Ya know... there's no deeply meaningful experience in life more satisfying than being completely honest with somebody you care about. It's a wonderful thing, folks - a bonafide miracle of modern interpersonal magic. And getting there is quite the road less traveled, let me tell ya!
First, you spend half your life unlearning all of the backwards bullshit you were taught—or, ya know, that you accidentally learned from school, friends, family, and from listening to other people in the grocery store, or church, or anywhere humans congregate—by the intellectual cave-dwellers representing your civilization to the rest of the universe - and that's cool, and all. Pat yourself on the back a bit, marvel at the feat of willpower it took to achieve not only the capacity to be a self-managing rational human being but to ALSO wake up every morning knowing that, just by being alive and interacting with the world, you are at least not making it shittier - unlike the other 99%...
But that's really just the beginning of your life, isn't it? After that comparatively small achievement is under your belt, you then get the privilege of struggling against a diverse barrage of whatever social tides of uniformly obnoxious ignorance happen to be trending from day to day - which, of course, are all perpetually alternating between savagely beating you square in the face with their stupid-knuckles until you're nearly unconscious, and then pulling on your naughty bits with both hands—and fingernails that are always too sharp—in an attempt to drag you out into their happy seas of oblivious apathetic self-slavery... to drown... so your worthless corpse can drum uselessly against the rocks of their own wasted lives, forever, just like them. It's an honor, really. Glad to be here, glad to suffer through it. At my own sole expense, uphill both ways, naked in the snow, for absolutely nothing but the immediate benefit of all humanity and the theoretical future benefit of myself. I'm a fucking veteran.
So I do all of that, and I master myself, and I master my mind, and I accumulate human capital of self equivalent to a small (European) city, and I completely sever the remaining ties of insanity threatening to re-commit me to society... and then that's intellectual middle-age, I suppose; the golden years of golden intelligence - population: too fucking few.
First, you spend half your life unlearning all of the backwards bullshit you were taught—or, ya know, that you accidentally learned from school, friends, family, and from listening to other people in the grocery store, or church, or anywhere humans congregate—by the intellectual cave-dwellers representing your civilization to the rest of the universe - and that's cool, and all. Pat yourself on the back a bit, marvel at the feat of willpower it took to achieve not only the capacity to be a self-managing rational human being but to ALSO wake up every morning knowing that, just by being alive and interacting with the world, you are at least not making it shittier - unlike the other 99%...
But that's really just the beginning of your life, isn't it? After that comparatively small achievement is under your belt, you then get the privilege of struggling against a diverse barrage of whatever social tides of uniformly obnoxious ignorance happen to be trending from day to day - which, of course, are all perpetually alternating between savagely beating you square in the face with their stupid-knuckles until you're nearly unconscious, and then pulling on your naughty bits with both hands—and fingernails that are always too sharp—in an attempt to drag you out into their happy seas of oblivious apathetic self-slavery... to drown... so your worthless corpse can drum uselessly against the rocks of their own wasted lives, forever, just like them. It's an honor, really. Glad to be here, glad to suffer through it. At my own sole expense, uphill both ways, naked in the snow, for absolutely nothing but the immediate benefit of all humanity and the theoretical future benefit of myself. I'm a fucking veteran.
So I do all of that, and I master myself, and I master my mind, and I accumulate human capital of self equivalent to a small (European) city, and I completely sever the remaining ties of insanity threatening to re-commit me to society... and then that's intellectual middle-age, I suppose; the golden years of golden intelligence - population: too fucking few.
Anyway, but that's all in the past - and for the best, amirite!? Because, now, with this amazing gift of meta-sapience that I've given myself, I am capable of true honesty, and of seeing people for exactly what they are, and of communicating exactly what I am to others who've cultivated the capacity to comprehend, and of forming and growing meaningful relationships that are utterly inaccessible to the overwhelming majority-demographic of lowest-common-denominators.
Yes, folks, there's nothing quite as fundamentally fulfilling as being completely honest with somebody you love –
Yes, folks, there's nothing quite as fundamentally fulfilling as being completely honest with somebody you love –
– and being subsequently ignored by them because they're either too chicken-shit, too stupid, or too busy tripping over the sudden realization that "Oh, uhm, that just got awk" to follow up with something human in return. Nevermind affirmation; anegoists don't care if you don't reciprocate - but when nobody can be bothered to even participate, what the actual fuck is the point of me trying?
Heh... a seemingly-rhetorical question that's actually genuine - but still won't get an answer.
You couldn't make this shit up.
Heh... a seemingly-rhetorical question that's actually genuine - but still won't get an answer.
You couldn't make this shit up.
I totally get what you are saying. I experience this myself on a regular basis. Waking up is not an easy thing and for me at least I wonder how the world ever got like this.
ReplyDeleteThis helps, most of the time.
Deletehttp://dhechen.com/pub/spiritual/37prac.htm
That said, an intellectual mind can only do so much. Greater perspective does an excellent job of minimizing unwanted emotional coefficients attached to the people and ideas in our lives - but fails to eliminate them entirely. I have come to understand that the world got like this because most of the people in it cannot reconcile their simultaneous conflicting needs: on the one hand, the need for other people and for the connections and self-expansion they facilitate - and on the other, the need for a strong and independent foundation of the self. I suspect there is simply far too much compromise inherent in even the most trivial social interactions for balance to be possible, these days.
Despite being uncomfortably familiar with the problem, I have yet been unable to conceive of a solution; I suppose all we can do is continue to wake up, and do our best each day to try to discover or create one. Then again, maybe that's just the direction in which my own unique coping mechanism has evolved.