Youth of my old age – 2021 – Page 4

Long walk, White and Black Pills, and author of your own experience

SUNDAY, 28 MARCH 2021

Some things you need to do are like taking off your clothes and jumping naked into an icy lake. You scrape together the courage, take off your clothes, take a deep breath, run, and jump.

Other things are like when someone says to you, “If we start walking now, we should be there by Thursday – five days from now.” It doesn’t matter if you’re excited about this project, and there’s no big moment where you take off your clothes, start running and jumping. You just have to start walking. And keep walking. And when you get tired, you rest. And the next day you keep going.

SATURDAY, 3 APRIL 2021

What does it mean to swallow a White Pill? According to UrbanDictionary.com, it refers to a moment, or a series of events, in which a person abandons his despair for an increasingly hopeful outlook on life. This is done not out of optimism, but by confronting difficult circumstances and even nihilism with the use of reason and inquiry.

The White Pill is the opposite of the Black Pill. With the latter, you have an increasingly pessimistic outlook on life that you see as meaningless, with a belief that life always amounts to suffering and misery. In the Black Pill view, morality is seen as merely a construct or a mechanism that enables people to live together in relative harmony.

MONDAY, 5 APRIL 2021

Again: an idea does not necessarily have to be new. Maybe it just reminds you of something you already know. Or it confirms something you’ve already accepted for yourself. Or it expresses in other words something that is important to hear again.

Says Scott Adams in Episode 1334 of his daily talk on YouTube (he was talking about traumatic experiences and the best ways to deal with them, as part of a larger effort to be the author of your own experience of reality): “The weird thing about reality is that sometimes an inaccurate view of reality is more functional. Sometimes an accurate view of reality is exactly what you need, but there are lots of situations where an inaccurate view of reality is better. Now I won’t give you examples. I’m just going to make that claim for now so don’t worry if this seems like too much of a simplification and you say to yourself but you’re leaving something out. It doesn’t matter for a reframing. You’re trying to keep it simple so that people can hold it in their minds. [If] I get this about eighty percent right, that’s all you need. [Forget] about, you know, being pedantic. The twenty percent where you’re saying, ‘But is it really just genes and traumas? Isn’t it also some positive …’ Forget about that. Just keep it simple. Your brain is your genes; your traumas the bad things that have happened to you; and the things that you do intentionally to make it better [are the hacks]. […] One example of a brain hack is education. So you get some education – it physically changes your brain to be more productive. And you did it intentionally, all right. [We] all agree that’s a simple thing to do. And another hack is intelligent skill stacking – putting skills together in an intelligent way that they become greater than the value of the individual skills. […] Here’s some more [examples]: associating self-rewards with habits you want to deepen is a hack. You’re literally programming your brain by rewarding yourself for this thing you want to do more often. Learning to put things in context is a hack. Practicing optimism is a hack. If you make your system – your habit – to routinely learn and test new hacks, you become the author of your own mind. And because your experience of reality is subjective, you become the author of your own experience. Your experience of life is subjective, right? Life itself might be objective, probably … there’s probably something there. But the way you experience life is purely subjective. And you can change that. And so I summarize by saying, be the hack not the trauma. Now when I say that your brain is formed by traumas in part what I’m talking about is … let’s say there was a bully who always teased you about your looks. Well, that could scar you so that you would always be concerned about your looks. [That] trauma of the bully just becomes part of your permanent personality because it actually rewires your brain. A hack does the same thing but you’re doing it intentionally to create a good outcome, all right? [If] you learn to sort of continually scour your environment for little psychology tricks, hypnosis tricks … affirmations is an optimism hack basically and a focus hack … If you make it your lifetime practice to look for ways to hack your mind and then test them out, you will be the author of your own experience. Otherwise you’re just going to be the recipient of the experience. Otherwise the world will program you. The world is going to program you if you don’t do it yourself. [You] will become just your traumas. Be the hack not the trauma. Now there’s … that’s the whole message right there.”

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Two possibilities and a few questions about accepting responsibility

SUNDAY, 14 MARCH 2021

Possibility one:

We are largely responsible for how we experience life. We don’t usually choose what happens to us, but we have to a significant degree control over how we respond to what happens to us, and therefore we have some control over what impact it has on our lives.

This would mean that people who were on the wrong side of government policy, such as during the apartheid years in South Africa, or similar periods in America, also had a significant degree of control over their reactions. Other people were responsible for the unethical and sometimes cruel policies, but the people on the wrong side of it had control over how they reacted to it, and this reaction – from acceptance to armed opposition – in turn influenced their experience of reality.

Possibility two:

We have no control to any significant degree over how we experience life. We have no control over what happens to us, and our reactions have little impact. Plus, our reactions and attitudes towards what happens to us are anyways largely dictated by our culture and how we have been programmed since childhood. This means people on the receiving end of unethical policies and cruel governments and other institutions that exercise power over them are victims who have to take what comes their way. That’s just how it is. Sometimes you’re on top, and sometimes you get crushed, and then you die.

The questions:

Which of the two views on life would ideologues of Apartheid South Africa have preferred black and brown people embrace in the decades prior to the 1990s? You have the power to do something about your suffering, or accept your fate?

Which of the two views on life would ideologues of the resistance movements during the apartheid years, people like Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko, have preferred black and brown people embraced? What about civil rights leaders in America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – people like Frederick Douglass, Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. du Bois, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King? Did they think people had the ability to improve their experience of reality, or did they believe people simply had to accept their fate?

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For the record, the person who commits a crime, or who plans or executes an unjust political or social order, does so out of free will. He does not have to do it. He chooses to do so and is therefore morally and legally responsible for his actions.

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A fundamental aspect of this whole discussion was articulated by Scott Adams a few years ago after Kanye West made headlines over his remarks about slavery. In response to someone else who said Kanye West was guilty of “disgusting victim blaming”, Adams said: “I believe the proposition on the table is that giving yourself a victim identity is less productive than looking forward.”

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Steve Biko, Malcolm X and even W.E.B. du Bois were not exactly non-racial integrationists. One could even argue that especially Steve Biko and Malcolm X (at least earlier in his career) were Black Supremacists. What I say about victim mentality, historical oppression, accepting responsibility even for your own suffering as a way to empower yourself is not affected at all. If you think non-racial integration is more ideal, you might have a problem with Biko or X. But at least they had a positive outlook on the future, right? They looked at a future where black and brown people would do better because they would actively create a better future for themselves, which included convincing white people with political and bureaucratic power that a more just order is better for all.

Quotes from Steve Biko (1946-1977)

“Obviously the only path open for us now is to redefine the message in the bible and to make it relevant to the struggling masses. The bible must not be seen to preach that all authority is divinely instituted. It must rather preach that it is a sin to allow oneself to be oppressed.”

“So as a prelude whites must be made to realise that they are only human, not superior. Same with Blacks. They must be made to realise that they are also human, not inferior.”

“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”

“It becomes more necessary to see the truth as it is if you realise that the only vehicle for change are these people who have lost their personality. The first step therefore is to make the black man come to himself; to pump back life into his empty shell; to infuse him with pride and dignity, to remind him of his complicity in the crime of allowing himself to be misused and therefore letting evil reign supreme in the country of his birth.”

Quotes from Malcom X (1925-1965)

“Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it.”

“Any time you beg another man to set you free, you will never be free. Freedom is something that you have to do for yourselves.”

“No, we are not anti-white. But we don’t have time for the white man. The white man is on top already, the white man is the boss already … He has first-class citizenship already. So you are wasting your time talking to the white man. We are working on our own people.”

Quotes from Marcus Garvey (1887-1940)

“Ambition is the desire to go forward and improve one’s condition. It is a burning flame that lights up the life of the individual and makes him see himself in another state. To be ambitious is to be great in mind and soul. To want that which is worthwhile and strive for it. To go on without looking back, reaching to that which gives satisfaction.”

“The man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who uses his mind.”

“The white man has succeeded in subduing the world by forcing everybody to think his way. The white man’s propaganda has made him the master of the world, and all those who have come in contact with it and accepted it have become his slaves.”

“Liberate the minds of men and ultimately you will liberate the bodies of men.”

“Before we can properly help the people, we have to destroy the old education … that teaches them that somebody is keeping them back and that God has forgotten them and that they can’t rise because of their color … we can only build … with faith in ourselves and with self-reliance, believing in our own possibilities, that we can rise to the highest in God’s creation.”

Quotes from Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)

“We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.”

“No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.”

“I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”

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Do with the facts what you will

WEDNESDAY, 10 MARCH 2021

It’s already 2021?

It’s already March?

It’s already Wednesday? The tenth?

You’re already 32, or 49, or 57? You’ve made it this far? Other folks already died at 24, or 42, or 53 …

You’ve made it to Wednesday? There are people who died on Monday!

You’ve made it to March? There are a lot of people who didn’t see the end of January!

2021? How many people – of your age – stopped breathing years ago?

The tenth of this month? There are people who didn’t see the end of the first week!

Be grateful for the time you have every day? Do with it what you will. I’m just stating what everyone should already know is the truth.

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Six thoughts over nine weeks

TUESDAY 5 JANUARY 2021

12:11

To share or not to share – your chocolates or nuts in the fridge, the bananas you actually bought for yourself, the money in your wallet that you thought you were only going to use to pay for your own meal. The bigger question is, who do you want to be? A wealthy person, in terms of attitude and bank balance, who likes to share, or a person with a little money, a few nuts or pieces of chocolate, or a bunch of bananas, but who deep down believes that a lack of resources is the true state of affairs, and if he shares, whatever he has will not be replaced?

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You are to a large extent responsible for the environment in which you live your existence, the environment in which you have sensations and experiences that you collectively call your life. This environment includes the atmosphere created between you and the people with whom you share your living environment – at work, at home, even in public places.

14:05

Don’t think in terms of true or false, but in terms of probability: How likely is it that something happened, or happened in a specific manner?

SUNDAY, 7 FEBRUARY 2021

One man asks another: “Don’t you feel embarrassed, even ashamed? You failed at doing what a good son ought to do! You didn’t buy your parents a house, and if your sisters didn’t also make a contribution, they wouldn’t have been able to survive on just what you sent every month!”

The other man answers: “I used to feel embarrassed, even ashamed. To some extent I still do. But I also believed, for a long time, that the make money game was rigged against creative people, against true believers, and against lost souls looking for something to hold on to, for their place in the world, for who they’re supposed to be, or could be.”

WEDNESDAY, 10 FEBRUARY 2021

Imagine an author favoured by the political and cultural elite publishes a book and Amazon bans any negative or critical reviews. How can you determine the quality of the book if no dissent is allowed from the official and approved narrative?

SATURDAY 6 MARCH 2021

In his book, Carnage and Culture, Victor Davis Hanson explains how certain aspects of Western culture gave Western soldiers, military leaders, and governments a critical advantage in military conflict from the Ancient Era to the twenty-first century.

The very last item in the glossary gives a description of the word, Western: “Generic adjective for European civilization that grew up in and west of Greece, and shared core values that originated in classical antiquity, including but not limited to constitutional government, civil liberties, free exchange of ideas, self-critique, private property, capitalism, and separation between religious and political/scientific thought.”

According to Hanson, adopting and developing these aspects of Western culture would make non-Western nations like Iran, China and North Korea more dangerous than the wide-scale import of weapons and technology developed by Western scientists, entrepreneurs, inventors, and companies.

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Partially improvised play in 20-year chapters

FRIDAY, 5 FEBRUARY 2021

Look at life in overlapping 20-year periods:

0-20: From new-born to young adult, includes virtually your entire programming of who you are, what you believe, how you fit into the world, and how you need to function and act to stay out of trouble most of the time and enjoy a reasonable chance of a good life

10-30: From young child, almost teenager, to 30-year-old adult; includes final elementary school years, high school, post-high school education, starting a career, maybe buying a house and getting married

20-40: Tertiary education, start your working life, get married or find a partner, settle down, maybe buy a house, maybe start a family

30-50: Work hard on your career or own business; may raise children and see how they become their own people; think about what you are going to leave behind of your existence; work on financial well-being

40-60: May reach the pinnacle of your profession; work on what you want to leave behind, make as much money as possible to look after family and prepare for retirement; make lifestyle adjustments to combat health problems

50-70: Work on what you want to leave behind; continue building wealth; keep a close eye on any signs of deteriorating health; make specific preparations for retirement

60-80: Start living at a slower pace; focus on maintaining your health and a good quality of life; give advice when asked by younger generations; fervently hope your money lasts until the end

70-90: Become increasingly dependent on other people – family, or staff at a retirement resort or nursing home; most likely no longer economically active; focus on relaxed activities with family and contemporaries

SATURDAY, 6 FEBRUARY 2021

The bad thing about the above scheme is that it makes your life look like a play with the parts neatly outlined.

On the one hand, it’s how it is: the first block of twenty years, you’re actually just waking up. By the time you realise you can indeed end your own life – that you’re not caught up in something that was never your choice, you are already knee-deep in it, and you realise the price of doing so may be too high for yourself or other people you care about.

On the other hand, there is plenty of space to go beyond the outline. You can improvise. You can start a new career in your forties, or even fifties. You can start your own business and get rich from it in your sixties. Some men become fathers for the first time in their sixties and sometimes seventies, and some women have their first child in their early forties. And people also get married for the first (or second, or third time) long after their twenties or thirties.

There is always a mainstream that varies by country or region, and by culture. It also adjusts with time – people no longer do things exactly as older generations did in the fifties or sixties of the last century.

Important to remember as you celebrate the transition from one block of years to the next: You are as free as you think you are.

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