Tag: people

People Problems

I don’t like being an audience member. I prefer being an active participant. And this goes for all of my life’s activities. Whether it involves one-on-one interactions with people, or small groups, or society at large. The situations and people I want apart of my life require that I function as an active participant in their development. I can’t afford to be a glassy eyed bystander all the time. I hold the same desire for others as well; specifically that they may maintain the same attitude and relation to me as I hold for them. I want them actively contributing to the development of my life, my perspective, my abilities, my ideas, etc.

Regarding people, I don’t want to listen to them all day talk about their personal problems. On the flip side, I don’t want to talk about my life problems all day either. I don’t want to talk about fleeting circumstances, nor do I want to talk about flaky people. I want to talk about, first and foremost, good ideas. Sure, I can talk about events and the people involved and what not but, in the greater scheme of things, those topics are insignificant aspects of life. They change. People change, and our opinions about them change even quicker. Events happen, but there are always more events to talk about the next day. Ideas are the most resistant to change, but “truth” (in the proverbial sense) and understanding certainly don’t (Unfortunately bias and stubborn habits of thought don’t change as quickly as they should). That’s why I desire talking and thinking about ideas, visions, goals, things that endure.

I’m sure some people may find my position disagreeable, but the bottom line is that I don’t care about problems you don’t want to fix. In fact, I don’t care about any problems that A) cannot be fixed or solved or changed and B) that you don’t want to fix. The consequence of this philosophy of mine is that I don’t spend time with too many people. However, the people I do spend time with are either thinkers, or they are easy going. Ideally I could have the best of both worlds, but that’s just me being ideal. Usually I find the easy going people. Less frequently I find the thinkers. But usually the easy going people don’t think, or the thinkers are not easy going. Oh well.

Whatever the case, I don’t want to share your problems. I wouldn’t want you to share my problems either. I want to talk about solutions, about a better life more generally, about the positive aspects, or the critical aspects, with the thought of improving or accreting understanding. It’s good to be skeptical, it’s good to challenge and exercise doubt. But lets not get carried away and allow ourselves to fall into complete skepticism, or worse cynicism or nihilism. But skepticism is good, and sometimes being discontent is a great thing, but only if your intention is to improve circumstance, to actually develop or change things for the better.

If you are being discontent for no reason, and have no desire to improve, I don’t want to talk to you. And you shouldn’t want me to because that would serve no benefit to my life. Simply commiserating is not an admirable or worthwhile past time. Empathy is good, but only when a perspective is gained that will allow me to contribute to their life, to help solve an issue or problem. My empathy falls short when it works to simply bring me down, to simply have someone to share a miserable state of being just to feel less alone, less weak.

Contrary to popular belief, we can choose our problems. How is this possible? Because we can choose how we look at things. There are no problems apart from a subjective perspective. So how should we choose our problems? First and foremost, we need to define our ends. What do we want? What is our goal? What do we desire? What am I willing to sacrifice for this end? When these ends are defined we can decide which obstacles prevent us from their attainment. It is then that we recognize problems and only then that these obstacles become our problems. But they shouldn’t stay our problems. Why? Because we want to accomplish our ends, our goals and desires, more than we want these problems.

But this requires having goals and desires, clearly defined and enunciated. If you don’t possess clear ends, everything will potentially be a problem and you won’t know why and you want ever improve yourself and you want ever get anywhere.

But some people LOVE problems. For some, problems ARE the goal. They give them a sense of purpose and place. Problems become their identity. Their sense of being. And they never ever progress beyond them. They stay a pathetic victim of themselves. Always hungry for attention and pity and futile support that will never solve anything. These people are like a diseases whose literal life supporting function is actively feeding off the life of other people, quite like a parasitic organism or bacteria or virus. Their life is attained by sucking from the lives of others. But changing this behavior would require changing their function and in turn change their ability to survive in life. Unless, however, they decide to adapt and adopt another identity, another gestalt for living.

On the less extreme end of the spectrum are those people who simply survive off attention without directly harming the person. They don’t intentionally drain your life, nor to they directly detract from your well-being. In fact, they don’t think of you at all. These people simply want an audience that reflects back their self-image. They gain their sense of self through people and as a result use them as an audience in which they can extol their accomplishments in order  to derive a sense of approval. These people are simply ego maniacs driven by extrinsic motivation, by the external rewards dolled out by the people, by the values amplified by the herd. Their sense of self is derived entirely through an artificial sense of achievement; that is, through approval from others. It’s a way to live, but a terribly sad way to live. In my eyes anyway. There’s no properly sense of self. It’s distorted through a subjective lens that’s entirely created from the opinions of others.

There’s a ton more I want to write about, but I’ll save it for later. For the record, I need to elaborate thoughts on monetary expansion policy  and how it relates to investment, inequality, debt, and finance. I also need to write on technology and culture. Specifically how there could be potentially dangerous consequences due to an over reliance on the processes  that derive semantic content and the source of that content for reliability and “truth”, as well a atrophy in our very ability to derive semantic content for ourselves, that is think critically about things in order to empirically acquire semantic content for ourselves. But more on that later.

Problems Don’t Exist.

Passion is powerful. You can’t be all thought, all machine, calculated and cool. You need warmth, fire, some fuel to spread your light. But I despise drama. Drama is unnecessary theatrics.  It is passion with problems. Problematized passion. It takes good genuine energy and creates problems rather than solutions. People who attract drama feel insignificant without it. They lack an ability to exist in tranquility. It’s almost as if they think that drama gives their life character, somehow makes them strong or resilient for persisting through these problems, problems they create within abstract of their mind. They take a perfectly good life, and instead of applying their passion, their life force and energy to synthesizing new solutions, they problematize a good thing. Of course they talk like they don’t like the drama, like it weighs on them, like a millstone they carry with them. They are constantly talking about the day when they don’t have so many problems. They are the first ones to talk about discarding this laboring load and equally quick to point out how  badly they want to set it down and dispel the drama, but they continue talking, thinking, seething about their problems, adding potency to their diluted delusion.

Problems do not exist. There. I said it. Problems are only problems when you identify them as problems. Before they are identified, we accept circumstance and situation, absolving that that’s just the way things are, for better or worse. Perhaps it is a skill to be able to identify problems, to label things are deficient, broken, and I bet it takes a critically inquiring eye to do this. But where do you draw the line?

Problems are not problems. Drama is not drama. These are facets of life. Contrary to the clamoring chorus of capitalist commercialism, our life does not need to be problematic and dramatic to be glorious and grand. They profiteer off such knave  propensities for ease, for life without suffering. They drain you of your liquid wealth and welling life as you train to maintain and gain a greater sense of self, a sense of self complete with all the accessories they sell your squeaking soul. But your soul needs no oil. Let the soul, that broken squealing soul, scream, let it scream and burst forth in melody, let it create harmony with other squeaky souls. Do not oil. Warm yourself with its friction, these triturations of life. Soon your stridulating soul will begin to warble and transform into a beautiful hum, a harmonious vibration that echoes across cold chambers where copious copies of silent, gunky souls reside, soiled and slow from the years of feeble fabricated fixes. There is nothing wrong with your soul. You are perfect as a diamond is flawed, stronger than all the universal forces and extraterrestrial elements, pressed and latticed in structural perfectitude, lined with innumerable inclusions and trace elements that straddle its knitted bonds, strontium and nitrogen, rubidium and barium, adding to the refracting flash that douses the senses when you allow transparency and light to work their way within you and shine forth.

Problems do not exist. They are in your mind. If there were no mind to observe, no eye to see, there would be no problems to probe. Overcoming yourself is a task which has no end. The road up a mountain is the same road down it. Do not confuse your life’s task, your journey. Do not tire yourself with the trifling pursuits of climbing the insurmountable where barren cliffs and cleft rifts and ice tips are all that waits you. Go instead down the road, where momentum is your friend, and follow the valley where the streams merge with rivers and  gather into looming pools and luscious lakes and lead to opulent oceans that provide cooling relief under the dense shade of living vegetation. Go where there is life.

Problems do not exist. Life begins in consciousness. Life is not simply physical minutia, else the moons and marbling spheres and stars and solar systems be living. Life is not simply movement. It is purely imagination. No mind exists apart from the life giving force of their imagination. Our eyes cannot capture meaning. That is reserved for our minds. Do not forfeit your mind and believe your eyes. Do not let your ears consume the drunken speech of other grey minds, their crannies and crevasses all canvassed in web, caught in a tangle of dense delusion, of smog that blocks the breathing flue, changing flowing channels into choking chimneys, and strangulating the stronghold of being.

Problems do not exist. They are created, by us, to achieve ends, fabricated ends, short sighted ends, poor hallow ends. Until we believe that our means are greater than our ends, we will fail to dream, fail to see opportunity where there is challenge. Our lives will encapsulate a silent storm of tears, sleeting, frozen over from lack of warmth, from lack of friction with the world, lack of authentic abrasion that causes aural ambage.

Problems do not exist. People sell you problems, don’t sell yourself problems. Don’t add insult to injury and do the job that capitalism, commercial advertising, has perfected. Problems. Everyone wants you to believe that there is a problem free life– that can be achieved by means they can provide if you forfeit a small payment in price, a small piece of your time, a fraction of your wage. We will provide you the happiness, the comfort, the pleasure, the distress-free existence if you pay for it. But this is a lie. There are no problems. And the people who buy into the problems die poor, poor in pocket and poor in spirit. They failed to save, failed to build, collect and create. They diluted themselves with the quick fixes, the shabby solutions that clutter their consciousness, until they are wrapped in flax linnens and preserved in a perfect state of lifelessness.

Problems do not exist. What exists is desire for power, power over circumstance, power over passion, power over thoughts. These people die a slave. They never learned to revolt, never embraced the chaos, the flowing flux that embodies a living life, and rebel as a self-sustaining individual, perfectly punctual in the moment. Defining and confining, constraining and restraining.

Problems do not exist. Mind exists. When our mind identifies a problem with some thing, it is not the thing that changes, but our mind, our relation to that thing. Our mind is eternal, but our attention is finite. We cannot allow ourselves to be preoccupied with any thought or feeling that does not deliver grandeur to house of being, or fails to cleanse our doors of perception. We have one life, one spectacle, a single show, a solemn act to perform. We must choose the words that echo into the ears of eternity with heart, with care. We cannot think our way out of a state of being, a dramatic scene of tragedy, we can act our way out, only feel ourselves into another line, continue playing a developing role to an ambivalent audience.

There are no problems. There is fate. There are ends. There are expectations: faulty suspensions, wry calculations, aslant anticipations. Properly viewed, problems are merely  stepping stones that carry you through life.

 

Anyway.

I believe that love for a subject, passionate unrequited love, is the only way to let yourself gain any appreciable acquaintance, since love is selfless devotion. But I’m not sure we can love people before we love ourselves. We love the me we see in thee.

 

Anything to Anyone

(Unfinished excerpt)

“…There’s a point in everyone’s life when they realize their talent. For some this occasion arrives sooner than later, but nevertheless it arrives. If you were to ask me how I it is I came to acquire this talent, I might begin by giving you a breezy account of my upbringing, of the tumultuous transitions that marked my meandering life; or I might start off with a detailed account of my fascination with self mastery; or I might illustrate the parental influences that indelibly pressed upon my conscious. Whatever story I end up telling is more myth than fact. It may serve to inspire you,  kindle your fascination with me, feed your imagination; in the end they all serve an act of false generosity. False in the sense that it is the very talent in question that renders these myths.

To say my talent is people would be a gross underestimate. The more accurate telling would capture something supernatural and transient. You see, I am amorphous. I have no character that stolidly weathers the winds of time and the tides of change. But I am much more than my nebulous nature. I am a mimicking mirror: reflective, to a greater or lesser degree, of your exacting desires. There are no constraints, no guidelines, no rules, no method to this madness. It is a poetic perversion, a pantomime of subtle revelations mixed with mystery and madness, and nothing regular.

I work out of curiosity, out of the competitive challenge of can’t. I overcome these hurdles by moving myself towards a suit of interests. And when interests cannot be uncovered, it is my job to sow them.

You see, I can be anything to anyone. But surely, you say, this is manipulation, a farce of fabricated facades. I may disagree with fabricated facades, for they are surely fabricated and surer still facades, but I am by no means manipulative. On the contrary, my interests lie in you and you alone. There is no one else I hold in higher esteem. Your well-being is my well-being.

My vocation may be untraditional, but it is nonetheless legitimate and requires respect. It is not easy being other people. It demands constant work and attention, for people and their tastes are always changing. Fickle people. Fickle and flaky, but nonetheless predictable. If you do the thinking for them, that is. People begged to be swooned, to be lulled into a comfortable complacency. Defenses are an exhausting expenditure if there is no threat to counter or reward to reap. These walls always come down in time. Persistence is the key. Persistence and planning. If success is to be secured, you must increase probability with planning. Memorizing the mechanistic behaviors of man is just half of it. You must understand context, conventions, values, motives. Where are they from? With who do they acquaint? How do they behave? What do they value? Why do they act? To understand these is to understand the harrowing heart.

First and foremost, keep their best interest in mind, always. This must never escape the attention of your work. To absolutely achieve this, you must deny the self. You have no self. Subjugate whatever ego that sits at the window of your consciousness. He must observe from a far, with patience in mind. Every action is calculated for its long term returns, not the short term satisfactions. In this way the ego must sit idle and wait. His opportunities to whittle a path come at night, in solitude, under deep reflection.

A smile is the most disarming gesture you can offer. Let it

When you are something to someone, you become them. Their desires must be sought as if they are your own. More accurately, they are your own.”

 

Human Habitat

Ah. You think you see me? My habitat is humans. It is there I dwell; with the dark and distressing, the sublime and sombre imaginings of man. I beg you, do tell: who am I? I exist in all of you. I am you, a shallow reflection of your ego. No wonder you cannot resist. It is not I you fawn, but your self. You cannot look away from such beautiful trappings. Pride is the vice I leverage. You know me as well as you know yourself, dear one.

Strangers are People

1989.

Tall like trees. Bodies danced at the margins of my world, filling the jungle with movement and life.
My mother strolled ahead. I was two at the time. We were in Saint Luis Obisbo California. My father was in the middle of a six month naval cruise somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Operation Desert Storm was underway.  Patty, my mothers best childhood friend, was visiting our new family from the east coast. They wandered through the public promenade and admired the Californian city scape while they caught up on life’s new details. My sister Jaclyn was strapped tightly to a toddler rook, hanging like a swollen sack from my mothers back. Her little arms protruded out to the sides and her tiny fingers grasped at the passing air. My mother latched onto my hand like a leash and led the way through the thicket of legs and knees that shuffled along the sidewalk. I stared at my shoes. My laces lashed back and forth as I toddled to keep pace. Gum smeared the cement. I looked up: the world was tall.

Suddenly there was a pause. I watched their lips move in parley as their eyes surveyed the storefronts for a potential lunch spot. I jerked my hand away: I wanted freedom. I stared at my flopping laces and continued walking without thought to where I was going.
“Michael!” My mother called me; her voice was piqued with concern. “Get back here Michael. You need to stand near me. There are strangers here.”
I looked up and found her eyes peering at me. Bodies bustled about. Conversations echoed near and far. On nearby benches sat individuals, some propped and alert, others slumped and sluggish, all with a distant look in their eyes; their minds absorbed in contemplation.
“There are no strangers here. There are only people.”
I looked at her curiously, blinking. A smile warmed her face.
“You’re right Michael. There are no strangers. There are only people.”

Part-E.

The tentacles of their gaze wrap around me. I look away to escape the entanglement. My thoughts are reluctant to turn with my head: they are transfixed on the motioning masses. Huddled in clusters, they divide themselves evenly throughout the room.  Every so often bodies will detach and absorb into another cluster, near or far, like a firing neuron. They maintain a hum, a gentle hum, a hum that cackles and keeps the insipid look in their eyes alive. They pour more of the intoxicant down their throats, trying to consume it with coolness, not realizing it is them being consumed.

I avoid their eyes. I don’t want to stir their mind. I want to see them as they are: complacent automatons molded and shaped by self fulfilling events. A glint of metal whirrs above me and a cool malted fragrance mists the air and settles on my brow. It smacks against the wall with an empty crack. Deep cheer and laughter erupt from one of the clusters. A boy stands with his spine erect, like a conquering hero; a rapacious smile hangs on his face as glistening liquid drips off his lips and soaks into his curling facial hair. I watch as their dull eyes reflect admiration, but I cannot make out their praises. I examine the once whirring metal, now motionless on the ground: an empty beer can. A hole punctured in its lower quarter. Shot-gunning.

I force myself to look around. My eyes return. I do my best to maintain casual eye contact. Do they see the fear in me? Are they afraid it is I that sees the fear in them? I want to be alone, but I stay. I have roles to fulfill; people to please. I pull a smile across my face. I feel my lips tighten and mimic the expression of a voluptuary. I tell myself I am pleased. I continue to scan the room. Make eye contact. My lust admires the youthful figures shifting in front of me: Boys and girls, courting one another with self-conscious precision. They have practiced this routine, this dance, these gestures: The alluring batting eyes; the coy retreats that indicate bashful vulnerability. They beg to be swooned. To be noticed. They don’t want to be taken a fool. They are ready to play this game.

The boys stand tall, proud, chests out, chin erect, like adolescent steeds. Their loud gestures fill the room, sweeping motions, legs spread, trying their best to dominate as much space as possible.

Most people are other people. Where is the passion?

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation”
-Oscar Wilde

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When I read this quote it struck me hard. How true. I talk to people and they know nothing for themselves. They examine the evidence and opinions of others, negating their true voice and adopting a tone of another. People don’t know what they believe, nor do they give it too much thought. It requires far too much of them. They’d rather rely on someone else being wrong, or right, for their direction. Speak out and find yourself! I want people to care! How SAD that people don’t know their passion! They try finding themselves! It’s not about finding yourself!! It’s about listening to you’re heart. ‘Follow your heart, but be quiet for  a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.’  Why do people scrutinize their own understanding? Do people really find security in settling? Can you achieve an intimacy with your passions in this way?

I think settling is the larger issue. People settle. They accept the minimum instead of probing the depths of truism, where their soul resides and their desires yearn to flourish. They unknowingly, err, ignorantly live according to the opinions of the world. I can’t imagine anyone would become a slave, sacrificing their will, if they really knew it. But they should know it, and they don’t question. They accept the obvious and most convenient proclamations.

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“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keep with a perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” The sole servant to you’re passions and you’re own convictions. You are important and you’re experience is just as real as anyone else’s.

Defining

Where ever you go in life there will always be those defining moments with those defining people. I suppose you seek them out and allow the the definition to take place when you’re most comfortable. I can also imagine a willingness to forget a place and time that’s uncomfortable or possibly painful, with the hope that you might be able to escape the grasps of regret. What’s sad is, if you never deal with with those moments, you’re left with a big hole in your heart. Who are you if you aren’t all there?