It's been nine days. I'm counting.
Depression is like being a yo-yo. Up, down, up, down, but never being quiet in control of the motion, no matter how well you train yourself to recognize it and compensate for it. In these 21 posts, you've seen me vacillate from wanting to push myself to accomplish more with this thing, to feeling like it's too much for me, to feeling like I can't feel it anymore, to being overwhelmed with feeling it, to being scared to capture what I've experienced the last ten days.
And now here I am again. Still frightened.
But I saw something I couldn't not try to write about.
This ten minute clip of Jordan Peterson on Mikhaila Peterson's podcast (I'm guessing she's his daughter?), talking to Africa Brooke about “Wokeness, Racism, and being Truthful.”
I don't know who Africa Brooke is, and I didn't know the context of the full podcast episode. All I knew was the clip's title (A Change of Heart Towards Jordan) and what I saw in the thumbnail – something to the effect of changing opinions through honest dialogue. Which is something I'm all about.
I say this a lot, but it's kind of my raison d'etre.
Which is not something I write without understanding the irony of or without being aware of how pretentious that sounds.
He said something in that piece that I had to write down, I had to quote, and which I feel compelled to share with anyone who will look at my work now or in the future:
“Maybe your stupid opinions aren't right. They're probably not right. And, like, are you so sure your life is going so much the way you want it to go and you're such a bloody paragon of virtue and the light is shining out of every orifice that everything you think and say is correct and everyone who disabuses you of your notions is evil? You're really so sure of that, are you?
“So you wander around and you think, 'God, maybe I should listen to this person because I'm such an ignorant bastard and I'm so full of malevolence and maybe they'll drop one thing on me that won't make me, like, miserable and doomed to hell and drag everyone else there with me.'”
I have had countless engagements in my life that go a little bit like, “Why are you so nice and kind and agreeable in person, but such an incomparable asshole online?” The online equivalent to that, people who don't know me in person, will ask, “Why are you reading my Tweets if you disagree with me? Just go away.”
The answer is effectively the same: I can only learn by observing and interacting with other people. In person, I don't care to engage in topics because someone is inevitably going to get their feelings hurt and their hackles up. Online, I don't care how you feel because when I write, I write what I believe to be true. Even if I turn out to be wrong. And also I don't have to see your stupid face as your organize your ignorant argument – I can anticipate with some measure of hope that you aren't going to choose ignorance and stupidity when you respond to me.
Mine is a fool's hope, I think.
But maybe not. The beauty of social media is that there's a record of the things I say being left behind me. Even in conversations I'm excused from, my graffiti on it can't be. Someone will see the things I say, and again all I can do is hope that some percentage of them will see wisdom and learn something – and maybe apply it in a way that I can't.
But I also get it.
I am a college dropout. A “drug addict”. A loser, by any measure. I am and have been my whole life marginalized.
I remember, in university, they made us go through this exhibit (is the only word I can think to use, it felt exactly like a museum exhibit) about prejudice. Here I am, an extremely poor white kid, tall and reed-thin, with long black hair wearing dirty jeans and a Tool shirt, and I'm being told that I'm racist and prejudiced. My entire school career, I was always the New Kid. I was bullied, excluded, called gay and otherwise prejudiced my entire life. My only "friends" were always the black kids or the kids too poor to be considered human. I'd made exactly zero friends since starting university because I was the only person in my Learning Group who didn't live on campus and had a full-time job.
Yes. At 18 I was a full-time student and working a full-time job to pay for the apartment my roommates would eventually decide they didn't need to pay for anymore. School became a place I didn't feel either welcome or wanted, and it was too much work to go straight from Steak n Shake at 6AM to Wright State for my History class at 8 with too little reward. What was I going to get when it was all done? A piece of paper that tells me I'm in debt and that I get to work this hard for the rest of my life?
I'd rather just work this hard the rest of my life, is the choice that I made. Maybe it's the wrong choice. I wonder more and more every day.
But what would a degree give me other than the advantage of authority?
What would it be other than an attempt for me to pretend I don't exist on the margins of my society?
I think of University as 1:1 analogous with the Chinese Government Exams. Not least of which because many, many – too many – successful people are such either in fields other than what they got their degree in or never got a degree at all. From my vantage, success has everything to do with timing and the connections you make on your road through life.
I used to follow Good Mythical Morning pretty closely. Their content is hit or miss, but they've managed to build a quite literal YouTube empire on the backs of their personalities – which includes their hard work. I'm interested in this – the empire building on the back of a personality. This isn't much different from a cult, and you know how I feel about cults. (Actually, you probably don't, because I only got 5 views on that post, and I'm pretty sure three of them are bots.)
They have a podcast, and the conceit used to be interviewing other famous YouTube personalities and learning the backstories behind how they found success. I don't know when or why they changed to a livingroom setup where it's just what happened in the lives of Link and Rhett since the last episode, but I know that I'd heard about all I needed to hear from their celebrity guests about ten episodes in. Not because the personalities stopped being interesting – I didn't know who any of them were, and I still don't consume any of their content.
Because the stories were all the same:
Loving families, friend groups, support networks. This seems to be the key to finding success in the world.
Another video of Jordan Peterson's I like to watch to remind myself my life isn't entirely my fault is titled something like "Why Low-Status Creative Men Suck at Life."
I like this question he asks: “How should you regard yourself as an active and competent organism when you're facing problems that you can't compute?” It's kind of why I'm writing this Producer's Logs in the first place. “The baseline is there isn't much of you, you're very fragile, and things will grind you to nothing.” This is why I dropped out of college. He goes on to say that this is a Buddhist idea: that life is, first and foremost, suffering.
I often lament or wonder whether I shouldn't lament, that I adopted Buddhist ideas as a way of surviving my abusive and neglectful home life as a child.
Jesus didn't have answers for me by the time I got to high school. “Turn the other cheek” was getting me slapped in both cheeks by my mother. So I turned to the Buddha, who understood that life is suffering and the only way to get out of that loop of suffering is to leave life the material life behind and engage in entirely psychic, spiritual pursuits. Because he's right, and I'd learned it by the time I was 18: you can't fight against life.
People who say they fight things like cancer, they aren't fighting. They're struggling – they're suffering openly and honestly. That isn't fighting, though. What it is is not giving in to death – it is, by its very definition, living.
But if you look at people who fight life, they're fighting everything. Social Justice Warriors, by definition, are people who are fighting against life. They're fighting against the struggle imposed upon them by life, by circumstance, by deliberate action of elites (and non-elites alike). But what are they gaining? The short answer is they're gaining followers who are people like them. But they aren't gaining real ground. The best thinkers in their number abandon them regularly, and the majority of fighters bow out by their 40s. This is how those same Liberals who protests Vietnam can be Conservatives and in favor of wars in the Middle East today.
But this is what I remind myself:
“Do you have an intimate relationship that works? Do you have a family that's networked well together and strong? Do you have some sort of interesting occupation that regularizes your schedule, gives you something productive to do on a long-term basis, is stable and productive? Do you have something that you find engaging to do, or maybe more than one thing, outside of work? And are you compromising your mental and physical health by doing any things that are particularly stupid?”
He goes on to say that any plan for correcting a life path that's gone awry is to build on these five things.
I hear this, and I agree. The problem becomes that my family is a non-starter. I tried to revisit that when I allowed myself to go into total spiritual free-fall at the start of the COVID Lockdown. I couldn't provide for myself if I couldn't work, and for the last 18 months or so, I have survived to greater and lesser degrees on the kindness of strangers.
(If you're interested in the idea of spiritual free-fall, or you want to know why it's even more dangerous than it sounds, you should check this interview out. It's a Buddhist discussing liminality and antistructure in early Buddhism, and specifically why and how modern Buddhism is designed to protect the practitioner from those states of antistructure and liminality.)
I can resoundingly say that all five of those pillars are either missing or seriously flawed in my life.
I have my blogs. I treat them like productive work and the engaging activity outside of it. But they aren't, really. This isn't productive work in the sense that I'm taking an income from it. And that's fine. I'm not here to beg for alms. I wish that our society had a place in it for monks to wander out of the woods with a bowl and that people would put food in it. I would live that life and you would be happier for me for it. But that is not the life that has been given to me.
The life that has been given to me is one with an infrastructure in place for the creative monk to wander out of the wilderness with a bowl and say, “I have interesting things to say and a marketable personality, give me money.” Which is to say that creatives and philosophers alike are cast upon the mercy of the market. I can either figure a way to make Robert palatable to a traditional publisher, or I can generate enough eyeball traffic to turn on AdSense, or I can hold out my bowl and suggest that you subscribe to my Patreon or that you buy me a cup of coffee or that you Venmo me $5.
And it is what it is, no matter how much I hate it.
Should I offer to let my readers buy the segment titles for my football blog? Or put their names in my work where my readers can see it? It feels like so much song and dance and totally disingenuous to me.
I keep identifying the blockage in my life every time I sit down to write and think about Rob, and then I end by trying to talk myself out of not changing my behavior.
I've been trying not to talk about an experiment I saw the other day on social learning. The basic premise is asking whether you can condition someone to an arbitrary rule, then get them to teach the arbitrary rule to others. They have a hospital waiting room full of people trained to stand at a beep. They introduce a woman, the control, and see whether she will stand with the beep.
Not only does she eventually stand with the beep, but she gets another waiting room, this time full of other controls, to stand with the beep. The looks on the faces of the people who aren't the first girl are hilarious.
I'm watching this, and I'm just laughing at everyone in the doctor's office like they're idiots because I would absolutely not stand with that beep. I wouldn't stand with that beep even if I started getting negative feedback for it. I'm that stubborn, that disinterested in the behavior of the group when there isn't a well-understood reason for their behavior, and really care that little about what the group thinks of me either positively or negatively.
That's a problem.
It's my problem. But it is a problem.
I started writing this piece – that's not true – I started conceptualizing this piece a few days ago with a rant in my head about adaptability.
My girlfriend brought home two pet rats. We named them Fives and Echo after the Clones from Clone Wars. Whatever. I've probably said it before, but we also have five cats – only two of them came with me, and that was really two two many when I got them. But that's a story I wrote in another blog I tried to create as stimulation outside work and got overwhelmed by.
I observe our animals to the same degree that I do the people I follow on Twitter or am walking past in the grocery store. And what I've noticed is that animals get high levels of stress from change if they haven't learned the skill of adaptability. Because it is a skill.
Anything we have to learn and practice and perfect is a skill. Some of us have particular talents – that is, they come with what appears to be a built-in advancement of a skill, sort of like a Feat for a level 1 DnD character. But even prodigious talent can only take one so far.
Like how I am crippled by an apparently titanic intellect – in the same way that an anorexic is crippled by their bloated body mass.
If I am skilled at anything – or if I was skilled at anything – it is adapting. ...If maybe not adopting.
I said earlier I have confused people with my ability to be pleasant and kind with people I disagree with in person. And I played it off like my concern is with not being forced to watch your face stupidly contort as you work through your mental gymnastics to present an arbitrary argument. And it is some of that.
But it's also a matter of energy. Specifically, I find arguing – engaging – with – most – people not worth the expenditure of psychic energy. The payoff in what they give back is just not ever worth it.
Well, is so rarely worth it that I allowed the skill of talking to people to atrophy, maybe. No, not talking to people – relating to them. Attempting to relate to them. Is it a matter of being obsessed with myself and what I've gone through, I often wonder.
I land on the answer that it's not. It's that I'm the Hermit: lamp extended toward the mountain. I can't make the people in my proximity climb.
And friendship is found in proximity.
The problem has become that when I venture to observe the people observing, even climbing, the mountain, they don't want to hear what I have to say, either. Because I'm not already part of the group.
I'm observing (bitching about) a problem I see recently-successful entries into the paranormal community discussing. I saw some female podcast were slut-shamed simply because the one was attractive. Which I find interesting, because I asked that question a couple weeks ago: where does the bias come from that attractive women, women I want to fuck, can't also be intellectually stimulating? Is it because the women I have fucked have been fraudulent? Or is it something to do with the Male Gaze?
I don't know. But what I do know is that we will find any reason we can to exclude people from our groups. And if I am going to find acceptance, I either have to build a large enough cult following, or I have to catch the attention of someone already-established.
We'll see. I find it exhausting, but I'm still working at it. Promise.
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