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Sometimes the thing that's got you fucked up is too insignificant to justify just how fucked up you are.

Sometimes the monsters have no nads for you to kick.

Sometimes you find yourself overdosing on adrenaline and cortisol for no good reason at all.

Sometimes there's no hope of a satisfying narrative conclusion.

And you can hide from this reality, and you can deny this reality, you can live in this reality with no hope of ever growing up or out of your petty trauma and maladaptive coping mechanisms. You can be furious with this reality, and scream into the unfairness of not having a moment to dredge up and fight and win. You can insist that no you're fine really and let everyone else carry the burden of your shit, because you won't.

But these are choices, and you have other options as well.

If a narrative conclusion is what you need, then go and fucking make one. Your head's as big as mine, as big as all our heads: whole universes fit in there. Start using that machine for something more productive than Marvel Cinematic Universe continuity errors. Build yourself a monster and fight it. Build yourself a trauma and overcome it.

You've always been a flighty kid, a dreamy kid, a kid with an overactive imagination. Stop hating that and start using it. Stop wasting it on entertainment and start using it to heal yourself. Write a better story. Run a better game. Make better art. Run that "coming to terms with the past" narrative over and over until it wears a rut in your brain as familiar as the one that says you're an idiot who can't do anything right. Make it as automatic as the path from your bed to the toilet.

Because it turns out your brain doesn't actually give a shit whether the bad thing you're getting over is real or not, it just needs practice going through the motions. It turns out healing is a habit like any other, and "cheating" means absolutely nothing in this context. Sure, there are folks with specific monsters with nads they can kick, who need to spend time doing that thing, but if you are one of the many who is broken because of a thousand papercuts instead of a sword wound, take heed.

Pretending is more powerful than you know.

Excellent thinking there.

Seeking permission to translate into Hungarian and publish, with link to original here. Or alternative, acceptable solution.

How's about this one?

"RUGGED INDIVIDUALISTS OF THE WORLD,UNITE!"

Firstly, how do I get to know what creativity means to me? What's the advice for uncertainty about that?

Aren't you the Pope? Get Eris on the horn, ask her directly.

Yeah you know I do that, but I'm acutely aware she could be having me on!

Soooo...........


It sounds like you're going down the a priori/a posteriori road with a large backpack of epistemology, hauling a wheelbarrow full of semiotics.

You might want to deal with that before even approaching the OP.

The OP? What I wrote? How could I have written it without approaching it? Long pencil?

Also, frankly, no. Must be some weird acousics.

Okay fair enough. But let me reframe it:

Firstly, how do I get to know what creativity means to me? What's the advice for uncertainty about that? I don't think it's all that rare.

Also, I think for people who are pretty sure about what creativity and and destructiveness mean to them, it might be bad advice.

Of course I don't really see how advising people in general is possible beyond the profoundly self-evident (which does come in handy at times).

[did]

I kinda think that the original framers of the Principia¹ did believe in a hierarchy between creative and destructive forces. While Order/Disorder are equal and up for interpretation, their advice is to embrace creative over destructive, whatever that means to you.

Whether this "creativity is better than destruction" hierarchy is moral, or cosmic, or comic, or spiritual, or arbitrary--is anybody's guess.

¹ the OG Chairfuckers, you know who I mean

In a way, it seems self-aggrandizing to me. (And I should know about that shit!) As if I were ever in a position to know for sure. "I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good." - Mephisto in Goethe's Faust

But seriously, Dildo quoted your response, so does he believe you used mind beams to change his quoted text?

Well, you know it would take considerably less than mind-beams ( :

But on the balance, I admit that by far the most likely explanation is simply that I was being a dozy fuck. Maybe some vague recollections about... never mind. dozy fuck.

I haven't read the whole discussion, most of the linked content is dead, sadly. I did read the post you linked to, and I liked your characterisations of the pairings (though I don't understand the Atlantean stuff).

The most halfassed thing that occured to me as I was reading was that this reminds me of the courtly cards in the tarot. Both the coins/cups/swords/sticks and the Princess/Queen/Prince/Knight sequences are supposed to be analogous to earth/water/air/fire, so the courtly cards form a matrix similar to the New Chart. But that's as far as that went...

The other thing I've been thinking about is whether the Order/Disorder and the Creation/Destruction dimensions are on the same level, and whether they are independent. I think order/disorder are qualities that tend to be ascribed to states of affairs, while creative/destructive are ascribed to processes. It even feels quite natural to describe creation as movement from disorder to order, and destruction as movement from order to disorder. Then I tried to think of a way of defining order and disorder in term of creation and destruction, and I could only come up with: order is the precondition of destruction and the result of creation, while disorder is the precondition of creation and the result of destruction - but that's saying the same thing. Also, where do I fit the static-dynamic duality into all this?

The "this smells like hippie shit, it's still dualistic, and we like breaking things" bit was very much after my own heart. But this is still dualistic, isn't it?

Also, all four appear to be perspective/ascriber-dependent. The very same thing is seen as beautious order by some and as atrocious disorder by others (industrial agriculture versus permaculture, regimented, Prussian-style schools and project-based learning, person-centered schools), and the very same acts are seen as creative and destructive (often in sequence).

That's as far as I got for now.

If it was edited, there would be italicized script underneath it, saying so.  But you know that.

Well perhaps I had known, but I forgot. It was a while back.

That sentence was a link to the page.

I literally only saw "You're in luck!  We went through this about ten years ago." Which is not to say there wasn't anything else there, but if there was, I failed to notice it. I have noticed it now, and I will read up on it at the earliest opportunity.

So Dildo, did you read that post from 2008 (which, I now realize, was really from 2005); and did you have any thoughts or comments on it?  Because I assumed that was your intent for starting the OP.

Well I don't trust my memory the way I used to, but I swear when I first saw your comment, all I saw was the single sentence about this having been covered ten years ago. So either you changed it later, or I just overlooked it. I think you'll agree that both are quite possible. Any rate, I haven't, but I will, thanks for linking it and for asking.

Look, this thing is my baby. That doesn't mean it's perfect or that I can't take criticism, but if you're gonna come in here and go HOLY NONSENSE HAS PROBLEMS and then quote one of the five sections pulled from the Principia and act like this is a Holy Nonsense problem IN PRINCIPIA DISCUSSION, I'm gonna get my hackles up.

When have you known him NOT to be a passive-aggressive shitbag? 

Ow, don't be like that!!

Also, your two links are identical.

Quite right, I fucked up there, thanks for pointing it out.

I meant this one for the second one:

https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/systems-of-wealth-hoarding-hide-in-your-mind-bc5998934931

Lots of intelligent people have said great things while using coke. Freud is not one of them. He was a musty misogynistic trash fire, and has never been anything but. If you think his work has any value outside of mockery, you are beyond hope.

I agree he was a rather unsavoury character, misogynistic and authoritarian (his treatment of Reich, another interesting nutcase, is particularly hard to forgive) - and yet his contribution has shaped our culture so massively that he cannot be ignored. His notions of the mechanisms of the human psyche were crude and opinionated and often wrong, but he was onto something with the talking cure. I am not beyond hope.

I hope I won't cause offence by responding with an angle on my own life, but this seems all too familiar to me. I'm of the bipolar persuasion with no hospitalisation events (so far). Right now, Im not feeling under the weather and I don't think I'm being manic, either. But I'm keenly aware that when I'm manic, I very rarely notice it. And I sleep less than I did two months ago, when I was still brooding over our house renovation and move, which I then considered a shameful failure. And I know that pretty much every time I have miraculously exited through the rear end of a depression, I thought I had finally cracked it and would not get into that terrible black pit of dejection, self-loating and emotional deadness again. Until I did. But still, right now it is good.