On not rejecting outgrown parts, and others, 2026-03-25

• Log per day - 2026
• 2026-03-25
• Work-in-progress
• Got a really great prompt/nudge from a mentor, when I told him about the disagreeability micro-era I’m in right now (which I wrote about at Holding myself and other men to high standards - 2026-03-24)

“Beware of doing the thing of rejecting parts of yourself that you've outgrown”

• It’s easy to fall into the behaviour of:
  • Outgrowing something (or at least, beginning to outgrow it, having the desire to outgrow it become a foregrounded thing that you are now doing, now have full aliveness/consensus/Chanda to do)
  • And then being like, ”fuck you!!!” to any parts of yourself that still want to do that thing
• And then, extending it interpersonally, to be like “fuck you!!!” to anyone who you see doing the same thing
  • (which is exactly the energy that I’ve been in for the last ~5 days, a real “omg, I’m so sick of people, I keep seeing people doing these things that I’m now so allergic to”) thing
• It currently feels more of a problem that I’m rejecting other people because I associate them with a trait that I’m currently super allergic to. It doesn’t feel clear that I’m rejecting parts of myself, it doesn’t feel like that is currently part of my lived experience. But I guess I am definitely doing the thing of “I used to do x, and now I want to make sure I never do x again”, which definitely has a strong flavour of “and therefore, I will leave behind any parts of me that used to do x, or endorse me doing x, or liked x”
• So, an exploration of:
  1. What I want to do differently
  2. Past parts of myself that I don’t want to reject
  3. Other people who I don’t want to reject

The triggers, and my own parts

• Note that all of these triggers happened in a single day and inspired my current “oh god I need to get the hell away from people” thing 😅

1. Intellectualising

• Trigger → pointless intellectualising without actual engagement
  • I see a man pontificating about philosophy, in a way that is clearly just spouting memorised facts, talking about different “isms”, philosophers, etc. All very surface level, not actually engaging with ideas or really thinking, just reciting “well, philosopher x says y”. And pointless, too, not leading anywhere, not generative. Engaging in the bullshit act of theorising for the sake of it, with an implicit assumption that it’s leading somewhere.¹
  • What I want to say when I witness this is: “so what?” and “why are we talking about this?”
• What am I rejecting?
  • I spent years doing this without realising that there’s a better way!
  • This was literally a key failure mode that a mentor pointed out to me. “You know a lot of concepts but you don’t engage with them. Invoking the concepts of others isn’t the thing to do”
• The core triggers/associations
• Why it’s ok
  • It’s soothing to recite stuff that you’ve learned. It makes you feel like you’re intelligent. It feels good to say something relevant in conversation, especially if it’s an intellect-flavoured conversation where the implicit framing/warrant is “we will trade facts and theories”. It is a win condition, it’s an endorsed behaviour in this kind of conversation (even if IMO it’s often not actually leading anywhere).
  • We are people (at the EA Hotel) who will have got some of our “pellets from the universe” (to quote DFW) from being smart kids. I remember being a teenager and reading a bit of Noam Chomsky and feeling special. I remember being good at maths as a kid and feeling special, and being rewarded for it. “Showing off what we know”, “signalling that we are smart”, was a strategy that worked well at some point.

2. Naive optimism

• Trigger → naive optimism, bullshitting yourself, double ignorance
  • I see a man talking about something confidently as the fix, the new thing that they’re about to start which will “save them”, and/or how if they can just figure out a way to do this thing daily, their life will be transformed forever. I note how they’ve engaged in this pattern for years, and none of the previous fixes have stuck, and they remain confident and unabashed.²

3. Sharing “wisdom” unskillfully

• I see the most inner-critic-led person I know doing a long speech from a Posture of Wisdom about the Importance of Self Love. It’s the posture/role they're adopting of Wise Sage which is the most triggering thing to me, as I do not see this person as successfully living the wisdom that they’re sharing. They will have made progress in self love, but they still abide from a place of self judgement, and should be humble enough to recognise that they’re not ready to share wisdom.³ (or at least, they should share it with much more humility, rather than their vocal tone of “here’s a bunch of stuff that I have figured out. I see a traumatised person leaning forwards as if taking notes, as if this person is a wise sage to be learned from, despite the fact that the wisdom is a collection of second hand aphorisms. “Maybe if I listen closely, something in me will change”

Grasp-y Tanha-y “trying to solve something” energy

3

If a man is disagreeable/angry/inner critic-led

• It’s ok to abide from the inner critic, god knows I did for many years, until kensho. It’s essentially impossible to stop.

4

If a man is awkward, nerdy, dressed badly

• It’s ok to be shy, awkward, uncomfortable, socially anxious

Footnotes

1. Wittgenstein’s “the point of philosophy is [should be!] to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle”. ↩

2. I’m witnessing Socratic “Double Ignorance”, basically. They are bullshitting themselves without realising. They are claiming to have found an answer, despite having not found an answer. Rather than throwing up their hands and admitting that they don’t know what to do.

   “I’m reading this book about x, and it’s really inspiring me to act like the author!“. “But you’ve read that book before, right? It didn’t lead to any significant changes, right? Just reading a book and highlighting it is not enough to lead to significant behaviour change”. “No, that’s not true, it inspires me, and it does lead to changes!“. “No it doesn’t - you’re nothing like the author. He didn’t become the way he is because he read a book. Your life will still be a mess despite reading this book”. ↩

3. I’m realising that this actually may not be the case. There’s the thing of the “curse of knowledge” and how it can actually be better to learn from someone just one or two rungs above you, rather than someone who has mastered the thing. But it does still feel triggering that this person was doing the thing of sharing a bunch of poorly thought out philosophy and aphorisms. I don’t think this is the way you help people (and there’s irony here, as when I’m in a disagreeable mood about consensus-ism, I rant at one of my friends about how he’s living from a tanha place, in a way that is the opposite of skillful, actively anti-useful). ↩