... this blog, it was literally a matter of life and death (just look at my first post). It was kind of like an "existential" gratitude journal. Not "I am grateful for this" but "I had this new thing to talk about and that means I'm not dead yet" (think Paul Erdös, sort of).
And at the time it was like "okay, I gotta write something every day to keep myself alive" (kinda like how writing the second section of Anomie in about a week might have saved my life), but it's actually really difficult to write something every day, because life is very repetitive by nature. And you look at all of these blogs and such and usually it's a hail of bullets and then silence. "I'm going to write a travel blog... I did this, this, and this today... here's my play-by-play, this is what I've learned about the world because I'm here and you're there, are you jealous yet?" Okay, that's unfair I suppose. But it's becoming less unfair the more we're monetizing ourselves and working remotely and redefining the... "idealized" class, let's call it... you get the idea... Remember what I said about Ed's "Beautiful People" a few posts ago? Something like that.
So how do you make life interesting so that you have something to new to write about every day if you're not riding elephants and diving into waterfalls and island-hopping or whatever the "idealized class" does these days to feel existentially alive for a few weeks, months, years or what have you. And it's interesting, this "staying ahead of the curve" thing. Why did you want to kill yourself again? Anyway...
[agad break when I went to find a video to throw in... doesn't "chess is a professional sport" sound weird? It definitely would have when I was in elementary flipping through Tartakower / du Mont, but these days where video game NHL is a sport... well... imagine THAT being a thought when playing Blades of Steel!]
Aside... so because there was a second video and it had been posted only three minutes before, I thought "I'll check it out and see the first few comments" and someone wrote something like "at 14 I was thinking about the Earth as being roundish [in contrast to the 14-year-old playing great chess]" and I responded with "Imagine how an Ancient Greek (I think it was) could have measured the circumference of the Earth" and he replied with "They were the real warriors, they made our lives easy!" And then after that, I talked about Christianity and Islam and the Middle Ages and stuff like that, tweaked it here and there to make it exactly a sort of "but be proud of your culture, bro" (because his name was Azham or something) and then I realized "oh yeah, this is chess and my comment is going to be deleted before I even finish writing it". Fair enough! (But I did include an edit apologizing for getting into history and politics and promising to focus on chess in the future.)
Saw a short about Mike Tyson saying "Day 2, I'm getting ready for you". And... I don't really care too much, but Mike Tyson has become a pretty good guy in my eyes because he admits his faults and he tried to do that stuff for Malawi and what not while this Jake Paul guy is just some other monetizing ponce in my eyes, so since Mike Tyson is Mike Tyson and Jake Paul is an entertainer, I believe (and hope) that Jake Paul gets completely obliterated. Even though in the end it's just more monetization to mouth off to. It's just being done by YouTube rather than Don King and it's about cyberpolitics (YouTube) and not geopolitics (DRC, for example). The more things change...
Anyway, back to the main topic, how do you always find something to write about so that it's not deathly boring and repetitive? Well look consider the one I did in South Africa. There too I thought "there's going to be a lot to learn and experience... this is a completely different world... plenty to talk about..." But I often found myself struggling to write. Was I trying too hard? I don't think so. It all depends on how big your frame of reference is. Like, if you are travelling in South Africa and you're going there for Kruger and cage diving, that's a pretty narrow frame of reference. You're not really talking about South Africa at all, you're essentially talking about a zoo and a museum that could be anywhere in the world. In my case, I was definitely talking about South Africa and its nuances, but still, how much can one say about South Africa as a visitor? Plenty, yes. But you're still there with an aim and a goal. And sometimes you feel like the robot in the original Transformers movie with the Matrix saying "Imattheclimaxofmylifewhywontthisthingopendammit!"
So I woke up this morning. Some things happened here and there that are noteworthy (I think) for a variety of reasons. But at a certain point in time, I said "watch this video and think about it"
And I said "imagine that I am Yoda and you are Luke Skywalker". And this was after our conversation where she went from stressed about everything to "I think I understand. Thank you."
And I was going to go onto some long spiel about power and The Force and metaphor and whatever. But I watched until the very end (as I'm wont to do). And then, at the very end, I realized "ahhhhhh..." And I sent her a short text (I could see she hadn't seen the one about our Yoda and Skywalker roles yet):
"I don't believe it." "That is why you fail."
[...]
Don't get me wrong, here. I'm not talking about all of this manifestation mumbo-jumbo "if you don't believe it won't happen, you need positive energy". Nothing like that at all.
What I'm trying to say is that if you don't have a good grasp of who you are and what you're doing and where you're trying to go in life (based on whatever forces you believe are the most advantageous to you), then you're just being pulled along with the tide and you can't see beyond the riverbed within which you're treading water. Like Otto Neurath's ship. And I'm not talking about authenticity like some douche like Tony Robbins is talking about, because all he wants is to talk your money and give you big words in return and then blame you if you're not successful. "Look at all these other people that just believed and got rich."
No. It's the "if there's a million red balls and three blue balls and each ball is chosen by exactly one person, then someone's gonna get the blue balls and it's your fault for choosing a red ball when it was your turn to choose because you wanted to get a blue ball" scam, right? The "a rising tide lifts all boats so what's your problem?" scam. The "this bro got rich by doing X, Y, and Z, so if you do X, Y, and Z and don't get rich, you're just not trying hard enough" scam. Correlation does not imply causation, right?
And this is where the "Tony Robbins" grouped with "authenticity" came from.
Revolting, isn't it?
And I haven't looked at the article in a million years or remember many of the details (just that it put Tony where he belongs, in general) but that "little talk about authenticity" moment just grinds my fucking gears. Albert Camus? Who is that anyway? "Be yourself, bro." Fuck off you fucking swindler.
[...]
I dunno. These gurus really creep me out. Like Jay Shetty said some interesting stuff in his book and I can see some value in it, but it's still like "okay, I'm going to hang out with Tony Robbins and all these other whatevers being capitalism's version of Kenneth Copeland [oh wait, Kenneth Copeland is capitalism's version of Kenneth Copeland, but you get the idea] and then we're going to come together as a supergroup to really tell you all how you can be just like us."
A bit irresponsible, isn't it? "Think like a monk"? Is content creation and self-promotion and convincing people to chase material wealth what monks think about? Or is it "think like me by reading this book and tell your friends won't you?"?
I like to think back to the end of that book about India. Maximum City. Such a great book. And at the end you have this extravagantly wealth diamond magnate (if I remember correctly) who is now going to do the transcendence thing and become a Jain and travel from town to town begging for food (there's a lot more to it than that, but that's the part that's important... the emperor's new clothes). And the author talks about how before this final sacrifice is made, he gets during some celebration (if that's what you could call it) everything that his heart could ever want (or something to that effect). So it's kind of like you get all of your desires out before you can be the desireless pious ascetic.
But the interesting thing about all this is that there's a subtext to all of this about Ibrahim Dawood (well maybe not exactly him but some part of the Mumbai Underworld) and exactly where this money and racket comes from. And you can't help but think "okay, so what's actually going on is that this guy crossed someone that he shouldn't have, and he values his life more than he values his wealth". Like... slink off into the night rather than die in a hail of bullets sort of thing.
Maximum City and In Spite of the Gods (the former was a gift from my father, the latter I bought in a bookstore in (ironically?) Dhaka). If you want to really get an idea of "the real" India, read these two books. And if you want to get the nonsense view of India, go ahead and read Shantaram. But take it for what it's worth, okay? Shantaram is the version of India that the Tony Robbinss and Jay Shettys of the world want you to believe in. But the real India is much more interesting than that. Or if you don't have time for those books, watch the episode of CBC's Marketplace where these cowabunga whitey journalists go into Mumbai and act like "Justice, bro! We're here for you bros!" (because they want to infiltrate all of the scam centres that are preying on the vulnerable) and the locals are like "ummm... you don't actually know how this city works, do you?"
[...]
This song came up today [well... a song with the same title but I went to this one]
So gonna sign off for another day with that!
Comments