Ignore and Prosper or: Openly Yearning and Slowly Earning
January 1st, 2021
Somebody emailed Daniel Kazandjian, my dear brother, and myself, requesting something from us the other day, and I emailed Daniel the following …
Ignore and prosper.
And he responded: hahaha. I love you man.
I deactivated my Facebook account. I deleted my Discord account. I publicly put myself on a “Twitter diet.” I put my phone on grayscale, to make it less attractive to look at. I deleted a bunch of apps off my phone, including the email app, and put the following auto-response on my email …
Hey beautiful person, I will not be active on email in 2021. There might be a long delay before my response, and it is possible that there will be no response. My preference is to receive concise emails, as for whatever reason I am receiving a lot of emails. With love and warmth, Peter
I’ve created a bunch of new protocols for my email usage, as I sense this email thing was a problem in 2020, and I sense it will no longer be a problem in 2021.
I have taken back my mind, and built myself an inner citadel. I also was privately journaling, tinkering with my philosophical “operating system,” and it is much cleaner and coherent now. Like Frank Yang told us, a beautiful mind is a symmetrical mind, and my mind is feeling symmetrical at the moment.
I was reflecting on why I am journaling here, as it felt like I lost the plot recently, and then I recalled that I like writing love letters. 2020 has been the best year of my life. It was full of meeting so many beautiful people, through this thing called The Stoa.
A lot of these beautiful people are my people. I was analyzing “memetic tribes” before, in a disembodied way, from a safe distance, but when the virus came for us, I recall saying: Fuck it. I am going to find my tribe. I am going to find my people.
I did find some of them. Bonnitta Roy is my people. Nicolas Benjamin is my people. Hannah Robbins is my people. I would not have had the opportunity to meet these people, or get to know them better, if it were not for COVID, and The Stoa. Not everyone I have met is one of my people though, and our Dunbar number is not that large. You might not be in one of my slots, I might not be in one of yours, and that is okay.
In the entries that felt most alive here, there was an open yearning, to find the others. I was writing love letters to my tribe, the one that has not fully formed. It was aspirational writing, a sigil in form of a letter, that was placed in a bottle and thrown wildly into the digital seas.
This exodus from the spectacle, during which the memetic tribes become embodied tribes, has just begun. It is going to be a long journey, and it is best for me to know who I am writing to, so I do not get distracted anymore, or take cheap short-cuts.
This whole writing journey, along with the stewarding one, has been an individuation process for me. Am I individuated now? Does one just declare this? Will I get an individuation certificate in the mail by doing so? I do know that I am feeling whole, in a very local sort of way. I sense this will make my existential loneliness even more potent now, perhaps serving as a beacon for my tribe to be to find me.
Yearning is one thing, earning is another. I do not just want any tribe. I want the most beautiful tribe, and if I have to live boldly, and turn my life into an artwork to find them, then so be it. Yearning for communitas is the first step, which I have done, now earning communitas is the next thing on the agenda, and one has to show up for that, in the right way.
A lot of people hold themselves back from showing up, because they do not believe in themselves. This is tragic of course. There is another segment of people though, who do believe in themselves, but hold themselves back because they are afraid of being called egoic, or seen as narcissistic, or whatever. One thing Alexander Bard taught me is this: if you have talent, you own it, and you show it.
I know what I am about to write might seem like it is coming from ego, and it might seem narcissistic, and it is probably overall naïve and ridiculous, but it is a thing that seems true, and I only show things here in a truthful way …
I think I can steal the culture.
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