[1122] Innit To Win It

What motivates you?

Increasingly, I've been thinking about incentives. When you move away from the idea that everyone is immediately and personally culpable for "the way things are," it opens space to investigate their environment. Indeed a major portion of my counsel to people is to spend a considerable amount of time examining who and what they are plugged into. If you have no context or underestimate its influence, you can take on unnecessary guilt and stress. You also fail to frame whatever your problem may be in a way that allows for it to be fixed or a real solution to be discovered.

Money appears to be one of the biggest incentives for an array of questionable, if not downright abhorrent, behavior. In fantasy, how many plots are motivated by the antagonist's greed? Cash wildly flying through the air as a masked bad guy flees a scene with a giant duffle bag are ubiquitous whether or not you've seen that actual scene somewhere. It's not a secret. It's not hard to understand. They want money, so whether it's fashion a complicated Ocean's 11-esc plot, or put a gun in someone's face, they go in and get it.

A deeper-layered story starts to unpack that antagonist's relationship to power. They often have money. A supervillain will be super smart, or maybe have a super team, and none of them can put their heads together to figure out how to live well and leave things alone. What's their motivation? "Power," in and of itself, is incomplete. Even the ones that do manage to take over the world or achieve their goals, are they ever depicted as "happy?" Was it "enough?" Thanos didn't keep fighting to preserve his "perfect balance."

The story you tell yourself is the foundational incentive. The ability to maintain a familiar, predictable, and, even if it's self-destructive, reliable self-conception. There's so many things built into the formation of that story, and almost zero cultural cues to attend to them, that you maintain the unhelpful habit of pretending "that's just who you are."

I'm someone who has been told his whole life he's smart, good looking, talented, yada yada. That's certainly a story I wish to keep. Who wouldn't? Younger me felt very alienated by any commentary related to my looks. I cut off my hair. I never wanted to be in pictures and definitely wasn't smiling when I had to. I've never been a particularly "cut" or in-shape person, so even a little fat made me think I was "too." I resented the narrative otherwise until it started manifesting as success with girls. I didn't start growing my hair out until college. It took a while to realize I wasn't fat so much as surrounding myself with runners and rock climbers.

There's a running story we have to maintain. At least, it feels that way. The nature of your sacrifices. The goal at the top of the hill. The things about you that mirror your loved ones or echo what you want to believe deeper about yourself, but might struggle to. The closer your behavior and your words match that story, the more you carve out a "safe" psychological home to live in. Whether or not the nature of that story is more or less true doesn't even enter into the discussion foundationally.

What disrupts the story? I observe the consequences of chronic punishing conditioning. I have a friend who's so stressed, he can't lift his left arm above the shoulder. He can't sleep. He ruminates and repeats stressful events dating back years and takes on new things he can't get organized and achieved. I have a friend who habitually takes on more work than she has to. (That's the most common thread I see across friends and clients.) They say, "I wish I had time for…" or "It'll be fine if I can get to next week/month/August" or "They're counting on me! I have to!"

The lie is built into the foundation. You don't "have to" do anything. It's instantaneous the moment you go from the language of potential agency to helplessness. The presumption when you tell someone you "have to" is that they'll nod along knowingly and throw up their arms in concert, because we all know what we have to do. Of course, we don't. We don't know shit about shit. We don't spend any time trying to. And when someone comes along pointing that out, we seek to punish or silence them.

So, I ask again. What's your motivation? What incentivizes you?

They aren't the same question, and each is their own big bag of words the closer you look.

I'm motivated by the idea of scaling up things that have worked for me. I know the visceral experience of less stress and more freedom, and the conscious long-term deliberate acts to get there. I know what I had to focus on. I know why I chose to focus on those things over others. I know what I'd like to enjoy as a result of seeing the efforts and practices carried forward and manifested through others' interpretations. I'm curious about what that looks like, and I don't think it happens often. I like believing I have both the capacity and awareness to achieve something many find it hard to even conceive. I feel good about that story. I can draw practical steps along the road.

I'm incentivized by feeling understood and being communicated with. Those things generate positive emotion and a feeling of being engaged. Even if I'm feeling "unmotivated," when you have something to communicate to me, or you are making a genuine effort to understand something I'm saying, I can engage in that exchange almost indefinitely. If I'm in an environment that's force-feeding me bullshit, I need to leave, like so many past jobs. If I make a genuine effort to articulate and seek empathy, and you ignore me, I keep my distance. I'm, by default, a major turn-off to those, and this includes friends, who are "too tired" or disinterested or distracted to genuinely communicate and seek mutual understanding.

Thus, "friendship," by itself, isn't the incentive nor is it necessarily a "motivator."

You can frame any relationship this way, be it to your child or romantic partners. If you're unclear with yourself and are unduly motivated by superficial things, you'll find the deep dissatisfaction of introducing as many of those unhealthy relationships into your experience as you can find. You'll spend a lifetime developing apologetic language to justify the abuses. "Hell is just a fun way God shows us he loves you!" "Well, he pays the bills and I get fancy vacations, what's a backhand and shout now and then?" "My friends and parents tell me how lucky I am; surely I'm just confused about how much I really love my child, boyfriend, job, circumstances…" etc.

If you don't know that you're motivated by confusion and fear significantly more than a desire to own and understand, you'll grow the plants of confusing and terrifying consequences instead of taking pride in or capitalizing on your garden. If you engage the narratives around the nobility and utility of money, fancy products, and fantasy posture, you might be well-consumed by the idea that you give a fuck what strangers on the internet think. You might align your morals to an imperative to post, lie, and curtail a raw opinion, if you bothered to form one at all.

I, always, feel the pull of "normalcy." Every day I spend consumed by media, I think "I could be…" What? Answer the question. Driving to work? Wearing down my car? Sitting around waiting for a meeting to start? Resenting getting paid half or less of what I'm worth? Spending time taking direction or instruction from someone wholly captured by corrupted systems, obligations, and narratives that bleed into your awareness and make it hard to believe in anything? What could or should I really be doing that isn't patiently waiting for the narratives I truly believe in to get their time in the sun? I think you should be bored more often. I think when you work, it should feel meaningful and useful, not obligatory. I think you should write songs, and talk with me all day about TV or who's left that can reliably report on the world. I think we should be building something together.

But, I know my motivations and what incentivizes me. I don't trust that you do. I mainly don't trust that you do because you all sound the same. And if everyone is saying the same shit, where are "you?" Is it where you belong, or where you've stuck yourself? Are you fighting the correct fight? Are you fighting at all? Or are you laboring under a narrative of your victimization and circumstance? Are you suffering the delusion that tomorrow is guaranteed? Are you pretending you don't matter?

I've started to go overboard in my TV consumption having mildly shifted my approach to it. For how many hours I've spent sorting and separating things, it dawned on me that I don't want to sit for hours and just watch cartoons or sitcoms. Each story or style registers in approximate lanes of intrigue or interest, and my motivation for engaging heavily depends on what my environment is otherwise incentivizing.

If I need to "kill time," it's a stream of shows I have either a passing familiarity with, or ones that have been popular that I never cared for at the time or don't interest me anymore than a random painting might at a gallery. I'm not anticipating an episode of NCIS or Law & Order is going to put me in a particularly thoughtful place about compelling narratives. They're safe and familiar, that's why they never die, and are wholly uninteresting.

If I want to challenge myself to think deeper about why something is catching my attention or what makes it different, I put on a different set of shows. Maybe it's cast chemistry, the joke timing, the way it's shot, drawn, or paced. Maybe it's having a compelling heartbeat and message. Maybe it's an individual's kick-ass ability to sell what's otherwise unsellable. Maybe I'm delusional and certain works just click with those delusions. I think shows like Legion and Scavengers Reign flirt with transcending the medium entirely. I'd feel absolutely brilliant if I could achieve the humor of Shameless, The Great, or Airplane!. If I could transport you like I've been transported to Cinema Paradiso and Dogville, I'd feel I've put in the right kind of work.

I think I connect with creators who tap into the incentive space that can barely pronounce "money" or the words "I don't have enough." I think there's a craving and unyielding desire to connect and be understood at a transcendent level. It's a level that exists only when you start from the right place and weave together all of the pieces that inform the message. That's the music, the glances, and other gritty details that are both absolutely necessary and hopelessly insufficient on their own. "I would have made a better movie, but the budget!…" "I would have called you for dinner, but I've been so busy!…" 100 million dollar movies have been made for $15,000. I can eat in 10 minutes, if that's what you really need from me.

I separate my desire to feel useful and needed from what the evidence needs to look like in order for me to claim I actually am. I'm not a good counselor when I can juggle 150-200 people on my caseload. I'm a good counselor when a plurality of those people say something like, "When I started practicing what you said, I felt better, people noticed, and now I'm able to do this next thing." I'm not a "good person" through merely refraining from going out of my way to cause harm or a few bucks I might toss to a charity. I define "good person" as a useless concept first, and focus on being comfortable existing altogether in whatever manner my personhood brings forth. I then try to notice when what I do or say makes me feel good or seems to result in what I deem good generating from others.

Christians think it's good to indoctrinate contradictions and capitalize on mental weakness. Muslims think it's good to ignore the consequences of normalizing radical hateful mantras. Conservatives think it's good to control women and enshrine greed and grift. Liberals think it's good to pretend they don't have their own totalitarian compulsions that have destroyed important pillars of speech and science. Most people think it's appropriate to use as broad and incoherent ever-changing labels like "Christian" "Muslim" "conservative" and "liberal" to race away from any real discussion about how any given individual abuses the terms to their self-serving narrative ends.

Every layer of your life incentivizes you to speak and operate in a manner that protects you from crashing too hard against normative practices. Right or wrong, good or bad, true or false, useful or useless, constructive or destructive…familiar binaries that arrest our capacity to investigate what's underneath or beyond the traps they set. It's a place of your subjective and yet removed observation of your experience operating under their spells.

The more "normal" I try to be, the angrier I feel. The more I've tried to be like the "friend" people wanted, the more alienated and like a liar I felt. The more I was begged to "love" as others professed to love, the harder things crashed when the truth was finally allowed to be spoken. The "work" I took so much pride in was never recognized or rewarded. The things I was "afraid" of had nothing to do with their actual consequences or my deep understanding of their nature. The people I thought I looked up to were brief ideals painted upon the infinitely fallible. The expectations I built for myself were bred from spite, naivety, and insecurity. The story I was telling myself was stuck, and I was pretending I wasn't obligated to continue writing it every time I needed to.

[1044] Reason Seasoning

I haven't talked religion in a long time. I just watched this "Skinny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets" series though. My brain is kicking off down some heavily compacted trails, but I'd still like to see if there's anything new.

I'm very much in the "religion poison's everything" camp. Whatever you may wish to claim is right or wrong about human behavior, there's a familiar, comforting, and easily digested religious anecdote, adage, or idiom to summarize and excuse away any remote lesson or inclination towards accountability. At bottom, every book, every tradition, every gathering of thousands boils down to "Because God!" The unprovable, ineffable essence of what us boring nerdy types recognize as self-satisfied circular-reasoning and infinite regress. Every single religious tradition terminates the same way.

As such, you take whatever fiendish inclination between thought crime to child molesting to child torture then molesting then murdering, as long as you punctuate it with "God's will," or spin-doctor it into your next trial and lesson, it never actually has to get dealt with. And why should it? It's the same people perpetrating that get attention, power, money, and literally thousands of people crafting their day-to-day excuses to not think for themselves or find their agency. Arguably, beyond the wholesale corruption of critical thinking, the thing I hate most about religious types is the unearned pride and piety bestowed by thirsty empty sheep looking for a strong daddy.

This isn't shaping up to be a blog where I feel moved to qualify anything positive about religious experience, so don't expect this to look "balanced" or "fair" or giving much a shit about your personal story as it pertains to your Jesus. You've been warned.

Anyway, now that I deal with addiction, I get to see new, but precisely the old, patterns manifest in ways I haven't written about yet. It could be notions of "purity" and "submission" that plague the minds of those who literally can't see a paradigm that would allow them to be independent. You're at the mercy of the eldest man who I don't think it would be unfair to say you're addicted to. We're addictive creatures, trying to indulge the positive feelings at all costs. Literally, we will die to feel good, and I don't think this is framed as dangerous as it's registering to me in this moment.

I've heard a lot of, "I just don't want to deal..." from my friends as much as any client. No one wants to deal. They don't want the headache. They don't have the time. Whether they're addicted to their vape or to some desperate conception of their duty or destiny, they don't fundamentally feel situated to deal with the heart of whatever their own issues may be. It becomes very easy to get enmeshed in family issues, client issues, indulgences for their own sake, or a feverish "busy-ness" pointed in no real direction in particular. They want to feel good. Maybe not even "better" than "good" or "good enough."

That's part of the religious impulse, no? You want to feel better about the infinite. You want to matter. You want to think you've created a kind of noble and lasting example in your attempt to start a family or in how hard you've worked to get letters after your name and higher paychecks. You want to pay your respects and keep the traditions of your elders alive. You want to think someone's paying attention and keeping score. It doesn't matter if in your heart of hearts you "don't believe in anything," as one woefully incomplete phrasing tries to caricature it, it matters that it feels better to "believe in something" than your insignificance and lack of connection. Jesus is a thousand times easier to understand emotionally than "quantum" anything.

It just feels so fucking boring and disingenuous after, well I spent years reading/arguing this stuff, but with an adult brain and 15 minutes, some deeply consequential layers of this shit needs to crack. You can be a perfectly good person without anything religious making its way into the conversation or your identity. Your car takes gas, not God's will, and for whatever scientific description you want to use about the combustion engine, the same scientific principles and rules apply to what's going to make you "go" as a healthy connected individual verses an incidentally alive node in a narcissist's cult.

I genuinely wish for the shedding of religious indoctrination to happen as quick as possible. I wish the people who hold it harmless would spend more time in good faith analyzing what they think it's been teaching them. Every form of abuse is justified "because God." Every opportunity to hold someone to account is a move to kick the can all the way to Hell. You reduce yourself to the dog who got in the trash. It's never going to walk up to you, apologize, and begin picking up and putting it back in the can. It's going to live in fear, or oblivious pride, and wait for daddy to decide what comes next.

It's always and of course the religious household where you get the most abuse and allegations. If you build church bells to sound "duh" on the hour every hour, we would still carry ourselves as if noticing a cross on the wall is tantamount to a Safe Space sticker for runaway teens. Where else are you going to find the worst kind of predictable tragedies of human behavior than where there's billions of dollars and adherents fundamentally situated to pretending? They pretend they weren't abused. They pretend to know what it is to be accountable. They pretend to have an identity. They pretend with every single word meant to obscure. It's easier to say "sin" than, "He made an 8 year old suck his dick."

There's so many parallels in my thought right now, it's hard to put it together. People defend the wrong things in the exact same ways with the exact same language. Your abusive partner, Trump, religious pedophile, terrible drug use influence..."He didn't mean...." and you're off to the races of excuses and reinterpretation of words and actions that have about as definitive a meaning as you could ever ask for. Every second you experience a moment of hesitation or confusion about something you haven't studied or don't have the mental faculties to entertain..."It's part of a larger plan." Yes, someone's always Ocean's 11ing things in the background.

People will escape! Then they will still say, "You can still trust God!" As though I should be surprised that an entire lifetime spent being punished for having your own identity could lend itself to any other conclusion. No no, dear traveler, what all of these rich sex and violence addicts were doing with all of their influence and time, never being held to account, that's the "fake God" stuff. The "real God" stuff is do literally everything they've ever said and done that doesn't rise to the level of pedophilia or violence that leaves marks. Nailed it!

I get annoyed when Hussain will say something about sex or relationships that is as purely distilled "purity culture" cult shit as you could stomach. Even if none of his actions reflect that of a controlling husband/ownership dynamic, he can't shake that it just feels "right" that you have your one woman, and anything else is grounds for divorce or disassociating. This, with I guess his tongue sticking straight through his cheek, as he tells me the permissibility of having 4 wives in his culture. You see, you can't "cheat" or be "open," but you can corral four bagged women to be at your beck and call if the money's right. You don't get that stupid convoluted headspace without religion.

Let's get back to "deal with it" as a phrase. We just don't want to deal. We don't want to deal with climate change. We don't want to deal with the fallout of our toxic friends or habits. We don't want to deal with our oppressor be it at work or in abstract attacks from the government. Why deal? It doesn't feel good. No one in our various religious contexts is showing us what effectively dealing means. It's not even really an option because it can't be conceived of. What are you not "dealing with" in your "addiction?"  After a few weeks/months you can pretty much be physically fine if not in dire need to recalibrate your dopamine and serotonin over the next 2 years.

I'm interested in what moves us past this whole "religious debate" that doesn't get to the heart of making excuses and fantasy worlds verses working within our actual power. We talk about "raising consciousness" which I think looks a lot like people showing people things, but without an appreciation for how or why they learn so it doesn't really matter how often it comes up, it never sinks in. You could very easily discuss the assumptions and illusions we're situated in as conscious beings altogether to persistently derail what that next conversation space could look like. I don't need another cult-leader, rich god-guys-is-an-asshole story. Do you? Are you ripe and ready to fall for NXIVM or Scientology if your Jesus or Mohamed wears off?

These crazies, these cultists, these monetarily powerful playing on human weakness fucks think in generational terms. We can't be persuaded to get half a dozen people into an intentional community, but you have millions on the same smug team regularly donating, indoctrinating, infiltrating, and humbly requesting through speakers outside the baseball stadium that you meet them halfway in a discussion about who's more likely to burn for all eternity as though we're not literally on fire already. Blame Canada!

You don't want to deal? You don't want to accept? You don't want to try? You don't want to touch an ounce of the anger you hear from me when I type? You're the piddling middle-ground that doesn't protest when the Nazi sits at your table. You're the $10 donation affirming private air fare for your spew-daddy while your neighbor starves. You're the held-harmless "individual" "who's just trying..." every overtaxed phrase about caring for them and theirs or what it means to be "good." They're not trying. They're not just. "They" aren't real or a person. They're a water molecule without the language of "flood."

We're all part of more waves than we can conceive. You can disappear into it, or you can adopt the buoy's perspective. You can learn how to be weather and impact resistant, bob and weave, act as a warning and help others navigate. It's dangerous to give your checking capacity to anything else. You need to be able to recognize the impulse, what ignorance looks and sounds like, and feel, as deeply and radically as the ideologues do, a sense of purpose and direction. Religious thinking is arsenic sprinkled on food and you say, "Oh! Almonds! Want a bite?" It's where you go to feel good about not taking responsibility. It's where you go to celebrate addictive thinking patterns. It's how you get to Hell. "You," of course, not me, because I don't need your daddy. I don't need him molesting the kids I try to place. I don't need his money. I don't need his excuses or story for my behavior or sense of agency. 

Why the fuck do you?