the eucatastrophic lifestyle: an illustrative example

well i was sure feeling down until a few days ago because the big deadline is coming up next friday and i wasn’t making any progress and hadn’t for several weeks

so it sure is good that as of yesterday i am ON again (in the work sense) and even though the computer network at my school is broken and i can’t log on except at one particular computer in the public computer lab and even though i need to log on to do work and even though i lost my internet connection at home for two days at the same time for a different reason and even though i’ve spent 7 hours in the past two days grading exams and generally have had almost no time to actually work towards the big deadline

i feel completely capable and at ease and like i can do anything that is thrown at me

i crammed 30 minutes of actual work toward the big deadline into my schedule yesterday and my rate of progress in those 30 minutes was astonishing

i asked the only question anyone asked in my 9 am lecture class this morning and it was a very good question (the lecturer said so himself)

i don’t want this to sound like a description of mania or hypomania because it really isn't that extreme, but, okay, as an example: today it’s been really hard, when socially necessary or when it just gets uncomfortable, to stop constantly smiling

the eucatastrophic lifestyle

There’s a continual pattern in my life where I will have somewhere between a few hours and five days of intense productivity – during which period I’ll tend to assume this hypercompetence will last forever, and extrapolate endless rapid progress – and then, having gotten some concrete thing done, will suddenly crash and literally accomplish nothing on any major project for several weeks.

It’s almost always like this.  The proportions are usually about the same, too: “on” periods last between one and seven days and “off” periods last 2-3 weeks (occasionally much more).  Unfortunately, despite this statistical regularity, these periods aren't quite regular enough to be predicted in advance.  This creates a lot of stress that isn’t the result of uncertainty about my literal ability to do my work, but rather the result of uncertainty about how these patterns will map onto the worldly patterns of deadlines and the like.  When given any major responsibility, I never know, even days (sometimes even hours) before the deadline, whether I will enter one of my competent periods or not before it arrives.  If I do, I’ll do it effortlessly and well; if I don’t, I’ll scrape something together at the last minute, I’ll feel ashamed because it sucks, I’ll go in sleep-deprived and present what I’ve done and bullshit about it and people will be forgiving because they know that sometimes I can do good work.  Or something.

The difference between these two states is like night and day.  It’s really as though I wake up some days on a serious dose of some strong stimulant, but I don’t get to choose which days and never know in advance which ones they’ll be.  I can try all sorts of healthy strategies in the “off” periods, I can try diet and exercise patterns and mental tricks and let myself do all sorts of fun things to relax (indeed, since I can’t work, I don’t do anything but “fun relaxing things”), but none of these will let me open up the major project on my computer without it feeling like pulling teeth and quitting after 30 minutes, max, because I realize I’m expending massive amounts of effort for pathetically little gain.  Then one day I wake up and I’m “on” again and the idea of doing anything but work is very strange and unappealing, and all of the shit I’ve gotten behind on in the last few weeks just dissolves.  And I go in to work/school feeling like a conquering hero, or at least some sort of very successful con man.  I feel vindicated.

And in some ways that might be worse than unequivocal failure.  Failure would force me to realize that the kind of work I’m doing might not be right and I should maybe find something else.  This kind of frequent but unpredictable success lets me keep doing this stuff while nonetheless feeling intensely uncertain in a way that can’t be good for my health.  (Chronic stress is bad for you, right?  And every time one of these “major responsibilities” is over, even if I’ve screwed it up, I feel physically so much better, like the way you feel when an illness clears up … )

For a very long time I’ve wondered what it meant that my life involves these types of cycles.  This isn’t the only one – my sex drive also cycles between “asexual” and “very much not asexual,” again with a typical “off” period of 2-3 weeks and a typical “on” period of 1-7 days.  These sex and work periods don’t always coincide, though, which makes it much harder to come up with a hypothesis that explains them.  I feel like this is the kind of thing that must have some sort of biochemical explanation, but I have not been able to figure it out for myself, and I haven’t had much success trying to talk to medical professionals about it.

(To clarify, my mood doesn’t cycle in this way, so I strongly doubt I have anything like bipolar disorder)

cosmogyralbell replied to your post: Incidentally, in all seriousness, if y…

i dunno, EY is the sort of pompous, self-styled guru that needs to be taken down a peg and it’s not like you have significant structural power over him. you’re mocking a pretentious adult male nerd, not teen girls.

Sure, but I guess I’m wondering what this reflects about me, even if it’s justified in this case – and whether I’d keep doing it even if weren’t justified, probably with some flimsier excuse

Long ago, I once had a similar obsession with JDR – who, like EY, is a bad influence on people, yes, but … obviously, there are some pretty salient differences between the two cases

To be completely honest I think my interest in Henry Darger is kind of in the same category

There’s a clear line connecting all these people together, and it’s not about being pompous or having undeserved social prominence so much as it’s “prolifically creative but in a way that’s in a whole different universe from anything resembling good taste”

And the thing is, I don't really think “good taste” is that important.  I’m not even sure it indicates much of anything at all about a person, usually.  The mode of criticism I’m using here could be very easily used to mock undeserving people in a socially effective way, and I’m not sure “but it’s justified here because this person actually sucks” is sufficient justification for doing it quite so much

There’s stuff I need to actually be doing now, but my mind keeps rewriting some long stupid post tangentially inspired by that J. Campbell shit, and in order to exorcise it I’ll say the gist which is basically 

• at some point in the last N years I stopped thinking I “deserved” anything in particular, even life itself, and in fact stopped thinking in these terms entirely and more in terms of what I can do and what its concrete effects would be
• for instance, even if I don’t deserve to live, I’m not going to kill myself on that basis because that would severely harm some people close to me and have a negligible effect on stuff like the earth’s ability to support human life
• so at that point why does it matter what I “deserve”
• I don’t think I should be part of any kind of radical, directly acting movement because I think there are numerous indicators that the concrete effects of me doing so would be negative
• the previous point has nothing to do with ideology, it has to do with me being bad at this kind of stuff.
• you don’t want my version of direct political action.  have you talked to me?  I’m good at taking rigid systems to their logical conclusions, I’m very obtuse and bad at understanding people
• most of this tumblr blog is about how constantly confused I am by other people
• my father grew up very poor and was involved in radical politics for around a decade in his youth and in a lot of ways it ruined his life (via getting involved with the worst, most manipulative people in his subculture) without doing any apparent concrete good, because he has the same kind of cold, rigid, and easily manipulable mind that I do
• lots of people have insurmountable limitations and cannot “get serious” and start “really trying to change things” the way they tell you heroes do in movies, or if they do they’ll fuck it up in ways very directly predictable from their personal characteristics
• if I were to go into radical politics, I know one concrete effect would be that my father – who is still far left, just a little bit more aware of what people like him and me are like and what’s wrong with us – would feel like, now, near the end of his life, he had essentially failed at raising a child who wouldn’t fall into the same pointless abyss he did
• I’m a mathematics student living in an expensive city, not really “doing anything” about anything except slowly working on math stuff (which I feel like I’m shit at, but I feel like I’m shit at everything) which might, if things go unreasonably well, in some tiny way help us understand some things that might be important about out planet or something
• I’m not saying that as a way of proving my “worth” or that I “deserve” anything, I’m saying it’s better than what would probably happen if I were to start “giving up illusions” and “really trying to change things”
• people like me acting on guilt and self-justification and a feeling of “needing to do something” are not good and you don’t want us, trust me

involuntary eccentricity

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When I was in discussion groups in college classes (which there were a lot of at my college) I would almost invariably talk a whole lot, and I would never be sure whether I was annoying or not.  At the time I usually reassured myself by telling myself that the professors almost never seemed annoyed with me even when the other students did, but for all I know they may just have been indulging me

A large part of why I talked a lot was because I often felt like the professors were asking really obvious “leading questions” to try to shunt the discussion in the direction of whatever point they would have made if they were giving a lecture – essentially, they wanted to be giving a lecture but were required to hold a discussion instead – and I always wanted to play along.  Often it seemed to me that the other talkative students just wanted to use the professors’ questions as opportunities to show off what they knew, when ultimately the professors knew much more than them.  I think some of these professors may have liked me so much because I actually played along with their attempts to covertly lecture in discussion when other people resisted them

I don’t think I was trying to be a know-it-all (though maybe I was on some unconscious level), I just wanted to know what the professors thought because they had more knowledge and experience than any of the students did, and I felt like there was a certain sequence of responses that would make that happen most efficiently

I have never known what to make of this, but it’s true: not only am I obsessive, but my obsessions are very often with things that are fucked-up or disturbing

In that video posted earlier today I droned on about a creepy outsider artist and an internet cult; if you liked that I am also available for spontaneous mini-lectures about the Manson family or the Church of Scientology

A lot of the second installment of that trucks conversation (to be released later this week?) is about the movie Southland Tales, and it’s basically I and J saying “that was a terrible movie that forces you to wallow in its own gross, juvenile worldview” and me saying “I know, that’s why I love it and have seen it 10+ times”

I guess I try to spin this as some sort of useful job I’m doing – like “I gaze into the abyss so you don’t have to”

But really I don’t know, it’s just the way I am

The person closest to Worst Person in terms of internet behavior I’ve ever encountered, besides WP herself, is Requires Hate / winterfox (who you may have heard of if you read SF blogs)

They both have a history of being terrible that is largely ignored by their current followers, they both seem to have little regard for accuracy or consistency, and they both do this whole “I am not white so I speak forall racial minorities” thing that is eaten up by a largely white audience who want to feel virtuous and able to take criticism but don’t want to actually acknowledge the complexity of race/ethnicity or the necessity of multiple sources and viewpoints

(RH does a particularly strange version of this where she claims that she, simply by virtue of living in Thailand, is automatically more qualified to speak on anything concerning “Asian culture” [yeah, as though that’s some homogeneous block] than any Asian person living outside of Asia)

To be honest I think both of their audiences are perversely supported by racism, in that certain kinds of white people are willing to put up with their bullshit out of a not-consciously-acknowledged sense that PoC are just like that

Some people in the SF community seem to take Requires Hate very seriously.  I saw a number of people saying she should be nominated for a Best Fan Writer Hugo – see e.g. this post.  Note the patronizing tone typical of the white audience for this type of writer – “this is a purely political nomination,” i.e. “it’s not like I think her blog is any good, it’s just that she’s a ‘well deserved boot up the arse,’ the sort of thing that helps me continue thinking of myself as one of the 'good' white people”

I have tried to read her blog and see something good in it, but I always end up thinking “this person isn’t just an asshole – which might even be OK by itself – she actually reminds me of people I’ve known who have turned out to be fucked up in much more harmful ways than just 'being an asshole’ ”

Singer’s arguments about donating money to charity strongly appeal to me, because they’re in a genre of argument that has always strongly appealed to me

When I was a child, of all the morality tales I was exposed to, the only one that really got to me was “Horton Hears A Who!”  That book was very moving to me as a child, and seemed to capture something central about the moral emotions I was capable of at the time.  (And I don’t think that much has really changed.)

What hit me so hard about that story wasn’t the part about someone with a strange belief being persecuted.  It was the part about the Whos being people – people with lives, desires, arguments, dreams – who were literally invisible to those with power over them because they were so small.   And – this is the key part – the other animals’ dismissal of Horton’s claims didn’t present, in their own minds, as a kind of callousness or cold rationality but as common sense.

Horton was the one making “abstract arguments,” arguing at a remove from immediate experience, talking confidently about people he would never be able to see.  He was the philosopher, the abstract reasoner.  The other animals were using common sense and appealing to a sense of comforting immediacy.  If we can't see the Whos, if their experience is something we know about indirectly, then can they really be as real as you and me?

Ever since I read that book I guess I’ve just hated the convenient division between immediate experience (=good, warm) and abstract reasoning (=bad, cold).  Because the real world pretty much is Horton’s world.  We can’t possibly know most of the people in the world; most of them we will only encounter, if at all, as parts of abstract aggregates, as interest groups mentioned in news stories or demographics appearing in statistical data.  If we cordon that kind of knowledge away as not allowing for empathy, then we’ve made these people invisible to us; we’ve declared that, because it’s difficult to have a fulfilling human relationship with the tiny Whos, they might as well not be people to us and we would have no qualms crushing them underfoot.

Most of the voices in the world can’t speak to us without the amplifying device of reason.  It can be difficult to listen to these voices, and it’s easy to make mistakes.  But it’s better to try, and to acknowledge the difficulty, than to simply declare the Whos unreal because they can’t speak un-amplified, and go on with your daily business.  As if that were a moral sentiment rather than an anti-moral one.

But, okay, when I read about Singer’s infanticide arguments and his conversations with Johnson?  If we were to apply this framework to that story, well … I don’t think Singer would be Horton, would he?