We Got This
Hey beautiful people,
Beyond-Self Discipline (BSD) is back!
After an informative MVP launch in October (Beyond Self-Discipline Zero), we are officially launching BSD on April 1st via the Maven platform.
The first cohort will consist of 12 individuals. Applications will be posted here on March 6th.
You can view the course outline here: https://maven.com/thewisdomgym/beyond-self-discipline
Tomorrow’s events:
Collective Journaling. Daily @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
Systemic Constellations for Societal Change: A Practice to Deepen Our Sensing Capacities Leading to Wiser and More Aligned Actions w/ Luea Ritter and Nancy Zamierowski. March 2nd @ 12:00 PM ET RSVP here.
Newly posted event:
Hyposubjects w/ Dominic Boyer. March 28th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
***
March 1st, 2022
I am kind of well-read, but not that well-read. I am definitely not well-spoken. I do not like speaking out loud at The Stoa. I feel so stumbly and incoherent when I speak out loud. I often feel pretty bad for the English language when I use it. I guess my writing is getting better, but I am not trying to be a good writer here. I imagine (and really hope) you are not here because you actually want to read the words of a good writer.
I am also not your super high-IQ fancy philosopher who plays status games with other fancy philosophers, ones that are alive or dead. Like, don’t get me wrong, I totally wish I could be a fancy philosopher, but alas, that is not me. I do not have the capacities or discipline to play the fancy philosopher game. I see myself more as your somewhat weird and sensitive dudebro who playfully pretends to be a Stoic on the internet.
That is cool, because I sense there is room for a guy like me to play in the unfolding of whatever this is. There is probably room for you to play as well. People often tell me they like the way I write here. There is a word for the style I use in these journals: conversationalization. Here is a decent definition I found: a style of public discourse that simulates intimacy by adopting features of informal, conversational language. It is also known as public colloquial.
This “conversationalization” style emerged naturally for me here. Using this style is probably an unconscious strategy to encourage people to like me. And yeah, I want to be likable, especially after feeling not just unlikable, but unlovable, for a good portion of my life. The reason I did such deep dives into getting better at “social skills,” as I chronicled in my Social Alchemy presentation, was my way to ameliorate feelings of not being likable or lovable.
I was a trainer at “Dale Carnegie Training,” and took their year-long and surprisingly grueling trainer training that was shaped by Dale Carnegie himself. Carnegie, the author of the famed How To Win Friends and Influence People, was the best in the game at teaching a “likable literacy.” This is one of the many “invisible social literacies” always at play in the social wild, and elements of my knowledge here probably have become an “unconscious competency.”
There are other invisible social literacies: seduction literacy, cool literacy, status literacy, and probably most critically to know these days, power literacy. I am somewhat aware of all these literacies, both on a propositional and practical (aka embodied) level. I am also somewhat competent at them, but I can become way more competent at them, which I am called to become. Power literacy is one I would like to explore more at The Stoa, and here in these journals.
I might do that soon, but I want to circle back to this conversationalization thing, and add another possible reason why I am inclined to write here in this way. Like most people who are not full-blown galaxy brains, I have intellectual insecurities. I see most people who have intellectual insecurities do two moves:
They pretend they are smarter than they are, or overcompensate in some other way, often playing silly status games, which leads to intellectual imposter syndrome.
They opt out of playing intellectual games, outsourcing their thinking to legacy institutions of truth validation, to “secular gurus,” or to whatever memetic tribe that is trying to capture their mind.
I see a mixture of 1 and 2 often happening within the same person. There is another way to relate to your intellectual insecurities though: be cool with being insecure, while showing off how cool you are with your insecurity. This is my conscious approach, and I sense this influences how I write here. The vast majority of people are surely insecure about knowing what is and ought to be. This is understandable, as we are fragile creatures, with incredibly fragile minds. If you go crazy a few times as I have, you’ll have an embodied intimacy about how fragile your mind actually is.
This is why I am into trying to get into the right relationship with this bodymind rather than just this mind. “Descartes wound,” our Western dis-ease of separating body and mind, is a part of this endemic intellectual insecurity most of us feel. So yeah, let us feel insecure. It sucks to feel this, eh? But you know what, it is way more fucking honest.
I cannot help myself: for whatever reason, I have to think for myself, and with my self, and – when I feel most alive – beyond my self. I also like thinking publicly in a way that invites you to do the same. Being insecure just means you do not feel secure, and nor should you feel secure. The world is pretty fucking insecure right now, and the reality is that security is not an existential entitlement.
Pretending to be a Stoic is great because the whole “fake it until you become it” thing actually works. Stoics are about radically sinking into reality, and responding, not reacting, from that spot. The reality is that the world is insecure. We can react to reality and escape into some illusion of security, pretending we know things we do not really know. Or we can respond to reality, be with the insecurity, and figure out how to get along with it.
In my attempts to be Stoic, I tend to become localized to where this bodymind is currently at. Spiritually speaking, nothing is more local than being in the here and now. There is choice from this spot, and to continue to write with a conversationalization tone, one of the choices can be boiled down to this: believing you got this or not. Who cares what “got this” even means. I know you can feel what it means.
For my part, I choose to believe I have this. I am also casting a choice spell your way, choosing to believe you got this. Of course, we may not actually have this, but we do not know that, and oftentimes belief is the thing that makes the difference.
***
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