[1223] Master Debaters

Part of me thinks each time I write I’m looking to round out a “grand theory of communication.” I don’t know what that means. I do know that I continue to notice patterns and experience frustrations in talking with people that steer me in a direction that there’s a better way to account for how we exchange information.

I have a really good friend who, I think it’s still “innocent,” will do this:

I’ll ask her, “If you had 10 people, 5 of them white, 5 of them black, would you be able to separate them into 2 groups based on color?”

Her, “I don’t know if they’re actually black or white! I would just feel so uncomfortable and wrong!”

Sure, but, that’s not really the point. It obscures the simple for the sake of the moral posturing. She knows, I know, we’re all mutts. She knows, I know, I’m not fishing for some racist conclusion. She knows, I know, colors are their own mystery and exist all along the color spectrum. She invites an infinite list of needless-to-qualify sentiments that obscures or obstructs what, at least everyone in our high school, could figure out in self-segregating at lunch. We also both know that she, and I, and nearly anyone on the planet, could do it easily.

This is also a friend who, at least initially struggles to notice characteristics that might be shared by different ethnic groups in general. This could be a form of prosopagnosia. I find I struggle to distinguish cars, maybe similarly defining mechanisms are implicated. Again, she knows, I know, nothing is perfect as there is no archetype “Greek” or “Italian” or “Somalian.” But it would be weird to pretend like traits aren’t shared and passed down, and that some people look like the groups they, in fact, belong to. When I go to Serbian fest, I see my uncles everywhere. When I go to Italian fest, I see my aunts and grandma everywhere.

I don’t know if there’s a discussion that even brushes against racial or ethnic differences that isn’t immediately derailed, so you can reasonably criticize me leading with these examples. They do give you a most visceral window into the nature of the immediacy of the general conversational derailment.

The classic space where this occurs is in religion “debates.” Legions line up to argue facts, science, history, genetics, evolution, psychology, chemistry, philosophy…and they don’t understand they’re up against “faith.” Hours of exchange improperly coded as “discussion” and “debate” and “reason.” No, you’ve been banging your head against their faith. Any topic for any reason can be subsumed by your faith in it.

I think we’re wired to protect “just whatever it is I believe right now.” I don’t recall what the more scientific or accurate way of saying this is. It’s not enough to call it “bias” of our own opinion. It’s deeper than that. There’s a survival mode invoked in the emotional experience of being challenged, contradicted, or “threatened.” We dress up that reactivity in myriad ways, but at bottom it’s a defensive reaction, not an owned and methodically accounted for and relayed relationship. We feel insecure, lash out or shut down.

I listened to comedian Dave Smith word-salad ramble against Coleman Hughes recently. The unironic “I know you are but what am I” sentiments flew out of Dave. The “whataboutisms” the “Sure, but” as though the point didn’t just land or wasn’t true enough to negate and move on from the lazy and incomplete thing Dave just said. It was a masterclass in showcasing how someone who is cursed with an impressive selective memory has no capacity to organize the soup in his brain.

But, there’s an extremely small group of people who are going to listen to the 3.5 hours of that exchange, recognize what’s happening, or translate what’s happening in a way that anyone else might understand it too. What purpose did it serve? Other “intellectuals” got to dip into the pool of “debate” and take their mind off whatever’s plaguing them that day. It’s not “helping” the “public conversation.” It’s another errant play by the attention economy to capture yours.

I do think there’s utility in serious thinkers and academics getting into these kinds of exchanges with idiots, frauds, comedians, propoghandists, and apologists. I don’t think there’s a broader theory of mind and strategy that most are following when they do. A Christopher Hitchens debated differently than a Sam Harris or a Coleman Hughes or a Professor Dave. Notably, most aren’t, even when I think they should, going to just call the dangerous frauds, “fucking dangerous fraud” as explicitly as they could.

Regardless of the topic or debaters, I apply my heuristics. Who’s getting defensive? Who’s asking explicit and should-be-easy to answer questions? Who’s name-calling, not because it’s correct and appropriate, but so they can jump away from what’s attempting to be focused?

This tension between focus and abstract is key.

This debate I just watched between Professor Dave, Dr. Dan Wilson vs Steve Kirsch and Pierre Kory echoed even more viscerally that foundational discrepancy between an errant exchange for attention and good faith discussion.

I think it will need to be part of our cultural immune system, word choice deliberate, to be able to recognize these kinds of tactics and exchanges quicker. We need to move past the idea that someone who is anti-vaxx is “merely skeptical.” We need to stop pretending that an ideologue, of any stripe, is doing “good faith” in their thought exercises. It’s a complete inversion of the words. It’s good for them. It’s self-reinforcing for their foundational faithful position. All you can accomplish is peeling layers of respectability and coherence off of your argument in the minds of onlookers by engaging naively with their position. You need to be able to disentangle, highlight, and embarrass what they’re doing while also educating on whatever the topic might be.

It’s a feat, to be sure. To look and sound reasonable under what is a literally insatiable desire and comfort for destruction, grift, and ego/brand protection is nearly impossible without training or incidental personality quirks that not many of us share. Even with those people in our lives that we’d wish the best for our capacity to disagree and misinterpret leads to catastrophic outcomes so regularly, many people just shut down and don’t make waves as an act of self-preservation. Who has the time, inclination, motivation, etc. to combat and deconstruct what might be understood as the death of coherent coexistence?

Yet, I think we all will need to find our own engine of “actual debater” in order to last long term. Right now, we’re letting people die of measles because we’re acting like segregating people by color is hard or unreasonable. That is, we’re letting our fears and unwillingness to designate information as more or less reliable based on evidence instead of assumptions kill our capacity to sustain ourselves, let alone get better. Yes, if you’re having a assumptive discussion about who gets to be a slave, somehow always leaving aside the era or country, you are correct. Horrors would then abound and you’d be right to be deeply incensed and suspicious of the person presenting the exercise.

The nature of lying is what’s being protected. The story of how a lie manifests and contorts stays hidden. The reasons you would resist getting past your own insistence to lie stays a secret. The nature of your always-right, always concerned with your feelings god gets to exercise its power indefinitely. You don’t change. You don’t learn. You don’t grow. You don’t genuinely see the evidence or define that which can cohere between us all. That sounds like the death of us all.

As a counselor, I watch my words get twisted instinctively all the time. I can say, “The door is brown,” and be interpreted as, “That door has never been brown, will never be brown, and if you try to paint it brown, you’re an asshole.” That’s what feelings do. That distortion doesn’t just ignore or destroy our ability to see a brown door, it can take something innocuous and convert it into a feeling of being personally attacked. It instantly builds entire worlds around the subject matter from which “natural conclusions” follow almost as quickly, about the person, the door, the color brown, or why we’d be so bold and disingenuous to invoke the door at all!

Return to your questions and make them excruciatingly specific. It’s excruciating for the person who doesn’t understand they’re lying. It’s important if you’re going to maintain respect and rapport for the people in your life who are otherwise inclined to behave like bad actors, but without the intentionality. Those who are in on the grift will get angry. Those who are genuinely trying to think things through will let your questions linger and hopefully discover how to speak to them either more removed from their initial feelings or after better incorporating what that feeling was attempting to tell them.

I get 2% heated when my friend does the conversation obscuring, abstracting out thing. I have feelings just like anyone else that want to catastrophize and race through my pages of thoughts and experiences of things it rhymes with. I know that’s a thing. I don’t make it personal. I don’t treat her differently. I move on from nights where it’s going to get intractable and needlessly frustrating. She returns to the subject matter later, more specific, sometimes with questions, or with a demonstrated ability to digest more than what was happening at the time. It’s something I’m incredibly thankful for as usually I just have to pretend there’s not some growing well of irreconcilable resentment that tends to erase me from people’s lives.

We’re now in the future where that erasure is rewarded from AI to the attention algorithms. Whether you’re calling out errors in my thinking or vice versa, that whole exercise is gone if you’re not seeking it out. I’m prescribing a debate and communication process 10-steps long after we bother to agree on the nature of the problem or purpose and utility of engaging said process altogether. That’s an accidentally convoluted way of saying I don’t think we’re gonna pull that off. I also don’t know what our institutions would have to look like to mitigate the fallout of it never getting better. As it stands, they’ve proven to be ineffective against popular gish gallop.

Individually, you can recognize in yourself what I’m talking about. I know when I’m getting “elevated.” I know when I’m feeling “defensive.” I know when I need to learn more about a topic to discuss or debate it more effectively. I know when I’m inclined to make a personal attack instead of contend with what’s being said. I know there are real and persistent patterns across subjects that speak to the reliability of the person relaying the information. If your narrative is unconcerned, or incapable of defining, evidence, you lose by default. If you’re unable to build on relevant details, you're trapped like a Sims character in a pool without a ladder. You have to figure out you’re playing the game and there’s only one way the part of you that’s struggling to find agency doesn’t drown.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[1164] Buzz

I feel like the last few times I've gone to write, the essence of the "randomness" in my head is not breaking through. I feel like I'm only taking quarter or half shits. There's a dozen lines or insights from the things I'm listening to that never make their way in. There's moods and observations skipped right over. I really want to rectify this. As I type, if you feel yourself understanding, you might be having a stroke.

Hasan Minhaj speaking to Mike Birbiglia talked about being all-in when it comes to comedy. As you're coming up, you differentiate the people who happen to take to the stage sometimes, and those who put their whole ass into this being the path and lifestyle.

This is a familiar feeling I get when I observe people. This distance between me and whomever I'm looking at who has clearly chosen some path. It doesn't have to be something particularly showy or grandios. I'm somewhat flabbergasted by the plumber just as much as I am the known performer. I've never wanted anything to the degree that I would put my whole life and sense of direction or intention behind it.

We can look at the things I've done the longest. Writing is the far and away winner there. It's the one thing save basic survival behavior I've done for 21-ish years now? And it's more of a "have to" kind of thing because I don't want to hurt myself or others. I've heard comedians discuss their careers in those terms. School comes in second, which again was more or less compulsory. I was in a relationship for 5 years, but depending on how in the weeds you want to get there, you might only count 2 or 3 of them. The longest job I've had was my first, at the theater, for 2 years and 8 months. DCS was second at a week shy of 2 years. Aside from growing up, where I live currently is the longest I've stayed in one place, about 7 years.

The gentleman training me at the factory job I quit today had been there for 22 years. Before that, he was at KFC for 25. Talk about whole-assing.

Him, and the other people on the lines at the factory, I have to stress to remind myself, are all people. They don't look, feel, or sound like people as they're silently repeating actions on plastic car parts for 10 to 12 hours a day. But they're people. They're people who are getting exploited, even if their circumstances have been greatly improved working there compared perhaps to where they are from. I found it fascinating that way more than you'd think couldn't speak basically any English. The "excitement" of stupid-fascism snapped into focus in that environment.

I would put money on the fact that none of those people are the types to come home, write a big reflection on their experience of their job, dig into the politics of the moment, and play with the spreadsheet of their wages. It's not to knock them. It's to discuss, fucking dramatic, differences in types of people. I already stick out amongst the ones you'd think would be more my ilk, but holy shit. Put your head down, repeat, stay as long as we tell you, take what we say is fair in pay, do it for years? If you can wrap your head around that, you've got something I don't.

There's this chasm in talking about things trying to match the feeling language with the "reality." You might clock perfectly well that there's something rotten about the existential circumstance that cobbles hundreds of vulnerable people together to hock Subarus. You definitely clock being hungry, or the worries and obligations towards your family. At that juncture, I, hopefully not too hastily and cuntily wonder, are you really living?

I worry about this question constantly. I'm not under the impression an afterlife is waiting for me. I'm not super keen on martyrdom, slave-value-esc sacrifices, and choking shit down because "one day" it "gets better." No the fuck it doesn't. It just stays "like this." Every day. Every single fucking day is exactly like this, and sometimes you'll snap your fucking truck mirror off trying to be polite to let your neighbor pass on your country ass road, and sometimes you'll be gifted a vehicle that helps you escape many dire circumstances both real and self-imposed. I had tape in the truck, so, like most things in my life, it functions, but it'll never be pretty.

I've been writing music. I've got a song that I started out not liking for all the stuff I would have done better, then each time I listen to it, probably past 100 by now, I like it more and more, even though it's still definitely fucked up and could be re-recorded, but why? There's this interesting thing that happens where all of the most melodramatic and ridiculous feelings get almost mocked in their condensed form to make a song structure. As someone who has written out so much of his complicated series of swirling bullshit thoughts, when I can just be like "maybe I should just die" in a disquieting upbeat tone set against a dissonant background, it does so much of the same work in a different way. I'm both a better and worse singer, piano player, and drummer than I ever thought I could be.

That's one of the things I got to do today not going into the factory. I had a few lyrics hit me as I was helping my friend pick up a water tank. You can't use your phone on the shop floor, or have to disappear to the bathroom. I think any amount of words put to music are more important than a Subaru fender. You can disagree or decry apples vs oranges, and I'll call you a cunt, and we'll depart not as friends.

I felt such relief Door Dashing today. It's a weird thing to think about. All of those "side-hustle" companies have just as many issues as any other. But you know what? I was listening to podcasts. I signed off and on when I wanted. I made enough money to let it sink in that it's a viable way to hit my floor so I don't have to stress as badly. I don't have to think about driving 4 hours directly to Chicago to catch my next show, Whitney Cummings, from the factory because I couldn't come up earlier.

I've become, still incredibly mildly, invested in this phone videogame Last War. I have a team that genuinely tries to beat other people. I don't think I would like or get along with nearly any of them in real life and most of their chats upset me. It's just incredibly awkward 30 to 40-something women in the leadership positions who have all alluded to their upper-class lives and basic-bitch tastes. It's the closest I can come to embodying "factory-type person." I click all the bubbles, calculate rewards, and do my little schoolyard version of Starcraft building and strategizing. When I first entered the alliance, I was dismissive and condescending to one of the leaders saying I did not intend to treat the game like a job. This, in response to her awkward ass energy having a whole ass conversation by herself, like 15 texts, after I blocked her. I discovered said texts weeks later after a cooldown period and unblocking that helps bring coherence to the group chat.

It's getting colder, and it's another winter in which I've neglected building a wood-burning stove. Every year I pretty desperately need it for a good portion of time, and every year I spend money on literally anything else. The overall desire to build out/on my land has dwindled dramatically. I spend most of my time right here, just as I did when I was in apartments and other houses. I'm either in front of my computer, asleep, or not home the vast majority of my time. Every extra room is something new to clean, fix when I inevitably build it wrong, or act as a drain on my already massively inflated electric bills.

I'm gonna stop for a while because my eyes hurt.

It's a few days later. The Whitney Cummings show was alright. I got to spend most of the weekend with my friend. We watched another Marvel movie and got wine drunk. I (she pays me) cleaned her house, car, and garage. I was unable to Door Dash because the gifted car immediately broke down, but I've learned this morning it's back up and running. After my session with a new client tonight, I'll go and pick it up and dash a few hours.

I listened to a couple books while I was cleaning. The Elephant in the Brain discussed the performative games humanity plays to fit in and signal all the right things. It wasn't anything new information wise, but it's nice to know other autistic-adjacent people like Coleman Hughes and the author are resonating with the same themes of my experience. In the book, a discussion of this bird who spends all of its energy creating a human-sized display struck me. Is that not my whole existence out here? Except the momma birds in that species don't expect dad to raise the kids.

When I go to Chicago, I fantasize a lot about owning one of the apartments across the street or right above the venues I go to. I have to drive 4 hours, get parking, be awake and sober enough to get back home. Or I have to be on time and directionally aware if I take the train at least into the city. When I look up how much it would cost to live across from The Chicago Theatre, it's minimum $1500 a month, more likely $2000 to $2500. I'm assuming this leaves out utilities, garbage, or anything else the city or an HOA inevitably tacks on. My property taxes, electric, and internet for the year still don't go above $5,000.

It makes it easy to "kill the fantasy" when I consider how much I would have to work to keep my little box with all of its rules, noises, and neighbors so I could "conveniently" walk to and from a show. It also wouldn't be mine, like my land is. I also, never, have someone coming up to me asking for cigarettes or change, and I keep off weight not having the world's best food around every corner. But, I love Chicago, and were I rich, I would get an apartment there and try to immerse myself in it deeper.

I think about my ex-friend's uncle who killed himself. The last time we talked was at Christmas a few years ago, and he talked about how he has so much money, time, and he's never been more sad in his whole life. My counsel at the time was to focus his energy on a problem worthy of his status. If you have money and time, what are you working on that matters? Matters to you, at least? If you don't set and reset goals in an ongoing way, you get stuck reflecting on all the stuff you've surrounded yourself by that has transformed in meaning. It's not the thing you're striving for anymore. It's not a reason to get out of bed. It's not to alleviate a pain. It's just there, mocking you. My home, like Chicago, like every individual life, is a complicated series of thousands of decisions and circumstantial happenings that require constant attendance and reorganizing.

It's why I'm never done writing. I'm seeking a peaceful-enough platform to continue engaging in decisions that never feel that correct. I can build confidence into them, but I'm staking an existential claim with each one. This is what I want. This is who I am. I can intellectually accept that I am constantly changing and any kind of static statement is illusory. But shaking a persistent feeling? I still feel, in some ways, like I did as a child. If nothing is really permanent, what do you make of that? Perhaps it can never be accurately articulated, but it's a force, impression, hint, echo, something that I don't think can or should be ignored.

I've been thinking more about stealing. I mean in the context of music or creating things with my woodshop. I think way too damn hard about what to do with my time or days, and it leaves me feeling lazy and paralyzed no matter how much I actually get done. I can knock out every errand, help a friend, build something, retrieve a car, work, and get home like "You fucking cunt, 3 hours went by, and all you did was more TV?" I worry about the costs of experimenting with some new side-quest that I hope makes me money. I hit certain, pretty foreseeable roadblocks, when I jump into one of my dozen land projects. I get bored before I begin to even bother grinding through the next videogame.

But I like the idea of like, learning how to craft or make little trinkets in tribute to the things I already like. Can I make a fun wall decoration of the hand grenade heart? Can I resurrect split-up bands or celebrate my favorite songs with things I could churn out from scrap wood, but still make look cool? I've thought about crafting something I could give my favorite comedians, especially the ones coming up. Even talking about it like gives me a sense of vigor and excitement.

I can feel the order of operations in my head at all times. I need to secure (x) amount of dollars first, which entails maybe door dashing for 2 to 5 days morning to night. Then it's make peace with locking myself down and not wasting money on gas. I gotta make sure to get all my laundry and food shopping done while I'm out. I need to submit more applications and job search. I need to plan for what I'll need to do more projects for my friend in rehabbing her house. Then, I might "have the time" or secure the headspace to spend a few hours learning how best to go about making little gifts for the people who make me laugh. If I don't do it like that, I'll undermine my ability to get any piece of that train done.

I understand this is the nature of my irrational compelling feelings. I can refute it. I can choose differently. But it will take a lot of energy and constant redirection. I don't know if exerting my energy that way is necessary. I do know that this is the exact nature of how or why people do or don't change with regard to literally anything in their life. There's an order of operations, almost never articulated, that steers the ship independent of the reality of any given moment. I can watch a woodworking video right now, but it's not where my head "feels" is "correct. " I can change that feeling.

I've been setting myself up for failure looking for the same kind of desperate rush and hyper-focus of my past. Nothing is going to invigorate me like the naive story I was riding about my potential and future. I've lived too long, met too many people, worked on too many things to "believe" anything. I see the structure. I recognize the luck. I understand the need for having something you can sustainably do constantly that crashes into enough people until you can properly plug in. I recognize the road to fame and the road to business owner. I don't have an adequate daily practice, and that's informed by years of daily practices being aggressively undermined, ignored, or exploited.

What do you practice when the nature of practice turns suspect? I think my instinct about giving things I create to people who give me what they're creating provides an answer of gratitude or appreciation. I never stop practicing writing. I never stop practicing learning, from how to record music now to what small woodworking things I've done recently. I think you practice flexibility, from me doing squats to mental flexibility in thinking about what I might have to do to escape stupid-fascism and entrenched enshittified moral calculators.

I don't need a religion, but I do need to belong. I don't, in so many ways. I do, kinda, sometimes, here and there, when I'm up for the performance. Whether it's fair to the people I'm closest with or not, I can't shake the sense that I'm one day going to fuck it all up or see it destroyed? It could be an ongoing childhood trauma response or just a reflection on how pressed up against my chaotic nature I really am. If fundamentalists of any stripe are even fractionally afraid of that sensibility, it makes sense the amount of shit they would swallow and holler about in order to maintain the faux sense of order.

In 30 minutes I'll hold a session with my new client. I need to eat. I need to find the will to dash. I also think I'm going to utilize my white board to try and draw out a big mind-map of the different little tasks I want to explore for making money. I genuinely feel like this entirely different kind of existence is just around the corner. I have so, so much, potential, so poorly organized. You could not ask for more tools, time, or things to constantly learn about and experiment with. What's the nature of the challenge worthy of that/me? Do I exercise the discipline, or pretend I need to roam around the woods until I find it? I think I'd prefer to belong in the cage I build myself than the ones I find myself trapped in.

[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?

[1133] Fog Of War

You're born into a fog. It's little droplets of absolutely mystifying information sometimes cooling your face, sometimes collecting so thick you can't see and feel like you're drowning.

I find one of the defining factors of what I consider a "great" or superb-to-perfect piece of media is definition. The characters, good or bad, actually sit within the consequences of their strengths and flaws. They aren't randomly inserted at choice times because "the plot must go on." They aren't apologized for. They aren't treated like a schizophrenic episode manically punctuating a moment because a substantive idea couldn't be had. Things like "over acting" fall into this category, or the too-humbled place someone falls in being made an example of in your message-piece.

The analogy holds for the difference between a great and superb life. You can do a fair amount of "good" or "fair" things, and die without scandal or offense. But the people who lean into their characters seem to define precisely what we don't wish to be, or explicitly could. I think this is where ideas about "celebrity" versus "influencer" really diverge. A celebrity depicted timeless tropes and stories that have sustained us since we started telling them. We're drawn in. An influencer is trying to trap your attention. They're selling easy and accessible in a way someone pretending to be Hercules isn't.

Why should you want to be your character? I think about this a lot. My head echoes with the guy at a beerfest years ago who said, "You have celebrity energy." I feel like I know exactly what he's referring to, but have done next to nothing with it. I don't even know if he's actually met any celebrities, or if he's just unfamiliar with extroverts on a good day, but I'd be lying if I haven't, for years, rehearsed what I'd say on talk shows. But, what business would I have being there?

Famous chefs and political figures get their time in the sun without needing acting credits. If you spike in popularity for some viral moment, occasionally you can sucker well-known people into entertaining you for another 15 minutes when they're struggling for material. It's not something I really aspire to, but has always felt like it'd be something I should be prepared for. It may be one of the most irrational persistent thoughts I ever entertain. Bert Kreischer got mini-famous for partying. There was a couple years in college where people were shouting my name across campus still-enthused about one of mine.

Arguably, I'm more "blunt answer on the news" kind of "potential famous" at this point. I want to be known "in my world" whether it comes to social work things or if I manage to develop anything on the land. I listen to famous-enough people talk about how it's nice to not get mobbed, but it's never a bad day to have a stranger smile at you and tell you what an impact you've had on them. Garnering a certain notoriety tied to a creative approach or genuinely helpful fix to something is what I'd like most to lend my energy towards more than "look at me" or "let me sell you."

It's only exhausting to be the "life of the party" if you don't enjoy the party. If you're there out of obligation or desperation, it doesn't feel important or wise to invest in your character while you're there. If you're an appeaser who smiles and laughs at everything that doesn't earn it, or frame your existence as the thing other people need to enjoy themselves, I don't know how you refrain from resenting that immediately.

It's been about 2 days since I left off, and I've noticed another pattern that informs my foggy thoughts.

I look for people smarter than me to listen to. I like listening to nerds who specialize in some area to give me the details and history of topics I'll never have the patience or sustained interest in to research too deeply on my own. The thing about nerds, they usually only really know about that one thing. Even when they're talking about the logical fallacies or lapses in wisdom that "smart" people succumb to, breathlessly they'll mindlessly and unapologetically engage in said behavior if you give them 5 extra minutes to talk.

This makes me wonder what would happen if these people I enjoy listening to could get together and identify how to put a stop to that.

After 100 hours of Peter Boghossian interviews and videos, I can identify somewhere around 10 things he consistently does that feel like expressly poor framing, straw-manning, or frustration stoking that impede his ability to understand more about what upsets him.

The If Books Could Kill guys will matter-of-factly relay what they believe to be someone's, say Steven Pinker's, political opinions and conclusions to be and poo-poo qualifiers and context to endlessly insist there's a more insidious misstep occurring. Because they'll do so back-to-back with a genuine fact check that refutes bad research, it feels more right of a behavior and posture than it is. I think you get to score a point for calling out a bad, old, or piddling example used in service to the broader argument. You don't get to mind-read.

The amount of times Jordan Peterson is invoked as a kind of shorthand for alt-right nonsense is such a cliche lazy thing to do, he feels like the next Ayn Rand in the mind of a liberal who thinks reading or listening to him will make their head holes leak. He's become a king for speaking outside of his lane and religious apologetics, but he didn't start that way, and still sometimes recognizes when he's fallen off certain cliffs. That should matter. He's couched in so much stupid, but he's not Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, or even the most manipulative religious dicks he gobbles like Jonathan Pageau.

The religiosity of Chris Hedges and Cornel West keeps them perfectly blind to what you'll hear argued from Sam Harris and the guests like John Spencer who specialize in the history of urban warfare. Masih Alinejad, Yasmine Mohammed, and Maajid Nawaz are functionally silenced when it comes to an honest discussion about the practical and moral consequences of cultural ::ehem:: differences. Noam Chomsky will talk out of one side of his mouth about American imperialism, and downplay what funded his early career with biting defensiveness.

I think Coleman Hughes does a decent job of bothering to engage people on different topics while being less adept, than say Sam Harris, at knowing enough particulars of a given subject matter to undermine his fastest-talking guests. Coleman can get a side-stepping apologist or defensive Ph.D. to get caught in their errant missing-the-point loop which can be interesting in shedding light on how hollow the basis for many popular and too-many-books-about ideas really are.

I just listened to Yanis Varoufakis refer to what's happening in Palestine as a "genocide," after detailing a historical picture of how France and Germany have played out politically and economically. His penchant for insightful financial analysis or digestible conceptual frames stalls outside his lane like so many on the left who think this is the first time in history war has killed or starved children and continually forget who started the whole fucking thing.

Seth Meyers, who've I've gathered has cared about real shit, has a segment where he does corrections on what he's broadcast on his main show. John Oliver will do similarly, but you can feel him routinely skirt and downplay the brunt of a critical conclusion about the position he's explaining, and pawns off deeper responsibility like Jon Stewart used to do before his return on a sensibility that, "It's comedy first, after all."

I guess I want to know, what is it that makes the ability to reason, and reason so strongly, simply, and concretely just stop at a certain point?
Is there a mechanism in the brain that gets overwhelmed or hijacked?
Is there something we can measure at the level of emotion that prevents new or conflicting information to take hold?
Why does it feel impossible and unrealistic to get a standard for discerning and discussing information to as good as it ever can get, and then strike a dissonant note so simultaneously fluidly, and weirdly consistently in that extra bit of time you give someone to talk?

At a certain point in my "learn everything" behavior, it sank into my bones the futility of the effort. Whether I was trying to record every animal name in notebooks as a child, read/watch every book, lecture, debate, or online fight related to religion versus science, or do ALL THE THINGS when it comes to home projects, playing instruments, playing video games, listening to bands or podcasts, or seeing shows. You either learn to enjoy the ride, or you suffer the infinitely incomplete indefinitely.

It feels like the project of being a "public intellectual," is to professionally create a fog around yourself as you detail out someone else's. Are you both united by reason? Occasionally? Certainly more than you're united by a god concept, but a god complex instead? I'm not sure.

In my naming different people, I feel I should shout out to Naill Ferguson, Christopher Hitchens, and Michael Shermer. For the amount of subjects they can (or did) opine on, I've gotten the most consistent sense of that general respect for reason and its process. That Naill and Ayann Hirsi-Ali are married suggests to me your heart is clearly the most irrational thing, thus invoking "passion" for your position is always a loser. My pithy grievances with Sam Harris and "free will" I'll probably take to the grave like Dan Dennett.

We'll "believe" in "science" until it threatens our "identity." Our statistics are the one true statistics and not something to contextualize with dozens more at all times. I see another in road for why people adopt the perpetual high-horse-ery of a religious system. Is there any greater power than feeling no obligation to even state plainly what it means to butt-fuck your little boys or bag your women?

The intellectual wants to feel powerful too. I think they fuck up when they wish to cling to a certain "truth," like any religious apologist, instead of the truth of a process. You'll never lift the fog just by blowing your hot air.

[902] But Seriously, Like, Read This One

I really want you to pay attention to this blog. I'm going to try and approach it very deliberately, run some numbers, and speak to some of my highest aims. I had a momentary resolute surge of hope for the future, and longtime listeners will know how much I dislike the word “hope.”

I genuinely want everyone in my orbit to be organized in a way to “maximize” themselves. This is not a small or simple feat. It's also not synonymous with being “efficient” or presupposing some level of opulent lifestyle aims (which, to some extent, I have).

If you have goals in mind at all, they are likely to vary in as individuated of ways as you conceive of yourself. Maybe you covet a certain kind of decadence or environment. Maybe you want the simple pleasures indefinitely. This is “fine,” in some broad, existential way, but it also might mean you are not my audience. Or, in the spirit of “hope,” you're a $1/month subscriber that functions as a kind of thumbs up for the greater political project and contributes to an ever-more-imposing supporter count.

My bills, at what I consider something of a modern subsistence level, are $106.50 for the internet, between $117-$374 for electric (3 space heaters for months straight - not typical), and food, which were things to get dire, could be supplemented by the food bank or food stamps. What this translates to practically is, at bottom and in splitting the bills, I'm only obligated to pay $240/month, in the worst of all possible space-heater worlds. Do I need a cell phone? It's a kind of luxury, but that would push the bill to $265/month. I don't ever need to leave my house with the amount of books, movies, and instruments I've amassed, so gas and car insurance/maintenance/registration would drop precipitously. Property taxes can't be ignored, so $326/month if I don't pay them in a lump some. Every year, being a hermit who wants the internet and to wear his contacts too long, it costs me just under $4,000. Unplugging the space-heaters knocks that down to just over $3,000.

Of course, that's kind of ridiculous, right? I like eating at restaurants, leaving the house, and playing with new toys and tools. It's not “realistic” to expect myself to hunker down for the entire year and really feel “human,” unless I was oddly gratified by becoming a mythical miser. I designed my lifestyle to try and account for what might happen if I had to work at McDonald's, and still wish to feel like “me” in pursuing my larger entrepreneurial and world-takeover goals. I'd cover the basics in 3.5 months flipping burgers.

I currently occupy this weird space that is filled with increasing amounts of potential. Last year was amass the supplies and tools. This year, they are in the next room or sitting outside. Last year was dig up the hundreds of saplings or dump piles of driveway stone one wheelbarrow at a time. This year it's detailing with soil amendments and shoring-up muddy holes. I'm *excited* to build experimental structures that are blowing over to ground me in what I can and can't do with salvaged wood.

So much of this process has been a pain in the ass. Who wants to drive to the middle of nowhere? Who wants to learn how to compost if you grew up “normal” and flushed your cares away? Who wants to deal with Trump flags, fast-food 20 minutes away, and ticks? Who enjoys the aesthetics of a shed for their living arrangement? Who wants to get nominally used to water that smells like sulfur? Any one of those things would have stopped me from bothering with this project had I maintained the point of view prescribed to me through a “modern” upbringing. I'm supposed to have a mortgage and car payment, right? SHEDS AREN'T HOUSES!

The failings of our capitalist system have turned “tiny houses” and shed-living into not-so-niche points of pride and creative excitement. Poverty re-branded as a lifestyle choice is a coping mechanism. It's not more or less an effective one than the polite pleasantries we offer to excuse our behavior in service to austere neoliberal capitalism or “conservative” thought. The antidote to those modes of being has been fashioned as a kind of “radical socialism” in which even marginally giving a shit about one another is branded as un-American and begetting the inevitable road to... communism? We get boxed into this rhetoric, paralyzed and exhausted by endless working hours, and become distracted indefinitely, if only to survive.

And then what?

I think I unconsciously ask myself this all the time. What happens after I make “enough” money? What happens when my dog catches the car? A wheel makes a revolution, always returning to where it began save the wind around it or the wear-and-tear. How fast do I want to spin, and what kind of air do I want to stir? When I stop spinning, will I have worn myself down for something worth it, or did I just spin too long because I could?

I've spent 3 or 4 years to go from buying the land, to the shed, to turning it all into something resembling a house and degree of comfort I look forward to driving back to each day. I vividly remember staying here without power, without rocks to walk on, without running water, and without any idea of when or if anyone would be joining me...ever. It's a level of focus and work-ethic that I take a lot of pride in speaking about. I also simultaneously SAVED THE CHILDREN if that counts for anything. It chases back further to being able to save enough money to buy the land, and discovering that I did, in fact, want to spend as little amount of time being subjected to “normal” as humanly possible.

I don't want everyone to “suffer” like me, but I do want people to appreciate the level of dedication and detail in their own stories as well as mine. One of the things I took for granted - especially talking to a mostly-white middle to upper-middle class group of kids in how I conceived of what our futures might be – was that there was an appreciation for how many tools we'd been given and how lucky it was that we had found each other. The “goal” or “obligation” seemed clear, don't fall into the habits and traps that got us all waxing about the folly of the past. Build sustainable things. Work together. Pragmatically pursue a kind of life that enabled what everyone was saying was going to be hard to impossible given our corrupted and (literally) crumbling conception of ourselves.

Oh to be young. And, really, I get why people in their 30s hesitate to call themselves “old,” my knees or general circulation be dammed. In truth, I've had less than 10 years to, not only attempt to circumvent the circumstances I was born into, but navigate all of the new psychological drama of algorithm-infused myopic “hatred” combined with a political project to ever-institutionalize American fascism that's been churning for 50+ years.

Like a conservative laser-focused on overturning all that is good and true in the world, I, too, have an indelible focus that believes I can achieve my ends. I think I can recognize my place on the wheel. What is yours?

I have land I'm offering for you to live on *rent-free. That comes under the condition that you do the same amount of work and sacrifice in service to your largest goals or narrative as you've watched me put into mine. There's room in between, I'll happily collect rent, but you know we're both better than that. What is your money going to? Where is your time spent? I want you to be exacting in your budgets. I want you to imagine what it would mean to take over the world.

When I look at my friend list, I don't precisely know how to understand it. There's people I've been familiar with, worked with, and a couple strangers. There's people I know a fleeting amount of their bill or life obligations. There's people I've gotten drunk and dreamed big with. There's people I'm waiting for my big birthday party invite no-one's going to show up to to delete the day after. They've probably still got student loans, donate to charity, or you wouldn't believe how complicated kids are! I see occasional personal wins or celebration. And then what? What is the goal? Wait for Joe Manchin? Die old and in your sleep?

I want to drop rocks, rehab a couple trailers, and rent free-to-cheap. Do you want “passive” income? Help me. Buy in.

I want to scale up worm production.

I want to grow food and live off-grid.

I want to build sustainable little communities on small and large acres that supplant the impact of the larger power brokers and psychosis of myopic depression and anxiety.

I want to sleep and wake up at whatever times I want.

I want to be left alone to practice a small measure of difficult music for as long as it takes my fingers or lips to figure it out.

I want to be busy with things that give me energy and get me up early in the morning.

When all of that comes under threat I want to organize my vigilant and accountable crowd to beat back the enemy (Guess where we are on the wheel.)

Then I want to get back to building the infrastructure that lends itself to letting me piss off and play music or sleep until the next Rush Limbaugh is born. Or, I want to have created such a robust and meaningful system, it incorporates the Rushes and the Trumps and the Hitlers in such a deliberate and awake way, we avoid bending ourselves into jagged spokes being turned against our will.

What does that look like for you? Where in my goals do you see any of yours? How much time do you want to waste doing 1/10th alone what we might do together? What's your budget? How much do you spend on rent? How precious is your locale?

16 or 17 years ago, I sounded a lot like I do now. The macro-picture has not improved, and I don't mean to dismiss the musing or statistics of a Bjorn Lomborg, Stephen Pinker, or Coleman Hughes, but they don't seem to have a way to account for what seems like the heart of a sickness. I can't “persuade” well-enough-off people to form a more aggressive Rainbow Coalition around a shared truth or identity that renders the ticks and funky waters of life as mere details. I can't persuade people to even *speak* to their goals for fear of provoking the embarrassed resentment that begets the flood of excuses for their behavior.

Keep asking yourself – and then what? The wheel is going to turn regardless. Where are we going?
In 3 or 4 more years, I bet I have another camper or 6 set up. In 10, I suspect I'll have stopped associating with the vast majority of every eye-ball that might be looking at this now. In 16 or 17, I hope to not sound piddling and pathetic about the state of the country, environment, or my prospects because we all saw what was coming, and couldn't be bothered. I am bothered. I am doing something. It won't be enough alone.

And if you can't figure out how someone so “bleh” like me could ever be worked with, borrow from Am's or BT's example. I'm basically just an obnoxious proxy for their behind-the-scenes calculations.