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axiomabstractions · 3 years

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Interlude

Tonight, for the first time in about 6 months, I truly worried about myself. For about the past year and a half, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking. Not that I didn’t always spend a lot of time doing that; I have. However, my thinking has been of a much different nature these past 18 months, as I’ve been constructing a newfound sense of identity around principles and aspirations I have personally decided are good and true. No part of this has been easy. It may be a bit of a moot point to state as much, given that life, in general, is not easy lol. Still, I’ve made a lot of progress, and can definitively state that 2021 has, so far, been the best year of my life. I am proud of myself for that, though I know I still have much more growing to do in the coming months.

There are several things, which I’ve known for some time have been holding me back, yet have failed to address. I have been a tobacco user and addicted to nicotine since before I was 18. My diet, exercise, and sleeping habits have been wildly inconsistent for many years (I’m glad to say I’ve mostly gotten the sleep thing under control, at this point). I have an addiction to social media and dating apps, which I have mainly used over the years as an empty substitute for a natural, healthy pool of social opportunities. I have also habitually used other forms of entertainment and media as distractions from the anxiety I regularly feel due to all the unresolved shit I just explained. I’m sure there’s more, but those are the main things I feel I’m still struggling with. So, yes, although this year may have been the best so far, I think it’s clear there is still much work left to be done.

I felt this very strongly tonight, in the form of powerful wave of depression. If you’ve read any of what I’ve written and shared, to this point, you may have gathered I’m no stranger to depression. I’ve never been clinically diagnosed, but it’s an old friend. I’ve become much better at dealing with it this year, and now it only pops its ugly head up temporarily, once in a blue moon. It’s nowhere near the problem it used to be for me, which I am very grateful for. I could never have reached this place of inner strength I now find myself in without the support of several people, who have chosen to assist me in shouldering this emotional burden of mine.

I have often felt guilty for this, the fact that I have never quite been well enough put together to maintain inner peace on my own, but I’ve come to believe that needing help sometimes is just a part of life. We all need a little sometimes, some of us more than others. Some people may view this as a weakness, self-reliance being the masculine, noble alternative. I, however, don’t agree with that. I think there is much more power and nobility in acknowledging your own flaws, your own weaknesses, and inviting help where you may need it most. I see this as a sort of superpower, because, in addition to holding the ego at bay, it grants you access to knowledge, talents, and generosity of others. It provides those others with an avenue to be useful, appreciated, and acknowledged by someone other than themselves. It provides them with a reason to be they did not have to search or ask for, and the promise of gratification, should they only choose to make the effort to earn it.

Do I think I need help from others right now? Not so much, in any particular way. I think, more so than anything, I need to start helping myself more. While I realize I will need help from others again, at some point in the future, and am open to asking for that help wherever I may need it, I want to become someone who has more help to offer than I ask for. This has kind of been the theme of this year for me. I realized, I think it was back in February or March, if I ever hope to be able to offer help and value to others, I’ve got to fucking help myself first. I mean, it seems like such an obvious thing, but when I tell you this simple truth evaded me until I was 27… I can’t make this shit up.

I think I’m at the point now when I really need to just disconnect for a while. It may be a couple weeks. It may be a month. It may be until the end of the year. I don’t know how long I should unplug for. All I know is that I need to start listening to myself more closely. I need to start seeing myself more clearly. Again, I’ve come a very long way, but there is much work left for me to do. I need to make sure that, for the rest of this year, I focus diligently on serving myself as best as I can. I want to enter next year prepared to not only continue refining myself, but to also begin serving others in more substantial, fulfilling ways.

I will definitely continue my writing, mostly because it is my own form of personal therapy. I have already purchased a private domain space, and intend to get that up and running soon. As I post, I will keep you all updated, but I will also be keeping my engagement to a minimum. To any of you who have been reading these, I sincerely appreciate your time, attention, and support. It really does mean the world to me. I can only hope that you continue to find merit in my writing. As I’ve said before, I’m just getting started. See you fuckers on the other side.

#unplugged #journal #growth #self care #contribute #interlude #love

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axiomabstractions · 3 years

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Constructively Approaching Self Reflection: Part 3

More so than anything else, the human brain is a prediction machine. It is constantly making guesses about what is going to happen next in the environment and how the actions of the body will affect the outcome of those external events (external to the brain, not necessarily external to the body). When the prediction is true, everything is good. However, when the predictions our brains make about how our actions will affect the world around it are false, it often identifies this as a problem.

In response to an incorrect prediction, our brain will try to determine what exactly went wrong, and how does it need to adjust its prediction-making process in order to avoid being wrong about what outcomes will occur in the next similar situation. How does the body’s response to the external stimuli it is receiving need to be modified in order to produce a more desirable outcome next time it encounters the same pattern of stimuli? I’m no expert, but I believe this is all done in service to the natural chemical feedback systems hard-wired into our anatomy.

When the brain interprets an event or experience as good, it wants to replicate that experience. When the brain interprets an experience as bad or harmful, it tries to avoid those types of experiences. The brain accomplishes this by managing the signals it sends to the body, and fine-tuning how the body responds to the stimuli it receives. The brain is in constant communication with the outside world, through our sensory organs, and, I believe, it uses these as tools to accomplish two main goals:

Minimize its own suffering. Maximize actualization of its own will.

The only problem with this is it includes no mention of ethics or morals. It is very easy to see, as I’m sure you would find if you tried, that this minimalistic set of primary directives affords infinite opportunity to enact suffering onto others and, as a member of a social species, hinder oneself. I do not believe the brain evolved to necessitate treating others well. I believe it simply evolved to maximize reproductive success, and has become an exceedingly useful tool for serving that end.

This claim can be easily evidenced by observing human behavior. Most people will put themselves first, even if it means enacting some form of consequence on another. This seems to largely be true unless they have children, in which case, the children usually come first. Still, protecting ones own children over oneself is an act of protecting ones own reproductive success.

I don’t want to detract too far from the point here. I am simply trying to demonstrate that our deepest set of incentives, as human beings, do not require that we are good to others. At the bare minimum, it only requires that we are able to avoid conflict and put others to good use to serve our own ends. This can be seen very clearly among the broad spectrum of psychological defense mechanisms and manipulative tactics we are capable of developing within our own minds.

However, we are more powerful, more capable, when we are able to work together to provide value to one another, to aid one another reciprocally in our shared quest to actualize our respective wills as individuals. The drive to build a will which can be shared and actualized peacefully with others, was a necessary component in overcoming the predatory, destructive forces of our natural environment. I believe it may be the sole reason we have not yet gone extinct, and have been so successful in propagating our species across the planet.

This is why it is imperative for each of us to practice this final strategy of self reflection: Look upon the past with love, always.

I have previously said this about love, in a facebook post:

Love is difficult.

It requires you to find balance between truly giving generously of yourself (in such a way that you not only expect nothing in return, but are at peace with receiving nothing in return), while also not being completely self-sacrificing.

Whether it be spiritually, physically, emotionally, psychologically, socially, etc. it is necessary for you to incur some benefit from the relationships you invest in. However, you must first be able to invest in the development of that relationship yourself. This way, you are providing value as a default (which is fulfilling in and of itself, so long as you have some indication that the value you provide is appreciated).

It is when you feel you provide value which goes unappreciated, that you begin to doubt the substantiality of your investment. While it may be difficult, you still have to be okay with your investment not being appreciated, else you risk becoming resentful. You are not at fault for your efforts going unacknowledged, neither is the person who fails to acknowledge you. In order to maintain peace-of-mind, blame must be out of the question.

The best you can do, is try to understand where you may have been less than you should have been, than you could have been, and aim to improve upon your own shortcomings. Seek gratification through the process of becoming, not through whether or not another is able to see your value. You must see your own value. You are enough.

- Mason Robin; Facebook; January 27, 2021

For the sake of self-reflection, I believe the statement “In order to maintain peace-of-mind, blame must be out of the question.” is particularly relevant. If we are to gain something useful from the examination of our past, we must be able to grant ourselves and others permission to make honest mistakes. We are all human, after all. Without choosing to step into grace voluntarily, in this way, we will almost always inherently resort to faulting ourselves and others for our shortcomings and building resentment for the flawed nature of humanity as a result.

Putting this into practice requires that we become good at forgiveness. We must become good at forgiving ourselves and forgiving others for perceived transgressions against our internal peace. We must become good at noticing when our innate chemical feedback systems tell us something has gone wrong in the environment due to an inaccurate prediction our brains have made, and learn to tell our brains it is okay to be at peace with an unexpected outcome, learn to tell ourselves it is not necessarily bad simply because we do not understand it at face value.

To be continued...

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axiomabstractions · 3 years

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The Progression of My Relationship With Women

For as long as I can remember, I have always struggled psychologically with my lack of success connecting with females. I do think it’s important to note that I had difficulty forming connections in general from a very young age. The main contributing factor to this difficulty, I believe, was what I learned to identify with as a child. For a lot of complicated reasons, not particularly relevant to describe here in detail, my sense of personal identity as a child was built up around the notion of my own intelligence being superior to that of my peers, specifically those peers who treated me in ways I did not appreciate. This aspect of my identity persisted as the focal point for my interaction with the world, mostly unchallenged, until I was about 18 years old.

I had my first and only girlfriend for a couple of months during high school. When I first met her, during summer school of 2010, I thought she was one of the most beautiful girls I had ever seen. I wanted her. I didn’t want to get to know her for who she really was, I didn’t want to participate in a mutual exchange of friendship, support, and knowledge with her. I only sought to gain from my interaction with her, never to give. I wanted her to be mine. In hindsight, I do believe this had been my general attitude toward interacting with females for my entire life. I think females have a strong intuition to see through these sorts of things, which could very likely account for the fact that she was utterly disinterested in me for the entirety of summer school, as every other girl I’d ever been interested in had been. I was unavoidably frustrated by this, to the point of even muttering the phrase “bitches are stupid,” one evening while we were hanging out in one of the commons areas. Yeah, I know.

Motivated by this all too familiar sense of frustration, when I returned home from summer school (I was attending a residential high school at the time), I decided to spend the rest of the summer researching how to convince a girl to like me. What this amounted to was me filling my head with manipulative pick up tactics, tactics and methods intended to coerce women into engaging more substantially with men who aimed only to gain something. I studied a lot. I learned a lot. Not much of what I learned was good, but it was effective. When I returned to school in the fall, I began employing these tactics. Within a few months, I’d manage to convince her to be my girlfriend. I should note here that I did not aim to manipulate, I simply aimed to win at getting what I wanted, and was too young to understand how misguided the things I was learning were. However, the result was the same.

So I got what I wanted, and my work was done, right? Wrong. Again, I was too naïve to know better, but I hadn’t even thought of what It meant to be in a relationship with a woman, want it meant to contribute meaningfully to her experience. After all, this had not been the essence of my intention. I wanted to win her for my own benefit alone. I wanted to feel good knowing that a beautiful woman wanted me, and was willing to share herself earnestly with me. It didn’t take her very long to see through the façade I was unaware I was putting on. It didn’t take her long to realize I was not adding any real, substantial value to her experience. I thought I’d changed into someone who was now magically attractive to women. I had won the game. This is why things only lasted a couple of months.

She expressed to me, towards the end of our short relationship, that she felt I didn’t care about her. She felt I wasn’t doing the small things anymore that had shown her I appreciated her. I think this sentiment was expressed for a couple of weeks, before I realized I would lose her if I failed to change. I didn’t want to lose her, because having her made me feel good about myself. I did love her in my own selfish way. I wanted to keep her for what she provided to me. So, one night, I sent her a very long text message detailing how much I cared about her and about fixing things. This was when T9 prediction was still a thing. The message was 14 pages, which, if you’re old enough to remember what T9 prediction was, was a long ass message. I poured my heart and soul into that message to her, or so I believed at the time. The only problem was, at that age, I was unable to see myself and my intentions for what they truly were. Though my subconscious intentions were misguided, consciously I really did want to make things work, and I was willing to do whatever it took to keep her.

Unfortunately, it was not meant to be for us. The next day, she plainly told me in the school hall that she did not believe me. This, for me, was crushing, as trust was one of the most important things to me in our relationship, in any romantic relationship. I pretty much held trust as the highest value, and I had always been honest with her. The problem was, I could not see myself well enough at the time to be honest with myself about who I was and what I was motivated by. I processed her disbelief in my intentions for a few hours, then I broke up with her via text message. I had been convinced by 4 words that things could no longer work out between us… “I don’t believe you.”

I think she really wanted to believe me. I think her statement of disbelief was a test, a test that I failed. Had I truly been resolved, for unselfish reasons, to make things work as I had said the night before, whether or not she believed what I told her would not have shaken that resolve. I would have made things work anyway. I would have shown her. I did not. I showed her that exactly what she had suspected intuitively was indeed true. I was not committed to her the way I had led her to believe I was. I was only committed to protecting my ego. This was crushing for her, I believe because she actually had placed a very high degree of trust and faith in me, and I utterly let her down. I not only shattered her trust in me, I most likely made it more difficult for her to genuinely trust men again. I gave her cold, hard evidence that men were manipulative pigs, only devoted to the process of self-validation. I’m sure she’s gotten over it by this point.

Still in all, the result of this for me was I only saw one way in which I was able to dependably please women. That way was through sex. Learning to please a woman sexually was really not that hard compared to the task of learning how to please them emotionally and spiritually. It’s been over 11 years since I’ve had a girlfriend, and I think I’m just starting to really figure it out. However, in the time between then and now, my self-validating behavior continued, and in many ways only got worse. See, just as I had broken her trust in men, she also did break my trust in women a bit. For different reasons, but I’m aiming to address how I was affected by this experience, not whether I was in the right or in the wrong.

In the years following, I believe I sought to validate my own value by reaffirming my ability to please women sexually. Of course, this was not a conscious process. I, as many of us tend to do, was simply responding to the biological reward systems put in place by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. What I really always wanted was something substantial and true through my socialization with women. I wanted a woman who truly cared for and about me. Someone I could love and pour my heart and soul into, form a meaningful bond with, and possibly spend my life with. This is what I’ve always wanted, it’s just my strategies for obtaining this have always been misguided.

Mostly, I believe I was still seeking a woman who would add value and validation to my life. I still hadn’t reached the point where I wanted to give. As I stated earlier, I believe women have a natural intuition about these things. As you may have gathered by now, I was unsuccessful in finding anything substantial though this process. I became increasingly frustrated with my inability to do so over the years, and participated in countless fleeting sexual interactions with the women I came into contact with. This was the only form of validation I was ever able to acquire from them, so it’s what I defaulted to.

That shit got old after some years, and actually it was never spiritually satisfying for me. I don’t think it’s spiritually satisfying for anyone, but many people still participate in this behavior because they haven’t been taught how to provide value to others first. This manipulative, validation seeking behavior is highly prevalent among American men, which is something women have become increasingly vocal about and frustrated with in recent years. I think they’ve always been frustrated with it, but never quite figured out how to nurture and raise better men. They have definitely become more vocal though, and we should start listening to them, because I see many women beginning to default to the same types of manipulative, validation seeking behaviors. This isn’t good for any of us. It’s not good for the ethos of our society.

All this being said, I’ve struggled through a lot and grown a lot over the past two years. I truly believe I’ve grown more spiritually, emotionally, and psychologically since June 2019 than I did in the 25 ½ years prior. However, my level of success forming connections with women has remained largely unchanged. I have some guesses about why I haven’t become any more successful. A lot of that has to do with the environments I’m choosing to place myself within.

I’ve been using dating apps for several years now, probably since I was about 19. I’m now 27. I was reasonably successful in my use of dating apps until about two years ago. Now, I’ve become more and more motivated to forfeit them as part of my toolkit. As I’ve evolved, and seen through the errors of my past, my standards for my own behavior and for the behavior of women I view as dating prospects have only increased. I know I have a lot of value to give, and am committed to the process of giving everything I possibly can to benefit others. This includes my commitment to my relationships with women, and providing whatever value I can to them by default. So I’m in this place now where I feel I need to start making better choices about the environment I’m providing myself in my quest to establish meaningful connections with women, platonic or otherwise (it will probably come as little or no surprise to most of you that I have very few female friends in my life).

Dating apps have consistently proven to be unfit environments for my pursuit of female companionship, more and more so these past two years. Now, I’m in a place where I seek better, more wholesome avenues to participate in this pursuit. I’m thinking about hiring a dating coach, this will be an introduction for her into the beast she’s dealing with lol. Hopefully, If I approach this mindfully and honestly, she’ll be able to help me produce a more full and abundant social life for myself in the coming months. Cheers!

#honesty #vulnerability #perspective

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axiomabstractions · 3 years

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OOOOOWEEEEEE It's getting Juicy!!! (trigger warning maybe?)

So this is another collection of notes. I've got to go to work and earn that bag, but I will finish this soon :)

Natural predatory forces

- Agriculture + domestication of animals

- Community/infrastructure

- More sophisticated weapons

- Industrial revolution

- Technological revolution

o Increased access to different ideas and different mating options (travel, exposure, connection)

Over time a pattern of decreased reliance on male strengths in order to be successful as a species

- Due to a decreasing reliance on male strengths to be successful, innate male aggressions and violent instincts found a place or places to be redirected. Additionally females now, let’s say particularly in countries where their liberties have increased over time, had the security to begin scrutinizing male behavior within this new framework of inherent protection from the predatory forces of our natural environment.

- Now I will say that the liberation and empowerment of women is a good thing, so long as it is not accompanied by the oppression of men. I would say this is true for any form of liberation. You don’t solve the problem of oppression by introducing a different flavor of oppression or by changing the direction of oppression. Until oppression is eliminated, it will continue to be an issue.

Outdated social strategies of men

Women’s inclination to correct for these outdated social strategies

The issue of our evolutionary psychology in fixing these issues

- Our biology has not caught up with our social incentives in the modern day

- We are designed to teach men social strategies which would equip them to deal with pressures we are mostly no longer at the mercy of

- Male socialization needs more perspective

- We need help from women to learn social strategies they had the luxury of evolving over the eons, whilst men were serving as their protectors

- We had different environmental demands as counterparts

- Men provided security, women bore and raised the young to successfully propagate under our natural pressures

As the active modifiers of our natural environment, now we do not have the same prospect of danger associated with the destructive, predatory forces of our natural environment. Men are no longer needed to serve as protectors and providers, in the same ways, though we are still brought up as men within the social framework produced by our evolutionary history

What this produces is an incongruity between the way men are raised and the demands of their modern environment. We need to be taught how to exists peacefully and empathetically within a framework which does not present the same level of threat. We live in very different conditions than those which governed the eons evolutionary history we share.

So now there is a dilemma where our current circumstance demands that men socially adapt in certain ways to better meet women within an environment of security. This environment, this luxury of security, compared to men, has been enjoyed by women for much, much longer. It should be noted however that the environment of security we now enjoy is not infallible. It hinges almost definitely on maintaining peace between nations. Not going to get into that much, just wanted to point out that our security as a society should not be taken for granted, which I will say a bit more on later, when I talk about the dangers of our current path.

What I see happening largely now, is an open denouncement of many male social tendencies, many masculine traits. This is starkly represented by the notion of “toxic masculinity.” However, it will be very difficult, if possible at all, for us to grow beyond the evolutionary psychology forged over the eons. This will be difficult for both men and women. We need to work together to do it.

So we have this situation where females are passionately advocating for increased liberation, whilst simultaneously denouncing and undermining their male counterparts. This isn’t happening universally of course, but it is a strong trend I see exhibited in our society. It’s so strong, that many men, as we would like to call simps, are actively forfeiting their own power as men in order to appease the accepted rhetoric. I won’t even get into cancel culture and the incentive structures promoting this aside from this passing acknowledgment.

Now that I’ve set the precedent with this heaping mass of context, I want to specifically address the sexualization of women, and how we are heading down the wrong path for solving that issue.

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axiomabstractions · 3 years

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Constructively Approaching Self Reflection: Part 2

Constructively Approaching Self Reflection: Part 2 of a Series (Raw)

Okay guys and gals. If you read this, it will quickly become apparent that I am unfinished. However, I am very tired, so I will drop my raw notes here for you all to take a look at. I’ll clean it up later, but hopefully you can see where I’m trying to go with this, for the most part. Cheers! RIP R.B.

- Aim true (an idea sourced from Jordan Peterson)

o Self-reflection is only practical insofar as it allows us to extract something useful from the examination of past choices and events

o If you’re going to spend your time looking into the past for answers, it is best if those answers equip you with strategies to produce better outcomes for yourself in the future.

o The more consistently you can produce desirable outcomes for yourself, the less time will need to be spent evaluating why or how things went wrong, because things will simply go wrong less often.

o Therefore, I would argue, the most important role of self-reflection is to is to equip each of us with carefully constructed methodologies, by which we may more reliably replicate the results in our lives we most desire.

o As each one of us becomes more familiar with the process of extracting effective strategies from the blunderous results past endeavors, so too do we become increasingly capable of performing self-examination intuitively, in the present moment.

o We become increasingly able to see our mistakes as they occur, and correct for those mistakes with punctuality, precision, and grace.

o All of this hinges on our ability to frame our examination of the past through the lens of self-scrutiny.

o This requires the removal of ego. We must aim to first identify where we were possibly wrong or misguided, then to modify our decision making process accordingly

- Be honest with yourself

o This is not always easy, because the truth of things is often not readily apparent

o A good place to start is to simply be honest about whether or not the outcomes you experienced were desirable.

o In the case that the outcomes you experienced in your past were unsatisfactory to you, the next thing you must be honest with yourself about is to what degree your actions played a role in producing those outcomes.

o What could you have possibly done differently to be more successful in getting what you wanted? What parts of the situation under examination were in your control? What aspects of your experience provide an opportunity for you to learn, grow, and improve?

o Even further, it is vital that we honestly examine whether the things we desire themselves are actually of service to us. Not only should the things we desire be of good service to us as individuals, at the very least, they should also NOT be a disservice to others. This is one of the most vital elements, and must not be overlooked. At the very LEAST, what we desire must not be of disservice to others. At best, what we desire should serve others as well as ourselves in producing better outcomes for all people involved.

- If any of us can even hope to produce better outcomes for others, we must first aim to understand. We must understand how, if at all, our actions produced an undesirable experience for someone else. If my behavior lessened the quality of your experience, how so? Did it make you angry? Sad? Frustrated? Did it somehow otherwise disrupt your state of happiness and peace? How was it that my behavior made you feel? Go through the whole process of who? What? When? Where? Why? How?. I know this is super elementary, but I believe it is very important. “Who?” is already answered: Me. My behavior. How did it make you feel? What specifically about what I did made you feel that way? Was it what I said? Some physical contact I imposed upon you that you didn’t appreciate? A face I made at you? Cold body language? What did I do that made you feel this way, specifically? And finally why did it make you feel this way? (I will omit “When?” and “Where?” because I feel those have a more much more circumstantial relevance, thus I do not see the place for a general principal derived from the asking of those questions)

- We must be able to both ask and answer these questions with the intention of working together to produce better outcomes for one another. This process not only requires a certain degree of sophisticated language, it also requires a familiarity with understanding and describing ones own feelings. One of the greatest travesties I see in today’s society, particularly education and parenting, is that we are not successfully, intentionally equipping our children with this most essential tool kit for interacting cooperatively with one another. For children to grow within a social framework which denies them these tools, means they are increasingly likely to mature into adults lacking the wherewithal to forge into the future peacefully with one another.

- The only essential obstacle we have in our environment is how we choose to treat each other as human beings. We have long since extracted the means from our environment to eliminate all other immediate threats to our infinite propagation as a species, possibly excluding climate change. The only remaining growth to achieve on this planet is the perspectives we hold, and the resultant attitudes toward each other we express. If we simply solve this, together, we will surely overcome all other perceived threats to our survival. We have the intelligence, we have the infrastructure, we have the technology, and we have sufficiently sophisticated channels through which we are able to exchange vital information with one another.

#unity #perspective #communication #coordination #cooperation

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axiomabstractions · 3 years

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One Step Forward

For many years, one of my most deeply held beliefs has been that the most powerful thing any individual can do is inspire others. I’m almost positive I’ve been saying this since high school. A TED talk I watched earlier today (June 11, 2021) reminded me of this. Now, here I am, closing up what may be the single most important piece of literature I’ve yet written in my life. It's definitely the one I'm most proud of.

I won’t provide you with a complete synopsis of the TED talk, as I believe it’s good enough to deserve you listening to it in its entirety and in full context. However, one of the central ideas was that of looking inward in order to first develop a stronger sense of self, and then to strategically, methodically align your intention, efforts, and actions with those things that inspire you in a positive way. It was an excellent presentation, and the themes resonated with me strongly enough to inspire me to write this essay. I feel like many people in America, particularly many young adults, have been very impassioned and inspired for the past several years. It’s good to be inspired. Inspiration is where action and change come from. It shows that many of us care to make a difference, which is important and necessary, but I’m not so sure the picture of the world we are being inspired by is accurate.

The way I see it, the truths each of us is able to see are not only becoming further and further divorced from the way things actually are, much of those truths are being manufactured by a technological and informational infrastructure designed to exploit each of us for our attention as effectively as possible. In order to maximally draw our gaze, the artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms track our activity across the internet, and develop an increasingly accurate picture of the type of content each of us tends to engage with most consistently. The fact that I even believe this may very well be a direct consequence of what I just described, except I listen to a lot of podcasts and actually pick up a book every now and then, so I’d venture to say enough of my sources exist sufficiently outside of this framework to provide at least a moderately effective filter. In any case, the general trend I see is that, within this infrastructure, it is becoming increasingly difficult for us to distill the same truths as one another concerning the state of the world and the direction we are heading as a society. We’ve seemingly been reduced to engaging most strongly with, among other reference points equally unfit to facilitate the expansion and forwarding of the conversation in any meaningful way, memes, sound bites, “gotcha” moments, group think, moral outrage, and open resentment and hatred for “the other.” The identity politics serve only to devolve the conversation into a finger-pointing fest devoid of any potential to produce real, practical forms of change which could serve all our interests.

Okay this seems like a monster of an issue, so what the hell do we do about it. Well, one approach would be to demand more stringent regulatory oversight of the tech superpowers responsible for maintaining the infrastructure within these systems. That would be great, and I think that idea does deserve some careful attention. However, I prefer to work from the ground up. By that I mean I try to focus more on what each of us can do as individuals, as opposed to relying on some institution to implement changes that probably won’t ever happen. Even if the necessary changes were implemented on this scale, I believe the time it would take to get there would allow for much more damage to the ethos of our society than any of us should dare to flirt with. We need to change the way we’re interacting with these systems and with each other, so we can collectively break the spell being held over so many of us.

I mentioned something above, which I think serves as a good starting point for finding a solution: the idea of a filter. Functionally, what this filter should do is provide each of us with enough variation in perceived perspectives, incentives, and outcomes so as to enable us to break the gridlock of these confirmation-bias bolstering meme machines. We need to re-enable ourselves, re-equip ourselves with the psychological, contemplative framework from which we can make more reasonable determinations about what information qualifies and what information has no utility as a piece of the story we tell ourselves about the state of the world, about ourselves, and about each other. Again, this could be done by regulating the systems which deliver this information to us (i.e. try to make is so that no bad information is broadcasted), but I think it’s more important for each of us to take personal responsibility for the way we interact with these systems, not to mention the implications enforcing such regulations would have for our free speech. There are powerful forces at play, and if we aren’t mindful and strategic about our approach to overcoming this, I fear we will simply be inviting the technocalypse. The filter needs to come from inside each of us. It needs to happen in your mind, not in silicone valley.

If we rely on tech or the news media companies alone to address this issue, we will be perpetuating the cycle of disempowerment and victimhood, a cycle whose trajectory only leads downwards into the abyss. The same can be said for any institutional problem that we care to identify and take a stand against. Regardless of which position you start at (victimhood or powerlessness), the same positive feedback loop is activated (“positive” in this case meaning that these two modes of thought are complimentary and enforce one another, not that this feedback loop is good in any way). When you frame the world through the lens of victimhood you rob yourself of your own sense of autonomy by the assertion that the outcomes of events in your life are outside of your control, and thus the processes which determine those outcomes should be governed by another. Allowing our outcomes to be increasingly governed by others gradually robs us of our ability to make decisions over outcomes in our own lives, and thus constructs a society wherein we are all increasingly likely to be made into victims by those whom we have allowed to steal our autonomy from us. See how this feeds into itself? My basic proposition would be that personal responsibility and accountability serve as the antidote to this cycle, by re-empowering us to control the outcomes of events in our own lives. If each of us chooses to be accountable for our contribution to the outcomes we experience in our own lives, we empower ourselves to change the way we choose to contribute, thus can gracefully pursue the outcomes we most desire.

I believe firmly that the macro social phenomena we see are necessarily the direct sum of our attitudes and actions as the constituents of our society. Consequently, it is imperative that we manage how we interact with the framework of our society, the relationship between ourselves and our institutions, and the personal policies we carry through our day to day lives as individuals. I was recently introduced to the simple notion of us all taking one collective step forward by Douglas Murray, a guest on Eric Weinstein’s Podcast “The Portal.” To clarify, I am in no way associated with Douglas or Eric, but It’s a fucking awesome podcast. You should check it out sometime. Anyhow, the point I’m trying to make is that I see much more potential in the idea of working to inspire a healthy perspective shift across 350,000,000 people, than I do in the notion of regulating our institutions so as to attempt to please 350,000,000 people. The latter seems like a fool’s endeavor to me, which is why I care more to work from the ground up. And yes, that starts with working on myself. I wouldn’t be telling you all this, if I was not adamant about incorporating these ideas into my own life.

If we bring our focus back now to the filter, I do have a suggestion for how specifically to make this happen. You ready? Spend less time getting your information from within the framework designed to extract as much of your attention as possible. Get more of your information from books, scientific literature, observing nature, conversations, etc. Go to a library if you need to. Find more places from which to extract your model of the world we live in, places which are not manufacturing an artificial truth for you. Intentionally seek diversity of perspective to help you build a model that is well examined from as many angles as possible. Insofar as you do choose to consume content on facebook, twitter, Instagram, wherever you get your tailored version of reality, be more critical of the ideas you choose to adopt and/or share. Indeed, I think a more critical general audience would be a natural consequence of us forming better habits around where we get our information.

I’m no evolutionary biologist, but I don’t believe humans were evolved for our brains to compete with supercomputers in constructing our perspectives, incentives, and policies of living. I believe we evolved to extract our understanding and meaning through the process of interacting with and carefully examining our natural environment, and testing those observations, in good faith, against what others have observed. Another big difference is the sheer volume of information the average American in consuming on a daily basis. It’s outrageous. There’s no way to possibly keep up with and make sense of it all. We need to stop bombarding ourselves so haphazardly with mind numbing click-bait that’ll be irrelevant in 12 hours or less.

And look, right now, as I’m writing this, I am as much telling this to myself as I am telling this to you. I’m not perfect, and I’m not immune from this either. It is every bit as important for me to grow and improve in these ways, and to remain cognizant through my effort to do so. In fact, that’s what this whole thing is “axiomabstractions.” This is my standing invitation to everyone to not only bear witness to the process of my growth in real time, but to become more involved in the process of their own growth, so that we can grow and build a better truth together as we move ever-forward into the future. If we fail to do this, we will likely continue to suffer from the existential angst produced by the unbalanced distribution of perspectives, incentives, and outcomes manufactured by our technological machinery. We will likely continue to fall deeper into the grips of insecurity, fear, powerlessness, and victimhood together, which if that’s the ride we’re on, then it’s the ride we’re on. I’d much rather be on a different ride though, one that ends in a better place than mutually assured destruction.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a pessimist. I can just see catastrophe looming. However, the fact that I make the effort to share this with all of you is my way of saying I have faith in us to get through this shit. It would be a total waste of my time if I didn’t have a fundamental, unwavering faith in humanity. We’re not going to accomplish it alone though. The conversation on how we’re approaching progress needs to shift in a manner which promotes more collaboration, cooperation, and honest communication. We need to start participating in growth with each other in good faith again.

In closing, I’d like to send a short message to all active members of the IDW:

We, your viewers, desperately need continued and even more exposure to your perspectives, just as your perspectives deserve increased viewership and broader consideration within the context of our society as a whole. Please keep the conversation going as you have been. This movement, by far, does not stop with you, as I’m sure you are already all starkly aware.

#nuffsaid

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axiomabstractions · 3 years

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Balancing Patience and Urgency: Part 1 of 3

TLDR: If you feel my writing can be dense at times, I’ll be working on it 😊 SKIP TO THE ALL CAPS

I would like to preface this post by briefly outlining some changes I’ll be trying to make to my writing process over the coming months. Historically, I’ve always chosen for my writing to be the most refined form of communication I share with others. This tendency of mine has been the main reason I usually default to speaking rather than writing (I’ve done a lot more speaking than listening over the years as well). I’ve always thought myself a more capable writer than a speaker, but the time and energy required for writing has always far outweighed that of speaking for me. I want to try to change that. I want my writing to become more of a free-flowing, natural process for me, so that I can both provide more digestible content to my readers as well as participate in the writing process more casually. No more going over my piece 6 times trying to catch every grammar mistake and ensuring that every idea has been aptly put. I want this to be more like I’m sitting in the room talking to you and speaking in a language you can easily understand. Hopefully, my efforts to do as much will become apparent soon, but I just wanted to throw this little heads up out there.

WIITH THAT OUT OF THE WAY, LET’S GET INTO THE MEAT OF WHAT I FEEL INSPIRED TO WRITE ABOUT TODAY, WHICH COINCIDENTALLY FALLS RIGHT ON THE COAT TAILS OF THE LAST THING I WROTE!!!

I mentioned last time that I could write a bit about my struggle (ongoing) with balancing urgency and patience. I think the best starting point is explaining how I learned I was having trouble with this balance, and the development of my thoughts surrounding the issue since then. There were a few things that I needed to experience first before I was primed to paint the nice, pretty picture I’m about to try to paint. There was an empty dream board on my wall, a few separate phone calls with loved ones, a temporary ‘F you’ to females (sorry, no offense meant. You’re no worse off for it, I promise.), and a couple months of working myself a little too hard for my own good.

The dream board was something I put up, on my wall, around April-May 2020, with the intention of doing what you do with a dream board… filling it up with things I wanted to manifest in my life through one means or another. I didn’t put a single thing on it until February 2021. Clearly, I’m a slow starter. No, not really. I don’t believe that. Sometimes it just takes me a while to see what’s right in front of me.

Anyway, it was around the first week of August 2020 that a friend and I took a weekend trip to Utah. My dad called me in the late afternoon/evening, while I was taking my turn behind the wheel, on that 8-9 hour road trip. I forget the exact context of our conversation. It was probably about 1/3 what was going on with him at work, 1/3 him venting about his issues, and 1/3 me venting about my issues. Pretty typical stuff. However, there was a point he was trying to make that simply wasn’t coming across to me the way he wanted it to. I can’t remember the words he was using, but it just wasn’t hitting home in a meaningful way. It may have been a couple days, a week, or a month, I’m not sure how long it took, but what my dad had been trying to communicate to me on that phone call eventually stuck in the form of “start providing for yourself the things you want to experience/have in your life.” I know, seems pretty simple, like “Okay. Yeah, isn’t that what all adults do?” but what I was able to take away was much more powerful than just that for me.

It wasn’t until after I had understood this from what my dad told me that I realized, I mean really realized, that the dream board was still empty, after months. Like I already knew it was, subconsciously, but it had always just been something I knew I needed to work on. It wasn’t pressing until I looked a little deeper at what an empty dream board actually meant. Why would a space that I designated, on my own wall, to fill with my own dreams, goals, thoughts, desires, wants, needs, fantasies, etc. be empty? As I laid in bed, one autumn day in 2020, staring at the wall, the empty, drab, lifeless wall, this question, and more importantly the answer, fell into my lap all at once. I didn’t know what I wanted.

When it came to answering these sorts of questions:

“What does Mason want is his day-to-day life?”

“What would make Mason happy more often?”

“What does Mason want to spend his time doing?”

“What does Mason care about pursuing for Mason?”

I didn’t really have any answers that I could lean back on confidently. This was a truth about myself I had some trouble processing. It left me in a temporary state of shock and bewilderment. Surely this could not be right. I was almost 27 years old and didn’t know what I wanted for myself? Just total amazement at myself, right? Almost 27 years, and I still hadn’t found good answers for questions so close to home. For all the disappointment I felt at realizing this, as I’m sure anyone would, it fit almost perfectly into the story of myself that I began re-authoring in summer 2019, so I could hardly ignore it. The more closely I looked at it, the more certain I was that this was an essential piece of the story I’d been missing.

I believe it’s a weird thing that happened, during that time in my life when I so strongly identified with the idea of being smarter than most other people, that I gradually developed a disregard for others’ opinions on what would or might be good for me. Not to say you should listen to every Jack and Jill with an opinion. Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one and they all stink. However, I think I probably swayed so far in this direction that I crippled myself along the way. From probably about 19-24, I wasn’t earnestly asking myself questions, such as the ones above, which I think every young adult should be answering for themselves. I think I had such a strong subconscious self-assurance or arrogance that I wasn’t even equipped to honestly scrutinize myself. Stupid. I know. Luckily, getting honest with myself about not knowing what I wanted opened the gateway to practicing a different kind of patience, patience with myself and the process of growing.

Something that I’m seeing more and more, as I grow older and continue to evaluate my past, is that I’ve pretty much always been impatient with myself and with how quickly or easily I’m able to get what I want. There are a few exceptions, but you can take it as the general rule that I haven’t successfully committed myself to, and seen through to completion, anything in my life which has posed more than a mediocre challenge. I know that’s not something to brag about, but it makes this next piece significant; realizing I didn’t know what I want forced me into a position where I had to be okay with not having answers. These aren’t just answers to any questions, either. Only I can answer these questions for myself, and I need to be consciously committed to the process of finding those answers or it will never get done. I cannot forego patience, else I’ll only be committing myself to failure and disappointment.

Once I was okay with the not having answers part, I quickly realized it presented a plethora of possibility where none had existed before, at least none I was able to see. My perspective soon changed from “WOW it’s been months, and I haven’t put anything at all on this damn board!” to “Now I’ve got this mostly blank canvas of what’s important to me in my life that I have the opportunity and privilege to build for myself at my leisure.” While the latter is a much better state of mind to be in, it still didn’t answer, nor did it even bring into focus the question of how to balance patience and urgency. Notice I said “at my leisure.” #calculated. I still needed to find my sense of urgency, which was the only way to reveal to myself the patience I lacked…

More next time

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axiomabstractions · 3 years

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I forget exactly where I heard this (probably a podcast), but I recently adopted the idea of conceptualizing my place in the world not by what specifically I want to do but rather by what role I want to have in my community/society. I find framing it this way more useful, because it grants me more options than does specific thinking. To me this grants that no matter what I am doing, so long as it fits within my model of who I want to be to the people around me, it is probably worth my time and energy.

My baseline is providing value, in whatever form I can, no matter what service or product I’m providing specifically (another idea inspired by another). My full-time job right now is working with Uber and Lyft. It’s not glamorous and is a job I could easily see inspiring feelings of insignificance, but, through my effort to provide exceptional service in all dimensions, I am consistently rewarded by the genuine appreciation of my customers. This may seem trivial, but the value of feeling like what you’re doing is worthwhile can hardly be overstated.

I think it’s also essential to have a “northern star” of some sort. By that I mean something you aim for, whether it be a principal, a dream, a vision of the world, or even just a life you imagine for yourself, that no one else can take away from you. Ideally, it would be something you can’t accomplish. Have an eternal mission or idea for yourself that can endure the test of time and is applicable across all disciplines and industries. This way, you have true security.

People like to blab about “Job Security,” but that’s temporary at best (dependent on changes in economic and political circumstance) and nothing more than an illusion at worst. Any form of “security” which can be simplified to “my ability to earn a living hinges on someone else choosing, or being able to, pay me week after week” is not security at all. It’s a ticking time bomb waiting to violently blast you into the grasps of uncertainty and chaos.

We should each do everything in our power to minimize this risk for ourselves and move towards forms of increased autonomy in our pursuit of something greater. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying “quit your day job.” I have a day job, and it is essential for me, at this point in my life. What I’m saying is the amount of real security you have is contingent on your ability to be the arbiter of events in your own life, so the amount of influence anyone else has over your livelihood should be strategically reduced over time. If you have to take that unexpected 2 p.m. call from your boss on a Sunday, while you’re at the family barbeque, else your livelihood may be at stake, you have absolutely zero security. Regardless of how much money you make, if someone else can just strip your income away from you at a whim, that’s no bueno.

My northern star is a mission. My mission, put simply, is to assist everyone I can in their pursuit of self-fulfillment. Hopefully, you can instantly see how this is a mission I can never accomplish. The work will never be done. There will never be a point when I have successfully helped everyone reach their highest state of self-fulfillment. Furthermore, no one can take this mission away from me. It’s mine. It will always be mine. That is where I find my security. Through all my successes and failures, my mission will never change unless I decide it changes.

Now the real kicker here is, how do we take something that’s a useless, intangible notion and breathe life into it? How do I pursue something as vague and far reaching as the aforementioned mission and produce something meaningful with that? That is the real challenge, as I see it.

It’s been helpful for me to view my northern star simply as a compass. My mission has become the primary lens through which I frame my interaction with the world. It’s nearly always relevant, and it begs an array of questions, questions I believe good answers can be found for, any time human suffering or any form of lacking is brought into focus. However, that simply produces a compass which would continuously spin on its axis. There’s immeasurable suffering and scarcity being endured in this world, despite us as humans having created so much abundance for ourselves. We each need a compass that points a direction in which we can move confidently. One that is constantly spinning does not serve that purpose well.

This is where patience becomes your saving grace, as a moderator. It’s okay to have huge, unrealistic dreams, and to pursue those dreams passionately, so long as the amount of time you’re willing to devote to that pursuit is on par with the size of what you wish to accomplish. When you stretch tasks out over time, the compass tends to settle down a bit… a lot actually. And yes, this is to say that I have mapped out real, tangible ways to manifest my fairy dust, woo-woo mission. However, every key element of this manifestation would be an enormous undertaking, so stretching things out over time is the only way to choose a direction and move confidently. Otherwise, there would just be too many things to do, and no time to get from point A to point B. The compass breaks, right?

My thinking on what I want to accomplish and, more importantly, by when has gone from weeks to months to years to a lifetime. This isn’t to say that I ever deluded myself to thinking I could accomplish anything requiring millions or billions of dollars within the span of weeks. I never thought that. However, my lack of patience with myself and with my pace of progression towards the things I wanted has been the source of so much anxiety and indecision I almost pity myself. Looking back on things with this framing, I do believe that I’ve always had a very strong compass, it just never stopped spinning given the size and scale of what I want to do paired with my lack of patience.

For me, and this is something I’ve only started working on the past few months, employing patience as the moderator between where I am now and the actualization of unrealistic, intangible dreams has started clearing up a lot of time and space in my head. Now, it is becoming okay to spend my weeks voluntarily working 60+ hrs, because I’m confident I will be in a financial position, soon enough, to take action on the next essential part of my professional growth. My social life is something I have felt was lacking for years, yet I never took the actions necessary to improve it. I still struggle with that, but now I’m taking responsibility for it, and I know it’s something I need to take an active role in improving, if I’m ever going to successfully build a team talented and driven enough to continue molding this vision with me in the years to come. There is also the fact that my devotion to my own health has been greater and lesser over the years. This is something I will need to get better at, if I aim to be around long enough to see any of my vision through to fruition.

Inviting patience into every dimension of my growth is becoming more relevant and powerful with each passing day. For the record, this is not to be confused with a lack of urgency (I could write quite a bit detailing my struggle with balancing urgency and patience. Perhaps another time). This is simply an acknowledgment that every aspect of my growth is an essential element of living my mission, so every step counts and is deserving of love, presence, and effort. This means it’s okay if I focus on one dimension of my growth a little more heavily today or this week at the expense of some other form of growth. It’s all connected, and as long as I don’t lose sight of where I’m heading and what I need to accomplish to get there, the process can be as flexible as I need it to be. As long as I am making progress along some vector of growth which I have deemed meaningful and worthwhile, I feel I am winning the day.

So, if you’re having trouble figuring out what you’re doing with yourself, or what you’re doing with your life, or what’s next, or where do we go from here, etc. here’s my recommendation, in no particular order:

- Decide what person you want to be to those around you.

- Find yourself a northern star which can provide you security and meaning throughout all your successes and failures. You need something no one else can take away from you.

- Exercise patience in your process of growing. This will allow you to pursue multidimensional growth with flexibility over time.

For me what this looks like is:

My ideal vision of a future for humanity is one in which each individual has the tools and resources necessary to be successful in their pursuit of self-fulfillment, and the obstacles to effectively utilizing those tools and resources are minimized. Insofar as I can imagine improving the world we currently live in to this effect, I am devoted to the process of doing so. I realize this is a task no man, woman, or team of people can ever accomplish definitively, and that each particular element of the solution I envision will likely take years, if not decades, to actualize. Since I know I am devoting myself to a lifetime of work, I have resolved to allow myself to grow in any dimension I believe will make me more effective in my pursuit. Along the way, as I continue to grow and build, I will aim to provide value to others in whatever way I am capable.

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axiomabstractions · 3 years

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Constructively Approaching Self-Reflection: Part 1 of a Series

When making predictions about the future, regardless of how extensive the data we base those predictions on is, the farther one looks into the future, the greater the margin of error becomes for such predictions. The best way I have learned to approach reflecting on my past takes into consideration a similar idea. It is essential for me to keep in mind that, the farther removed I am from the events of my past, the less accurate my memory of those events becomes. It is for this reason I believe making it habit to periodically reflect on recent events in one’s life, especially those which result in some form of stress or unhappiness, is the most certain way to maintain a clear, honest understanding of oneself. The dangers of not honestly understanding ourselves are often unapparent until after some form of consequence or suffering has been endured. It wasn’t until I was around 24 years old that I realized I had been neglecting this process of honest reflection for my entire life. By that time in my life, most of the consequence I would stand to endure had already been realized.

I am now 27 years old. Since taking a vested interest in understanding the forces which have shaped and motivated me throughout my life, I have become an almost entirely different person. While the process of gradually peeling back the layers of my own psyche and revealing the truth hidden underneath has been an arduous and imperfect one, it has been one of the most worthwhile endeavors I have ever undertaken. I say this process has been imperfect because my approach to understanding myself and how the events of my past have shaped me has not always been perfectly fair to the other people involved in my experiences. I haven’t always been fair with myself through this process either.

People like to say, “Life isn’t fair.” but I think that’s lazy. This phrase is a convenient way to forfeit responsibility for the consequences of our actions. Is it true that there are predatory, destructive forces in our natural environment which remain outside of our control? Absolutely! However, we as humans, at the very least, have the illusion of self-awareness and choice. At most (and this is what most of us seem to believe passively in our daily lives), each of us has apparent autonomy over each decision we make. Therefore, if you are not at least trying to be fair, I may venture so far as to say you’re a bad person, because you are voluntarily deciding to forfeit accountability for the effect you have on others.

Still with me? Awesome!

The question now becomes: “How can each of us approach self-reflection in a way which is honest, fair, useful, and efficient?” The answer to that question is not a simple one, but I have arrived at an answer, for myself, that I am content sharing with you. I would first like to stress why exactly I think it is important to have that answer… How one chooses to approach self-reflection bears almost absolutely on the quality of what is learned. What you learn from your past, whether it was 5 minutes or 30 years ago, influences how you interpret and respond to the present, and how you carry yourself into the future. This makes learning through hindsight one of the most delicate, and potentially harmful, aspects of personal growth. Because of this, I think it is pertinent for each of us to be mindful in our approach to learning about ourselves this way.

This journey truly started for me while I was working as an OTR (over the road) truck driver, between March 12, 2018 and November 26, 2019. “OTR” means I lived in a semi-truck and was traveling across the country almost constantly. During my tenure working OTR, I had to face many harsh truths about myself, truths that were most often revealed through overcoming difficult, highly stressful, and/or dangerous situations. One of the first things I understood was the difference between feeling alone while still surrounded by others and actually being alone. This understanding would be the first, and possibly most essential, piece in unlocking my ability to see things clearly.

I’ve often wondered which is worse, feeling alone or being alone. While both are difficult, it has become obvious to me that simply feeling alone provides a powerful advantage over being alone. You see, while you have other people around you, you also have the opportunity to communicate with them and receive feedback on your ideas. The beauty of the world we live in now is that, thanks to modern technology, none of us is ever truly alone. There is an ever-present opportunity to connect and share ideas with others. This brings me to the first strategy to approach reflection as I described above:

SUBMIT YOUR IDEAS FOR SCRUTINY AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE

The operative word here is “submit.” By this I mean you must voluntarily present your ideas to others with the intention of improving those ideas through open criticism. This is a very difficult thing to do. I believe the main reason it is so difficult, is because humans tend to identify very strongly with their own beliefs. This means, by submitting your ideas for scrutiny, you are also submitting your identity for scrutiny. Being judged is tough, and the way we receive judgment and criticism is often ungraceful.

Now I know this may seem a little weird, but bear with me. If you are the only person who ever examines and criticizes your own ideas, what you are able to learn will be severely limited. None of us has all the answers, but collectively we have most of them. Well, we at least have most answers necessary to achieve infinity as a species. At least that’s what I believe. It is essential to remember, consciously so, that every person you encounter understands things that you do not. It’s a simple concept, but it is one I think goes overlooked in the majority of human social interactions.

Personally, I spent most of my life strongly identifying with the idea that I am smart; not only that I’m smart, but smarter than most other people. The first time I had this aspect of my identity challenged in a meaningful way was when I got sent back to my hometown high school, after failing to meet the academic requirements of the residential high school (boarding school) I had been attending. I would stand to have this particular aspect of my identity challenged in similar ways repeatedly, over the next 5-6 years. It’s unclear to me, however, how much of this belief was my own doing. Where and when did I make the determination that I was smarter than other people?

I was the smart kid before I knew what it meant to be smart, before I knew how to talk or how to walk. I know this because I grew up hearing stories about how often the adults in my life were astounded by the intelligence I displayed as a baby. While I do believe possessing high intelligence is a privilege and a gift, in my experience, it has always been accompanied by a heavy burden of expectation. At first, I think that expectation was likely passive. However, as soon as I was of age to begin school, the expectations others had of me became a much more active force in my development.

Not only did I see myself as the smart kid, growing up, but I believe my peers did as well. Having been indoctrinated through an education system which disproportionately rewards and acknowledges a neatly defined subset of useful human competencies, there was a social barrier I could neither see nor combat which had gradually been built between myself and my peers. It said, “Mason is better than you because he’s smarter.” Despite it being untrue that I was better, everyone I grew up with was reminded of how smart I was constantly. I was reminded of this constantly. Every time graded test papers were returned to students, every time we had an end-of-year award ceremony, every time I coasted my way through effortlessly what my peers were struggling with, the notion I was better than them in some way, because I was smarter, was starkly enforced by numbered and lettered scores placed on each of our performances.

Eventually, I think some level of resentment for me developed within many of my peers. Coincidentally, it was these very same peers who I most desperately wanted to be accepted and understood by, so I know for certain resentment built within myself for them. After years of unsuccessfully bridging the social barrier I was unaware had been built, I resigned to simply believing I was better, as a means to cope with the lack of social success I enjoyed. Obviously, believing such a thing is not a winning strategy for forming lasting friendships, but this belief did keep my self-worth intact enough to prevent me from literally killing myself as a child. I feel like that’s a fair trade. It wasn’t fun, but it’s fair I guess.

I think it was this, though, that led me to frequently, almost always, discount the opinions of others when I did not agree with them. I spent a very long time in this state of mind. I carried this forward with me to boarding school, and even through 5 years of university. I remember having a very lengthy conversation, one evening in high school, with a group of my friends about whether or not I was pretentious. Of course, I thought they were full of crap. I was incapable of seeing what they were trying to tell me, because I’d learned though my upbringing to so strongly identify with the notion of my own intelligence. I guess this is my official acknowledgment that they were right.

This mindset of mine, my inability to fairly consider the ideas of others, made me very stubborn, combative, defensive, and probably all around unpleasant when people disagreed with me. I still struggle with those tendencies sometimes. This is a very deep-rooted issue for me. Like I said, it is literally the thing that kept me from killing myself. While I no longer personally identify with my own intelligence in that way, I still do struggle to honestly and fairly consider the opinions of others when their ideas disagree with my own.

This may be my cross to bear, but it doesn’t have to be yours.

To be continued…

#reflection #honesty #authenticity #vulnerability #ego death #more to come

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