Dear Diary: So... Wat Do?
"If it’s not working, it’s because you’re a dumb ass with a dumb ass strategy. It really is as simply as that."
I can’t focus. My brain is tired. Why? There must be a more efficient way. How harmful is technology? I mean social media mostly. Yes, these cost energy. But doesn’t everything? Are they net positive? Or at least, can they be? How would I determine this?
Feeling good is energizing. Getting that dopamine release of satisfaction creates motivation. Motivation is a past—not a future—oriented process. It goes “hey that was rewarding, let’s try to recreate it!”
The problem, at least that I run into, is that this re-creation process is extremely difficult and rare. I am deep into the law of diminishing returns in pretty much every domain. I have picked all the low hanging fruit. So I am mostly just chasing the dragon when I use these things. Maybe everyone is and just isn’t as aware of it.
The problem is that it costs a lot of energy to cut these things out. In the short term,the most energy efficient thing is to just keep doing them. But in the long term, it seems like cutting them out is better. The problem is that they have some benefit. Educationally, socially, whatever. And life is hard so sometimes getting an “easy win” is great for keeping you motivated. But we all optimize for the most reward for the least amount of effort. So eventually they creep up and, before you know it, you’re spending hours a day just scrolling.
I need to write effort posts. And I need to prioritize Actualization Hub, at least for the time being. The problem is that writing something new is hard. Writing requires mastery of many things. Mastery of the ideas themselves. Mastery of the flow and organization, listing things in the order that make them the most digestible. And then mastery of the prose, using the right words in the right order in the right amount.
Maybe my issue is just my fundamental drive toward efficiency. There comes a point at which things just can’t become any more efficient. Or at least you must have patience for how long it takes to make an improvement. It’s just so hard to stay motivated when that improvement is coming so slowly.
This is a good sign. This is where you want to be. Where you’re so obsessed with making progress on something that you just start diverting everything about your life to dump more and more time and energy into it. Obviously as long as that thing is actually good. Drug addiction and building a business are literally the same thing chemically. The only difference is that one creates a positive feedback loop and the other creates a negative one. To your limbic system though, there is no difference. Which is why most creative and entrepreneurial people have weird issues like drug problems. It’s why like a quarter of the creative and entrepreneurial kids from your high school went on to become “successful” and the remaining three quarters went on to become drug addicts or kill themselves.
I can’t imagine this ratio isn’t getting worse. As technology advances it just becomes easier and easier every year to get “hijacked” by “sin”. It has always been a problem. Which is why “the temptation of sin” is a thing. Sin is just a synonym for “monkey brain desire that is antagonistic to civilization”. God, goodness, morality, whatever, these are all just synonyms for “higher order behaviors which override your monkey brain, sacrificing your short term pleasure for the long term benefit of your life and the ‘life’ of your civilization”. God, religion, morality, they are “tricks” of human belief to allow us to have civilization. The biological difference between modern, high trust societies and primitive, war-torn societies is functionally zero. Sure maybe a bit of an IQ difference, maybe some other minor differences in temperament. But the main difference between human groups today and human groups a hundred thousand years ago is just which values and beliefs we collectively hold.
There’s more here. It’s not important. This isn’t Minor Dissent. Diving into it more here is an inefficient use of energy.
I have a problem. Which is that I’d like to contribute something of value to society. I don’t want to be a cog (building someone else’s vision) nor a parasite (consooming only). I want to create something of value that is novel, and that people will value enough to pay me money for. Minor Dissent will take a long time to achieve that—if it ever even does. It is delusionally ambitious and it will only pay me at scale. There is no world in which anyone will pay more than ten bucks a month for Minor Dissent, even if I can get it near as good as it could be. Ten thousand readers and one thousand true fans paying some money will take a decade at least. So Actualization Hub—or something else—must enter to meet my current needs for providing value, feeling successful, and making income.
My brain is just so jumbled. There are so many good ideas that are there but just buried, unpolished. I could communicate them in a conversation; I have a solution for most any specific problem. The issue is in separating them out into something coherent and universalizable. This will always be the case to some degree, which is why getting over the hump on coaching is worth doing. My guess is just another year or so of coaching and it will all be mostly wins from there.
I think consuming ideas has always been a crutch for me. That doesn’t mean it is bad, just good by accident rather than on purpose. Most things are this way. Most things should be this way. I think the level of suffering I endure in an attempt to provide value is uniquely high. Maybe not top 1% but at least top 10%. Maybe? I don’t know.
I think I need to consume less ideas. It’s not like I’m enjoying it all that much anymore. There is no more low hanging fruit. Everything left is hard. Dense, old books mostly. I was only consuming ideas for the last decade because it was easier than producing. But today, I’d rather just write something than read Marx or Hegel or Nietzsche. Maybe I am too dumb for them. Whatever. Being valuable is better than being smart. Being smart is a consolation prize for people who aren’t valuable.
I am already reducing my consumption. And this number will only dwindle further as more and more mental conclusions all point toward its value. It is better to write Onlyfrens rants than to consoom mindlessly. Even if that stuff is educational. I have enough knowledge. What I need is to organize and articulate it in a way that is digestible for people. I can learn more about this process if I want. I am reading The Elements of Style and On Writing right now. It is just that they feel like work. My preference, has been to spend lots of time but little energy learning slowly. Listening to some audiobook while I do chores, “vegging out” on Youtube, where I can just passively intake new information without having to think that hard, etc is better than having to block out time to sit down and really focus on some deep philosophical work. This has gotten me pretty far. But has it actually? I know a lot. But are my results keeping up with my knowledge? I don’t think so. I am in this uniquely good financial situation right now not because I provided insane amounts of value to the world, but because I provided slightly above average value to the world—maybe top 20th percentile—and then I just hoarded all the money I earned, and just happened to have the right interests, skills, and curiosities at the right time to benefit from being early to the worlds transition to the Bitcoin Standard.
I mean, I should be dead. Or at least rotting in some drug den somewhere like all the other smart-and-creative-but-lost nihilists I grew up with. The amount of effort, the amount of suffering, the amount of toil and struggle and thinking that got me here—it is a miracle, an “extraordinary success”. But it’s an extraordinary success in the same way that the dude with Downs Syndrome getting on the college football team is an extraordinary success. College football isn’t that impressive. For a retard it is, it’s phenomenal. But if you aren’t retarded yourself it’s nothing to write home about. That retarded guy probably worked harder and knows more than everyone else on the team. If they could learn from him and mimic him they could probably get to the NFL.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I am lazy and stupid. Maybe I didn’t work that hard. Maybe this isn’t all that impressive. I mean given that my retardation isn’t as obvious as someone with Downs Syndrome, maybe it isn’t even real. Is Bipolar disorder real? Is Asperger’s real? Is Major Depressive Disorder real? Is the fact that I “solved” them, to reach the top single digit percent for my age an actual accomplishment? Is the fact that I basically did it all by myself relevant? I just don’t see why it should be. It doesn’t matter how hard you worked; it just matters what results you got. If anything, it’s better if you worked less hard. No one wants to work hard. If I told you “Yeah man you can become 10x what you currently are, but it will take lots of blood, sweat, tears, and suffering” would you even want to do it? What’s so bad about you? Most people probably think to themselves “Nothing. I am fine just the way I am. Why work that hard?”.
I just feel like there’s something I’m missing. I’ve never known someone who was fighting this hard to become better. To provide value. To make massive impact. Maybe everyone else just has this secret battle that I don’t even know about. Maybe I’m still too autistic or something to see how hard everyone else is working.
It doesn’t seem like most people are working that hard. It seems to me like most people are avoiding. It seems to me like most people are running away. And they have like “normal” skills. And more importantly, “normal” expectations. I have weird skills and weird expectations. I hold myself to extremely high standards. I don’t think they are unreasonable. Intelligence is the single biggest predictor of outcome. I am at least in the top 2% of intelligence, so I should be in the top 2% of outcomes. I guess that is only measuring financial outcomes. I expect more than that of myself. I expect myself to be in the top 5% of relationship health, physical health, financial wealth, and like productivity/value generation. I think I meet most of these. My standard for mental health is a little lower. Maybe top 10%. I’m sure all of these are somewhat correlated but not completely. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that people who meet all of these is less like 1% of the population. Maybe it is 0.1%? That just seems too small. But if it were larger, wouldn’t I be finding more people with the same expectations of themselves? Maybe I’m just too introverted and I should go out more?
I’m getting off track. What is the problem I’m trying to solve? I need to produce more content that is of high quality. Particularly Actualization Hub. But it just doesn’t seem like I have the mental capacity to do so at any reasonable speed.
Is it that my mental capacity is being wasted on things that don’t matter? Definitely to some degree. Reducing consumption should help this. Is it that I am not as efficient as I could be at condensing ideas? Definitely to some degree. I know someone has solved this problem already, but I can’t find them.
I just googled “James Clear How To Write” and found some strands worth pulling.
Maybe my issue really is that I just want to avoid the work. Maybe my issue really is that I haven’t put in the work. Maybe I just need to get more serious. Maybe I’ve actually been half assing it this whole time. Who would be able to say? Measured by what standard? Does it matter? The labor theory of value is nonsense. It’s cute and maybe it says something about morality, but it doesn’t say anything about how cold hard reality actually works.
If you haven’t succeeded yet, you’re not trying hard enough. If it’s not working, it’s because you’re a dumbass with a dumb ass strategy. It really is as simply as that. Who cares if other people succeeded with less work or worse strategies? That doesn’t help you. If anything, it harms you. Because it makes you feel like there is something wrong with you—or something evil and unfair about reality—when the truth is that there is just a lot of RNG to complex systems. You can sit around and whine about how it’s unfair, or you can just shut the fuck up and get to work. Everyone knows—or at least should know—that results you don’t feel like you’ve earned, don’t actually feel rewarding. This is why political solutions will never work. Because even if they can actually get implemented (they can’t), everyone will just feel ashamed and disappointed afterwards and try to destroy everything just to have something interesting to do.
“Why should I care how much another man makes? I can’t spend his money”
The only way to achieve true satisfaction, for even a little bit, is to work hard and get the result yourself. And the harder and longer you worked, the more satisfying it is.
So, wat do? Well one, stop feeling like this is some kind of burden. What the hell else are you going to do? What would you be doing if you weren’t doing this? Nothing. There is nothing else to do. Sorry you’re like sensitive and emotional or whatever and want to complain about your job more than most people. Sorry you have an important job.
Sorry for making you important! Fuck me, right? - God
I get it. You’re a dumb monkey. You want all the results with none of the work. Tough luck. Unless you’re going to go be a drug addict then you can’t follow your monkey desires. You have to be a civilized human. And you have to be more civilized that most people if you’re going to help move the median civilized-ness upward.
You had your break. You had over a year. We tried it your way. We tried to see if you could make something great just by like having fun. You didn’t have much fun and you didn’t do something great. Sorry. It’s time to get back to work. Work for nine years. You can try again when you’re forty. Maybe then you can get “real” wins in a way that isn’t a huge pain in the ass. Unless then, if you want real wins, you have to do the hard shit. Sometimes there’s just no way around it. No amount of strategizing, no amount of optimizing. You know what you have to do and you just need to do it. As the sooner you stop fighting, the sooner you might actually start having some fun with it.