Making Maps and Making Friends
Some thoughts about my purpose. And also friendship and grifters
Originally published on 9/5/21. Reposting. Please excuse any formatting errors.
I just finished reading Yarvin’s little digression quartet on circling and, for not-worth-figuring-out reasons, it got me thinking about my purpose.
And I realized that my purpose is to make maps. Obviously, not literal geographical maps. Philosophical, psychological, and phenomenological maps.
The interesting bit though is that I have little use for the maps myself. The degree to which I use the maps only serves one purpose: to become more effective at making higher quality maps. This confuses a lot of people, and is part of the reason few (thus far) use my maps (and why no one at all wanted to use them ten years ago).
To get more concrete: with everything I do, I have this innate and uncontrollable impulse to learn everything about it. I am more or less incapable of half assing anything. If I am going to enter a domain, I am going to master the knowledge about that domain. I may not necessarily implement it (or at least not all of it), but I will know what to implement for any given desired outcome. Fitness, diet, women, business, crypto, mental illness/psychology, etc I know infinitely more about these things than I actually use, because my job is not to become an expert backpacker but an expert map maker—I do not have to spend all my days going up and down every trail, mastering the in’s and out, I just need to be observant as absolute fuck the one time I do it. And then go find a new trail and do it again (and then get to drawing).
Most wish to learn through experience. Most trust “experience” over “theory”. And this is reasonable and good. But personally I hate the unknown and I hate figuring out things that have already been figured out (except when it comes to philosophy but thats more because I don’t trust any philosopher), so rather than spend a decade running a business and constantly reinventing the wheel, I just read a dozen books from everyone who’s already done it. Literally every business problem you could ever have has already been solved a thousands times over and is a maximum of an hour away if you know where to look (rather than years away through figuring it out yourself).
Millions of men have spent decades succeeding at the game of business. Thousands of them wrote books on their experience. Hundreds of them devised solutions broadly applicable enough for other people to give a shit. And the dozen of them sitting at the top of your Amazon search are the absolute most universally applicable ones. And I’ve read all of them. And I’ve done this, or something equivalent, with pretty much anything I know anything about.
Some may find this off-putting—they think my knowledge is too “theoretical” not experiential enough. The fact that I know more about how to train than dudes twice my size or more about business than dudes twice my net worth or more about health than dudes twice as healthy as me makes me “not credible”. Maybe. But I don’t really care. I care about whether I am correct. My job is to make accurate maps not to become some kind of master of the trails (who then grifts you in to believing you too can master the trails).
Tangent: You’ll never master a trail you aren’t obsessed with going up and down every day. Grifters selling you courses are mostly using hypnosis, persuasion, and NLP to hook into your limbic programming so they can get you to join their cool little cult and pay them money (Circling is a great example).
If you need to pay someone else to teach it to you, you’ll never become a master at it. Mastery only comes from true passion for a subject.
However, just because you’ll never become them by learning from them doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay them to teach you shit. In fact you’d probably be best served by paying grifter assholes to teach you shit more often.
Yes, you’re smarter than them. Yes, you could teach yourself. But the correction question is not “can I teach myself”, it’s:
“Is ‘downloading’ knowledge from a professional in three months that would take me three years to teach myself (and probably five because of how much I’ll procrastinate it) worth a few hundred or thousand dollars?”
The answer to this question is almost always yes, and your disgust at the thought is based much more on your own ego bullshit than some rational calculation of the best use your of time and energy to meet your goals.
The less time you waste trying to figure out for yourself the shit you have to get good at, the more time you can dedicate to the shit you actually want to get good at, and every hour you can add to the that time will pay itself back—financially and otherwise—ten fold.
My correctness will be determined not by people looking to me for results but by enough early adopter weirdo’s willing to say “what the hell why not?”, giving it a try, finding that it works, and then them getting results. Don’t get me wrong, I do have great results. But, as I go into more here, that’s largely because I forced myself to go get them so people would care about my maps. Yes, I literally got rich, happy, healthy, and functional not because I actually wanted those things but because no one trusted my maps until I went out and used them to prove they work.
So what, why am I writing about this anyway? I guess to some degree, I have always felt somewhat ashamed that I’m not a master of a trail; that I’m not some Alex Honnold who has mastered a map so well that he can free solo it.
But I’ve realized recently that I don’t mind being a map maker. Making maps is fulfilling. And I am very good at it. I don’t really care that I don’t get to be famous or rich or admired. My desire for these was just me trying to find some external replacement for self worth because I didn’t admire and respect myself because I wasn’t doing what I was designed to do (make maps) because everyone else found the idea of map making appalling and I just didn’t want to be rejected by all of them. My desire to be a masterful map user was not my own but everyone else’s seeping into me through some kind of creepy social osmosis. Being surrounded by those for whom the craft of map making is so alien and foreign (99.99% of people) that even the allusion to it as a “job” (generally by me questioning every deeply held belief I’ve ever encountered) elicited blank stares at best and combative rage at worst, which was setting off these alarm bells in my mind that I am somehow bad and evil (or at least a useless loser) for feeling driven to do it.
Interestingly, of all possible jobs, map making was the only one that felt “off limits" for me. I’ve tried a dozen different weird jobs. Being an entrepreneur, for example, is pretty weird, and the normies would probably still not get it, but I have often wished my purpose was to do something like that instead. Maybe it’s because it at least touches a realm they can interface with? Or maybe it’s because it’s “out there” and doesn’t start mucking about with their internal world? or maybe it’s because there are at least groups of entrepreneurs who “get” each other?
Groups of philosophers are rare (nonexistent?). Even in the overconnected world of the internet, we are so sparse that if you find one who is on your level (either up or down; big timers who are ten years ahead of me will never be my “friends”, and I will never be “friends” with kids who are ten years behind me) enough to have some kind of mutual “getting”, you are lucky.
And even then, not really. We’re all so autistic, our behavior and preferences so idiosyncratic from even one another, that it is extremely rare we even feel much motivation to attempt “friendship” with those somewhat adjacent.
Perhaps I am odd in this regard but at least part of me has always wanted this type of connection. Maybe even most of me. But it’s more that I just know it wouldn’t work. I would just hate you and you would just hate me. Too much cook, too little kitchen.
I have a friend—though not a writer/philosopher per se (thank god, he’d be even more insufferable) but definitely autistic turbo intellectual—with whom it has taken years of just arguing about dumb bullshit and deep mutual humility and introspection for hours into the night that we have even managed to understand each other’s eccentricities enough to have a half functional relationship.
If it were not for the fact that a special interest for both of us is cryptocurrency (or more precisely, it’s pre-req’s of technology, business, economics, cryptography, privacy, finance, etc that independently led us both to it), there is no way we’d have any relationship at all (and in fact, until he started asking me about it, I found him insufferable, and he thought nothing of me).
Tangent: I guess a little pro tip here is that if you’re fucking retarded and 95 openness, the only way you’ll ever have real friends is through shared interests that make you so dependent on each other to achieve your own intellectual goals that you just have no choice but to learn how to communicate, negotiate, connect, and bond.
Also it has to be IRL. Which is far harder but E-relationships are dumb surrogate bullshit and mostly a waste of time. They will never be real and you should stop trying to make them so. You should keep them around and commingle enough to build a network for sharing ideas and growing your grift of course, but just know that without physical proximity it’s just not possible to overcome how retarded both of you are to actually create a real friendship that is deep, lasting, and worth the effort that goes into it.
To bring this back to the point:
I’ve been in a weird lull for a few months, trying to figure out what my new, slightly-less-imprecise directive is (this is not abnormal, I reorient and refine multiple times a year).
I used to be really into self improvement and doing hard shit. But it was never who I was. I never really fit in with the self improvement kids because self improvement was just a temporary means to an end not an end in itself (you can’t be a map maker if you aren’t reasonably fit and reasonably skilled at navigating unmapped and treacherous terrain). Eventually it became clear that just doing hard things I don’t want to do for the sake doing hard things I don’t want to do, David Goggins style, is not what I am for.
I do not exist to test my limits. Most times I have pushed myself past my limits (which is more times than I can even imagine trying to count), while they did lead to necessary growth that got me to here, still haunt me with embarrassment, guilt, or shame for how much of a fool I made of myself. For me, “doing hard shit” will occasionally be necessary to fulfill my purpose, but in and of itself is just a saccharine replacement for purpose (and honestly, I’m pretty sure this is true for most “self improvers”). It’s better than nothing but it’s still fake (and gay). It is “better” in the same way that fucking real women is better than watching porn; or that Stevia is better than Sweet-n-Low. Fucking random bar thots is nothing compared to real love with all it’s connection and trust and growth and family; and drinking Stevia sweetened tea is nothing compared to real fruit full of antioxidants and fiber and vitamins and minerals.
Sex is a transport protocol. a KPI. The reason you like fucking women is not because fucking women is in and of itself good for you, it’s because fucking women is (supposed to be) a lagging indicator that you are a valuable and powerful member of the tribe, and leading indicator that you will have family and children and love and connection.
Sugar is the same. The reason you like sugar is not because sugar is good for you, it’s because fructose is a marker for edible, nutritious food full of fiber, vitamins, and other important health creating shit.
But, as happens with all living things, when nature optimizes a means to meet an end eventually selection will find a way to man-in-the-middle that means, and divert it toward some alternative (and likely degenerative) end. The modern world is mostly just humans optimizes toward KPIs that, like your sales goals at work, lead more to bullshit pseudo-goal attainment rather than the actual goals they were designed to meet.
So what is my actual purpose? Or at least, what is the new, now-a-few-degrees-narrower-of-trajectory north star I am using to guide my action? To make maps. Or more precisely, to print the maps (doesn’t matter how great my ideas are if I never publish them).
I have spent years walking the trails and learning the routes, but this, contrary my intuition and most other people’s jobs, is all extraneous and useless. I don’t need to read another book. I don’t need to implement more shit. I don’t need to “achieve more results” or “build more credibility”. This is all procrastinating. Acknowledging this doesn’t mean I won’t continue to do that bullshit often—making maps is hard and procrastinating is easy—but you must first know your destination before you have any chance of arriving there.
Walking in the right direction—even if it’s slowly, with lots of distraction and sitting along the way—is infinitely more productive than sprinting in the wrong one.
More maps coming soon frens. Good dae.