Partner Needs

             Something that has always puzzled me is that there exists a very common sort of individual who always needs to be in a relationship. Perhaps it is related to testosterone or hormones in a way that I don’t really understand or find myself subject to, but this mindset is completely foreign to me although I see it nearly everywhere I look. I know a few people who are like this, and I can never relate to how they feel or put myself in their shoes.

            I understand the desire for some close friend or romantic partner as well as the benefits that come from such an arrangement. It’s nice to have people who you can rely on, tell things you wouldn’t say to anybody else, as well as (in the case of romance) have the other individual constantly giving you some sort of validation in the form of desiring you and seeing you as special in comparison to everybody else. All of those things are quite nice and I don’t mind them or disparage them in the least, but this compulsive need of them does seem to me to be some form of neediness that is not desirable or admirable.

            In the proper context, when you have the rest of your life ordered and the ability to provide for a second person squared away as well as no neurosis that is leaving you miserable, the desire for a romantic partner seems healthy and even praiseworthy. You have enough for yourself and are looking to use your excess to provide or benefit somebody else. In the context of these people who always need to be in a relationship, it seems like this is some form of distraction from internal distress.

            This might be related to a sort of insecurity and need for external attention that is completely foreign to me. I am not bragging, as I never did anything (at least consciously) hard to earn my soul’s contentment, but rather making an observation that seems logical. People who always need to be in a relationship to feel whole are fundamentally broken people. There is something wrong with how they are processing things, some internal conflict that remains unresolved, and instead of fixing these problems inside them, they are constantly seeking external stimuli in the form of other people to either distract them from their flaws. They may think that this second party will fix them, will make them whole, but it never works out and eventually they end up alone once again, even more miserable than they were before the relationship began, most likely because the problems at the root of their compulsive behavior have festered and mutated even further over time.

            Upon writing this it strikes me that I am most likely describing the type of person known as co-dependent, which makes my writings on this a bit useless for the reader. Nevertheless, I will continue as writing my thoughts out helps me go from noticing things on an unconscious and undefined manner to more concrete and thus examinable form, which benefits me. And, as I have stated multiple times prior, my writings are fundamentally beneficial for my own understanding and enjoyment before they become of any use to those who read them. Back to the topic at hand.

            Fundamentally, self-worth comes from the self. This is very simple and should be understood by everybody but somehow most people seem completely unaware, and perhaps this is the reason for people getting into these sorts of relationships that validate them but are headed nowhere. I myself am not immune to looking for validation through women and admirers, but this seems to stem from boredom, a love of novelty, as well as a lack of productive discipline rather than any insecurities or need for others to tell me how special I am. I do not believe I am special, nor do I need anybody to tell me that I am special. I am quite content to simply be above average, which is not a very high bar since the average is essentially being an ugly stupid moron who consumes resources and never has a moment of honest self-reflection in an entire life. I pass that bar quite easily.

            At the end of the day, relationships need to come from a sort of excess that is overflowing rather than being restorative. If you don’t have your income, living situation, and habits in check before you sign up for a relationship with somebody who also has those things squared away, you are simply signing up for a dysfunctional nightmare. It may take a month or even a year or three for the dysfunctional nightmare to make itself visible, for the excitement of somebody else caring about you and putting energy into what you care about to wear off, but the dysfunctional nightmare will always eventually reveal itself. At that point, you can pretend you don’t see it and allow yourself to be further consumed and eventually destroyed or made completely miserable, or you can do the reasonable things and rid yourself of nightmare via ridding yourself of your romantic partner. Of course, the people who habitually sign themselves up for these sorts of bad situations are not good at recognizing what is going on or they wouldn’t habitually sign themselves up for these situations. Furthermore, once they have eventually rid themselves of the nightmare they learn nothing and it is only a matter of time (usually only weeks or months) before they sign up to engage in another nightmare that can only end in another disaster. This sort of amnesiac behavior is disturbed and not something to emulate, but there is a sort of humor that can be extracted through observing it.

            This essay isn’t really applicable to young people, as most of us need to make some serious mistakes in order to learn why the mistakes shouldn’t be made as well as what types of stupid thinking led to the mistakes. When you’re in your mid to late teens, your brain isn’t really working and you aren’t able to make great decisions even when provided ample information that any rational self-aware person would be able to parse effectively and make rational self-aware decisions as a result. When this sort of behavior is indicative of a serious problem that needs to be addressed is in the early to mid-twenties.

            The reason the early to mid-twenties is so important to form good habits and really take stock of self-destructive behavior such as needing romantic partners for validation is that this is the period in life where you have some genuine self-awareness (should you honestly and dutifully work towards gaining it) and also the ability to change as a person. Once you’re in your late twenties and early thirties it’s increasingly impossible to change who you are. Your character and habits are pretty much baked in at that point, if you’re a loser who abuses drugs and repeatedly engages in relationships that set you back months or years, you’re most likely always going to be a loser who abuses drugs and repeatedly engages in relationships that set you back months or years.

            The entertainment industry has really messed up a lot of people with regards to romance. Love is not some fluttery feeling in the pit of your stomach. It’s not dysfunctional and it doesn’t make you crazy. Those things are symptoms that can happen from infatuation, and they’re not horrible in their proper context, but they are more phenomena that come from the combination of affection and immaturity, and immaturity is not something that should be enabled or praised outside of their healthy context, which is in youth where we flail around awkwardly and try to find how we fit into the world and how everything works.

            The compulsive need for a romantic partner is not impressive and is similar in caste as a homeless mutt humping a fire hydrant. It is very distasteful to observe and shows poor breeding. If you find your life lacks meaning without some other person to take up your time and energy, then the problem isn’t the times when you don’t have that other person, but rather some deep flaw inside yourself that you should do your best to root out and destroy before it turns you into the lowly debased thoughtless creature growing inside you that you have a tendency towards doting on and feeding.

            The fact of the matter is that if you are mildly successful in any respect and not completely hideous, it is extremely easy to find somebody of the opposite sex and charm them enough to fall in love with you. I’m not rich, I have made a ton of stupid missteps, and I find this whole process disgustingly easy. Most people (of both genders) essentially exist in the context of a very simple skinner box. If you say the right words to them, show affection in moments that are proper, and give them even a small amount of attention when they don’t think they deserve it, they will attach themselves to you like a leech in a river attaches itself to a swimmer’s unprotected skin.

            You shouldn’t get your validation from other people; this leaves you vulnerable to what you can’t control. They might change their mind, hear rumors, or simply find a better person than you which causes them to view in a less than flattering light. At that point, if you have put your self-worth in them caring about you and seeing you as some sort of god or superior individual, you will find yourself even worse than when you entrusted your worth to them.

            Get your validation from how competent you are. Do you spend your time on worthwhile activities? Do you abstain from behaviors that harm you, whether those be social activities like parties and gossip or antisocial activities like drinking and abusing substances like drugs or pornography? Do you put your energy into projects that will pay off in the future or increase your worth? Are you fit and healthy? All those things are what should be driving you, giving you some sort of satisfaction with yourself, not relationships which are good in their proper healthy context, but completely poison in the context of making you feel like you matter.

            What is also funny about this pattern of dating or forming relationships based on personal insecurities is that anybody who knows how things work will agree that the most attractive thing to potential partners is being somebody who does not need potential partners. If you want to have other people care about you, if you want to be valued in a sexual or personal light, then be somebody who doesn’t need others to care about you. No woman has ever thought less of a man who told her he was too busy to hang out or talk. The reality is that being somebody who is genuinely busy, who is constantly working on genuine projects, who is not able to waste hours a day talking to some woman, is somebody who is valuable, and quality women are attracted to people who are genuinely valuable.

            The people you interact with when you’re needy and desire constant affection are not quality people. They are people who also have this serious flaw, people who are not headed anywhere in life. Much like communities oriented around making money are filled with people who are incapable of making money, people who are attracted to people who need love are people who also lack love. And who lacks love besides those who have some problem that makes them fundamentally dysfunctional and practically useless? This incentive structure/environment is made explicit with regards to apps like tinder, where you can see how the women on it are suffering from severe emotional problems that scale in proportion to their attractiveness. If they didn’t have those severe emotional problems, they wouldn’t be on a dating app in the first place.

            If you’re somebody who this essay relates to, take stock of yourself and how you expend your energy. Do you really need to feel good that bad? Do you really need to engage in masturbation via sex (since you’re not having sex for any real purpose) habitually? No, you don’t need to do either of these things; you’re just covering up some sort of unaddressed problem. Most likely, the problem you’re distracting yourself from isn’t even that bad. Put that energy you spend into trying to find a relationship into fixing yourself and doing things that are actually beneficial to yourself, and most likely within a matter of months or a year you’ll realize how silly you were acting. It’s really simple to fix this problem, but it requires admitting that you have a problem and then realizing that it’s not that hard to improve yourself and actually take life seriously instead of constantly searching for external validation. Until you stop looking to others for happiness your baseline is going to be misery which only gets worse as time goes on.  

Arrested Development

            As I am now twenty-five, I am still quite young but heading towards being old. My perspective is sure to shift in great ways over the coming decades (if I live that long), but I now have enough data and a wide enough berth of experiences to begin to knowingly shape my behavior and habits into a manner that is both productive and mature. This ability is not unique to me at my age, but it does not really seem to be quite engaged in by many others around my age.

            I feel quite confident in asserting that most people never grow up and remain in a state of childlike mediocrity willingly. After all, the basis of civilization as a whole rests on the vast majority of people to live boring uneventful stable non-challenging lives. What sort of person besides a perpetual child would enjoy such an existence? This is not inherently bad or good and I do not seek to change, condemn, or praise it, it just is what it is.

            I also feel quite confident that this arrested development and perpetual adolescence is not a new phenomenon, although it is most likely more observable now that the opportunities to behave in an embarrassingly childlike manner  have become increasingly numerous. On the whole, humanity is a pack animal that refuses to think for itself or make its own decisions, and there is no reason to suggest that this will ever change. The only difference that should occur over time is that the majority of humanity will become more explicitly pack animals and look the part: uglier, fatter, shorter, and more bovine than ever before.

            This arrested development is what I mean by not having a soul. At a certain point in the twenties, an individual gets a choice or series of choices where they can face uncomfortable choices and ideas that disturb them but result in them coming closer to genuine truths and critical thinking skills, or they can hide from these uncomfortable choices and ideas and fit into some pre-defined societal role that keeps them distracted enough that they don’t feel the need to think or make decisions on any real level. Most people choose poorly and get increasingly stupid as they get older, having knowingly embraced the role of slave and thus gradually transforming from an implicit one to an explicit one. These people can’t be saved, but that’s alright, they made their choices and we must respect their autonomy, or rather the autonomy that lead to them giving up their autonomy.

Congress and Tech Companies

 

            Right now, the American congress has semi regular conference calls with heads of tech companies. These calls relate to censorship and “unfair” applications of rules that these tech companies are involved in. The funny thing about this is that congress is fairly powerless against the tech companies although they have a higher “legal standing” than the tech companies.

            The people who have built tech companies are smart, hard-working, and competent people. Of course, their goals and methods of operation are not completely moral or for the general public’s good, but that does not mean that these people are losers. They are just not aligned with the common man or even the country in which they operate. The people in congress are whores, they are old politicians who got elected by lying and sucking off people who held the keys to the halls of power they wanted access to.

            Every congress and tech company call goes the same way, some old congressional whore (male or female doesn’t matter) makes an embarrassing monologue disguised as a question and tries to shame the tech CEO. The tech CEO puts up with the display and gives some non-answer that doesn’t really mean anything while pretending to be respectful. Nothing changes, no policies are adjusted at the tech company, and nobody gets anything out of the exchange except for the politician feeling some semblance of power.

            A new age is dawning. The psychic economy is more powerful than the physical economy, which can be seen in how the stock market has been increasingly dominated by digital companies as physical companies shrink in proportion. The old guard, the useless whores that make up governments and prostitute themselves and destroy their dignity for titles and a pension are now only in charge symbolically. Power is molting, the physical force that nation states have is ineffective in controlling capital, as capital has been abstracted and digitized, not corralled any longer by border guards or physical impediments like geography.

            Because people in the government are generally incompetent, stupid, and lazy prostitutes, people in government do not know what is happening right in front of their eyes: which is that they are being stripped of their power and their titles are becoming insults rather than awards to be proud of. There is reputational lag that exists, but with every year that passes it becomes increasingly clear that those who seek to be managerial or involved in the government are people who should be looked down on and mocked rather than looked up to or respected.

            Tech companies are the new world government with the real power. They are the ones who organize and control the distribution of value and information. The old government, the congress and senate, the governors, the police, the social workers, these are people with power only over those who are stupid and worthless. The old government is allowed to operate not because it is too powerful to stop, but because the new government doesn’t want to stop the old government or take on the old government’s responsibilities. The old government is filled with suckers and morons, worthless fools with worthless titles. The new government gets all the money, power, and access without having to deal with the rabble or the hassle of elections. The old government gets three hour long video calls every few months where they can play the role of hectoring powerless wife asking her husband to stop cheating on her.

Personification

            Just like time, entropy isn’t a real thing but rather a measurement of change. Informational entropy is a description of the forces that degrade informational transfer. This can be further divided over time or iterations of transfer or geographical transfer. Entropy can be visualized best as a fist gripping a ball of mud, and the fist is gradually closing no matter what you do, deforming the shape of the mud. Some of the mud even detaches from the increasingly deformed ball of mud, but that mud does not disappear, it simply moves onto the hand or falls to the ground.

            I suspect, but am not sure, that entropy has to do with a lot of the personification of deities and spirits that can be found in ancient and fairly recent history. The Greeks and Romans had gods and temples to gods, so did the Native Americans, and so have a bunch of other groups. If I had to guess, priests and shamans as well as parents found it easiest to pass on knowledge and wisdom by wrapping them up in characters that could be concrete. It’s hard to abstract values and their benefits for normal people or children, so as a sort of “sugar coating” you personify these things into characters that can be understood and described quite easily.

This choosing the easy way of passing down values is a form of informational entropy, because even if the person who you are telling a slightly false story to knows that the story is made slightly false, there is a non-zero chance they will not communicate that fact properly to whoever they pass the information onto. If they don’t mess up, then maybe the people they tell will mess up, or perhaps the people after them, and so on. Eventually, what was a clear myth becomes a historical claim, and the historical claim eventually becomes disputed by some and believed by others. In this disagreement, the actual message of the information being passed is gradually lost, and you end up with Marvel movies and comic books and disgusting looking creatures being “fans” of Odin, Loki, or any other mythological figure as a bizarre personal identity.

Non-Biological Organisms

         There is a theory I have, which cannot really be proved or disproved by science, but is fun so I will elaborate on it. This theory pertains to non-biological organisms, or organisms that I believe probably exist which do not live or die in the sense that we understand life and death.

            Biological organisms take physical resources and derive energy from them in some way. For plants, they take stuff from the soil as well as light from the sun, for humans we drink water and eat food. Both plants and humans and all other biological life-forms have a life-cycle that is temporary. The plant or body breaks down and decays and eventually can’t sustain itself for one reason or another, then decay sets in and eventually death occurs, then the organism breaks down and its resources are redistributed through the environment in one form or another for some other biological organism.

            There are energy fields of some sort, perhaps electricity, perhaps ethereal, where conscious organisms exist. I think these organisms most likely float around and collect energy from other organisms of the same material. I also think they manipulate reality in some manner that we as humans are a part, and perhaps they guide and direct events to generate energy for themselves.

            The interactions these life-forms have with humans are necessarily malicious or benevolent, most likely these life-forms see biological organisms as we see plants. Perhaps they understand us as we understand animals, where most people don’t really empathize with them but don’t go out of their way to harm them or look down on them, where some people do empathize with them and refuse to take advantage of them, and where some of these life-forms are sociopathic or otherwise deranged and get off on causing harm to us.

            Seeing life as a sort of fractal of which humans are a part, I think it makes sense that the same sort of dynamics between us and each other and us and animals, and us and plants, and animals and plants, and plants and resources, etc., exists in ways we can’t really comprehend or be aware of. It seems quite silly to me to think that we lucked into being the top of the food chain, that there is nothing exploiting or directing us much like we exploit and direct animals and plants for our benefit and amusement.

            I think in the future, most likely not in my lifetime, this theory will be proven right, unless the non-biological organisms see it fit for us never to gain access to the awareness of these organisms and thus never gain the ability to exploit them. I do think, being that there is a lot of neurological diversity in humans, there is also neurological diversity in these organisms, and some do reach out or influence things in a beneficial manner in which they inspire people to do great things or take risks in ways that seem irrational but are not really irrational. Perhaps this is where true philosophy or genius stems from.

            A lot of aboriginal and Native Americans as well as ancient religions had an intuitive sense of this. This might be related to how incense or burnt offerings or even human sacrifices were decided on, the idea planted in the heads of humans via these non-biological organisms. Perhaps these were all just various forms of neurosis and imagination on the part of humans, but it seems reasonable to assume they might have served, and still do serve to feed some organism that exists outside of our current conception of what organisms are.

            Writing this is funny, because I know it sounds quite out there and indicative of mental issues, but really it is just a thought exercise of sorts. Or perhaps, it was inspired by one these non-biological organisms lending a helping hand and is completely accurate. Sometimes I get ideas and conceptions that I cannot honestly say seem like something I would think of myself, and they make too much sense for me to ignore them, and this is a concept or theory that fits that description.

            Either way, it is amusing to write these sorts of things, because by demonstrating competency in mundane and normal things such as writing fiction, programming, or running social media accounts, and behaving in a fairly normal manner when it is required, there is a sort of disconnect between these “out there” ideas and being normal. This causes a sort of uncomfortable friction between people who want to see me as simply somebody who is normal and makes jokes, and somebody who is mentally ill and deserving of ridicule or pity. Keeping a sort of amorphous reputation allows me to move in the ways I want to move and do what I want to do, a freedom that very few people alive seem to possess.