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Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
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3:00 am
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I had a very cool epiphany at the gym yesterday: the law of attraction doesn't exist. (well, ok, I guess that's a bit obvious, but...)
As silly as it is, the law of attraction was pretty much my religion for a year or two. I was in a depressed funk, watched The Secret, felt inspired, and pretty much just followed it blindly, and it helped me get to a much better place. It didn't seem to matter that it was nonsense (in fact, I knew that intellectually from the start), I was just very comfortable believing in it.
Later on, I started having some difficulty with it and mysticism. What used to be highly functional aids to my psychological well-being started to seem pointless. Now, I needed a justification for how they worked if I was going to get any use with them. My faith had been shaken. I kept trying to find the same happy, inspired state of mind that worked years ago, couldn't, and found myself getting increasingly depressed.
Then, I simply had the realization that I'm not supposed to believe in the law of attraction anymore. The law of attraction is meant as an aid for beings of a lower order (who cannot yet grasp that the appearance of the law of attraction is just an illusion created by the fact that positive thoughts influence a positive mood which affects more efficient decision making which produces better results which gives more impetus for positive thoughts, etc., and vice versa) to meaningfully comprehend one aspect of reality. Once the phenomenon can be fully understood in the resolution I've described, it is actually counter-productive to even bother with the law of attraction because it is more natural for the mind to start pursuing the creation of a very pragmatic psychological/economic/spiritual infrastructure.
All enlightenment is is a stripping away of one familiar level of understanding and replacing it with one of higher resolution. And it seems like because the world has a nearly infinite resolution, this can go on forever.
Which makes me wonder what my newly found ability to relate to people will one day be replaced by. It's something I can't know now (and frankly don't want to), but it seems like understanding this will make the transition much less stubborn than the previous one.
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| Thursday, November 12th, 2009
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3:03 pm
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2:57 pm
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SPIRITUALITY SERVES AS SELF-EVIDENCE THAT VALUE IS NOMINAL AND NOT RELATIVE!!!!!!
AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS IS FOUNDED ON A FAULTY PREMISE!!!!!!
The methodology remains intact, but if a different fundamental premise is inserted, the output is.....oh my god.....
Wow
WOW
Fuck me, I have to completely re-think everything....but holy shit is this going to be enlightening!!!!!!!!
Oh how I wish I had my material shit together, I want to explore this so fucking badly!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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11:09 am
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You HAVE to focus on yourself before you can help others.
That's all there is to it. I have been fighting this reality for so long, and I'm sick of it. Guilt has helped me recondition my world paradigm to something that is less destructive, but it has also rendered me a miserable, worried, useless little pussy in the process. Fuck it, I'm over it.
It's time to kick ass again.
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| Monday, November 2nd, 2009
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11:53 pm
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I took an OkCupid variation of the Meyers-Briggs personality test recently (not the most reliable source on anything, obviously, but it's fairly accurate). In the past I have usually scored INTJ, with particular pronouncement on N and T. The most recent result was ENTJ. N and T are a little less pronounced than they usually are, but E was through the roof!
I used to be the most introverted person you could imagine. I can count the number of times I went out and visited someone from my high school on one hand. I always saw myself settling down on some big, private piece of property and being a hermetic writer. Today I can't imagine a greater hell. I find people interesting. They are stimulating, relaxing, empowering, and comforting all at once. I am happy to have amazing human relationships and to feel like a part of something greater than myself.
I am grateful for all of this.
And I think that Sartre was a fucking retard.
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7:23 pm
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Yesterday was an amazing day; I managed, without drugs or being in a large audience, to finally re-experience the love of firespinning that has been lacking in me for the past year.
We were at Forest's house in Asheville (Forest is a member of Unifire, a professional troupe in North Carolina). The fire scene was quintessentially southern; messy, debris-ridden backyard, whiskey and locally produced organic cooking, lax safety, and a "hey y'all, look at this!" attitude.
Forest's style is very similar to mine: big, flashy, sensual, loose on techique. We play off each other very well. We had a lot of fun while there was a crowd, but then later I went off, put on some of my music on my headphones, and just spun for me.
It's something I haven't done in a while. I've always been "practicing," trying new tricks, perfecting old ones, trying to keep up with Lucas, Baz, and the other top spinners. I did it so much that it made me almost averse to spinning. I forgot the spiritual aspect of it: having fun. Well I remembered what it was like again, and my old spinning style finally came through. It felt great.
It's amazing how easy and subtle it is for anything fun to morph into a miserable discipline. It can happen with firespinning, sex, partying, and games. Discipline is important, but without taking the time to remember why you got into it into the first place, you just can't continue.
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| Saturday, October 24th, 2009
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12:00 am
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They say it's much harder to make friends when you leave school.
This, I declare, is crap.
School (particularly college) is very accepting. The culture is equally permissive of overachievement and underachievement. Everyone lives in approximately the same kind of domicile. The kinds of jobs that are available to everyone are roughly the same. Personal wealth is basically irrelevent, because everyone basically uses the same public student resources. We are insulated from our jealousy, and never have to confront it.
We know such a lifestyle is unsustainable, but we are all naively confident about what the real world has in store for us.
So when we get out in the real world, find it to be much harder, and find that the jobs, home types and lifestyles vary wildly, and see some of our old friends doing much better than us...well...we don't know how to handle it.
But that still doesn't change the basic laws of human connection. We believe that people won't accept us unless we are successful. And in certain cultures, that is true. But for the most part, adults are just big children, looking for connection, emotional freedom, and fun. We don't care about how successful anyone else is. All you have to do is admit to yourself that no one cares about your success, put aside your ego, open up, and you find it's just as easy as it ever was.
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| Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
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3:10 am
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So recently ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) domspe (who, it should be mentioned, is a goddess), helped set me up with a writing job. I will be writing some simple content for websites about a bunch of different subjects. The articles will be short, the workload will be small, and the pay will not be that much, but I will be able to intellectually masturbate and work from home, so these happen to be factors that work brilliantly with my situation and choice of lifestyle. I am incredibly happy about this!
If this pans out, I will finally be able to pay all of my bills doing next to nothing, with no job interfering with my desire for self-expression, with a complete lack of soul-crushing idiocy, and with the fascism of the alarm clock finally removed from my life, perhaps forever. If I build upon it and organize my tenant situations correctly, I'll be able to take off on road trips fueled by laptop writings and fire performances for extended periods of time, whenever I want. I'll finally be able to give a proper "fuck you" to the real world with a melange of hair dye, tattoos and piercings that are sustainable with a mature, responsible, sustainable lifestyle.
I've never been so excited about the future in all my life. It is surreal to think that the distant dreams I've had for so long are soon, very very soon, going to become today. :)
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| Sunday, September 27th, 2009
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10:55 pm - On Death Panels
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A few years ago, my grandfather on my mother's side was diagnosed with stomach cancer. He was 78, well retired, a devout Catholic, and a bit overweight. The cancer treatment was very harsh; for four months, my grandfather endured an ugly series of chemotherapy, drugs, illness and pain. The cancer was eventually removed, and after a few more months of rehabilitation, he was finally able to come home in a wheelchair.
There was a family gathering that Saturday afternoon. His wife, his brother, his four grown children and their families got together on the outside patio to to see him back at home. It was an unpleasant sight. His formerly handsome head of silver hair was now completely bald. He breathed through a tube connected to a machine. He had lost an awful lot of weight, which made his formerly plump skin seem baggy and old. He had especially lost weight in his legs, which now looked like tiny spindles. He could not walk, he had to be moved about in the wheelchair by family members. He did not have a happy look on his face. He looked exhausted and seemingly pessimistic. To any objective observer, and to myself, it was obvious: this man had months, not years, to live. At best.
However, the reaction from us suggested the contrary. We spoke optimistically of how he was going to get better, how he would walk on his own again, how he would not need the respirator, and how everything was going to be fine.
Bullshit. He's going to fucking die.
It never bothered me at the time because surrounding the ill with hope, comfort and reassurance is typically how we react to sickness. And for the most part, that is a very appropriate reaction; in many circumstances it helps ensure the best possible quality of life for the sick. But we have no idea how to deal with death, even when it is inevitably in front of us. Surely a more appropriate way to approach the situation would have been to spend the time helping my grandfather reflect on his life and look back fondly rather than bullshit ourselves about what meager mortal existence he has ahead of him. (And considering that my every member of my family is Christian and believes, at least in theory, that eternal salvation awaits him upon his demise, this is doubly confusing to me) Death is inevitable, we should have in our culture an appropriate way to deal with it.
This raises a more difficult question: do we provide seniors in our society with an excessive degree of medical care? What is the point of dragging an elderly person through weeks or months of physical agony, at great monetary expense to society, only to prolong his death with a few more months of miserable torment? Surely the situation would be better handled with a responsible acknowledgment of the incredibly high likelihood of death and a healthily reflective cultural response, and allowing the resources to go to people who still have a real life ahead of them.
From an economic standpoint, the logic seems very sound. If the marginal utility per dollar spent on life-sustaining treatment decreases exponentially with age after a certain point, and if the trend in life-supporting technology is to continue finding new ways to employ these costly measures in more critical circumstances, then it stands to reason that a large elderly population, a system that enables health care to be spent without regard for cost, and a fragile economy could be ingredients for an economic disaster where young workers are taxed into insanity so that the old people they don't have time to visit remain zombified in a home somewhere.
There HAS to be a check against this situation. If our health care model is a fully privatized one, this is straightforward: the elderly continue to live as long as either they, their family, or their insurance company are willing and able to pay for treatment, but if the model is social it becomes more challenging. In the event of resource scarcity, how are medical services distributed? First come first serve? Do certain people get priority over others? How do we decide who?
This is why I think that, under dire circumstances, death panels could actually be necessary to a social health model. Surely no one would agree that it should be left to chance that a certain person be allowed to live or die in tight economic situations, and I think the easiest way to do this is come up with a reasonable paradigm of priority. I feel it is inarguable from a social standpoint that the young be given priority over the old (all other variables being equal) and that the very old be denied costly treatments in these circumstances so that more valuable members of society be allowed to receive them.
So bring on the death panels. Our pussified society is so scared of death that we can't even look it in the face. It's time to be reminded of our mortality and learn how to deal with it. If we can't do that, how can we expect to actually live?
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| Monday, September 21st, 2009
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12:12 am
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| Tuesday, September 15th, 2009
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11:56 pm
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9:34 pm
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8:17 pm
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6:56 pm
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5:14 pm
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| Friday, September 11th, 2009
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10:42 am - Burning Man 2009
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Here's what I've got thus far. Haven't gotten to the interesting parts yet, but I figured I'd post something....
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| Monday, September 7th, 2009
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9:43 pm
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| Friday, August 28th, 2009
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8:32 pm
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Signed a contract to buy the lot next to me, which will take my property up to 2/3 of an acre. Aquatic swimming facility is being built catecorner to my house, will be done next year. Neighborhood is rapidly regentrifying. Roommate left unexpectedly, forfeiting his security deposit, got an electric engineering student in two days. Insurance prices are coming down for me. Will buy a rental property next year and free myself of economic exploitation. Making connections for fire gigs. The Bassment is almost dug out. I have an acronym for a name. Studying history and economics and enjoying it. Have a hot chick who is super intelligent, gives me affection and freedom when needed, and knows how to make costumes. I have a matrix-style trenchcoat made of blue fur. And I'm going to fucking Burning Man in less than two days.
God my life is fucking awesome. Overwhelming at times, but yeah, awesome :)
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| Thursday, August 27th, 2009
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1:24 am
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I am caught in a philosophical dilemma.
I do not know what approach to take with people. I can be both a dualist and a communist, I see pros and cons to both, but I don't know where and when to apply them. For example, I cannot be purely selfish/dualistic and view other people simply as means to my own ends. While it will get me further ahead materially, it will destroy my relationships (as it has done in the past) and leave me isolated. But at the same time, being a truly communal person puts me in a vulnerable position, as it invites me to be taken advantage of and, on a very Ayn Randian note, does not encourage others to be productive or responsible. It also leaves me lethargic and lacking the motivation to create beauty in my life.
I know that the answer lies somewhere in between; one approach is good for these circumstances or these people, and the other approach is good for the these and these. I have no idea where though.
This would be so much easier if other people were smarter and didn't make it easy for me to fuck them out of their money.
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| Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
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3:11 pm
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An End To Movements by Douglas Rushkoff
The national healthcare movement was doomed from the start. TV clips of shouting matches at town halls and fear-mongering by cynical politicians may be lamentable, but we are witnessing something more profound than the collapse of civic discourse. The failure of a movement that could rightly claim over 70 percent public acceptance just a month ago, exposes the inherent failure of movements of any kind to effectively address our society’s ills.
That’s right. Mass organization may just have been a twentieth century thing: collective actions of all sorts—good and bad—were responses to the corporatization of government and industy. As such, they took the form of the entities with whom they sought to do battle. But—like the top-heavy, highly abstracted creatures they were created to counter —they are proving utterly incapable of providing an alternative to what they would replace.
They did work for a time. When a corporation had the power to hire a police force to crush labor unrest, labor created its own collective, virtual structure to fight back: the union. When disenfranchised blacks faced Jim Crow laws, the Civil Rights movement gave them a tent under which to organize, a charismatic leadership to follow, and a clearly articulated cause to promote. It was branded. Marches could be scheduled, buttons could be worn. And it worked.
Between the 1960s and today, however, the mediaspace through which these causes disseminated ideas and gained momentum has changed. The best techniques for galvanizing a movement have long been co-opted and surpassed by public relations and advertising firms. Whether a movement is real or Astroturf has become almost impossible for even discerning viewers to figure out. The question often becomes the new content of the Sunday morning news panel, taking the place of whatever real issue might have been addressed.
But the problem is not simply that we’ve lost the ability to distinguish between real movements and cynically concocted fake ones. It’s that they are functionally indistinguishable. They may as well be the same thing.
In our current position, when disconnection from the real world is itself a cause for concern, movements only serve to disconnect us further from the actionable. They give us content for websites, language for our bumper stickers, and faces to put on our ideals. But they distract us from the matter at hand, and worse, turn our attention upward toward brand mythologies instead of immediately before us to the people and problems that need our time and energy. In the place of real connections to other people, we get the highly charged but ultimately fake connection to an image.
This is why progressives are so disillusioned by President Obama. He was never anything other than a centrist Democrat. But “brand Obama” gave his supporters—a movement in the fullest sense of the word—an abstracted ideal on which to focus. At least until his election. Meanwhile, the real requirements of progressive activists to contribute to their neighborhoods, promote local business and agriculture, invigorate failing public schools, were again left to someone else. This is not the failure of a president, but the flawed functionality of movements themselves.
For while civil rights, suffrage, and many other causes were largely won through traditionally organized, long-fought, top-down movements, the scale on which these great battles were waged is one no longer appropriate to the tasks at hand. In fact, it is the scale itself on which we have been attempting to orchestrate human affairs that is suspect.
Activists would do more to fight Big Agra simply by subscribing to their local Community Supported Agriculture groups. We’d more effectively pull the rug out from under a corrupt financial sector by simply investing in one another’s businesses—our own town restaurants and drug stores—instead of outsourcing our retirement savings to Wall Street. We could more easily re-invent public schools by volunteering our time to them directly, instead of sending our kids to private schools while we sign petitions for government to re-prioritize. And even in health care, we’d end up cutting everyone’s costs by commuting less, smoking less, landscaping less, and, yes, hating less. For each of these actions triggers different responses, undermines industries, requires new legal structures, and so on. It’s tiny, but it’s almost fractal in its impact.
For as the alternative is now teaching us, one size does not fit all. Americans, in particular, have been living under the premise that there’s something to buy, vote for, or believe in that will simply change everything. And it’s certainly still possible that government could develop the single payer system that pretty much everybody knows deep down would bring the best of industrial health care to the most people.
But just as we are learning that industrially produced food is not ultimately nutritious, a top-down, passionately executed, and highly branded movement is not ultimately effective.
In fact, by creating and branding a movement, even the most well-meaning activitsts are disconnecting from terra firma, and instead entering the world of marketing, public opinion, and language selection. Potential participants, meanwhile, are distracted from whatever on-the-ground, constructive and purposeful activity they might do. They get to join an abstracted movement, and participate by belonging instead of doing, or blogging instead of acting.
What an excellent article!
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