Violence must be met with violence, enough said there... A weak person needs support for that, and that's the issue.

Elon's biggest problem in life seems to have been his garbage narc creep of a father, who I recall even managed to blame that incident on little Elon! saying 'oh well the boy who did that said Elon made remark on a family member's sensitive passing or something, so you have to understand it was a matter of honor see', blah blah....

the vast majority of human beings can not "fluently" navigate social situations either...

the very small elite percentage of those who can are the 'social butterflies' that become actors, politicians, perfect 1950s social calendar wives, etc all depending on the culture they live in.

They are mesmerizing to watch, and rare like a lovely dancer or magician or elite athlete is rare. This is not normal, it's a special talent at the tail of the bell curve.

most ACTUAL normal social interactions involve simultaneous friction of many kinds under the surface-- as people have opposing motives (money, power, sex, pride etc) and limited face-saving default tools to navigate, dismiss, avoid, or paper over that friction.

(Maybe that's the difference, autistics suck at using or accepting the use of these shoddy tools as 'fake' and give resistance to all the sub-optimal goings on?? idk)

fake small talk and go-to phrases and lame jokes and polite chuckling and fake smiles and managed voice intonation ---these are the bread and butter of getting thru a interaction / dance while trying to still get what you want, balancing long term and short term incentives etc

Both people know it's fake and that's okay

----- it's exhausting to normal people too, at the 'end of a long day' it's not the physical toll

it is not evolutionarily normal to meet so many goddamn strangers every day and try to smooth over endless bits of friction (esp from so many cultures fundamentally at odds in core values and goals, but that gets into politics, so)

'normal' people deal with others sub-optimally and then let off the steam/ bitch and moan / insults and slurs to get out how they really feel in the safe space at home/ their tribe

Places where this is always at max capacity, it bubbles over and you see the failures and stress marks, i.e. strangers screaming at each other in new york traffic, littering and destroying things, unspoken boundaries (turf) being tested, shamelessness in breaking norms and criminality, helplessness/numbness to the disturbing etc

Most of the time, 'normal people' don't know what or why they are feeling / acting out the way they are either, they just relieve their tensions any way that comes up, angry at X person but take it out on Y person instead.

There are infinite ways to be dysfunctional and very few ways to achieve 'good-vibes only' haha

TV shows have skewed the sense of how smooth-talking and self-aware and charming normal real people are...

LOL thanks for posting this,

I love-hate this part, this is the state of things

------

Galloway then wants reassurance about his first big art purchase,

Saltz pseudo-approves, saying, Well despite all your self-loathing you perfectly bought a painting that represents you

(Swisher is dead wrong, this response is masterfully tactful in the most New York way, brilliant)

How much did it cost, he asks, 6K?

Gallawoy says to add a zero and laughs nervously...

Then he adds, well the artist of the painting is just so stunning and brave and really he bought it to support the artist and all they represent...

So I look up the artist, it's Grayson Perry and I guess google images is enough said

MDIIAMDIRuined

god if this is what a 'sincere' purchase feels like, well i guess the hedgefunders don't seem so bad

-------------

Ironically, modern art is the one field that I do not think it's wise to 'separate the art from the artist' without losing most of the magic, whereas films, music, books etc the works feel like contained mini-worlds, can be transmitted as complete, stand alone.

Modern paintings don't have the 'density' for that without the story/aura, so getting the right work with the right story to unlock it for you can feel really special.

(That ineffable specialness is what you're really buying imo, and yes it very well can be worth it)

----------

p.s. My favorite easy-to-read book for cynics trying to understand why 'who the artists is' matters so much in the 'aura' of art is The Accidental Masterpiece, by Saltz's competitor haha, Michael Kimmelman of nytimes

his short essays capture the 'essence' of different types of minds at work. A decade later I'll randomly think of the people from the book, tho I can't remember their names or the paintings per se. The feeling of exactly who I'm thinking of sticks with you.

Everyone who makes things probably wonders how other types of people make things, since it feels impossible to describe.

I've put my email in my profile if you still want to say hello

P.s. there were no google results for your username but I kinda suspect "ihoafw" likely stands for In Hopes Of A Future Wife, not sure how I feel about that on a 3 year old account ;)

elites 'let you win' some games for all sorts of ulterior motives, implicit or unconscious even.

Vincent barely wins for a small time, he almost collapses on the treadmill lmao

My point is they left the exclusion / ruthlessness dial at level 7 when they could choose to crank it to 9

Vincent takes advantage of that temporarily, next guy and group will be punished for it.

no he isn't, he is merely exploiting the compassion of the society of the fittest that temporary allowed the less fit/ gifted /engineered to still live / work near them and infiltrate at the right time

-- it's got a bit of that a heist/noir of criminal cat and mouse

Vincent uses criminal connections to pull the entire scheme off (the german), just like a bank heist in a film it feels fun for reasons that don't work without a movie's magic 'genre' control of tone/sympathy/agency etc.

similar to other problems we have today where 'compassion' politics actually harms the fittest members most

An old homeless loony stabbing a brilliant healthy young person today isn't a show of the former's fitness, it's because (there are other incentives for the) the fittest of society (elites) choose to not wipe out/exile/enslave the unfit for various reasons (inextricable from the society itself--labor dynamics, crime and fear being useful, christian virtue, etc)

Gattaca in the opening even says it's only because he was born in the 'early stages' of the transition

Actual 'meritocracy' safety and other values require ruthlessness and violence, which we already have as all states do, just distrubuted in one configuration (gattaca) versus another configuration (chaotic US today, versus say the safety of singapore, or dictatorship of north korea, or some other gattaca 2.0 where the Vincents aren't born at all because fertility is managed)

A society can distribute its coercion/violence/reward structure in different ways, vincent is just a defector in a trust game

Always reminds me of that lame smug 'Feynman negging woman at a bar' anecdote, how is defecting on social norms clever? that's literally the point of lying/cheating/stealing/littering etc, one individual wins a temp game at the harm of the environment / culture long term. Once a few men are rude / cads, reputation of the place declines and fewer girls show up, or only certain types and not others, etc. A higher status guy like F can avoid/internalize the social ding of resentment from others who lose out of the good vibe/meeting someone cool while he's there, but can't tell him off.

Managing mini social games everywhere is 'culture' and essentially the reason infinite invisible class norms are so 'stifling' and invisible at once, it excludes the riff-raff and keeps those included people on their toes, behaving in a way that makes the place/group/experience "rich" rather than the vincent-like 'richness' of just maxing his own experience at cost of group.

(essentially why costume dramas are so fun to watch for girls (me included, I just don't lie to myself lol) as a guilty pleasure that doesn't feel like a guilty pleasure (you claim it's high status reasons -- the set design, jane austen, the history, so well written!!! etc) -- But the ideology of the genre of the movie itself does all the heavy lifting on cost of the 'nice things' you're not allowed to advocate for or admit to yourself you want as an elite experience missing from our lives today (the fantasy of *extreme social exclusion* so only the very pretty, very rich, and very witty girls can join the tea party-- as well as enjoy the courtship dance pre-filtered by only worthy rich/pretty/witty men :) Genre expectations let you relax, they 'hold the space' ideologically. Real life is social chaos of competing norms and suspicion and low trust, that's the price... But I digress

Once they find out Vincent's fraud, next years space program is gonna have to be even more draconian, annoying rules for all coworkers because of him... Maybe all the fellow blue-collars will get fired too.

'we live in a society'

why not just get stuck on 'what IS culture even', 'what is a trend Really??', and other forms of useless filler-think that magically only crop up when a middle class smart-and-friendly-smile type person is made uncomfortable by working class people actually 'noticing things' with their eyes and ears...

Policy-wonks aren't gonna be in the family rooms where people say things that matter to them, where populism and/or prejudice brews.

Get to know some immigrant communities, they don't understand english to watch fox or cnn. Black folks didn't make vaccine decisions based on what channel you think they should watch. Wealthy white people buying property or voting with their feet/dollars aren't going to tell all the friends they went to college with exactly why, revealed preferences and all that.

I'm a radical feminist, if american conservatives/rep have common cause then all the better

Imagine understanding capitalism, the state, warfare, or the history of any nation at all.... and still having party loyalties??? sad :)

Physical violence (and any indicator of physical needs- shelter, food, safety) basically signals 'cheap animal unit', and animals are useful tools to be managed by the machinery (of capital, patriarchy, globalism, blah blah etc whatever left or right wing flavor of 'power structure' you mentally choose to sketch it out, it's there churning, by whatever name you like)

you seem to confuse elite signaling and countersignaling with personal sufferings when in reality, both are exactly how it's supposed to go

The cultural machinery works thru contradiction and desperate elite mimicry, people trying to aspirationally sound like the class right above them, leading to tragedy of the commons, for example:

Rich women support bail reform/ islamic immigration/ transgender craze/ porn-culture that gets poorer women raped/ scared/ fired / cheapened, and that's the new feminism

Pragmatic feminists/terfs/lesbians/mom groups/anti-vaccers are the new witches to be burned as the purity test for desperate psuedo-middle-class aspirational women, supplying the cultural fodder content mill, while Republican women/Christian evangelicals make popcorn...

Abortion rights are a cheap voting lever, the more passionate you are the more the machine knows how to use you, people are putting their carrots and sticks in their bios, announcing the best ways to control them with a smile lol

Women in Iran and Afghanistan not allowed to go to school, that is defacto no longer a feminist issue but something something 'why not both' meme-mumbles by nonbinary mental illness connoisseurs.

Gays getting beat up by rural whites so they move to metropolis and work for the rainbow utopia of corporate America is exactly how the machine eats :)

'When I wrote 'In Cold Blood' many were critical,' Capote said. 'I spent six years on that book wandering the plains of Kansas and nearly went mad but I saw it through. (Fellow author Norman) Mailer called it 'a failure of the imagination,' and now I see that the only prizes Norman wins are for that very same kind of writing. I'm glad I was of some small service to him.'

-----

great capote interviews are Paris Review 17 and especially controversial Playboy 1968 interview....holy moly

you can't believe the actual meat and saucy opinions this guy really said out loud

Compare to the insipid 'i love puppies and rainbows' interviews of writers today, ughhhh

The costs / risks of trusting important matters to average middling people makes it not worth it.

It's not a horror show, it's just a waste...

The reputation of therapy came from the top/excellent practitioners in the field over several decades.... and now it's a cheapened wonder-bread experience and even app based, lmao

The hype needs extreme push back.

I'm shocked at how high quality the correspondence was, makes friendships of today feel kinda cheap

Paperback layout feels like a workbook, not overwhelming-- beginner friendly

in person therapy is a waste of time/money for most people unless you're so wealthy you can afford the wise old superstar in their field (most of the best have already dropped dead of old age).

less charitable: those who knock the easy/free/practical-yet-harmless-woo are kinda just protecting the value of their profession / special modality, consciously or unconsciously imo, like doctors who don't accept basic fasting thats been around a thousand years, eating keto/carn, or benefits of natural immunity... lol

I say don't be loyal to any 'experts', steal whatever works from their cheap books and youtube and other resources across modalities and put together a hodgepodge of stuff for yourself!

Research and libgen and then buy physical books and highlighters and a journal and especially a medium/large STUFFED ANIMAL with expressive eyes to mimic eye contact while to talk out loud to instead (like rubber ducking with trauma) and do it yourself. You can process feelings privately, keep a journal of progress and try one book/method at a time at your own pace.

Most normal people (esp men) can't cry in front of strangers, but can cry in private.

ONE session of therapy is $50 to $150, and only gives you one hour with barely ONE insight or emotional moment a session. Thats after many sessions of fighting defense mechanisms and intellectual tricks to maybe get to the real meat of what's painful.

The classics of the field are mostly books that cost $10-15 as paperbacks on amazon and each can provide MONTHS of insight /catharsis if you DO/work thru feelings that arise as u read each chapter instead of just reading it and throwing it aside for the next book.

People just race thru and don't APPLY anything, that's as useless as reading a programming book and not trying any of the code/psets. Slow it down, only one chapter a week, the same way in person therapy is only one hour a week, the insights/feelings that you chew on the other 6 days until the next session. Make a schedule and DIY.

Unplug your alexa and phone and u can say stuff out loud to your plushie that you cannot legit say to a therapist-- they are truly a stranger with LEGAL BUREAUCRACY and social programming makes them often unable to handle realities of anyone unlike themselves.

Therapists gossip and share stories at parties and know little about real privacy in the digital age where two random anecdotes can google-fu most clients.

The lame psych majors you met in college are the same people your insurance will cover a pathetic 10 sessions with. They get bored and tune out or jump to their fave diagnostic buckets when they can't untangle your issues and unconsciously need to make themselves feel more competent.

The money is bad so they compete for clients and aren't going to tell you hard truths that would HELP you when that risks being dropped, a bad review, bad word of mouth, or risk of legal/license headache.

You are just paying for a 'legitimized' comfort zone, rather than a strong helpful truly honest person to guide you out of your own misery-is-safe-and-familiar comfort zone.

Incentives are not on your side.

The types of people that become therapists are not emotionally hardy, mentally strong, stable, world-weary people with a strong sense of character.

If you knew any in real life as friends, you would never hire them.

Seriously consider what you disclose and reset your expectations.

more ranty side points----------

therapy is like the 80-20 garbage/quality ratio of all fields, especially the affordable ones most likely a mediocre broken person with their own baggage/desires/ego they'll project onto you.

Good luck being a hot girl, philosophically and politically anything but a very liberal humanist, having any personality type that isn't already a feely crier who understands your emotions, any one with working class common sense, anyone with aggression, bitterness and/or less 'nice' presentations of symptoms or a myriad other demographic factors. These aspects SO OBVIOUSLY influence the undercurrents between mediocre therapists and patient but they swear as professionals do not or are just further 'grist for the mill', eye roll...

You're not gonna magically book an appointment (with or without insurance) and get like Irvin Yalom wise jedi soul that can cut thru your bullshit with affectionate firmness, nor will you get the smart self-dignified composure of Melfi/Paul HBO fictional therapists that created standards of excellence not realistic in real life....

Most practitioners are kinda weak people seeking status and comfort and easy wins, difficult patients annoy them subconsciously, they emotionally flinch from them and truly do nothing to earn the trust necessary for 'real' therapy magic to work.

(Everyone recommending "get therapy!" on every thread online is just a middle-class reaction formation, an automatic unthinking refrain when THEY can't handle their own emotions of uselessness/systemic helplessness against the pain and grim reality of being an individual in the world.)

Every time a horrible cringe/guilt memory comes up, instead of expletive Fuuuuuuu (mental or out loud) literally reprogram yourself to immediately say "I love me!" or "Different now" or something else that's positive.

The silly goodness of the thing legit interrupts the pain of the memory.

Thoughts and feelings that fire together wire together, so you MUST to break the connection of old shit spiraling into bad mood, paralysis, etc in the moment.

This is daily housekeeping for mental health. No one has endless time to meditate or waste money on therapy

once you have a few of these solid habits, you feel strong enough to do the heavy murky freudian trauma unraveling that's more longterm and releases the tight gordian knots from childhood etc.

But daily tools DO work and are just as important.

aggression turned outwards --> anger

aggression turned inwards --> depression

i wish some of these super smart people weren't so afraid of the harmless 'woo' that costs next to nothing, like read some old 70s book on primal scream into a pillow or try a radical keto meat diet or weird mental re-framings from people who are total quacks

The internet is full of 60 plus years of this stuff since the 60s, books and lectures and diy reprogramming you can find for free.

random 'outdated' books where 80 percent is fluff i've stumbled on one page of a random client story that just cut through time and space to reach me at that moment. I can't even remember the book title but I still remember the page layout, reading a paragraph at 2am and started bawling after feeling numb all year.

I've pieced together little bits of insight this way and each feel like growth and knowing some secret unconscious part of myself better. You never know what will crack the ice and get thru to you.

like who cares about evidence when that has gotten you nowhere in matters of the mind?

Hell, you can build a life going from placebo insight to insight if that's what it takes to keep on, why would that even be different than the lives on 'normal' people chasing hollow consumer goods?

it's still a life of trying things out to better know yourself and your world, which is plenty meaningful

this bit from the latest Cormac McCarthy seems fitting:

"The horrors of the past lose their edge and in the doing they blind us to a world careening toward a darkness beyond the bitterest speculation.

It’s sure to be interesting.

When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible even the coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned and every aberrancy embraced.

It should be quite a spectacle. However brief."

I'd be fine with the new surveillance state if it actually delivered some safety-dividends, but i guess lawlessness keeps the working class in line

emotional flinching

distraction is just running away from a feeling. I don't actually care about the content of the new tab, i'm not addicted to the internet, blah blah

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BTW, The old book Focusing by Eugene Gendlin really helped me here-- it's on libgen or you can youtube the authors name to see some of his one on one sessions he did with people before he died. (You can do it yourself without a person tho, it's just having a kind listener helps you stick with it)

it's NOT about adhd or focusing on stuff lol, it's the name for his diy technique of 'figuring out what the feeling is' and unlocks all other therapy stuff that you may do after

"If you can't be happy with a coffee, you won't be happy with a yacht."

somehow this makes me naturally gauge if I'm enjoying the present as a question "am I enjoying this coffee / new fountain pen / crunchy leaves?" and I actually feel the happiness bubble up in sensory focus.

Doesn't last long yet works for me.

I didn't want to get deep wrinkles (female vanity) or hold angry look (stress headaches/blood flow) because i think that posture towards work is damaging and subconsciously enforces notions from culture/childhood that doing/learning is "hard" "battle" "tough" etc, and

this starts the cascade of physical effects that those states would, like "bracing myself", changing breathing patterns to shallow and stiff, rigid muscles etc, leaning head forward a stupid degree, adrenaline/ anxiety chemicals, harming eyesight with needless strain etc.

Also increases procrastination because you've decided everything is difficult and risky and dangerous, which your ego wants to avoid at all costs.

I reprogrammed myself with thoughts about "childs mind" "how would a kid savant see this puzzle" and "what if this is super easy???" regardless of evidence haha...just mimicking the face and mannerisms and sounds like some form of method acting. Face muscles are like a curious zen baby buddha now lol, open and relaxed but wide eyed, and I have a set of funny/curious gestures too lighten my own mood during long sessions, exaggerated hmmmmmmmmm????, "curiouser and curiouser!!!" type stuff I stole from movies and happy memes

(and the muscle movements I remapped to ones that aid vanity (girls know this as facial yoga lol, work cheekbone muscles etc instead of furrowing brow)

beware of differences between home/office tho,

I literally gave myself 'Tourette's' when i reprogrammed myself to say a certain thing (OUT! and related easy to say exclamations) when upsetting negative/thoughts/memories intruded on my mind during a difficult time, and it worked wonderfully to dispel thought immediately and stay on task/positive when I'm working on work/hobbies at home.

Bad thing is I realized I kept doing it on outside on walks I was using to think thru problems, and a few times someone actually turned their head when I was talking to myself. Just pretended to be on a phone call/blue tooth haha... So I re-mapped the more common ones to deep breath exhalation and more subtle "tics" that have no social cost in public.

I also use the "talking to self out loud" for heavy stuff that only comes up sometimes. If you're working thru mental baggage, you can literally say stuff like "get out of my head ghost of shitty father" when you catch yourself ruminating on the past or feeling criticized or becoming like a bad parent etc. This "externalizing" is really effective for me. I also renamed certain recurrent baggage, such as calling father issues "Iago" as short hand (evil Shakespeare ref), or memories of harmless yet cringey stuff I map as dopey cartoon characters that fail in same ways. This really helps me create emotional distance and feel more in control, I guess that ultimately depends on how imaginative you are.

(I don't have any family history of schizophrenia and never use drugs, so I guess I'm not worried about this getting out of hand, shrug. And in the privacy of your own home, who cares?)

All these are ways to just keeping your mental landscape clear, maybe ten years of meditation would do the same but this suits me just fine for now.

I prevent doom scrolling sometimes by saying out loud "nice try culture war ya almost got me!" when I feel outrage. Catching your own mental reactions becomes easier as you practice the muscle.

In the kingdom of your skull you can think anything you want and create your own tools. Life is a state of mind.

I don't know if this helps most or if you need a certain temperament. My mindset is somehow both extremely open AND extremely judgmental at the same time, so I'm very friendly to all woo that may help yet feel zero loyalty to the media source/guru that developed it, just steal what works and dip haha

More 'rational' folks I've tried to share with are allergic to this mental-DIY stuff, yet casually harp on about potentials of nootropics or amphetamines or shrooms, eyeroll...

I require no evidence to try anything that has essentially no harms / costs / cults and just take the good, cut out the bad, and tailor it to myself ¯\_(ツ)_/¯