Freaks, Power, And Why I Am a Shitty Writer
and why I should stay a shitty writer
Originally published on 12/6/21.
Everything about me is antithetical to the acquisition of power. Or at least the acquisition of power via “traditional” means.
I am neurotic. I am disagreeable. I add a cuss word to every sentence. I am honest to a fault. I am a poor communicator. I am not particularly disciplined. I lose interest in things quickly. I hate persuasion games. I am physically incapable of keeping my mouth shut when I should be “towing the line”; the more useful it would be for me to “just shut up and tell them what they want to hear”—and I know exactly what they want to hear—the more visceral and uncontrollable my urge to tell them to fuck off and die.
And yet I am obsessed with power.
To be fair: whether you realize it or not, so are you. And so is everyone else. I’m just explicitly aware of it. At least as of recent years.
Don’t believe me? Tell me: what do you want? Freedom? Freedom is obviously power.
Comfort and safety? comfort and safety are just stored order. And stored order is just stored energy. And stored energy is power.
Status? Status is just stored social influence. And stored social influence is just stored energy. And stored energy is power.
Meaning? Meaning is just stored social impact. And stored social impact is also just stored energy… which is power.
Money? Money is just straight up stored energy. And stored energy is what again? Oh that’s right. Power!
Power is simply the accumulation of and/or ability to effectively wield stored energy. And stored energy accumulates to beings most efficient at extracting (gaining) and storing (preventing loss of) it. With only minor exception (luck), those who are the most efficient at getting more output with less input gain the most power. Worded psychologically, the desire to get “something for nothing” or “more for less”.
Every human being—and, for that matter, every living being— every second of every day is optimizing toward more output for less input. More income for less work. More goods for less cost. More freedom for less obligation. More status for less dick sucking. More leisure for less hard work. More safety for less worrying. More meaning for less suffering. Power—the efficient use of energy—is the only reason humans have anything at all. Power is the only reason life—or even the universe itself—exists at all.
In the realm of what we care about though, humans: there are dozens of individualized strategies for acquiring power. But they cluster into three distinct skill trees: Predators, Prey, and Freaks.
The Three Strategies of Power
Group one – “predators” – The dark triad. “anti social”. Manipulate, lie, steal, kill, or otherwise exploit to acquire power. “Pure” predators never generate any new power, rather pillage existing power. Predator however is a high risk high reward strategy and is extremely rare in its purest form, and thus is usually complemented by being partially prey or freak. But the greatest power acquisition goes to those who can harness “the dark side” and leverage its “evil” without getting zeroed out. And what better way to optimize getting more for less—rather than build the new or contribute to the existing—but to extract it from already existing stores? This can be seen in the tiny minority of mostly-predators who end up in charge of everything, while the vast majority of them end up dead or in jail.
Group two – “prey” – The most common strategy. “pro social”. the herd strategy. Follow the rules, only low risk manipulation (white lies, placating, self-erasure for group acceptance, etc), “fit in”, etc. This strategy relies primarily on economies of scale to increase its power and then distribute the means “fairly” across the group. The vast majority of people get most of their power from this strategy—themselves an organ in a meta organism, a worker bee in an a meta organization, rather than a complete individual. Prey are generally agreeable, extroverted, and cautious; really into “movements” and “solidarity” and other group cohesion strategies, and terrified of “independent thought” (and would fail at it if they tried). Like Zebra’s, their survival strategy relies on camoflauging into the mass of the herd so the predators—human or existential–can’t isolate and devour them.
Group three – “freaks” – entrepreneurs, musicians, artists, poets, novelists, philosophers, etc. This group ranges from mediocre to completely retarded at either exploiting (predator) or maintaining (prey) the hierarchy the other two groups depend on, instead opting to build new hierarchies. They feel about the herd how water feels about oil (though, ironically, in their rejection of the herd generally just create their own competing herds that are equally as blinded by groupthink) and are just off on the edge of knowledge somewhere seeking the novel, to wrestle chaos into order. How deeply and in how many dimensions they “go off to build some new hierarchy” depends. Some only defect in minor ways (eg scientists or inventors who are half prey half freak who invent electricity or some other science thing that quickly gets integrated into existing hierarchies) while others defect in much greater ways (eg Martin Luther or The Enlightenment or the founding fathers, etc).
The Struggle of Freak-hood
For me: pretty much all of my skill points went to the freak tree. I am deep out there in the wilderness. If there are 25 skill points, I have 3 or 4 in “prey” (I am generally aware of what you’re supposed to do to be a “good little Zebra” but I just have contempt for doing it), 1 or 2 in “predator” and then like 20 in “freak”. Maybe the first two are a bit higher now, given that as you get older you earn more skill points, most of which I have put toward these weaknesses. But it took me literally years of studying power, persuasion, and communication to be able to get even median win-win results in the social world. And really all that was just to do damage control on my weaknesses enough to where they would stop getting in the way of my strengths and freak-based mission.
If you aren’t innately talented at being a Machiavellian manipulator (“predator”) nor a group-think, social-rules-obeyer (“prey”), your only option is to go off into the wilderness and discover something new (“freak”).
For some reason, part of me deeply resents my freak-dom. Part of me has always wished I went to Berkley like I was supposed to and sucked the dick of power as some stuck up, upper class, sweater vest wearing, leatherbound book enjoying, fine wine drinking armiger (these people generally have half their skill points in predator and half in prey). Part of me feels like this is who I was supposed to be. But somewhere along the way I was corrupted and infected with some demon that made me into rock and roll and cocaine and cigarettes and skateboards. And that might have been fine except that I never cared about making music or art or partying and don’t fit in with the half freak’s that populate this scene, instead obsessed with engineering, technology, and how things work (a field which is mostly confused by if not downright hostile to “creative” temperaments with our laziness, neuroticism, and contempt for rules and the “tried and true”).
If I had to guess, I’d say the root of my frustration lies in the different reward structure that is allotted to the different strategies, and that I’m “supposed” to be using the other one.
Linear vs Exponential Progression
The first strategies—predator and prey—have a mostly linear reward curve. You can see yourself progressing as you move up through mapped territory. Because—regardless of whether you are exploiting or obeying “the system”—you are climbing an existing power hierarchy that is mostly saturated and thus has a dependable and solid (low volatility, predictable) foundation. It may slowly change minimally over the years, but not by much. Meaning as long as you’re consistently performing your strategy and have enough error correction to not get zeroed out, you’ll generally move consistently upward.
The freak category however, being full of chaos and the unknown, is an extremely disordered and inconsistent strategy. For entrepreneurs, musicians, artists, poets, novelists, philosophers, etc rather than “linear progression” it is: basically no progression despite years of hard work—misery and failure and years of seemingly wasted energy—but then for a small fraction of them somewhere along this road of suffering and loserdom: massive exponential overnight success.
The freak category is mostly designed for and populated by people low in trait orderliness. Well I score 97 on trait orderliness so I find this absolutely infuriating.
I don’t think that I ever really “loved” being in this freak category. Which is why I have always had this kind of idealization toward the douchebag high status armigers with their old oak desks and frat parties. And this is probably the root of most of my suffering. My brain was just built to be a master of linear progression hierarchy climbing. But whether it was the drugs or my crumbling family or my many head injuries or the dozen other pitfalls of my early life: early on in my teens it just became painfully and soul crushingly apparent that the entire hierarchy is a corrupt and disgusting disaster.
And what do you do when the whole ladder has become corrupted?1 Well, you have to go off into the unknown and try and build a new one. And it most likely won’t work. You’ll most likely die. And on the off chance you don’t die—if it does work—it will take a very long time. Maybe years but more likely decades. However, when it does finally gain traction, it will saturate extremely quickly.
Such is the case with everything new. Most inventions are dumb and useless and quickly forgotten. But a few quickly take over the world.
But I don’t want “nothing at all and then all at once”. It just doesn’t work for me. The entire last decade of my life has been me trying to make some kind of linear progression out of this dumb asymptotic curve of freakdom. Which is why I became so exceptional at understanding human motivation and habits (and yet also feel basically zero motivation to teach what I’ve learned despite that it would probably be much more useful than something like Atomic Habits, because I don’t care about it and am pissed I had to even learn it in the first place).
I just wanted a smooth curve. And was annoyed that for all of my twenties I had to work three times harder and be two times smarter than everyone around me just to get the same results as them (median results; which are for poor people and morons). I never made a 200K salary. I never developed some huge following on social media. I never slept with a hundred women. I never built some big important company. I never achieved mastery of climbing the old hierarchy nor correcting or adding some new sub hierarchy. Compared to what I knew and know I am capable of—top 1% results—I am a loser.
Thankfully, as occurs with the lucky few of group three Freaks, after years of studying and thinking and updating and starting several dozen different ventures, one finally got the outlier financial success I was looking for.
But in a lot of ways, it feels anti-climactic. Only fellow Freaks could ever possibly appreciate the years of effort and struggle and iteration and dejection that preceded the “lucky overnight success” I had with crypto. And even in myself, because the effort feels so detached from the result and because the thing that actually succeeded was something I put such relatively minor effort into compared to the dozens of other projects I’ve worked on (a few hundred hours of research and buying and holding accounts for less than 1% of the total effort I put in over the last decade), it doesn’t really feel like a win.
Without that observable linear progression, the human mind—or at least the orderliness-oriented mind—just cannot sufficiently pair the effort to the result, inevitably leading to falling victim to imposter syndrome. Maybe if my “financial success” were the result of building a company—something that I uniquely created (rather than something which someone else uniquely created that I simply understood the utility of before most everyone else) I’d feel more like I’d actually “earned” the result. But as it stands, the effort and the result feel too detached to really care.
I mean sure, it’s nice to “make it”. That I don’t have to wage slave doing shit I don’t like to survive is nice. But the level of narcissism and self-delusion it takes to think your success is a sole result of how great and smart you are, rather than just an example of survivorship bias, is a gift I was (to my frequent dismay) not endowed with.
And I guess even with a company it’s the same thing anyway. Maybe It’d be a little better. But people who create $1B unicorns are not any smarter or harder working than those who create $1M median companies. They were largely just lucky. The thing that they were interested in and obsessed with and directing their intelligence and hard work toward just had way more potential for mass adoption. And everyone ignores all the ones who ended up homeless and dead.
Did I “just get lucky” by buying Bitcoin in 2013 or starting the crypto/ICO research and investment team in 2017? No. I spent hundreds of hours studying economics and what is money and technology and the history of technological revolutions and what market problems are improved by an immutable public ledger, etc. And then I maintained conviction for years while nothing was happening (or, was happening in the bad way via 80% crashes). The amount of effort and study and interdisciplinary knowledge and conviction that made that repeated success possible is not something that happens by accident.
However, what was an accident and mostly luck was that I was interested in those things in the first place. My interdisciplinary, autodidactic first principles thinking style; my understanding of economics, libertarian philosophy, cryptography and distributed computing, computer science, central banking, and all the rest that were necessary to understand what Bitcoin was when I saw it—that was luck. I did not choose my temperament. Nor my IQ. Nor what “vibe” nor topics interested me.
I guess my consolation here is that I was about as involved in my freak “success” as any other freak is in theirs, whatever that ratio may be.
Trajectory Correction
So what is the point of this post? I guess I’ve been taking a break for a few weeks. Stepping back from philosophy (or whatever you want to call what it is that I am doing) to examine my writing, strategy, and purpose. I produce content in sprints. I do really anything in sprints. And the last two or three week sprint I’ve just been playing a lot of Halo Infinite trying to get Onyx (would have it already if my game didn’t keep fucking crashing and deranking me a third of a rank every time) and focusing on lifting. Not reading nor writing nor even thinking about big boy ideas much.
And one thing I’ve realized, or at least been reminded of, is that right now my focus still shouldn’t be on gaining influence or communicating things I already understand but rather on trying to understand new things I have yet to figure out and just bringing you along for the ride of the mental chaos this involves if you’re weird enough to be into that.
And thus that my (and others) desire for me to write highly polished, digestible pieces is still not what I should be doing right now.
Sure, I understand a lot of things most people don’t, and those things could make a difference in people’s lives if I was willing to put in the effort to teach them. I get messages all the time from people basically saying “Your ideas are great and would get lots of influence and impact if you just polished them up and organized them and stopped going on tangents and rambling like a psychopath”.
And of this I am very aware. But I’m not here, at least not right now, to grift or to build a little tribe or to give people micro solutions that make a minor impact. I’m here to fix the whole fucking world or die trying. And frankly, doing the “logical” thing of polishing the things I’ve already figured out so I can get a few thousand followers and earn subscriptions or whatever is just a waste of time. Yes, I will eventually need more money to accomplish my mission, yes helping individuals will eventually be important again, but prioritizing either right now will only compromise my trajectory.
I only have so many years I’ll be alive. And the problem I was seemingly engineered to solve is a really big one that I am unlikely to succeed at it even if I dedicate the rest of my life to it. And so I just can’t be bothered to waste my time on anything that won’t make me more effective at that.
And that’s annoying. Because I’m still human. Of course I want influence and money and linear progression and a bunch of people who think I’m super cool and smart and wanna suck my dick. Who doesn’t? Especially given that I’m smarter and working harder and more cognizant about what I’m doing than most of the people who have more money, impact, power, and happiness than I.
But it’s just immutably the case that the thing I was designed to do is so deep down the hierarchies of hierarchies and that all of this stuff is superficial garbage by comparison.
In the short term it can seem like I’m wasting all my talent and intelligence and persistence by not focusing these things. But that is only the case when seen on the scale of weeks and months. On the scale of years, and definitely on the scale of decades, the picture is much clearer. And as much as part of me would enjoy putting these more superficial things higher on the priority list so I can feel cool and comfy and successful, I have a mission bestowed upon me from God (or maybe Satan, not sure) that I am obligated to focus regardless of whether I or anyone else like or understand it.
So with all that said: If you don’t care about the journey—if you just want the hyper polished conclusions spoon fed right into your dome—hey man that’s fine. I can respect that. In a decade, I will have the most polished and awesome ideas that you’ll just be like wow and everyone who matters will read them and be impressed and think I’m cool. But they’ll also be late as fuck and way behind the curve. And I can tell you from experience: a decade of not knowing this stuff is a long time.
Hey, if it’s any consolation: maybe, the things I’m figuring out through my rambles and introspection aren’t all that important. But given how hyper specialized I am toward this role, I think this is unlikely. I used to say “I’m not smart enough for this job” and that’s still true. But what I lack in intelligence I make up for in obsession and persistence.
An ASIC mines a whole lot more Bitcoin than a general-purpose CPU with twice the speed. And I suspect getting in early will be a good investment. But hey, what the hell do I know about good investments, right?
That’s all for now.
1 I didn’t realize this until recent years but: the ladder’s corruption is not novel. The ladder has always been corrupted. It is inherently corrupt. And the only way to fix this is to get rid of values all together, which would be the end of life itself. The current ladder is actually the least corrupt ladder we’ve ever had. Or at least close to it. The main reason we don’t realize this is because “the golden age past” we have been sold as better and more pure was written by old (corrupted and lying) ladders. The same liars who don’t see a problem with the present. In 100 years, people like us will read back on the perfect fairy tale history books written about the 21st century and fall into the same dilemma we are currently in, pedestalizing and seeking to return to some idealized past that never actually existed.