Planning to fail and envying the Normie

You don't even rule in Hell, you're renting in limbo

Planning my serious book writing in November was a terrible strategic move. All my time and energy was spent on fighting with my family and I never got into a good groove. Overall nov-dec was better this year biochemically, but I got too cocky. Lesson learned: never plan anything in early winter for the rest of my life.

I keep wanting to produce just to produce, just to do something, make anything, but then I run into my own writing advice: you should not want to "be a writer", you can't focus on this as a persona you want to be, you have to want "to write the book", have some idea or notion you are obsessed with. The writing can only ever be the means to an end, it’s perverse to want “to write”. And here I am, perving.

I don't want to tell you about my private life just to tell you about it. When I do it is supposed to be channeled for constructive ends. I only do it when I feel like it illustrates a point, a notion I want to communicate to you, because I think the principle or idea is valuable and helpful in some way. That's the theory at least.

Now that's all very well and good, and a nice little rationalization. But I also have 30 drafts of half finished ideas, that I know for a fact I could just sit down and force myself to finish, and they would come out exactly as satisfactory as all these imaginary potential ideas that I wish were just writing themselves. What I'm saying is it's a complex situation.

I want to give people their moneys worth, I also don't want to waste anyone's time. I am also lazy and want to couch on the sudden insights and flashes to carry me, so I don't have to do anything myself.

I try to go to church more. It's good, I get a lot out of it.

A young woman has recently convinced me that it's not over for me, even though I'm 33. That is not a coy way to say I have love in my life, I don't. I mean she literally said those words at me repeatedly and argued with me about it. A very nice gesture, and I can believe it intermittently. Dare you to prove it. (She is not reading this. Girls never read your collected works, like you are paranoid they will and reject you for).

This is just filling time. Crowd work. I'm just writing to get the gears moving. I don't like it. It feels weak. What's the point? My problem with women is the same as my problem with writing. I don't want to do the foot work. I don't want to 'be texting' with three women who are all ten years younger than me. I don't want to small talk and flirt. I don't want to write. I want to have written, I want to have flirted. Lazybones.

That's something, that's a point. Cheap though. Is that worth anyone's time? I don't think so.

Previously a lot of people have compared me to the famous blogger The Last Psychiatrist, and lately, I’ve been described as “basically Kierkegaard”, like some sort of expert or enthusiast about it. In total honesty, I have only read a little bit of each, but I think it speaks to our scientific standing that we arrive at such apparently similar conclusions more or less independently.

I recently had the good fortune to meet some handsome young men, whose lives were progressing well. They were excellent company and, I hope, it was a mutually invigorating experience. I have nothing but good things to say about them. But afterwards, when I was just walking through town, or at a train station, I found myself deeply frustrated with random strangers on the street.

When my friends are getting married and having children, I rejoice. It is a simple and clean emotion. There is no envy or jealousy, because their joy is mine. I recognize it as Good, big G, and it is a joy. But when I see a man and woman walking their dog, and the dog is dressed in a little coat, and the man, if you can call him that, is carrying the dog in his arms - then I feel “why do they get to not be lonely, when they are so obviously deficient”. Then I feel envy.

In my bible studies, I took note when I came upon an old Testament prohibition on “envying the sinner”. That is a very strange notion, very foreign to our modern minds. Not just a prohibition on envy, but specifically qualified 'for the sinner'. The phrase has stuck in my head ever since. Because it doesn’t make sense, right? Why would you envy the bad thing?

Walking around junkies and “normies” and various other kinds of dregs of society, the comparison from the night before was clear in my mind: I envy only those I deem undeserving. In a hardcore theological framework, the problem is obvious: “deem”. Judge.

Envying the sinner, for being a sinner, is to judge him a sinner, which is to make yourself equal to God. Pride. When you say oh they get to have it so easy, I wish I was so simple, I wish I was a normie, this kind of self flagellation is not humility.

On the human side of things I think we can say a lot more nuanced stuff about it, which might be useful to illustrate. First off, the man that I don't envy, is happy - but the man that I envy is miserable. The story I tell myself in a microsecond when I see him on the street is: “yes, of course he is in hell, but if I was having that girlfriend, I wouldn't be. “He is squandering it”', I say, as I squander all my own opportunities. “If it was me in that girlfriend things would have panned out a lot different. Let's just say there'd be a lot of babies in that cockpit.”

But I have been that guy and I have had that girlfriend. And although it didnt go exactly like that, it didn’t go well either. Clearly. So what am I wishing for in that moment? His destruction. I was “punished” - why isn’t he?

And if I reason about it a little bit, I also know he doesn’t posses what I lack. I know for a fact that some people envy me! A very dangerous thing to do.

If I have that same feeling about someone, while not currently squandering my own opportunities, what I feel, I don't call envy, but pity. Or if you want to be Christian about it: Charity.

The problem with paranoia is that if you try to plan for all eventualities, in practice, you prime yourself for failure. It's good to have a backup plan. It is not good to have two. It's bad to have three. You’re impressionable. The real mkultra was inside your own heart all along.

How do you win? A good first move is to simply stop planning to fail.

I hope to finish writing a book length continuation of the NPC Q series of articles published here last fall, soon-ish. But my first priority is just having a regular posting schedule. I’ll publish the chapters here as well. Happy New Years.