40 minute brain dump

30 Minutes of Work. No Reward. Sleep is my escape. It's the only thing right now that will allievate the burden of this exercise. I hope one day it's no longer perceived to myself as a burden. I can extract some joy from the stress it provides. I can be happy that I've exhausted it. But I feel that day will never come and I will be forever trying to attain it, miserable and uninspired. Yeah, probably, but you know what:

It's for the best.

You don't want to be a lazy slug who can easily manipulate his own happiness. You try to achieve happiness by overcoming challenges. You can remove all the challenges from your life, or make them much more trivial, aka, lowering the bar, but that's not going to make you happy. It's providing the illusion of happiness. It's making you content. You are winning the consolation prize. Human by nature by default seeks perpetual improvement. It's why if you had a direct neural link to stimulate happiness in your brain you'd press it all day, at an ever increasing rate. It'd make you happier despite the fact you've done next to nothing to achieve it. If you can derive satisfaction from an insubstantial activity, then you are deceiving yourself and being a self consuming disease, a virus of your own body and mind. I've always somewhat known this, but I don't think I've ever put it into such explicit words in writing: Pain is necessary. It's good to make yourself miserable to attain the sweetest happiness. Once you get to the next level, keep climbing. Keep struggling. If you are slipping downwards, gain solid footing, restore your homeostasis and push on. But never stop, otherwise, you might as well just die and get it over with. If you aren't going to get any further than you are now, what's the sense of keeping on going? Don't put up with this charade.

Ah, this thought chain. I want to call it existential, but it's even more nihilist. I don't know what to call but this is how I feel: Life is so devoid of solid meaning. We need to use intangible / imaginary concepts such as happiness and emotions to give ourselves a semblance of certainty and morality on the world. But honestly, these things are merely the stepping stones to what makes us human: are ability to act way beyond them. To be able to name them, see them, describe them, understand them, and hopefully overcome them. The self examining recursive nature of our thought processes may just be the only thing that makes humans unique.

But it really makes it tough to live life. What really excites me? What really surprises me? What inspires me anymore? Not much. I appreciate being able to seeing things, but rarely do they effect great emotions in me. I can find the beauty in the aesthetics of a building or sight, but life-changing? No. Not even close. I've become a sponge. I soak absorb so many ideas and reject so few, so it's hard to really find something that much different in my diverse eco-system of a mind. I refuse to let myself be surprised due to my own ignorance, so I must be in a constant state of improvement and expansion. Exponential growth of the mind. Ah, humanity. Wanting and expecting more than is likely possible and only really being happy once the nearly impossible has been achieved.

So why did I really go on this trip to Brazil? I honestly can't tell you what the exact mindset I was in when I bought those tickets. I feel like I was probably high, but the specific thought processes and the hopes and intentions of what I'd get of it? No, those I can't remember exactly. Perhaps I never really thought them all the way through. Perhaps I just had this nebulous notion that it was the right thing to do. I suppose I could scour my journal for details to shed some light on this mystery, but it'll have to wait, it's hypothesis writing time.

If I had to go off my vague notions, I'd say it was to challenge myself. To screw myself over. In some senses I knew I was becoming entirely too comfortable with my life. Becoming addicting to my routine of medicrity—well, perhaps not mediocrity but of doing a routine that didn't really meet my full potential. Something that let me be comfortable, perhaps even live a nice easy life, but not something that left me feeling fulfilled. Nothing that allievated that notion in my mind that I was being a waste of life. The belief that I was selling my own mind short, letting parts dwindle and die off due to negative self-perceptions and my various methods of circumventing them.

Yes. I needed to fuck myself over. Make myself really panic mentally. Make myself really uncomfortable, confused, at the fate of my own wits and intuition. I don't do that very often. I'm a meticulous planner or a cautious experimenter. It's rare I can't undo what I've just done. It's why programming feels so safe to me. There aren't any dead-ends or undoable actions assuming—well, there are substantially less. The turn-around time to redeem any mistakes is pretty quick and relies entirely on your own ability to solve a problem. It's not that bad.

Because honestly, I don't like talking to people. It makes me uncomfortable. I hate speaking in general. I don't like talking for a long time. When I'm speaking, I want to make a point, and quickly. I feel as if every breath I'm expending is wasting someone else's time unless I'm starting to make perfect sense quickly. But it's funny, I don't really feel that way when people are talking to me at all. I enjoy listening to people speak, it's a time when I can just go into data-retrieval mode. Why do I have these seemingly hypocritical views? Does my reluctant to speak come from the fact that I'm greedy with my own ideas? It does seem “safer” to be a listener than a speaker, indeed, you cannot offend someone by listening to them, but it's easy to say something that will make people rather uncomfortable. I suppose that may be one of the reasons why people enjoy speaking to me, or why I get called “approachable,” I'm seemingly the most nonjudgmental person there is. Nobody can offend me, so people probably feel quite comfortable saying anything around me. I guess that means people are just as self conscious as me about speaking, but they just feel the need to get a lot off their chest. Haha. I'm self conscious about speaking and really don't feel compelled in the least to say shit unless I feel it's pertinent.

I really wonder what drives people's desires to speak? Is it just a method of externalizing your own thoughts? Hey, you, buddy, do thinking for me and transmit it back in English. Oh, I like that idea, I'll use it. Thanks for sparing my brain some effort there, as it was easier for me to ask you and quickly assess the quality of the idea than uniquely come up with one on my own! You're the best (I hope)!

Ah, what the fuck am I talking about. I want to talk about the trip. Yeah, the trip. It was pretty good. I tell people it was amazing, but that's really what they want to hear. I don't think it was tremendously awesome by any stretch. It could have been a lot better. What the fuck is wrong with me. I had a great time and I still say it could have been tremendously better. Most people would say that I'm being too harsh or negative, but I don't feel that in the least. I guess most people don't understand that I can be 100% satisfied with a trip, feel I got lot out of it AND somewhat regret that I didn't do it better. These are not mutually exclusive emotions. I feel it's very healthy to have the second, more negative, emotion, as, it will only push me to have a better trip next time. So, thank you for yielding a negative emotion Mr. Good emotion. You're the best! At least it's a genuine feeling!

Genuine feeling, what a funny term for me to be throwing around. I guess I sense all too often that there are imitated or unsubstantiated feelings in people all too often. Imititated ideas are easy to understand how they come to be, by merely copying someone. But unsubstantiated feelings tend to derive from being the erosion of an idea into a mind, fitting the square peg into the round hole by using a mind trick to pretend it's not there. Or even worse, entirely removing the faculties for identifying what's a round hole and a square peg. Yes I'm making lots of references to humans in gov't nationalisms, religious followers, and double-think in general. I think such attributes were a necessary part of evolution of the human organism.

If you really think about it, human beings have become a giant organism that's more or less taken over the world. We even have specialized cells (people) that control such huge facets of our life (govt's and/or anything that may be true in conspiracy theories), which are more or less unaware of the whole. Without the coordination and growth of other cells would the human organism grow to its current size. There's an enormous about of interdependence amongst all the cells, and failure of a large group would have major rippling effects on the other portions. The scales of size and time are just a bit different.

Just as it's impossible for a cell in my toe to really directly talk and know what's going on with a cell ear, humans are often out of reach of one another. Yet we're all on the same ship (environment) sharing the same body.