Loneliness

Both.

Loneliness is a yearning for some non-specific dream person to appear and perform a role. Lonely for "that person" who wakes you up in the morning and waits for you at night, we feel tasked with finding someone to portray that character.

But a real person might not be home in the mornings, or might sleep even later than you. A real person might not be predisposed to waiting, being intensely engaged in some pursuit or another. The Special Someone is a fantasy, and real people have limited ability (let alone interest) in portraying one-dimensional fantasy characters. Real people come with a whole backstory. You can't conjure someone fresh to make the role-play their core function.

If you do find someone willing to enact your wishcast - to do the waking and the waiting - there will be perturbances, because it will never completely or consistently fit your mental fantasy. Always "off", you'll always be lonely. The perfect benevolent character in your head was never a human being. Human beings are ambivalent and complicated. Upsettingly, it's never quite all about you. That's why you can't get no satisfaction.

If you can escape the dreamy realm of role play - of desperately seeking the person to act the part - the waking and the waiting, etc. - then, good news. You live in a world full of billions of people. They're doing just fine, and you can enjoy that they're out there, living their lives obliviously to you. You might occasionally offer some support or encouragement - just because! - but it needn't lead to a "Meet Cute" kindling of a fantasy scenario. You can just let it be what it is, which is pretty good!

I've described two radically different scenarios, but you'll feel lonely in either, because you'll never be awakened nor awaited per that special no one in your head. Caught up in drama, the shortfall feels bitterly lonely, even if s/he's right here right now. But if you opt out of contriving indulgent cinematic tearjerkers in your mind over What's Missing, you'll experience loneliness as a light wistfulness. 

You can be free, and able to do whatever you want, encumbered by a light wistfulness.


See also Love Theater

Adjusting my Must-Read Twitter List

I maintain a "Must-Read" list on Twitter, carefully curated to offer a smart, insightful, funny stream of tweets. I don't agree with everyone on the list, but all are reasonably clear-minded and interesting and don't just echo trendy sentiments.

I recently removed Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Elon Musk because both have gone from being trollish dicks who periodically say clever things to a more robust trollish dickishness unrestrained by intention to be clever.

I've resisted this move for years. There's grave danger in closing one's ears to those with whom one disagrees. But I demand nutrition. There must be some enrichment. Snide pique and dorky trolling do nothing for me, even from those with whom I agree (e.g. a lot of the Lincoln Project stuff turns me off, though I strongly support their mission).

I'd love to include a MAGA in this list who offers thoughtful perspective (however flawed), and who doesn't just fling memes and contrived horseshit. I've never found such a person, so I settle for anti-Trump commentary by former Republicans (well-represented on this Twitter list), who help assure me that I haven't been spun into irrational fury and paranoia by cynical profiteers.

It's a concern of mine because while I still strongly disagree with Reagan and GWB, I see now that I was incited into hating/fearing them way too severely. I was spun into seeing them as devils, so now that an actual devil has appeared, I question my appraisal. But with Dick Frickin' Cheney voting Democrat, I'm much more confident. It's truly that bad.

Founder Mode, Manager Mode

If you read the epic tale of the sale of my startup to a major corporation (it starts here), you know my thoughts on the vast chasm between founders and corporate managers, most pointedly stated in this installment:

The best route for creative people with business impulses (or vice versa) is to hatch one's own startup. And then sell out to puddy pudpuds who'll follow procedures to maintain it and apply relentlessness to profit from it.

The same analysis was back-linked in this later short posting.

Well, have a look at this exploration of the gaping differences between companies in "founder mode" or in "manager mode".

Interestingly (and well-explained by my writings in that series), creative types would instinctively roll their eyes at the very notion of "manager mode", while corporate types (aka "puddy pud-puds") would do likewise at the mention of "founder mode". It's every bit as partisan a divide as Harris vs Trump. Yet I think there's something to be said for both. In the epilogue of my series, I strained to be terribly mature, taking a higher perspective:

Both sides screw up when they encroach too far on the other's territory. I am absolutely a poster child for the woes of a creative founder hitting a wall after sticking around too long. With some funding, I might have instituted the revenue scheme on my own early on. But I lacked the funds and the time, and that's on me (though, in my defense, I was perennially being drowned by relentless scaling). I should have been talking to investors (learning to polish my shoes, to carefully modulate my voice, and to project gravitas), when I was mostly freaking out about the latest spammer, or getting the newsletters out on time. But, as I've explained, there's a point where you're so locked into daily overhead that the marginal time to push forward disappears.

I make a terrible pudpud, and CNET made a terrible creative founder. I stuck around too long and, paradoxically, they jumped in too early. The operation suffered from my poor pudpud skills as well as from CNET's poor creative skills.

Edginess

If you're the least bit embarrassed by the memory of Americans carrying around Mao's little red book, wearing Che Guevara t shirts, and cheering the Viet Cong to seem edgy, maybe you can break that pattern of atrocious stupidity and not make Hamas your edgy righteous paragon.

…while justifiably sympathizing with Palestinians.

 

Processing Hamas Support Through the Lens of Vietnam Protest

 

The Futility Threshold

I have some additional thoughts as to what's really happening in the scenario described in my previous posting, "The Fog of Self Awareness". I described how people fall unwittingly into loops, trying the same thing over and over while expecting different results, as a foggy amnesia blocks self-awareness of their predicament.

I attributed it to the need for continuity. You fancy yourself a chef - a conceit which persists despite the enormous mountain of evidence that you're patently no chef. Forced to choose between contradictory views, you can guess which choice most people make.

This provides the basis for most comedy: the buffoon desperately and tenaciously clinging to presumption despite snowballing contrary evidence.

If you try to make the person cognizant of their plight (and manage to survive their reaction), they'll, at very best, nod impatiently and set themselves to do better next time. As if steely determination is what's needed. This also presupposes that previous attempts were performed by a pathetic slouch...even if they tried super-hard then, too!

At a certain point we need to try something else, and not just keep taking the same run at the impasse. At a certain point, we must recognize the futility of our efforts. Let's call that point The Futility Threshold.

However patently true this may be, it coexists with the antithetical truth that determination and grit can be highly effective. Very often we truly must transcend our slouchy selves via redoubled effort. Iteration - enduring poor results until they eventually improve, seemingly by magic - is a fundamental process.

So the threshold of futility is a crucial consideration. At a certain point we need to stop and reconfigure. In our effortful determination, we can fail to notice that we've passed this point, but outside observers do notice. For them, we're hilarious, trapped in an obvious loop without a shred of self-awareness. A fog having settled, we've lost our clarity.

It's the familiar error of using the wrong tool for the job. Maslow’s hammer! Determined pushing is how we get cars out of mud. But past the futility threshold, we must cease pushing, sip some coffee, and chart a new course involving shovels or chains or tow trucks. When perspective freezes, we lose the flexibility to view from multiple vantage points. Our efforts grow more and more futile (and funnier and funnier) while we remain grotesquely un-self-aware.

This has reverse engineered the observation that insanity is "doing the same thing over and over expecting different results." This saying always irritated me, and now I understand why: Anyone who's ever gotten good at anything has, indeed, done the same thing over and over with gratifyingly different results! Iterating in order to improve is the foundational human magic trick!

But only up to a point. The futility point!

The Fog
What about the "fog" - my foggy characterization of the tendency to become too distracted to notice the futility of one's circumstance? The fog which leaves us blind to overwhelming evidence that it's not going to happen even with an extra generous running start? The fog which creates the amnesia about how hard we've been trying all along?

"Fog" describes zones outside the spotlight of our momentary attention. Mental fog seems to rush in to fill an attention gap the way oxygen rushes in to fill a physical vacuum. The absence of Anything feels like an eerie, foggy Something.

A wine expert friend once told me that a tannic wine is either 1. too tannic, or, more likely, 2. lacking in all other tastes. Similarly, "foggy" is a concrete way to describe the "flavor" of a gap; of negative space; of the Ignored.

I noted that "a fog having settled, we've lost our clarity." This describes the experience of frozen perspective. Lithe reframing dispels fog by viewing from multiple vantage points, casting light from all directions...while a frozen perspective feels foggy everywhere beyond the tight tunnel vision. And so we may err endlessly, oblivious to the obvious truth. 

The act of balancing attention and shifting viewpoint - i.e. active reframing - not only dispels fog, but also recharges our self-awareness and sparks the creativity to devise fresh methods which can connect effectively with desired outcomes.