Tomorrow’s events:
Depolarising Conversations w/ Richard D. Bartlett and Ronan Harrington. September 15th @ 10:00 AM. RSVP here.
Neo-Nihilism: The Philosophy of Power w/ Peter Sjöstedt-H. September 15th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
The Smart Village w/ Euvie Ivanova & Mike Gilliland. September 15th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Glimpses of Communitas w/ Donna Rodriguez. September 15th @ 8:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Newly posted events:
Disagreeing Well w/ Justin Weinberg. October 15th @ 8:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
An event not to miss:
The Cultural Theory of Everything: Exploring 4Game Dynamics w/ Jamie Combs & Eric Brown. September 16th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP by clicking the image below.
Jamie Combs (Captain Simple) and Eric Brown (HighExistence) visit The Stoa to discuss the 4Game Dynamics model.
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September 14, 2020
I do not really want to get into this, but this journal is not going to write itself.
As an aside, one thing about writing here—which I have done almost everyday since March 2020—is a concern of repeating myself, or accidentally plagiarizing myself from a past entry. A thought just occurred when I wrote that first line: did I use that “this journal is not going to write itself” line before? It kind of feels like I did, and it would be embarrassing if I did.
Well, who cares. This is what Stoic Punk is all about. The free-associative nature of this journal is not about producing pristine artifacts. I like rereading my journals, but I do not rewrite them. What comes, comes, and that’s that. But now I am distracting myself from writing about what I am now going to write about.
When I sit down, I write about what is most alive. I find it hard to force myself to write about anything else. What was alive when I sat down today, was not something I want to write about, but I will write about it because it is alive, and needs processing.
I have an annoyance towards somebody who was once a friend. I will not go into all the details, but this person is not a friend anymore, and this defriending happened a few months ago. It was him that pulled away, with a vague rationale. Building and maintaining relationships is something I am good at. I am a pretty considerate person when it comes to relationships in my life, and I am constantly putting myself in the perspective of others: both cognitively and emotionally.
So when it comes to this person, what happened felt like an aberration. We were collaborators, and had a series of disagreements, which did not feel that serious to me. This is not unusual for me. Disagreements are par the course to any real friendship. I like them, and I like to stay with the difficulty to process what is asking to be processed. This individual did not want to process them though, and basically (and lamely) said: “I do not want to be friends.”
This hurt, especially because I was there for this guy when his life was in emotional shambles. I gave him advice when his past girlfriend cheated on him, I wing-manned him at seedy bars, and I was on-call for when he asked me for advice, which he did often. I also gave him opportunities to host events at my in-person groups, to take his mind off his situation.
So you’d think he'd give some allowances to whatever relational wrongdoings he thought I did. But he did not. It is true, I am not the easiest friend, but fuck having easy friends. Once a certain friendship threshold is passed, I am very truthful, and I do not hold back. I am not cruel but I am direct.
I sense he could not handle this, but I have other theories: he was deeply jealous of the newfound attention I was getting in the noosphere, or his new girlfriend, who seemed like the possessive-type, was threatened by me. Whatever the case is, he became distant and broke off our friendship like we were in middle school or something.
I have not felt the pinch of rejection in a long while, but there was a time when all I felt was rejection. In middle school, there was a series of events, where it felt like one social rejection after the other. It was large scale as well—like getting beaten up by the whole school type thing. It was humiliating, and created social trauma, and I wrestled with pretty serious social anxiety for years after.
I felt inherently unlikable, and worse, unlovable. I put in a tremendous amount of work to ameliorate this, and I did. To get over social anxiety I took public speaking classes and was a member of Toastmasters, and became a competitive public speaker. I took lots of acting and improv classes, and read every single book I could on social skills and relational dynamics. I also self-experimented with a slew of psychotherapeutic practices, and even had Jordan Peterson himself as my therapist for two years.
All of this helped, and now I do feel likable and lovable, and I have the capacity to like and love others back. Thanks to all the social pain I experienced, and all the work I did to address this, I have the ability now to build and maintain relationships with many people, from diverse backgrounds. I could be overrating my ability here, but at the very least my skills in this area have improved from what they once were.
This all being said: I rarely feel social rejection anymore, and even though I can go meta about all of this, the decision of this person—who opted not to process the difficulty but rather end the friendship with a vague rationale—did bring me social hurt, and I sense that is what he wanted.
Even though the hurt was not overwhelming by any means, the tough-guy in me, who is reading off the dude-bro masculinity script, does not want to admit it hurt at all. He wants to pretend like it is nothing, and his default response is to say “fuck that guy.” Instead of saying this, I will attempt to send loving-kindness to my former friend, and have an openness to him, if he ever feels called to process what needs to be processed. I sense he will reach out, eventually.
I will not be naive though. People find a way to reveal themselves, with things such as this, and how this guy conducted himself was a red flag. I do believe people have the capacity to change, as I did in many ways, and I do believe it is good to give people a second chance. It is prudent though, with giving second chances, to see what the person is doing to actually change, before you give them your trust again.
From my experience, in the realm of interpersonal and intrapersonal work, you need to stumble your way doing a tremendous amount of stuff to simply move an inch in your development. The normie-lifestyle that our culture promotes does not encourage an examined transformation, if anything it encourages an unexamined stagnation.
So I will proceed to be lovingly kind, and forgiving, with a guarded openness.
***
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