The back nine of attitudes, the rise of the understudy, memes, dolphins, how to have purpose

Thursday 8/29/24

Are there two more narcissistic, egotistical words than "My truth"?

Can anyone actually be a person anymore, or is everyone an amalgamation of poses and adopted personas, from the language they use to what they partake of, to who they are at their deepest level? Deepest level by dint of there having to a deepest level to all things, not because that level is actually deep. I don't believe there are very many people in the world by what I would mean by being a person.

I know how people are and how they've become, but it still takes me aback when I see further proof--which is constantly coming into view--of how early they want to tap out and be done. There's so little fight and drive in people. There's so little life in them. I look up and there's someone who is fifty-six-years-old saying they're on "the back nine."

People now always look to do less and will automatically do less if doing less is an option. In everything. This makes them unhappy and unfulfilled. And unhealthy. In all of the ways. They will cede anything over to AI that they are able to. They have no problem with AI being their representative, but that's not really what AI is. AI is their replacement.

It starts off with AI being, in theory, the stand-in. But we know how that works, or we should. The understudy who plays the role every night takes over the part and is no longer the understudy but the featured player.

I feel like it takes very little intelligence to understand this, and it shouldn't take much for someone to think and see this on their own, but I believe there is hardly any intelligence at all in the world right now. I believe it because that's what I see, and it's pretty much all I see (and admittedly I'm qualifying this that way so that people who might be offended have wiggle room to think they're not included). And hear. And that's not because of a lack of looking or listening, or confining myself to a set number of places.

You can always tell when something is written by AI because AI attempts these turns of phrases. People almost never do that. AI doesn't do it well, but it's a go-to move at this stage of AI's writerly existence. For instance, if a woman has a dating profile and on that profile she said that fishing was one of her hobbies, AI will write--as her replacement--"I'm looking for someone to reel me in."

Sadly, that is much more clever than most people are capable of being. We are so disposable. We've made ourselves so disposable. So replaceable.

Photos of people "kissing" a dolphin are telling. That's someone who doesn't respect nature. A lover of nature would never think, "Need a photo of me kissing that dolphin."

People on social media have this strategy they employ. When they are not getting as many clicks and likes and as much engagement as they wish--and need--they pull out the stops and say, "I am going to end it all! I can't go on!" and then they get that attention and those clicks and those likes, and it's back to posting about how awful men are and telling people to follow them over on TikTok as well.

I haven't eaten in a restaurant in many years and I don't intend to very often going forward unless I have to. I don't really like going to restaurants. I don't venerate food. I'm interested in art, humanness, nature, meaning, helping people, moving forward. My diet is simple.

The other day I looked up what foods were bad for you in terms of cholesterol and was pleased to see that there was nothing on that list of twenty items that I eat.

People talk so much about generation this and generation that. People of this generation do that, people of that generation do this. I pay no attention to any of these synoptic pronouncements. I don't know what generation I am. If you don't stand outside of matters calendrical in terms of what is important and who you really are, I think you are failing yourself and also others. Or maybe not others, but you are limiting what you can offer.

I don't even like age. What is my age? I don't know. I have an amount of time in which to get things done, impact the world as I wish to and as I believe the world needs--and more so by the hour--and to get where I'm going and have what I wish as far as my life goes and how I may live it. But that is different than age, in my mind. The idea of that amount of time. I am also my art. My art is infinite. Candles on a cake aren't relevant to my art.

If an intelligent person has ever used a meme or a GIF, then I'm unaware of it.

People are not special and people do not try. As I said, everyone wants a something, but no one is willing to put forth any effort to be anything, and most people have no idea what real effort is. Like all of the pretend writers. Who is the writer who always writes? Who is the writer who awakes at two in the morning on a Saturday to write for eight hours before running stairs to be strong enough to keep doing what he does and fight his war on behalf of that writing? What do other people do? Arise at nine and go to brunch and talk about and pretend to be something they are not.

Now people pin a badge of "neurodivergent" or "ADHDH" to themselves and talk about this constantly and castigate others who have less need to pretend as "neurotypicals." Most people are not these things. They are not anything except lacking and lazy and empty and simple and uneducated and narcissistic and mimetic. They demand to see and hear reflections and echoes of their own limited, closed off, stunted selves. This idea drives the concept of platforming. People don't want anything other than those reflections and echoes of themselves. No matter how boring that is and how little it does for them.

They have made themselves into nothing. When you are nothing, you are insecure. When you are insecure, and you look all around and see things like you, and encounter thoughts like your own--which are comprised of nothing, save ignorance--you feel comforted and less of a sense of nothing, because you're not out there on some island as some freak. After all, he said this and she said this and that media outlet said this and Stephen A. Smith said this and I say this and think this. Mediocrity is what people want in everything. In their lives, in themselves, in who and what they follow and look to.

Mediocrity in an age is determined by the parameters of that age. It's like adjusting for context with baseball stats. The age sets the market because of the contributing factors of the age. Thirty home runs in 1976 meant something different than thirty home runs in 1998. Mediocre now is lower down the yardstick of human achievement than mediocre once was. There is nothing good in culture. In society. Anything good is not good as in welcome. And nothing is worse than true greatness. Nothing is more hated and feared and envied than true greatness. Greatness is a threat to the ego, to the self, to feelings, to one's manufactured, heavily-processed, precariously held-together simulacrum of reality.

True greatness goes against everything in our society. All of the bullshit, the posing, the lying, social media, clicks, "likes," fake/incestuous community, delusion, fantasy, enabling, excuse-making, self-victimization, all of it. Nothing needs to be suppressed like true greatness. The greater the greatness, the more it must be shunned. People don't even have their own words. They all talk the same. They can't come up with anything that is their own. They use the same stupid phrases that they got from others using them. Then they all use them.

Checks notes, gives me the ick, I was this many days old, literally literally literally literally literally literally.

People view intelligence as robbing them of their voice, because when there is no intelligence, and there is no baseline, all are equal because all are the same. People, for instance, like to just say whatever. When no one knows anything, it all just blends together. But if someone who knows shows up, the party is over. You can't say the stupid thing out of your ass that you could have before, because now you'll look ridiculous. You're silenced. You feel like you don't have a voice.

That's why stupidity, "hot takes," drives engagement; one stupid person starts with something stupid, other stupid people follow with stupid things.

There are no individuals. People aren't persons. It's just one big, slowly undulating mass. No one can read. There's nothing worth reading anyway. No one can speak as an individual. As who they are. No one can communicate. Communication is the basis of all healthy relationships. We don't have healthy relationships. We have people we know and people we are with. That's so very different. No one thinks, focuses, tries, takes accountability. No one is open. No one is strong. Strength has been societally policed out of existence. Ownership is never taken. Reality is shirked. Labels are applied instead. We are what we say we are, rather than what we actually are. And if you don't go along with that, if you don't play along, if you don't commit to lying, if you don't find a way to be stupid if you're not, then you pay. We are in a world where the life of the least amount of pain involves being an absolute moron without character. Who never grows. Who never thinks. Who partners up with others who never do as well, and eats and fucks and eats and fucks and eats and fucks and watches twelve-second videos and eats and fucks and eats and fucks and eats and fucks and posts and follows and eats and fucks and posts and follows and hits that like button and says literally literally literally and dies. And there it was. This or what? Suffering? The higher you go, the more you grow, the more you suffer? Rewards in another world, then?

I can't believe that this has to be the way, how it is. I have to believe in the road--the overall road of humanity and humans--as one that can be reshaped.

We see people perform sobriety and that performance becomes their brand. Millions of people doing this for clicks and likes and follows. And attention and publication and readers who aren't interested at all in the actual writing. But it's a form of "support" and community. This isn't community at all, of course. And it's not support. The latter comes from a place of reality, not enabling fantasy.

I saw a post on social media where a woman said she wanted to end it all because she had no purpose. How hard are you trying to have a purpose? Or purposes? Everything has to be worked at. Sometimes we must make decisions to do things and to force ourselves to try them and see how it goes, what it might do for us. This is a bit different, but consider the stairs. They are not my purpose. But they contribute to my purpose. They are part of my means on the way to my ends. Part of the means of my purpose as I strive towards a goal. When I reach that goal, other goals will open up. It's all part of a bigger thing. My ultimate purpose. I didn't accidentally start running stairs. I made myself run stairs. I decided to try it. After coming up with the idea. I did it, I did it more, I kept doing it. And I learned things as I went, about the doing of it and about myself. And the world, and people, and art, and strength and focus and presence. The act acquired value. It contributed to my overall purpose. No one recommended the act to me. I didn't watch some how-to video. It came from me as something I decided to do.

If this woman decided to volunteer at a hospital, in a children's cancer wing, she might learn something about purpose and a purpose for her. Something would have to happen, right? There'd be a result. That wouldn't just bounce off of you, that experience. I am giving one example. I'm not saying we all must volunteer in cancer wings for children at hospitals. What I am saying, though, is you must be trying something to locate purpose. People expect everything to come to them. That's how the world is now. No one is going to go out and learn anything. If they learn something, it's because it was stuck right in front of their face, without their choosing. I learn all day long. I'm always seeking and learning and adding. I've been this way my whole life. I am even more this way now.

If you feel like you don't have a purpose, you must ask yourself what are you doing, or how hard are you trying, to find a purpose? I bet the answer, most times, is that person is not dong anything. That's not going to get it done for you. I understand: It can be hard to find the energy to throw one's self into...what? So much uncertainty. There are no assurances. Chances are we'll have to search and search some more, and search again, and rally each time for a fresh search. To be searching simultaneously on multiple fronts.

We think it's easier not to try and to sit everything out. And now we think it's easier not to try, sit everything out, and take to social media to complain and fill the void within that way. But none of that works and it only ends up hurting us all the more. We must try. We must risk. We must get back up and get back out. This is strength. This is faith. This is love. It is love for ourselves.

People attempt to build themselves up by posturing and machinations and big leaguing others. All they end up doing is making themselves alone, bitter, brittle, weak, defensive, angry. Social media, again, becomes the attempted void-filler. But if someone reaches out to them, with a gracious note, and that person is coming from a sincere and decent place--and let's say that that person has remarkable qualities, too, and would be everything and more that other person wants--then the person on the receiving end will typically behave in some condescending manner because it's about power for them because they can do this thing. They will be short, they'll send some emoji, like they are above this other person who is not worth their time, when the reality, it's the other way around.

That person is within their rights. Certainly. But there is a reason they are alone, they are getting wine drunk again, they have all of the cats, and they post about how awful such and such as a group are and do a most miserable form of pseudo-bonding with other people exactly like them in the same situation for the same reasons.

And none of them--or at least it seems this way--can put any of this together. That's because people have no self-awareness, there is no accountability in our world, no one holds them to any standards, they can't get out of their own way, they've become more and more insecure and narcissistic, and they are frightened to live at all, in any real or consequential sense. So this becomes their life.