kingtycoon | What It Is Like

This is how I became a Platonist. I can tell you this one thing and that’s something that people don’t understand about me and that I can’t really explain except to say that regardless of what is apparent in my demeanor or even my actions – it’s that I’m a joyless person. Now, I’m happy, that’s sure, everyone can tell that because I smile a lot and act like I’m pretty happy. It’s because I am. Happiness here though, connotes different things than I think are accepted. I say I think, and I observe and really what I’m talking about is the social media – about the things that are expressed to me from others via their portrayals of their lives- really caricatures, but ones that exert a steady influence over my own sensibilities. I’m very sensitive to how I am influenced by external forces and very calculating as to what I like to allow to influence me. This here, what I’m saying now, this is about that.

See, you wake up and clean yourself and go outside and to work and there are minute pleasures you are meant to take in the details of which you are supposed to record ad absurdum. You must present yourself in your beloved outfits and notice each bird and cloud and the particular shade of the summer sun. You must do those things and they will in some way improve your experience of whatever daily drudgery you endure. This is doctrinal, so it seems, at this point.

I don’t like to get lost in the details, the details are not useful, the details are in opposition to my wellbeing. That’s the state of things for me. If I notice every little bird I see (and I do) I also notice every unpaid bill (I do) and every shard of broken glass and so on. I might notice that my best meals are barely palatable, that I don’t sleep well and almost never have dreams. I might notice all the things, like barbs, covering the earth, that chip away at me as I go through.

Because you see - I’m happy. Natively, innately. MeMyselfandI is contained and whole – the external is adversarial, untrustworthy – the internal is ideal, beatified. So this is what I think about when I don’t get any catharsis out of eating or waking or sleeping or sex, when I realize that I don’t get any real gain in happiness from engaging in what’s external. I notice that the best things in life aren’t experiences at all. I notice that most of the experiences I have – I am happy to be able to forget, when I can.

Because these are the 10,000 birds that peck away at the essential self – MemyselfandI – which is perfect but for the pressing demands that the external imposes upon it. I think about that, the inviolable interior self and how I have no doubts or feelings of limitation or dislike – no conflict at all. All the problems come from the external – well.

Not quite. I was writing this – originally, on the bus, writing to write because I wanted to, because it’s time and I got a little, tiny shiver of pleasure from it, I like writing. And then I think of the catharsis I’ve gotten from the books I’ve finished reading, the games I’ve run and played, the pictures I’ve made and the stories I’ve written down. More than just reflections of the inner self (that I’m unashamed to love) this is my experience of the sublime intellectual world.

Walking down the street to have ice cream (it wasn’t great, the very skeevy man at the shop ruined it by being effectively the biggest creep I’ve ever seen in retail) I am explaining to Agatha about the public domain and we ventured into what we each think about ideas. I explain: “The things I make, I don’t have vanity about - they aren’t really mine except that I did the work to kind of make them physically real, but I had an idea and I’m good at having ideas – but really – that doesn’t seem like something I do – but more like that I get a lot of visits from some kind of Genie. Anyway, I get these Ideas, that are like letters stuffed in my mailbox and I try to do something with them, and since I’m not really ever happy with the outcome – I don’t mind if people use them to do something better.” Which is pretty much my position re.: creative output, I like doing it, but I’m not especially proud because everything physical that I make is a bad translation of a really cool idea that I got.

And I realize this, writing on the bus, that you know – ancient peoples…

In antiquity life was not very great. Life was so unpleasant in fact that the most preferable way to die was in battle – heroically dying while killing your enemies. That was deemed what was best in life. That and having a lot of children that also had a lot of children. Because in the ancient world life was cheap, and pleasures much less common. But still, they weren’t any different than us – they could still imagine a better thing, a more perfectly suitable thing – they could see a room and imagine the perfect version of that room, the idealized form. They could see in fact, that the world was an imperfect replica of an idea that someone had. Or at least that is how they decided to describe it because it mirrored their experiential reality.

Which is to say that life lacks savor, the pleasures it offers are meager and that I consider my existence something that must be stoically endured in exchange for the privilege of having a consciousness.