Does it matter that most of my TV watching has occurred between 9PM and 5AM at twice the speed and often while I'm doing other things simultaneously?
The agent that is me is choosing how to spend his time, and often choosing differently than the defaults the moment they become viable. You call me to hang? I'm out the door. There's a show in Chicago? See you in a few days, cats. Something needs built? I work until I physically have to stop.
I've been as critical of A.I. as anyone. I've played with it here and there, thought it was shit and over-hyped. It got better. All of a sudden, in spite of what I feel is still derided as "vibe-coding," I was able to create things in my mind's eye that had practical application to my life. I've tried to get my music organized for literally decades. I built a music organizer that 15 different ones haven't been able to accomplish in a couple days. I wanted a better way to track the 200 or so comedians and musicians I've been following for the last 5 years. It became real. I have calendars based around where I live or if I'm around Chicago that show me every pending show I could go to. It's not "hard" or that "complicated," it just didn't exist yet how I wanted and needed.
What I learned in creating those I started to apply to civic-mirror.com. It's my latest bid to demonstrate what I think. When you're someone that asks a lot of questions, you can create a lot of problems for yourself. When you plug that process into "politics" as a broad catch-all idea…well, good luck to you.
I know, from my own life, the power of my agency. I've built my own home. I've started businesses. I've gone to 439 performances over the last 5 years. I can, and do. That agency is betrayed often. It doesn't matter what I can do, I exist along with other people and in environments that undermine it. The distinction is real. I don't let myself off the hook. I respect what's fucking me.
A.I. is the latest testimony I have of what happens when what I think I can do is functionally unrestrained. It has cost me more money than I realistically have. It has resulted in me feeling light-headed and "behind" or like it's never "enough." But it's a real living example of me trying to fix what I think is broken created, exhaustively, the moment I found the path to try and do so.
There's a significantly painful thing about being someone who does things or tries to create things. "No one," seems to appreciate the struggle or what it has "really taken" to get as far as you have. I'm going on 3 months of almost constant "tending." Learning how to navigate the A.I. drift. Learning the back-end infrastructure to make the features I want work. Finding ways to pay for it. I had it print a list of "problems solved" that is several hundred entries long, mostly forgotten, because there's a hundred more staring me down. I've worked on it while door dashing and eating Easter dinner. It's working right now as I type.
Another answer I find in a regular patterned way is, "Oh, cool," or "that's nice," or "you should…" or "why didn't you…?"
Even if, presumably, people have felt like me, can see the utility, can flirt with the hope of a meaningful difference or change, they still don't access their agency. There's a distance. There's an instinct and a reflex that they are already too-taxed, too-tired, too-busy, and this, too, is more than they can handle or deal with. Do they truly believe that? I don't think so. Anymore than I think they can't afford to come with me to the $10 show, that they haven't in 5 years. Anymore than they don't have the time to watch the 20 minute episode.
What you do, or especially don't do, becomes who you are. You are training yourself, every moment of every day, to believe that you don't matter, can't choose, and can't manifest what you think and feel needs to exist. In woo-woo land, I think "anything" exists precisely because of whatever you may wish to describe as that creative force. For "spiritual" people who want to terminate at an undulous and diffuse "god," why not? For excuse-ridden ideologues who bemoan the concept of "god" to judge and replace personal responsibility? Go fuck yourselves.
Because none of us can ever know what someone else "truly believes," we're left with what they do. I build. You can't argue with that. I try. You pretend there's a real "you" in their playing devil's advocate and picking stupid fights to some discernible end. In reality, as far as we can share it, you're defensively lying and reacting in lieu of exerting your own agency.
I see this in addiction, whether your problem is work-a-hol or alcohol. I see this in your sentiments about "politics" or "the world." I see this in the reticence to try and fail and sacrifice. I see this in stuck ruminated narratives about obligations and standards you hold to such an extent they become weaponized against you. Maybe your "care for a family member" is at the heart of what's destroying you. Your "work ethic" is ripe for the exploitative capitalist preying indefinitely on your nature. Your "exhaustion" has nothing to do with the nature of your tasks, and everything to do with the inability or unwillingness to figure out if you're really choosing, or would really choose them altogether.
I sacrifice a lot of otherwise "comfort" or "normalcy" in service to what I believe in, which leaves me often alone or feeling alienated. I can usually recognize a good parent from afar when it's clear how much they give up to ensure their kids are in as good a position as they can make them. I can feel that, "What the fuck is up with this guy?" in practically everything I do or say about how I live or what I think. But I can manage because I'm just navigating reactions, not hearing what anyone genuinely believes. I find this incredibly sad and a lonely place to be.
Thankfully, it's not "everyone" and it's not "always." I have people I care about and they care about me, and they don't just say so. I have people who are thoughtful and intentional, sometimes, often, or more often than not. I have examples they've set and histories I can rely on when my own story starts to feel acute or wobbly. Do I genuinely believe they care about me? I don't have to, anymore than I have to argue about what is or isn't racism. There's a transcendent reality I feel and appeal to that doesn't waste time reactively undermining what's consistently demonstrated.
When my "best friend" consistently undermined my trust in increasingly escalating ways, I stopped engaging. It wasn't a faith-based relationship. It wasn't, "But 25 years!" It was, you stopped holding your end of the bargain, and changed your behavior. He, unlike a lot of people, knows better. His relationship, truly, didn't change towards even "me" per se, it changed towards the truth. I'm not going to sacrifice myself in service to people who unburden themselves from telling the truth. You can be confused about the truth. You can wrestle with the truth. But you can't forgo it entirely if you're going to get anything from me. There's no "But my subjective experience!" sympathy over here. Did you start with a lie? Yes? Cool, go fuck yourself.
I'm the kind of person who wants "the world." I want "everything" to be "better." I want to clean up the trash in the drainage ditches along Cline Avenue because it's there and I can and it should be cleaned up and the dozens of people who threw trash out of their window are wrong and lazy and ridiculous and will be for the rest of time. But also, that we don't have a system that reliably pays someone a livable wage to clean up after those cunts is a problem. It's easy to say, see, and understand. It's apparently fucking impossible to get people to feel and act as though that's the reality.
The excitement over A.I. I think is rooted in the people who've suffered experiences similar to mine. I don't need your permission to do and fix and manifest. I don't need to field your excuses and navigate your feelings. I don't need to court your reaction. I don't need Reddit irony. I need my will and creativity and persistence clawing away each inch of achievement that hopefully speaks to people as willing and capable as I am. If I'm a business-owning tech guy, do I need Jim Banks's racist tropes about non-English speaking truck drivers? Or my autonomous fleet? Do I need hillbilly opinions about water use? Or pay off 7 city council members?
In comparison to, and hopefully unlike those who've been corrupted by power, mine is relatively muted. I don't fear or shy away from my capacity to build or destroy, but I also don't pre-emptively look for the excuses and license to do either. I had the idea first, so it's right to do and how I'm doing it by default? I had the money so however I spend it is fine? I suffer delusions of being the best, smartest, most just, etc. therefore…? I'm willing to entertain and believe the idea that I'm catastrophically wrong. It's why I write. One of you, one day, may actually think along with me and go, "You know, this was really fucked up right here." Polymarket puts that at less than 1% likely.
I could see civic-mirror turning into "the" tool, like our shitty social media environments have turned into "the internet." I could see it going nowhere but being fleetingly useful to me and a few nerds. But the point is that I actually see it. I created it first. I demonstrated what I believe about myself and the world I want to live in. In what obfuscating arbitrary universe can that be regarded as "failing?"
