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We demand unvarnished clarity, yet when trauma—like a crime—is reported too concisely, the teller becomes suspect for their clarity and precision.
Inconsistency is consistent with human nature, while over-embellished stories, laden with absurd detail, show their lies—straining too hard to convince, they abandon natural behavior.
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That which is, is.
Survival comes before thriving; once we are thriving, we are full of opinions, ideas, and reasons. Yet this is to forget the first principle and move on to our luxury of wishing for something different: a moral order that justifies our existence and our wishes.
Squirming and expressing opinions won’t allow you to survive and thrive. There is no “because,” no ideological argument, or complaint that can fight against the rule of the cosmos.
To apply our complaint to the universe is illogical and downright silly: hubristic existential entitlement begging for destruction.
‘Why me?’ is not a question the universe ever answers.”
Chp7, The Mercy of Gods James S.A. Corey.
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“How are you doing?” ~ “Fine.”
Most greetings are symbolic exchanges: a social nicety, a nod to politeness, in no way meant to be answered as a genuine inquiry. They start an interaction and establish a minimum harmony between people.
As an aside, the correct response, “I’m well,” instantly reveals an exhausting pedant, thrilled with a minor win and unaware of the larger loss.
More interestingly, the phrase operates on multiple implexed levels:
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To be nice is not to be good, to be good is to stand for what is good.
Being nice is polite, wanting to be being liked, and sacrificing the good to get along, despite knowing better.
Sure, you can be nice and kind up to a point or be politically astute up to a point, but a whole person (an authentic, emotionally secure, resilient individual) will cease polite agreement and take a stand for what is good.
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Vaporware was technology releases that never came to be, highly promised and loudly touted software and video games that were delayed for years until they dematerialized. Vaporware sold the future before it existed, boosting stock prices on fanciful dreams.
Vaporwave is a musical style (from about 2010) born from a nostalgia for the 1980s: a disillusioned re-creation of a aesthetic that never existed, at once cynical of the 1980s optimism and perversely sincere in its stylistic adherence. Somewhat techno, somewhat adult contemporary, all muzak, it is intentionally looping and unsettling. As a critique of optimistic, neocon capitalism, it revels in broken promises feeding us back what we loved in fragmented memory form: it is a remembrance of hope, distorted, often cheesy, beautiful and melancholic.
As we now consume Vaporwave as nostalgia, many of the artists keep the music free, so it cannot be commoditized, attempting to avoid the pitfalls of Vaporwear reselling our dreams.
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Money and protracted non-binding alliances have become our social immune system.
Given wars, familial relationships, poverty, or climate change, we gesture support with one hand and throw money with the other, spewing placating platitudes as we retreat into our affluence.
We build walls of resources around infections while we distance ourselves from direct contact, often through attenuated proxies and abstract language. The problem is that we neither excise nor subsume the toxin, the damaging agent. In our active avoidance, we never cure our spreading symptoms, leaving less and less ability to maneuver in a disease-ridden body.
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There are real problems, but assigning blame has become taboo; historically, generalizing others (reductive) easily leads to demonization and subsequent bad outcomes.
Yet, to demonize speaking suppositions (half-formed or ill-formed) undermines the problem-solving process. To utter an observation invites alternate points of view by which arguments can be parsed, while to stay silent on taboo topics is to ensure that societal consensus never matches observable reality.
For example, in the 1970s, rising crime was real. Acknowledging systemic failures rendered individual action moot: You cannot "blame the victim." Although empathetic to injustice, this rhetoric shifted policy toward moral retaliation against enforcement, making speaking obvious truths (violence and theft) a form of self-exile from accepted discourse—rendering many critical solutions silent.
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Ideology is the frame in which we understand the world so that it seems non-contradictory. Therefore, it is a necessarily reductive structure that is contradictory; it just makes us blind to anything that does not fit the framework. Yet because ideology often breaks down when we glimpse the contradiction, it must be supplemented by fantasy at its core: an irrational belief that can overcome the discontinuity of reality.
from Todd McGowan
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When life doesn’t turn out the way you want, that is normal.
To rage about it is entitlement: to expect “personal consideration” or “proper context” in a system (society) that is both selfish and uncaring sounds like insanity. It is like arguing with a psychopath.
(Note: This stoic stance does not mean we should accept unfairness, but we should expect it and remain humbly surprised when we are treated as valuable humans. This stance privileges reality over ideals.)
