[839] Come Sail Away

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, and no one who's written less than me should ever start anything like that, but I'm a king.

Yes, I am indeed a king. I have regal hair with the softest curves. I have attire that causes people to call me “sir” and move out of my way. I eat incredibly fancy food from all over the world which I pay a premium for, because I can afford it. People smirk and chuckle at jokes I make, even the less than funny ones. I control the very air of my living quarters. Millions of people conspire to keep me entertained. I'm in considerably better health (indicated by my plump but not obese stature) than those I generally interact with. I'm skilled in different sports, hobbies, and am as learned as the books I complete every few days (which I even have people to read to me). The finest women have, and continue, to throw themselves at me. (Mostly as they drive.)

By all accounts, I've peaked. My realm of one is as good as it ever has been or could be save the grandiose immortality-seeking posture of vast structures built to honor me and the formation of leisure gardens. But rest assured, vast structures are commissioned and various gardens will be populated with the freshest foods and flowers.

Where, then, to go but the grave?

In one of the newer episodes of Cosmos, Neil deGrasse Tyson discusses East Asian sailors who, after populating islands and growing isolated from each other, forming different dialects and words, they all maintained the pronunciation of “sail.” Something moved them into the vast expanse of the ocean, and by way of urging us on, Neil wants us to believe we can traverse the stars. They had their kingdoms, luxuries and problems, but familiar and safe home, but were compelled into the unknown.

I think the psychology of most of the “West,” is that of the self-satisfied king. What ever could be the matter? So much abundance! The idea of there being something better, someone else to consider, or something beyond was lost. The gripes of baby-boomers about people my age not working hard enough when I never knew someone not working multiple jobs or destroying their youth in service to desperately struggle. It wasn't too far before them things like the steam-engine were invented. Our species’ recent history had an actual life-threatening amount of work to try and improve upon in order to shape our decadent conceptions.

We stagnated. We defeated the Nazis (yeah, right). Everyone got a car, a modest dwelling, vacation once a year, and smart enough to know whether or not they wanted to go to college. When the temperature got turned up on the water we were floating in, it was easy enough to ignore it. Cost of living going up? Environment signaling danger? Sick, but not too sick just yet? Slowly, daily, one person's mind at a time went blind to the cost of living each day like a king. Living like someone with no subjects to account for. Living like someone who can't be held to account without violent revolution and a good beheading.

The grip of how you anchor yourself is practically insurmountable. My dad seemed to have a really hard time hearing that our ancestry was more Peruvian than Italian. My dad is someone who takes an incredible amount of pride in my grandparents and how they grew up and what they went through. My dad has read an insane amount of history and things related to his heritage. A “simple” fact displaced his roots. I don't blame him for being upset. I was happy to figure out how my hair is curly and people habitually think I'm mixed or Hispanic (my dad regularly has people speak Spanish to him...)

Where are we currently anchored? I'm 31, which means I occasionally see a friend of mine who has mostly or finally paid off their student loans. They've raised several cats, had half a dozen jobs, a few first marriages, maybe 3 or 5 kids total if I go back and count. The vast majority, and remember, I knew a lot of smart, hot, middle to upper-middle class white kids, are not married, 2 car garage, 2.5 kids, cliché conception of the past. Most are meme generators playing adult-ish cards in service to not being destitute. They've found a balance that lets them do a series of mid-life crisis things, now prepackaged and Grouponed, every couple of months.

Kids? Maybe by accident or if their spouses had them from the previous relationship. Work satisfaction? Hey, at least it's not that guy's amount per hour. What's the future look like? Honestly, in asking myself that question, when trying to adopt the character of my collective conception of what I've watched from my online feeds...I don't know. I drew a blank. My personal conception is the freedom to move away from the increasing number of disasters I think I see coming. It probably has a few hastily built rooms with a dozen quasi-businesses. Hopefully I've roped back in Hatsam and haven't scared away Allie Cat.

 

I've found myself coalescing at work. What does that mean? I'm finding it easier and easier to shine, get cocky about it, and speak with a more demanding and daring tone. It comes out in an email I shouldn't have responded to. It has me making sure you notice I went above and beyond in manipulating the stupid or crazy person into doing what I needed. My “future” in doing something like this is the same as it was for me when I behaved that way in school. Extra shit to do. People giving me that look like they wish they could destroy me, except, dammit, I really did help them with something or actually know what I'm talking about. It would be a safe, prescribed, future dictated by the inadequate expectations and pace of a system that stagnates by design.

While we're all holed up in our homes coming face to face with the immediacy that catastrophe can strike, revel in the opportunity to reflect on what's been stuck that, ironically, can be unleashed with the right compelling force. You have to will your way into the future, attack problems worth your skill and attention, and define the indefinite unknown as something for you to shape. You can get fatter, richer, older and more complacent. You can be a cliché king from a forgettable child's fable of folly and excess. Or, you can mark your era by the continued conscious decisions to behave your way over another. To speak to what you actually want and believe, over what's been handed to you, wilted and wrung dry.

If the bug kills you, what did you leave? Your nice-enough personality? Your impersonal out-of-context Ikea quotes and art on your walls? Was it anything someone coming after you could pick up and take even further? There's a kind of king I wish to be that I'm not yet. I have my solitary kingdom, cut from the wretchedness of circumstances imposed upon me. But I still dream. I still wish to design the mind that makes it hard to stop but for the chance to stare and wonder about all that is or will be.

[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?

[553] Not Saying You Should

This is an attempt at rationalization. It assumes the very basics of moral truths regarding survival and an indifferent universe.

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s catch-phrase bids us to, “Keep looking up.” On a planet that feels like it is losing its charm, if not its habitability, the heavens can occupy every waking moment of an intrigued and adventurous yet lowly mammal like the human. We’ve dozens of movies about meeting new life forms or books on the priorities of advanced civilizations. We dream of the technology that might have us existing in some form or another until we either answer every Ultimate Question or reach the end of the universe.

I understand that any and all anxiety that I ever feel is bred from ego. I get that, whether I like it or not, whether I want to be alive today or not, I’m built to be up my ass and keep it protected. Literally every day I can bring my perspective closer towards someone who has it dramatically worse, and my nervous system doesn’t care. I’m arrested by me. I go as far as my genes and my environment and a fledgling desire to believe in the veracity of my will in making choices.

It seems that in order to get along in this world, you have to learn to perpetually let go. You have to let go of your false friends. You have to let go of your poor language that divided them up as such. You have to let go of every naïve assumption that, even if it at some level seems to be keeping you alive or well-adjusted, is wrong and isn’t yours. This means letting go of every animal that’s gone extinct. It’s letting go of ideas that you can protect your health. It’s letting go of everything but the utter burden of your inured existence and experience.

Here’s the important part. You let go not because you should, but because you don’t matter.

Take this blog. Whether you conceive of it as a persuasive argument, an incoherent ramble in the dark, or something in between, whatever your response, it’s not because you should respond that way, it’s that it doesn’t matter. It exists in spite of you. It exists in spite of me. I can’t tell if it’s “good” or “bad.” I won’t know if I’ll like it years from now. The prevailing reason for its existence is because I couldn’t help myself. “My” thoughts, provoked by science fiction and an obsessive brain sought relief so I could go back to watching movies. It’s not that I should write this; it’s that it doesn’t matter.

The tendency is to always scream from our assholes though. You may like this, so you’ll press the button. You may hate it, and tell me to kill myself. Both are a struggle to matter in vain. Because whether I live or die, the words will still be there. Your reaction will have had nothing to do with “me” specifically, as much as it will speak to your poor conception of both me and you in the scheme of things.

Now, I know this liberation of your ego from any responsibility to the world around you is dealt with in different religions. Where they go wrong is in then suggesting what should be done. Giving it up to your god is just a roundabout way of protecting your fragile and naïve ego. In fact, every transfer of individual perspective to a “higher power” suffices as the same thing. Oh humble academic or middle manager whose hands have ever been tied! It’s not that you should spend an hour arguing about a discount code, it’s that neither of you matter.

The true irony of embodying this idea is that we’re angry getting exactly what we ask for. We’re finally getting to die and silence our egos from insisting we should be afraid and sad. Who wants to be 117? Let the cancer take me at 65. Who needs clean air? I’ve been smoking since I was 14. Who gives a shit about polar bears? There’s starving kids in Africa I didn’t give a shit about first. Who needs the oceans? I don’t even like to swim and fish is disgusting. Who needs books? Wait until you see this dude get totally pwned and you won’t believe what this cat did. Who needs elitist politicking and 5 dollar words? We get by just fine on our own.

Deep down we know we don’t matter, so our mass suicide is taking shape in the form of arbitrary violence and nonsense words. We don’t want to live, how could you expect us to believe in someone else’s “right” to? We have nothing to say, so who gives a shit if you end up in prison for using your voice? Oh you think you’re scared? Let me show you my advanced weaponry and rain hellfire down upon you. What to make of democracy? We don’t want to learn or make decisions, Heil Hitler 2! Again, this isn’t how things should go, it’s because it doesn’t matter.

You may want to invoke the children, but the children will die every day like the 107 billion people that have ever lived have died. We’re just a species who got a little too big for its habitat and ran up against its limits. Should you care for your children? If you’re being honest, that wasn’t really your concern before you brought them here. You were just the unlucky end of an unconscious biological imperative that mindlessly played on your fears and disposition. Then all sorts of cultural forces, sometimes literally, forced you to adopt the obligated language and time.

I wish I could tell you what to do, but it doesn’t matter. Donate, or don’t. Escape to the woods, or don’t. Watch television and play video games or climb mountains and pray. It doesn’t matter. Sooner than later you’ll get to shake off all the anxieties about the world you live in, because even if you can’t face it right now, it’ll catch up. Even if you think your plans mean shit, your humanitarian soul will reach just one person, your passion for some activity keeps you afloat, you don’t matter. The universe cares nothing about you. Your god couldn’t save if it switched to Geico.

I’m not saying you should believe anything I’ve said. It just doesn’t matter.