[975] Mo Mo Mo

I need to spend some time thinking about my motivation. In no way will I be able to synthesize the thoughts before now because I’ve passed up at least 3 times I probably should have started writing.

I do things, often enough, after being backed into a corner. I create debt for myself so I can get a “real job” and provide the justification to submit myself to the pain that entails. I might physically exhaust myself on some task so I can shake off the “I’m not doing enough” feeling. I create these kind of high-stakes social dynamics that pit your sense of cordial duty against my righteous indignation, so by the time we’ve disassociated, I don’t have to pretend there’s a bridge worth repairing.

I had a lot of energy when I was in high school, college, and right after college, to push an incredibly strong notion of “excelling.” It could be attached to anything. I could take pride in the sheer amount of TV I was able to watch, or the efficiency with which I made money doing drug studies. Academically, the designation of “A” had lost its muster, so I tested how A/B-ish I could be with the least amount of effort possible, and I decided to get really good at partying. I was pumping a certain kind of psychologically gratifying, albeit arbitrary, stats. Who cares if I can go from zero to coffee shop in 4 months? Just me.

I seem to do things in a disproportionate way, just not precisely the things I’d really rather be doing. When I get the chance to do what I’d rather be doing, the rules of life are still at play. This speaks to an underlying motivation at play at all times. I want to exist in a way that renders those life circumstances mute. I want to always have the money, the time, or the help. I can’t change the weather, but I can build a considerable amount indoors. If there’s a rule that would stop me, I want to have the means to undermine or circumvent it. This could also be a complicated way of describing the drive towards creative self-expression.

The desire to accomplish “small” things plays by more viscerally practical rules. I almost never leave trash laying around. Shit’s in the way. I don’t have a lot of space, and I don’t want shit in the way. I may dawdle on doing dishes because until they’re in the way of me eating or making food, they’re where dirty dishes belong. When you own a house, something’s always broken or missing, but it gets ridiculous to think that you’ll account for it all in every moment you notice that the milk is low or bugs’ nest isn’t easily accessible. There’s less “do it now” with those things, and they get grouped for weekends or those days where you’re just really into getting things done.

I was listening to a Sam Harris podcast, and he brought up how we’re always looking for the next thing, living in this illusion that obtaining it will make us happy. I was watching a Louis Theroux documentary as a compulsive millionaire gambler blew through hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a few days. I’ve noticed the eyes of the bewitched with their hollow desperate and craving emptiness for recognition of their suffering when their persona wears thin. I suppose I’m lucky to have maintained a kind of motivation to not end up perpetually in that state.

I don’t like to feel bad. This may seem like a weird thing to have to state so plainly. I think it’s important to do so though. It’s more than obvious. I don’t like to feel bad so much, that I will write for years until I feel a little bit better. I don’t like to feel bad to such a degree, that I will work myself to death to ensure the thoughts in my head align with a decent-to-exceptional conception of myself. I might habitually bite off more than I can chew, but I took the bite, and I’m still chewing. The moment I felt what rolfing could do for my physical well-being, that money was gone. My food budget is so high because the shittiest I tend to feel is when I haven’t eaten enough. Again, we could describe this as being up against a kind of pain-threshold wall.

When I think about how we evolve, it’s selection pressure. What is the environment selecting for? What genes are being activated under the current constraints? If we talk about different “classes” and the cultures they entail, is it down to the biology that iterating obnoxious selfishness plays out in superficially different ways? You can complain about black-on-black violence as a loud example, but how many people suffer and die as a result of greed? Why is greed good in rich culture? The environment dictates the conditions for remaining in said environment. You might not consider yourself rich, certainly not Bezos-rich, so the nature of your greed, familiar, common, is hardly noticed. You’ve got an HOA to answer to, and you earned your privacy fence.

I’ve removed a lot of the walls in my journey through this shed-life thing. It’s sweltering outside, and cool in here. I’m still inconvenienced in my bathroom and kitchen setups, but I’m not flinging shit out the window nor going hungry. All of my effort to build more is in service to creating new corners to get backed into. I have the tools, now they need a home. If they’re not running, why did I buy the tools? Indefinite hobby and selective guilt await. If I think someone is special or unique, well, surely, they deserve my effort to create something cool! I get to take it a step further. If I don’t dictate, complicate, or imbue my work into a larger context, I just sit and wait for things to happen. I refresh facebook and reddit. I marathon TV and don’t think too hard about the gross juxtaposition of “marathon” and “TV.”

It’s been insufferably hot lately. You think I’m building my workshop in that? I already barely drink enough water or eat right, let alone wear sunscreen or generally go about things that would suggest to you I don’t like to feel bad. If I feel faint upon opening the door, game over for that idea. Are there things that need to be done indoors? Kinda, but no, not really. If I choose to rearrange the furniture again, it’s hard to say what’s been accomplished beyond it feeling good to pretend exercise and experience the different room flow.

This is a restatement that the vast majority of my “problems” are, not. I’m not a jaded and broken millionaire feeding machines hundred-dollar bills, but I’m also not a millionaire. I’m not cripplingly sick or in mental turmoil, but I don’t have health insurance. I know how to swim, I’m not drowning, but the only race I’m in is against death, which serious as it might sound, I can’t win.

I really do feel like I have made a concerted effort over time to be okay with whatever “this” moment is. I affirm my health, wealth, comfort, kitties, conveniences, computers, and capacity for compartmentalizing my competing conceptions. It doesn’t take away from my desire to proverbially “take over the world,” but it does mean I don’t suffer the anxiousness or depressive guilt by not “excelling” via being busy or “above” in my concerns for how I’m spending my time. If I had millions of dollars right now, you know what I’d probably still be? Alone. It might be with someone(s) happy to spend my money with me in the next room of fancier architecture in a distant locale, but people I consign to my larger goals would be just that, paid for.

Part of me feels like that’s an incredibly real scenario because of how hard it’s been to get people to join, with weeks or months-notice or otherwise, what I’ve been up to. I do have friends and my dad who are down, it’s not a desert in spite of what the weather suggests. But I’ve had people kind of flirt with the idea of spending time together or doing stuff. I’m not their priority, which is perfectly fine, it just naturally translates that will continue to hold whether I’m inviting you to Fiji or a comedy show. You’ll have a life and obligations that I’m supposed to what? Pay you to put aside like any good capitalist?

It feels like I’m talking about that sneaking suspicion we all might have that there really is no “our” page, goal, or reality. That doesn’t mean reality won’t kill us all the same or that we don’t rhyme, but it does heartily explain the appeal of religion. You don’t want to go through a series of thoughtful, accountable, and painful evolutions in thought or behavior? Check out this brand-new forgiveness for sale! Just give it up to God! You can be as free as Sam Harris in his disposing of free will! Good is good, evil is evil, and we’re all just along for the circularly-reasoned ride! Yee-haw! I still believe “consciousness” is the “what” that makes the indeterminate determinate, so I struggle, or futilely refuse, to be a happy cog. I didn’t will myself into existence, but if I maintain my faculties and shoot myself in the head anyway, you’re gonna get an attestation of the nature of my will, messily depicted and ironically incomplete in its finality.

The last time I used “motivation” in the title of a blog was in January 2013. A few lines from that blog stick out to me, but as I started to mine them, it seems inadequate to the task. You should read it after this one. What’s clear, is that at least 9 years ago, I still hated the idea of getting a normal job, knew no one would respect me or my time like I might, and I acknowledge the conditional nature of my being. I was aware of the clarity that having a goal provides. I was suspicious of the form my potential impact on the world could take. I lamented people who couldn’t pair their best ideas with any practical actions.

Do I even remember what I was doing in 2013? 2 years after college I was probably failing at the mobile coffee van and circling the pillow of the loner-in-the-basement status I was about to adopt. A month later I was speaking to the comfort I felt thinking Kristen and I were in the same kind of relationship and I was understood lol. Maybe we were at that point, who knows, I only have one-sided small and garbled snapshots.

It’s easy to get lost. I repeat myself a lot. In going through and scanning some old blogs I’ve like reignited the memory of the “stuck” and anxious place that I fairly-well grounded into the center of my being. 9 years ago? I was in a long-term relationship. I was just starting to do drug studies. I had a lot of ideas and energy to put behind my informal “retire by 30” plan. Was my motivation fundamentally different than it is today? In the greatest sense, no. I still want the same non-physical things. I don’t feel like I have any less “energy” than I did then, it’s just not sporadically involving itself with more than I can reasonably address in any given moment.

I think I feared that if I calmed down, I would start to “settle” and look and sound like all of the people I grew a severe distaste for. The ones who have every excuse not to move to the middle of nowhere and try to get out ahead of our modern fall of civilization. The ones who blow superficial smoke up every ass of interaction because that’s what polite society expects. The ones who just stay silent and suffer indefinitely and live vicariously through comedian commentary or the pleasant pictures whirring by. It was harder to recognize or accept my “alone” status because I was with someone. I wasn’t so far removed from college and there was still a fair amount of people left to drift away. My environment dictated, for as much as I was talking about it.

That I’m where I am in life now, I think speaks to how much I’ve maintained a sense of self and orientation in spite. My capacity, happiness, or direction isn’t fundamentally dictated nor rooted in “you.” I choose friends. I chose to suffer the discrepancies and loss. All these new babies hitting the scene are going to die. You knew that when you got into baby-making mode. They may even die before you, and isn’t that colloquially understood as the worst kind of tragedy? Surely it wasn’t thoughts like those that fed your motivation to have a child. I thought, probably incorrectly, that I envied people who found their deepest sense of purpose and drive to ensure their children grew up and passed those genes on. What a burden to carry if you don’t know why you’re doing it.

You can linguistically reduce all efforts to procreate or proliferate literature to the same nihilistic absurdity. You can ignore that it might just feel good. It doesn’t have to be deep. You may just exist to be personally gratified, at least the conscious part of you, for as long as you can. A kid gets wrapped up in that? All the more collateral damage. I mean, child brides are still a thing, and I don’t know if you know how many kids are molested growing up, but you’re not gonna find a statistic that won’t remind you how woefully under-reported the 25-30% of the known cases are speaking to.

Have you noticed the drift in this blog? How did I get to child molesting? Isn’t this about motivation? As I continue to describe my spite engine as moving me right along, it’s no wonder the sheer amount of atrocity that’s pressed right up against how I conceive of my effort and best conception of the world. To talk of “my motivation” or “spite engine” is just a personal understanding of the marriage and dance at the conflicted ever-changing heart of existence. I think about death constantly, and it makes me want to live a certain way. I still don’t know that the reasoning I apply for my own existence I would use in service to a new child, but I also don’t think early-abortion cells, or any persons, are going to an afterlife.

Motivation feels like a calculation. I want many things at once. I want them in perpetuity. I’ve both experienced intellectually and emotionally the reality and diminishing returns of the mere acquisition. You can’t just make a friend. You have to celebrate, and work with, and evolve together. You can’t just buy things or amass wealth; you have to put them to work. Things like Amazon and SpaceX are incidental giants who need to create giant corners to get backed into like I need to pile up a few dishes and turn 2x4s into adult building blocks.

We’re shaped by these unconscious desires to belong to something “more” and beyond ourselves. The endless irony being, we perpetuate circumstances that keep us isolated, angry, and feeling almost perfectly misunderstood. We keep up the façade that we can’t learn or connect, share in our goals and motivation, by staying silent unless it’s to say something disparaging or superficial. My motivation is inextricably tied to my awareness and the demonstration and repeatability of that awareness. I know I’m going to die not feeling really any more or less happy than I have for the last 9 if not 18 years since I started writing.

I don’t make it a secret that I want you to speak, or that I’m going to. I won’t be surprised if things turn out as bad as those who’ve been paying attention say they will. I won’t lose my motivation to fight or create or move the hell out of the way. There is no illusion about life I need to paint over how I actually feel and think, even if I didn’t “will” every impression I could extract. I will the words. I will the movement. I’m not at the mercy of my chaotic and contradictory heart. I dance with the chaos, and in so doing, create an order that suggests balanced direction. Who could get tired doing that?

[843] The Only Way

The broad theme of this is communication. I'm going to try to not shoot too high in how I connect the scattered lines I'm hung up on. The major question is whether or not there is a right way to do something.

We make the argument, often enough, that there is only one way. Implicitly for most things, but explicitly when the danger is more immediate. You are silent in a theater. There's a correct and incorrect side of the road. Jesus.

The deliberateness or explicitness of the task is a dependent variable. It depends on the abstract frame you use to decode the world. If you have nowhere to be except to “transport” yourself, you may walk, ride a bike, be carried, send yourself through the mail, or take mushrooms, and the goal - transportation - is achieved.

This very blog has the goal of quieting my mind as its largest abstract framework. I define what “quiet mind” is. The next layer down is the careful word choices that hopefully you can digest. Together we might frame and conclude if anything has been translated. I hope you can identify your frames and see how they bump into others. I hope to provide resolution to how you and I orient ourselves and decide on goals.

I want “security.” A knee-jerk fear-based response might mean buying a weapon. This boxes “security” into the two hero-story scenarios everyone defaults to when they pretend they are a “good guy with a gun.” A model U.N. participant might regard stabilizing an entire region of the planet as the just and proper means of attaining “security.”

We know the ambiguity in communication so well that we tend to disregard the perpetual pain and consequences of misaligned meaning as “normal.” We settle for “different ways to skin a cat” sentiments instead of digging. We beg to be understood for what was “plainly said” with “common sense” and plead with people to tell us “what you really mean!”

I find business books constantly alluding to psychological studies on why your pitch or good idea doesn't resonate with a big boss's lizard brain. Relationship and self-help books prompt you to define your personality and style to categorize and depersonalize what your frustrated partner might have regarded for years as, “That's just Bill!”

Politically we bicker beyond the point of feeling sick about the ways to “defend the country,” and very often decide there are “sides” that cannot be resolved, somehow both perfectly reasonable, moral, and with their own kind of “rationality.” The consequences, often excessively felt by those hardly represented, serve less to teach something we later correct for than to punish those we disingenuously regard as “merely disagree with.”

As with most positions I try to take, the idea is not to bemoan the very circumstances of life to make some fatalistic throwaway comment. Yes, you can be right and wrong across many dimensions or layers of focus. Yes, we're always seemingly in some form of contradictory position. No less, I think there is a right way to do things, and a wrong way to do things, at the most abstract levels I can imagine. Specific is easy. Right side of the road, or crash. Eat, or starve.

Abstract is whether you should drive at all. This is a broad historical story predicated on the ethics, ignorance, and selection pressures at the start of the combustion engine era. There were angry environmentalists in those days, but it could be easy enough argued that the prosperity from working in a car manufacturing factory at that time, contributing to the boom and technological development of vehicles, and being an earnest part of modern society outweighed the impact of the pollution.

Can you be right about this issue? Immediately, the impulse is to cite individual justifications and get defensive. “How else can I get grandma to the hospital!?” The effort to lose the point makes itself known. I ask myself, if I were offered another means, a sustainable and reliable means to stop driving grandma to the hospital, would I take it? Yes, that's the right way.

This is a huge hurdle. The way we do things, talk about things, and orient ourselves in the world is our entire world. It works, for better or worse, in “maintaining life” as miserably as we conceive of it in any moment. What are you introducing that's more reliable than my car? What problems does it bring? Where's your proof it works as well? While we lose ourselves to the details and fight, poor grandma is left with all the time she has left to contemplate if, in the abstract, she was really the kind of person who should have had children.

Individually, we don't spend a lot of time attempting to frame things for other people unless maybe we're a parent or supervisor (and even then who knows). The trend of recent human history is to cultivate individual frames and feedback loops. Without ever thinking about the consequences of doing so, we start to regard this as the correct mode of interacting and obtaining information. After all, “information obtainment” and or “being entertained” are ends unto themselves, right? What's being communicated doesn't matter as much as that it exists at all. Thus, naturally, it follows we should compete as entertainment or for other resources.

I think this is a wrong way to be human.

Humans are conscious. Consciousness is awareness. “Awareness” is abstract. How to be “abstractly aware” the “right” way? This is the junction where people default to prescribed religious doctrines or a hodgepodge of mangled philosophy with “ist” and “ism” monikers doing the work of lived experience.

Claims of awareness abound. Pastors are aware of what God said to them. Environmentalists are aware of the impact of fossil fuels. Situational awareness is bestowed to the most paranoid or trained. Reliably though, we find ourselves only just-so aware and often tricked by those who understand the underlying forces at play. We'll be able to fool people with the monkey dancing between people passing a basketball video indefinitely.

It already feels impossible to be aware correctly, no? Even the phrasing feels weird.

This is where the humanity comes in. You qualify with acts. Immediately, your awareness coalesces around specific acts. You can arrest other's attention. If and when you become aware of something, you can choose to act in service to your understanding, or lack thereof.

We're about to get in trouble. What do you know? What kind of understanding doesn't beget a feedback loop of isolated self-satisfaction and justification? For before you can get to whether or not you are behaving in the “right” way, you have to find the impulse for truth and honesty.

Uh oh, I did it again, didn't I? I offered two exceptionally boundless words that we routinely treat with every possible interpretation as bedrocks. I didn't put them in quotes, though. I think they exist as far as you can throw them, sure, in varying degrees of focus and relevance, but also as an indomitable consistent base in each of our hearts. Absolutely none of my indignant posture towards other people makes sense without this broad abstract assumption I lay across everyone.

The thing is, I don't know what it is to be human if I ignore that impulse in myself. When I lie, it's disorienting. It's in service to something impersonal, primal, and probably reactively and unduly destructive. If I approach all of our interactions like you're perfectly understood and honestly relaying your experience, I betray the lies in you that I recognize in myself.

Practically, this means I occupy two very different conversational, social, and emotional worlds, and from the outside, they're impossible to differentiate.

You don't have to believe when I write that I'm being as honest as I can muster. If a part of you knows that I am, and you refuse to believe that, we're occupying different plains and I find it impossible to conceive of you as “doing human right.” This is not the same thing as struggling to contend with conflicting information or holding two competing ideas in your head at once. This is about whether or not I have the capacity to speak to, and you have the capacity to hear and recognize, whatever it is at bottom that connects us. I'd like to call it a science without cheapening science.

So you make the decision to be honest and tell the truth. First, impossible, hurdle and footing is done.
Next, you start denoting what you're aware of and stating where you exist relative to it.
Last, you act to change your relative place or in service to consequences the study or science of your experience can reliably predict.

This is doing human correctly and being aware in the right way.

When you hear an “intellectual” tout a series of catch-alls and vagaries that tangibly and reliably beget death and destruction, don’t get lost in their weeds, as they deliberately lead with lies. They pick untruths. You have to believe this about people, just like you can believe it about yourself when presented with the magnitude of your mistakes all at once.

People will deliberately choose death before they will choose honesty. They will do this because a life suffering the consequences of the reality of their decisions would be worse than death. Ironically, they only know this because their bottom-line communication science that understands blogs like this tells them so.

The problem, as our coronavirus times can no doubt attest, is that their choice to die in service to their demons, when scaled up, kills us all.

Thus, you need to return to the exercise. Is it honestly hard to believe people are willing to die and kill those around them, so recklessly, as you consider our violent past or watch them do so every day? Are you allowing yourself to be corrupted, in so many ways, by sympathies and physical or emotional burdens that have entangled themselves to those who are going to get you killed? Can you move in a way that maximizes your chance to survive?

Only once you frame the game and its different layers can you play it. If you're unwilling to do so, it's hard to consider you human. If you're unable to do so, you're likely the kind of person that needs protecting. If you're unable to find protection, you'll be the first to die. Maybe you don't care about who dies, but then again, I reflexively call you inhuman and a liar.

[655] Fourced

I want to tease out a few probably disparate ideas, but have all become stuck in my head at once.

1. On an episode of StarTalk, Neil DeGrasse Tyson says something like, “What if you wake up as a completely different person, would you ever know it? You'd have all their memories, mannerisms, etc.”

2. Considering the inability to think something that never occurs to you. And closely aligned, the idea that you can keep making the same mistake.

3. The idea that, “you should pick the ones that pick you.”

4. Looking up to “cool” people.

To the first idea, I initially thought of claims regarding the “collective conscious” and the title of the new show “Wisdom of the Crowd” kept flashing by. If we presumed a collected conscious, then, in a sense, every day you are waking up as any or everyone else. “Their” memories are only as good as they can remember and relate them. “Their” quirks or habits presumably things you could work yourself into. Or, maybe better said, at the level of experience, maybe you can't hit a high A note above the highest C ever sung on stage, but you can experience the same nonchalance and calm with regard to one of your own talents or capacities.

That same consciousness could possibly, only be so conscious. In the sense that if you take an opinion poll from all of the same type of person or demographic, you'll get a skewed answer. The crowd may be able to provide some larger insight some of the time about a few specific things, but there's little reason to believe much of what they say or do lies beyond the confines of convention and norms of the era. Science, then, as a set of processes to remove the biases of that consciousness, in it's interpretation can also only be so conscious of its conclusions. To the extent you let the conclusions breath independent of your opinion speaks to its efficacy and survival as a viable means of interacting with the world.

I don't personally think there is a collective consciousness, and I think if you had an exacting and comprehensive method of accounting for how and why people transmit ideas, you'd narrow down the harbingers of the next waves of good or bad ideas, much as if you had the computing and recording power to better predict the weather. I think that would be a pointless goal and shift too quickly in real time to provide any real insight, but I don't think the transmission and evolution of ideas is fundamentally magic or hard to understand.

Waking up as someone else, shifting your life laterally perhaps, could simply be an exercise in extreme empathy and imagination. It'd be utilizing the part of our brain that grew to run the thought experiment so we wouldn't have to risk our lives to figure something out. Your specific interpretation of whatever the subject matter then becomes mute. I can envision myself as a rock star. I can play the instrument, I can sign autographs, I can run from paparazzi. At the smallest level, while I won't be “culturally interpreted” as deserving of the Hall of Fame, no act of any band member is beyond my doing or feeling. They incidentally get swept up by the winds of chance that begot fame. My winds, while ignored, blew just as ferociously as forces in my own life.

Here seems like a good time to talk about idea 2, being unable to think something that never occurs to you.

Say it never dawns on you that you could ever pick up an instrument, let alone develop a “talent” for it. Given the innocuous nature of whether or not you play an instrument, no one is going to bother to blame or shame you for that. There's a million roads you haven't taken that no one would bat an eye about. But then force yourself to think of criminal behavior. It's immediately easy for us to imagine why we wouldn't spend our time kayaking or becoming a lawyer, but somehow our brain shuts down imagining getting into elevated levels of trouble. We affirm a “be anything you want to be” posture and completely forget we can be absolutely terrible. We can desire destruction and aberration, and yet even acknowledging that seems lost on our “collective consciousness” no matter how many war documentaries get produced.

I think this happens because of an idea often forwarded that “people are fundamentally good.” It's that people don't normally want to be be bad, or suffer the social repercussions. People aren't good or bad, they're people. Any and all behavior that strays from the echoed, presumed, or televised “norm” triggers bad feelings. This creates a condition where you don't allow yourself to play with just how “bad” you actually are. This is how “weird” fetishes and taboos get created. This is why self-righteous religious hypocrites accept things like pedophilia and rape. It never occurs to them they're bad. Never. Meanwhile we blame the “intellectuals” and “left” for not speaking their language and not being understanding. It never occurs to them, irony weeps, that someone else's brain never had the same ideas occur to them.

Take an easy example, like being gay. How do you know you're not gay if you've fundamentally barred your brain from ever asking the question? You don't just “never find the words,” you reduce even the hint of discomfort into derision or violence. Similarly, you don't care how science operates or at what stage a nervous system develops if, in your mind, you've never not known how to have a thought where “soul” came first. Not the simple word, “soul” but every feeling, memory, positively and defensively reinforced ounce of care that soul has meant to you your entire life. It never truly occurs to you that “accidental life” is even on the table. You don't have a real conception of “cell,” “life,” or even “accident” because what they mean isn't your hard won parsed perception and description, they're a jumbled mess of righteousness in need of defending.

I think this speaks so much to why I try to read and watch “everything.” I've heard a number of times back to back how the study of philosophy or constant pursuit of knowledge just keeps informing you of the different degrees of your ignorance. You can get insanely technically proficient at a handful of things, and you can create a thousand new questions regarding a new topic that grabs your interest. I don't know what I don't know. The things I do know, and the way I've oriented my life, I start to lose sight of how long it took me to get there. It doesn't occur to me that habits I've built or fought long and hard for can be, in a more specific sense, forgotten. Habituating doubt is great for breaking prejudices, but dangerous when let out of the box of context.

So onto “choosing those that choose you.” On its face, it sounds like a terrible idea. Anyone could choose you. A gang member chooses you for your desire to impress or balls in dangerous situations. A self-destructive lonely partner sees you for the beautiful, amazing, strongest person they've ever known and equally as afraid of being alone or disappointing their parents as they are. Ash and Pikachu took a minute to get on working terms. It makes me think of the fatalistic yet cheerfully sung, “Love the one you're with.”

The same could be said for topics of interest or compulsion made by society or family. Get a STEM degree! They scream, as you ignore the statistics regarding a glut of cheap engineers coming from India. Kim Kardashian! As you join in the chorus of, “What does she even do?” and peep the price of her new perfume. Marketing chooses you. Schools choose your family for their money, not because IU feels a stately obligation to educate the Midwest. The army chooses you to stand for your country, even if it knows you're only there because you couldn't afford school or were caught up in the romanticism of dying in service to “freedom and democracy.”

A less insidious interpretation could be at the level of an actual healthy family or friendship. Choose to engage deeper the friends that bother to occasionally text or call you first. Choose to engage the ideas like the ones I listed above because they couldn't go away and try to figure out what you really see in them. Maybe you want to get all mystical and say “chance” chose you to engage and perceive the life you're living, so choose to just generally pay better attention and offer the level of choice and engagement that your eyes and brain seem to lock you into whether you like it or not. I can't help but think I've tried to have the best of all worlds in picking back the girls who've been happy enough to sleep with or cuddle up to me, but here the failure of the idea seems most easily manifested when they haven't picked each other...

Finally, the idea of looking up to “cool” people. Part of looking through endless streams of information is the search for people I want to be more like. For a while, I caught the idea that I wanted to be “nicer” and worshiped, in a sense, the friends of mine in college that seemed to have these “pleasant” or “delightful” dispositions that attracted more of the same types. Easily argued, that's not me, but I admired, and still kind of do, the ones who can pull that off. The mean part of my brain calls their behavior mostly a well-rehearsed lie that they suffer indelibly for and lays at the ground of why we often part ways for stupid and insecurity-screaming reasons, but that's just one interpretation, right?

I've found fictional characters cool. I thought the “new atheists” were cool. I've had a handful of teachers I admired for their dispositions or hilarity. I think my dad is cool. My grandma and grandpa were cool. I have a handful of friends so wildly outgoing and individualistic, no matter how absolutely weird they absolutely are, they're stuck at the coolest level I could imagine.

You think of people as cool because you want to be more like them, whether you're always comfortable admitting that to yourself or not. A big reason I “hate everyone” isn't because I can't make a case for why they still deserve a place on the planet, but because they don't have a single thing I want to be more like. I don't want to be a bureaucrat deferring to the rules to perpetuate stupid exploitative ideas. There goes my life as the voice on the other end of a “help” line. I don't want to be a single-minded gamer or stoner. I don't want to be “middle-class,” pulling in just enough to keep paying the bills as I salivate about the week vacation I'll get maybe a year or two from now. I don't want to crawl up the ass of one of my hobbies until I can black out the rest of the world. I don't want to force conversation because you're scared we won't be cool if we don't see each other for a while.

The last person I genuinely thought was cool was Jordan Peterson. There's many many people I certainly admire, don't get me wrong, but what I recognized in Peterson was an infatuation and enthusiasm with his chosen material that I felt I at one point had and missed about myself. He had a moral and intellectual compulsion to fight with difficult and horrible ideas until he could shake out solid foundations. Him having the ability to articulate and move my thoughts into realms I didn't know I didn't know how to think about was, still is, immensely gratifying. I want to be that for other people. I find it unimaginably motivating and cool when I get the opportunity to explore new territory someone has opened up. On my horizon is a field and an open-ended mapping website. I want to create the conditions for my own motor running in service to discovering the unknown.

It'd be great if there was a way to tie it all together right? I mean, these 3 or 4 pages now exist as one new thing. It's another little chunk of me to add to the pile. I think it's cool. Until I wrote it, only those four thoughts at the top occurred to me, against my ability to escape them or anticipate them getting stuck in my head. I picked the idea of writing about them after they picked me. And if you read this, or re-read it, and then “forget” about it, and then one day spit out a line exactly as I said it, maybe it could be said you woke up as me and never would be able to say so. It would never occur to you my impact or what my consciousness did to our collective one. Or maybe I'll get ignored and taken for granted, and different forces will fill in for what mine might've done. Could I blame you?