Posted by fredrivett 2 days ago
But invariably they're prompted if not reinforced by changes in circumstance.
Before the internet replaced actual experience with virtual, many middle-to-upper class westerners took a year after school to travel. Traveling means people don't know you; you discover that you can present yourself however you want, and people will mostly go along. (Something similar is true for meditation, etc.)
So the fixed world becomes more dynamic, and as you return, you work on making a dynamic world that fits you instead of fitting yourself to the world: you apply to that school, chase that partner, etc.
People who commit to work or partners or houses/locations before traveling in this sense are really making it much harder to live.
The scarcity of opportunity makes this much, much worse. People feel they need to keep following their followers or the latest tech trends to stay relevant for opportunities, and they never travel.
“How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
Except it's a bit deeper I think; the author realised at one point they were confirming to a stereotype, maybe even thinking they were playing by the rules and doing what was expected of them by ??? society or something, but then realised they have free will, they can do whatever they want in the privacy of their own home and the cops can't stop them, and they were in bad physical shape.
They realised they were holding themselves back and stopped.
We climb the mountain and the mountain climbs us back.
> For me, something shifted in my late twenties. Growing up I guess you could call it. I don’t remember the exact straw that broke the camel’s back, but a desire for change grew.
> If you identity as a failure, incapable of achievement, unfit, unlovable, destined to play a bit-part role in your own story, then by heck no matter how much willpower you put in to push that boulder up the hill, it will return to its place.
> You have to actually want it.
How do you actually want to change? That part remains largely a mystery, and appears to be the all-important ingredient everything pretty much flows from.
At the end of the day, nobody knows why they want certain things - they just do. There is a lot of magic to that part. Where does "motivation" come from?
I go back and forth on this, but I pretty much settle on that motivation is the all-important ingredient which no one actually knows much about and all the rest is just backward-rationalizing to make ourselves feel good and feel that we have more agency than we really do.
I think we go out of our way to rationalize decisions that emanate beyond reason because the truth is a lot more stark, and usually we only try to rationalize irrational choices when they backfire and we face criticism for them.
Allahu A’alam.
Pretty fascinating the retro marriage of words and tech gets us here, to a kind of Gutenberg stage of restriction.
Words and narratives are low-bandwidth compression for meaning. It's simple. How did we get stuck here? We were lazy Pleistocene kids, and lazy Pleistocene kids we remain.
Think hard now, the words are being used to extinct us. How did we get stuck here? Math? Status? Money? a combination of all these.
Look at the status drive that pretends we have beliefs in this post. Read it carefully. Do we have beliefs, or do we simply have actions (neural syntax)?
Debate me, don't just downvote me, that's proving my point.
Time to rethink all communication.