Blank page so blank. Where do ideas go? Where do they come from? How can I be brimming w/ them in one moment, and then empty in the next? What do you do when you have nothing to do? Being alone with options is quite different than the state w/o options. People are always an option. Sitting with someone is something in a way that sitting alone never can be.

There’s so much time. So much. Hilariously much. How do we ever think there isn’t enough? We schedule our lives so we don’t have to confront that truth. Be alone w/ no options and you are forced to confront it.

Whenever you feel like you have no options, there’s always a lower level to reach, but the level where you are cold, without electricity, and without the ability to anywhere to change those facts is a rather low level indeed.

Suffering is infinitely more bearable when you know the expiration date. 

(more…)

i thought i could endlessly amuse myself in isolation. i thought that the gospel of self-improvement was enough. i thought if humanity needed a single brave soul to check out, say, jupiter’s moons, i could be such a soul.

i was wrong.

for here i am on an innocent saturday cracking. this is it? this is all existence offers? really?

guitar: too hard
food: too repetitive
reading: am i even paying attention?
fitness: for what?
writing: i have no ideas
exploring: it’s 28 degrees
driving: ice owns all
friends: i have none who aren’t (a) petrified of covid or (b) officially in a life stage where the tv and its attached streaming services are more enjoyable than hanging with a cracked-out crazy person like me

i can’t even go to my usual oasis of coffee ’cause just like the type of person who would hubristically think he could solo through the universe, i decided to give it up and expunge the last bit of fun from daily life.

i want to do drugs. that would solve this. d::::::r:::::::u::::::g:::::::::s so it’s no longer this day=that day=yesterday=tomorrow.

but wait. xxxxxxxxx. it stares at me on the venom-injection precipice. and not just xxxxxxxxx, but xxxxxxxxx+guest. there is this girl that maybe i like {though maybe it’s just loneliness}, who maybe is interested in me {though who knows because part of her charm is her mystery in such matters}, who maybe would let me touch her {just the clavicle is all i’m asking for}, and then all would be well enough to obviate future “interventions.” hope’s power is destructive in taking us out of this here moment, but sometimes this here moment is maybe worth destroying.

Champ? To some, sure. I hiked 3hrs yesterday to a friend who had power … only to have him lose it hrs later. I did hundreds of pushups, jumping jacks, and laps around the inside of his house. I read for hrs & have written several pages on this trusty legal pad. I even mounted his Peloton and broke a sweat. That all sounds kind of impressive when I write it out, but I assure you it is not. I’m bored in an unprecedented way; time is moving at the speed it moves for a child on Xmas morning as he counts down to 7AM when presents can be unwrapped. The major difference is I have nothing to look forward to. “It’s only XPM?!?!??!” FUCK. I hate the practice of “killing time,” and yet I’m struggling to break its mind grip. There’s something important to be learned in these tragic mental depths…

Hahah. What’s come in handy is my propensity to make up stupid little games for my own amusement. Still, I’m bored in what feels like an unprecedented way. It makes me wonder if I’ve overrated my ability to thrive “alone.” This is not to say my preference ever has been infinite bachelorhood, just that I feel I’d never need to desperately settle for a woman since the alternative (i.e., being alone) is more than fine. Though, hopefully, life alone/coupled will not ever again be lived in a 40-degree apartment w/o electricity or food, and so any conclusions drawn from such an experience are probably none too relevant for 21st-century living. TBD.

It will not “solve” it, but it will reduce the suffering. For the energized self is often the best self, the one most likely to charge into laughter instead of anger, creativity instead of frustration, and compassion instead of egocentricity. It’s these probabilities, far more than any long-term health benefits, that should motivate us to *actually* prioritize sleep instead of merely rehearsing incantations about blue light, caffeine, and bedtime consistency without ever enacting the required dramatic behavior changes. 

“Does this mean I can’t …?” YES, that’s exactly what “dramatic” means. You thought you could transform into your best self without some serious sacrifices?

“Well, how about I just drink some Red Bull and obviate these unpleasant sounding ‘dramatic’ changes?” Because you might end up powerless in the blistering cold with no plausible access to Red Bull. Having trained your body to rely so heavily on a foreign substance that now may as well be discontinued forever, your FML quotient will be 4x your peers’. Which maybe you think doesn’t matter much, “I mean, it’s only, like, four days,” but once in it, that time will be indistinguishable from eternity. 

tl;dr No, Red Bull will not solve this problem.

I want a vice, because I want something to look forward to. I know, I know: be in the moment and all that jazz. The moment can be just so damn boring. This observation may well be the inevitable byproduct of testing isolation’s limits. Answer: there is a limit, and I’ve found it.

Nope, I can’t be the man who runs a one-man mission to Mars or elsewhere one-man missions are required. I simply don’t have the right stuff. I now know this. But I also now question if that is really the right stuff. Congratulations that you’ve managed to survive all alone, thrive even, but can you ever thrive as grandly alone as in the company of others? I’m tending to think “no.”

Our Teetotaling Elites | The American Conservative

That may come as a nasty shock to Christ Himself, who was known to serve wine at supper, and enjoyed the odd tipple with prostitutes and tax men.

Everything Is Broken

Anyone actually concerned with solving deep-rooted social and economic problems, or God forbid with creating something unique or beautiful—a process that is inevitably messy and often involves exploring heresies and making mistakes—will hit a wall. If they are young and remotely ambitious they will simply snuff out that part of themselves early on, strangling the voice that they know will get them in trouble before they’ve ever had the chance to really hear it sing.

Everything Is Broken

“You might not even realize you’re not where you started.” The machines trained us to accept, even chase, this high. Once we accepted it, we turned from willful individuals into parts of a mass that could move, or be moved, anywhere. Once people accepted the idea of an app, you could get them to pay for dozens of them—if not more. You could get people to send thousands of dollars to strangers in other countries to stay in homes they’d never seen in cities they’d never visited. You could train them to order in food—most of their food, even all of their food—from restaurants that they’d never been to, based on recommendations from people they’d never met. You could get them to understand their social world not as consisting of people whose families and faces one knew, which was literally the definition of social life for hundreds of thousands of years, but rather as composed of people who belonged to categories—“also followed by,” “friends in common,” “BIPOC”—that didn’t even exist 15 years ago. You could create a culture in which it was normal to have sex with someone whose two-dimensional picture you saw on a phone, once.

Everything Is Broken

The homogeneity of these spaces means that traveling between them is frictionless, a value that Silicon Valley prizes and cultural influencers take advantage of. Changing places can be as painless as reloading a website. You might not even realize you’re not where you started.

 

(more…)

(Had Vincent succeeded? She felt by any rational measure she was living an extraordinary life, but on the other hand she wasn’t sure what the goal had been. later she stood alone on the terrace, filming the Mediterranean, and thought, Maybe this could be enough. Maybe not everyone needs to have a specific ambition. ic ould be the sort of person who just goes to beautiful places and owns beautiful things. Maybe I could film five-minute videos of every sea and every ocean and perhaps there would be some meaning in that project, some kind of completion.)

It wasn’t the romance of the century, but it didn’t have to be; if you genuinely enjoy someone’s company, she’d been thinking lately, if you enjoy your life with them and don’t mind sleeping with them, isn’t that enough? Do you have to actually be in love for a relationship to be real, whatever real means, so long as there’s respect and something like a friendship?

Anyway, it wasn’t just that. I was having one of those moments, where you look at your life and think, Is this really it? I thought there’d be more.

What kept her in the kingdom was the previously unimaginable condition of not having to think about money, because that’s what money gives you: the freedom to stop thinking about money. If you’ve never been without, then you won’t understand the profundity of this, how absolutely this changes your life.

(more…)

then it seems foolish to suggest that the solution rests in expanding the bad practice and objectifying men. Maybe it can be argued that by subjecting others to suffering, they will be motivated to end the suffering, and thus this bad practice expansion is simply one step back, two steps forward. And I can appreciate that when you yourself have been subjected to a bad practice, you may just want to see the world burn. Still, the loss of moral legitimacy – calling something bad and then proceeding to cheer for more of it – is an untenable price: Americans are a forgiving bunch, but not when it comes to hypocrites.

Just because something is optimal or true or right, doesn’t mean that it always yields unequivocally great outcomes. The non-great outcome doesn’t make that something any less optimal or true or right, but does decrease the likelihood that the experiencer of said outcome will strongly adopt that something.

Take something like telling the truth. Everyone basically agrees truth-telling is a good thing, and yet many people don’t practice it. Why? Explanations abound, of course, and they are usually laced with castigation. These judgements are extra juicy for the truth adherents who casually inflate their egos all while failing to grasp that what may be obvious and easy to them is not for others, EVEN if those others echo the same refrain about truth’s goodness.

Let’s say that a behavior yields four scores (-10 to 10): short-term individual flourishing, long-term individual flourishing, short-term societal benefit, and long-term societal benefit. When we find a behavior that, at minimum, scores positively in the two long-term categories, it gets encoded into society’s standards of things a good person does. Stuff in this standard often appear in religions, philosophies, advice parents give to kids, and phrases uttered mindlessly in 2AM discussions. What this wholesale adoption doesn’t do is erase the importance of personal experience, experiences that may well score negatively in categories that usually, on average and among a very large sample size, score positively.

I shall now default to this divergence when I find someone not doing things a good person does. Like, I can shout from the mountains that telling the truth is the only way to be and I can, in fact, be right, but I must appreciate that part of the reason I’m so convinced of my rightness is that my history is littered with broadly positive scores. What if upon revealing my biggest secret I was kicked out of the house? What if I had to weigh being loved against telling the truth? What if I had experience piled upon experience that scored deeply negative numbers? I certainly wouldn’t be shouting from the mountains.