July 1st 2024

…[other than] reading the brain vomit of old geezers, what am I going to do with these notebooks going forward? For the most part, I want to use this space as an opportunity to save ideas from old essays that need to be scrapped and rewritten anyway. [Even if] I’m not motivated to explore these old ideas anymore, I still want to keep some scrap of them around. These entries will become a scrapyard of me reflecting on some ideas and why they worked or didn’t work…

Lately, I’ve had a lot of negative thoughts and hatred for the way society has turned on itself. I must remind myself that most people, I believe, are still inherently good. But we live in a society overtaken by reductionism and false activism. There’s so much bad going on in the world, but we’re not going to make it better by miring ourselves in negativity. We need to work on ideas. That’s what I’ve said for years to Emily: when the world is going to hell, work on ideas. If someone drops a nuclear bomb on a major city, all you can do is work on ideas. A major hurricane comes through and kills millions of people… work on ideas. Nothing will change anything except working on ideas.

… I’ve been considering focusing on things I’ve been reading. I want to share the ideas that people need to engage with, like Bertrand Russell. His book is available for free on most platforms, but his writing is dense. I like Apple Books because you can highlight things, which I then copy into my notebook and aim to write about later.

I’m trying to write shorter form pieces that people will actually read. The next book I publish will be an essay collection, including everything I feel is worthy of being published that hasn’t been yet. [This is what I’m doing with Life and Times of a Rambling Soul, due out around May 2027, which was, funny enough, what I was going to call it back in 2024.]

I also have a ton of ideas for fiction that I’ve been coming up with lately. I’ve narrowed it down to three or four I really want to work on… [No more sagas!] I’ve decided that I’m going to really narrow the focus on a few specific characters here and there. You know, I’m not really an epic fantasy writer. I’m not any good at it. I’m not organized enough to be able to handle all that. But I think it’s better if I focus on one, two, or maybe three characters… I was having a hard time keeping them all engaged in the story.

… I keep talking about kind of sunsetting my essay writing, but I’m good at it and it needs to be done. And even if no one reads it, somebody will read it eventually. That’s the way I look at it. And it’s good for me as a writer to keep writing about ideas. Even if no one’s reading it…

Going forward, I really need to use these notebooks as a specific outlet for ideas and to kind of give a snapshot of where I am currently in life, rather than just ramble on and complain about how bad things are. Things might be bad, but they could always be worse. There’s still good people in the world working on good stuff, and these are the people I’m going to highlight from now on.

…

“Sometimes we use our minds not to discover facts, but to hide them.” – Antonio Damasio

…

‘We don’t always use our brains to find the truth; sometimes we use them to hide the truth from ourselves and others. Sometimes we keep secrets to protect ourselves and those around us, but sometimes we keep secrets to protect ourselves from ourselves. We tell ourselves lies or ignore the truths that are staring us in the face because we don’t want to deal with them, and then we have to find creative ways to avoid facing reality until we can no longer do so.’ [I think this was something I wrote, but I’m not sure.]

This is a great quote and a strong basis for an essay. But it’s not one that I want to explore right now because I could write a damn book on the subject.

…

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” – Isaac Newton

A famous quote. But it’s probably been written about enough.

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“The only limit to our realization of tomorrow is our doubts of today.” – FDR

Great FDR quote here. Emily and I were just discussing yesterday how in order to properly look forward to our future, we must do everything we can to not throw away today.

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From The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger: “The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”

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“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

July 29th, 2024

From the scraps of a former old essay draft…

“… I lacked any sort of direction. I had no real plan. I just did a little bit of everything, hoping I’d slot into a niche somewhere and people would finally just leave me be. 

But, no, it took me literally walking away from everyone, everywhere, and everything I’d ever known to go move in with a relative stranger for me to finally see the light. It still took nearly two [more] years for me to escape the darkness that still had its hold on me. Only now with the chains of my past finally cut free can I truly see the stars in all their glory. All I was actually seeing was the darkness and the stars were too distant to be any use to me, or so I thought.”

“I know that the darkness I’ve endured is nothing compared to the darkness millions upon millions of people are facing in their own daily lives right now as I type out this essay. But, for the first time in my entire life, I’ve come to recognize that happiness is a choice. You can’t choose when the darkness will come or when the light will finally appear at the end of a long, seemingly endless tunnel. 

But, you can choose to make the best of it, wallow in it, or choose the third, often obscured option: do your best to make things better. That all begins with yourself. Without all those years building up my endurance, my fortitude, and my integrity, I wouldn’t have gotten to where I’m at today. Only in the darkness did I see the stars, but only in my reevaluation of the darkness within myself, it took choosing that third option for me to finally expunge the majority of that dark cloud that was attempting to swallow me whole.

When did you last look up at the stars? When did you last go out of your way to get a better look at the night sky? It’s not only a nice idea to let everything else go for a minute and simply take in the grand universe around us, it’s vital to our well-being. After all, we are but made of stardust, and our own life is but a tiny blinking light in a sea of billions of lights, many of which are flickering, yet only a brave few are burning brightly.”

This was an early draft of what eventually became “Only in the Darkness Can You See the Stars.”

…

I haven’t dug into the Perplexity Discover recently and the first thing that popped up was the adoption of ChatGPT by some investment firm called Morgan Stanley. The tools are saving the company many hours of labor, apparently. [I should check up on this in future]

Another interesting topic: energy efficiency of coding languages. With how complex computers are getting, this is actually an interesting concern. Python and Ruby are particularly inefficient.

Also we now have artificial maglev titanium hearts that work. Kind of nuts.

July 30 2024

So I’ve been reading a lot of Walden by Henry David Thoreau, and it’s given me a lot of thoughts. Thoughts that are actually sort of related to thoughts I’ve been having anyway recently. I was just thinking to myself how lately I’ve been starting to back off some of the modern entertainments that I have enjoyed for so long. On YouTube, I watch very few videos now. Even though there are things I could watch, I’m sort of portioning them. And the reason for this is that I’m trying to back away from being distracted by things that actually matter.

One of the things I’ve really been thinking a lot about, I actually had to stop halfway through this essay, the second essay in that book, because it just goes on forever. And I had to stop so many times and really consider what Thoreau was saying. One area where I disagree with Thoreau is I do think that simply just living off the land, to me, is not really necessary in our modern day and age. But what’s interesting is that the way that most people lived in 1850, the core of what people do with their lives is essentially the same now as it was then. It’s just that the machinery of the times has changed. There are now all these modern conveniences, but rather than use them as conveniences to better our lives, we often use them as crutches.

We live in a time now where everything is just taken for granted, basically. You go to the grocery store and you can just get processed food and not think about really much of where it comes from. For example, Emily’s going to the grocery store today on her way home from her doctor’s appointment, and we’re going to be having salad for lunch. But these salads are not salads. They are processed salads. And you might ask, well, why don’t I just get random vegetables and cut them up? Because it’s more work. And I think that that’s the thing. You have to decide what modern conveniences are worth spending the time on.

…because we have all these modern conveniences. We don’t need gardens. We can just go to the store and buy what we need. But the problem is that rarely are these things fresh. Rarely are they as nutritious as whole food right from the farm. But the issue is that most of the time the farmer’s markets in Vermont are primarily dairy and beef. And those are the two things that I can’t eat. So it’s kind of funny that that’s the case. But we’ve become such a beef and dairy heavy society. Back then, even in 1850, we were pretty dairy dependent. Even back then, not nearly as much in the beef department.

Anyway, what Thoreau is really saying is that people are basically living their lives asleep. And it’s only one in a million who even makes something of themselves. They actually wake up and have a thought. God forbid they have a thought. And where I left off in the reading today, and this is why I stopped where I did, is that basically, and this hasn’t changed much, the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. What does that even mean? What does that even mean? And what Thoreau is saying is this is the problem. People don’t even understand what that even means.

And that’s something which, from a very young age, I realized that people were supposedly glorifying God and enjoying him, and yet living in abject poverty. But by abject poverty, I don’t mean living in the woods with a cabin and growing your own food. Just as Thoreau doesn’t consider that poverty, I don’t either. But most people live in filth. He definitely didn’t live in filth. And yet they’re glorifying God for having nothing due to their own stupidity.

Okay, why would God want people to live like that? God did not create people to go to these jobs and come home and watch Netflix, go to bed and repeat the process. That is not why we were put on this earth. If we were put here by divine intervention, which over the years I have definitely soured on that idea, why would God do that? That doesn’t make any sense. But I don’t really want this to be so much about God as much as people saying, well, this is what God intends for me. You know, this pre-deterministic nonsense. And that’s all it is. It is deterministic philosophy pervading every aspect of our lives.

And that deterministic crap is the reason that I suffered for so many years. I’m like, you know what? I’m going to be an SEO specialist and content creator and I’m going to rise above due to the strength of my own skill set. That didn’t happen. In fact, the opposite happened. I ended up poor. I ended up practically on welfare. And that just made me sick. And the only reason I got out of that was I met Emily.

Because my mindset was such, and I’ve written about this, even the first two years I lived with Emily, I was still trying to somehow continue my career [in a weird, shadowplay kind of way]. I was still trying to rank in search engines. I was still trying to write about the same stuff I’d written about for years. I still was seeking recognition for something that no one was willing to give me any credit for. And that’s just futility.

And I feel like people are just running around in futility trying to figure out, okay, well, what does God want for me? Well, maybe God wants you to wake the fuck up and realize that you have been put on this earth with the opportunity to just enjoy life. Maybe you should just find what you enjoy, go do that, and figure the rest out as it comes up. Now, yeah, you can’t do what Thoreau did. You can’t go do day labor for six weeks a year and get enough money to get the materials to build your house and get the seeds you need to plant to sustain yourself.

… that’s not really possible, at least in the United States. There are places in the world you could probably still get away with it. But, in fact, you probably could still get away with it even today. And I’ve seen people live off the land in RVs. I’ve seen people do it. So, which is something I actually thought about doing at one point.

…Anyway, those are my thoughts for now.

…

A book suggested on the Sports Card Madness YouTube channel: Never Split the Difference, by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz

July 31 2024

… [while reading Walden] Thoreau drops bombshells so often, it’s hard to stay focused. I want to write something about how I wish I could write like Thoreau. EB White certainly emulated a lot of Thoreau’s better aspects, but I don’t know that we’ll ever get another writer like Thoreau. I can’t see myself ever reaching that level. Doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try though, right?