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Approaching the new: As children, we learn to experiment and experience novelty until the thrill produces anxiety, threatening to overwhelm us. Then we rush back to safety, regain our courage, and set out again.
This cycle remains, but as we grow older, we can detach from reality, allowing our pathologies to simulate the anxiety and thrill of novelty and discovery, often at the cost of relationships.
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Consider how we treat anything dumber than us as "lesser." They become disposable, or at least subject to the regulations and "care" of those more intelligent. We have an intelligence bias, yet we have developed AI, which will be more intelligent than us. As we anthropomorphize sentences as intelligence, we fear our IQ-based dominance will be applied back to us.
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Benjamin Bratton speaks of the reversal of the “uncanny valley.”
The uncanny valley is when an artificial construct gets very close to looking or behaving as human; its proximity to the real thing is precisely why it becomes more disturbing, even evoking horror or disgust.
As technology gets better and creates informational duplicates of us (digital persona) we now become disturbed when we see ourselves through the eyes of technology.
Our digital double, the data construct, is perhaps too accurate to stomach; not a replicant of a human, but data’s exact portrayal stripped of our context and self-deception.
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“desire is a memory of happiness, fear is a memory of pain” Buddhist proverb
Yet, according to Lacan, we often desire what we have never had: it is the object of our desire that causes us pain by our inability to possess it completely.
The separation from our supposed happiness is our pain, and our fear is the loss of this painful striving: without pursuit we lose purpose, our greatest fear is losing ourselves.
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Your new state of anxiety is sold to you as freedom.
When your stable job collapses and you take on a precarious freelance career, you are now “free” as your own boss. Without universal care, you can now decide to spend that money on vacation to reduce your stress.
Your freedom to reinvent yourself in order to stay ahead of the market shifts and reductions is not the liberty you sought, but a pernicious fake freedom thrust upon you.
from Slavoj Zizek
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According to Freud, the fear of castration (a lack) leads to a multiplication of representative genitalia: scared boys have lots of big toys (phallic stand-ins).
Mark Fisher says if we apply this logic to modernism, the multitude of object fetishes proves our disavowal of an underlying fear: modernism does not exist. We have lost it and must indulge in manufactured commodities to avoid losing faith entirely.
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The impatient need to speed things up in an anxious attempt at control, which can soothe fears.
The lazy procrastinate and ask for patience. Claiming they are unwilling to expend excess energy, the lazy inevitably feel anxiety as immanent failure approaches, yet do not alleviate it (act to directly solve it).
Both stem from a fear of not doing enough, well enough, but in polar approaches.
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Consider the times you got precisely what you wanted or your fears were made manifest.
We know this may happen, but you cannot remember even a small fraction of them. Currently, your brain is occupied with your newest worries (catastrophizing) and hopes (fantasy).
Upon consideration, our hopes for the future are merely a way to displace our fears: hope is an antidote to the uncontrollable present.
from Sam Harris
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It is impossible to know what your future self will value.
You will not know this stranger, the same way the younger version of you does not recognize the current you.
The only actions you can take for this presumed valuable future self are generic goals, such as financial security, a modicum of free time, and meaningful relationships.
From there, you work backward: find the closest path at hand to support your future. If we see our lives in this way, every decision is structural and expedient, yet will shape the interests and concerns (personality and character) of future you as much as practical stability will.
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“The monsters we create welcome us aboard.”
Mark Downham
Our fantasies we provoke to frighten not only become transformatively terrible, but they take us further into terror. They perform the inverse of scaring us away: they teach us to become comfortable with the monstrous, if not to be monstrous ourselves.
The revelation is our familiarity makes our intimates, the creator lavishing attentions thrills in the creative distress.
