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The rockstar creates and energizes while the dragon protects its hoard.
The glamour of creativity is alluring, yet for most, it is a consumptive trap (drawing more from you than returning to you).
The less glamorous persistent strategy to maintain wealth and status is not to create but to wrest power and eternal resources, such as real estate, away from the aging dragons: don’t waste your time making; start slaying and squatting.
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“How could you?” is answered with “That’s no excuse!”
People forget that an explanation is not an excuse; it is not a justification. Explaining the mechanics is not appealing to morality.
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Do you find yourself looking for a reason to check in?
We often think we are doing this for somebody else, doing them a favor.
Still, it seems to be a means of grounding ourselves: this is who I am, this is where I am, please reciprocate my thinking of you by connecting with me.
It is a pattern of behavior to reverify ourselves in relation to others.
Many people complain that checking in is repressive control in a relationship, but once you don’t have the relationship you find yourself looking for and creating the repression you miss.
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You don’t withhold your feelings for the other person out of kindness or care.
You do it for yourself: to void future abandonment and to cover your ass. That way, no one can ever blame you.
Withholding is a form of control.
You present a “fake you,” which is manipulative, and when people discover the deception they leave, robbing you of your stability. Or they stay, and you resent them because you have to keep pretending.
(From Nick Pollard, mostly)
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We once repressed our desires, channeling energies into capitalist production and some neurosis or dysfunction.
Yet to liberate those desires is to offer them more fully to manipulation and cooptation by Capitalism. Today your freed desires feed the machine that once repressed you.
In this sense, there is no more prolonged repression to access and no angst or will to motivate sublimation: we have released the slight whim, the smallest grain of sand before it truly aggravates. Each urge is liberated instantly through desire and consumerism. And yet, we are still troubled, aggrieved, and chaffed.
The reaction is a resuscitated burrowing into stoic asceticism, where self-governance is a fad amongst the most hedonistic.
We now look to rediscover how to control and repress ourselves to build up the tension: a recognition of internal pressure as power.
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We can point at a "why" to explain when we do things.
When we fight we can claim family (or a friend) provoked us. But knowing "why" allows us to misuse the stated purpose for the real reason: the real reason is never the stated reason.
Often a fight is a means to be close, get attention, to feel intensity and release, only to revel in the bonding of the aftermath.
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We create our failures: they are our excuses not to succeed because some part of us is scared.
"I can’t do that, it would compromise who I am."
We protect our "self" relentlessly, setting up fail-safe double binds to protect our scared ego: "I am not liked because I am not likable" or "To be true, I must isolate."
The symptoms of our distress, perhaps a psychosomatic ailment, are resolved once we work past our self-righteous barriers. And yet, if we keep solving the excuses (I am not likable, I am authentic), our protectionist psychology creates new excuses to prevent change, which means we continue to hurt.
{Adlerian psychology}
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Doing wrong in the name of right seems obviously wrong. Virtue can shift into justice, and shade into justification.
But how do you know what is right?
The right is known because it endures, while means/ends instrumentalization contradicts itself.
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Moral people behave poorly, while many with integrity have no rules.
The recognition of this is to grasp absurdity and strip away all justifications.
Here, you are innocent, not naive but not justifying anything, living outside of dictated morality.
In this sense, the innocent is dangerous.(idea from Albert Camus)
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To be denied your planned desires provokes an overreaction.
We move through life assuming our accommodations, requests, and pleas will be met with reciprocity, or at least entertained. While this is a conceit, it is also a mainstay of civilization.
While being spurned smacks of petty boundary setting, if not outright malice, there is no justification for our rage as our mind spins up destructive scenarios: We are owed nothing and in turn owe them nothing.
Their boundary established the relationship: you are free from a relationship or politeness. For this clarity, we should thank them.
