Bullshit is the point

Whenever people talk about something, you can bet that they're avoiding the deeper subject underneath.

• When people talk about the news, it's to avoid looking at the problems in their own life, which they very likely have the agency to change
• When people complain about their problems, it's to avoid seeing them as they are and how they themselves are involved in maintaining them, in other words it's to avoid taking responsibility
• When people talk about falling birth rates, it's to avoid talking about relationships, and especially how genuine Love is incredibly rare in our times, giving way to romantic fantasies or a form of "compatibility" which more closely resembles business partnership than two people being in love with one another
• When people talk about the increase in the price of rent and housing, it's to avoid talking about societal collapse, which can also be a way to avoid talking about death
• When people talk about how stressful their job is, it's to avoid talking about how much of a slave they are that they can't do anything but a corporate job, and deeper than that, to avoid talking about how meaningless it is
• When people talk about this or that new technological "solution" to our problems, it's to avoid looking at the entire pattern of problems and how we focus on narrow solutions to address isolated aspects, which end up creating more problems, more complexity and more social molding to fit those "solutions"
• When people give writing advice, they rarely focus on the part which nearly everyone struggles with, which is writing the goddamn novel in the first place. Moreover, people who give writing advice usually do so to have an excuse to not spend their time on writing (this applies to me, and also to anything really, not just writing)
• When people talk about subjects outside of our day-to-day lievs, such as aliens, or going to space, or esoteric planes of reality, you can bet it's because they are too bored by "mundane" reality and use their curiosity as an excuse for some escapism

I am not saying that the examples I gave are totally accurate, after all there are many topics which are routinely avoided, but my main point still stands. Conversation is a way to stay in denial about something. Knowledge is a way for the ego to not pay attention to how bored, loveless, impotent and cowardly it is.
Blindness is not merely about not knowing, it's also about not looking at the right things. Many people go on a sort of self-help/spiritual journey to uncover the roots of their problems, and in doing so, they often learn lots of words in a foreign language, esoteric concepts and diagrams, meditation techniques, rituals, and all sorts of things I do not know of, and very often forget what it is they were initially interested in solving.
The way I see it is that modern people are by and large unhappy, anxious, unmotivated and bored, and then they start piling all sorts of concepts to remediate those, going through book after book, podcast, technique, retreat and so on, instead of simply looking at the problem straight in the eyes and feeling whatever is there.

To get a sense of how absurd this whole ride is, we have a very easy example in Western traditions. Here is a quick exercise for you: name a philosopher who seems genuinely joyous from their writing, or at least lives their life with the sense that there is something utterly positive about the mere fact of being alive. You will probably struggle to name one. Personally I cannot. The Stoics had some good things to say about life, but their tone can feel very lifeless, like they have become good at dealing with suffering but not so much at being joyous. Nietzsche was most certainly life-affirming, but there is something incredibly bleak about the whole project of "will to power" I find. Most philosophers seem to dodge that question altogether, like somehow joy is not a "serious" subject, which is rather absurd when you look at how many distractions need to be manufactured nowadays so that people don't stare at the utterly empty lives they live.
And yet, even though none of the (Western) philosophers look at the problem of unhappiness dead in the eyes, look at how much has been written over the years! Not just in philosophy, but in religious texts, spirituality, occultism and what have you. People love to think about all sorts of things so that they don't have to face their lack of joy.

What to do then? Well first of all, the thing to realize is that the usual way of addressing problems is too narrow. Because what is a problem fundamentally? It is a thing, an isolated aspect of your life or situation which you do not like and would like to deal with in some fashion. There is nothing wrong with being discontent, whether at an individual or collective level, but what goes wrong in the vast, vast majority of times is that those problems are seen in isolation.
As Darren Allen would say: "The problem is not the problem", because what causes the problem, the tension, the argument, the unrealistic expectation, the boredom, the lack of motivation, is bigger than the isolated problem. This whole situation cannot be fixed by a magic bullet, because those only work on some limited aspect of your life, often with the promise of being painless and whatnot.
Therefore what is required from the situation is to perceive it fully. Not by thinking, though that can be useful of course, but mainly by feeling. It's truly fascinating how when you reduce a "problem" down to the physical sensations it is associated with and which you do not like, it looks like nothing. A little bit of tension in your belly, a frantic gaze, an irregular breathing pattern.
This by itself doesn't magically solve all problems, which isn't shocking because otherwise this would turn feeling into yet another magic bullet, but there is no such thing. But it is a much better foundation to acting on the real problems that we have, and not the imagined ones.
By and large people are unhappy. Learning to accept that and feel it in your body, and then and only then see what you can do about it is significantly more direct than trying to go on a whole self-help/spiritual journey which merely fills your mind with more concepts, and your life with increasingly complicated habits.

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Distraction     Attention     Blindness     Death     Unhappiness     Spirituality     Selfhelp

2025-08-25