An important Date

 April 9, 2022

The day I got my first follower on twitter. :)

    It would probably be easier to come up with things to post about if I didn't write most of what I want to say in notebooks. Ah well, the hoard won't fill up itself. 

     I write a lot of stuff I will never in a million years post, largely because writing long projects that don't go anywhere feels deeply cathartic to me. 

The Price of Love

    I recently watched John Green’s video “Motivation in Hard Times”, one of those video’s people make to attempt to help those struggling with sadness and worry over the state of their lives, the way pretty much everyone is right now. The point of the video was that it’s important not to let yourself be consumed by anger and to instead focus on those you love, but one part that stood out to me was when he said, “Anger burns dirty, leaving a whole inside you, while love burns clean.”, Well at least that was the general gist of it.

     Central to our cultural narrative is the idea that love is important, that our lives should be focused on seeking the approval of our friends and family. Like all narratives, you will find people pointing out how this isn’t true, and how pushing this idea onto others in harmful, kind of like how I’m doing right now. But I think it’s important to know that love, like most things, isn’t inherently evil. It helps people struggling, gives them a reason to keep going, keeps them focused on something that matters to them.

   Anger can also do that. I think most of us forget that there are those out there who, for whatever reason, can’t find love in their lives, either because they screwed up or because their community abandoned them. We forget that when we push the narrative that acting out of love is better than acting out of anger or spite, we’re pushing people who’ve been forgotten by the world to give up their inner selves in the hopes that society will take them back. For these people, anger may be all that they have left, and they often hold onto it long after people who care about them come into their lives.

    I should also mention that love can be damaging in it’s own way. In this day and age, I think all of us have seen at least one person we care about, either among our friend group or online, do something we regard as horrible, something that leaves us asking if we should give up on them to preserve our integrity or keep them in our lives because they matter to us. Morality demands we stand for what we believe in, but so many of us have stories about people we love getting involved in conspiracy theories, and love has no good answers for how to save them or ourselves.

     I don’t believe anger to be inherently evil, nor do I believe love to be inherently good. One thing I learned in AP Environmental Science is that ecosystems require a healthy balance of all sorts of resources, and sometimes you don’t know what’s important until you remove it. I believe we should value all of our emotions, and acknowledge that there are many wrong ways of doing things that people do, just as there are many right ways of doing things, but if we want to know the difference, we have to admit our feelings to ourselves.

      I've been watching a lot of Vlogbrother's videos lately. Partly due to nostalgia, mostly because I keep searching for the right way to word the thoughts going through my mind. 

    I wish I knew how to find other people interested in how society works the way I am. 

The Gift of Wealth

 The greatest country to ever exist,
Built on the backs of giants.
Where many are hungry
And most don't have enough.

A country blessed
By the gift of wealth,
Unending days,
Nights without stars,
Work that goes on forever.

A few live in towers
Built of glass and steel.
Directing our lives
As a conductor would an orchestra,
They demand we work endlessly
Or else die homeless and alone.

They allow us to live,
Only asking that we give them
Everything we make.

Some look at our country
Blessed with wealth and prosperity,
And say it is little more than a prison
Where the crime is being born
And the punishment is unending, ceaseless toil.

The citizen's don't agree.
They are blessed, they say,
To be able to work for wages
That can't even cover bills. 
So long as they work, they know their lives have meaning.
To be unable to work, 
They say,
Is a fate worse than death. 

     One of my strongest beliefs is that life isn't inherently meaningful. It's us living life, making choices, writing our own stories, that gives it meaning. I don't think the universe ever intended for there to be good and bad, just a series of choices of how to shape the world to our choosing. 

    The problem is that we keep creating systems that artificially limit the amount of choices that we can make. This isn't usually a problem, choice paralysis is a thing after all, but everyone is going to come up to a situation where they have to choose between a choice that's bad, and a choice that's worse. Or maybe a clear good and bad choice, but taking the good choice means sacrificing something they care about. This was taken to such an extreme in the United States that your choices are less "Good vs. Evil" and more along the lines of "The people who are against unionizing vs. the people who are against unionizing and have spoken out against gay marriage." Is it any wonder so many of us have become so cynical? 

The New Societal Narrative

       Like most of the world, or at least most of the United States, I’ve grown tired of watching society fall apart. What really bother’s me is that nobody seems to know why. A lot of people blame polarization between the right and the left, but if that’s the case then why is the Left willing to compromise when the right is not? And why is there nothing the Right will agree to? To me it looks less like a disagreement between two ideas and more like a power struggle between two different groups with conflicting goals, where the only thing they agree on is that compromise is the worst outcome of any discussion they have. 

     It goes much deeper than just division between the democratic and republican parties. In order to understand why they’re fighting, you can’t just look at who’s in charge, you have to look at how they got to be in charge, which in theory is by convincing the population of whatever state they’re from to vote for them. In practice, it’s more complicated than that. 

     The biggest issue is that while the United States is a democracy on paper, a lot of power is held by people we never elected. The CEOs, Billionaires, and Pundits of the United States. How they got their power varies, but what they all have in common is they didn’t get power via political channels, they got it by convincing a portion of society that they were worthy of having it. Maybe because they were elected to be in charge of a successful business, maybe because they inherited money, maybe because they were good entertainers, but however they got their power, they influence society while most of us have no say on the subject, because we aren’t in the choir they preach to. 

     This means that, in the Republican party especially, the problem isn’t limited to the politicians. Most of it is in the hands of those telling stories they know their audience wants to hear. Stories of how life was better back when you didn’t have to see the suffering of others and those who weren’t members of society knew better than to speak up. It’s a narrative that’s familiar and comforting, and if you’ve never been confronted with systemic oppression, it’s one that makes total sense. 

      It’s this narrative that’s tearing America apart. 

       It’s not a story that’s limited to the United States of course. It’s as old as humanity itself. The idea that things were better before is a story we all tell ourselves less because it’s true and more because we can easily imagine the past, and our minds all need a place to retreat to when the world feels overwhelming. But it’s a dangerous story. It’s a story about how the world was better before the world changed, regardless of if it’s true. It’s a story that puts the blame on others for changing the world, for making it worse than it was. It’s a story that says we’re better than them, that we’re inherently good, because we come from a time when things were better, and they’re evil for deciding to change things. In a world where a small amount of people holds all the power, where those with the most power can’t be replaced, and where those with power have all the incentive to stop things from changing, it’s poisonous.

     It’s time we abandoned it. 

    We need to start telling a different story, one where good and bad are relative, where change is the way we express to the world what we want from it. We need to stop treating society as inherently good, when I feel it’s become increasingly clear that it isn’t. It’s only good if we put in the effort to create a society that disincentivizes evil and promotes good, and then put in the effort to make sure that’s true. Most importantly, we need to acknowledge that what people want from the world will change as we learn more about ourselves and as people move from place to place. That’s the point. The world wasn’t meant to be static; it was meant to be dynamic, a place where you could build the world you wanted and where all your choices made an impact. The point of existing is to bring meaning to a world that would be meaningless without the beings that live in it. 

   Instead we’ve built a society where everything sucks, and nobody has any real way of changing it beyond praying to the gods and hoping that they’re willing to listen. Worse, those in charge can’t see what the issue is, because the world belongs to them. They don’t care about those who keep them in power, because from their perspective there’s no way they could be replaced. We keep going along with this because we’ve bought into the idea that there’s no way we could changed this. We had no choice. Without society, we lose everything. But what that means is that everyone participating in society is asking themselves the same question, “What is the point to any of this?”

    I don’t know if it’s possible to build a society where the rich won’t take everything from us, where we aren’t either swimming in more money than we know what to do with or struggling to just barely survive. But I’m tired of everyone saying that we need to hope, because hope is the only thing that will change things, as if living in denial means that the darkness looming over us will just go away. This won’t be easy. We will lose a lot. And when it’s over, we won’t even be sure if we made the right answer. But I don’t want to be stuck in the present because we as a species are deeply averse to the idea that our world isn’t as real as we think it is. This is our world. I know we can change it. But first, we have to believe we can. 

Life of a Writer

      One problem I have is that my brain keeps choosing random things to obsess over, a lot of it is stuff I would never talk about publicly. This means I write page after page of stuff I never plan on posting, just as a way of trying to get it out of my head. My head doesn't want to let go of things though, and I've learned that sometimes the only thing to do is to expose myself to it as much as possible in the hopes that my brain will get bored and move on. 

     I don't know if this is a common problem. I think it's mostly to do with the fact that my brain is one of those brains that loves to think about all sorts of things, to the point that a big reason I never graduated from college was that I couldn't think of a major that I wanted occupying my existence. I know my brain too well, and I know that my brain gets bored very easily. It's so bad that the tricks they give you to try to stay organized don't work for me because I can never stay organized enough to make them work. 

     Yes, in case you're wondering, I do sometimes think I might have ADHD.