As kids we were all bullied about things we had no control over so, generally, we all want to be liked despite who we are.
The smartest person in the room isn’t trying to show off how smart they are, they’re trying to be liked despite the fact that they’re smart.
The most attractive person in the room isn’t trying to show off how attractive they are, they’re trying to be liked despite the fact that they’re attractive.
The richest person in the room isn’t trying to show off how rich they are, they’re trying to be liked despite the fact that they’re rich.
So, you know, don’t trust show-offs. Trust the inner child.
The story about the Tower of Babel is pretty historically accurate when you realize that before Judeo-Christianity came onto the scene people weren’t that patriotically attached to their own deities.
Basically, gods and cultures weren’t connected. “The one you call Pluto, we call Hades. The one you call Krishna, we call Herakles,” the Greeks said under Alexander the Great as he conquered Central Asia, “We’re all speaking the same language at our core.”
All of that changed when Exodus 20:5 was written down:
“You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.”
Before that was written you’d have a hard time telling apart someone from the time of polytheism and someone who now says, “I’m not religious, just spiritual – I will always believe in a higher power.”
I nerd out about great business strategy so this isn’t a bash on Judeo-Christianity in any way, quite the opposite. As John Gray wrote, “Modern politics is just a chapter in the book of religion.” And it can be argued that modern business is as well.
Us humans are religious animals, and we’re not the only primates who are. Even elephants are religious, so who in their right mind would hate on someone using science to reach us at the core of what we are and always will be? That’s just being smart. Apple Inc. could learn a thing or two from Judeo-Christianity.
Or, you could say they already did. We all did actually. Listen closely the next time an app or website makes it harder for you to leave or to watch a video on another website, you can practically hear the AI-gods in the machine whispering, “Stay, you shall not bow down to them or worship them…”
As someone once joked, “When YHWH/Jehovah said I am the one true god all of the other gods died laughing.”
Because this is all about not having competition. You can’t have someone all to yourself without first telling them that you’re the one, and that talking to others is wrong. You can’t have someone all to yourself without being jealous.
MAGA is the creed of mostly white men because when anyone yells that they want to, “Make America great again,” what they’re usually yelling is that they want to make themselves great again.
This is why mostly white men can also be heard chanting, “Make Britain great again!” or, “Make Australia great again!” It all means the same thing: Make Me Great Again!
American (and British, and Australian) men are going to foreign countries to find wives because they want to turn back time and live in a century where White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) are great husbands just for being white and male. In essence, they don’t want to live in the 21st century.
For all its faults America is at least the 21st century for a lot of its peoples; women, people of colour, anyone’s who LGBTQ+. Unlike with Thailand, the Philippines, and many other foreign countries. And for men who don’t want to live in the 21st century these countries that haven’t quite reached it are the answer to all of their problems.
To put things simply, American men are going to foreign countries to find wives because the countries they’re going to haven’t truly advanced to a century where a woman doesn’t need to marry a man to feed herself. They’re going to foreign countries to find wives because they miss the subservience that comes with a woman needing to marry them to eat. Because they miss when America was great.
American men are going to foreign countries to find wives because there they are great again.
Being bad at something you truly love is one of life’s secret blessings. You’re given that much more time to focus on it than those who get it easily. The road is that much longer.
The more chances you give yourself the less respect you’ll have for yourself.
You’ll begin to ignore the standards that you’ve set for yourself exactly because you’ll know that you’ll always give yourself another chance. You’ll know that no matter what you won’t walk away.
You’ll get comfortable with depending on self-forgiveness. Thus turning self-forgiveness into a crutch comparable to self-avoidance rather than into a motivation for change.
Never ever get comfortable with disrespecting yourself.
The difference between the tourist and the traveller is that the traveller allows themselves to be so shaped by where they are at the moment that they can rightfully say, “I’m not just in Toronto, I am Toronto. I’m not just in love, I am love. I’m not just in the abyss, I am the abyss.”
Unlike the tourist, the objective of the traveller is to not just be moved but to be remade.
And to then shun where and who they are completely so that they can move on to a new way of being, a new city, a new them. Because the traveller knows that you can’t ever truly be in a new city, in a new moment, in a new you, when an older has even a bit of your soul.
The objective of the traveller is to one day look back and say, “Not only did I see everything, I was everything. Not only was I alive, I was life. I was never a tourist.”
“For in my eternal search for something greater, I’ve left too many cities, too many lovers and friends, too many daily routines and ways of living that I was still madly in love with for me to have such a half-hearted title. I am a traveller. I pack my entire life with me when I move, my entire being, I leave nothing behind, not even love.”
The difference between being a tourist and being a traveller is exactly how much of your heart you carry with you.
The art dealer successfully possesses the main character’s body but he quickly dies because a cop pulled him over on his way out of town and he reached for his ID a little too quickly.
All of the other party attendees die under somewhat similar circumstances because none of them had been taught as children on how to act in a black body so as to not be shot and killed for something trivial and mundane, like sitting on their own couch.
Overcome by this news and the bewildering fact that being black is its own horror movie the Armitage family members–each having already possessed a new body by now–make terrible financial decisions, lose everything, and live out the rest of their lives as a black family suffering under the crushing weight of poverty.
With the way their country is set up against anyone in a black body, the Armitage family never escapes poverty and they realize that their brain transplant experiments have successfully ruined the lives of their children, their children’s children, and so on.
And, finally, after having exhausted all other possibilities, the Armitage family accepts their predicament and tries to make their country better for black people, for themselves. They fail miserably and become bitter.
“Let’s wade through the crowd of people who love us because they want to fuck us to find an intimacy that’s far less ephemeral. The last thing our heart wants is a short-lived love affair.”
ID:
“Hey, at least our heart’s getting something then. All we have and all we’ve ever known are momentary flames. The world’s not as warm as any of us want it to be, there aren’t enough lovers in it to even make a crowd for us to wade through. See, love comes from kindness and kindness requires attention, and that’s the rarest commodity. From us. From anyone.
Wading through a crowd of lovers in search of our true love is beautiful but it’s just not realistic. We ourselves aren’t paying enough attention to be real lovers and we don’t expect others to be either. Honestly, fuck true love and true lovers, we’ve given up on all that and we know it. What we’re really searching for is how to quiet the rumblings of our love-starved heart so we can get on with our day without breaking down.”
EGO:
“By grabbing on tightly to who we can when we can, I guess. By burning our morals and pride a little to have a couple warm, bright, and sultry hot moments with our latest lover while the fire in their eyes is still strong. By doing what we must while we still have them and their attention, and they still have us and ours.
Our heart will understand and forgive us for burning idealistic self-respect to ash in our need for temporary heat, even on the days our memories won’t. I mean, we have to light something on fire to keep our heart warm and full, we’re human, we weren’t built for cold and hunger.
If longlasting love and the search for it is beautiful and warm and just right but wildly unrealistic then let us survive the cold by frequently burning ourselves on the high temperatures of the realism of our many temporary flames. At least that’s something.
Besides, there are love-starved hunger-rumblings in everyone’s heart, who’s honestly going to judge us on how we burn our ideals of love to feed ourselves in the moment in a world where we all understand why someone would dig through the trash to feed themselves? Hunger’s real, true love’s less so.”
// Excerpt from “Your Golden Locked Heart and the Three Bares: How to Quiet the Rumblings of Your Love-Starved Heart so You Can Get on with Your Day Without Breaking Down,” a nonexistent book made-up by Arsène Hodali.
“I’m difficult to understand” is an excuse, and you’re lazy.
Communication is difficult, for everyone. For everyone. If you want to be understood then it’s your job to work at being understood, nobody else’s.
If you don’t want to be understood and just want to wallow in the loneliness of being incomprehensible that’s fine as well, I mean – that’s a mood, but don’t ever say “I’m difficult to understand” or “I’m complicated.” Say what you really mean to say. Say, “I’m difficult to understand because I don’t actually want to be understood by you, even if I act like I do. I’m too lazy to put in the necessary hard work required of me to be understood. And, frankly, I don’t think you’re worth the time it’d take for me to translate myself into your language. You aren’t worth my time or attention.”
Yeah, that’s what you really mean to say whenever you say “I’m difficult to understand,” because everyone who works in the fields of communication that’s worth their salt understands that although communication is difficult it’s not up to their intended audience to decipher what they’re really trying to say. I mean, everyone knows that communication is difficult and that people are hard of hearing.
I repeat, everyone knows that communication is difficult and that people are hard of hearing. Everyone knows that there will always be people we’ll all be too lazy to interpret ourselves for, people we roll our eyes at. But if the people we really care about don’t understand us – that’s on us, not them. So, don’t ever mistake unfathomableness for genius. Don’t ever mistake nobody-understands-me loneliness for anything other than laziness, for anything other than strange pride. Loneliness stemming from lazy pride is the weirdest flex. So, you know, stop flexin’.
If the modern world disregarded social status and widely embraced a system of kowtowing when apologizing, of publicly kneeling and touching your forehead to the ground in front of the person you’ve wronged, almost all apologies today would be revealed for what they truly are, empty.
The modern person kneels for no one, especially when they’re wrong.
