yo taxpayers. Do you occasionally act like someone who has never been breastfed? Is your life not overtly terrible but not great? Become a normal functioning consumer. Endure the ecstacy of outliving your enemies. Spite the government by collecting your social security.
Standard rules apply. Seek clinical help, statistically medication and CBT remains the treatment methods with the highest efficacy. Quips on making your bed everyday won't do anything for severe mental illness or stand in for anti-psychotics and mood stabilizers. Second-hand wisdom is always unconvincing but just throwing it out like a miasma will surely dilute some skepticism.
Become a realist, someone only concerned with immediate physiological needs. Of course you'll feel ill if sleep deprived, nutritionally deficient
[1]
, cottaging with bedbugs, or have an addiction. It's as illogical as stepping out during a thunderstorm and complaining about your mood. Don't set yourself up for failure by feeling like shit before feeling like shit.
Identify personally enriching behaviors. Isolating yourself from others, interests, yourself, is a convenient but ultimately maladaptive habit that materializes into nothing. Defining your enjoyment is a lifelong process that will never be rendered useless.
Accept waste. Progress in jobs and hobbies and relationships is gratifying but the lack of it shouldn't be a preoccupation. I will probably die having spent years cumulatively peeling eggs or avoiding my coworkers. Every time you carelessly gloss past bookshelves or movie catalogs incalulable hours of human labor are passing by, some sincere, others full of shit. Straining to minmax every waking moment should probably be reserved for the savants. Life is full of tremendous waste, feeling comfortable is a goal itself.
Aschew comparative thinking. The lows of humanity can go very low. Guilting yourself by reiterating statistically unfavorable life outcomes being born Sudanese or Palestinian or Inuit or Bihari or Congolese is ultimately futile. Don't guilt yourself, become angry instead.
Act. Don't even think or contemplate, act. Become a single-celled organism when it comes to activities under consideration and live in the moment.
Confront negative thoughts skeptically. Is your current condition really static? Is nothing truly out of your control? Time dilutes past ordeals, will you retain the same anxieties 24 hours, a month, a year later? If wrapped up in a negative cycle ask yourself "would doing nothing be more proactive than entertaining these negative thoughts?"
there's probably no silver bullet. A relationship or job that seemingly changes your life is as tenuous and fragile as the one thing that ruins your day. That third option will always be in the back of your mind. Improvement is likely a mille-feuille of incremental, conscious changes.
Don't take it seriously. A woman with gastrointestinal issues inherited her brother's acne and her boyfriend's depression after a DIY poop transplant.
[2] [3]
Feeling down can be as absurd as the half-digested beefy 5-layer burrito sending maladaptive neurotransmitters to your brain.
[4] [5]
These are the conclusions I've landed on, the absurdity of being a glorified ape playing second fiddle to the mass of bacteria freeloading within. It's all in your head isn't convincing but blaming your unfortunate physiology is a tangible, believable, workable legend.
6/8/2024
(2018)
A few persistent anxieties with no proximate solutions coagulated into a lingering voice hanging over my head. It constantly parroted that my apex was over, that continuing to live this way was self-infliction. My delusional insistence that "the best was yet to come" would turn maladaptive once things didn't work out. Constantly waiting, waiting for something to sweep me off my feet, to transcend and transform my day-to-day. It also meant I was constantly at odds with my neuroticism while fully understanding that picking apart my life circumstances under this mindset was fruitless and masochistic. Thinking about coping mechanisms when you don't know what to cope with. Drafting a schedule when the rest of your life is an improvised mess. Getting frustrated for living the last week on autopilot, floating through life like everyone does effortlessly. Being pragmatic with fragmented knowledge is just acting on delusions, and that's exactly what I was trying to do. Trying to desperately extract or make some contrived meaning to something I did.
My schoolwork suffered accordingly and with it, I lost my only source of incremental positive reinforcement. I lost 20 pounds in a short period, the inside of my mouth would constantly bleed from biting into gaunt cheeks. My head started shedding hair like a barcode cosplay. I lost plenty of sleep, the "vomity" part of the morning a routine. The creeping fatalism of my day-to-day had no definite cause, and no justifiable source. And in a way that dissatisfaction and ambiguity, the lack of hard borders, was the most distressing of all. Even now I have to consciously take a step back and confront my emotions as if they're something superficial or supplemental to me.
And how will I react when I'm dropped into "real society?" 7 hours of my day isn't tied up with obligations, nor do I have any tangible worries. I don't have any crippling ilnesses, nor any financial troubles. Can the preoocupation of trying to staying alive really grant me enough stimulation that I'm satisfied with my day-to-day? This "best of yet to come" ideology that I recognize is harmful yet adhere to anyway is reducing my life to waiting. Since middle school I've been waiting for something to sweep me off my feet, insistent that anything my surroundings won't satisfy my curiosity. My life is left static, grinding away at this self-fulfilling, isolationist prophecy. Out of it I've attempted to weave some semblance of gratification and progress out of this vaccum. Naturalistic behaviors like hobbies are reduced to fruitless pragmatism and bottom lines. It all evolved into a neurotic fixation, a futile pursuit of answers in an environment I didn't understand or care to explore.
(2019)
And there's a sudden reiteration that it's not normal to be dissatisfied with your day-to-day. I may mentally disparage those that "waste their time", but that's just my personal benchmark that inexplicably casts "progress" over any sort of immediate gratification. Your roommate scrolling through Instagram? His life is more gratifying than yours. It's an anomaly to have 1 day out of the month be a "good day," the rest fading into the backdrop. Nostalgia operates on something fondly reflected upon, no matter how artifically disingenuous or rosy. What do I have that I'll look back on favorably?
(2022)
When I was a teenager I was deathly afraid of become a boring adult, the kind wholly satiated by grilling and doing sudoku on the weekends. The kind whose stylistic kodawari fell away long ago to pragmatic convenience and apathy, the kind who can only feel pleasure through amazon packages and ejaculation. I became one of those working NPC's recently commuting among the black masses. But I'm trying, I'm desperately clawing back the effort to care about what to wear again, the desire to pursue drawing and pottery and gardening and sculpting and stonecarving. I want to care, to invest myself in something beyond my material existence or homeostasis in my bank account. I don't want to continue worrying about squandered youth or careers or experiences. I wish I could pause time so I could accrue these skills, to become skilled and interesting and gratified and fuckable. I want to feel at peace with myself.
(2024)
I think the broad conclusion in college was that my near-obsessive neuroticism was ultimately fruitless and would continue to be. Much of life is unflinchingly simple: jobs, bills, basic needs, with some enjoyment weaved in between. Pastelshoal said it best in 2019:
Trying to think your way out of otherwise static realities is at best good introspection. Thinking of how to change your life is simple fantasy when you don't have tangible options. When you're young you don't have options - contemplation eagerly fills in the void for action. Broadly it was my folly born out of impatience, daydreaming veiled in desperate hypotheticals rather than anything actually productive. But that's probably part of some embarrassingly late realizations, that your way of approaching life changes and that inapplicable perspectives must be discarded. Self-improvement is boring. Sickly sweet optimism is boring. Earnestly listing to second-hand advice is boring. Living in the moment is boring. Contemplation and ambiguity is interesting, but ultimately it won't improve your life.
It's not that the world becomes inherently less interesting as you age, just that childlife naievety must be replaced with self-directed appreciation. The 30-somethings baking bread or collecting books shouldn't be a source of pity. The linear tedium I was predicting that came with the responsibilities of adulthood did not overshadow my enjoyment of life. I was incapable of predicting the ability to develop new appreciations, many that blow away the inescapable drudgery of commuting and sitting around. Ever since I was a barely-conscious mammal I was assuming that the people around me were more or less noseblind to substandard, unfulfilled lives. To put it bluntly I didn't expect such a multipolar attack on my worldview, to have changing priorities out of enjoyment and novel appreciation for the shifting sands around you.
There were many fears I carried. Some came true, others rendered insignificant in the mosaic of experiences that followed, many unimaginable to a child incubated in suburbia. I still fear aging. I still don't understand the allure of some old man hobbies like HAM radio or sudoku. I did not (yet) devolve into the working NPC as described in prepping.html. I'm no longer trying to minmaxx every waking moment. Spending time with people and family has only grown in enjoyment. I understand kids. I've been able to take many of my hobbies to their logical conclusions, some long-rested and others simmering away. Things aren't that bad.
I will put these conclusions into publically facing words so that I can retrospectively chew these thoughts again and force myself to only think "what an idiot" to 2022 incessantpain, 2018 incessantpain, 2015 soccer_steven2002, 2014 anti-australia ranger, 2011 sexy clown dad, and on and on and on.
6/11/2024
