The Emo Entry
Tomorrow’s events:
Stoic Breath w/ Steve Beattie. Every Wednesday @ 7:00 AM ET. RSVP here.
Embodied Book Club: Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck. Every Second Wednesday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Newly posted event:
Squad Wealth w/ Toby Shorin, Laura Lotti, and Sam Hart. February 18th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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January 26th, 2021
I am listening to an aggressive emo song I used to listen to when I was a teenager. The lyrics are fun ...
Cut it out
Your self-inflicted pain
Is getting too routine
The crowds are catching on
To the self-inflicted song
The lyrics go on about recreating misery through creating art and being tired of entertaining others. Writing every day commonly makes me ask why I write. Is it to entertain you? No. I am not here to fucking entertain ...
Sorry, my aggressive emo side is coming out, but there is signal in my emo though.
Sure. I am writing for me. That “ta eis heauton” shit, which is to say I am writing to become virtuous, but I am writing in front of you. Certain things come online when I am writing in front of others. My showy side, my impression management algos, and those “look at me I am so fucking awesome” desires.
When those things come online, and when I get too into them, I start fading away from the essence that seems pure, and this is the essence that makes me feel alive. I shake things off, and return to this essence often. There is concern about disappointing people when I do the shaking though.
Overall, the vast majority of people that have been reaching out to me have been super supportive. It is not wise to extrapolate this feedback to everyone that is encountering my work. There could be a large segment that is not messaging me that is thinking: who the fuck does this guy think he is?
I am actually really sensitive to negative feedback here. This is a surprising discovery for me, as I can be quite masochistic about getting negative feedback—charitable or uncharitable. I sense my mind has to be prepped for it though.
I mentioned before that I belonged to a super secret debate club in Toronto, where we basically yelled at each other week after week. It was a rough ride, and nothing was off-limits. Before each session, you had to take a big existential breath, and prepare your ass to get existentially kicked. It was exhilarating actually, and I miss having that experience.
I learned a lot about my intellectual limitations from that club, and it made my ass very humble, especially when I now play in intellectual domains. My ego got untethered from my intelligence and my intellectual musings. This is partly why I do not want to be, nor consider myself to be, an intellectual.
I can sniff out when people have their ego fused with their ideas, and there is a part of me that wants to have at them. I was not only masochistic in that club, but I could also be sadistic, or at least played the part well. I can be ruthless, unapologetic, and piercing when delivering propositional violence. I do not play that game often though, especially not on the internet. You need a space to process, ideally with people who are in your “communitas number.”
Broadcasting on the internet seems to promote two modes: uncharitable culture war bullshit mode, or let-everyone-save-face-so-we-can-promote-each-other’s-products bullshit mode. This is the problem of doing the broadcast thing in the spectacle. It usually creates a bullshit personality.
I am trying not to play either game here at The Stoa, and it seems to be resulting in two things: a nebulous excitement and intrigue with this place and with me, perhaps because you cannot easily pattern-match this daemonic motherfucker. The other one is disappointment, which is often expressed with a non-clear and frustrated criticism. The latter is what I have been surprisingly sensitive to.
I’ve received some woke criticism. There is the “too many white men” thing, but critiques in that vein have been very few in number, and the people who voiced them only took a glimpse at the place, and I felt that they were engaging in boringly obvious virtue signaling. A more common criticism stems from online consumerist behaviour. It blows me away how many people want YouTube comments.
Then you've got the boomer alpha male types, who will bark things like: be a leader dammit, 'nuff of this hippie navel-gazing bullshit. Meanwhile the envious spiritual types seem to think I am a power hungry egoic grifter, who does not want to hand the keys to the “collective intelligence” because I get a meta-boner at the prospect of creating a meta-cult around my ego.
None of this criticism is particularly interesting. I have addressed them before to various degrees throughout these journals, and I can easily face them truthfully, in the spirit of truth. The confluence of receiving all of them however has been draining, and to risk sounding emo for a moment: they hurt my feelings.
I am suspecting that's because I have been naïve about this project. I did not enter this thing by taking a big existential breath like I did before I entered that debate club. I went in during a pandemic, piercing through all the collective uncertainty, riding the daemon while being as truthful as I could be, with my heart fully here, and I gave a gift without asking for anything in return.
I've known coming into this that when you give a gift, you cannot expect anything in return, but where I think I was being naïve was that I lacked the following truth: when giving a gift, you have to expect some people to be disappointed by your gift, and be unfairly critical of it.
Do I still want to give, given this?
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