I am bored. I am anhedonic. Nothing is satisfying.
When everything goes according to plan I am bored. When I fail to account for something and it doesn’t, I am angry. Right now I am both.
My brain is broken. Not like permanently but it’s trained improperly at the moment. I mean it is also permanently broken but that part I accept.
Motivation does not lead to action. Action leads to motivation. But taking unnecessary action is a waste of energy. And right now no action seems necessary. So I have no motivation.
The problem with accepting who you are is that you are already good enough so there is nothing to motivate you to become more. The problem with hating who you are is that you will never be good enough so there is no point in trying to become more.
You must feel you are adequate enough to deserve to live. But not so much that you are satisfied staying where you are.
For most of my adult life my issue was that I thought I was I pile of trash until I was top 0.01% at something. If I’m not competing with Elon Musk at building companies or Scott Alexander at writing or Jordan Peterson at orating etc then I am human mold deserving of incineration without remorse.
And this got in the way a lot. But it also paved the way. It made me always striving for more. But also perpetually anxious. The amount of time I wasted hating myself could have been far better spent doing something else.
So I spent years practicing tolerating myself. And it worked. But now I think it may have gone too far. I am too confident. Or too accepting at least. I either think that I am guaranteed to solve the problem I am seeking to solve in the next decade or two, with plenty of time to spare; or I think it’s impossible anyway so doesn’t really matter how hard I try. There is no sense urgency. Because I have no good justification for it. And without a sense of urgency nothing happens.
So I’m just not really doing anything lately. I mean I’ve been going all out on training and nutrition right now but that’s like 2 hours a day. I spend most of the rest doing dumb maintenance life shit I hate or doing nothing. Way too much time just sitting on Twitter or Reddit or watching Youtube.
I’ve optimized myself into uselessness. Most everything that I could possibly change to make my life more convenient to me, I have. And everything that I can’t change I just accept.
So it’s like what’s the point of me now? Sure I have this big life mission but it’s either going to happen without me trying that hard or it’s not going to happen regardless of how hard I try. Such is a recipe for depression.
I must believe that it will only happen if I try hard. It will only happen if I hit the perfect balance of effort.
Most people do this unconsciously. They invent reality and then call it objective. Isn’t it just so convenient that the political party or religion or race or country you were born in is the savior and the best ever and the true good that is worth fighting for?
Everyone—or at least every group— is inventing their purpose, their meaning, their morality. And they are strategically oblivious to its subjectivity. Human “stupidity” is a feature, not a bug. The fact that every metanarrative is a lie is not a problem it is a solution. The problem is that we became aware enough that enough people realized it was a lie but were too stupid to realize the lie served a critical survival purpose. And thought that if we just try to get everyone to stop believing in anything then everything will be better.
Big oof. Because this does not lead to the transcending of metanarratives as a concept. It simply leads to saying “older, highly iterated, highly refined metanarratives that have survived thousands of years for very good reason are dumb trash” and that “new, experimental, untested metanarratives that are barely decades old and are in direct conflict with the old highly effective and antifragile metanarratives are universally superior”. The philosophical discoveries of the French Post-Modernist did not spawn a transcendence of Modernity, but simply caused us to ditch the old reasonably effective Modernity with a new shittier version of Modernity (progressivism, “radical postmodernism” ie CRT, SJWism, etc).1
Most new ideas are bad. Most old ideas are obsolete. Which is why some seek new ideas in the first place. And why most resist them. Big problem.
The problem I have—that I can see this, that I have always been aware of and feeling lost in this postmodern landscape—is not a me problem. If you too are lost, it is not a you problem either. That retarded laggards who call you “mentally ill” for being an innovator or early adopter to ideas means nothing. Their job is to be retarded. Being retarded is the glue that holds civilization together.
The innovators iterate like crazy, living in a perpetual world of change and novelty and chaos. Most of them come up with nothing. All of them are crazy. They are perpetually giving birth. That some retarded laggard may say “look how useless that baby is, it can’t even walk or eat or work. It is a net negative” misses the point entirely. If you killed all the innovators, or even stifled them to any reasonable degree, your society would die in decades.
Because being a laggard is only effective in a stable environment. But because the individual reward for successfully breaking the stability is so high (wealth, power, etc), innovators will eventually destabilize it.
Innovators are dependent on laggards to keep society stable enough for them to innovate. Laggards are dependent on innovators for changing society enough so that it doesn’t rot. But also innovators have their souls perpetually crushed by laggard’s order and hierarchy and rules. And laggards beautiful order and hierarchy and rules are perpetually being subverted by innovators. So both hate eachother. And yet both can’t survive without each other.
The ESS, the evolutionary stable state, is one in which 90% of people are consumer-types and 10% are creator-types.
Allow me to go on a giga tangent to describe ESS’s using the example of the evolution of lying.
Evolutionary Stable States; Why Lying Exists
Imagine a starting point in which 100% of people told the truth all the time. It would be a total waste of time and energy to be skeptical or cautious of liars because they don’t exist. Anyone who wasted time and energy on being skeptical would be outcompeted by people who dedicated that time and energy toward something actually productive, and so if there were ever any skeptics they would eventually “die out” and thus 100% of people would believe everything anyone said (“Believers”).
But eventually, some way or another, someone would figure out lying. And that person (“Liar”) would be massively rewarded for this. Go to any Believer and say “I have a billion dollars but I left it in my other lambo. Can I borrow $10,000?” That guy will quickly actually become a billionaire. And soon enough—whether it’s his now thousands of offspring, or perhaps believers who got conned by him, or just attentive and observant people—many more will begin to adopt the Liar strategy.
All who defect to Liar early will disproportionately benefit from the strategy (early adopter). But eventually, after there are enough Liars, after the Liar strategy achieves mass adoption, there becomes a new huge counter selection pressure to be able to detect lies (“Skeptics”; innovators of a new strategy). Given that all Believers would eventually get conned out of their wealth by the liars, Skeptics begin to massively grow in population. And as this happens, the Liar strategy quickly plummets in effectiveness.
But once there are no more Believers, only Skeptics, Liars lose any advantage at all. And so rather quickly Liars stop lying. Or at least gaining power and reproducing. As the advantage of lying dwindles so do Liars but also so too does the advantage of skepticism; If Liars go to zero, soon Skeptics will also go to zero, returning everyone to Believers. But as Skeptics go to zero, lying becomes disproportionately effective again, and Liars start to take over once again. Cycle repeats.
100% Believers is an unstable state because eventually someone will exploit it by becoming a Liar. 100% Liars and Believers is an unstable state because eventually someone will wise up and become a Skeptic. 100% Liars and Skeptics is an unstable state because lying will quickly stop working. And 100% Believers and Skeptics in unstable because skepticism is extremely labor intensive and if there are no liars then being skeptical is a waste of energy (thus Believers will outcompete Skeptics), until there are so few Skeptics left that Liar becomes a viable strategy again.
Eventually, this game will settle into a stable state which may be something like 70% of people are believers, 20% are skeptics, and 10% are liars. Obviously it’s much more complex than this because everyone is actually all three, but in general, this is what we see, and it makes sense from a natural selection stand point.
What we also see is that after this collapse into a relatively stable state, there are slow oscillations over time within a given range.
Coming back for example to our Post Modernism issue: In the early 20th century most people were “Believers” in their respective metanarrative. But then we accidentally killed everyone. So there was quickly mass defection to the “Skeptic” side. Since then, many have become Believers in various competing metanarratives, but the Post Modern state is really just being stuck in a (relatively) perpetual state of skepticism. Pathological order, say the height of 20th century, probably had 90% of people as “Believers” in the dominant metanarrative. Today that number is probably closer to 50%. These oscillations, these periods of “revolution” happen all throughout history. But they always collapse back into a state of high levels of “Believer” (because as long as the meta narrative works, Believer is far more efficient, enjoyable, etc), until some blackswan event fucks the order and sends us back toward Skepticism.2
Anyway, what’s the point of this whole tangent? I guess just to say that human society is and always has been a dialetic of competing factions—Whether that be Believers, Skeptics, and Liars or Freaks, Predator, and Prey or however else we want to categorize them— which are ever evolving in the infinite game of life. And further that those of us who are “innovators” of new strategies will seem crazy to the “laggards” (or even the “early adopters” when we are still “writing the code” so to speak). And this will never get resolved because while the laggards would eventually suffer if the innovators stopped innovating: we never will. So the laggards will only ever see the negatives (disorder, dysfunction, etc) about us.
The laggards will always feel about the innovators what the Non IT personnel (“users”) will always feel about IT. IT has to work all the time and fix things and keep everything running and the users will only ever see anything happening when IT fails. Then all the users hate IT because IT is autistic and the only time they ever interact with them is when something is broken (which it was IT’s job to prevent so clearly IT must suck).
Meanwhile IT hates all the users because they don’t appreciate them and are retarded and barely tie their own shoes let alone reboot their PCs.
But without users there is no income and without income there is no IT paychecks.
And without IT there are no computers and without computers then users cant do their job meaning no user paychecks either.
So despite their hate and conflict, companies continue to run and goods continue to be produced and no one ever implements a company with no IT department or no non-IT department because this shitty conflict filled frustrating system is actually better than all possible alternatives.
And this is why “society sucks”. Because all other know options are worse.
So, what’s the point of that point? I don’t really know. I was just following whatever path came up. Let’s go back to whining.
Back to Whining
I want to write “good” pieces. Not crap like this. It still bothers me that I wrote that long explantion about why depression exists in the middle of my Why Politics Is Gay post. That should have been its own piece. But I do not think linearly. I think like this. This is what my brain is doing. And I try to say “oh you should write a good piece that is organized and structured” but then I’m like “well I don’t understand it well enough to write a good piece that is organized and structured” and then my options become either to beat my head against a wall and hate writing and probably never even finish the post or not write anything at all and get depressed for being useless.
And worse, I don’t really care to write about things I understand. It’s just boring to me. I don’t like communicating, I like thinking. But the way I think is incoherent.
Well, you’ve been trying to not do what you do naturally for years. How long are you going to keep fighting what comes natural?
Maybe I just need to accept this. It’s just annoying. I just want to “make it”. I want to get to a point where I can communicate effectively, not just think. There is no point in thinking new and useful thoughts if they die with me.
Well, we aren’t there yet. And the longer you waste sitting around trying to force yourself to write in a way that is unnatural, the longer it will take. If you’d just write as psychotic as you think you’d probably get over it much faster and enjoy it while you were doing it.
How do you know? How do you know I won’t just be psychotic forever?
How do you know you will? The truth is that we don’t know. Which is why we must experiment. Experimenting requires progress and action. Progress and action requires motivation and effort. So whatever creates consistent motivation and effort is the best strategy. You know this. This is not new.
Yes I know. I just want to be someone I respect. I want to look at what I’ve made and say “wow that is cool I am proud of that I respect that guy”. Not “look at that psychotic vomit that person is insane”.
I hear you. But maybe you need to change your expectations for what is respectable. What if this is respectable? What if this is valuable? What if this is the most valuable?
How could it be? It is so childish. How could such solipsism be respectable. One must provide value, not vomit feelings.
How do you know your highly articulate but generally disoraganized feeling vomit is not valuable? Perhaps you are helping people cultivate their own internal dialogue. Perhaps you are providing a level of authenticity and clarity that does not exist anywhere else that is sorely lacking from the market.
People don’t want pure, real authenticity. They don’t want “truth” they want “truthiness”—It should contain truth and be generally truthful but it must form into a beautiful story or something. Most bloggers who emotionally vomit everywhere are experts at crafting stories with a beginning, middle, and end and a deep message and an ending that makes them feel empowered or something. I am too autistic engineer for this.
How do you know? Remember your issue where you try to be what someone else already is? You go “well clearly there is a market for that given that someone is meeting it so now I know it’s safe to try and meet it” but where this just has you constantly trying to contort yourself into something that you are not? You are doing that again.
You are correct.
I know. I am very smart.
Stop. So what are we learning again?
That the most important thing is to write. To make progress. Who cares if no one reads it. You are sharing the journey. People can tune in or not. Eventually we will have coherent things to say. Or we won’t and you’ll just have to accept that because it ain’t changing anytime soon.
Also your Dream Analysis post is your most organized post of the last dozen and no one cares because no one is here for “how to’s” they are here to revel in your psychosis. Give the people what they want. See how it goes.
Okay. *Publish*
1 Is Progressivim really shittier than Classical Liberalism if Progressivism is more stable? More anti-fragile? The Evolutionary Stable State (ESS) is not what is the most effective it is only what is the most stable. Democracy is worse than Monarchy is pretty much every way except one: Monarchy is fragile. Democracy is anti fragile. You can kill a king. How would you kill the million headed Hydra that is the current Oligarchy? Progressivism may be the same. Or it may not. Only time will tell.
2 Though it is probably the case that the baseline of “skeptic” is slowly increasing, due to technology escalating social change faster and faster as well as awareness of history causes us to never fully reset into the same amount of “Believer” as last time.