[1205] When I'm Gone

I have a unique ability to trust in who I am. I presume it’s unique. As a counselor, and often when I reflect on conversations with friends or coworkers, I don’t get the impression others are as convinced of themselves. That is, they’re often “fascinated” or “frustrated” about their own behavior or in hearing about how I conduct myself. The most dramatic contrast is with clients. A deep ambivalence and skepticism is the default when I insist on performing habits of taking responsibility or looking for solutions. It’s a though I’m operating with answers and am pursuing the matter-of-fact or step-by-step means of trying to achieve the given thing, but am encountering people who either haven’t asked or can’t be bothered to believe there’s a question altogether.

At bottom, my mind wants to obsess over something. Call it autism-y. Call it compulsive. Call it ADHD. I want my attention sunk deep down into TV or a videogame, a woodworking project, a rabbit hole debugging something, yard work, practicing an instrument. Any one of those things could be a relatively indefinite obsession. I reach natural stopping points. My fingers give out. I run out of money. I get tired. But I crave a degree of engagement and stimulation at my core.

I’m not addicted to it. I’m not at the mercy of it. It’s just how I’m built. Knowing this, I also know I can, in fact, achieve pretty much anything I genuinely wish to do. That’s, at least, the most common way to phrase the idea that provided I’m realistic, even at the outer bounds of what one might consider realistic, I know I have the intelligence, drive, creativity, persuasive capacity, and time. I know what I’m prepared to sacrifice. I know at least half of the ways I’ll likely fail and what would be needed to carry on anyway.

You might well consider this all an errant faith claim. Fair enough. Faith without works is dead. Hence we arrive at the floor of my “belief” in myself system. I work. I put the time in. I make the drives. I have the conversations. I write the blogs. I try, really hard, to make peace from moment to moment, and I try to keep track of what is or isn’t working. I state my values constantly and then work to put them into the world. I pick hard things to do, and then show myself I can do them. You do this often enough, you’re allowed to claim you know something about how to conduct life.

What I’ve gathered as I’ve gotten older is that in spite of my work, I’m embedded in a significantly impactful series of contexts that don’t really care how quickly I can fingerpick or competently assemble a shoe rack. I don’t live in a county, state, or country that appears to agree on pretty basic principles for someone like me. Whatever heights I, or anyone bothering to do work, might reach, they will inevitably be cut short because the air is poison. This has humbled me. This has stifled me. I’m reticent to obsess and immerse because “it” always tastes poisonous. I can’t maintain innocent “passion,” I’m disingenuously distracting myself from “things” that need more attention. That’s no way to live, and that feels like precisely the point of ensuring we must. Why nail a Sum 41 song when insurrectionists are getting pardoned?

Life’s not fair! The dismissive and condescending will decry. And they are correct, in the weakest way. The counselor in me would question the framing of my last question. What does enjoying music or drilling a solo have to do with federal corruption? They only happen to both exist as facets of my perception that appear to influence how or whether I direct my attention. Fair or unfair, I feel I owe “the mess” more brainspace than I do the story of what I can do with perfecting an already written song. My relationship to both things is its own story. Maybe I get called on stage one day at a reunion show and get the chance to show off! Maybe fascism continues to win in greater and greater ways. One feels considerably more likely, and not just because I’m not appreciating art enough.

I used to think I had “good reasons” for a lot of my behavior, and come to find out even more of it was out of spite than I was already claiming. “I” used to be an unyielding reactionary force. Reacting to people’s judgements. Reacting to the helplessness and fear instilled in me growing up. Reacting to off-comments about how I talked or looked. What did I want? Who could even say back then, but I can speculate. I wanted to hang out at my grandma’s. I wanted to play videogames. I wanted to fit in.

I think a lot of the chaos I see in the world, in clients, in colleagues, is the same kind of misstep I used to make riding my reactionary energy. Bari Weiss recently told Coleman Hughes that The Free Press started as a reactionary response to her experience at The New York Times. Now she’s tasked with evolving it to be a center of people’s news or media diet. She never considered herself an entrepreneur or business owner, she’s just corralling the fallout of attracting attention over what she was reacting to. The “good reasons” might have been one or a few, but the ongoing story of the collective reactionary effort will be painted as though there was a method and guiding principle all along.

I’m still spiting circumstances more than living for things. I’m living to go to shows and hang out with my friends and dad. I’m living for the last few hours I spent inventing a multi-situational phone holder, playing with my tools and drowning in sawdust. I’m living in service to the, still pretty vague, story of what happens when I’m back out of debt, too comfortable with my job and regained my free time. I’m situated in a future hopeful the broadest institutional and spiritual failures don’t crash my plane on the way to Vegas for When We Were Young. Perhaps my industry goes bankrupt because “charity” and “grants” are needed to construct the Thunderdome approach to healthcare.

I just heard it, but forgot who said it, when they said the best thing they ever heard about how to know if you were rich. You’re rich if, had you even more money, you’d still be doing exactly what you’re doing. I’d still be building, just bigger and more efficiently. I’d still be going to shows, but in more exotic locations and with better seats. I’d be trying to hang out with more people, but likely from the crop who have the money to have the time. I’d probably spend more time catching up on the history of games I haven’t played knowing I don’t have to be anywhere else. I might get a personal trainer and cook or nutritionist.

This presumes a world you can basically trust. Overwhelmingly, I’d be doing what I’m doing, just taking errands out of the equation and building a team I can’t achieve organically. If I could create the adult version of my college party house atmosphere, I think that’d be swell. But, that wasn’t about what “I” could do as it was all of the players involved. If we’ve come full circle, it appears every potential player I meet is stuck asking questions they don’t feel obligated to answer.

I think I don’t want to wait until things get dramatically broken that we simply must react. I don’t want to wait until the next divorce or depressive episode to be relevant to a “friend’s” lived experience. I don’t want to be more bald and grey before it dawns on us that time’s almost up and the answers are already there, but they aren’t being acted on. I don’t want to think I’ll “luck out” and get brief stints of my “ideals” provided I treat most time as something to suffer the wait through and incidental to some vague fairytale about tomorrow.

I got really good at guitar and I love to play, but not in a way that started a band. I enjoy creating things and having the tools, but rarely invest the money and time to make things particularly pretty or consistently. I can get lost in plenty of stories, but I’ve already given myself to dozens of narratives in the past, and whatever I was missing that compulsively drove the play, I think I found. I’m not waiting for permission. I’m not confused. I’m not helpless or ashamed. I’m not even as alone as I’ve normally been. But I am still pretty singular in my perspective about how all of “it” works. I’ll continue to dream about the damage we could inflict as a group of like-minded individuals.

[1196] Baby, Thinking Of You Keeps Me Up All Night

I’ve been finding it incredibly hard to focus. I’ve had much on my mind. I’ve felt “inspired.” I’ve felt almost incapable of talking about it at length or capturing it. I’m feeling myself discover an instinct for “later” or that my time, remotely free in any way, is too precious to meander through. This is an auto-pilot place. This is a place I otherwise tend very hard try not to occupy.

I’m in this place because I don’t find much of anything remotely appealing about my job and the ways I’m spending most of my time. This week, for example, I’ve been babysitting Y kids for 8 hours a day at “camp,” or, a gym area their parents leave them in all day. I’m not a kid guy. I don’t have some visceral feeling about them one way or another, but the facts about kids just don’t appeal to me. They’re gross, often very very dumb, and I get a level of internally shutting down and disenfranchisement when I have to repeat myself indefinitely in service to something I don’t really care about in the first place.

I’m at this job, truly, because it pays, and for no other reason. It barely pays. It’s an hour away from home. I drive there in a truck. When I’m not stuck at camp, the hours are less miserable, but I’m still marooned an hour away if I don’t want to wear my car down and burn that much more gas trying to go home. I’m also at this job because nothing in life has made sense for my entire adult one. My degree and education haven’t meant shit. My pay has never matched what I’ve contributed. My life has been a series of tactical decisions to try and emulate “normal” for someone of a middle-class background and above-average drive or intelligence, but I look like an arbitrary disingenuous slug who “chooses” one ill-fitting role after another to suffer.

Meanwhile, I’m gorging on information about, essentially, not just the decline of my country, but overall fall of man who can’t be bothered to swallow facts about it anymore than they will any other piece of nonconforming information. If I spend an hour listening to Leonard Leo point fingers and claim his magic sky-daddy thoughts are an intrepid march through history fighting back the strangleholds of liberalism…I have a lot of thoughts, retorts, instincts…and they all have stay bottled up so I can go inside and tell a 6-year-old to stop picking his nose for the 27th time.

I’m still the kind of person that can’t shut it off. I have to keep listening, learning, trying to wrap my head around the broader contexts and weigh them against what I think I can or can’t do within my own. I’m increasingly fascinated with language and how it’s used to justify abject atrocity and immorality. We lob the accusation of employing propaganda, but I see a much more specific pattern play out routinely colloquially.

Here, we’ll get messy. I want to start parsing out some ideas about what I perceive as a generalized habit for word-salad. I also want to speak to and highlight that, in this very moment, competing with the ability of me to do so is an array of things wholly unrelated to the task.

You can probably skip this paragraph. I’m listening to a new Linkin Park song. I’ve got 2 episodes of things to complete. I had to stop and shit. I’ve had a large hard-drive fail and have been experimenting with ways to revive it and/or back it up over the course of at least a week now. Without fail, I get several questions and topics I’d like to explore with an AI chatbot on my drives home. I want to keep looking for remote jobs. I have muscle tension I spent a long time driving a backbuddy into yesterday, and want to keep the war going. I’m itchy. I’m dehydrated and have no substantive food at home. My cat just left after insisting on attention. My head hurts a little. I’ll have tasks in Last War to complete in a couple hours. I need to complete The Last of Us Part 2 before the show starts back up. I want to search for missing pieces of my drum set, buy a bass, and several woodworking machines. My roof is falling apart. The weather is suggesting I could start back up with outdoor projects like a catio and my wood-pallet fence. I want to shower. I have a handful of dishes. I want to do some rearranging of my space. I need to put away laundry. I want to look up things to do this weekend. I have a consolidated debt payment looming. My cat just came back.

Okay, now the messy “serious” project. I’m intrigued by how often, be it the rich person, or the “crazy” person, conceive of themselves as fundamentally correct. That seems to be the first unifying thing. They’re talking with a confidence that no conscious being should ever possess. It’s what immediately puts me on edge when I’m listening to someone’s “grand theory of everything,” because that’s the next step. If they get asked about one thing, it becomes an answer about “everything.” “Yes” and “no” become the hardest words to ever pronounce, because that would betray the project and purpose of speaking altogether. That purpose, the third thing, is to keep things abstract and obscure.

“Expert” bullshitters do this as fluently as breathing. All it takes to be an expert is a propensity to keep talking. There is no end but yours. If yours doesn’t “make sense,” well, keep talking until it does, or you’ve worn down your opponent, or claim within your context It’s the most sense anyone has ever made about anything.

My hackles raise when certain words with certain characteristics get employed that really highlight this. Leo, reflexively, likes to blame “liberals” or “the left.” Anyone discussing politics does this as a matter of routine and regular discourse, but sometimes it’s used so pointedly that you get the sense someone has some deep personal slight they suffer by invoking their vague approximation of an enemy. When discussing consequences of who holds power or when, almost never, and I mean nearly never, do people talk about the specific incidents they believe indicate the drama and destruction or folly they’re crusading against. If, somehow, an example is used, it’s hyperbolic, incidental, and likely adjacent to their, seeming, broader point, but probably incredibly fuzzy on important details.

I think about when the shoe is on my foot. If I want to argue about “conservative” policy, I point to dead wannabe moms. That’s a kind of horror I don’t feel needs to be massaged into something “persuadable.” If you can’t wrap your head around that stupid, preventable, tragedy, I don’t think you’re someone interested in human morality or real conversation. I’m not going to make a sign and decry hypocrisy. I want you to sit within the death you create by pretending your position is less batshit than it is.

I know your sky-daddy is fickle and based on your feelings, not some shared reality we’ll all get to access the harder you push your dogma.

This is something that annoys me about The Free Press and “good faith arguments” between ideologues. They’re both doing the same thing, talking past each other with the same rhetorical flourishes disguised as expertise or evidence. And we let it pass because we don’t recognize or know how it works or how to speak better. They’re talking like us! They’re only saying things we either vehemently believe or don’t already! Bari tells you, if this conversation made you think, infuriated you, etc., write us and subscribe! The bitch knows what she’s doing, keeping the flame war alive, peppering in a reasonable person or two, and polishing her, “No no, I’m the reasonable middle!” crown until it blinds.

Caricature is a key component. Any time someone bemoans the “radical” or the “ist” and “isms,” you might as well shut your brain off. Individual actions and culpability don’t exist. Direct cause and effect can’t even be inferred. All you get are “historically” or “things” that “trend” or major institutional bodies taking the flak for the individuals and lobbyists that populate them. It’s one of the reasons I’m so enthused by the Atl National Parks people publishing everyone’s names fucking things up with DOGE. “DOGE” is an idiotic idea abused by both right and left to pretend it’s carrying out a reasonable idea. It’s an abstraction that is both boogeyman and savior, thus, it’s incoherent to invoke it. Tell me who it just killed, disenfranchised, or starved. Tell me the specific programs that might have, in fact, been corrupt and wasteful. “DOGE” doesn’t mean anything but what you want it to when you wish to argue with someone unwilling to hear you in the first place.

Materially, in spite of the “first-world” version of it, my whole adult life has been treading water. I couldn’t do less for myself and still have “just enough” to, if I were a normal person, “hope” and “hang on” and “get by” until my years of angst and resentment tickle me into laughing way too hard and with a painful growl for fascism. My country is in severe decline. The voices tasked with describing the hows and why are woefully inadequate. Modernity in its messaging and technology compounds our problems with communication incalculably.

I can’t save, because my car will shit the bed, or pipes explode, or I’ll get sick, and that money will be gone instantly. In the meantime, I’ll develop whatever you wish to call the complex of spending too much time alone eating ramen noodles is. I’ve somewhat gone the other direction in trying to indulge while my time is short, and that’s proven useful for coping, but doesn’t alleviate the fundamental state of existence. I will never see enough concerts to feel good about not getting paid enough for my time, effort, and experience. I will never listen to an hour or two of someone playing apologetic games for their power, our self-destruction, and myopic disregard for shared reality.

I can’t build, often because I need to spend that vast majority of the time it would take to do so to make money. What I do build is rough because I don’t have conditions that would allow me to become a master. What I don’t want to do is develop a resentful complex about the things I build, because they are direct evidence of a capacity that is otherwise hidden or muted.

I can’t play, because I don’t feel the spirit of it. Sure, I’ll play a game with the kids or something. I don’t want to. I’m not having fun. They’re not doing it right or even trying. I’m not even really contributing because they’re kids, I can, and have, hurt them accidentally but turning it up to 3% of what I might with an adult. Or what about music? How many songs do you need to hear about being bored, tired, and uninspired? Wanna hear me almost nail riffs and just-not-quite produce the vocals correctly? I can add a $99 40−hour production course and $5,000 lessons with Gaga’s touring guitarist to the things I’ll never buy or have the time for.

I bought 4 more videogames a few weeks ago. It felt like an act of rebellion. I made some money, dammit! I can spend it! I can spend it on 4 games for 4 different systems, and yes, I own all these systems! How many cunts walk out of this Disc Replay with 4 different games from 4 different systems!? I’m a unique wasteful idiot!

My life gets reduced to little snapshot incidents like that, mostly around me spending too much for food. I’ll add up everyone that’s been lingering on Amazon and see if I could technically afford it. That’s partly what got me into debt trouble a couple years ago, but after getting to the edge of getting out, I doubled down and spent the debt-money trying to hire people for fundraising/grant writing, building my counseling website, and fees to stay registered and legit.

My along-for-the-ride activity is definitely TV, so now that I’m in the midst of this drive that’s crashed, a hundreds-of-dollars replacement is feeling both vital and necessary to maintaining one of the most reliable and persistent copes/hobbies I have. It would mean, like spending any amount of money always means, that I couldn’t buy anything but gas and food for 2 weeks again, but what else is new? Here, I begin to wonder how many new bank accounts I could open for the $100 to $300 they often offer after you get 2 direct deposits. Because this is how you think when you’re first-world-in-decline poor.

I don’t like that tomorrow is Friday, and every day I’ve worked, even as I’m cursing circumstance as I leave my car and walk to the door, each day has felt “easier.” It’s only because it became familiar. I know which kids are shittier than others. I know what is or isn’t expected of me each hour. I know, eventually, some small amount of money is coming, even if it’s already spent. I can’t get the time back, so there’s something in being able to mourn it that’s more reassuring than suffering its alleged potential.

[1195] Not Like Us

If I were to lay claim to a sort of “super power,” it would be in pattern recognition. Specifically, linguistic ones. I only do marginally better than average at “official” tests for that sort of thing that might get you into Mensa. I, without having to think particularly hard, can recognize how someone is using words. I can tell when they’re batshit. I can tell when they’re “too smart.” I can tell when they’re scared or insecure. I can tell when they’re lying, most especially when they would deny they are doing so. I know people patterns. I know word patterns. I know how they work together.

This is a pretty big, bold, and vague claim on its face. My grandma was 9 for 10 in guessing who was on the phone before picking up the call. It’s a little like if she were arguing the “intellectual” place where her intuition came from. Arguably, she was only getting called by the usual amount of people at their handful of times they might usually call. There was a pattern, but to anyone watching, it might look like a kind of voodoo. I think whatever pattern she was privy to is one we could all see, and any ones I claim to notice, you could too.

Smart people. Smart people are the worst. Smart people have a habit of thinking they are the only one who is smart. They use this instinct to think it grants them license to engage in any number of unwise behaviors. I have a kid in my YMCA program who scored off the charts on some IQ test. I clocked him early in him trying to respond to my new direction for the space in a proactive way. Ultimately, he’s still a child, so he’s also been the one to steal from another child and get caught, is bossy and mean to younger kids who might annoy him, and wholly embodies the word “cringe” when you consider a 5th or 6th grade boy in the abstract.

As a smart kid, he acts as highlighter for what I might observe in smart adults. Which smart adults am I taking in? It’s political podcasts. It’s debates. It’s intellectuals interviewing Ph.D.s from the bowels of academic departments. So many, so smart, particularly in their realms, and then they invariably step over the line to draw broader inferences. Often said, it’s a very specific tone of confidence, that always makes me go “eeeehhhhhh.”

When I listen to smart people, I look for “wise” qualifiers. There’s a class of by-the-numbers Youtube personalities that will give you incredible breakdowns of some social or political phenomenon. They read the bills, site their sources, and are as accurate or relevant as any “expert” you might conceive of in an old-world framework. I’ll think to follow them or subscribe when my instinct about what I hope they’ll say at some point shows up by surprise. One recently detailed Tesla’s magnificent fall and towards the end of the video, wisely, said, “Now now, you’re not the first one who thought it’s time to short the fuck out of Tesla stock, and it’d take one tweet to wipe out your investment.”

I appreciate when someone can fluidly and matter-of-factly arrive at appropriate levels of caution. He wasn’t trying to contribute to a frenzy, he was trying to inform.

Contrast someone like him with what I’ll call “convoluted” or “masquerading” people. These people, desperately, want to be smart. They might have an aggressive ADD or anxious condition. They might have too good of memories. Their brains work, too well, and they find ways to exercise them that have absolutely nothing to do with being smart or wise. This is the pundit or apologist. What they long for is to belong, so their capacity for “reason” is shaped by whatever tribe they most identify with at the time. A lot of incredibly weird people like your Stephen Millers or Ben Shapiros occupy this world. The popularity of levying “cuck” and “simp” are the ironic lashing out of their resented scarlet letters.

What I think is the most prominent pattern of both types above is the utter denial of and then reshapping of words. A smart person can get away with providing a nuanced, bullshit, way of describing their circumstances or responsibility to something. A convoluted person will employ 6 logical fallacies in 5 sentences alongside a complete dismissal of the concept of a shared definition or coherent through-line of causation.

It gets exhausting to listen to conversations that go something like this:

“There’s bloat in the federal government, and people are concerned about wasteful spending.”

“Which departments are wasting and on what? Which survey says how many people are concerned, and about what?

“Only an asshole like you would just disregard the waste and defend DEI while these grifters and entitled others destroy the fabric of our nation and routinely piss on our Judeo-Christian Values; I, for one, believe in freedom and lower costs and bringing back manufacturing, unlike the liberals with their open border policy and men competing in girls sports.”

A convoluted person is perfectly ambivalent about numbers. A smart person might weaponize them in a way that serves their interests. In either iteration, you’re getting someone concerned with themselves, their emotional satiation, more than any concern for reality or the truth. Further, convoluted and/or smart people will jump on their numbers or “arguments” to conclude that, no, *they are in fact speaking in good faith!* And there’s much to be learned in an “honest debate” with them. At which point I dutifully give up and write another blog.

I consider these patterns because I hear them on both right and left media. Bari Weiss is as circularly reasoned in abstract solidarity simping with Batya Ungar-Sargon as the Pod Save America guys are in their smug self-righteousness in brushing against anything Bill Maher says. I’ve listened to uber-nerds absolutely spiral when provoked by Michael Shermer or Coleman Hughes to expand beyond their expertise. Everyone mentioned routinely slips into “There there, I’m kind of above it all” pretentious space and utilize vague smart-sounding generalized sentiments to get away with pretending neutrality or that “we’re all friends here.”

What starts to become clear is that there are no shared “values” beyond the ones loosely associated with being “in the conversation” or popular enough to stay in the public eye. The people concerned with the actual truth of whatever the matter are out studying it, or organizing it, or living it - they’re not arguing it. A segment from Jon Stewart talking about being glib and ignorant about distinguishing that from what he does will always stick out to me. It dawned on him after fighting with 9/11 responders to get healthcare. That’s, primarily, why we’re suffering the fallout of people who truly do live within their horrible value systems and those opposed don’t understand the “resistance” doesn’t even value doing so.

Wrapping your head around smart and convoluted people patterns is one thing, but then you also just have people acting as animals do. Those are the kinds of patterns any social worker, counselor, or busy-body could tell you about. We have reliable statistics on how long it takes to get out of spousal abuse dynamics. We know the reported versus suspected rates of violence, sexual or otherwise. We watch the consequences of in-group/out-group thinking play out at every friendly competition.

Many get dismissive and condescending wishing to write this off as “dumb” people. It’s certainly not someone like them who would behave in such ghastly ways. What’s seemingly always missing from a discussion of class warfare or inequality is the genuine opinions anyone holds about the ones beneath them. Those opinions gets churned through the convoluted pundits and weaponized by the smart people because, wouldn’t you agree it’s their fault, they’re lazy, and they’re motivated to self-destruction? The smart thing to do is avoid the subject and not pretend you can help someone who doesn’t want to be helped.

Vibes. You want to feel smart. You want to feel like you belong. You want to convince yourself that you’re worthy, contributing, or otherwise inherently meaningful to whatever you’re involved in. Any and all means of finding and maintaining that vibe is the pattern you will succumb to. That might mean staying too cozy against a wholly catastrophic family or partner dynamic. That might mean swallow every spoonful of shit your job hands you. That might be engrossing yourself in some hobby or community at 6th-grade boy level of intensity indefinitely. I think it’s your tailored propaganda soup you become a glutton for. Bitch, don’t kill my vibe.

For the myriad patterns I claim to see, important ones in myself are in how I destroy or utilize them. I’m perfectly aware I have zero capacity to “convince” anyone of anything. Convoluteds are keen to hear “arguments” where none are being made, but I assure you, I’m attempting to articulate and explain for myself. It’s been, not precisely a preoccupation, but a soft goal of mine to figure out ways to ride a vibe without exploiting it. I feel my house parties did this. I feel creating the coffee shop did to. The freedom and comforts I pursue as a result of my living situation I’m trying to extend to my working one. I was looking forward to seeing where I could go with it at the Y before the power to do so quit.

I used to routinely kill vibes. I’d be “too smart” in a situation that needed no words. I’d argue like a pundit for something fundamentally abstract or less true than I insisted. I was masquerading as someone more concerned or knowledgeable than I was. That’s a hard thing to notice and break because it’s not insincere, it just doesn’t know how to be more honest. That’s perhaps the extent of the grace I might extend to the Batyas and Dinesh D’Souzas of the world. My Y kids have no idea what they’re saying or where it’s coming from, full stop. They just talk, too loud, or dance, or run, and play with the noises we call words. You can’t tell me merely surviving a few decades longer magically grants you the ability to escape their pattern and make any sense.

I mean, these writings kill the reddit vibe, indeed the very infinite-scroll nature of the internet and social media altogether. This isn’t a place to genuinely introspect or connect with other thoughtful people. It also can’t be, you’ll argue to, certainly not me, but no one in particular. And you’ll invite a pattern of inane internet banter and depending on my mood I will devolve along with you. But that’s only if you break the pattern of fundamental silence.

[1175] Boss Baby

Oh, shit! You ready? I haven’t written in almost 3 weeks. In that time I’ve started a new job, gotten sick, my car shit the bed, I experienced what felt like a Craigslist “missed connection” at a comedy show in Chicago (Phil Hanley late Saturday show if you’re reading this, Sam!), and have already begun plotting on how to morph my new job role into something that isn’t tantamount to babysitting+.

Let’s start local. I got pink eye. I don’t think I’ve had pink eye since I was 4 years old. I’m a site director now for the YMCA. I’m around, by definition dirty, kids and the things they touch for at least 5 1/2 hours a day. No matter how much wood I’ve knocked in recalling how infrequently I get sick, they got me. This happened at the tail end of getting over a mild cold that decided to get worse just as I thought I had efficiently beat it. I wear contacts and don’t have backup glasses. My eye’s aren’t terrible, but driving has been extra.*

While sick, I’m getting a handle on the true nature of my role and responsibilities. As with most organizations, they have a “mission” and “ethos” and “goals” which are on thousands of pages of wasted paper and policy, but no less inform how some of the most true-believers operate. I’m at a poorer school that no less has figured out how to raise enough funds to consistently engage its kids. I’ve found some people to click with, and found some people who it’s clearly not in their nature to click. Underneath that is the fundamental problem all companies seem to have with basic demonstrations of competence and communication.

I can’t pretend that my job is that complicated, especially given my experience just in my hobbies, let alone at DCS or in counseling. I try not to say it in a condescending way, but I have said it dozens of ways, that I’m a glorified babysitter. At least, that’s how the role was translating my first few days when it sunk in that the difference between a YMCA program and an actual daycare is, drum roll, the programming of activities. If you don’t have anyone concerned with implementing and consistently executing programs, you’re just babysitting. Hence, in spite of 9 people currently hired to oversee 30-ish kids at my site, they hired me to, you know, actually direct something.

At first, naive me was asking things like, “Why can’t the 9 adults do what I’m told needs to be done here?” Several more days of watching people respond to my questions with deer-in-the-headlights faces and pensive toe digs while trying to explain how they’re getting paid to essentially hang out, I got my answer. Also, everyone before me is to blame, as well as the broader chaos of the YMCA leadership.

I’ve done that thing where I have immediately found common ground with the most adult and introspective person and we’ve had quasi-therapy sessions in the mornings about how things are ran or what informs our perspectives. She will be vital in helping me get on committees and pushing reforms that hopefully flesh out that identity and values the YMCA professes. The takeaway is the same as elsewhere, you need to be the adult.

I’ve got some experience with children, but I’ve never been interested in raising them, am bored to tears after too much of doing whatever it is they want to do, and am generally ambivalent about people which informs how I engage with them professionally. A key thing about this is that I don’t seek to control or dominate. I don’t yell at kids. I don’t condescend. I, viscerally, remember what it was to be a child, and actively attempt to mitigate unconscious cultural norms that aren’t helpful in cultivating what you want.

Thus, I have to be the adult for both the kids and the adults I’m now responsible for directing who might feel licensed to get loud and lecture-y and disingenuous in their approach to a kindergartner. For me, who does not profess to be an expert in child-rearing, but who is informed by his experiences, developmental science, and in watching how others operate, I maintain a certain degree of confidence my kids will figure out how to operate along more structured and accountable lines. I’ll suggest something like, don’t reward and entertain the kid who is being performative in their crying. I’m pliable, but keep a decently strong opinion about the efficacy of certain types of intervention, for what age, and under what circumstances.

Some people deeply appreciate this approach, others get petty, aggrieved, and gossipy. You will, under every circumstances, become “the enemy” in one form or another by virtue of any whiff of change altogether, but more accountable change in particular. That’s baked into any leadership role. To me, this means even more not to try to be a dictator more than demonstrator. I speak to the kids like I want you to speak to them. I credit them when they do something right. I trade in time, so when they waste ours, they get theirs wasted while they’re itching for the gym or playground. It’s literally only been 3 days of mild implementation of “my” way, and I’m already seeing positive results.

It’s hard for me to not think about what my day-to-day looks like at scale. We’re now tasked with hoping and praying our way through the next Trump catastrophe, but that’s only to frame it as though we aren’t the fuck ups. That’s to again distance ourselves from our impact and ignorance and hate that dictates the ship. I’ve no less been listening to all my podcasts and reading about how people attempt to digest the zeitgeist. I can’t recommend enough listening to someone like Anthony Scaramucci and then the 5 vs 4 crowd back-t0-back. Or the guests of Michael Moynihan and Bari Weiss and then up-in-arms Leftist academics on Michael Shermer. The nature of wanting/needing a story to supplement or replace personal responsibility beams brightly.

I don’t think there’s a room with or interaction between any two people that exists where there isn’t both an obligation and potential. The obligation would be to something like an imagined universal human value. You treat people a certain way or expect something even as simple as holding the door open for all of space and time. The potential is for that interaction to be dictated or mitigated by personal folly and ambivalence. “It is what it is” as though you have no conscious choice. As though “reason” doesn’t exist or isn’t defined by how it’s executed in good or bad ways.

Monday this week, at 4:45 AM when I tried to leave for work, I discovered my tire was flat. I live in the countriest of country. It’s pitch black, freezing, and recall, my job isn’t that hard or needing of me to actually be there in order for the kids to be kept basically safe and supervised. It’s already extremely wasteful the hour drive I make there and back every day. I’ve been sick. I’ve got the excuse to stay home and sleep in playing out brilliantly. My truck is at my friend’s house. I’m not sure if the new-old car has the equipment to change the tire, further complicated by being on a gravel driveway. I could have left it at that.

I informed my boss of what happened. I sat briefly with my coffee, and proceeded to get to work navigating the problem. The tire wasn’t just flat, but the car I’m driving is very old and 2 windows are taped to try and hold them up. The tape failed, so the car froze on the inside too. Gotta get that fixed. After 3 hand-cranked failed attempts to get the jack to balance, I get the boot on. I drive straight to a tire shop up the road from my job. It takes hours, I overdraft my account paying more for needed tires than the car cost, and navigate from the lobby trying to get money from an account I almost never use, forgetting the pin. In the waiting hours, I cross the highway to mail a package, get food, and make some other errand calls. I was at work for the after school shift.

That night, a flash frozen rain descended upon the area. Parents were over an hour late to pick up kids. Wrecks blocked traffic. I’m perpetually tired the last 3 weeks adjusting to my schedule, sick, and am trying not to ruminate on the irony of being more in debt after getting a job and in needing to get there than by just being broke and at home. I’m staring down the hour and a half minimum drive. I, too, have to navigate remote country roads at 5 mph so I don’t end up like the SUV I stopped for just before I reached home. A “let’s drag this day out even more” cherry on top.

This is either a story of one massive bitch-fest meant to draw sympathy or a basic story of adult accountability employing the tools and skills of perspective and resilience to meet obligations. Some people will view it defensively and try to engage in a pissing match about who has it worse. Some will be ambivalent because...yeah it’s just life and we all get flat tires and deal with the cold. It’s vitally important to me that we all understand most the moments of inflection and choice. I could have sat out the entire day, blamed circumstances, and lied about my ability to address any part of it. I think that’s precisely what we’re doing at less viscerally obvious moments every single day.

You are accountable to you first or you cannot claim to be accountable for anyone else. I would not deserve a leadership position if I were the type of person to pretend I don’t know how to begrudgingly change a tire in the dark, freezing, and on my gravel driveway. I do, I did, and I’m sure I’ll have to do it again some day. I’m sick, so even if it’s more debt and I can’t “really” afford it, I have my medicated $150 eye drops and Urgent Care bill, and began reflexively disinfecting everything I touched at work. I need to continue to watch myself not being an excuse-ridden piece of shit in the world in spite of my very real, very reasonably felt grievances for things I suffer each day.

I unironically bring up unionizing in every job I take. I get zero enthusiasm, feedback, or curiosity about it. Everyone is keen to complain about the pay, disorganization, conflicting feedback, etc., no one, ever, will even entertain the conversation about how to do it better. They also know that, on balance, they’re probably getting away with a certain kind of murder in how they’re making their money or conducting their role. A union is an attempt at a more formal accountability. We, as a species, instinctively and reflexively do not want that.

Don’t be a screaming ape or in denial about your inner insecure kindergartner. We live and die by what we are bringing into or seek to take away from how we engage with one another. I want patience. I want beat by beat reasoned understanding and reflection. I want an earnest investment towards positive changes and values that aren’t empty abstracted truisms eking out of ambivalent cliches masquerading as adults and leaders. Getting by or through each day on some egocentric story of your rights, victimization, or entitlements is not the same thing as demonstrating your understanding and embodiment of your value system. You might profess to be the boss of your own life, but you should be acting as a avatar of what the best version of that life could look like.

[1165] Bottom Feeding

Whether it's a book, or a YouTube series, there's something about argumentative patterns I'd really like to explore. I've noticed, for as long as I can remember, these habits we get into when we're trying to sound reasonable. We presume it's "the following list of reasons" we offer that "make sense" or "justify" where we're coming from. From what I can see, it's the exact same internally emotional places using language in a very particular way.

My sensibility was kicked into overdrive when I listened to a Bari Weiss podcast where she's interviewing 3 people who switched from voting democrat to Trump. They were all deeply political types who march, volunteer, run for things, etc. These aren't the arbitrary "undecideds" who can't spout a book-length answer to questions. If you have the patience to strip down the extremely feverish rhetoric, it's hard not to see that they're each just hurt or confused emotionally, and there's choice phrases and redundancies that clue me in.

And here's where I get to be disappointing because I don't want to re-listen to the podcast right now and pull them all out.

What I can do is provide the process and mechanism that people use to justify breaking their capacity to reason.

One has to assume they are coming from a "first principles" place when they make a declarative or moral statement. Something, at bottom, has to be "true" or practically assumed for anything else to follow. Whether that something is coherent or consistent is an extremely open question.

It doesn't matter what the issue is. That's the key thing to keep in mind. You can't understand how the mechanism breaks if you listen to someone's line of reasoning down the track they take alone. If someone tells you "I don't like her answer on foreign policy!" That's not the operative information. What matters is that they feel a certain level of fear, despair, exasperation, and/or other things that emotionally persuade them to start carrying water for what was previously unacceptable about the opposition.

It then becomes exceptionally easy to write-off literally anything you need to. You also get stuck to a handful of reasonable-sounding reiterations.

I've learned that it doesn't matter how "smart" you are, or how quickly you speak, or how many references you can make, you are at the mercy of your feelings until you choose not to be. A "first principle" that is conjured by your feelings is neither first, nor a principle. It's the needy, hopeless, ridiculous child of insecure instinct and ego that is constantly begging to be appeased.

You can see a snapshot of this articulated brilliantly with Ben Shapiro as a person in general, but especially when he's talking to(at) people at The Oxford Union. The clash of alleged first principles is on display explicitly from the people arguing against him. They operate under the working assumption that Israel doesn't have a right to exist in the first place. Ben, to his credit and seemingly only in this area of life, manages to ensure this is brought to the forefront of the "debate" they're trying to have over history or who's "more genocidal."

As to the "true impact" of religion? That's going to antagonize Ben's internal irrational animal, and he'll speed-run his mountain of apologetics that are perfectly unpersuadable. I don't believe he, or anyone, needs magic sky daddies to come up with moral frameworks or good reasons to tow certain lines because I have a first principle about the nature of pain and consequences. If I can see something coming or don't want to get fucked up, the universe "magically" shows me the way to keep my hand out of the fire.

You know when a comedy show goes into a crowd of radicals and starts on-the-spot questioning? The loops people go into. The honest ones will betray their emotions and state explicitly they don't know something they're allegedly angry about. The rowdiest ones will return to their catchphrases or megaphones. Well, "intellectual" people will do that too, but they'll use a particular interview or quote from someone with the right letters and credentials. Both demonstrate that, what's at bottom, is how they feel, and literally nothing that comes out of their mouth is the kind of truth they wish it to be.

To develop a first principle you have to believe certain things about what it is to exist altogether. You have to ask yourself, constantly, what your individual responsibility is to that existence. If you don't develop that belief system, or don't defer to a falsifiable metric in your attempt, nothing really matters. It, in fact, can't matter, because it's not rooted or defined. It's a constant abstraction of your feelings, dressed up in so many words or justifications. This is why we're so hungry to "just accept" religious doctrines, and celebrate "faith" because they pretend to do the work of that first principle formation for us.

This is where you'll find every level of equivocation, precisely without irony. When someone exists as anything they need to to get away with anything they desire, without even realizing it, they will offer you the format of technical and philosophical "bullshit." It's an attempt to persuade, without regard to the truth. The target of persuasion? The person touting the bullshit themselves. They're searching, infinitely, for the words to match their emotional truth. Emotional solidarity and polite looking the other way becomes the only currency.

Of course, they're never going to define their emotional truth as an irrational screaming child suffering a sense of betrayal and disorientation. That would clash dramatically against their self-conception as a Harvard graduate or community organizer delegate, or serious person who memorizes pivotal historical dates like a preacher does bible verses. But, the truth, as far as I can tell, is they are, like most of us, screaming, scared, irrational animals first.

I think mental murder is achieved when you pretend like "all politicians" anything. You have not even the remotest first principle about the definition, importance, history, or purpose of "organizing" as a concept. Why would you? It's not taught in school. Your day to day life is provided. Your road to "serious person" with appropriate title was laid out clear as day. When you pretend to care about what a politician "lies" about, you're not literally counting lies and saying, "By the numbers, I'm going with the democrats because Trump lied 30,573 times over 4 years." That would be too dispassionate and grounded.

When you pretend to care about lies, you're elevating your token issue. When someone is "incomplete" about how they'll "support the Jews," they will exist in that state indefinitely until you've gotten your emotional revenge. One way you can be extra sure this is where someone is psychologically is when they can't stop repeating some hateful label about what you are or what your beliefs mean. When challenged, they'll just repeat themselves and say something like, "Why would I talk to an (x) altogether?" Tried and true strategy in maintaining a stupid bubble.

A first principle around communication with the "other side" would be capable of developing a tool for discerning a troll versus partner in conversation. It would concede more alikeness than difference if only because you're human or sharing a language in spite of its many connotative conceits. It would remain sensitive and qualifying when it moved to make a caricature or assumption about where someone was coming from. There's a soft pedantry for the sake of clarity. You're not trying to "gotcha" when a colloquialism or fair-enough sentiment betrays a dictionary.

If I could ever get paid to do like "take down" videos parsing out conversations and podcasts, that'd be fun. I appreciate those with like advanced degrees who refute, with deep technical prowess, morons. I know there are plenty of logical fallacies and psychological terms related to everything I'm talking about, and I think it's a lot harder to see just how quickly and fluidly they manifest in what otherwise presents like a reasonable adult or professional conversation.

I get the jarring experience of listening back-to-back Left and Center-right podcasts/people which helps inform how I see the pattern too. The dismissive quips offered by the If Books Could Kill and 5-to-4 crowd feel irksome when they're doing exactly what they'd accuse a Bari Weiss of with regard to a given author or "deeply personal" subject matter like Gaza or trans activism. It's funny to see how earnestly Anthony Scaramucci prioritizes a piece of Tim Walz on the debate stage versus how the Pod Save America guys do. The "secret" value statements of their class and character pop out.

To my mind, I've listened to them all sound not-batshit and agreeing on what I would consider my first principles, but their emotions don't allow them to say so. I've heard both If Books Could Kill and Bari Weiss podcasts say, for example, that the science around trans stuff is incredibly sparse, and there are meaningful reasons to be skeptical about the DSM and implementation of diagnostic criterion. Why not start there and have a conversation? Why, ever, introduce the language of "mutilated children," like the increasingly myopic hyperbolic rabbit holes of Peter Boghossian's universe where he "can't find anyone on the other side" to talk to." Coleman Hughes manages to, somehow. Neither side wants to mutilate children. Neither side agrees on the number who have been. Those seem foundational for coherence.

Like me, I think people who vehemently argue for anything are implicitly trying to synthesize. It's very disorienting to be fielding a constant stream of information and never feeling like you land somewhere. It doesn't feel right to be rooted in dispassionate skepticism. It doesn't feel right to use your emotions as one, relatively small, informer of your overall viewpoint. It doesn't feel right to find common cause with something "disgusting" or "hateful" or hellbent on "erasing your identity." It's nearly impossible for most people to accept that that's precisely what they are and where they're speaking from. It's nearly impossible to accept because emotionally defaulting to black and white thinking, either/or, in-crowd out-crowd, is the default.

I'm disgusting, hateful, and trying to erase self-conceptions all the time. That's not something I "admit," it's just a true series of things. Devoid of context, the hundred other things I can say about myself, they'd carry all they needed to for anyone disinterested in understanding me. More to my point, they won't understand themselves. Then, hours and hours, and often lifetimes, will be spent trying to fill something that was never a wholly conceived capable-of-being-filled "thing" in the first place.