had several conversations w/ friends who’ve been incapacitated by the burdensome bullshit obligation to Have A Meaningful Life / Be Remembered / Do Important Work
strikes me as socially inherited bloatware that causes tedious lag, which ironically prevents you from being awesome
i’m not saying it’s bad to want to do important work
it’s just kind of tragic if your persistent anxiety about how you need to do important work… is keeping you from doing the very work that you think you want to do
ofc, if you’re cool with all of this, that’s up to you too
wonderfully, it seems to me that lots of people who end up Doing Important Work got there by being playful and curious
a common tell is when you see someone who seems listless saying “I need to do this…”, or they use phrases like “the world doesn’t need…” don’t allow your lack of imagination + limited understanding of reality box you into a little psychic prison
“Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.”
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(this might be a youtube transcript?)
Bloatware is the stuff that comes on your device on your computer or your phone or whatever that doesn’t have that you didn’t choose right that it came installed by the phone itself or by the you know your service provider sometimes and it’s stuff that you don’t want but it takes up space it takes up resources right. i mean it’s a metaphor. And similarly a lot of people i have found
in my conversations with them they have a lot of socially inherited bloatware. What I mean by that is they have assumptions, they have beliefs, they have ideas about what they think is good or what they think they want, that they didn’t particularly choose for themselves. It’s inherited. It was installed for them “by default”.
The desire for prestige is very often a form of socially inherited bloatware – I definitely picked up some of mine from my father, which is a little bit weird to say out loud. I have a whole separate section about that so i’ll probably make a separate video about that um which so what do i want to talk about i have i have my my novel opened my novel my my book is open on my screen over there and i want and i’m a bit sleepy so i guess i’m gonna reference it a bit more and uh it strikes me as the bloatware causes tedious lag yeah so you know one of the things people very often people argue about the advice be yourself and you know what does be yourself mean right like you’re always yourself when are you not yourself whether you are when you’re being
awkward you’re still being yourself you’re just your awkward self right and when you’re being cruel and unkind you’re still being yourself you’re just being your cruel and unkind self and then you say oh you should be your best self well what does that mean how do you define that how do you and so how i choose to think about it is
i believe when people say be yourself what they’re really saying and i guess the the more technical and mathy way of describing it is sounds weird but what they mean to say is be not not yourself. and so why are people being not themselves right what does that mean and in my experience what that usually means is that the people are bringing to the conversation or bringing to the context they are bringing so there is themselves that’s who they are which you can’t help but bring everywhere you go you can’t you can’t avoid yourself and there is your idea about what you think people want that is your model of other people’s behavior there’s thinking right you know when you when you watch sports or when you interview people when you read about you can see that i’m sleepy um
Athletes in the zone / Test Flight
There’s this recurring thing that when athletes perform well and they’re in the zone and they score their match winning goals and stuff and then people ask them afterwards what were you thinking what were you doing they’re like i don’t know it just happened i was there i saw the shot i took it you know it’s very they describe it in very kind of uh it’s like they weren’t there you know and on the flip side if you ask athletes when they screw up you know they miss the penalty and they shoot the ball to the sky and you know like they they flub right they mess up very often it’s like oh i got in my own head you know i started thinking i started worrying about stuff so you know what i want to say is that the athlete who’s in the zone they are being entirely themselves they are being you know what they are their fullness that what they’re trained to be their their best self whereas when they get inside their heads their own heads they interrupt themselves they introduce this model of themselves that gets in the way they start thinking
what is the keeper doing and what is the you know what’s the goalkeeper doing what is
what should i do like when you start thinking you introduce lag right and it’s that lag that fucks you up. you don’t want to be lagging, you want to be able to interface with reality with the least lag, when you’re not in your own head and you dismantle and discard the mental models.
one of my favorite scenes in how to train a dragon there’s this scene where hiccup and toothless they are training to fly together and they need to work together because toothless has an injured tail and so hiccup has like the prosthetic that anyway so to fly hiccup needs to interface with toothless and uh so he had a bunch of instructions for himself like position one position two there’s like six positions and you know there comes a point where they’re flying upwards and trying all the positions and then you know he gets unhooked from toothless and they’re falling and they and tufts can’t save himself either because he can’t fly without hiccup’s help and he manages to get back on the seat the saddle and he has because he’s like about to
crash he has to throw away the the instructions and just fly by feel right and the thing is he has internalized those instructions by rehearsing through those things beforehand and similarly you know it’s the whole “Use The Force, Luke” kind of thing right you close your eyes and you trust your instincts and you go by feel.
and you know that doesn’t always work because sometimes you go by feeling just [ __ ] everything up and that’s usually what makes people become more self-conscious and it drives them towards feeling like they need to be more um to think more right to figure everything out because when you try being yourself you messed up and it is true that you need to you know investigate and evaluate but there comes a point where once you’ve done what’s a reasonable amount of investigation and evaluation and you will never truly 100 be certain that you’ve done enough but you do your best and you you come up with checklists or whatever and even your best might be too much you know you do a reasonable amount there’s no one way of answering
all questions in advance like you figure stuff out as you go.
That’s the that’s the thing about life right that i’m learning at age 30 is that some questions you will you will find the answers to by living them through your life and you have to accept that you’re going to make mistakes and you’re going to burn stuff and stuff is going to be
screwed up and you have to be okay with that and that does take courage and it can be scary
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I wanted to talk about bloatware. So bloatware is you know prestige traps feeling like you
have to do important work feeling like you have to earn a lot of money feeling like you you know need to have a lot of sex that’s a thing that you know i think people one of my belief
is that people don’t actually want sex nearly as much as they think they do
or i mean there’s a there’s a whole bell curve of range of you know so don’t @ me if you’re
someone who’s just kind of incredibly you know have a very very high sexual
appetite some people aren’t actually like that i have friends like that and i have friends who are
completely like ace like they have no feelings whatsoever
but like you know i feel like a lot of culture – thing does there is this because culture
you know pop culture pop media everything it uses sex as a shelling point you know it’s a
it’s a place where people gather their i mean it’s it’s
a so-called universal it’s pretty universal everybody
who is born there has been anywhere um – was it a great idea to make a video
and i’m sleepy i’m just going to wing it um – the desire for sex i mean i do think that most people
have a desire for sex and sexual intimacy and you know they want one another one of my phrases is people want to be fuckable more than they want to fuck. which is that they want they don’t want the sex as much as they want what they think the sex means. which is and it is it doesn’t mean it can mean those things right intimacy, power, respect, admiration, status, connection. All of those things that you think sex represents right. Because actually doing sex well it’s a lot of work you know you have to be attentive to your partner and all those things
and a lot of people don’t actually want a lot of that. I mean they might, it varies it depends on who you’re talking to. i’m contradicting myself but loosely i do think that it’s kind of overrated. and i mean i i’m not an ace person, i would say that i am a person with a
pretty high sex drive – why am I talking about this, i wanted to talk about bloatware
and yeah just doing and people feel like they need to do important work people feel like
they need to make a difference they need to change the world save the world right
like this and the thing is when i hear people talking about this
these things when i hear people talking about these things the thing i look out
for is do they do they have this needy do they have this sense of resignation
right that’s i guess that’s the core thing about this video that i’m getting at the end of the whole video it is there’s a sense of resignation and almost um spiritlessness like this this sense of futility almost. like people just feel like… “shouldn’t i want to make the world a
better place? If i don’t want to make the world a better place, am I not a bad person?” like that’s that sense of they’re not really choosing what their path is. they’re not really choosing what they
care about or what they love. it’s a kind of joyless obligation. And life is too short to live it as though it’s a tedious obligation. you can you can shake it all off and start from scratch.
like you know some some people say things like the world doesn’t need another youtube video
vlogger. Who gives a fuck what the world needs? You know, do what you want do, do what you
think is fun, do what you think is interesting. If the world needs anything, it needs people who have come alive. People who are free. People who are not obsessively worrying about what other people think. And i’m not saying go all the way to the other extreme and completely disregard society. (Anyway, if you were gonna do that, you wouldn’t do it just because some guy
on youtube said it.) Most people i think suffer from excessive self-imposed social constraint and often for noble good reason. something bad happenned and they don’t want bad things to happen. It’s painful, right. And I am here to nourish support and encourage people to be
willing to open up again and i don’t know if that makes sense uh but i’m just gonna end this here and publish it