To Be Great
June 15th, 2024
I think somewhere in my psyche, I still have a great desire to be someone great.
I'm reading a biography on Wittgenstein. It's interesting, he poses the simple question, "why be honest?" Then he comes to some "Kantian conclusion," whatever the hell that means.
I put down fewer and fewer words on the page nowadays. I'm so swallowed up by the anxiety of my age to put something out there worthwhile. I'm turning twenty-four already. I'm getting on with age now.
I've never dated a girl. I never made any close friends. I never got stronger like I promised.
My life seems to not go anywhere.
I'm not pressing forward with my life. Is it that I'm not pushing hard enough? Or am I just not willing to accept my mediocrity?
Honesty
Why should I be honest with anyone?
Especially when that is to my detriment? I go out into the world to acquire resources, why should I risk my reputation being honest?
Self. Delusion. Truth. Lies. Dishonesty. The words keep racing in my dull head trapped by a circadian clock.
If the abstractions are pre-installed in my brain---that language acquisition and organization is genetic---what's the point of thinking hard over it?
No Sugar
No sugar started hitting the mass media. I'm not all that special for going no sugar.
Somehow it feels like my individuality is being sapped away.
Blogs
Somehow, it feels like blogging has become useless for me. It's not a good way for me to restructure my thought patterns, and it just leads me down a path of sad thoughts.
It doesn't make me feel better. I wonder why I have the need to write? Write anything at all?
Drawing
I picked up drawing again. I'm still god awful. It makes me sort of sad.
Wittgenstein
Because I am so cut off I naturally have an extraordinarily strong desire for a friend and when the students arrive on Saturday I always think it will be one of them. - Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1908
Somehow, across time and space, I find some solace in the few words Wittgenstein sent to his sister.
A Mischevious Note
Suppose that religion and spirituality were our natural antidepressants. The very ism's that we sought out to destroy in the 21st century in moral retribution; claiming that such isms were the cause and death of humanity and for the better we would rid of them; what if all along, they were the only things holding people together?
Granting intelligence and awareness to a species, would it not neceessitate some form of schizophrenic mythology to hold the beings from questioning their very existence? Otherwise, we would have been lost to suicide so long ago.
I look to the current generation who has stopped giving birth to children in anxiety. "There is no future, we cannot afford it." But we have never afforded a certain future, ever, for our children. It is only this generation that is anxious to give their children a perfect life. Why? Because we are a culture without a religion. Without blind faith. Without hope. Without great feelings.
The isms we sought out to destroy in the name of morality, morality crafted from those very isms, were the only thing holding us together. In a delectable fate of irony, we are destroying ourselves, our isms, in the name of isms.
Surely, the isms did cause harm, because they were reasons people would kill and die for. Take them away, well, what reason is there to make peace and live for?
Epiphenomenalism
Epiphenomenalism.