Life-long learner
- Like my dad before me, I had to learn to climb out of the mud. I wasn’t given an easy situation where I could coast, I had strong motivation to figure shit out. And there were no easy escape routes, and no easy role models, so I had to learn to do everything myself. And yes, it was a very circuitous path, with many false starts, but that’s a necessary part of the journey, and completely normal when you’re operating in the fog of war. It’s literally impossible to take the correct step every time when you don’t have a map
- It’s mad what I ended up stumbling across, what I ended up discovering and learning about, from non-profound stuff (e.g. starting by reading a book on English history) all the way to group relational practices and “psychotechnologies” and enlightenment and how to make music and videos to share online and running events and etc. And I’m only 29, still lots more learning to do!
- The ultimate gift is the gift of becoming a life-long learner, but not just like “I wanna read a load of books and know a lot of trivia”. I’m adjacent to the cutting edge of a whole bunch of shit, it’s absolutely insane. Rationalism, post-rationalism, psychotechs, relational practices. Like I say in our microsolidarity crew calls, “it feels like we’re at the absolute cutting edge of some stuff, and on the one hand it’s awesome, on the other hand it’s mad that it’s us”. And having mentors, and being affiliated with the Open Research Institute, helping run an in-person community, etc.
more
- Not to like, deny that difficulties of it, but you know
- As a wise friend said, “suffering is fuel”. (Suffering is fuel) All this stuff has provided me with an absurd amount of fuel, both to “heal” and make sense of it all, but also to help others. It’s a nascent thing at the moment, but I was put in very close contact with the working-class underclass. I wasn’t raised in a middle-class bubble, I became deeply enmeshed in the consequences of trauma, both from my sister’s situation before being adopted by our family, the aftermath of the adoption & parental breakup, and then also zooming out and seeing the working-class english trauma throughout my family
- I am blazing new ground trying to “break the generational curse” (to quote a Kendrick Lamar song, where his wife actually says at the end of the album where he processes his trauma, “you did, you broke the generational curse. Say ‘thank you daddy!’ [daughter:] ‘thank you daddy!‘)
- I’ve been given the gift of the opportunity to break the generational curse. I want to rise to heights unheard of, unfathomed. I want to pull my family out of the mud along with me. I want to be an amazing dad.
Suffering
- I didn’t have a map, which made me a life-long learner, and also, I was surrounded by suffering - family members, the working class at large, myself. This was very meaningful! I wasn’t raised in a bubble away from worldly concerns (like e.g. the Buddha before he left the palace). I was intimately acquainted with the problems in the world (or, working class England at least) from an early age
- I’ve been given a profound Wyrd, to have a family that is struggling so much, to have struggled and learn to overcome so much stuff myself, to have more to do and good ideas for how to do it, etc
Simmo quote when I shared this stuff:
Re: “My life has been a long list of missteps and failures”: Everyone’s has. And it’s been a long list of magnificent growth and improvement, much more than most ppl IMO