Friday, January 5, 2018

Ruins

I feel like I've reached that point where I don't really care about interacting with people who don't want to listen.  Necessary components of my life are traumatic enough even without exhausting arguments with people who have no interest in being ethical or finding Truth.  If you have no interest in improving, wallow in your exploitative, hurtful, privileged filth.  I'll put in an incredible amount of emotional labor for people who are there for me, who aim to be people, who traverse the realm of ideas and not just the physical world.  Most of the time I'll be overgenerous with sharing what I've learned and advocating for things that are objectively important.  However, recent events in my life have put things into a bit of perspective that isn't new, but which I'm now forced to take far more seriously. 

If you listen to ethical arguments and marginalized perspectives and resort to defense mechanisms or cognitive biases without lifting a fingurative finger to humble yourself to the truth of the universe and the truth of the living beings who surround you, then you simply don't matter to me.  I've put my fair share of energy into outreach, argumentation, and social advocacy.  I'm passing the torch and moving onto the next phase of my life!  Knowing me, this'll be a phase and I'll engage tons of carnists/capitalists/prison advocates/transphobes/misogynists in the future, but for now I'm going to focus my energy on the superior human beings - that is, those who recognize that they are not superior, who relinquish any claims to unassailable dominance.

Please let this alienate some people.  Please let this whittle down my friend circle to the people who are genuinely trying to be the best human beings they can be.  Please let this offend people to the degree that they would rather sit mired in ignorance than subjugate their own pride to the well-being of others. 

...Unfortunately, the reality here is that this will be read like a horoscope.  People will undoubtedly read into it what they are predisposed to see.  Those who want to be offended will be offended, and those who want to feel validated will feel so.  So let me clarify.  If you think it's okay to exploit animals, I don't care about you.  If you react to anti-capitalist arguments unequivocal vitriol or dismissal, I can't trust your intellect.  If you characterize disagreement that doesn't masturbate your ego as aggression or conflict, then you make it impossible for me to be myself around you, and I don't plan on spending energy or time on you.  If your reaction to being challenged is to gaslight that intervention as abuse, then I can't very well take your narrative seriously until you listen to mine.

We only live so long.  Living our best lives requires us to strive, reaching for our dreams and pushing our love as far as it will go, whether it be eros, storge, philia, or agape. We have to use that time to become excellent, or else we will die ineffective and unfulfilled.  I have reached heights of friendship and personal accomplishment that are both far short of what I think I can reach, and more than adequate to prove that I must be more conscientious about my aspirations to reach those peaks.  We are dying and the world is dying.  We don't have time for casual, grassroots socialization to do the jobs that must be done.  We have to dream.  We have to work to realize those dreams. And we have to surround ourselves with the energy and circumstances that allow us to perform that necessary work.

I have too many dreams to fulfill them all, and my psychological profile is such that this overwhelms me to the point of total paralysis and subsumption by lifestyle inertia.  I am faced with a question of whether I want to grasp a few of those dreams, or none.  The way to arrive at the correct answer is yet outside my comprehension, but hopefully the pathways I've mapped out that arrive at the wrong answer will help to illuminate their inverse.

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