2020-04-13 Functional Dysfunction

No matter how much data we consume, our human nature is still story-based. I want to share my story so far, since you’ve been faithfully subscribing.

This huge project of mine is coming along nicely. I believe I’ve gotten past the most depressing part of it: the outlining.

For those of you just tuning in, I’ve been building an ambitious project. It’s a theoretical summary of all relevant philosophical realities about this world. My primary evidence is what other people far smarter than me said mixed with my own storied and discomforting background.

This project has taken some rather unique turns so far across the past year:

  1. Gather tons of notes I’ve scrawled across a few dozen media contained in the old philosaccounting.com site, outlinings as I tried to make sense of reality, frantic condensations of copy-pasted articles, strange doodles I made in an odd Lovecraftian dialect and purple-bismuth haze, and other madness minutiae. (January-March 2019)
  2. Try to assemble it into one whole cohesive site, complete with everything anyone would ever want to use the Internet for at all, ever. (March 2019)
  3. Scrap that once I realized that my site looked like a Swiss Army knife with a salad shooter and nailgun, then suffered existential angst for a few months while I wondered what the purpose of my existence was. (March-May 2019)
  4. Discovered how to make GainedInSite for my philosophical beliefs, AdequateLife for my practical guides, TheoLogos Site for my spiritual beliefs, EntertainingSpace for all my fun randomness, and this site for all my career portfolio needs. (May 2019)
  5. Tried to multi-task everything at once, successfully completing my CompTIA A+, most of TheoLogos, and not much else, then going through existential angst over how slow I was going. (June-September 2019)
  6. Poured my heart into studying for the CompTIA Net+, disregarding the lack of immediate career potential it could give me and also distracted by all the things. (October 2019-January 2020)
  7. More existential angst until I discovered that if I don’t want to do something because of something else I feel is more important, I should probably do that something else instead. (January 2020)
  8. Powered through all my hand-written notes, ignoring future career earnings and my 75-year-old self for the sake of getting this thing created. (January-March 2020)
  9. Realized I needed to make the AdequateLife guides before I could build the GainedInSite essays because “what” is an easier question than “why”. (March 2020)
  10. Finished my first AdequateLife guides in what feels like an eternity because of the new lifestyle that comes with my wife spawning a second offspring. (April 2020)

I once heard some tech blogger say that narrativizing the past is a bad habit because it adds arbitrary value to something that doesn’t have inherent value. However, I think he’s wrong. Nothing has inherent value. Philosophically, we work really hard operating human-constructed objects to gain things with human-agreed value, then trade those things (often unmeasurable with a stick) for other things that sustain us. This entire exchange is considered normal, but “normal” is just that because everyone else is doing it. I add value to my past because I feel like it, damn it!

I’m a writing factory these days. I ingest the creative works of people (mostly philosophers, some of them awful) and spit out the contents onto the canvas of a constructed imaginary light machine that can pipe a similar thing into many eyeballs at once. The more eyeballs, the more human-valued things they give me, though so many others fight for those eyeballs that I don’t care anymore. To put more simply, moving my fingers makes other people have ideas, but I don’t know which ones.

This whole thing is silly, but I get that endorphin kick from accomplishment, so even if a few eyeballs see it I feel like it did something for humanity. Based on my recent book sales, I have changed the lives of literally dozens of people across the world.

Ramble aside, I’ve created a few more AdequateLife guides. One on memory, one on basic field medicine, how to throw a party, and how to write real good-like. Assuming the sleep cycle of Child #2 is consistent with prior experience, I have no idea if I’ll be outputting soon, but all signs point to maybe.