Sooner or later, the world that you thought you knew gets ripped out from under your feet, and you find yourself grasping to make sense of it all.
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A useful bit of vocabulary from the world of crypto is the idea of the ‘rugpull’. Which is just a condensed form of an older idiom, “to pull the rug from under someone”. Sooner or later, everyone gets rugpulled in life. You find out that your parents lied to you. Santa “isn’t real”. You get betrayed by someone you trusted. You made some assumptions that you didn’t think to question, and then those assumptions get violated in a painful and ugly way. This is an emotionally distressing experience.
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(2024sep28 thread) my first big rugpull shock was probably when the women who raised me, left me. i seem to remember feeling the world going white, cold, screeching, the abandonment felt like a kind of death
it took me decades to piece this together but i think that explains why i was so drawn, as a child, to stories of civilizational collapse, of massive natural disasters, stories of death and destruction and plagues and war and so on. it all felt emotionally resonant
and then when i learned about ww2 in singapore, and hyperinflation, and how the very country we lived in had been rugpulled several times, that sent me reeling again, and i couldn’t understand why nobody else seemed nearly as troubled by it as i was
i couldn’t bring myself to do what felt like putting on blinders to follow the prescriptions written by people who didn’t know what the internet was. i got so much shit for it from my teachers & parents etc but it was 1000% the right thing to do and i wish i could’ve gone harder
i needed to know and understand the wider context that everything was happening in, because i simply did not trust the people in my life to be prepared for the future, significantly because their relationship with our own past was so sterile, disconnected, superficial, farcical
in living memory, money had collapsed to become completely worthless! and you’re telling me to keep my head down and focus on following decades-old steps to get a job while the internet was literally reshaping reality in front of our very eyes?
but of course, “look around you, use your eyes, see for yourself” didn’t change much when everyone was apparently too busy following the script that was already outdated. too committed to the path they had chosen mostly via social contagion and obedience to authority etc etc
also more charitably like, it does seem that people who’ve never experienced any sort of real shock in their own lives, simply can’t conceive of real shocks, no matter how much they read about it. “it’s like the rug underneath you has been pulled” what rug?. many parts to this
returning to the first tweet… i get so upset witnessing people abdicate themselves, their own taste, their own sensibilities, their own sovereignty. it’s downstream of indoctrination. to be polite we can call it socialization, whatever. ppl often assume order is stable, robust
reductively, a lot of civilization is like this big factory floor, designed literally during the mechanical/industrial age. it provided great wonders like plumbing and sanitation and transportation and antibiotics etc, lots of great wonderful things about it, huge fun of those,
but the big tradeoff is that many people get psychologically and emotionally mutilated to interface better with that factory. and often this isn’t even done very well, it’s all sorta many games of broken telephones via janky, errenous cultural transmission
and downstream of all of that you get Advanced Stupid ideas of productivity, where you see people twist themselves in knots to flagellate themselves for not being as productive as their fantasy of what they think a productive person/process looks like, and–
they never even developed/cultivated the tools necessary to investigate any element of this for themselves. that’s the big tragedy. for the progress of human civilization or the species or whatever we need people to be capable of correcting errors, learning from mistakes, etc
i find myself back in my classroom again, asking teachers questions that they find inconvenient. i envied my peers who seemed able to focus on their studies and getting good grades etc… then i flashforward to meeting those kids-turned-adults and hearing how depressed they are
“sure i have money or whatever but i can’t seem to have fun, i cant seem to have meaningful romantic relationships, all my consumer goods and luxury experiences get stale fast, i hate my job but i can’t quit, and idk what i would even do if i quit anyway, everything was for this”
(funny, i thought this was gonna be a Frame Studies essay but it’s sort of leading me towards Introspect territory. they’re definitely very complementary. Introspect is about investigating the frames within yourself, which are very significantly influenced by social reality…)
i’m trying to find something resonant to close this with, that would make it useful for me longterm. what is this whole thing really about? what is it for? it’s grief and rage at all that has been lost needlessly, and all that will continue to be lost needlessly…
tbc