Trust and expectations

Identity, politics and "Radical Individualism"

I wasn't set on a good path in life. It’s hard to be a self moving individual. Most people aren’t cut out for it, and designing our countries on the philosophical doctrine of it, of total universalist individualism, has been a terrible mistake. Most people aren’t cut out for it, and the people that thrive in it, would have thrived also in better circumstances, if they had a social safety net behind them. Even the minor task of correcting for your bad path in life, even if you know it and see it and understand it, is very difficult – let alone actually achieving anything once you have your shit straight.

I’m having some struggles with identity lately. In Denmark, a couple of months ago, I was very firmly rooted and knew exactly who I was. I was 33 years old, and made no excuses about it. I had been very alone for a very long time, and I had learned to be alone, to be self-moving in some capacity. Now that I live as a member of an extended family of in-laws, I am slightly less so myself. I am no longer 33. I am 25 a lot of the time. Until I look in the mirror, and look exactly my age, and I remember, life is short. I feel very embarrassed about this state of affairs. People say I look young for my age. I stopped having a beard after I found the first white hair at 30 (genetics – my family turns white very young). Last time I had a beard, I had one white hair. I tried letting it grow out for a couple of weeks. Now I have a full tuft on the chin of white. I am not 25.

My parents had a tough time with me, and the accident. They were also people of their era, and a moment in culture and history and technological development. I’ve written about this story before from my university misadventures, where a girl looked at me flabbergasted and with awe exclaimed that “you are so smart”, after I explained some homework to her, and how that moment was horrifying for me at the time, because no one had ever actually said that out loud to me before, only hinted at it, and the feelings it evoked in me were so strong and scary, that it triggered weeks of binge drinking to cope/run away from those emotions: “This is what I always wanted someone to say to me, even though I didn’t know it, and I only discovered it in the moment it happened”. I had a similar experience recently, but I dealt with it better this time. My mother in law said I should be a psychologist.

This is where it gets a little tricky, because my mom has also said that before. In her own way – she said she thought I should go back to school and study it. And furthermore literally hundreds of people have said something to this effect. Many on the internet have believed that I already secretly was a working psychologist.

A frustrating and painful judgment I have articulated with all my intuitive psychologist prowess, in regards to my own parents, is that despite me being very clever and good at everything I’ve ever attempted, they will always see me as a victim, as a handicapped child that is in danger. The accident and watching me be turned to a temporary vegetable, traumatized my parents in a deep way, and while they have in their own way found coping mechanisms now, both their coping mechanisms are directed away from me – my mother works with handicapped children now, and my father has a savior complex where he continuously finds random tragic fates he can involve himself with and “save”, because the experience of holding me dying in his arms and being unable to do anything, scared that trying to help me would kill me, caused some deep fundamental wires to be crossed. Our fundamental relationship remains unchanged, and it is very difficult to change. You can only chip away at it gradually, and they are getting quite old now.

The painful judgment: “you know what the difference is between me, and “successful” people is? “successful” people’s parents say “you can do it”, they nudge them on and encourage them, to do whatever they are doing. And since the accident, no matter what I am doing, my parents first thought is always “are you okay?”. Don’t overexert yourself, don’t try too hard, be careful. The attempts at making them “proud” that I have achieved something fall flat, because that's nowhere near their expectations of me. They want me to be safe, not achieving. They are anxious, because part of them always lives in the summer of 2003. And they won’t know, that seeing me achieve something is what they always wanted – until it happens. They wont know that they always wanted to see me happily married with children, until it happens. Because no one has ever said the words out loud.

People having expectations of each other is not a bad thing. It is a necessary thing. The live and let live laissez faire social philosophy that our modern worlds are built on, are fundamentally in conflict with human nature. When you have no positive expectations towards someone, they will meet them. Our expectations shape the world, just by them being expectations – expecting things of each other is the foundation of civilization. It’s another word for trust. Expectation is to let someone else be responsible for part of yourself – I expect that you will act in so-and-so manner, I expect that you will do your job, so that that will provide me with X resource, that I need for my own Y project. Micromanaging, helicopter parenting, “are you sure you are okay?”, is depriving the other person of something. There is no neutral state. You are either giving or taking. There is no neutral state in life, where you can be a radically free individualist, where your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. That simply doesn’t exist, and is pure overrationalised speculation – it only exists “in laboratory conditions” of a thought experiment. In the real world, you are either hot or cold, a positive or negative charged neuron, either or. You are either giving or taking. And there is no accounting in this life – the calculation doesn’t ever add up to a nice equilibrium. You are either giving or taking, and you just get to choose whether you want to be a giver or a taker, moment to moment. Living or dying. Yes or No.

It is a very scary thing to trust someone, because it is giving them part of yourself. You can and will be hurt. The people who stop trusting are the people who have been hurt very much. My parents trusted me to be able to be safe in traffic, and look left before crossing the road. Then they got very hurt.

That set me on a bad path in life. I spent all my teenage life with fellow people who had been hurt, and created a social environment of radically liberal psychonauts and libertines, who all agreed we had no expectations towards each other, but could just be radically free together (?). Then one of them slept with my ex girlfriend, and I didn’t even have the framework to explain why that was painful and felt like a betrayal. I couldn’t even name the word betrayal, because no one had any expectations of me, and I had no expectations towards them, and then I spent a decade self destroying about that. I trusted these long haired cool philosophical libertarians with a piece of myself, and then I got very hurt. Then I stopped trusting anyone, and I started back from nothing, and slowly built out my inner world in writing. Descartes was probably raped as a child.

I spent the last ten years of my life trying to engage with life “on my own premises”. Get a job – on my own premises. Not like “you’re supposed to”. No education, just going down to the temp office and signing up to do manual labor. Write – on my own premises. Anonymously on the internet. Twitter. Blog. Socially – growing out of the neo-hippie libertine – libtard – social arrangements I had been in, and getting in fights with people when they were doing unreasonable things.

Some of that was good, some of that was bad. The social stuff was much needed. Its very important to stand up for yourself socially, and usually, with the people that love you and the people you love, having the fight – the genuine exchange of energy, “showing who you really are” – that process is more valuable, than the hypothetical “agreement” you would be inclined to fake for the sake of peace, would have been. Love is not being in agreement – love transcends it, and the people that love you, don’t love you in spite of your disagreements. The disagreements are part of that love.

The bad stuff was doing manual labor for minimum wage, just because my parents are weird and I have hangups about it. That, in hindsight, was retarded.

“You should become a psychologist. Go get the easiest scammiest degree you can get, any piece of paper, that will open bureaucratic doors.”

You don’t have to do everything yourself. Let people help you. They love you. And they are giving you a part of themselves to take care of.