Reflections On The New Blog Schema - Part One
Today I am tired. I am not certain why. Had a long week last two weeks. Worked out hard last three days. It is hot outside today.
I am glad I made the change to split the blogs up. Every day I feel more confident it was the right decision. I have rewritten the Myers Briggs series from scratch on Actualization Hub and actually like them (only parts one and two are done so far).
I realized while writing them that I am not actually a bad writer. What I am “bad” at is trying to write four different things for four different audiences in one piece.
I have Fe. I instinctually know what other people expect. And I hear their criticisms while I act.
I know those low in neuroticism become annoyed when I go off into some personal tangent. Titling them with “Dear Diary” helps a little so they can skip it. But make someone want to skip more than one of ten times and they will unsubscribe.
I know those high in agreeableness get uncomfortable when I am insulting or provocative. I know many who care about self reflection or introspection (high neuroticism) don’t really care about my civilization and philosophy engineer stuff. And I know long ramble tangents about philosophy or self reflection or self criticism get in the way of dense, concise, strategic life tips (Actualization Hub).
I needed Minor Dissent to start off as a (mostly) direct representation of everything that is me. So I could accept I was not defective despite not being an optimal product. Well and I wasn’t even 100% sure I wasn’t an optimal product. I’d never verified it, just assumed. So I needed to either learn I was a good product or learn how to be okay with filtering myself to become one.
As I suspected, the latter was ultimately what occured. What exactly happened that lead to this conclusion is for another time. But it was certainly a result of the experiment that was 2021 Minor Dissent (a third of which now has moved to this blog and a third of which is in the process of being moved to Actualization Hub).
Back in the OG AH days (2017-2020), when I would “filter” anything in my writing I felt like I was betraying myself. I tried to reveal as much of myself as I thought I could get away with but I was always in this anxious battle between what I believed (knew) people wanted to consume and what i wanted to produce—my awareness that my lack of filter was making the product worse conflicting with my integrity saying “fuck you, this is me, deal with it”. Which is why I took the 2021 AH hiatus in the first place. It felt too restrictive. I needed an “unrestricted” blog to work this out.
Minor Dissent did not set out to be that but that is what it ultimately became. At least for a year.
But now this is resolved. This blog is a diary, AH is self improvement normie friendly, and MD is autistic philosophy poasting.
And more importantly: I now accept what I am. And this acceptance requires no effort. I know what my job is. I know why I exist. And now that I have those things, it is simply about becoming as effective at executing on it as possible. About doing whatever is necessarily to optimize the speed at which I can achieve my objective. Of course there is still a lack of clarity in some things. There always will be. But it is all minor trajectory corrections and detours. Not major swings trying to determine whether we should go to New York, LA, Miami, or the moon.
The Case Against Self Loathing (Or How To Get Addicted To Doing Things That Are Good For You)
Hating yourself will get you to take action when you can find no other good reason. But it is ultimately inefficient and slow.
Crawling is better than sitting—true—but eventually you will need to learn how to run. And right now the weight of your own unrealistic expectations will break your legs if you try.
To succeed, your expectations must be only about ten or twenty percent higher than your competence. If these diverge too greatly, it becomes a self reinforcing feedback loop of depression and failure.
If you try to compete way outside of your skillset, you will fail. Then you will bully yourself for your failure, which will cost you energy and leave you traumatized and avoidant in the future. The more you compete too far outside your skillset, the more you will fail, the more avoidant you will become.
And the more avoidant you become the less competence you develop. The longer you live the more you see others succeeding, the higher your expectations become. Eventually you have no choice but to remain in a perpetual state of self attack, anxiety, and suffering or to give up on trying at all.
And even giving up is only a band aid fix. Avoid long enough and your competence not only flatlines but goes negative. Meanwhile you become addicted to drugs and all your relationships fall apart and your body becomes trashed and you fall way behind the curve and all the rest. Eventually the previous disparity in expectations and competence you were avoiding returns. But your life is infinitely worse because now you have all this baggage and all this wasted time and everything is far more fucked up than when you started. Eventually you hit “rock bottom” and either kill yourself or decide you’re going to try and climb out of hell. It’s much better to avoid hell in the first place if you can manage it.
How do you avoid hell? by fixing your expectations. Not by deleting them but by making them high enough to be challenging yet not so high you will be perpetually frustrated and ashamed and avoidant of them. If you want to prevent—or escape—hell you have to learn to engineer the fun zone into every day of your life.
Video games don’t start you at level one hundred playing against the hardest enemies and where it takes a dozen hours to unlock a single new perk or attachment. Because when you’re a beginner that’s not where the fun zone is. That’s where the you’ll-get-mad-and-stop-playing-zone is.
Instead, they start out giving you rewards frequently and for almost no effort. In fact, they bombard you with reward for literally just showing up so they can hook you in.
But they don’t keep rewarding you this often and intensely forever. Because humans are masters of adaptation. Consistent environment leads to homoestasis. Every reward becomes less rewarding. Without challenge—without having to “try”—you will eventually lose interest and move on to something else.
Why? Because the harder something is to achieve the less it is achieved. And the less achieved it is the more bounty lies there for you to take if you can achieve it.
Anyone can reach the low hanging fruit. And so the bottom of the tree is barren. But no one can reach the top hanging fruit, and so it just sits there, bountiful, untouched. If you can learn how to climb or how to build a chainsaw or a shaking machine then enough food for an entire tribe becomes yours.
The great biological innovation of the Homo genus was the ability to learn skills. And to become obsessed with “the buried treasure”—the asymmetric bets that are impossible to achieve except without skill, risk, intelligence, cunning, courage, and all the rest.
And thus: it is hard coded into our biology that motivation is a by product of trying and then winning. If you never win, you lose interest. But if you never have to try, you also lose interest.
Your problem is that you have the worst of both worlds. Everything you win at, you didn’t have to work for. All your dopamine is instant gratification surrogate dogshit. You didn’t have to fight for your dinner, you just had to walk to the fridge. You didn’t have to fight for your social approval, you just said some bullshit on Twitter. You didn’t have to work hard to find something novel, you just opened your phone.
And meanwhile everything real that you try at, you fail. Because we live in a world of hyper novelty and hyper complexity. Everything “instinctual”—everything we are born good at—has been automated away. The only things we could ever theoretically “try” at are these things which we must be taught and cultivated to do.
And If you didn’t have exceptional parents who found a way to solve this, and to teach it to you, you will have been dependent on “safety nets” like public schools, TV, and all the rest. But if you are in any way neurodivergent, these will fail you miserably. They are products for a certain type of person who cares about certain things and learns in certain ways and has certain goals. This certain type of person makes up the majority of the population, and they are served by it well enough. But you are not the majority of the population and thus you are served poorly.
And this is only made worse by how globalization and mass communication has hyper stratified our status hierarchies. A hundred years ago you had only to compare yourself to the top one percent in the neighborhood. Now you have to compare yourself to the top one percent in the world. When you filter the leaderboard by your friendlist, you can accidentally end up in the fun zone. When you filter the leaderboard by global however, you will never accidentally end up there.
He who controls the fun zone controls the world.
And who controls the fun zone right now? The only people who are consciously trying to engineer it. And who are those people? All the assholes who make the products you’re addicted to of course. Twitter. Facebook. Instgram. Netflix. Apple. Tiktok. Google. Gaming companies. Drug companies. all the rest. Every single last one of these companies not only knows about the fun zone but has mastered putting you in it so you will give them money (or data so they can sell it for money).
Meaning: until you can master the fun zone, you are fucked!
But enough about you. This isn’t Actualization Hub. Back to my feelings!
Reflections On The New Blog Schema - Part Two
My sincerest apologies for that tangent. God forbid I say something useful while I’m busy having a feeling. Back to my point:
I no longer hate my writing. My contempt was a by product of knowing that the product was flawed and hearing the voices of all who it was not for criticizing it. I would ruminate and rewrite and reorganize everything all the time and it just never met the needs of all the audiences it needed to. I would try as hard as I could and still only ever lose! Of course I was miserable!
Now that the audiences are separated into three however, this critic is mostly quiet. Or at least he is satiable. He has high standards, but not impossible ones.
The Myers Briggs series is good now. Or rather it is hitting the target it is aiming at. In a way that the Minor Dissent version did not.
And I actually enjoyed writing it. I liked doing the whole bullet points and super-filtering thing. But I was only able to appreciate it because I knew elsewhere I could go off on long tangents about philosophy or sociology (Minor Dissent) and could barf my feelings here.
Something that has always been true of me is that my internal mind is a hellscape of chaos and disorder. And I hate chaos and disorder, so I create external order to achieve some semblence of stability. This external order, this framework, this scaffolding, of the new blog structure creates that for me. It allows all the voices to be satiated. They all get what they want.
With a good enough framework, maybe you really can please everyone.