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There is an ouroboros of history: we create the very errors we attempt to solve with our knowledge of history.
Not only is history “written by the victors,” but in attempting to learn and apply our lessons we misdiagnose (fall prey to confirmation bias) allowing us to recreate the idiocy we attempt to avoid.
In an ultimate irony, we recreate the circular cliche “history repeats itself” by applying the incorrect past lessons to current problems.
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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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Future you is a stranger, and we seldom empathize with strangers distant from us.
To improve your future life (by having discipline now), you must empathize with your future self enough to make them real: make them a vivid companion, full of your hopes and dreams, a friend that you talk to daily, writing letters into the future, and receiving them back.
Your imaginary friend who makes you better should be your future self, not your past self or your present devil.
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Digital reality (if it is to thrive) requires a knot, a point of chaos, at the center, which cannot be made to make sense: it is not cartesian and, therefore, can give birth to chaos and dreams that can save a world from the mathematical impulse of control.
This allows not for linear time (once again cartesian) but circular time with variation, Aeonic or Aion time.
In this cycle we find infinity, and this singular point (the knot of chaos) reminds us of The Aleph, where we can see and comprehend everything in the universe.
However, seeing worlds within worlds, such as digital reality, reminds us of the unimaginable excesses that the brain cannot fathom or grasp, an abundance we do not have language for, and thus cannot remember. Our recall is to only see glimpses recalled hazily (dreams), and from this chaos, we begin to create.
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You might expect the tyranny of time to be it’s resolute march forward without empathy, yet it is our social mass adoption of it as a governing system that transforms it to brutality.
Time is not relentless or uncaring. Time is shared mass consensus, and so it is a reflection of ourselves.
You can ignore time, as some Amazonian tribes. Or, while you’re asleep it ceases to matter. But upon awakening in our society the time prison of the clock manifests devastatingly real effects.
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Patience can appear passive, but it is widely acknowledged that it requires great willpower and discipline.
Passive patience is abdicating responsibility while playing virtuous, but active patience is setting yourself up for success in the future: you can appear patient while building skills, discipline, and fortitude to pounce when the moment is right.
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For the novelty seeker who will always keep up with new media and releases yet is compelled to consume all old media, everything is instant on-demand until gluttonously stuffed.
Your overfullness is in direct proportion to the emptiness of your life.
Our capacity to reside in the present, detached from media, has vanished. Yet our overconsumptive addiction thrusts us into the past, as our apathy for keeping up is overrun.
Nostalgia is the lazy desert of the overindulged.
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The hard-won rights of the previous generation are valuable, but the new generation will have new agendas which grew from prior victories.
The hard-won rights of yesterday are the footing for new battles today. But the youth are not interested in maintaining old infrastructure. At least not until they grow older.
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Symbols (and ideology) are tools that help us grasp and manipulate reality, like a pair of pliers or a flywheel. When the tools (symbols) are widely adopted, we find a new means of heightened speed and control.
Once literacy became commonplace, we could communicate more rapidly, allowing influence and manipulation by broadcasting easily repeatable messages faster.
The converse of symbolic ubiquity and indoctrination would be “incremental learning” or “particular skills acquisition,” such as becoming a stonemason, rather than rapid, frictionless downloads, the process of incremental tutelage and physicality can buffer or bottleneck the transfer rate, providing ample time for redirective response.
The symbolic’s rapid and straightforward dispersal -with virtually no investment to gain the knowledge- is appealing, allowing them to reside in every portion of our life. Yet, we do not have good defenses (immunological reactions) against such speed and its potential harm.
(This is echoed in the physicality of a human’s strength versus the flywheel’s released kinetic energy or the hand against the exponential clamping force of the pliers.)
