How to lose all your friends

The good news is that you are no longer wasting the best years of your life.

If you can’t write about what you want, write about why you can’t. I have writer’s block. Writer’s block doesn’t exist. But I am disoriented. I don’t have a strong self image and I can’t orient myself in the world, which is necessary to write what I want to write. So I orient myself.

Why we stopped making Einsteins

“Where are all the geniuses today? why no renaissance pls”

Enword I have to work. Einstein famously had a housekeeper to tie his shoes for him.

Its a good article though and I agree with it. I’m just having a little fun.

About 5 years ago, I changed my phone number. I forget what it was, but i had to change provider, and I couldn’t get the number transferred, something like that. On a spur of the moment impulse, I just kind of didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t send a big group message informing everyone I knew. I didn’t make a facebook update about it. I had already stopped using facebook. I told my family and then-roommates, that’s about it. On some kind of imp-of-the-perverse, unarticulated for many years, level, I was testing to see if anyone would notice. I’ve always been testing people - would they even care enough, to try to find me, if I just suddenly disappeared from their lives? Would they even notice? Now I have no friends.

I messaged an old high school friend about a year ago and talked a bit. He was doing well. I haven’t spoken to anyone else I knew since then. It wasn’t some kind of decisive move, if wasn’t a conscious action. It wasn’t something active, specifically, it was a kind of inaction.

I’m sure some of them miss me like I miss them. I’m sure some are glad to be rid of me - good riddance - like I am of them.

Yesterday I had the thought, sudden regret, of all the time I spent with certain people, watching “tv shows”. I was lying in my bed rewatching old episodes of Dan Harmon’s “community” and finding it extremely bad. It’s cynical and mean and perverted through and through. I thought it was a testament to my personal growth - at a certain time, I thought it was incredible, and all the meta-jokes were oh so clever.

in a certain episode, two characters talk about television being better parents than parents - “television never came home drunk and abused me” - cynical. sad. and it’s presented sincerely - the writer loves television more than his parents.

I thought about certain friendships based around media consumption. even after I got sober, we’d hang out and “watch shows”, and we would genuinely feel a kind of affirmation from it, we’d feel good about watching “the good shows” and not the “bad shows” like the normies. Deriving a sense of superiority over that, while just literally doing nothing. Passive. Gorging ourselves and feel proud about it.

Work is rough. I don’t sleep enough.

I watch TV now because it’s running at work. I watch the news, because for two years is was legally mandated. I see adds, the world people experience without add blockers. It feel like waking up in a total nightmare. Like waking up from a nightmare but the other way around.

I try to be positive and productive, being productive is what redeems me. I need to feel productive, to feel good. I need to write all my clever ideas online. Yesterday I came home swearing up and down I was going to finish “The Political Question: Do you want to be an active participant in your own life?”, but once I got home and sat down in front of the half written notes, I just couldn’t do it. and I couldnt even tell you why. Mind just blanked out. Well now I can tell you why, but in the moment, you know. In fact I am currently telling you why. Not to excuse my low productivity, but to remember who I am and orient myself in the world - I just forget sometimes.

I suppose I can't write “politics: active” because right now I would be lying.

My dad is always bugging me about setting up a pension savings account, because he wishes he had started one earlier, and I don’t have the heart to tell him that I’m going to be fully demented at age 60. Full Brandon, final destination. Life by the bottle and brain damage, die by early onset dementia.

I know I have access to great wonder and joy which others are closed off from. I try to be gracious. Generally, I genuinely am. But I’m tired and confused and lonely.

I have a good 20 IQ points on the smartest people I talk to on a day to day basis, and I understand how my father became the man I so resented as a teenager, for always talking down to me and never being sincere. And I pity him. He is in a way lonelier than I ever was, because he gave up much much earlier. And adapted.

I write entire essays on my phone during work hours, instead of just dotting down quick notes in my physical notebook, because people get irrationally angry and afraid of the latter, while the former they just assume I'm "texting". I think. I started with the notebook to try to be courteous and waste less time - I thought it would be less offensive, to be “on your phone” at work. But being “on your phone” is normal, and being able to read and write for pleasure is abnormal.

The lesson is, if I go out of my way to be nice, people think I'm attacking them, and if I am brutal and indifferent, they like me. I must be cruel to be kind.

My kindness hurts, and my hurt make them love me. I'm not allowed to be kind. I don't get that luxury. I'm envious of it. I have no one I can be kind to.

I am ungrateful bastard. Is it ungrateful to say that a thousand readers does not make up for a single friend, a single person you can be physically close to? I think it's the truth.

There is nothing I look forward to. There is nothing I want in this world, so everything I do must be its own justification. I have nothing to sacrifice for.

My dad has been living in hiding his entire life, and when I think about it, I can't imagine anything more horrifying. Yes, he is a Coward. But at the same time he is also braver than me - he does live. He does do it. He goes out to tardwrangle every single day, and he never once complains. He doesn’t believe there are anyone who could understand his complaining, of course, which is a profoundly lonely thing. Who’s lonelier? Let’s not make it a competition.

I understand my father becoming a teacher. If life is going to feel like running a day-care either way, children are easier to forgive.

One of the people I get along best with is a gay man, just for the fact that he is maybe ~110. He occasionally mentions his vacations in Philippines and I'm reminded he is a podophile and I realise I could kill him without feeling anything. Because I know about the ping pong clubs.

I can't get woman on apps because to stay sane and I have to present myself as being in control and functioning, in my life generally my aim is to become more stable and normal. And if you want Internet gf you have to signal that you are insane. Conflicting impulses.

The good news is that you are no longer wasting the best years of your life.