[1231] Add It Up

I think a lot about when I might believe I’ve “made it.”

I read an interview with a musician who explained that for many bands who don’t define success, it can feel hopeless or antagonizing that they aren’t getting a certain level of attention, money, or opportunities. If and when they are comparing themselves to The Beatles no amount of what they put in or get out is going to feel like “enough”.  This insight, of course, applies to many domains in life outside of music, and I think one of the reasons that explanation has stuck with me is because I’ve tried to apply the lesson to my day-to-day experience.

Is today “enough” for me? I woke up whenever I woke up after going to bed whenever I fell asleep. I was watching what I wanted to watch. I was playing with AI, or stated differently, creatively engaging with a tool I’m interested in and learning about. I’m going to another comedy show tonight after attending one yesterday. I’m digesting an apple fritter I got as a gift yesterday. I’m wearing a new band T. I’m on the verge of again-maximizing my base level of Last War. Food is cooking. I have enough money in the bank for a few beers and my debt consolidation payment coming up.

So far, even with the first few snippets of what I might say about today, yes.

Most of the days of my life look something like this. Even when I have a job, my days circle around the story of my otherwise fair-to-well operating environment. This is in spite of the negligence and fascism of my state and country. Even if, in general, I have a fairly precarious relationship to long-term employment. Even when it starts raining, and you can tell a compelling story about the different insurances I can’t afford.

The concept of “making it” feels all the more on the nose. I have to make a story of my context. I’d go a step further and call it something of an obligation of consciousness. Because my experience exists within some deep and perhaps unanswerable questions about what is “mine” or it means to “experience,” the narrative mechanism of my brain literally needs something constructed to anchor to.

When you’re poor, or poor enough, that constructed story ties intimately with your need to survive. A proud declaration of your “work ethic” might hide that if you didn’t, you’d starve. The hundreds, if not thousands, of times I’ve heard, “It is what it is,” from people in bureaucracies and social work environments. When your nose is pressed right up against the ever-failing human condition, you “accept” all of a sudden deeply “wise” and “obvious” things about what is or isn’t possible.

It works the opposite direction with every rich megalomaniac. You breach the bounds of “average” human activity? Now, all of a sudden, literally anything is possible! Including you being the one to lead us into your imagined future. The same trick is being played on your psyche though.  Your brain is under the impression it’s about “you.”

Many people have intuited ways out of this trap by finding themselves working “in service” to others. The difference between actually doing so and paying lip service to it could not be more clear. At DCS, I saw the people who got off on the power of what they could do to your family. Same in the prison. You can tell the people who are being led by the insecurities or inadequacies and laziness, dragging that posture over the struggling people they purport to serve.  Add to that, and I consider it a plague upon the modern condition, where your otherwise good deeds or service can turn into viral capital.

They say most kids want to be “influencers.” They want the money, prestige, and attention, superficially, like any musician might imagine about the lives of the biggest stars. The story of the work to get there will remain just as obscure. How many hours a day do you want to practice your instrument? How many posts do you want to feel obligated to every day? I question the desire to influence if you can’t wrap your head around the nature of what’s influencing you.

One of the ways I think I’ve found a degree of stability and quelled anxiety was to tell the story of what happened at each moment I got “the thing.” Did my life fundamentally change? Did my energy levels and time get utilized exactly as I imagined they would? Literally, never. I moved to the middle of nowhere, and I do play around with random projects and blast my music in the middle of the night, but it’s not my main preoccupation of time. I bought all the fancy woodworking tools, and have made a handful of things, but I’m not churning out an Etsy store. My “friends” and my friends don’t have any more or less time to spend with me. I’m still lightly concerned about my next unfulfilling job and how much it’s not gonna pay me to keep my head just above water.

One of “the things” I got was the ability to start going to a large number of shows. I’ve clung to that as a thing I both wanted, still want, and sacrifice other things in service towards. It was in making graphs with my show attendance data that informed my feelings about “making it.” It was my hundredth “fun thing” event last night this year. It was 109 last year, 143 the year before that. I’ve been playing catch-up and taking an active role in shaping my story by the things that I enjoy, like music and comedy, and the rituals around getting to where they are on display. You can ask me where to eat, drink, navigate parking, or best place to stand at dozens of venues across the Midwest. I can say, “I saw them open for” dozens of bands who are getting big or who I’m betting will.

I’m working on “more.” Because I want to not just attend these shows, I want to attend them on any day, in any location, they might happen. I want to get to them in a car that’s even more reliable than the ones I’ve been driving. I want a T shirt for every band I’ve even wanted to support a little. Is it a selfish or greedy goal when there’s so much going on in the world? It could be.

I’ve learned that the nature of my wants isn’t about “instead of.” I want it all in concert. Derek Thompson of Plain English and the book about Abundance fame, talks about how he can’t stay locked into one domain of interest. His brain begs the question of the broader metrics and narratives that explain something. I resonated with that idea. I’m not a “woodworker” or “musician” or “political junkie.” I’m not a “counselor” or “landlord” or “fan.” I’m just generally interested in the interplay of things and how we manage to react or work with them. I don’t want anything beyond feeling meaningfully engaged in that interplay. Because I accept that meaning derives from the narrative, I’m interested in continuing to write said narrative.

For me, it’s important that narrative is true. I mean true. I don’t mean “my truth.” I don’t mean arguing the weeds of subjective experience. I mean, for any English speaker, you can read these words. That’s a true statement. I mean, I’m a dude. I mean, I just ate meat, and regardless of how much suffering or intelligence I can attribute to the pig, it was delicious. I feel “intellectually” bad about it, and would eat pig cells grown in a lab and seasoned the same way if it were an affordable and reasonable option. I don’t feel bad enough to stop eating meat today.  It’s not telling a simple story of my righteous vegan posture or ambivalent negligence towards other conscious beings. It’s a true sliver of “me” and what I think it would take to change my behavior.

My relationships to things are always in flux. That’s not about making room for moral relativism. That’s about the exercise of accountability. Those who are innocently confused and those who are motivated to bad-faith reasoning will operate functionally the same way in the face of this idea. I’d call it a simple and easy truth, but for whom there’s an eternal mystical reality, one imagines it’s too disorienting for them to grapple with.  God can be their Rock. I’ll take Chris.

It’s true I want to get lost for weeks arguing with AI until I find it more useful than for torrenting and efficiently organizing my media. It’s true I want to be involved politically creating grassroots infrastructure to combat the rot I perceive at the base of our ability to collectively survive. It’s true I want to watch nearly anything that’s been turned into a TV show that was actually trying to say something. It’s true I want to learn how to produce music, and create worthy-of-sale woodworking things, and have the kind of “fuck you” money that doesn’t blink about empowering my cartoon soldiers on a gambling-adjacent phone game.

There are, easily, a dozen things I could rifle off about genuine desires I have that exist in each moment. Sometimes my presumed ADHD gets a chance to demonstrate that when I’m juggling 6 at once. A couple days ago, I undressed, turned on the shower, noticed something about my bathroom mirrors, and proceeded down a rabbit hole, naked, which included, cooking, power tools, a shattered bowl cleanup, and grime cleaning, before I found my way into the actual shower. Did I want to shower? Or clean? Or cook? Or adjust the mirror? Or not cut myself? Or ensure my tools were organized so I could find one easier next time? Or get that spot addressed while I’m down here? Yes.

I don’t want it all. I don’t want it now. I want to feel like I can do any of it in the moment I really want to do it. I want to celebrate the freedom of ambiguity more than feel trapped by obligations. I want you to feel as freely chosen as I was to choose otherwise. I want the power of my awareness and capacity to build as much as destroy. I want the conversation to start from that mutually shared place and routinely surprise and delight with where it goes. Given that I don’t really know where to begin in that endeavor, I guess I’ll go back to dinner, my shows, and keep my ears open for what the next story is that hits me.

[1189] Just Dance

 I don't know where I'm going, but I do know how to start.

I'm bad at pretending. That's not the best way to state my perspective on it, but it's the first true way to begin talking about it. I don't feel "good" or "right" when I have to perform contrary to what I think is a "better truth." Let's make this immediately practical so you'll understand.

I lied to one of my bosses today. I didn't want to. I felt morally obliged to. She's not my direct boss, nor do I work with her particularly often. She's one rung higher than me on a bureaucratic ladder of the YMCA. She's, technically, in charge of the "camp" program at one of the locations. I've heard from her boss that she's a perfectly nice person, but a terrible manager. I've experienced this first hand in her woefully inadequate response to children shitting themselves while I attended her site's camp days. Today, I was expected to be at her site, an hour and ten minutes away, for 7 children who had signed up for this day off from school. I was told at 7 PM Thursday that I would need to be there at 10 AM Monday.

Leaving aside that everyone else at my level was otherwise getting a 3-day weekend, the late notice in and of itself is unprofessional and indicative of their broader extreme struggles with communication. I didn't tell a single person about the 7PM email who didn't respond with some version of "Yeah, fuck that." Holding a "camp" for 7 kids is pointless. Telling me, arguably the farthest drive of anyone working for the organization in the entire city, to be the one to occupy a spot is something of an insult to injury. Mentioning that she would be on site for most of the day and spelling my name so catastrophically wrong while simultaneously tagging me with the correct spelling all the more so.

The truth of most organizations is there are terribly managed and arbitrary dictums to navigate all the time. Most people shouldn't lead or don't have what it takes to remain internally and externally coherent long enough to maintain a team that trusts them and vice versa. That's a higher order truth one has to individually navigate. There's a series of increasingly honest discussions you could have about her capacity and the organization's broader responsibility in order to find the coherence you'd hope leadership would espouse. Because you can never trust they will, you get invited to organize, protest, or quit when demands become too much.

I thought to start with the idea of being bad at pretending because it feels like the most persistent truth of my day to day experience. I have to pretend I want to keep "doing capitalism." I have to pretend I'm enjoying my time around the people I'm obligated to work with or for. I have to pretend like much calls to me from each day beyond the next TV show or hobby. My poor capacity to pretend has obligated me to finding ways of describing my life and taking actions that don't feel fake or performative. If I eschew most "normal" narratives about family, keeping up with the neighbors, school, politics, or anything in which you know every beat of the story until the anticipated end, I can carve out an individual perspective that allows me to approach those topics from a real and reasoned way.

My thieving family hasn't caught every hateful thing I might say to them because I've reasoned through the impact that would have on my dad. When I coped with the emotional let down and joke that was college, I turned it into one of the most fun periods of partying. When I thought a mortgage sounded like the craziest thing I'd ever heard, I set myself up to live in a shed. When I punctured the naive entitled sense of limerace or "love" of my youth, I figured out "open" just means to the prospect of more accountability and honesty, not being a selfish whore.

To exist as a society is the reasonable maintenance of pretending. No matter how emotional you may get, you want the basic civility that comes with conducting yourself in any context. That, in and of itself, doesn't feel like a lie or that hard to do. What I experience is the next step further from most people. They feel obligated to perform in service to other's unreasonable emotional demands. If it is presumed, for example, that telling my boss she has no business being the boss, and that might hurt her feelings, instead of having the conversation, reorganizing the leadership, and getting everyone on the same page, we'll all just gossip or shrug our shoulders thinking ourselves powerless.

But, this is just the first, pretend, linguistic layer in which we pretend. They don't actually care if it would hurt her feelings. That's an, for reasons I don't know, accepted excuse to not be "too harsh" in your assessment of someone's inadequacy. What happens when you engage in that conversation is the next begged question of who hired her, protects her, or apologizes indefinitely for her bad job. Very quickly, you begin implicating the structure writ-large. In doing so, you trigger a pivot back into the abstracted cliches about big organizations, bureaucracies, or human nature. Round and round you go until you burn out, get entitled and indignant, or resolve yourself to the hopeless and exhausting business as usual that, if nothing else, keeps your bills paid. I think most people with children exist in that space as a matter of basic practicality. You're not fighting the system or navigating nuances of human failure when you're just trying to keep them fed.

I consider myself bad at pretending because it makes me feel bad. It's, mostly, that simple. I know that with each lie, something in me is suffering, dying, or being altered in a way that I have to pay attention to. I decided to assert my individual power over my time today. I was completely unsympathetic to whatever story my boss offered as to the late notice, the running of a 7-kid camp in the first place, or the idea that everyone else gets a day off but me. I'm getting much needed car repairs done as I type this. I've spent most of the weekend organizing my house which I'm rarely in anymore, and catching up on sleep. It takes only a moment of leaning too far into my reasons to start believing myself fundamentally reasonable, and therfore justified in advance of the next lie.

I think we get catastrophic failures at scale because enough individuals allow themselves this space. They pretend they aren't allowing themselves this space until something breaks. They eventually become dependent on the lie in order to function, and the nature of their agency is wrapped up in continuously doing so.

This is where I have a hard time empathizing with most people. I try my best to be making choices in spite of how often it feels like I don't have one. When I need to make a particular example of my capacity, I don't then use it as license for more or to pretend like I want anything to operate this way. I wish I lived in a world where reasonable people were in charge, or barring that, offered reasons for their behavior your average person could get behind without reservation. Instead, each day we're offered to do whatever we must to navigate bull-in-a-china-shop ways people conduct themselves. We're encouraged to get along, swallow a lot of shit, and shut up, or we'll be the next thing they shatter.

One of the areas I find it impossible to pretend about is when I learn something new. I can't go back to not learning whatever the thing was. I can't unsee the straw-man argument. I can't jettison the nature of cognitive dissonance or load. I can't ignore Bell curves and statistics attempting to ground how many people are suffering or from what. No matter how many times someone makes a disingenuous qualifying statement about "government waste," I can't blissfully pretend that firing every federal worker would make even a dent in the ways and whys of our debt. At that precise moment, you're starting with a lie, conceding the game, and just along for whatever ride they wish to take you on. "Yes! Waste is bad!" As though that's, at all, what we're talking about or what they're doing.

So much of political talk radio is people comparing apples to oranges in this way. They take one disconcerting fact, or fact-ish, and pair it against whatever they need to justify their feeling. To me, it's not even a conversation at that point. I've heard recently Joe Biden is worse than Trump because of his failures at the border, and therefore it was intentional.  I've heard Trump isn't a fascist because of all the laws he hasn't, yet, ignored. I've heard democrat lies and complacency touted as worse or "the real" problem, as though Trump isn't lying with the fluidity of a fire hose.

I think we're fundamentally, willfully deliberately, ignorant of ourselves, so we can engage in these exchanges with free and clear consciences. We can't even entertain the idea that we're pretending anything at all. Performative outrage, is in fact, the new actual outrage. Performative "research" is blissfully devoid of the concept of "confirmation bias." As long as your friends and family don't harsh your vibe, they can maintain their title. As long as your kids are fed, "it is what it is," and you've never heard of a "union" nor is time remotely as valuable as the next dollar.

I think the worst ways the pretending manifests though are in "smart" religious types. It's peak pretend when you have to lure people in and play coy about how much you want them to start speaking your crazy. Jonathan Pageau was doing this during a discussion with Jordan Peterson towards the height of Jordan's suffering years ago. Ross Douthat just did it to the enthusiastically curious Plain English podcaster. Smart people pretend worst of all. They can't help but to articulate and cohere and try to strive to not be at the mercy of their brains. The exceptionally convoluted worlds they invent will never match the validation from people they consider at their level.

It's, almost by definition, extremely lonely to be too smart or too capable. You can't just take orders because you see how it can be done better. You can't reciprocate for the same reasons because yours aren't superficial nor can ignore the implications and consequences. And no one has sympathy, nor even recognizes the nature of your struggle. You learn early that attempting to explain yourself only gets punished. You either are lucky enough to be born with the disposition that doesn't really give a shit, if not even thrives on that, or you're normal, and desperately seek a form of apologetics in service to your place in the world.

Thus, the "human nature" picture gets articulated across book-length examples of foundational insecurity and nagging questions. Animals need to belong. Animals need to perform their basic daily functions without the nagging anxiety of their inevitable death and arbitrary nature of their actions. So? Look around. What's popular? What's "true enough?" What's a place you can plug into where most people, most of the time, are refusing to do any of the work that honestly holds themselves accountable? Insert your favorite religion. It's the details lost to the sea of adherents to its framing.

I cut through noise. I ask myself if I'm pretending. I'd have to pretend to believe in any version of god offered by the famous faiths. I'd have to pretend that I think it's wise and reasonable to pretend a story book is better and easier to justify or follow than what we've learned scientifically. I'd have to pretend like the routine atrocities played out in the name of hardly-disguised power are what I'd consider "holy." I'd have to pretend like I need something "other" or "outside" my experience of the world in order to explain why I do something good, bad, or seemingly contradictory or confusing.

I don't need to act like the math is complicated. I don't need to resign myself to a conversation that isn't fundamentally coherent. I don't need to act to any degree that doesn't let me basically get along with the society I'm born to. That does not seem to be the ethos or operating principles of most people most of the time.

I think some of my perspective takes practice, but I think it's foundationally about honesty. I don't think you have to be smart to be honest. I don't think you have to be wise to know when you're talking adjacent to the truth. I don't think you have to get an advanced degree to know when a detail or fact you're leaving out would undermine how urgently you're insisting someone accept and believe your feelings on the matter are so true, whatever you might say about it also becomes true. Here, again, you can differentiate for yourself if you bother to. I'm not writing this to persuade you of anything. I'm not writing this so I can feel better about lying. I'm writing this because I can't pretend that I don't have a running narrative at least this long about so many scenarios I'm invited to, that I didn't choose for myself, and what I do to navigate them. I want to know and trust my reasoning indefinitely.