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11 years ago
Taking a breather was nice! I didn't get nearly as much done as I'd hoped (my to-do list is only one item shorter!), but I did get a chance to think about things a bit.
[[Note: The rest of the journal is typical myopic soul-searching. Not believing in souls as I do, that means it's really pretty vacuous.]]
As I've mentioned a few times before, I've been on-and-off a very sad panda for the last few years. That hardly makes me unusual, I realize - especially on the internet - but just like when you've hurt yourself, it's hard to concentrate on anything but the pain when it's going on. Usually when it's at its worst, I don't actually want to be happy. It's not that I lack motivation, or have discovered some exciting new moral value for sadness, or that I don't think I deserve to be happy, or even that I think that the world is a terrible place and being sad is the proper, rational response. Even at my saddest, I'm still pretty optimistic about the world and humanity as a whole (current politics notwithstanding), and excited for people who love life and want to live it. But if there's anything that qualifies as a religious alliance in my life, it's a belief in (and being a fan of) the long-term status of life, and intelligent life in particular. Natural selection and the existence of evolved behavioral memes are critical secondary corollaries. Scroll way down through tertiary and quartiary lemmas and you find underlined and highlighted in my head that the significance of my life is on the same order of magnitude as an ant's, and that depression is a natural culling mechanism. (I'm not going to claim that I suffer from depression in any kind of clinical sense, but I don't think there's a better term for what I put myself through.) The end result is that life, and the resources needed to sustain it, are best left to those who *want* them, and as fickle as emotions are, they can be seen as the warning lights on our life. Unless there's some reason you need to *need* to keep sinking thousands of dollars into a car that's worth less, usually the best thing to do is retire the car. Combine that with the fact that one of the facets in my vorish leanings is a death fascination in general, and I just end up stuck in a positive feedback cycle of sadness.
Anyway, when I'm not so wallowy, I tend to try to try to self-analyze to see if I can isolate what's making me so sad, because most of the time I *do* want to be happy. It's easy to cling onto various ideas and get obsessed with that as a root cause: It's my relationship with my wife! No, my relationship with my son! No, sexuality in general, and I should cultivate asexuality. No, a lack of religion, and I should put away reason and follow what feels good. Or, hey - maybe my vore fetish is messing me up and I need to step away from it. When I get to the point that I'm ready to take a break, I'm usually so melodramatic that I feel like filling out posts with subtext like 'And maybe I'm never coming back!'. And who knows - maybe that will happen some day.
Staying away from Eka's/Fur-Affinity/Tumblr/etc. for a month (and it was far from a complete separation, but at least I didn't participate) didn't miraculously make me happy, but at least it gave some distance to question if maybe I am spending too much time in the community. I love this community. I can't imagine leaving it entirely. The vast majority of my current friends and casual acquaintances come from the community. There are a lot of you I'd love to get to know better outside of fetishes and screen names, as unlikely as that is to happen. And I really, really enjoy doing commissions, both for the pocket money it lets me spend on my son, and because it's always great knowing someone really wants and likes something you've done. It scratches an itch I have in a fundamentally satisfying way. But I do think I've pushed my head too deep into the community. It has come to take up almost ALL my free time. I LOVE RPing. I love it so much that even though I think it might be a good idea to give it a break for a month or two, I don't think I could countenance it. But I don't think I'll start any new ones, and the ones that are sliding, I'll just let them go. The bummer is that RP is the way I started talking to most of the people that I do, and I'm terrible about just up and chatting with interesting people, but I think it's a risk I'll have to run, at least for now. In exchange, I'll have to try make better conversation, and feel free to chat me up if you'd like.
One of the things I realized this time around, though, is that the beginning of this climate change toward melancholy (as opposed to the daily weather of emotions or monthly seasons of sadness) coincides with deciding to drop the dream of publishing novels. I'm not too sure what to do about that - after all, none of my rationale for it has changed: I'm not so absurdly skilled as to force a career out of it; none of the things I want to write *need* to be written; and I'm philosophically opposed to the way art is monetized in our culture. But the fact remains that I'm going to write something, obviously, and right now I'm writing a lot of stuff that I can't thrust into my wife's hands, or my parents' or sisters' or coworkers', etc. - and even more to the point, I'm not writing things I'll eventually give to my son to read. No matter how liberal my views on sexuality, I don't think that's going to fly.
So, I still plan on taking commissions here and there. And I still plan on a -little- bit of RP, if only to finish out what's already going, and maybe do one thing at a time after that, and slow ones at that. And I'll still write stories now and again, because I really can't help it. But I think I need to at least make an attempt to turn my main focus back on writing other things, and see if that restores some of the order in my head. I'm not sure if it will. I feel like the problem is more like the lack of personal meaning that gets tied up in long-term planning for one's life, but I've essentially got writer's block when it comes to writing meaning into my life. My imagination isn't that good yet. So I'll just try. :)
And maybe I just need to get more exercise outside.
[[Note: The rest of the journal is typical myopic soul-searching. Not believing in souls as I do, that means it's really pretty vacuous.]]
As I've mentioned a few times before, I've been on-and-off a very sad panda for the last few years. That hardly makes me unusual, I realize - especially on the internet - but just like when you've hurt yourself, it's hard to concentrate on anything but the pain when it's going on. Usually when it's at its worst, I don't actually want to be happy. It's not that I lack motivation, or have discovered some exciting new moral value for sadness, or that I don't think I deserve to be happy, or even that I think that the world is a terrible place and being sad is the proper, rational response. Even at my saddest, I'm still pretty optimistic about the world and humanity as a whole (current politics notwithstanding), and excited for people who love life and want to live it. But if there's anything that qualifies as a religious alliance in my life, it's a belief in (and being a fan of) the long-term status of life, and intelligent life in particular. Natural selection and the existence of evolved behavioral memes are critical secondary corollaries. Scroll way down through tertiary and quartiary lemmas and you find underlined and highlighted in my head that the significance of my life is on the same order of magnitude as an ant's, and that depression is a natural culling mechanism. (I'm not going to claim that I suffer from depression in any kind of clinical sense, but I don't think there's a better term for what I put myself through.) The end result is that life, and the resources needed to sustain it, are best left to those who *want* them, and as fickle as emotions are, they can be seen as the warning lights on our life. Unless there's some reason you need to *need* to keep sinking thousands of dollars into a car that's worth less, usually the best thing to do is retire the car. Combine that with the fact that one of the facets in my vorish leanings is a death fascination in general, and I just end up stuck in a positive feedback cycle of sadness.
Anyway, when I'm not so wallowy, I tend to try to try to self-analyze to see if I can isolate what's making me so sad, because most of the time I *do* want to be happy. It's easy to cling onto various ideas and get obsessed with that as a root cause: It's my relationship with my wife! No, my relationship with my son! No, sexuality in general, and I should cultivate asexuality. No, a lack of religion, and I should put away reason and follow what feels good. Or, hey - maybe my vore fetish is messing me up and I need to step away from it. When I get to the point that I'm ready to take a break, I'm usually so melodramatic that I feel like filling out posts with subtext like 'And maybe I'm never coming back!'. And who knows - maybe that will happen some day.
Staying away from Eka's/Fur-Affinity/Tumblr/etc. for a month (and it was far from a complete separation, but at least I didn't participate) didn't miraculously make me happy, but at least it gave some distance to question if maybe I am spending too much time in the community. I love this community. I can't imagine leaving it entirely. The vast majority of my current friends and casual acquaintances come from the community. There are a lot of you I'd love to get to know better outside of fetishes and screen names, as unlikely as that is to happen. And I really, really enjoy doing commissions, both for the pocket money it lets me spend on my son, and because it's always great knowing someone really wants and likes something you've done. It scratches an itch I have in a fundamentally satisfying way. But I do think I've pushed my head too deep into the community. It has come to take up almost ALL my free time. I LOVE RPing. I love it so much that even though I think it might be a good idea to give it a break for a month or two, I don't think I could countenance it. But I don't think I'll start any new ones, and the ones that are sliding, I'll just let them go. The bummer is that RP is the way I started talking to most of the people that I do, and I'm terrible about just up and chatting with interesting people, but I think it's a risk I'll have to run, at least for now. In exchange, I'll have to try make better conversation, and feel free to chat me up if you'd like.
One of the things I realized this time around, though, is that the beginning of this climate change toward melancholy (as opposed to the daily weather of emotions or monthly seasons of sadness) coincides with deciding to drop the dream of publishing novels. I'm not too sure what to do about that - after all, none of my rationale for it has changed: I'm not so absurdly skilled as to force a career out of it; none of the things I want to write *need* to be written; and I'm philosophically opposed to the way art is monetized in our culture. But the fact remains that I'm going to write something, obviously, and right now I'm writing a lot of stuff that I can't thrust into my wife's hands, or my parents' or sisters' or coworkers', etc. - and even more to the point, I'm not writing things I'll eventually give to my son to read. No matter how liberal my views on sexuality, I don't think that's going to fly.
So, I still plan on taking commissions here and there. And I still plan on a -little- bit of RP, if only to finish out what's already going, and maybe do one thing at a time after that, and slow ones at that. And I'll still write stories now and again, because I really can't help it. But I think I need to at least make an attempt to turn my main focus back on writing other things, and see if that restores some of the order in my head. I'm not sure if it will. I feel like the problem is more like the lack of personal meaning that gets tied up in long-term planning for one's life, but I've essentially got writer's block when it comes to writing meaning into my life. My imagination isn't that good yet. So I'll just try. :)
And maybe I just need to get more exercise outside.
Welcome back of course in any capacity
I think the idea that depression is a natural culling mechanism (or perhaps a NEW culling mechanism for the new age/modern era?) and that life is for those who want to live it is interesting to me, even if it's a little sad.
Then again, limited resources should probably mean that we, as a species, should reproduce less, not set up our offspring to fail/kill themselves.
Anyway, this sort of journal is why I like you. Very insightful!
I hope your writing goes well, of course.
And you can always write more mainstream things and publish them at any time in your life. This is probably a macabre example, but I know someone who just passed, and he began painting at age 80; he did really beautiful work, and there was an art show of his work, at his funeral. I suppose the point of that story is, you can start very late and still be great, if you want to be.
There's definitely some logic to planning for the amount of resources we have. Perhaps if we ever get to the point where we've completely subverted or transcended the competitive nature of the natural selection mindset, we will. We've taken some steps in that direction. One could also argue that just like life seems to be a counter-entropic force, society seems to be a counter-competitive force; or rather, we are more competitive interspecies when we are cooperative intraspecies, so while subverting competition, we are just going meta. Either way, though, there a peculiar sort of comfort (for me) in the idea of depressive culling. In the long run, my feelings don't matter. (Arguably, even in the short run.) But what does matter (sort of) is that our species is ever-more-adapted to our environment, and a species full of energetic overachievers is more likely to be adapted than one of navel-gazing layabouts. Maybe it's weird, but seeing a mechanism at work that's meant to improve/protect the species from a potentially destructive force (even if internal) is gratifying.
And yes, I definitely agree! I could always try to get published later. I'm not sure I want to publish and participate in the book market, but that option will definitely always be open as long as I can write what people want to read.
In my humble, but flamboyantly brandished and hysterically vocalized opinion, in the same way that our relateable form oh human consciousness was born somewhere on the intersection of all the wonderful data gathering and analyzing wetware that we'd evolved - not a sum of its parts, per se, but a function of them all, a new order of complexity with its own interface - that is the way the new paradigm of meritocracy have gradually developed in the centers of human civilization. It wasn't merely one tendency of any one group to flourish due to possessing a fortunate mindset, and neither was it an algebraic sum of a multitude of such tendencies that gave birth to sciences and arts. The idle layabouts, the pathological sociopaths and the unfairly privileged have all had their moments at the helm of history, and so had all the heroes and paragons - all navigating the treacherous and bountiful streams of opportunity on the ships made from the bones of their forebears, and under the sails fashioned from suffering of the producing classes.
The resulting noosphere possesses such a greatness of scope, depth and projection that it gives hope and inspiration even to the ones disgusted by its seemingly ungainly dimensions and dubious judgement in accepting contributions and rewarding recognition from the humanity - meaning your own expressed favourable disposition towards the prospects of intelligent life.
The bottom line presentation calls for a clarifying comparison, and here it is: the old school natural selection is stern but fair, returning the result definite of improvement in parameters corresponding with the criteria of its process; the way civilization works is fundamentally unfair and erratic, like a drunken lateral thinker segueing from an incoherent rambling to an innovating revelation and back to babbling with no reliability save for the mild solace of statistical mapping - even though there are certainly multiple processes of hard-and-solid natural selection going on inside it.
The sub-bottom line is no one is more deserving of resources than another, no matter the will for it. A languid down-shifter may be eager to part with the claim for a certain amount of generalized materials that are in high demand among the go-getting crowd, but the pragmatic over-achievers are prone to rigidly follow the algorithms of maximizing gain, even if they do provide power for the factory of human ingenuity, as well as a number of to-the-point technical solutions. There is really no telling where the resources expended will meet their most optimal application and most efficient refinement, but over the centuries we the people have grown tremendously proficient in squandering any amount of goods and goodies.
So no, I wouldn't say that depression and deficiency of ambition is in any way white flag with an "Eat me!" scribbled on it, as far as any meaningful social evolutionary process is concerned. But I must confess that is indeed a very comforting concept, and a very handy one to have whenever the going gets tough. It isn't that I get randomly thrown off the wagon on a particularly prominent road bump - my failure has a higher inner rationale behind it, ordained by the All-Law Itself!
As for the artist's faithful steed, the agony of coming up with stuff, I believe that it has something to do with one of those hard-lined natural selection arrangements that you seem to honour. The con is simple: the exponential extension of one's versatility(justly brought about by boredom, curiosity and competition) meets the inevitable decline of interest in the much-practiced areas. The end result is a bewildered artist throwing up their hands in despair while sitting in a pile of unfinished projects, each more ambitious and daring than the last. Some reach that state after having churned out a bibliography and a half, others quit after a muddy sketch, a limerick and a verse-long song; it is hard to say which ones are the ones who've lucked out.
Apologies for the digital miles of watery cognitive dross I've left behind after my promenade, and the obvious expression of joy regarding your reappearance was present and accounted for between the lines. I could advise you to pull a Tolkien and address the singled out problem by writing something *specifically* for your esteemed progeny, using the parental imperative to augment your already blood-curdling abilities further. And a children's book is something that you would be able to show to the remainder of your household.
Much despair and frustration to you in your writing, for they are the enforcers of your standards ! But perhaps a little respite now and again would be warranted as well.
I might be talking myself into believing natural selection is a 'law' of nature, not a modality that can be replaced. It occurs at so many levels it's holographic. Even if we supplant it, it's akin to flying in an airplane - we discoverd a way to temporarily mitigate gravity, but we haven't rendered it obsolete.
But maybe we are defining natural selection differently? I wouldn't call it fair, stern or otherwise. On the contrary, it's capricious, manipulative and manipulatable, and senseless. It produces some pretty horrifying results (like the oft-mentioned botfly larva). Civilization, if anything, is an attempt to impose fairness on callous, indifferent nature, though it meets with variable success.
So, as relates to the bottom line - I'm not sure I'd argue that anyone -deserves- resources more than another, but natural selection pressures have contrived depression as a means to route resources to those who do the most to make the species prolific. If we are going to look to another source of meaning, there's room to argue that resources are better directed in other ways, but I suppose it comes down to the idea that the most fundamental meaning I cling to is engaged in the concept of natural selection, so I'm inclined to favor that interpretation.
Ah well. Thank you for your thoughtful words! I hope you've managed to discover a bit more faith in humanity elsewhere!
What I've been futilely attempting to posit does defy its very premise, crudely defined as it was - the better way to to put it would be to say that the accumulation of various mechanisms of natural selection have produced a new superstructure that is rooted in those processes, but functions on somewhat different terms; the natural selection isn't obsolete in the sense that it no longer works, but that its effects are no longer merely additive and cumulative at this level of complexity.
...It's two hours and three scrapped paragraphs later, and I still haven't been able to either formulate a counterpoint to the virtually infallible assertion that sorting algorithms rule all or to come up with any historical examples. I used to operate by baseless invocations of general principles and how I expected them to work, but that feels awfully hollow today. I could say that the overarching selective process that I could be trying to allude to was that effect of civilization that you mentioned - the imposition of not-necessarily optimal and better adopted practices and mindset in order to do away with the gruesome necessities of the old, that the natural selection of today is gradually becoming more intelligent while remaining largely impartial, but it doesn't really aid my case. I suppose it's a concession, then.
The "fair but stern" was more a bit of tomfoolery than a trait I'd attribute to evolutionary processes literally - it is entirely non-partisan despite its profound effects on the scale of millennia, naturally.
Oh, and
It occurs at so many levels it's holographic
was a very beautiful metaphor, striking and evocative - thank you for it !
What I'd still disagree on the subject of depression - methinks that unless it's hazardously chemically-intensive, it's just an another regulatory feature of the human psyche, a signal that one's been focusing on dead end or overtly taxing subjects to much, and ought to either give it a rest or shift the searchlight elsewhere(so much for the previously stated tendency towards eschewing armchair sciences). And your earlier supposition that living in the modern world brings out that reaction in people shouldn't be too far off the mark.
Cheers, non-exclamatory.
That's sort of the thing that's silly about any frustration I have - it's very much related to first-world problems. I have plenty of reasons to envy my current self. It's really easy, though, especially when you have a lot of time for your thoughts to wander, to fixate on what's going poorly to the exclusion of everything else.