[988] Compounding Interest

I’ve been having these flurries of inspiration to write on Monday mornings. I listened to part of a philosophy podcast with one of the hosts from Know Your Enemy appearing as a guest. The usual incredibly specific and intellectual banter, questions, and theory ensued. I felt a few familiar things and began to think on the purpose and direction of when I “intellectualize” things, particularly when it comes to what I work on and why.

I’ve known few highs like when I was obsessed with reading about religion and science. I liked the fight. I liked that the purpose of my reading was to argue and organize the best ideas and information. “Obsession” is the correct word. I was watching not just debates and reading things from the most famous names, I was watching the field-specific conferences and speeches getting into the kind of details absolutely no one outside of that particular realm cared to consider or debate.

The energy to dive so deep into that world was held over from my frustration and confusion tied to my ideas of “love” and then my naive sense that human ignorance and injustice could be mitigated with better data and clear ideas. They aren’t replicable conditions, but were I to try, it would be conjuring a series of “impending doom” feelings related to democracy, the environment, and any taken-for-granted luxury we’re not prepared to lose. I listen to these incredibly informed nerds and am envious that I know what it takes to be like them, but I spend most of my time brushing past dozens of topics instead of diving into a few.

It’s the next day and I’ve woken up early, returned to a work environment, and listened to two Sam Harris podcast episodes. The first talked about time-management and the various strategies we use to trick ourselves into thinking we have control or avoid feeling negatively about all we can’t. The second was about wealth and the psychology of markets or how people spend their money. Much of the sentiments from both feel very familiar and I believe to be insights I’ve attempted to build into how I conduct my life. They served as little reminders of the things I’m not suffering as deeply as I have in the past.

Take, for example, my propensity to try and do “everything.” This could easily be conceived of as distracting myself from a “deeper” or “more meaningful” set of behaviors in service to “larger” goals. The thing about me though, I conceive of my goals as both big and small and synonymous with my overall sense of orientation and purpose. There is little difference between my playing Candy Crush while marathoning a season of a show and me making phone calls to search for referrals. Both are concerned with my moment-to-moment sense of my agency and ability to make decisions.

Consider inputting notes. I have 3 sets of notes to put in from groups yesterday. 3 sets of notes I pretty deliberately ignored while I was in the office yesterday and certainly upon getting home. I thought I might do them after getting to the office today about an hour and a half early. I’m writing this instead, or at least, first. I have every intention of getting the notes done, but I’m wired psychologically and through practice to make a certain kind of peace with what’s informing my awareness before I introduce less-gratifying or abjectly meaningless tasks into my experience. It’s a process I’ve learned to begrudge less, but still begrudge because it testifies to my remaining impediments to more agency and choices.

And here we may tie into the sentiments offered yesterday. There was an invigorating sense of control in having an intimate understanding of complex fields of information. I could anticipate what the argument was going to be, the very words they were going to use, and the proper response. I knew there was another book around the corner that was going to be a fun weapon to swing. I also managed to get a better understanding of how intimately my behavior and sense of being in the world was tied to an infinite array of things that had very little to do with “me.” It helped me slow down and mellow out when I started to embody the broader futility of my effort.

It would be foolish to pretend that every moment I spend in an office I didn’t make, making money for people I don’t know and a company I didn’t start, was anything less than an admission of defeat. My initial ideas about how to “own my effort” or enrich myself were wrong. I had to be humbled and give up. I had to sacrifice the foggy dream of what things were supposed to be and ground myself in the practical reliability of sacrificing a certain experience and utilization of my time for the monetary teats I must suckle. I’m less concerned, now, with the sucking than I am with losing the awareness of how hard or long I have to, and whether or not I’m still feeling fulfilled and able to pursue what I put on my plate otherwise.

As such, my concept of “debt” has definitely evolved. Less-consciously, I’ve always known that I’m perpetually indebted. I can’t live in a capitalist society and own property without a lingering bill. I can’t be on-grid and share my ideas with my handful of followers unless I’m spending money in service to transportation to free wifi or paying for the internet. I have to keep or maintain the technology I’m typing on. I’m not growing my own food nor wiping my ass with leaves. I’ve described my debt as a practical corner I box myself into to compel an easier capitulation to these work environments. It’s become something more.

As the negative number continued to rise as the Amazon bills registered in my Personal Capital tracking page, I felt an increasing sense of freedom. All of the things I’d been piling up, anticipating, wanting were on their way or had arrived. I was able to collapse a lot of the longing narratives in my head in one fell swoop. Why am I not practicing piano? The updated, weighted-keys, midi-connecting tool isn’t a dream, it’s plugged in waiting for my time and attention. The tire knocking on my backseat window has my replacement hoist in my hamper waiting to be set where it belongs under my truck. My fraying ratchets won’t need to be relied on as I frantically glance and whatever’s next to be secured in my truck bed. What am I going to do this weekend? At least through October, it’s some show, if nothing else, and probably bowling where I’ll get to continue experimenting with my technique and new ball of proper weight and drilled hole.

I’m functionally building a “life mortgage” that accounts for the myriad narratives I have in my head about how I wish to round-out my day-to-day options and experience. I can’t escape the debt. I can make the debt mean considerably more for my moment-to-moment experience. I can’t stop “thinking so much” or “turn off.” I can corral those thoughts into the series of solved problems condensed into a singular narrative or problem that can be addressed in a number of ways. If the goal now becomes “make money” or “make more money” or “diversify means of acquiring smaller amounts of money with smaller investments of time” it becomes easier to conceive of how I address “all of the goals” I keep on my mind in perpetuity. I don’t have to make practicing the piano compete with inputting notes in a head that’s only going to feel negative regardless, compounded by the knowledge that, until recently, the right piano wasn’t plugged in and waiting.

The word “meaningful” has been creeping into my language. I don’t want it to get away from me. There are a number of things that I’ve acted as though they are meaningful whether my efforts were recognized, reciprocated, or understood even by myself or not. My time is meaningful. I try to spend it in service to demonstrations of my perspective and agency first. That’s why the blog has to exist before the notes. That’s why the stuff gets bought and the debt raises, but the collapsing of the things to think about means more freedom of agency and discretionary use of time. I’m always in debt. It’s barely worth mentioning anymore. I’m always having things about my moment-to-moment being dictated well outside of my conscious control or even desire to be aware of, let alone control. So, how full is my moment?

I’m literally full. I’m going to a concert tomorrow, then driving to Cleveland in a car my friend offered me because he knows it would be that much more expensive to drive my truck. My truck which still runs, has that winch for my spare tire in it, as well as an array of tools I’ve acquired over time. My instruments, cats, and stuff will likely all still be waiting for me when I get back as well as a few new things in the mail. I have half a dozen projects waiting for my attention and effort in progress. I have a job in which I tangibly help people in spite of how nominally gratifying it may be in any way beyond the responsible exercise of power. I’m healthy. I’m listening to music. I don’t “technically” have to do anything for another hour and a half. I have fond memories of hanging out with a friend who we both almost every day email and text well-wishes. My dad’s coming to the concert tomorrow. I had to pause writing this paragraph to help someone get in contact with housing resources and reassure them that it’s okay to ask for help.

In the Morgan Housel episode discussing wealth, Morgan mentions that he did not get a mortgage and while it was the “worst financial decision” given the low interest rate he could have locked in, the psychological gratification of knowing the house is his and not the bank’s is practically indescribable and altogether foreign and absurd to his friends and contacts in the finance world. I get it. I live in a shed. I live in my shed on my land with all of my shit that I can afford with ever-decreasing obligations of my time and effort. Nothing really compares to that. I can own my effort and things in a way that I never will, nor want to, a person. The ownership of the capacity to practice or spend or not transcends the work in service to any instrument or effort to place another screw or move another tire.

It needs to feel real that I can escape or alter my circumstances before I can accept and work with them. It’s why I have to write before I can get up or stomach the sight of the spreadsheet. I have to access my agency and feel the infinite options before the reality of the infinite sacrifice can be swallowed. I’m not complacent. I’m content in my knowledge and potential if not the given action in a given moment.

The forever-project and task gets another reiteration. Bring moment-to-moment desire in line with awareness and meaning in a persistent, accountable, and reliable way that speaks to ideals and the means of their practical obtainment. What do I want? Everything I have, some things I don’t, and less-than realized means of compounding my exceptionally desirable moment. So, I guess it’s okay to attend to notes now…ish.

[943] Little Big Planet

Someone I respect for their reporting is Matt Taibbi. He’s, broadly, an even, detailed voice about things most of us are keen to glean from the headlines. I recently listened to him downplaying the idea that January 6^th was an insurrection attempt. His criticism mostly focuses on the media and the language they use. He points out all of the things that Trump or the republicans don’t have, like control of the military or people generally smart enough to stay organized and persistent. He says coups don’t have selfies and shit smearing if they’re to be taken seriously.

I think, just like anyone I respect who gets something so wrong, he’s missing the mark because his lenses are too focused. Anyone who is otherwise consistent in their ability to offer measured analysis of detailed issues, until they aren’t, commits the same error. When I get myopic about my struggling or misery, I’m usually tired, hungry, need to shit, and in the wake of too many little things that have annoyed me back-to-back. When “smart” people get lost in the weeds of their analysis, the direction of the wind can become wholly obscured.

We live in infinitely complex systems. Not “incredibly” not “vastly,” but infinitely. There is literally no telling what to make of every force working on you, through you, in any given moment. When you pause, you might notice your breath, heartbeat, temperature, hum, an itch, a tightness, a dryness, the lights, and you won’t have even moved on to what it takes to get you up and out and worrying about what you haven’t done with your day.

In that spirit, people can be forgiven for their missteps. This is why we have concepts like forgiveness and accountability. You can’t be blamed for a miscount if no one taught you how. You can’t live in perpetual shame and blame without functionally killing yourself and often many things around you.

Jordan Peterson has been flirting with the same error as Matt Taibbi. He tweeted that Joe Rogan is to be trusted in a way CNN is not. What’s the level of analysis there? CNN and Joe Rogan aren’t even measured at the level of the individual. Is it legacy then? Aggregate truthful statements or apologetic retractions? It’s a generally bizarre and imprecise thing to say. Are all CNN news anchors complicit? Are purported news programs to be measured on the same level of popular MMA comedian pontificators?

I happen to think that we’re living in incredibly dangerous times, big and small. I live in an area where there’s unlikely to be Proud Boys roaming the streets, but they’ll be sourced from my neighbors. I think local governance has been under attack, and it continues, with little to no repercussions. I think small, irrationally motivated groups are all it has ever taken to reshape history. I think I’ve never had good healthcare coverage. I think our financial systems are wholly corrupt. I think my version of an appreciable “middle class” life is as much of a mockery of what I expected to have growing up as anyone else’s who might still be paying off student debt.

Fundamentally, I’m not happy. I’m not content. I’m not in a privileged headspace that can deny my anxiety about what I think and feel is coming. I want to move, I want to build, I want to invest, but I don’t even trust that anything I do in service to those desires will last. I mean, maybe a couple years, but not so far back in my head is still the idea of selling everything and attempting to escape to a different country.

I consider myself lucky that I have so much writing. I can see instantly that, more than my ability to ceaselessly complain, I’ve been identifying or calling out issues that haven’t been resolved for at least a decade. This suggests to me they aren’t going to be resolved and no one is aware, capable, or cares enough to even try. I don’t think there’s a political party that’s clued in and effective. I don’t know of any local or independently organized movement. There’s a few speaking explicitly, Sunrise, Diem25, individuals on the Left, but operating major levers of power? Hardly.

Sometimes, it’s enlightening to read an account from an “average Joe” on the ground during a historical tragedy or genocide. Provided you weren’t in the path, as if you knew, of a roaming violent hoard, you’re basically presented with an off-grid survivalist challenge. You have to get food, have places to hide, and keep your wits about you in who you talked to and about what. You just kind of wait, in relatively extreme discomfort, for the killing to stop. It seems like one would need a fantastic imagination to consider the practical reality of this in an American context.

That’s precisely the pacifying impulse. We have every reason to write-off our dramatic thoughts. That is, except the countervailing evidence. The problem is, we don’t know how to weigh it. There is no objective measure of “insurrection.” There are only modern definitions of words and how many or most use them. We’ve used such hyperbolic language in our media, all the people “slammed” and “eviscerated” for what might be whispered disagreements or passionate-adjacent speeches. So, we sleep. We pacify. We wait to be compelled. We program ourselves to default to a passive environmental selection process that may or may not leave us alone or shuffle us on trains.

I also recently listened to an absolutely brilliant Know Your Enemy podcast with Pat Blanchfield on how to understand politics from a Freudian perspective. Where an initial impulse to see hypocrisy or point out contradictions, you can instead ask yourself, what is it that the belief the hypocrite is holding is serving? Why do Evangelicals like someone who wants to fuck his daughter? Why do pro-democracy Chinese dissidents find themselves incapable of the irony of escaping only to rally for American fascism?

At bottom, there’s just an immense amount of suffering. It isn’t coherently organized. It can’t be approached through some kind of talk therapy or mass psylocibin trip. At every level of our being, something is being violated. You can take a snapshot of any given life and just apply traumatic statistics. Most sexual violence happens from someone you love or who is in your family. Most people are still reeling from child-rearing practices that are almost designed to induce long-term trauma. The U.S. has the 6^th highest divorce rate at 50% in the world. You can flip a coin on your romance narrative. 43 million people have student loans. 31.1 million don’t have insurance, and most of us are familiar with how shitty what’s on offer actually is. Jobs aren’t paying enough. With your master’s or doctorate, you might be able to squeak out a middle-class life if you’re willing to work in what have morphed into human factory farms for addiction, “education,” or ill-defined “services.”

Most people start from a considerably worse place than what I considered my cohort. Most people are fat, and ugly, and on the losing parts of many a bell curve. Their jobs are stressful. Their kids suck. Their cars are breaking down. Their family incidental or fleetingly familiar with the intimacies that you may regard as constitutive of your being. Why did Trump get elected? Have you ever just looked at and listened to the people who support that? Do we need detailed historical analogies and 24-hour speculative punditry? Why do people believe even one lie, let alone an endless stream shot from a water cannon?

At the top of hierarchies, at the bottom of hierarchies, we all hate to fucking be here. Every unifying narrative is just and only that. It’s a narrative. We’ll rally behind Spider-Man and the Avengers. We’ll light candles and incense for a series that was cancelled too soon. Whether we pick up a liberal narrative about the underlying hatred and racism or a conservative narrative about downplaying the underlying hatred and racism, whatever our mind finds most satisfying is to be believed. Maintaining perpetual doubt is not necessarily conducive to survival, let alone a semblance of happiness or Insta-worthy posts.

In modern times, we talk about inequality in ways that feel dead or inarticulate to me. Not even a hundred years ago, the rich and poor were dying of things like Covid, or considerably more treatable conditions. Even now, we get a vaccine in a year because the rich, connected, and talented are at least selfishly aware of their own mortality in a way that our over-riding cultural narratives might otherwise dismiss. We’re not all in this together in the most important and forward-thinking ways. We’re desperately clambering to insanity-making narratives about our own worth and what we have the power to control.

What else can you do but wait? My feeble and disorganized attempts to rally people to connect and conceive of different ways of living have been feeble and disorganized. People don’t just fail to talk, but the more I do, the more I chase them away from the thought that they should even bother. I’m not in ongoing dialogues gaining perspective from my “friends” at different levels of their social and professional hierarchies lol. I’m just “ranting,” courting likes from my 3-5 fans, as we all watch our respective struggles or indulgences. There’s no shared goal or uniting quality beyond ever-winnowing history.

The crazies have an enemy. The crazies feel at home and like they’re defending something. “Us?” We’re writing op-eds about how leaders are failing us and reporting on the front lines of those patrolling the streets with guns actively campaigning to normalize their behavior. They’re “proud,” we’re scared. They’re lashing out about their powerlessness and confusion; we’re retreating into intellectualized fairy-tales about how bad we really feel as well and how it’s manifesting.

Do I hate “everything?” Is “life” constantly annoying? I grew up in my abusive household with ticks I haven’t completely shaken off. I’ve experienced the repeated “grind” and “burnout” of abusive work-environments. If I don’t choose debt, I can hardly dream, because my goals are not to merely live cheap, alone, in the middle of nowhere. If I don’t resolve myself to endless complicity in systems that destroy people, including my best conception of myself, I court becoming an explicit victim of those systems myself.

Do you pull out and feel guilty and speculative about what you “could” have done? Do you “radicalize” and tie yourself to some movement, moving almost certainly for the sake of it, because you’re psychologically stuck? Do you ignore how you’re perpetuating the abuses and exploitation that molded you? Ask yourself what narrative you’re already perpetuating and why it feels best.

At a conceptional level, what do you do when presented with the infinite? Many pick the “godly” thing, in lieu of the “right” thing. It’s a convenient and familiar narrative that has evolved to morph with what objectively may be a more rational or more right way of existing. It’s confusing, often deliberately. Just like the family member who molests their child. God loves you! He’ll also pretty much ignore the systematic ass-rape of little boys and righteous genocide. Woo! Everything you could ask for and more.

I think there’s a lot to be said about the storm of consequences of unremitting crazy or violence, but the most compelling story is the one actively worked and shaped. It’s why I feel adrift and useless if I’m not “doing something” or able to show you what my effort is manifesting as. It’s why I have to write. I am always looking, always processing, always trying to locate a source of inspiration or thing to incorporate into how I move in the world. I think we’re living in incredibly dangerous times, but not so much that I’ve arranged to sell everything I have and flee.

It takes an infinitely small shift a fraction of a degree to not embody the out-and-out hypocrite moniker invoked from an outside judge. “If you care about babies…why not after they’re born!?” You’re in an entirely different realm of existence, let alone discussion, with a charge and question like that. Even if you hate yourself, you care about yourself first. You care how you feel above all else. So, no, they don’t care about babies. They haven’t figured out how to care for themselves anymore than a baby has. Perhaps you and I barely have. I know every day I’m going to want to eat, and desire to witness some “progress” on one or dozen of my goals. I know I wish I wasn’t haunted by the prospect of abandoning it all to survive.

Most people don’t see things the way I do. The ones who are close are more than an infinitely small degree away from empathizing with my experience. They aren’t feeling the same obligation to move more independently of what the environment dictates. They’re undoubtedly watching my experience, my flail, and figuring their form of carved-out suffering or captured privileges will suffice. And we’ll continue to watch each other on our respective ice drifts. We’ll continue to take seriously that we really know anything about “most people” beyond our shared suffering we’re not interested in addressing proactively. I mean, after all, I’m not suffering, not really, not like them over there.

[921] Bad Philosophers

I have about a dozen disparate sources of thought I'm trying to synthesize, so don't think too hard and come along for the ride.

Some of the criticisms I've received from writing, if you can consider them as much beyond a personal attack, is that I maintain this posture as offering the capital T Truth of a situation, and that I'm something of a two-bit or wanna-be philosopher. I bring these up not because I find them compelling, but because they are persistent. I certainly don't believe the people keen and quick in offering these sentiments are concerned about the reasons I'd started writing or when I think it necessary to continue.

I don't claim to be a “philosopher” in some kind of formal way. Pythagoras came up with the word to mean a “lover of wisdom.” Anyone can be that, and my demonstration of that love is to search for and attempt to embody the wisdom in the many areas that keep me thinking. The charge about offering the Truth of any or all situations I find exceptionally pernicious and disingenuous. Informally, I've referred to it as “I know you are, but what am I” syndrome. I can say it every day, bookend it on every blog, I don't claim to have the Truth. I have my experience to the best of my ability to articulate and remember it. I'm engaging a process, not dictating a mythological ethos.

I'm watching Awakening from the Meaning Crisis with John Vervaeke. I'm about halfway through the 52 hour course. He provides a broad overview of many different philosophical ideas and religious traditions. He puts titanic figures in context and shows how their ideas responded or incorporated who came before. I've read a number of philosophical works, taken classes in college, and written papers or blogs in service to what I've read. You know what never stops? Your need and desire to think about and practice what other thoughtful people have brought to the conversation.

Whether or not you read a book or an argument doesn't mean you understand them, and certainly doesn't mean you've experienced anything like what they're getting at. I recall getting an A on a philosophy paper where I deliberately felt I'd “fuck around” with some modern philosopher's position. I was praised for not merely regurgitating what he was saying, which also would have gotten me an A in a “safe” way, and which the grad student grading the papers was sick of reading. I don't remember the philosopher, or the argument, or how I fucked with it. I just got a deep sense that so much of these “thought experiments” and “professionals” was considerably more loose or playful than you'd suspect at first pass.

Most often, as I'm in the middle of some lecture or hear some salient point made by some nerd on a podcast about climate change or the supreme court, I'm met with how dissatisfied I am with people broadly. I'm struck by how little they think. It's like the whole world opens up as this plaything because I can influence or direct my understanding of what's driving or sucking people up. Are they draped in the nihilism of endless consumption? Probably. Are they exhausted, angst-ridden, anxious, or otherwise adrift looking for a new religion or meaningful supplemental occupation? You tell me, how many people refer to or treat their pets like children? I don't just “dislike” things like Tik Tok or memes, I worry for our collective “soul” that so much has been articulated, but can't find its way into our practice or language. We're addicted to the shortcuts and dopamine flashes.

I've tried to make the deliberate and ongoing point that this process, this writing, whatever it amounts to, is necessary. It's useful. It's how I work to “embody” the things I say and empower the things I do in the world. I can look back through blogs and see what has stayed the same while I've been under constant bombardment from errant criticism, endless distractions, or misguided notions of who I am to people or what they are to me. There's no Dewey decimal system in my head where I can just bring up where and when my ideas of “love” have gone wrong or right. I can't begin to explain what “friendship” has meant or evolved into over time like turning to an illuminating chapter of your favorite book without it being written down.

You may be thinking I'm making some kind of pretentious and overstated claim about how little people are thinking. You, in fact, are very thoughtful, and you have a lot of strong opinions about not just the state of the world, but how I talk about it. For the longest time, I wanted to grant this special privilege to the people able or willing to read what I might discern from the cultural ether. I dropped that. It's not that I haven't experienced you as such or on an appreciable level of awareness or enlightenment, it's that I've watched it fall prey to things I can't reconcile with maintaining respect.

I don't respect silence, for example. I don't respect meme-speak. It's not to say I'm not silent on a great many things or have never shared a meme, but the days where my feed is ten pictures you found mildly amusing, maybe, I don't know where you exist. I feel like I bring this up a lot because it bugs me a lot and I think it's a massive cultural psychosis we've worked ourselves into in normalizing not-think. I want you to hesitate before sharing the picture, then I want you to turn a series of hesitations into a long enough pause to explore what's really going on with you in sharing.

I think about this with regard to my last relationship. In a real sense, this is one of the cleanest, at least emotionally, breaks I've ever had. I had expectations for our interactions that had absolutely nothing to do with some elevated level of “love” or historically romantic notions of our time together. I don't care who you are, if we're going to be “close” or “intimate” or “trust” each other, that's not going to happen if you can't be a friend. My friends aren't routinely yelling at me, giving me the silent treatment, or conjuring memories of growing up where I was hyper tense and aware of the mood-shift so as to avoid getting knocked around by my mother. My friends let me speak without interruption, and I grant them the same courtesy. My friends tell me they're going to do something, and then do it, and if they're going to use me or my things, they express appreciation or know they're on the hook for fucking something up.

I took my time getting into the relationship, and I suffered the things wrong with it until I broke. It's a break that I will learn from and do better next time by not allowing myself to ignore the escalation or mask it under the guise of “accepting someone where they are.” I understand people as having no clue where they are, and it's something I downplay or express some faux humility about at my peril. I understand people as having the kind of mindless irony of an arrested teenager struggling to cope with their incomplete brain and personal trauma. It's not a gratifying point that my home has returned to a place of peace and comfort after removing someone I care about. It's an existentially critical point about how we quell our sense of loneliness or emptiness despite superficially having everything we could ever want.

I'm extremely impressed with many of the book passages and sentiments from Daniel Sherrell who was featured on the Know Your Enemy podcast. He discussed the conditions under which you embody something verses just knowing intellectually. You have to let in the depths of the dread and despair and marry it to the action you take in your day-to-day or long-term, if not infinite, project. Dorothy Fortenberry, also featured in the episode, discussed having kids with no expectations of them ever thanking you or even smiling with regard to your efforts in service to them, and yet knowing you had them for reasons not to do with your own gratification.

What resonated so deeply was a sensibility that I've had to cultivate over time. It's a form of acceptance, not of fate, but of known and unknown conditions. Whatever hell you may be suffering, I can only choose to roll the dice with engaging or not. I can only open myself up, tolerate the vulnerability, and live the consequences of sharing my honest experience. I can't make you accept me, be patient, swallow any of my “reasons” you may regard as “excuses.” My harshest judgments of you either lend themselves to changes in my behavior or mood, or they get used to beat you to death. I can claim a certain awareness of when I'm choosing to beat you to death, like in blowing up at my ex, but it's a wasted awareness if I didn't want to do that and chose to anyway. There's areas in which I'm bound to the notion of getting “license” or “permission” to access parts of me predicated on granting you the agency and responsibility of inviting me in. If I'm bound to a blood-lust like a vampire, I'm forgoing my agency, and thus cannot grant you my honest impression of your agency. I'm then eschewing the responsibility for my actions.

I want responsibility, and begrudging the conditions under which I might yield it doesn't serve me. So that means I don't get “normal” relationships. That means I get to feel “alone,” and any orientation I maintain that baits people or tests people is about me, not them. I don't really know how to reconcile this with what it would take to create or empower a new culture or zeitgeist. I'm not actually a god nor claim some special enlightenment. At some level, it feels like I either maintain expectations I regard as self-preserving, reasonable, and practical, or I drop all expectations and just work people like I know how to work them. Think about it, how many people have you had thank you or shake your hand after you explained you took their children? How many strangers' homes have you been invited into? How many children have you been trusted to drive all over the state with? How many hundreds of people have you invited into your home? How many codes have you had to switch or topics have you had to incorporate to create things that represent your highest ideals?

If you believe, and I use that word liberally, anything less than me about yourself or what you're capable of, by my understanding and definition, you're at my mercy. I can provoke you. I can work you. I can convince you. If you don't know what you're capable of, whether or not you're doing anything for good or bad reasons, I do. I'm not under the illusion that everything I do is for a good or coherent reason. I couldn't take myself seriously if I regarded what you told me as some threatening Truth claim or if I reflexively felt ick and sought to write you off as some lazy airhead. All I can do is make peace with using you until you “wake up” and buy in.

That sounds so crass and cold and feels like the heart of a many years long project I've been trying to avoid. I dance around what I'm capable of precisely because I know what I'm capable of. A cultural project needs the people who are going to be a part of that culture. I didn't party alone, but I garnered all the resentment for the consequences of the party environment, earned and unearned. I can invite you to my land, but you can be stuck linguistically and psychologically reiterating to me it's my land, so nothing you do or invest in is going to matter or be safe from my arbitrary whims. That's fine, but you don't get to retain your skepticism for my aims or good will when I offer it freely or am willing to bind myself to a contract. I want checks on my power and reflection on my aims. You either don't give yourself the power, and thus don't claim the responsibility, or aim at dumb shit.

If what you're accepting about yourself leaves you complacent in what you're willing to discuss or examine, you haven't accepted anything. You've punted your obligation and likely adopted some posture about how busy you are. You've probably reflexively found a way to recognize the faults in others that you can't imagine manifest in you. It's precisely because I am an intractable cunt with an extremely, aberrant, loud mouth and fluidity to his inappropriateness that I've been driven to the desire for an exacting conversation about the forces at play and who is using them. I get snippets of resonant and compelling moments. I get glimpses into the people I wish you were and the person I want to be. But I didn't build my house, start my businesses, or take a chance in my relationships because I lacked a direction or ideal I wished to embody. I don't find patience, and healthy skepticism, or respectful deference from listening only to the feverishly antagonistic demons that foresee and enact every catastrophic end drawn from inferences of your every utterance.

I have everything. My brain works. I'm full. I laugh hard and make jokes. I study. I work on things that are easy for me and hard for others so that maybe they can be free to better handle hard things I can't help them with. I can't recognize the “love” you don't demonstrate. I can't respect negligently wasting power you wish you had, and do have, especially if I show you how it works or give you the opportunity to do the same kind of work I had to do in order to be the one presenting the opportunity. I don't resent people with something to teach me nor am I only willing to learn something on my own terms. I can only work with what's on offer.

I'm offering you 921 insights into my head, 5 acres, my tools, my back, my efficiency, my experience in high stress and high responsibility environments, and my spirit and style of engaging with the world. And who am I to pretend that you want or need any of that, right? Save the handful of my regularly cited exemplars, what is it you think you're offering me? A like? A follow? What are you offering “the world?” Do you want to be just something I keep feeling good or operating well-enough until you've exhausted your utility? Are you my afterthoughts and naive idealism codified by the silence, our histories incidental verses entwined?

I'll weather the scorn or isolation, to be sure. Every shit example I set or shit “friend” I've taken a chance on is quickly followed by the waterfall of prosperity and better examples set by others. I need to maintain the memory of the standards set by you, not me, in how I've been treated. I have friends who don't judge me. I have friends who laugh easy. I have friends who respect my time and effort. I have friends who show up in emergencies. I have friends I start businesses with. I have friends who demonstrate their grasp of their own wickedness or sense of responsibility and maturity without making it yours or my problem. The structure and system are there, because again, I have everything. You find a way to vibe with that or make peace with how you incorporate it, or not. If you're unworthy of what's on offer, well, you're my mom lol.

[898] Both Ways

I'm still thoughtful about a status I wrote this morning, copied under the blog, and after listening to part of an episode from Know Your Enemy discussing a prominent Jewish leftist who turned conservative while mixing in the intellectual circles of the 50s and 60s.

 

I try to emphasize in moments between frothing that I'm but one, infinitely small, window into the world, often befuddled, confused, and barely approximating the language that would “best” describe where I'm coming from. I approach sharing and vocal exercise with the idea that they are stomachs that need feeding or muscles that need stretching and conditioning. It's an analogy for everything worthwhile or terrible in life. You are what you do, or if you're stuck trying, what you're working on and shooting for.

 

As such, walking the line between “what I feel” and “how I think” can seem perfectly arbitrary or endlessly ambiguous to someone reading a blog in isolation or who is wholly unconcerned with giving me any credit. If I doubt that my tone or word choice was altogether awesome, I'm gonna bring it up. I'm gonna ask myself why and make another pass. A lot of that is just work I think you do as an individual to keep yourself honest. I want you to believe I'm doing my best, but I also need to be confident that it is, in fact, my best representation of the moment, if nothing else.

 

I want new ideas. It underlies why I bother to be an “everythingist” about life. I watch all the shows for a line or character I haven't met before or a point of connection with a stranger where something harder to recognize is never known. I want to have a perspective on different mediums of story-telling, like podcasts, and attempt to discern the “best” messages I've been missing or strategies for explaining something in a skillful way I lack.

 

In Know Your Enemy, the hosts are very giving of their praise and cutting in their criticism for different writers. I might choke at the idea of a “conservative intellectual,” but it means something that has practical and longstanding implications. They read the books. They describe the psychology, justifications, and emotional tenor of people compelled to functionally destroy what may otherwise be a salient opinion of fiscal responsibility or foreign policy but for all of the racism and ego. They point out how weird it is for a prominent public figure to brag about his A+ grades at 35 and to ignore his “self-made” conception of success started with a publishing company passed down from his father.

 

I really don't want to be that dumb. I try to incorporate the people that have shaped my perspective and drive. I try to shower praise and include your perspective into the larger project. It is very real for me how little I can do alone. That comes with it the burden of making sure people grasp and respect themselves and relative place in the picture so you can honestly discuss how to move forward. That comes with some actual vocalization and engagement with perspectives that are different from yours and approaching them with the patience and openness to ask more than tell.

 

For whatever I do in fact excel at, I have extreme deficits and perfectly visible blind-spots that almost everyone is keen to keep secret from me. Occasionally when they interject, I have a habit of pointing out a contradiction or confounding variable that becomes the pivot to a meta-discussion about the discussion and eventual derailing. One such instance is the offered argument that “I need to take responsibility for how I come across.” Superficially easy to say and agree with right? That alone is good advice when you're dealing with a world that is going to judge you and hold power over you. What happens when you breathlessly move on to your next argument that “you shouldn't care what people think?”

 

The details start to matter. Well, you should care about what the people close to you think, but not the ignorant masses lazily judging. You should at least vocalize you are taking responsibility for your “harsh” language, and then continue to do it anyway. When we feel personally attacked, we want the other person to take responsibility. When we feel we're “just being honest,” fuck the haters.

 

I don't believe you get anywhere if you don't start honest and believe the other person is too. Norman Podhoretz, the conservative on focus of this podcast episode, was friends with James Baldwin. He went on something of a racist tirade towards Baldwin who told him to write all of his grievances down and publish it, which he did, and it became a notable historical essay. I love this story, because I regard James Baldwin as an extreme truth teller first and foremost concerned with the truth. He didn't lash out and fight back, he said put that naked ass of your honest expression on paper to someone very comfortable displaying their naked ass, fast forward 50 years, we get a coherent throughline and useful perspective on how to discuss racist cultural issues.

 

I want a zeal for accountability. I'm fine with “crazy” people, so long as they are honest in their craziness, and we honestly account for their influence or what we're going to do about it. There are sincere racists that I want us all to be on the same page about how large we empower their influence. There are 74 million proud fascists which you shouldn't shy away from calling fascists. Your boss or owner is probably greedy and proud they sit above you, high on the perch of their small window. Lazy and loose talk will allow you to try and have it both ways, a false notion of your own righteousness married to perpetually justified ignorance of the many roles you're playing in destroying what we need to survive.

 

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From daily life to catastrophes, I can't shake the thought that it's a product of over-thinking. Over-thinking is not critical thinking. Over-thinking is coming to a relative or often obvious conclusion, and then doing nothing. Over-thinking is a coy held-harmless description about agency and taking responsibility for the moment.

 

I haven't been particularly anxious this week of snow days and very little money making. I'm not worried about the bills, the car or shed debt, or myself as an ardent TV watcher. This morning the sinking stomach started. I'm reminded how good I felt being able to pick up scrap again. I'm going to see how my play to leverage a new job works to let me make something worthwhile out of my current one.

 

It's obvious I should be paid enough to live and reward what I do. Every day I don't build how I'm going to live the obvious truth and consequences of that is on me. The "cling to practical" model of how to cope in two-week stints is obviously a path to hell. I'm not anxious about advocating for myself. I'm anxious about how hopeless it feels to do so. I'm hearing the "professional" excuses. I'm anticipating the open questions and work of mitigating an attitude that has crippled how we are to conceive of and relate to ourselves.

 

I want so little and increasingly obvious things. It makes for a stark contrast when I evaluate how little the systems I'm plugged into are designed to provide for those wants. If I want to grow, the system wants me in debt. If I want to show up and work every day, the system gives me an endless sea of entertainment. If I want more responsibility, the system says we should hold several meetings to dissect this curious notion of "responsibility," and maybe you should consider "doing your job."

 

I'm to believe that "fixes" or "hope" lies in some "generational struggle." These systems are failing me every day. They're freezing Texans to death. They're starving children. They're addicting you to opiates. The excuses for why the world feels like shit are happening right now. Can you hear them? Can you recognize the familiar patterns and design?

 

Why don't we, obviously, hold ourselves accountable? Why don't we force power to pay up? Why don't we strike? Do you want dramatically more than me at the expense of everyone else and the future? Why are you quiet? Why are you pretending you are a "good person" who can sit and wait until "the world" will bother? Are you a coward, or cunt?

 

Listen to the array of excuses and pleading for sympathy that washes over you from the last question. Feel the guilt. Watch how you ignore the real enemy and focus on my tone and word choice. Then forget this moment when someone pats you on the head and dismisses your needs in a "polite," professional, political manner. Come back to your easy target when you can't sort your feelings out, but you'll be damned if you're not going to continue thinking and praying about it. And you don't need my negativity trying to provoke you.

 

There is no hero if you're not one. It's obvious, at least to me, that I'm not the problem or enemy. I speak. I fight. I create. I state my goals and work on them. I pay attention. Do I want allies? If I could recognize any, sure. I'm not alone, but our club is too small for the size of the problem. It's got its own obligations and personal problems too. But it stays honest and fights back. It remains open and informed. It wants to isolate and judge and believe you can be left alone to suffer your decisions. But it knows the consequences of abandoning the project. The cancerous cultural mass is consuming us all.