The trouble with commitment

whistler - nocturne in black and gold [click image for huge]

Many investors will not sell anything at a loss because they don't want to give up the hope of making their money back. Meanwhile, they could be making money somewhere else.

Emodon's Rule

Going all Cosmo on you

“People have a fundamental motivation to improve the self and add to who they are as a person,” Dr. Lewandowski says. “If your partner is helping you become a better person, you become happier and more satisfied in the relationship.”

Article on sustainable relationships in the NYTimes that focuses on couples, but seems to work for all kinds

Related quiz

The outstanding characteristic of the mystic’s vision is that it is satisfying

Genuine revolt goes with an all-too-definite life aim — hardly with the lack of it. Whether or not there is anything genuine about the vision, whether the visionary really sees anything, is open to dispute, but there is a wide consensus as to what the genuine experience is like, and how the genuine visionary behaves. As Baron von Hügel pointed out in one of his most penetrating observations, true illumination always results in a special sweetness of temper, a deep, lyric equanimity and magnanimity. The outstanding characteristic of the mystic’s vision is that it is satisfying. He is never frustrated, at least not in our worldly sense. It would be hard to find two less suitable words in any language to apply to Rimbaud than equanimity and magnanimity. This leaves us with Rimbaud as a sort of magician of the sensibility — of that specifically modern sensibility invented by Blake and Hoelderlin and Baudelaire — and an innovator in syntax, the first thoroughly radical revealer of the poetic metalogic which is the universal characteristic of twentieth-century verse.

Kenneth Rexroth - Rimbaud as Capitalist Adventurer

Reach for the lights

Riding at night on the bicycle listening to a DJ set and getting a thrill each time the music built to make the crowd rush on their pills, and I remembered how happy I used to be watching someone discover this world for the first time.*

Now I get a deeper feeling from watching someone get their life together and living for creativity, kindness, health and sustainable joy, which means to say I'm over the trip and want to see what happens next, how people integrate their better selves with reality, those things that [as PK Dick said] don't go away when you stop believing in them.

*I still trip once a year or so [mushrooms] but with the understanding that I'm not going to get anything out of it unless I've worked on myself in the interim using what I learned on the trip before. And at this point in the psychedelic game [just over 20 yrs in] there's very little that I'm being shown for the first time, just lessons that I should have learned long ago: it's all connected, THIS IS IT, overwhelming beauty, and the need for love and inner peace, rather than greed [in all its forms] and furious activity. All the usual suspects.

Wasted youth

There were many, many nights in St. Louis where me and my friends would go see some punk band at the cool punk club, and then we'd all go to the landing on the Mississippi River, because the bars on the landing had a four A.M. liquor license. And all us punk guys would sit there and scoff and feel superior to all the heavy-metal bar bands with the big hair and the spandex, most of whom were having the fucking time of their fucking life. So who was losing? Me. I was. Those guys were getting laid, they were deluding themselves into thinking they were gonna be huge stars, and they were living. And I was dead.

Jeff Tweedy to Chuck Klosterman

More sincere, more free and more savage

another polar inversion

His conclusion, that in a more numerous society one enjoys more pleasures and suffers fewer fears (in which, in short, men are free), than one does living outside any society or within a very limited one, is an axiom which could be developed in a sociological treatise, and subsequently confirmed, modified or corrected in the light of our experience today. In the same way an entire typology and categorisation of conformisms and rebellions, judged according to their relative levels of sociability or unsociability, could be elaborated from the final sentence of the work [Calculation of the Value of Opinions and of the Pleasures and Pains of Human Life] where there is a contrast between he who is ‘susceptible’ to a greater number of ‘opinions’ and he who is ‘susceptible to fewer opinions’: the former becomes ‘more and more reserved, civil and dissimulating’, the latter ‘more sincere, more free and more savage’.

Italo Calvino on Giammaria Ortes in Why Read the Classics?

Money, status, sex, drugs

[Layne] Staley denounces “the hypocrite norm, running their boring drills,” and commits himself to consuming whatever drugs are available to him. “Money, status, nothing to me,” Staley sings, though that’s not completely true—it’s the money and status that “allow” him to live this way.

Layne Staley and Bradley Nowell are the living dead

Related: All posts tagged excess

Something of a problem

sunflower head photonic crystal

He’s extremely intelligent, but, as a political, social and moral actor, he’s the kind of guy who gets depressed by the happiness of the stupid.

Bruce Sterling on Julian Assange

Fear eats the soul

I have to tell you something about the relations of strength between those who live in resentment, intoxicated by their bitterness, alienated by their melancholy and their bad blood, and those who, not so much out of virtue as through their makeup, self-discipline, or just because they have something better to do (e.g., a new book to write), manage to escape this merry-go-round of poisonous emotions. It is the second lot who, once again, for reasons of pure emotional mechanics, will triumph over the former. Joy makes them intelligent and strong, whereas spite is a poison and sooner or later poison kills.

Michel Houellebecq - Public Enemies

I never had any plans beyond a certain lifestyle - II

I'm happy if I get food, sex, exercise, reading, some creativity, sociability, and a high level of control over my own time and / or space [ideally both, but often only one, being a freelancer who needs to pay the bills].

This feels good until I meet people who are working hard with talent and luck on more focused and appealing plans that seem to offer greater prospects for overall and long-term fulfillment, and then the monkey comparisons kick in. I'm getting better at being myself – becoming a better self to be – but sometimes it's dizzying to wonder how I got here and the hacking off of other branches at an early age, with the clear hells I escaped far outnumbering any plausible better outcomes.

Almost everything that's happened to me has been a surprise, a surrender into circumstances that then coalesce around something that can be sustained for a while, or else falls apart before being recognized as anything real enough to be destroyed. And things fall apart continuously, and if they don't then I seem to destroy them.

But this surrender and surprise is probably true for most people, based on the long-standing principle that there's very little that's exceptional about me. We all fall into particular reality tunnels, and moving between them requires only a trickster / daydream kit that involves a sine wave flow between concentration / lack of focus.

This is mostly OK. If I thought about it deeply or not there would only be different sets of rapidly evolving and semi-fictional rationalizations that reveal more about that day's particular tunnel vision than tell a coherent or plausible story. Instead I only get on with things – with no talent, a lot of luck, and sporadic bursts of hard work.

Related:
I never had any plans beyond a certain lifestyle

The relief you can feel on a good psychedelic trip

overlook

The fantasy they’re selling [on a luxury cruise] is the whole reason why all the subjects in all the brochures’ photos have facial expressions that are at once orgasmic and oddly slack: these expressions are the facial equivalent of going “Aaaahhhhh,” and the sound is not just that of somebody’s Infantile part exulting in finally getting the total pampering it’s always wanted but also that of the relief all the other parts of that person feel when the Infantile part finally shuts up.

David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

The best of the rest of the time just being ways of surfing the needs / wants and / or distracting them with some zen / art magic or stoic practice.

Coming off a long few weeks of intense work and waking up to a reality that I haven't found my way in yet, just suspicions that the old one isn't going to serve much longer without some changes that remain obscure.

Somewhat related:
Posts that refer to the hedonic treadmill.

Another sign of my lack of imagination

from here

Larkin's life was a failure; his work was a triumph. That is all that matters. Because the work, unlike the life, lives on.

Martin Amis on Philip Larkin's women

I don't see how this view is possible without an idea of an afterlife I don't have. Life is all that matters.

Related: ...

Unenlightened self-interest

antony gormley

Due to a 7-yr old house guest have only been to a bar once in the past month, and thus spent no time listening to people who drink, smoke, eat too much, exercise too little and carry too much debt complaining how stupid ‘the masses’ are for not acting in their own interests.

The better life of others

Nobuyoshi Araki

but paula goes on looking at the better world, wherever she can grab hold of it, no matter where, in the cinema or with a summer visitor. but it always only the better life of others, never her own.

Women As Lovers, Elfriede Jelinek, p19

Same same, but different

trustocorp

I don't know about you, and I don't know what your friends are like. But this seems to me to be a sadder, more hungry generation. And the thing that I get scared of is, when we're in power, when we're the forty-five and fifty-year olds. And there's really nobody - no older - that no people older than us with memories of the Depression, or memories of war, that had significant sacrifices. And there's gonna be no check on our appetites. And also our hunger to give stuff away.
...
And we're the first generation - maybe people starting about my age, it started in '62. We grew up sorta in the rubble of the old system. And we know we don't want to go back to that. But the sort of - this confusion of permissions, or this idea that pleasure and comfort are the, are really the ultimate goal and meaning of life. I think we're starting to see a generation die...on the toxicity of that idea.

Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, by David Lipsky, p159

Related post: The long line of supposedly beaten generations

What I'm doing now

almost taiwan

Philosophy calls for simple living, not for doing penance, and the simple way of life need not be a crude one.

Seneca, Letters from a Stoic p37

My girlfriend moved into this house a few weeks ago, with the gaps between her going back to her place becoming longer and longer and then ending. We work together, break for meals and eat good food, drink coffee and wine. So far it's an easy way to live, with no fight and no resistance.

One odd thing about the last few months is how contentment has stopped me from needing or even wanting to update this blog.

When I was a lot younger and writing [very badly] all the time it was because I had none of the good things in my life that I have now, and even though I enjoyed writing a lot, it was like drink or drugs, a poor substitute for the thing itself, a coping mechanism rather than a solution.

Great things can come out of sickness, but never mine, and the only way out after butting my head against the wall for so long was to change my life. I quit my job and keep whatever hours I want as long as the work I accept gets done. I work in shorts or a sarong, take breaks and bike rides whenever needed, never face a boss and never need to work when not in the mood. It's as close to idyllic as I could expect with minimal effort or talent.

My ambitions when I was younger mostly concerned lifestyle rather than achievement, but for a long time I focused on the latter and failed. When I gave in and went straight for the thing itself rather than tokens I found that it was easy to achieve and [so far] to maintain. Life is essentially a joke and a game at the moment, although I'm sure it'll get serious again soon enough.

If you shape your life according to nature, you will never be poor; if according to people's opinions, you will never be rich.

Seneca quoting Epicurus, Letters from a Stoic p65

Of limited interest

I haven't posted much because I've been so happy lately that it feels like I've been living entirely in the present, with almost no reflection or planning. This works because I've finally cultivated some good, simple habits - work hard, eat right, exercise, save $, love, and party at least twice a week. Plus I'm doing this in nice surroundings and self-employed, setting my own hours, rates and so on.

A simple life, but with rules that I easily adhere to, so the illusion of control is not required. Things are set in motion, and I follow them, with complex behavior emerging from the interaction of a few simple systems.

Signal / noise

simon page via grain edit

Following on from the last post, I kind of reset my head the other week at the beach (and in a new year frame of mind), so I'm going to try and take my hands off the controls for the foreseeable future [which with me, is very short]. What this means is focusing solely on inputs inre. overall well-being, and not worrying about the outputs.

What this means in more detail is:

• work hard / well
  
• save $
• keep active
• eat right
• socialize
• be nice
• drink less
  

Only the last item is a change in the current regime, but a small thing that ought to make a huge difference to how things play out.

It can only be a matter of time

Rafael Silks, above and below

Another in a series of superficially depressing posts about giving up dreams that depend on artistic success in terms of recognition + career in the cause of overall liberation and improved mental health.

Your Inner Whining Artist (IWA) is the part of you that tells you you’re a genius waiting to be discovered. If only the big bad world would sit up and recognize your talent, the IWA tells you, all your problems would be over. Audiences and critics would bow at your feet, agents would queue up to represent you, and all the people who’d ever rejected your work would be gorging themselves on humble pie. You just need to get your break, to be discovered. It can only be a matter of time …

Lose Touch with Your Inner Whining Artist

The oldest, deepest dreams may be the most distant and inapplicable now, in spirit and in practice. It's good to keep shedding skins.

Related posts:
A millionaire artist
Throw in the Towel
The myth of 1,000 true fans

Fun for amateurs

I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking — which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling. Nothing is fun when you have to do it — over and over, again and again — or else you'll be evicted, and that gets old.

Hunter S. Thompson

Sometime in the summer I had two women ask for test prep classes, one for TOEFL and the other for IELTS. On a whim I said I'd teach former for free and I charged the latter my normal fee. Both women were [are] attractive and smart, although the TOEFL one turned out to be more motivated and hard-working, but that may've been because she had to earn her class with homework.

What happened happened very quickly - I realized that I enjoyed teaching the free class far more than the paid one. Doing it for free was fun, there was no pressure, and I was happy when things went over time. It was an interesting experiment, which I continue now by doing some work for free if the person seems like they'll make it worthwhile. Otherwise, I take the money and do the work, but this is a tiny part of my income compared to the editing + reading, hardly enough to keep me in beer. I'd rather keep teaching as a hobby than a living.

Anyway, Isabella, the student in question, is taking her TOEFL this weekend, so an online thanks for the interesting classes and a wish of good luck for Sunday.