where to move

Hello hello hello.

I've been feeling sick for the past few days, and before that for about a week, on and off. I have a feeling I've brought this back upon myself, first with drink and now with stress. I've been taking vitamins and drinking water like its... well, water (pun). But anyway.

I'm pretty happy with the way I've decided to use twitter finally. When I first got it, I didn't understand the logic behind it. The core logic behind Facebook, I understood- it's basically a one-stop social hub that keeps you plugged in to people's past, present, future through words and pictures. You can tell if they're sexually available, if they're attractive, how they present themselves, what their interests are. It's basically the crack cocaine of social tools, and everyone enjoys using it. Part of its success, I think, was shifting away from the egocentrism of myspace, which got old fast after people realized how vapid and soulless it was to compete for virtual friends.

AND YET-- twitter comes along a bit later, and you get people hashtagging for more followers, whoring out to the masses. At least, this was my first impression of twitter. It seemed to be the final word on egocentric internet social networks, but as with many things, my first impression was a little simplistic.

Twitter is different for one (potential) key reason-- twitter relies on authenticity more than artificiality. On twitter, being artificial and obnoxious is not going to get you followers. The people that have the most followers have the most radical or "attractive" worldviews, attractive in the literal sense that is. Now the question of relying on virtual followers for self-esteem at all is another issue altogether... but we're only human.

My knee-jerk recently was to delete Twitter along with Facebook, for my own personal reasons as well as just to cut out any internet addictions and focus on capturing my aura of mystery again, being myself. But I was never really addicted to twitter before. I'm trying not to be now, but I can sense the potential of putting out positive energy all the time, both as an affirmation to myself and just to "put it out there" in the karmic sense. When my good intentions, perhaps inevitably, turn to cripple me and stunt my growth as a human being, I'll have to rethink that decision. But for now I feel pretty good about it.

But the real topic I've been thinking about last night and today is the idea of knowing when and where to move.

Maybe the most fundamental question along this line of thinking is this-- in life, should we tend to move towards pleasure or pain? I'm sure there's a balance to be struck here, but in terms of crafting a personal philosophy, it helps to make it binary since people usually drift towards the middle with everything in life.


I don't mean to get overly introspective, but it's important because of the conflict between how you feel and your ideal actions, apart from emotions. Deep down, I can't lie to myself and say that I'm unreservedly happy right now-- the days, weeks, months ahead are going to be very hard. I've looked back on the not so distant past and seen everything from a new perspective. Suddenly, everything I felt so serious about before seems like I'd just consented to play a game for a while, and somewhere along the line forgot I was playing it. And by forgetting, I forgot how to win. As a result, I feel I've driven parts of my life away that I can never get back.

Now there's an opportunity cost for everything, and regret can only go so far. Regret is a good starting point in terms of moving forward, since we can learn from our mistakes and not repeat them. But what about the idea of human specialty?

The idea is when you lose something or somebody, it or they are replaceable. But how true is this? What's replaceable are feelings-- I've felt happy before, I'll feel happy again. Same with sadness, envy, frustration, listlessness-- all of these feelings echo and reverberate throughout our lives.

But you can't capture moments or individuals again the way you can capture feelings again with new moments and individuals. You can't hold onto it. When you lose something or someone, you mourn.

You mourn because you already built a future. In the same way an inventor knows his invention before it becomes material, that future was crafted. Everything about it already existed, every second was bursting with potential. When you lose the ability to craft any kind of new future, I believe that there's nowhere left to go. Whether emotionally or physically, you will have to confront death at that point. Now of course, it takes a lot to get to the point of not being able to see any new future. But thinking about it more deeply, making plans is a way to predict and control the future.

You write yourself a list, you do it, and before you've done it you were able to picture the future with it done. When you make a commitment and you put yourself into it, you're pushing your essence into the future, cutting through it like the edge of your hand through water, warping time and space around your blade of intention.

When you lose someone, its like moving your hand through the water as a ghost. There's no result, nothing warps, nothing changes. But you want to try harder, you want to scream and shout and destroy, but no amount of effort you put in will control the world around you anymore. And it's frustrating.

All of this is an example of me pushing my mind fully into the negative, indulging myself.

The central conflict is whether you can will your mind to control the chaos. I'd like to believe that positive intent, if it's clear and pure enough, will tame it. But I'm worried that the truth is, at any moment we're faced with an infinite number of possibilities, and whatever energy we put out into the universe will be completely overwhelmed by cosmic energy, and we'll just be bounced from place to place like a pinball.

I can't sense which direction my self-deception is coming from... but both possibilities are equally terrifying.

To sum up, humans evolved a consciousness fraught with complexity and emotions for a reason. Whether this will be adaptively advantageous or not is another question-- in the blink of eternity, who knows.

But still, the complexity and emotions are what makes us unique in the universe (as far as we know). It's like being let loose in a jungle with a broken compass. Which way do we move? Peace,


Ryan