I did a post on Patreon on V-Day asking my patrons, “what are you looking for”? It’s interesting that there was a commonality through all of the answers (maybe selection bias is a part of it, or maybe the earlier answers primed the later ones – but still, there’s something here):
“actively levelling my thought processes, expanding social circles, finding ‘my people’ – knowing myself better, being myself better”
“continued personal development and a more fully conscious life – gather the strength to get better, and find community”
“looking for inspiration to see differently, think differently, rise a little above the humdrum in my life”
“am comfortable, but unsure of what I could be doing (lazy), or what my place is in the world (outsider). admire your energy and curiosity, wish I could start every day with half your vitality. getting older, hope to learn to make the best use of my talents before they desert me”
“interested in @introspectVV – I find the more I come to terms with who I am, the better I can shape my life.”
“just trying to figure what I want to do with my life and realizing that knowing myself is harder than I had anticipated. Looking to hear from those who have been/are on this journey and make friends in the process”
So… what’s common throughout all of that?
- know myself / come to terms with who i am / ‘being myself better’
- a more conscious life, feel inspired, engaged, in-tune, vigorous, ‘rise above humdrum’
- find community / ‘the others’ / ‘my people’
How do we do that? Where do we start? What have my personal experiences been on this front? I think I can honestly say that I have made a lot of progress on all of these fronts in the past 10 years – and yet, of course, the more you learn, the more you see how much you have left to learn.
I think I’ll skip community for now, since, in the context of my Patreon, I can more or less trust that I will be able to manage that process amongst my patrons and help everyone get some of that just ‘organically’. So let’s focus on ‘knowing myself’, ‘feeling inspired’, ‘a more conscious life’, ‘rising above humdrum’.
I won’t pretend that I am super self-knowledgeable, super inspired, always conscious (or even “mostly conscious”). I find myself thinking about Esther Perel’s TED talk about desire in long term relationships – “Erotic couples also understand that passion waxes and wanes. It’s pretty much like the moon. It has intermittent eclipses. But what they know is they know how to resurrect it. They know how to bring it back. And they know how to bring it back because they have demystified one big myth, which is the myth of spontaneity, which is that it’s just going to fall from heaven while you’re folding the laundry like a deus ex machina.”
I think the same is true for one’s relationship with oneself, and the world. Passion waxes and wanes, and has intermittent eclipses. What we’re all really looking for, if I may be so bold as to assert, is to have a passionate love affair with ourselves and the world. Right?? There’s so many bad, terrible, tedious and boring things about existence – why bother with it if it isn’t fun? If it isn’t funny? If there isn’t something exciting and compelling about it?
I believe that children hold the secret. There is a sincerity to kids. They know what they like, they know what they care about. They’re great salespeople and poets, and not in a smarmy or pretentious way. They have not yet been ‘socialized‘, and so their view of the world is “nimble and surprising, bizarre yet true”. I think that’s what me and my friends want. We want to be nimble, surprising, bizzare and true. My memoir (still working on it) is titled Naughty Boy, and I’ve re-articulated my t-shirt business to be “the Naughty company“. And in both of those cases I think I’m getting at that same sort of irreverence. To undo the damage of having been socialized.
Which isn’t to say that the point is, you know, to break social norms by being a dickish asshole to people. I think that’s a very simplistic, selfish approach… and it’s a common phase a lot of edgy teenagers go through. “Society is bullshit, fuck society”… and then you go and do some cosmetically destructive prank and other people, typically poor, working-class people who are also victims of The Man, have to clean up after you.
So. The point here is to recognize that you have been socialized – to see things in a rather predictable and safe way. Sometimes you might feel angry about this when you realize what’s happened – but that anger is something that has to pass, because it’s not about you. Sometimes you might feel indifferent, like, “eh, so what?” And… that’s okay too. There isn’t really a right or wrong way to feel about any of this. When that happens, you should probably just go ahead and do whatever else you feel like doing.
But when you return back to this space again, feeling… that you want more out of life, feeling a little restless, a little hungry – then what? I find myself thinking, “then you start tapping the bricks”. You know, like… in a old-timey castle, and there’s a secret passage somewhere, and you need to to tap the bricks to find it? When you’ve been socialized, you inherit this worldview, and you inherit these concerns, these ways of seeing, and they just… make up the world around you. Like the technology that already existed before you were born – it never really occurs to you to think what life was like before *that*.
There’s that old steve jobs quote about “everything around you was made up by people no smarter than you“. Steve says we’re told “not to bash into the walls too much” – and that’s a thing that rebellious angrykids do sometimes, just flail wildly and smash around at a bunch of things. But that’s rarely sustainable, you upset and annoy everyone around you, and while you might have some supporters who enjoy the spectacle, hardly anybody *really* wants to be your friend.
So… don’t bash into the walls. Tap on them. Because some of them are fake walls. There are hidden treasures behind some of them. There are so many walls, where do you start? I would ask, well, where do you think you should start? Most people already know the answers to the questions they’re kind of afraid to ask. You likely already know where you ought to be looking.
Don’t obsess about finding the passageway, though. Just start tapping.