Easy Contempt

Perhaps it is a worn out cliche.  Still, it is easier to feel contempt, to be negative, or to find an excuse not to make an attempt, than to find reasons, be positive, or look for understanding under the surface of chaos.

Depression is Comfy

I've been thinking about the rationale behind depression--you know, the emotional rationale.   What's the reason for depression?  Why revert to it even when it exacts certain pain from its occupant?  It must provide some benefit, and that benefit, somehow, must be comfort, the ability to withdraw from the world and recharge (or not), the capacity to narrow one's mind into one's own life.  Because I think the world is increasingly overwhelming, and complicated and messy.  And depression doesn't sound good, mostly because it isn't.  But that also doesn't mean that it doesn't provide some benefits either.

You're Not The Best.

And the likelihood is that you'll never be. Ever.  So scratch that idea, that fantasy.

I'm certainly not.  I know that my limitations outweigh my strengths. It sucks to know it, but I know it still.


The stark reality is that, for a given field of endeavor, we probably don't even know what the best looks like because we can't understand it. 

That's not a pitfall, mind you.  It just means that progress is possible.   And that we're not fundamentally broken because we haven't fulfilled the false wishes of those of us who try to formulate the parameters of our behavior and thoughts with their ideals and trances.

That's not the same as thinking that nobody and nothing restricts us and choosing ignorance.  Trust me, I used to chose ignorance a lot more than I'd care to admit now.  It remains, though, that, any one of us can spend many years to get even moderately decent at something.    The catch is that being moderately decent at something is still above average.

Challenge-

Most people act in what they believe are justified ways.  Which is to say, even when someone does something that upsets you greatly--you see no justification for it--they most likely are acting in accordance with their normative ideas about how they should act.  Which is to say that they have a reason. It's just that, when we're pissed with other people, we don't often think about their reasons and they don't often think about our reasons.

It is very difficult, for whatever reason, to say: I understand they have their reason, even when we know objectively that they have their reason and that their reason is valued by them subjectively the same that we value our subjective reason (predominantly as a priority over other competing reasons), and then put their reason prior to our reason, i.e. to not get mad, but to acquiesce in whatever conflict has arisen.

Of course, the world would be a little better if more of us were forgiving and the other half of us who always placate decided to stand up for ourselves once in a while.  The ends would justify the means, I think, collectively.  It just might not individually.

The skill I've most admired as of late is the ability to zoom in one's focus to minutiae and then back out to macro-events/reasons, and then back into the minutiae.   This is really hard to do.  In general, because we prioritize ourselves so heavily, it is hard to back away from reasons that justify our own predominance.  But when we do, there is a greater and more wonderful knowledge: of being accurate.  Or, that is, less wrong.  We probably can't ever quite get accurate.

We might have to pay the price in ego once in a while to get a little insight, in other words.  It is worth it.  It is worth it.   And it is worth diving into all that is difficult again and again and banging your head against the wall to try to understand it.  Especially when you don't.     I only wish my current self could have talked to my previous self.

Lights: Yeah, I put them up--Learning Process

Hard Times, Welch.

The Personal

I've shied away from making this too personal lately.  Sorry about that.  It was my  intention to bring some of these thoughts "home" if possible.  The truth is that I've honestly been subsumed with work for the first time in my life--and I mean, positively for the first time in my life.  I'm engrossed in it.  Suffice it to say that work is all about figuring out the cost of social goods--a particular kind of social good, mind you, something that already has a market.  And it has helped me realize that I'm absolutely never ever going to come close to having anything near an understanding of how even ten percent of the world works around me.  I mean, it is just too freakin' complicated and sophisticated.  There's no way to do it all.  I don't mean "handle all that is already in my life" and I don't mean that I'm going to stop investing my mental energies into undertsanding the world around me.  I just mean that I'll stop telling myself the lie that I can get to a place where it all makes sense.  It won't.  It can't.   I'm not an expert on almost everything. 

At first, when that realization hits home and the bottom drops out, the wave of insecurity is baffling in size, but now, it induces accuracy that I've acclimated to, at least partially, in that I can find fascinating almost everything and, well, there's a lesson to learn almost everywhere, from making breakfast to riding the train, to sleeping positions, to writing, to interactions, to knowing what set of personality quirks I've been adorned with by birth, and to frolicking with myself on a rainy night in northeastern city and thinking, for once, that i'm sort of [whisper] at a level of agitated engaged peace [i.e. i want nothing outside of this moment].