I had the thought, "No one wants to watch you learn." It gave me pause. It happened after I thought about how I feel I’m generally perceived on reddit after I posted about looking for help in developing Civic Mirror.
Most people, most of the time, do not have “the answer.”
I don’t care if it’s something as simple as trying to find an item at Walmart, most people, most of the time, will tell you they don’t know, need to look it up, or need to ask someone else. There’s a likely chain of events that you will incur in the pursuit of nearly anything. It can be small hiccup like your familiar fast food changing its menu, or a lifelong effort zeroing in on some existential “why.”
For my part, as a counselor and social worker, I’m constantly bearing witness to “the learning curve” and the resistance or struggle with combating what it takes to change. I know that nothing is a given, “common sense,” or given or won without a catch. I know there are a dozen reasons, or excuses, that inform people’s pictures of the world and sense of their agency or responsibility. We want clips and scrolling and background noise. We want our choices stripped from us.
It’s not what we “need” that we’re often in pursuit of.
You don’t need to know the answer. You need to know how to discover the answer, scrutinize the answer, and apply the relative strength of the answer to the pool of all your other relative answers. That’s work. That’s balance. That’s a series of discreet, measurable, decisions you can often literally account for. Or, it’s word salad and soup trying miserably to project and protect against being found out or seen through.
I’ve put a lot of work on my plate over the next few days. I don’t want to waste the money I’ve reinvested in vibe-coding. I don't want to let a project that excites me in a way I haven’t felt in years rot on the vine. I don’t want to pretend like I don’t care, am not invested, or can’t be bothered to “dig deep” and budget my time and energy to pursue all of the things competing for my attention in their due course.
But in order to achieve what I want to achieve, I have to put myself out there, often in environments that are dispositionally opposite, to put it mildly, aggressively dismissive and antagonistic often reliably predictably. It’s the struggle of anyone reaching out to anything. “The world” doesn’t care about you or where you’re coming from until it feels your impact on them. You make them laugh and you might turn into their “favorite” comedian. How many comedians do they watch? Shut up, silly, no one asked for an investigation. Just believe * the chuckle and words and we’ll stay getting along.
I can spend money. That’s easy. I can drive myself to the next show. I can organize my calendar. I can spend the extra few hours staying up late debating and correcting the AI. I can’t make you believe in what I’m doing. I can’t make you inclined to join me at the show. I can’t pay you anything to care about “saving democracy” or “provoking agency.” I can’t reasonably assume I’m going to find “productivity” and “maturity” and “help” in mad wild places like a social media platform. I know the hit rate of thousands of emails might number in a dozen or so tepid responses.
That’s also, begrudgingly, despotically, annoyingly, the game. No one I’m searching for really has the answer. They might have slightly better questions or directions. Big maybe. They might have a vague idea of how what I’m doing might make them feel, or feel one day. But right now, forever, no one cares, no one understands, and no one is interested in trying to care or understand. I hesitate to say “that’s okay” more than “that’s the game.”
So, if nothing else, I offer levity, money, and obligate myself to create more and varied kinds of pitches, explanations, and guides into my world. I weigh, each time, the impact of my invitations. I weigh the depth of the disappointment in the response. I weigh the materially progress I make alone. I’m constantly in flux, trying to balance my desires and goals against the environment that often provoked them. It’s work. It’s emotional labor. It’s time consuming. It’s humbling and lonely and objectively aberrant.
I also wouldn’t be doing anything differently. I’m not going to stop. I’m not going to “be normal.” I’m not going to accept that everything driving my behavior is peanuts to “the way things are” as though I’m just a passive animal that can only bark and scroll through it. That’s dumb. I’m not dumb. “The internet” is dumb. “People” are dumb. Abuses of power and privilege are dumb. You, as an individual and me as someone attempting regular accountable participation and creation in life, don’t have to be dumb.
But you look and sound dumb while you’re learning, and that’s enough for the sea of reactive apes around you to fling shit at.
There’s no way to do something well if you’re not prepared to field the response. You do that by recognizing the response has nothing to do with you. The response is the mindless reaction or chemical explosion of the unconscious. Making decisions is an exercise.
Taking control and responsibility for things is a moral demonstration. There’s a visceral rejection of that by our basest animal selves. Your pets are not ashamed they ate out of the trash, they may only fear your reaction to your own negligence towards what it means to be an animal.
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