What Is Life About?

God help me, because I don't know anymore.

Is it mating?  Is that it?  Raising issue/kids?  Is it about status, finding a way in this cold world and holding your head high against the tides that be?

A Beethoven string quartet?  Beauty?  Some aesthetic ideal?  Aren't aesthetic ideals just sort of reflections of what's so beautiful about life, though, in some more essential way?

Getting into good relations with others?  Well, what does that mean?  What relationship is crucial and honest, not a pot-luck or amalgam of hesitations and false-starts?  Which relationships work?

Having respectful kids?  Parents?  Elders?

Is it not going mad by the time you've reached middle age?  Recognized mortality?  Fended off youthful idealism?  Found enlightenment?  Where?  How?  What does it look like?  Is there any right answer?  I'm stunned for something correct.  Please provide it.

Have faith?  Is that the answer?  Have faith that there is purpose?

In the end, is religion effective because it is effectively all we can do??

Always So Serious?

Odd thing is that I don't think I'm serious, in my head.  This is almost an autistically removed answer because it might seem rabidly literal.  On the other hand, it is utterly true.  I do tend to stray toward the intense, or whatever.  Whatever in that I don't take the label so seriously, knowing the level of intensity that others I've been exposed to subscribe and act accordingly. 

How to respond, then, while not making the questioner uncomfortable? 

See, side note necessary here.  [insert]  I'm trying to figure this out as I write.  I don't have it pre-figured and ready for writing.  There's a bit of a difference between the two.  During the first, I actually am exposing myself in a kind of thorough way that's frightening. And exhausting.

Here's a separate side note, to myself, from myself: folks don't really care.  It isn't worth actually being vulnerable.  Every possible stimuli out there, exterior-side, screams toward the pedestrian, the strategy, that is, to be utterly fake and impulsive-driven and vaingloriously self-obsessed, mannequin-like when listening to other viewpoints, lioness-like when pouncing down the throats of non-interlocutors--non-interlocutors, I'll remind thee,  self, that are fundamentally hard to identify.  Damnit.  It isn't a puzzle.  It is a fucking diaphanous piece of opacity, of dual layered glass, that I/you can see through and see a reflection in, and I am reduced to measuring geometrical approaches to understand the angle of others, whether they are, as it were, in the reflection, or on the other side.  And either option is not heartening.

Another side-note.  If you don't know who is on your side, it doesn't make sense to jump down random throats.  It also doesn't necessarily make sense to have sides, except that they increase cooperation exponentially, because they offer psychological buy-in, which is a precious commodity, one that, shucks, can't just be produced by sheer will, but is the by-product of a series of emotional compromises and mutual reckoning.  Also, there's the issue that if you tell yourself that folks don't care, and act accordingly, they certainly won't care, but if you are sincere, and act accordingly, perhaps you'll find a commonality out there, one that can ring true and whatnot.  The question is of weighing the possible nuclear size harm of being hyper-sincere all the time, and of the problem, of course, that when you're sincere and interested in things, people are always asking you things like, "why are you so serious?" and that's fucking annoying, and makes you not want to be so sincere all time, and basically revert to a kind of nihilistic solipsism that's carnally gratifying and totally empty.  Which is the problem, isn't it?

So, there's a blindness.  That's what it is.  A blindness to taking action.   And there's a blindness in speaking (or writing on a blog); one that manifests itself in the incapacity to produce cocked and ready-to-consume pithy titty-pinchers of humorous content.  Mostly because we don't know who we're interacting with, not that easily, anyway, and certainly in a large anonymous place like the internet.  And, worse, perhaps, there's no guarantee, even in that space, of other like-minded souls to find their way together, even if I'm as sincere-as-is-possible.  There are no monitors of companionship, after all.  There's no assurances, no guarantees  

There's only you/me, our looking glass butane-filled science experiment of piecing it together, pretending that, once we get there, to the end of the journey, we'll have been successful getting some message across to one another about our experiences, so that we can breath a sigh of relief, and die knowing that: we weren't alone after all.  That would be a feeling of relief worth dying over, don't you think?

Living Life Shame Free

Imagine it, if you will, walking around without the crushing weight of wrongness, of deadness, of stale old lived in life, mocking you like a favorite outfit you've been forced to wear for days and now wreaks of body odor and wrinkles in all the wrong places.  Imagine knowing life without the desperation to prove yourself in a constant tug of war (to others, to yourself, to notions of whatever the good thing is or has been defined as), touching it in a way that is at once childish and innocent, truly interactive, and also knowledgeable,  aware of everything but the layer of cynicism that we often hold over ourselves in a coup not to feel, for the sake, always, to stay away from our previous failures, to hide it is who we are and run away forever.  Imagine not doing it relentlessly and with suicide-level zeal.  Imagine if it were just the case that you could be seen as human, instead of one-dimensional, and that this richness pervaded your own view of others too, and you might frolic into a dance of conversation and sharing bliss with those you felt least like you before.

Descriptive Accuracy Doesn't Equate to Pliable Feasibility

Why is it that we fool ourselves into thinking that approaching a comprehensive and exhausting pronunciation of exactly what it is that we suffer from might in turn script a policy of prescriptive highlights and blow outs?  (What is it that the salon in our heads offers us half off?  Decomposed rodenticide laced corpses?!)

Okay, side point.

Main point: why the fuck do we think that once we've got a handle on it that the handle will allow us to manipulate it?  At all?  Why is it that we're just as mindlessly obsessed with rationalizing all of our actions to the cohorts of people who are forced to be friends?

Here's my secret.  Gossip is relentlessly pointless when you are not part of the circle.  It holds negative weight.

And still.  And still, we ascribe endless loops and call them intentional meanderings, with a cross here and a supplication there, and we expect people to believe us; we expect them to capitulate to our own idolized notions of reason, however corrupt and obsequiously selfish.

I don't even know where life exists anymore.

Higher Status Friends

Almost all of my friends are/were higher status than me at some point in my life, and many have pulled into seriously high positions that I can't really hope to obtain.  Yes, I can dream of obtaining, but at this point I simply don't have the confidence for the game, and I definitely don't, because of my erratic training, such as it was, don't have the hard skills.

It is as much my fault as the fault of anything external.  I don't blame myself too horribly.  This isn't about blame, or shame, or anything like that.  I'm just saying that it is humbling to realize that wasting one's 20s in a haze of ambition and multi-headed energy was not the best way to do it.  I don't necessary wish I had what I was running from for so many of those years.  But the good parts of having it wouldn't be bad!

My higher status friends are all very modest.  But they are in another league.  I can't compete.  Everyone has fallen off with everyone else because of continental drift anyway, but I can't help, at times of righteous self-loathing, to propel my sputtering self into a realistic dichotomy, kick myself in the ass, and try to scrape up the crust of dessicated and used up happiness that has nestled itself into the crevices of my so-called life.

And when I do suck on that bit of solidified grease for a few moments, I realize that I'm alive because of it, and that when I stop comparing it to everything, perhaps I can find more flavor than at first seemed evident.

Emotional Attachment to One's Job -

I think we, ambitious, studious, people, try very hard (and earnestly believe) in the capacity for our jobs to be fulfilling.  After all, there are tons of Emotionally Fulfilled people out there doing jobs that seem rather fantastic.  Solving big problems.  Making lots of high level decisions.  Etc.

But over time, most of us, as a rule, simply see our jobs for what they are, and become less engaged with them.  We're "on the clock" and that's about it.  We want to be comfortable.  We want to be paid for it.  Etc.

It's Complicated

Simplification is nice, but often simplified elegance loses a lot of the necessary details to understand an experience, on the ground, step-by-step.  Of course, describing, in full detail, an entire experience is also tantamount to actually experiencing it, and as such, we who want to figure some stuff out conceptually before we actually participate in the stuff, have to find a way to get information that's neither too limited and not actionable, on one hand, or, on the other, so thick that it is impossible for us to differentiate signal from noise.

We basically need smarter people to tell us what's important.

And we need it bad.

Don't believe me?  Fine, go out and make your own mistakes.  But being bitter doesn't make anything better, trust me, and less ego earlier may lead to better results later.  Maybe.  I'm not sure.  See, I also know that assholes, i.e. those with high ego, may in fact have more courage to get what they want faster and with less shame than those with less ego and more concern for others.  At some level of decision  making and action, after all, we will run into the problem of competing interests.  It probably happens all the time.  Structural coordination that isn't highly efficient leaves loopholes for assholes to exploit and get ahead, and create more structural loopholes for their assholish behavior.  Fair doesn't cut it, in that world.  Knowing how many assholes are out there, and what their strategy is, and how to deal with it or undercut it, is much more effective, for instance, than muttering asshole under one's breath and losing a couple bucks/minutes in frustration.

I'm not advocating for assholes.  I am also not advocating for pure peace.  Simplification is an easy tool to let oneself become blinded, because it allows for post-hoc rationalization of everything and anything, and therefore, disallows learning, whether emotional or intellectual.  See, again, I'm forced to admit that learning is difficult because it is often times the place where waste happens unintentionally.