Just a reminder, I don’t plan these out or edit them, except for this reminder I guess.
Damn, its been a long time. I think I’ve written in this blog twice in the last 6 months or so. The crazy thing is, the last thing I posted actually talked about a new strategy I was gonna try to get myself to write more. That was months ago so obviously the strategy either didn’t work at all or, the alternative possibility, I just didn’t try the strategy at all and continued to just do whatever I wanted.
Regardless, I haven’t written here in a while. I guess I expect myself to feel kinda bad or something but I don’t. Basically, I think all that hedging I did, over all my posts about how I don’t care about this blog being “successful” or that I would simply use it whenever I personally felt like, ended up being true. I know nobody, including me, suffers from my inactivity. Only my own desire to be “responsible” can cause me mental pain for this “failure” to stick to a steady regimen of writing.
Psychologically, I would say that the imagined form of my Father, in my subconscious, asking me to explain why I’m doing what I am, is the primary source of my self doubt about these types of things. My dad, who I love, was a regular dad in that everything I did as a kid had to be in the service of The Almighty. For my dad that was a mix of God and Financial Stability. Both of those are important, to be sure, but what happened to me was that I ended up having to constantly explain to myself, or to my subconscious image of my Father judging me, how whatever I was doing could possibly be construed as “productive” by the societal definition of the word.
That society being the United States of America, an incredibly materialistic and empiricism focused society where only the provable is valuable, even in terms of life experience. Until you get that degree in high Finance you clearly have no idea what your talking about when you talk, or even think about, money. Until you get that degree in Creative Writing you can’t really be trusted to successfully write. Until you get that $100,000 piece of paper that says you get to help people psychologically, you better not waste any of you time trying to psychologically help people. I mean, until you get that piece of paper, surely made out of solid diamond considering it’s price, that says a respectable “Higher” Education Center considers me fit to be a psychologist, it’s basically a fucking crime to try to talk to people about psychological things.
Obviously, my real father never said any of that shit and would probably even agree with me that those things are stupid but the subconscious versions of things never really line up with reality, for better or worse, and our Fathers are always destined to be our greatest sources of psychological imagery, again for better or worse. It had always been almost impossible for me to do something without having to figure out a way to explain it to myself.
Whether that explination was to an image of my Father or to an image of people my father’s age that didn’t know me and would always ask, “What are you gonna do when you grow up?”, or if it was to an imaginary woman my own age that was judging me for some aspect of my life that I liked but was considered, by my subcouncious version of society, to be unnattractive, I was always explaining myself.
Can you believe that entire paragraph was just one sentence. I can feel myself morphing into a philosopher more and more. Don’t think I’m complimenting myself by saying that. I mean, I’d like to be considered a philosopher but It’s important to make sure that people are aware that even if I am what I want to be it doesn’t mean that I think I’m better than them or that I’m some sort of wise sage handing out knowledge to the rest of the village. While I personally like philosopher types, not the pretend philosopher types that teach philosophy in college and make you buy their $150 book they wrote where they just regurgitated the shit dead people said.
It’s actually a really weird aspect of our society. I mean, our society is so focused on the empirical, the provable, the statistically corroborated, and so dismissive of everything else. We don’t see the unprovable and say that it’s without cause or completely lacking in worth at all. Instead we see that unproven theory, that emotional reaction, that mysterious in origin opinion, and we basically put it into a category separate from empirically provable claims. One category, the category of the empirical, is useful. You can win arguments with these things, these claims or notions. You can prove to any fool, and more importantly to yourself, that you’re correct, that you have been right the whole time and that you have a true understanding of at least that thing.
Whenever we can convince ourselves of that we get a feeling of satisfaction or maybe we should call it a feeling of vindication. Life is really fucking hard and happiness is hard to find even though we want it so bad. Because of this we, as humans, are constantly looking for ways to make ourselves feel better or to feel happier. I don’t think either of those last two claims can really be argued against. It’s obvious that the vast majority of humans struggle with things like self doubt and self esteem. Life is hard even if it is also incredibly beautiful or whatever else and no matter how easy my life is there are people suffering right now. In our desperate search for happiness we fall into these traps all the time, without even realizing it.
I want to tell you a story that relates to what I’m trying to say about finding happiness. The story is about a video game but just humor me here. When I was maybe 10 years old or so I started playing a game called Final Fantasy 10. In this game you progress through a story while fighting in turn based battles. Most battles you fight in are just random fights against nameless monsters but boss battles always involve some story element. Usually, a boos battle is a fight against a character or a machine important to the plot. The boss battles are hard but every time you fight some unimportant, and easily defeated, monster your characters get stronger. What this means is that the more you run around fighting boring monsters, the stronger you get, and then the easier the boss battles that continue the story are.
Now, being 10 years old and new to this type of game I did not really understand this system. I didn’t give a flying F about the battles. I was drawn into the game by the Story because that’s was interesting and new to me. Because of this state of mind I would skip as many battles as I could. I wanted to just get to the next plot point as fast as possible. The game lets you run away from the easier battles with unnamed monsters, in case you need to get somewhere fast or something. Of course, this means I would just run from every fight to make the story continue. I got about halfway through the game like this winning boss battles by skill alone but, eventually I got to a boss battle that I couldn’t beat. I had been lazy on my journey and in avoiding every fight I had ensured that my characters never got any stronger. After a dozen, or so, hours of playing the game my laziness finally caught up to me. Because the Boss battles are part of the story and are therefore un-skippable I essentially “hard locked” my game. I couldn’t get out of the battle and I couldn’t leave to get stronger so I had actually had to restart the whole game from the beginning.
On my second playthrough I told myself that I wouldn’t run from any fights. I knew that some people would go out of their way to fight more and more monsters to get even stronger but I told myself that if the game was gonna make me go out of my way to find even more boring battles to fight I would just stop playing and go do something actually fun. On this play through I beat the entire game without ever struggling in a single boss fight. Simply not avoiding any fights was enough to make the game easy. All I had to do was not scroll down in the menu to that button that said “Run” and I was good. Ok, now I’m gonna use that story to explain the desire to people have to be provably correct. You probably won’t see the connection for a while but don’t worry about it.
As I implied before, I think the sort of “goal” for most people in life is to be happy. That seems to be the simple way to describe the Prime Motivator, at least as far as I can tell. Now, obviously how to get happiness is one of those incredible questions that almost everyone that has ever existed has tried to answer but we still don’t have a consensus. In my opinion some strategies that are used the most often are actually the strategies I believe are most unviable.
One way to make yourself happier is to increase your self esteem. The most common way to do this is to compare yourselves to other people. We, as social creatures, compare ourselves to others all the time anyway. Who among us hasn’t looked at the life of some old friend who now has a family, a nice big house, a nice car, a respectable career, and an attractive husband? How many among us have really never wondered why that other person the same age as us is so successful while we have no fucking clue what we’re doing with our lives?
This is a super common way comparing ourselves to others has an impact on our self esteem and even though we might not like to consider it we do the exact same thing in reverse just as often. When we see someone who’s life has turned to shit there’s always a part of us that says, “You know, I might not have a career or kids but at least I’m not them.” This is basically why bullies exist. Everyone knows the stereotype that bullies are usually the kids with the lowest self esteem and with the most problems. This isn’t exactly true but what is true is that everyone has issues, bullies included. My theory is that when a bully is making some other kid miserable they are doing it to make themselves feel better. I mean if I’m gonna say that a desire to be happy is the Prime Motivator than I have to find a way to rationalize “evil” acts with that motive.
A bully is often someone who is has come to rely almost entirely on the “at least I’m not them” thought for happiness. If your self esteem is based on comparing yourself to other people, obviously with the goal of being among the best. One way to move yourself up in those comparison rankings is to raise yourself up and the other way is to push other people down. Both strategies supposedly end with you higher up in the “who’s the best” rankings that you are sadly basing your self worth on.
Now, before we talk about how actually viable any strategy for happiness is we gotta talk about how obvious some strategies are. Clearly, any strategy that is either super complicated or difficult is gonna be tried less often by people than a strategy that’s simple or easy. So, what we might try to do is to find which strategy is the easiest to try. In my opinion the simplest strategy to enact is to make other people feel miserable.
What are the reasons this strategy is so easy and so seemingly effective? This strategy makes you feel powerful since you are influencing others so much. It makes the notion that the other person actually is worse off than you easier to convince yourself of. You just put all that work in being an asshole to make sure that its true. It’s a really easy strategy to get good at because you already know what makes you miserable so you just do that to other people.
It’s also really easy because there will ALWAYS be someone around that can easily be made miserable. We can all easily be made miserable so you’ll never run into an availability issue with this strategy. It is a VERY easy strategy to learn from others because, as it is the most common, it’s therefore the most likely to be learned at an early age. This strategy also makes the people that you currently are not attacking afraid of you because of your skill at making other miserable. Therefor, the better you are at this strategy the less likely it is for your peers to use it on you, at least so you think. This strategy can be implemented with just words and body language which means you’re never actually breaking any laws or serious rules. Words, additionally, leave no empirical evidence of being used like a bruise or an injury. In a society that only really values the empirically provable most verbal assaults go almost completely without consequence. The reward, of feeling “better than”, is immediate as you watch your victim cry in front of the other kids while everyone looks at you with fear. This strategy is also an especially clear message to the people watching. This means that anyone else who might agree with your strategy can spot you and join in the joy with you. You can use the fact that another person agrees with you to further convince yourself you made the right choice in strategy. It’s harder for someone who has chosen a different strategy, like the strategy of isolation, as one example, to surround themselves with like many minded people who can help generate the “mob mentality security blanket” humans always crave.
It also feeds into some other strategies without any additional effort. What I mean by that is this.
Another strategy to maintain your happiness is to never ever let yourself consider that you are wrong. Obviously, being wrong is horrible and anyone who is wrong should be ashamed of themselves. That’s an exaggeration of course but a lot of people don’t realize how scared they are to be wrong. I know when I was a kid I was terrified of it, that’s why I wouldn’t raise my hand in class to answer a question. Everyone knows the feeling of the teacher calling on you and then telling you your answer was incorrect. Everyone knows the feeling of an elementary school teacher calling on you to read a book passage out loud. You sit there terrified that you don’t fumble any of the words. Terrified that there may be a word you’ve never seen before and you’ll have to get the teacher to pronounce it for you. Everyone also knows that that particular fear usually makes it more likely for you to actually fumble a word. It feeds into itself, a self fulfilling prophecy.
Our society and our education system make being wrong equivalent to the religious concept of being a sinner. You are constantly compared to your peers by your grades which are decided based on how good you are at “avoiding being incorrect”.
All of these things contribute to a psychological fear of being wrong despite the fact that we all know and agree that nobody is right 100% of the time. It’s the same thing as the feeling of shame in Christianity. Despite all of us knowing that we are sinners and knowing that Jesus, or God, or whoever, forgives us and loves us completely, we still seem to have the need to feel so much shame about being flawed. When we make a mistake we need to give the church money so they forgive us. We need to say 12 Hail Mary’s and pray for an hour so that God forgives us. This whole thing contributes to a fear, deep inside of us, of being wrong.
If you can prove to yourself that your strategy is working than you can prove to yourself that you’re right about picking that strategy. If, every time you start to doubt that strategy, you can simply walk up to the nearest person and make yourself feel better through their pain then, you can basically tell yourself to fully commit to that strategy. If that kind of happiness is freely available at all times then there’s no need to change it. Everyone wants the strategy they chose to be correct because otherwise that would mean they’ve wasted time, made mistakes, been wrong. So many people have just gotten to the point in life where they will never again consider the possibility that they’re wrong. They’ve spent their entire life using other people’s mistakes as a tool to convince themselves that they are better than. At this point admitting to a mistake would mean that you’re just like all those dumb, sad, pathetic, weak, losers that you’ve used as the very foundation for your own self worth.
Everytime you choose to be a bully to someone not only do you reap the supposed benefits of that action but you force yourself further and further away from the possibility of considering another option. The more you commit, the more people you sacrifice, the deeper you dive into that ocean, the harder it is to see the way out. That way is simply admitting to error, in other words admitting to humanity. Eventually, over the course of so many years you can end up so deep under water that you forget the surface even exists. Eventually, you’ve been in the cave for so long that all other types of living that you could consider simply cease to exist. You remove the possibility of being wrong, of introspection, of change, of “weakness” from the metaphysical universe all together.
Every time you attack another person to make yourself feel better you get closer to that glorious moment of ascension where you never have to worry about anything ever again. You are finally free from the questions of life and the struggle of being human. In the same way that it never occurs to a tree what the world might look like on the other side of the horizon, it will never occur to you that you might be worse off than those people you think of as below you.
So, basically we, me the writer and you the reader, have laid out the most common, most obvious, most immediately rewarding, and easiest strategy for happiness. People who have chosen this strategy are all over the place. We all know them. I bet that some of you reading this post I’ve written here and using it as evidence that you must be better than those sad people who have chosen the life of bullying. I, in describing that possible path, might just be trying to convince myself that I’m above the people around me. I’m trying to convince myself that I’m better than people who say incredible things like, “I believe the election was stolen from Trump as much as I believe in the love of Christ.”
I know I just threw in politics, the type of topic that immediately dominates all others being discussed, but I despise Trump so you should stop reading this if that pisses you off.
I am not God or even Godlike in any way. I have no illusions about this. It is impossible for me to know what’s truly correct and truly wrong. All I can do is look at the evidence provided by the empirical world around and the evidence provided by my emotional self and try to come up with the correct answer. I know I’ve been deriding empiricism this whole time but the goal in life is never to completely eradicate one side of things from yourself while fully facilitating the other side. What you want is Balance and the idea of Purity cannot allow more than one side to exist. Balance, however, does requires more than one thing.
That desire for some kind of “Purity” will inevitably lead to that “glorious” existence I said was at the end of The Bully Path, no matter how righteous or ethical your idea of “Purity” is. The reason the two strategies, Desire to be Correct and Desire to be Pure, lead to the same outcome is because both goals are IMPOSSIBLE to accomplish, impossible to achieve, impossible to ever exist. You cannot possibly fully eradicate the part of yourself that you think shouldn’t be there and if you try you doom yourself to simply never seeing it and never understanding it while it sits there continuing to be a part of you as much as it always was.
Balance is what you want. That doesn’t mean a 50/50 balance. The Yin-Yang symbol we all know might suggest at first glance that some sort of philosophical idea of balance means equality between the two dyads. I’m not suggesting anything so concrete and I want to be clear that my definition of balance is not the same as equality. I don’t think the best way to balance anger and love is to believe that both should be given equal respect and equal space in my mind. When I talk about the balance of empiricism and… uh… what is the term for the opposite of empiricism?
According to Google the opposite is rationalism? I don’t like that term and I also don’t like the way it frames the concept of empiricism. To me Empiricism means provable, arguable, agreed upon, statistically obvious, mathematically irrefutable. Maybe that means I’ve been using the term Empiricism wrong this whole time but I actually don’t care about that. I believe that every person in existence, through the fact of having different lives, will have differences in our connotations of words. Because of this no word you hear another person use should be assumed to mean exactly what you personally think it means. When a stranger says “Liberals” they could honestly mean anything regardless of how I might define the word. In this way, I have come to have many terms for things that are probably misappropriations of the actual word itself. Regardless, huge parts of humanity have been, and will remain, obsessed with clearly defining, labeling, categorizing, and quantifying everything in existence and the fact that words are inadequate creates many issues between people.
Sorry for that rant about words.
The thing I’m trying to say with all this rambling is that; in the struggle to find happiness there are countless paths to take and so many of them remind me of that video game I talked about earlier. That button that said “Run” gave me what I thought I wanted and it did so immediately. There are so many paths towards happiness, that work like The Bully Path that human’s have been following for millennia. Another point is that you need to keep your eyes open for signs that you might be on the wrong path. When the game stops letting you forward, when the world throws a sign at you telling you that the strategy you’ve chosen isn’t working, when that moment comes, as it inevitably will, you can choose to ignore it, or to call the game stupid, or you can declare that the world around you is must be filled with idiots that are below you, idiots that couldn’t design a good game if it was their jobs. You and I, we can choose to double down on the wrong path just like so many people before us and around us have done without even realizing it. We can desperately swim with all our might, fueled by denial, fear, anger, and self-loathing towards that point of bliss where the concept of choice leaves our field of vision; where change becomes impossible, where release begins, where death begins.
Or, we can embrace the facts of our humanity. We can actually believe the fact that we all already know; that we are not perfect, we are not pure, we will never be. Until death itself takes us, we will not be finished learning, growing, or choosing. We can choose to keep our eyes open and never avoid the things that are hard but true. We can let the evidence around us be enough for us. We can choose to let the stories and warning given by others be enough for us to trust. To trust that we don’t need to see for ourselves how paths like War, or Hatred, or Meth might turn out. We can pay attention to the happiness, the real happiness, or lack thereof, of the people around us and learn from them. We can learn from each other. All people may learn from each other. We can choose to be “ok” with being wrong. Any alternative is to ensure that we’re never truly “ok”. We will never actually achieve perfection and to convince yourself that you have is to lie to yourself, to kill yourself. We can actually realize that imperfections are the source of all things beautiful and new and that even if perfection, or purity, was possible we would still reject it as the death it is.
The Mind of Joshypoo 