Latest on twitter:
The secret to being profoundly present is to build an ability to be mindful of your senses. This is most easily developed by giving yourself something of which to be mindful by exploring rich, intense sensation. Yes, this is my argument for reckless indulgence and wanton hedonism. Feel it.
“… Or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it.” - Henry David Thoreau
What if I told you that I regularly say something encouraging to myself in the mirror, fist bump my reflection, then walk away?
Being insecure is a physically emotional thing. You can actually feel it. And the closer you get to the cause of your insecurity, the more visceral it gets. In this sense, I find that resisting the urge to be insecure is exactly the same, physically, as resisting the urge to throw up when you’re drunk. Early efforts end up being failures. Then you come up with techniques. Deep breathing. Eating crackers. Hanging your foot off the bed to stop the room from spinning. Dealing with insecurity is the same way. You need to develop techniques, while accepting that early efforts will be failures. Finally, one day, you can drink without having the urge to throw up at all. Practice makes perfect.
I call it the “Don’t puke! Don’t puke! Don’t puke!” Method of Beating Insecurity. You’re welcome.
The powerful 2% have figured out that you can’t force people into slavery, because they’ll inevitably revolt. No, you make them need it instead. They developed a machine nicknamed “the economy,” and have filled it with employment culture that disempowers us from standing on our own. They have filled it with things we want, none of which are necessities, but they do their best to keep us emotionally addicted to them. Their hypnotic of choice is media. They wield marketing with scalpel-precision. They know the right frequencies of light and sound to make us NEED anything. Everything. And thus, we willfully task ourselves with turning the wheels of the economy. Going into jobs everyday. Keeping the machine running, churning out wealth for the upper class. We productive little things. We, the middle class, are entirely dependent on this machine in every way now. Financially. Socially. Emotionally. And if we’re lucky, we’ll do better, a little bit at a time, earning a little more wealth to dump back into the machine. Meanwhile, that 2% has all the real wealth. All the resources. All the loyalty. And soon, all the weapons. But it’s fine. It’s fine, because we’ll feel safe inside our machine.
I am wholly, lustfully infatuated with the notion of thought. I want to understand myself and for it to be clear to me, if no one else, the content and quality of my beliefs and my values. I want to understand the universe and my place and part in it, even if the answers are “nowhere” and “nothing.” I want to understand the other minds out there and my relationship to them, if I’m to have any at all. I love maps and models, concocting my own, adapting and manipulating yours, discarding them at will, again and again. I ache to look deep into things, pull them apart, and put them back together in creative and interesting configurations. I find it to be enriching, and at times pure entertainment. I want to comprehend everything. That’s my type. There are feelers and there are thinkers, and I am blissfully the latter.
Karma is too passive and lazy. If someone who has wronged you gets their comeuppance through no action of yours, how is that better than if you brought it upon them yourself? It’s not morally better — the outcome’s the same. Call it vengeance if you want, but nothing heals the emotional damage of being wronged like getting justice for yourself. I think that fair vengeance is not only ethical, but shows that you take responsibility for your experience and your emotional health. If someone has crossed me, I wouldn’t be inclined to wait for them to reap what they’ve sown. I should be the reaper.
Insecurity is the root of all evil. ALL evil. All of it. If you think there are any other sources of evil, then you probably need to read this more than I need to write it. Insecurity makes us lash out in fear. Horde necessities. Destroy beauty. Deny what’s necessary. Resist moving forward. Justify being angry assholes. Create lies to deal with it all, like purpose and meaning and magic. We’re afraid of life, so we coat it in beautiful stories of higher power and higher purpose. We’re afraid of living, so we complicate it full of drama and frivolous distractions. We’re afraid of who we are, so we pile on mask after mask until each of us is just a confused horror show of mismatched faces. We’re terrified of every single thing, and imagine that the various ways we grasp for importance and power and definition make us strong. But it makes us ugly. It makes the world ugly. This will be the gayest thing I’ve ever said [no homophobe], but there’s an abundance of beauty in me. And you. The beauty of truth. Of REAL truth. Of genuineness. Of authenticity. It’s hidden behind masks of irreverence and masculine strength, and stifled by the same human fear of failure and humiliation from which we all suffer. But it’s there. Brilliant. And I don’t want you to see it. I want you to feel it. Can you feel me?
If the Universe is in any way intelligent, do you think it cares what tiny organisms on a infinitesimal speck of rock in a nondescript corner of the itself think, or feel, or busy themselves with, or do to each other? Do you think the Universe cares about the sexuality of these ridiculous, little things? Do you think it cares about our liberalism or conservatism? Our guns? Our deaths? Do you think we are the center of this Universe? Do you think we are at all a significant point in its space and its time? Do you think the Universe bothers itself with you at all? How bizarre.
Each of us is so remarkably small. Each of us is so remarkably unspecial. Each of us is so remarkably insignificant. But even the lightest of our egos can’t handle this. We found it unacceptable. We must NOT be small. We MUST be special. We MUST be significant. So we create big myths into which we can insinuate ourselves, and as part of a greater whole become great ourselves. We created the spirit and spirituality, and even as the true nature of the Universe is revealed, we lash out against it. We create lies against it. We need the myths to feel important and meaningful, and the truth only serves to strip us of that.
Our first great revolution was humanity’s revolt against Nature. Against it’s primitive brutality. So we created civilizations. And cultures. And legions of definitions and labels and socially fixed ideas. All of which are utterly and disgustingly arbitrary. We created religions. We created politics. We created moralities. We created an entire social plane of existence on top of Nature, going beyond merely escaping its brutality, but orchestrating boundaries for for every possible thing.
Our second great revolution will rip this shit away, clearing a space for a new humanity. Humanity’s revolt against every thought and every thing that limits us unnaturally. All unnecessary definitions and labels and rules. Perhaps this will require a return to Nature, as primal as it is, to start fresh building a plane atop of Nature that is purely pragmatic rather than recklessly and restrictively romantic. A culture that empowers us, rather than weighing us down with senseless rules and limitations and whimsical mythologies, and shows each of us our boundless human potential.
"Life is a flickering candle we all carry around. A gust of wind. A meaningless accident. A microsecond of carelessness, and it’s out. Forever."
David Wong, John Dies at the End
The notion of “clarity” is deceptive. The details are usually an arbitrary and haphazard mess that could’ve been instrumented and executed any number of ways, and aren’t nearly as important as the big picture. It is less about perspective, or HOW you look at something, and more about scope, or HOW MUCH of something you understand. Changing the angle at which you look is not as important as taking a step back. And another. And another. Thus, “clarity” is about understanding the forest, not the trees.
Men, in general, don’t think being single is bad at all. Men think that not having sex somewhat regularly is bad. We’re biological “seeding machines,” and thus screwing machines. It’s our core biological motivation, often overriding even our survival instinct. Ultimately, the emotional need to feel like valid men (by having regular sex) is what drives us to relationships, because for a lot of guys the casual sex game is much more daunting than it might seem, with what can end up being months of either failed attempts or no attempts at all (maybe years?). For some guys (and maybe for most guys at one point or another), even a mediocre relationship is better than a potential extended period of failing at being single ;)
If we were honest, most men would choose the perfect single man’s sex life (lots of sex with lots of women) over the perfect relationship any day. Without question. Immediately. “Yes, sign me up for that bang-a-lot-of-chicks thing.” I said MOST men, not ALL. It is what it is.