I was talking with a friend a while ago about the idea that we all have within us a consciousness that is ‘deeper’ and ‘greater’ than our ‘normal everyday self’. The everyday self is a sort of shell. It’s an interface that we create, one that’s consistent and coherent and relatively simple. We do it to make it easier for other people to interact with us. We need to be a certain way when we’re on a crowded train, or when we’re buying food from a crowded market.
 
I’m thinking now about how some people complain about how everybody else is only talking about small talk – “i’m so tired of small talk, why don’t you tell me about your hopes and dreams and fears and about whether your believe in aliens or an afterlife or god” and so on. And in a sense that might be a sort of virtue-signalling, a way of saying “look at me, I think big interesting thoughts, I’m not a small-minded person like all the sheeple”.
 
But also at the same time I’m not so sure how receptive people are to thinking and talking about “big things” all the time. I had this idea for an app called “BigTalk”, which is like chat roulette but everybody is primed to talk about “big things”, like what your dreams are, what your relationship with your parents is like, do you want to have children, what would you do if money was no object… actually as I reflect on this I still think like it might be a decent idea. But I’m a little bit bored about the idea of it, for some reason. And I suppose it’s because as I get older I feel like I’ve heard it all before. I’m thinking about having watched Tony Robbins “I Am Not Your Guru”, and how all these people were speaking their truth, and their values, and who they were, what they really felt, and it all seemed a little… vacuous? I don’t mean to say that they were fake or lying or anything like that. I mean that ultimately maybe we’re all striving for the same sort of thing, like there’s a limited set of human values and that we don’t differ very much from it. It’s not really possible to be original in that regard. Nobody can say anything truly new, and even if they could, how interesting or useful could it be?
 
I think that I have less interest in big picture talk, but I’m saying that while I’m sitting at home on my laptop. When I’m given the chance to discuss it with a teenager – when younger people come to me with questions – I do leap at the opportunity to help out, to be useful. And maybe to preach a little. I suppose that’s what all older people do, to some degree. It’s a challenge to focus on them and to ask them questions and ask them what they think and what they What am I interested in, then?
 
I want to see things get done. I want to see things get built. I’m not so interested in the little details on a day to day basis. Maybe I’m being a little naive or I’m missing out on something – I’m sure that I haven’t completely run dry, that there’s always the possibility of somebody saying something or showing me something that blows my mind, that fills my heart, that makes me feel something magnificent. But I’m not so sure if I can get that out of reading a passage, or out of watching a video, or something like that… god this sounds so much more cynical than I want to be. But all of this is temporary I’m sure. What I’m trying to get at i that things need to change. The environment needs to change. There’s no point singing hippie kumbayah songs in a circle and hugging trees and whatnot and then going on to destroy the goddamn planet. Feelings are all very touching but THEN WHAT? What next? What happens next? What concrete things are going to happen, are going to change? How is the world going to be better? What gaping hole are we going to put into the ground?
 
I want more out of my life. So much more. I want to meet more people. I want to read new things. I want to learn new things. A while ago my big limiting factor was my inability to cook. Now I can cook. My next big limiting factor is the way I think about my time and money. I need to get good at scheduling. I need to get good at budgeting. I need to look at my money in a much more fine-grained way, the way I’ve learned to deal with chicken breasts and steaks and minced beef and tuna. I need to start spending money to build things that I want to build. I need to build out my blogs. I need to finish this word vomit project ASAP. I need to hire writers for the Statement blog. I need to do book reviews of LKY’s book and all the other civil servant books because goddamnit nobody else is doing it!
 
If I feel tired and bored and annoyed and frustrated with the world, it’s because of my lack of imagination, my lack of perspective, my lack of physical skill and technical know-how. I need to stop looking at cars going by and cross the fucking road. I need to Get Things Done goddamnit, one little thing at a time, one thing after another, more, more, more. I need to get addicted to that feeling. I need to measure my self-worth according to the amount of work that I ship – and I know that sounds a little bit workaholicy– I can balance that by also working out and socialising with people. I just want a bigger life. I feel like I’m ready for it. It just needs me to fucking burst everything open and just spill the paint everywhere, and then mess it up and get it wrong and then do it again and again and again. It’s always so easy to be excited as fuck in the middle of the night when it’s 1:17am. The challenge is to hold that excitement with you throughout the day. To be excited again and again. To excite yourself. To move fast and break things.