the snail shell


I'm Right and I'm Mad

There’s a voice I’m noticing more and more, in myself, that I’m calling “I’m Right and I’m Mad.” It shows up all the time.

Hannibal Burress saying “why are you booing me? I’m right”

(obv not the same phrasing but a similar feeling.) Here’s what this voice says:

  1. We’re suffering. (“we” meaning, me and all the little parts of me, I guess)
  2. I know a way out of suffering.
  3. Everyone should just listen to me and then we wouldn’t be suffering.
  4. Because everyone didn’t listen to me, all this isn’t my fault.1

Here are some simple ways it shows up, past and present:

A couple interesting points:

  1. Why do I care if things are my fault?
  2. This voice doesn’t actually have an answer for everything. E.g. “Just don’t have a car”?? with small kids in a small US city? That would make the bills a little easier and so much of life so much harder!
  3. It might actually be worse for me to distance myself from things that happen in life.

alignment

I think about work being more or less “aligned” sometimes. Aligned with what? I don’t know, aligned with you. Aligned with what you like, want, love, care about, how you want to be, your visions, your dreams. Very aligned: a doctor who likes figuring out tricky medical cases and loves seeing people get healthier. Not aligned: a doctor who’s doing it because their parents said they should, and now they want to get rich enough to keep up with the Joneses. This is not a brilliant insight here.

But it’s relevant to me now, because the “I’m right and I’m mad” voice is inherently un-aligning. When I work in my garden now, it’s pretty aligned: I like my plants. When I worked with my dad as a kid, it was pretty un-aligned, but then I made it more so by declaring “I want no part of this.” This wasn’t my idea, I would just not have all this landscaping, forget it.

There could be a viewpoint that pushes me towards more alignment with that job: “I’m doing this as a gift for my dad, who I love. And it is nice to see these plants; it’s not a total waste of time.” That would require not pushing away the work, or the suffering; not saying “I wouldn’t set up my life like this so I shouldn’t be responsible for doing the work.”

responsibility

Just always go toward alignment! Easy as that?? Hmm. It is not easy to take a problem that you might push away, and instead make it yours.

I can’t stop thinking about “Resentment is responsibility gone rotten” (despite the therapyspeak; the core idea I mean). One natural conclusion of this whole post could be “I have to take more responsibility for my life.” No, even better: “My life will be easier if I take more responsibility for it.” Easier! What?! But that’s sort of the inevitable conclusion here. If I find myself with a problem, like my dad wanting me to do yard work, and I can transmute it into “I choose to do yard work as a gift to my dad”, I can do more work but suffer less. The feeling might be less of “stuff just happens to me” and more of “on some level, I chose this.”

That is so counterintuitive that I am both rejecting it ferociously AND actually kind of intrigued. It’s so counterintuitive that I haven’t overthought it 100 ways, which means it might actually help.

Now the only hard part is, how to actually do it. In the moment, when I have a new difficulty, how to say “yeah I actually am partially responsible for this and choose to take it on and align myself with it”, not “this sucks and if I had my way I just wouldn’t do it.”

  1. I didn’t try to make this a Four Noble Truths joke, but here we are. I guess instead of “no-self” I just went to “100% self, I’m the best self, I know everything, I should be the king of the world.” I wonder why this makes me sad. ↩︎



Things on My Mind

I’m sick this weekend, which means paradoxically an easier time than most today, because T is watching our kid. Time to blog

fighting the gods

There’s a movie called the Odyssey, and for once T and I finally saw The Current Movie while it was new in theaters. It’s very good! One bit that stuck with me was when Calypso says “you have to stop fighting the gods if you want to get back home.” As that’s what Odysseus has been doing this whole time. I get it, Odysseus. I want to fight the gods - not out of pride, but anger. How could you all do this to us?

resentment

Resentment as responsibility gone rotten: “resentment comes from taking responsibility for something you shouldn’t, or not taking responsibility for something you should.” Post is about relationships and reality TV no less, but it made me think about: is Odysseus’s (… my?) resentment the same thing?

fully formed emotional product

I was expressing a feeling to someone, and cutting it off partway - something like “oh god things feel awful - well y’know not that awful - I mean it could be much worse” and they were like:

“You know, while you’re expressing a feeling, it doesn’t have to be fully formed. I’m not here to attack you. You can say e.g. ‘I’m the most cursed person to ever exist’, knowing that eventually, you’ll get through it and the fully formed logical thought will be something like ’that was a rough day.’”

People say “you have to feel your feelings or they’ll just lurk and subconsciously control you” and I say “ok, how do you do that??” and I think this is one piece of that “how”. One way you can “feel a feeling” is to express it to someone. And to express a feeling, you have to be willing to express it as it is, not just the fully formed emotional product at the end of the process.

omelas

why? man this is the stuff of Internet Discourse and I’m getting sucked in but I’m allowed because I’m sick.

Omelas, Je T’aime: Of course we can’t think straight about Omelas, because it’s a completely unnatural thought experiment. Would you trade your city for Omelas? Yes: there’s way more than one kid-in-a-hole in any modern city, we should be delighted for the suffering to be so low! No: but we don’t tolerate or condone that, we are always striving for the no-kids-in-holes city. Arghh how do we reconcile these– well, look, we don’t have to, because you can’t pick Omelas. There’s no “suffering kids -> prosperity” machine IRL, Omelas is just a fucked up little trolley problem.

But you all are missing the point! (In my opinion. Of this open-ended story with many points.) The point is “why can’t we even believe in nice things.” Le Guin sets up this utopia and then is like “but you don’t believe me, do you? sigh fine, here’s a suffering kid, do you believe it now?” Why can’t we believe in good things? Relevant SMBC - “By Zorcrom, it is bad to be human.”

(Possible counterpoint: sure we can believe in nice things, but not in the form of a story. We set up stories to have conflict or something. Being Ursula Le Guin and writing “here’s a nice city” is like a metal band with the metal band font and faces painted and dressing like Slipknot, singing “I love you, you love me” - you’re probably not just going to leave it as that.)

(Possible counter-counterpoint: if this is how all our art is, by Zorcrom, it is bad to be human.)

one feelings hack

If you find yourself saying “for the rest of my life”, you can just not.1 Even if it’s correct, it’s not a thought pattern that is gonna lead you to happiness. I like this because it’s so concrete; those words can be a tripwire. (I have not tried this yet.)

  1. tweet from @visakanv: ime i’ve found that people saying “gonna have to ___ for the rest of my life” is reliably correlated with despondence. and this is a pattern of thought that I’ve seen people learn to relinquish, which led to more presence and joy (even with negative thoughts and feelings!) ↩︎



Number Go Up Races

Things that seem related:

in art

in real life

It’s hard to keep wonder alive. In anything. So in art we go for exponential numbers, or new colors, or convoluted backstories about how our hero is in real jeopardy from the REAL big bad now. In life… I don’t know, it’s messier2. But as things get more exponential, I guess we’ll see this more and more.

  1. tweet from __alpoge__: hello there the jacobian conjecture is false thanx to my close friend akhil for asking about it and my other close friend fable for working during the world cup final ((1+xy)^3 z + y^2 (1+xy) (4+3xy), y + 3 x (1+xy)^2 z + 3 x y^2 (4+3xy), 2 x - 3 x^2 y - x^3 z): \C^3\to \C^3, has jacobian determinant -2, and sends (0, 0, -1/4), (1, -3/2, 13/2), and (-1, 3/2, 13/2) to (-1/4, 0, 0)” ↩︎

  2. no pun intended ↩︎