III - Ever noticed that - May 2024

The vivid, the Holy Mountain, Mussolini's rice failure

Complaining momentum

I notice that my writing tends to lean on complaining. Okay to be honest, it's not just a tendency, it's more like 98% bitching. A big reason for this is that my writing is mostly done when I'm at “work”, because you know, office jobs are fairly bullshit these days.

But this habit has definitely steeped into my life, since the momentum of complaining is not easily overcome. I won't promise this will magically go away, but I'll be keeping an eye on this.

Unclenching the fist of discipline

I'm not doing my magic training anymore (which I mentioned in the March entry, just two months ago). I know, I didn't do it for a long time, but the reason is simple: my life feels like a grind, and any form of training just makes me want to resist it even further.

It doesn't help that for basically all of my life, besides my early years as a child, I have felt like I needed to force myself to go through school, then university, and now work. I think my body is utterly fed up with this dynamic, it's simply not sustainable.

What is then? I don't know, I can't say I'm living very well right now, but I'm also not suffering or going mad or anything. Just spending a whole lot of time in front of a screen, sort of being a zombie. Not very proud of it, but I am genuinely not interested in fighting this for now. Writing and drawing just don't have that spark for me at this point. They're not torturous, but they don't feel like an adventure or something super interesting. They kind of feel like something I "have" to do. And I don't want to turn those activities into another grind. Modern work already gives me plenty of that.

The subtle coercion of internet advice

Related to the grind, there is a subtle form of coercion - sometimes not subtle at all in fact - that goes on with internet advice. It stems from the simple fact that a lot of stuff that is shoved into our digital feeds hasn't gone through the basic questions of: "what do I care about" or "what do I need".¹ This is incredibly obvious but the consequences aren't so.

The thing is that social media is basically bound to give you unsolicited advice in one way or the other, either because

• It has gone viral and landed into your feed, which tends to happen with "inspiring" comments, particularly the kind that reaffirms what people want to hear.

• The people you follow make videos centered around life advice or the likes, because you were or are still interested in it, which is rather common because personal problems are the norm in the modern world.

• People who have benefited from something will share about it, which is unlikely to match your current context.

The problem with unsolicited advice is that well ... it's unsolicited. You can only work on so many things at once, and having this stream of advice and opinions can seriously undermine your ability to focus on your projects.

It then creates this sort of backlog in your mind of unfinished "projects", which were never projects in the first place because you didn't set the intention to care about those. But in the mind, it registers as FOMO — the fear of missing out — or an inability to focus on your current tasks, both common symptoms of social media.

The lack of the Vivid

I don't believe that human beings strive for a static sense of peace, but instead want a vivid life, even if that involves a fair amount of discomfort. The opposite of a vivid adventure would be a tortuous and dull monotony, one where things are predictable, but which leave the people involved totally indifferent. There is no mystery, no genuinely memorable events, just a string of things to conform to, and meaningless "problems" to solve.

The effect of living this way for an extended period of time is that people stop looking and believing in mysteries and adventures, and merely become problem solvers and planners. For instance, treating relationships as an input-ouput problem — what do I need to tell her so that I can fuck her? — or approaching holidays as a list of places to add a check mark to, or making very meticulous plans for the next years of your life as if you could control those closely, or treating various experiences as phenomenons that need to be explained away — rainbows occur because of the refraction of light when the following conditions occurs ... — as opposed to be enjoyed for their own sake, on and on.

Problem solvers are very useful for the system, which would ideally only consist of dull, lifeless automatons working for its growth. Adventures on the other hand? Not so much. But because we aren't lifeless automatons, such a monotony is utterly maddening for us. I believe that Dostoesvky was right when he said that Man, being given every earthly thing he wants, would still rebel just to show at least to himself, that he has agency in his life.²

I'm not exactly in a state where I could give advice on how to get in touch with the vivid however, and anyway it's not the type of stuff you can rigidly plan by its very nature. I think a good direction is to simply expose oneself to different experiences, on the inside that is, even if they don't seem all that grand from the outside.

For instance, talking to a stranger on a bus is more radical than traveling to an exotic country but doing the same predictable stuff you would usually do. Or what about spending a few days without a screen so you can get to read this book you've been putting off? Or if you're going to be staring at a screen all day, at least you could watch some really weird stuff that really knocks you out of the comma of repetitions, such as …

The Holy mountain

The “holy” in the “holy mountain” stands for “holy fuck what am I witnessing”. Truly the most bizarre thing I've ever experienced. A movie about a spiritual journey, but even that isn't clear considering the ending.

Lots of symbols and colorful intriguing images, and I'm unsure if those are meant to be the main point of the movie: one crazy image after the other, or a massive bait for those constantly looking for meaning. It's probably both.

A movie which is also very nonchalant about showing ugliness, decadence, filth and deformed people. I actually find this refreshing in contrast with newer movies which feel so sterile in how clean they are: clean actors, clean manners, clean message, clean scenes, a "clean" plot, i.e. so utterly predictable that it won't make anyone think too hard about what is going on. Movies have overall become "nice", where "nice" is the same as in "nice guy", i.e. not nice at all, but on the surface not offensive.

Because even within the hell depicted in the first act, you can still see how there are still hints of light, life and humor. Not from everyone, and it's still quite rare, but it's there, it's vivid.

Spoiler alert for the ending (I don’t think there’s a way to put spoiler blocks in Substack, but just skip to the image after this one if you haven’t watched the movie. It’s truly an experience.)

The ending is often interpreted in the all too common mood of our times, i.e. it was all pointless. You've been watching a movie, and one of the main characters tells you to go back to reality.

This isn't how it landed in me. When I contrast the sheer insanity of the first two acts, from the filthy and depraved cities our main character wades through of the first act, and the madness and the utterly deranged power structures the 7 characters work within in the second act, the third act with its simple natural setting struck me as a significant improvement in basically every way.

I do think this movie was about a spiritual journey, that it portrayed genuine spiritual growth and that a quest for a better life is not in vain, but that this doesn't take the form of the coveted immortality, but rather coming back to reality, which sounds incredibly mundane but isn't so when we look at how utterly insane the world portrayed in the movie is, a reflection of perhaps the modern world that was to come.³

End of spoilers

Ultimately this isn't a movie that can really be spoiled through revealing its plot, because the ending is merely one part of an entire journey. And what a truly bizarre journey this was. Definitely the kind of movie that should be experienced more so than talked about.

Why time passes faster for adults

Related to the vivid, why does time pass faster for adults than for children? The common answer is that each new year is proportionately shorter compared to how long you've lived, which is why adults experience time faster. This explanation would imply that time keeps getting faster and faster, such that a year when you're 60 passes twice as fast as when you're 30, or 12 times as fast as when you were 5, which are both absurd.

My explanation is rather that adults are utterly disconnected from the present moment, and are constantly looking for ways to escape it. This explains why the experience of time doesn't keep getting faster and faster - it's more like a discontinuous jump that happens roughly at adulthood - and why meditating for 10 minutes can feel like an hour.

If the only relevant factor was how long you've lived, how conscious you are couldn't have a significant impact on how quickly time passes, yet it clearly does. You don't need to believe me, as the meditating example provides a very clear first person illustration of this.

Time passes slower for children because reality appears so magical to them, and so they don't have any need to escape to the future. They also haven't been indoctrinated by the system to accept the idea that life is just a repetitive grind until your retirement, they just do things that interest them.

Some of the deeper reasons why people are disconnected from the present moment are:

1. The technological system ultimately has very little use for it, since its focus is always on the future and on power. And because people have to become somewhat useful to the system in order to make money and thus live, people become system-shaped, i.e. they inherit the system's priorities of growth, efficiency and control.

2. Being present requires consciousness and most people are barely conscious, because it requires practice and also because society is built on unconsciousness. Moreover, the accumulation of trauma makes it uncomfortable to be present.

3. Most people don't like their lives and do very little that is genuinely fulfilling. It's not rare to come across people who only spend their time working, distracting themselves, and then going to sleep.

4. Boredom puts you out of the present moment, and it is useful for society at large to promote consumption and sleep, such as by people turning to their phone compulsively. And the discomfort with boredom is also a good way to filter people who can tolerate bullshit and bureaucracy VS those who don't.

Ultimately, time passes faster for adults because they aren't really living, they're sleepwalking through their life, afraid to break out of their dreadful, but comfortable, routines, by doing genuinely different risks, and actually paying attention to what's around them.

The underbelly of mental health problems

What are called mental health problems are, in my experience, signs of three things:

1. How deeply coercive the society we live in is

2. The death of a supportive environment⁴

3. A complete lack of spirituality — conscious connection with something bigger than just the self

For instance, I would say that so-called Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder says more about the utterly mind-numbing boredom of school, and children's need to actually do something with their body and their mind, than about an actual disorder in them. The truth is that if there is a mismatch between a child and school, the child will always be blamed.

When was the last time you saw someone critique not just individual teachers, but the structure of school itself? Even the basic act of sitting for 8 hours a day is an absolute tyranny on the body of developing human beings. We just weren't made to sit all day long. And this is only the surface of how coercive school is, with its constant demand of homework, making you take tests about subjects you don't care about, obeying absurd rules and respecting arbitrary deadlines, etc.

But because our system has no need for free people — who also experience freedom in their body in the form of being free to move and play around, as well as freedom in their mind by speaking their truth about what matters — it is the children who need to be shaped to the institution of the school, not the other way around.

Children then come back to a family that also agrees with the demands of school. They might do so in many different ways: by coercing their own child into "paying more attention" (has that ever worked?), or sending them to specialized schools for "difficult children", or sending them to a child therapist, etc.

But the relationship is the same: one of complete dismissal of the children's reality, because for many people, children are not even human beings whose opinion matters, they're just things you order around and get angry when they don't do the desired things. Which is frighteningly close to the way people discipline their dogs.

And thirdly, the utterly unspiritual — and even anti-spiritual — world creates a void in children's internal world, which will very likely get filled up by whatever is available to cope with it: social media, video games, porn, weed if they're a bit older, etc. When a child spends their time essentially bullied by their teachers and school, and finds no support in their family, it's essentially guaranteed that they'll distract or numb themselves to cope with the deep wound of isolation that afflicts them.

No wonder then that young people feel so aimless, because first of all, they are disconnected, from other people but also something deeper than the shell of the self. They might express this by saying that life is meaningless, but really this is merely the projection of the mind of a deeper empty internal world, resulting from their disconnected life. The mind is favored to make sense of problems, such as talking about "mental health issues", because people nowadays are so dissociated from their body, and numbed from their emotions, that they cannot see anything but the mind.

Those 3 problems I mention — coercion, lack of a supportive environment and the unspiritual world — will not magically get better overtime in my opinion, in the mainstream collective and in the short term at least. Society will keep playing its game of expanding its power for its own sake, until it cannot anymore because of its inherent unsustainability.

So people will be even more and more discontent, utterly confused as to why they can't meet their (suppressed) needs, shame themselves for their inability to conform to the system, feel suicidal and alienated from one another, play the stupid games of the system, or, if they have more agency and clarity of what matters in life, attend to their inner reality, end the cycle of coercion in themselves, live in ways that are increasingly independent from the system, and connect with other like-minded people who recognize that what is truly valuable in life isn't provided by the technological system anyway.

The main reason for change

People mainly change because they're tired of the symptoms, to the point that they’re willing to admit to what is actually going on, not because of, for instance:

1. Rationality or convincing arguments. For most people, ideas are built and rearranged on top of an underlying emotional reality, i.e. they believe what is convenient for their life, what causes minimal cognitive dissonance, not what is true. As a result, it doesn’t matter if you can show that what people believe in is flawed or impossible — like perpetual growth on a finite planet — they will keep looking for evidence or anecdotes to justify their beliefs, because they need them. They haven’t arrived at those beliefs through an inquiry, they have backwards rationalized them.

2. Foresight of future problems. It is worth noting that this ability is present in mature individuals, and is probably one of the biggest divide between the pleasure-seeking fool and the more experienced wise person.

3. Personal will. I am not saying that there is no such thing as will, I am rather saying that what is usually conceived of as "will" doesn't actually produce changes. What most people call "will" is in fact self-coercion to address a feeling of shame. But that shame merely creates more internal conflict, which can never lead to any lasting change. In the short term that coercion can be channeled into some productive output, but it will always be met with backlash eventually.

I mention this because despite all my writing about the problems with the system, I do not expect most people to change. It is simply too convenient to numb the problems away. But still, there are conscious individuals and those are worth talking to and building relationships with. Just don’t expect most people to magically change.

Mussolini's failure

Related to change, there is an interesting anecdote about Mussolini trying to impose a change in diet in the Italian population. He wasn't able to have them eat rice instead of pasta, which had economical advantages over wheat fields, because the Italians were that attached to their cultural heritage and their food.

It is rather interesting to think that fascism has been able to spread to so many people, but that the tipping point for this movement is when it starts affecting people's personal lives, even for something as small — in the grand scheme of things — as the food they eat.

The disconnect between success and failure is pretty much always the same: skin in the game. Corruption results from a lack of skin in the game, whereas change results directly from having skin in the game (life).

1st world country floods

On a Friday night, significant rain have hit areas around where I live, which fortunately didn't affect me as much, but still have left a noticeable pool of water in our basement, though nothing drastic.

Our house has already been hit in Summer 2021 by an actual flood, one that left the ground floor with a good 70-80cm of water, which left the walls covered with moisture and destroyed many of our belongings. My parents and I didn't lose anything significant in the process — some furniture and some personal belongings, but nothing that couldn't be replaced — but the time needed to clean and renovate the house, and the wake-up call that something like that could happen even in Europe was a sobering realization for me: the modern world, in all its "technological advancement", is still powerless in many ways against Mother Nature's wrath.

Of course there are many human factors at play too: surfaces entirely covered in concrete or asphalt are unable to absorb water, neglected river beds become incredibly poor at evacuating water, and an abandoned dam system meant that there was no way to direct the excess water elsewhere, etc. Don't take my words too literally, I'm not very knowledgeable in practical matters, but all that to say that there is a large part of decaying infrastructure, which means that many things could have been done within the system to avoid this.

The thing though is that when it happened, people were far more interested in finding people to blame — government, politicians, workers who were supposed to maintain the dams etc. — than to actually work on proactive measures. A lot of blaming, some reactive measures, but not a whole lot of sitting down and finding ways to prevent future problems. Not surprising to me, but still disappointing.

At the end of the day, the technological system can only exist through human beings and their coordination, and let's just say that I don't trust the latter. Too many conflicting interests, too little incentive to care about others that one doesn't personally know, too much systematic incompetence and corruption, not enough skin in the game.

The flood that hit us in 2021 were a good reminder of the fragility of the system we have come to rely on. Do not be fooled by the tech gizmos such as LLMs and generative art. If the basic infrastructures that provide us with food, energy and housing break down, the fancy tech doesn't matter. And the signs of fragility are everywhere, it’s just that people do not dare talk about them.

Tweet blowing up

One of my tweets blew up so hard that I went from 500 followers, to 1500 in a few days. I have no idea why it was this one in particular, and not many of the other ones I've posted which I felt were way better.

It was something about how people's lives are bottlenecked by their imagination, and one of the clearest example are the people who think that their only possible hobbies when they are over 25 are either cooking or exercising. Kind of weird how people forget that they can learn art, that it's not some type of arcane secret that only a select few can engage in, and that you could literally learn it at any time in your life. I feel like it was an important reminder, but not something worthy of 78.000 likes.

I really hate the way in which attention in Twitter works: you either get the usual 3-10 likes, or you get the industrial fire hose of attention that floods your feed in a few instants, and there is nothing in-between. And then you get remembered for those few tweets which got way more attention for largely arbitrary reasons, rather than the things you would typically tweet about.

It's really perverse that what you get popular for is not always what you wish to be known for, because it means that the stuff you're most excited in sharing doesn't always get met with attention, whereas the stuff that does feels far more forgettable and generic. No wonder that audience capture has become such a massive trap over the past years.

1. Obviously people frequently look for specific advice about a problem they actively want to solve, and even there there's a whole host of problems of incentives and coercion, but this isn't the subject of this, because I wouldn't say it's the majority of what people come across.

2. Quote by Dostoevsky from 'Notes from Underground':

“Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in bliss so that nothing but bubbles would dance on the surface of his bliss, as on a sea... and even then every man, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer libel, would play you some loathsome trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive rationality his fatal fantastic element... simply in order to prove to himself that men still are men and not piano keys.”

3. The movie was released in 1973, so recent enough to observe the sheer insanity that can result from the rise in power of the technological system: the two world wars of course, but also the abject work conditions in factories, the constant propaganda, etc. Also coincides very well with the later half of the hippie movement, which is referenced through one of the characters at the end, rather explicitly.

4. When it comes to a supportive environment, I've come to think that the nuclear family is actually not sufficient to grow as a healthy person, and that the extended family - aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins - is really what's needed. The problem is that families get scattered all over the place, particularly if your parents are immigrants, such that the extended family is simply not available. On top of that, it is very common to find nuclear families which are incredibly dysfunctional, a fact which isn't helped with the previous one.