Digital Miscellanies II

Life, in bits and pieces.

Friends, Readers, & Random Bots -
The writing of this post was frequently frustrated by the pride and overreach of Yours Truly. Thankfully, an annoying, but necessary slice of humble pie served as a reminder to adjust my expectations and actually do something, instead of hoping for perfection and failing to commit a word to the screen. It’s a week late, but better late than never.

Enjoy!

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Table of Contents

I. Melancholy

II. Recent Reads

1. Trade Off and Efficiency

2. Engaging with Life

III. Anger and Acceptance

IV. Some Projects I’m Following

1. Stoic Harmonism

2. Feminism

V. Closing

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I. Melancholy

On April 5th I woke up feeling ready for the day, but before breakfast found that the world had been muted in shades of midnight blue: everything taking on a weight that it had not had less than an hour before. Like many, I tend towards a sort of mild melancholy. While I have spent years of my life in the mires of depression, including a lengthy period of the ‘don’t think, don’t sleep, absolute numbness’ levels of darkness - wherein there was nothing beyond the gravitational crush of emptiness - this, thankfully, is not that. It’s just a general malaise I suppose, an ebbing and flowing, never fully taking up residence, but certainly overstaying its welcome.

If you are also of the melancholic sort, there are some excellent suggestions in the comments of this note - it is well worth taking some time to read through and consider some of the insights and aids suggested herein.

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II. Recent Reads

1. Trade Off and Efficiency

It’s rather basic to our existence and yet the experience of being finite - of being limited by time and being and resources - is a difficult one to reconcile oneself to. I’ve so often wished I had the time to be so much more than I am - to pursue a wider range of interests, to develop a broader range of skills; to live not one life, but many - continuously exploring all the potential that each choice that I have made has necessarily removed from the equation. Alas, it is not to be so. But awareness of this truth is not the same as making productive choices that reflect it.

Rohan Ghostwind, in his essay, “There is a God, and His Name is Trade-off” illustrates ways in which people make these exchanges, often without consideration, across a wide range of situations - careers, and institutions, and hobbies and relationships - and ultimately challenges the reader to:

a) recognize how this plays out in larger scale situations, such as in politics and academia, as well as the smaller scale

and

b) acknowledge the trade offs to solutions and the impact of consequences, not only to ourselves, but to others.

The lesson that stuck out to me the most was the fact that people take on projects without realizing a part of themselves will die, deteriorate, or otherwise be neglected.

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While The Once Percent Rule explores efficiency in the context of economics in his post “Efficiency’s Seduction”, the principles extend beyond it:

Efficiency, it turns out, is an exquisite seductress. It promises of sustainability, of doing more with less, of salvation through ingenuity. But what we get, more often than not, is acceleration, faster consumption, larger scale, deeper footprints.

I’ve recently realized that in my quest to maximize the use of my time I’ve actually compromised it - never fully present in any one time or place, not focusing on my family, not engaging with my studies, not resting, not working, always distracted by what I could possibly be doing with my time and trying to split my attention to take in more than one thing at a time. Obviously, it’s back fired and I’ve made no progress anywhere. I found both of the above articles helpful in re-contextualizing the decisions I make and the impact they have.

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2. Engaging with Life

As someone who has a tendency to retreat into the recesses of my mind and attempt to separate myself from experiencing life through the body, I found David’s reflective essay, “Knowledge and the Body” to be a beautiful consideration of the body as the vehicle for learning and knowledge. I’ve found this to be deeply and, at times, distressingly true in my own life. It is very easy to simply isolate concepts in the mind - but then they remain there, isolated as ideas without the experience that translates them to intrinsic understanding.

All of these things make the love real, something tangible in the world, something physical, something that my body recognizes and says "this is good". It solidifies the love into something that is just a little bit harder to refuse when my brain turns on me, because my body knows there is love to be found even when my intellect rejects it.

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I have spoken lightly about it before, but the later years of growing up and frankly the entirety of my twenties was. . . hard. As a result, I buried myself very deeply in day dreams - creating an almost secondary reality where I could live the life I actually wanted to live rather than the one I felt compelled to choose. Long story short, I do not recommend this particular path. For one thing, it is deeply distressing to deconstruct the secondary world and be faced with the stark realities of the choices you made and are responsible for. But secondly, readjusting to the “real world” is hard. You come to realize that socialization and experience are an important part of personal development and having intentionally distanced yourself from these things has handicapped you. You gotta relearn nearly everything and it's. . . a lot.

Cuckfucius’ essay, “Hyperonline Introvert Culture is a Spiritual Graveyard” hit both my introverted self and my recovering-daydreamer self right between the eyes - in the best way. It met me in a rather I’m-so-tired-of-trying moment and helped me refocus on the goals I am reaching for: human connection and resilience.

You need conflict resolution skills to healthily live in society. This shit is just romanticizing and enabling loneliness. Do not listen.

"They just want peace"

It is not "peace" to let your connections to people slowly rot.

It is dissociation, it is avoidance. Avoidance of the difficult emotions that come with conflict.

Where does this road lead? It leads to less conflict. Less uncomfortable emotions. Less capacity and skill to handle those emotions.

If you don't practice healthy conflict, guess what's going to become hard for you? Conflict. Every human life is filled with conflict. You cannot run forever. It is always coming, and will only get harder the more you avoid it.

- Also, by way of encouragement for others in similar places - it does get easier. You work and work and work and it feels like the cost is unbearably high without any return on investment, but it has been my experience that you do eventually hit a place where you start seeing that return and the mountain levels out a bit. It’s a beautiful feeling. Hang in there.

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III. Anger and Acceptance

It’s only been within the past year that I’ve managed to calm the visceral anger that wells within me when I hear words like contentment, or acceptance. I think having spent a good many years living under the consequences of manipulation and forcing myself to accept things that actively hurt me, as well as forcing myself to reject any desire to pursue something better, there is a very strong fear that if I ‘accept’ anything I will instinctively return to a place where I numb myself to the kinds of warning signs that should be heeded and will accept things that ought to be actively rejected. It's a familiar skin and one I’ve been frantically trying to outgrow so that I cannot slip back into it - something that happened again and again in the early stages of trying to change my ways of thinking and acting.

When I first heard of Stoicism I was cautious. I was scared to subscribe to any ideology of any sort because I recognized within myself an inability to see truth within something and still be capable of questioning it. When you are repeatedly cowed into unquestioning obedience you come to associate truth with blind submission. Unfortunately for my rather bruised psyche, one cannot exist in complete relativism without breaking the mind, and so I had to start looking for something that would allow me to find a sense of north.

I needed some absolutes. I had spent several years working to reestablish a sense of personhood, and I really needed a loom on which to structure the threads of my life. I had chosen to become a functional agnostic due to religious difficulties, but I had not found anything to offer me any framing. Stephen Bradford Long over at Sacred Tension was instrumental in my next step forward. His raw honesty about his experiences with Bipolar and the necessity of creating a very disciplined life to navigate the crisis of his illness allowed me to consider, however tentatively, the idea of Stoicism and within that, the question of acceptance.

These essays from Stephen and Dilay have been gently resting in the back of my thoughts for me to return to and consider in small steps as I try to make sense of how one can find truths within a system and still maintain the ability to ask questions and even possibly reject certain aspects without the rejecting the whole.

The Art of Stillness: Stoicism as a Medicine for the "Modern" Chaos

In Defense of Stoic Acceptance

Ex Libris & Cinematica I: Letters from a Stoic & Gladiator I

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IV. Some Projects I’m Following

1. In line with my cautious forays into Stoicism is this series by Left Brain Mystic on Stoic Harmonism, a philosophy that weaves together strands from multiple other ideologies. There are five pillars which he is currently exploring through essays.

Each point of the pentagram represents one essential domain of human experience—what I call the "5 S's" of Stoic Harmonism: Sport, Satiation, Sleep, Significance, and Social. These aren't randomly selected categories but fundamental areas where our conscious engagement shapes the quality of our lives.

2. You may recall from my last Digital Miscellany that I had announced my intention to do some exploration of the use of the term Patriarchy and whether or not its actually proving helpful in the larger cultural conversation. As a part of this I am curious about how feminist narrative engages with the idea of patriarchy, and as a woman who came from a background that quite literally equated feminism with nearly every evil under the sun, I’ve also been curious about feminism for its own sake. I was very excited to see that Last Blue Dog is currently reading through important works of the feminist movement, from the second wave through to today.

I’m seeking less to define it than to understand the different threads of feminism, how they interact, compliment and undermine one another, and examine the ways in which they’ve shaped modern social life.

He’s already published an essay reflecting on The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvior (this includes a list of the books he will be reading and sharing his thoughts on) and The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan.

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V. Closing

Dear readers, there is still so much I wish to spend time on and new authors I’ve been enjoying that I would love to introduce you to, but this is quite long enough. Thanks for reading!