Hell is other people ... if you decide to stay with the petty ones
One major function of shame seems to me that it signals to other people that even if you don't do the right thing, then you're a "good person" because at least you feel bad about it. This might be the main reason why people hold onto shame even if it isn’t useful, because they want to really believe they're good even if they engage in what they or other people around them consider to be "bad" behavior.
I don't find such judgements to be helpful in my life. That doesn't mean I subscribe to some type of amoral view of the world where there is no such thing as goodness, but simply that trying to assess where you are is a mostly pointless game. The mind loves to use bullshit to avoid actual change, so it's better to focus your attention on what you can actually control, i.e. your actions.
I'm noticing in my life how some people subtly enjoy torturing themselves about how screwed up they are and how impossible their problems are to solve because that entire game is actually a great distraction from doing anything whatsoever. I think in general it's simply better to cut through the commentary and instead examine whatever small changes you can make, and then commit to them.
There is this video where a girl cries because she recently got a job and was utterly crushed at the realization that maintaining her personal life basically felt impossible, and wondering how anyone could have the energy and the time to do stuff for themselves after work, because the work and the commute drained her so much.
Then some people see that and proceed to make fun of her because it is a common experience to have an office job and be utterly drained after work, but “back in my day” people didn't complain, and look at how brittle and weak young people are these days, and my generation was so much better etc.
I find that dynamic in human beings so utterly disgusting. When someone shares from the bottom of their heart their problems, but are only met with mockery from people who are so jaded and cynical about the current reality that they take it for granted that soul-crushing work and a lack of personal freedom are normal things. Literally crabs in a bucket.
In many ways, this strikes me as a circle of Hell right on Earth. A place where sincerity is crushed under the weight of cynicism and resignation. Fortunately, you can decide, like many things in life, to not play that game and cut those people from your life, but still, they exist and the interactions will be there. What makes it a circle of Hell for me is that those people not only participate in it totally unconsciously, but even revel in it, justify it in their own mind, and derive a sense of superiority from being comfortable in their misery, because there is this association between cynicism and intelligence. (it’s bullshit) But you can cut that type of people from your life.
Another circle of Hell on the internet is the way in which people argue with what are essentially ghosts. Either repeating arguments which they weren't able to "win" in real life, or arguing with the ghosts of what they believe other people said. The latter is not even straw-manning, it is closer to hallucinating an entirely new thing that was never said, so that you may reply in a snarky way. I don't have examples saved because I don't bother getting stuck in this dynamic, because I prefer moving away from it. But it's quite scary how often it happens on the internet especially.
The enjoyment of drama is similar to my post on Architects in Hell, and is one of the main themes I took away from my partial read of “Games people play” by Eric Berne. I would say a fair amount of them actually revolve around filling the void of boredom, which is particularly common in our time. 1 Other reasons include: blaming someone, coming up with excuses for oneself, signalling some type of virtue without having to do difficult things, or finding some way to feel superior to someone else.
The whole nature of these kinds of games is that the enjoyment of drama can never be made explicit, because it would highlight the petty nature of its participants, and the clinging to said drama. This is why anyone who cannot read the room and joins onto the pretend game is quickly dismissed, such as when people partake in a cycle of complaining about their life, but someone cheerfully goes against it and says that they love their life.
Pain is good, says the culture of masochism. Pain in exercising, in work, and even if it is something as petty as reading a book you don't enjoy so you can claim that you made it until the very end. Why do people do this? Probably because it benefits the status quo. Instead of looking for better games to play, people end up playing the same bullshit rigged games, with the idea that it is noble to not quit.
And so when they see someone leave such a toxic situation, they tell themselves that the person couldn't handle the job, or didn't have what it takes to stay here. Here are some more examples:
Life gets a lot better when you stop looking for excuses and just get better at making changes when needed, and accepting the things you can’t change.
I am not very convinced by a common belief I have seen around me, which is that sweets and cakes truly taste better than healthier foods. I think it is one of those common psyops which is so ubiquitous that it ends up being "true" purely through momentum and by never being questioned.
I would say the real tradeoff in food is between quality and effort. Quality includes taste, but also wholesomeness, and effort includes time and price and skill to prepare. It is possible to have healthy and tasty food, but you will very likely have to make it yourself, which costs time and requires some skills, but it is also a satisfying activity so there is that as well.
Personally I never grew up with the idea that vegetables taste bad and that you need to force yourself to eat them to stay healthy. My parents are from South East Asia, so perhaps that was a huge factor, and so they simply put down vegetables on my plate and I would eat them and enjoy them, no fuss made from either side. 3
I think the dessert psyop rather comes from these factors:
While I don't necessarily disagree with the explanation in point 5), I don't think reality is as simple as that. For one, music never existed in the wild, which is where our biology evolves from, yet humans find all sorts of music beautiful. But maybe taste is different? After all, we literally are what we eat, which means that food must have a specific match with our body.
But still, my experience is that how conscious you are has a massive effect on what types of food you appreciate, and the point of this entire mini-essay is that people tend to adopt the type of beliefs that justify their existence, rather than those which are true.
People who start living life more consciously commonly report that their taste aligns with what their body enjoys, and this has been my experience as well. Soda feels somewhat nasty, crisps are nice once in a while but quickly become sickening, and that dynamic is even more true for sweets and pastry for me, and fast food is atrocious and makes my body feel awful after it. All of this suggests to me that unhealthy food is one of the many many signs of our disembodied world.
Narcissus has become real in the modern world, but instead of his own reflection in the water, his reflection is shown by all the media he 4 chooses to consume—social media, movies, books—and instead of admiring his own beauty, he imagines his superiority to the "average person" or the normie, or the NPC, whatever he calls them.
There are several flavors of modern Narcissus, but they all revolve around the same core: 1) cowardice to actually make changes in his life 2) an attraction to intellectual domains which distance him from most people (examples below). Here are some of my examples:
Of course if I were honest with myself I would say I fall pretty significantly within the first 3 categories, and there's an air of superiority—which really comes from low self-esteem—that you might infer from my writing. The reason why I can see this dynamic so clearly is because I myself am a modern Narcissus too.
I think writing further reinforces this dynamic too, because it creates some distance from reality and people, and this split is necessary for the sense of superiority to exist, because after all, how could you feel superior to those whom you feel connected to?
One thing to note when people get angry is that they are almost never mad at the correct thing. They find the closest thing they can blame, because ultimately paying attention to the entire situation and taking responsibility are the very last things the ego wants to do.
This is why if you can show to someone who is angry that there simply has been a misunderstanding, which means that they have no reason to be angry, they will very likely remain just as mad but will find another target—usually you—or they might even stay mad at the original thing anyway, because it doesn't really matter.
This is also why the things that get people mad tend to be so irrelevant most of the times. How often do you see genuine anger at the entire structure of our system which oppresses freedom, makes people blind to love and turns human beings into automatons working all day to serve this alienating prison? Basically never, because it is too big for people to face directly. To the extent that they get angry at real problems—and not let's say some gossip at the office or the carrots at the cafeteria being undercooked—they look at isolated symptoms of our society, which are very real but are never the roots of the issue.
Look at the state of immigration! Look at all the inequality! Look at the corruption of our rulers! Look at the destruction of our environment! Look at the wars! Look at the misinformation! Look at all the failing marriages! Look at the despair of the youth!
Egoic collectives constantly have to find targets, also known as scapegoats, to vent their anger towards when things inevitably do not go according to plan, because they do not want to take any responsibility. Conscious individuals and groups do not need such crude mechanisms, but egoic ones do, and we live in an era of complete irresponsibility, as can be seen by the destruction of the environment or social life, which no one wants to and will take responsibility for.
There are many reasons for why social anxiety might be on the rise, one which I discussed here, about how screens provide interactions without the fear of rejection, while real life is much scarier in comparison. But a lot of them basically boil down to "kids are becoming more socially inept" which is so overdone at this point that I would like to say something counter to that thesis here.
One aspect I notice is that in some way, it is easier to be genuine on the internet. It is undeniable that, by virtue of conversations being projected down to only text or speech, a great deal of nuances and expression is lost, and as such internet "relationships" can never be like the real deal.
But on the other hand, real relationships aren't very real either when you are young. Most of the times, we are forced to interact with one another within institutions, which also project down relationships and people to discrete entities which it can manage, and as a result the interactions feel fake. I never felt like myself while I was at school, it always felt like I was a cliché interacting with other clichés. 5 You could argue it has more to do with age than with school, but the latter and youth cannot be separated within the modern world anyway, and considering how genuine toddlers are in their expressions, I am not super convinced that age is the factor behind fakeness.
But no matter what the explanation is, the result is the same for me: I didn't feel like myself at school, university or the office, and so the internet feels like a "place" where I can at least be honest because I am not bound by power games or bullshit social dynamics. And I wonder if that's one significant aspect of introversion? It is not so much that some people do not like being social, it is that they do not like having to be fake.
I remember this quote—from a Spiderman Animated Series from all places—where the Green Goblin says:
We all wear masks. But which one is real? The one that hides your face, or the one that is your face?
A mask can be more “genuine” when you get to choose it in a sense. Of course, nothing can replace real life relationships, because the internet is fake in many ways, especially identity games, but my point is that school and the office aren’t very real either when it comes to human relationships.
Some people are sensitive to bullshit, far more than those around them. This inevitably makes them outliers, because the largest collectives around us are built around and maintained by bullshit, i.e. the myths of the system. 6 Question the fundamental assumptions behind our economy, or schooling, or the medical system, or the entire technological system which contains all of those, and what you find is a series of bullshit which justifies, or attempts to justify, why human quality of life must be subordinate to "necessities" such as the growth of GDP, the bureaucratic demands of all of our institutions, and ultimately, the need to maintain and grow the technological system at all costs.
In general, what is called a strength is that which favors the dominant collective, i.e. whether there is match between the individual and their society. But in truth, every "weakness" is probably a strength given another environment:
Point being, there is no virtue to being well adjusted to a sick society. Better to focus on what you want to see more of, rather than appeal to standards you didn't approve of. Not an easy thing to do, after all being a good person in a corrupt world is the conflict of a great deal of stories, but still, it is what is easy to live with, as opposed to what is easy in the moment.
Group-laugh is the equivalent for laughter of group-think. We can draw a rather wide 3x3 table which points to obvious distinctions when one has experienced them:
In those 3 scenarios, the last category maps to a collective which maintains the illusion of consensus by utterly destroying real individuality and the quality which arises from it, whereas the middle is an example of a healthy collective, one which inevitably must be rather small and localized, otherwise the demands of the large collective outweigh the sensitivities and intelligence of the individuals, the same way that bureaucracy has no need for human discernment, and crushes it under the demands of its own tautological need of maintaining the bureaucracy at all costs.
Group-laugh is laced with anxiety, a nervousness where one is examining whether the others also find it funny, because ultimately the laugh isn't felt from within, but rather mechanically caused from the outside, which is why it is so fake, the same way that porn is a simulacrum of real sexual intimacy, and instead bombards you shallow excitement.
Ultimately group-laugh is what deeply unhappy collectives do, because they have no access to real joy which requires a sort of surrender to life and the present moment. Which is probably why irony and cynicism are such common ways to trigger a group-laugh, because those are additional layers of armoring from dealing with reality as it is.
People don't want to make better choices, they want to make shitty choices and then complain about the shitty outcomes
From a tweet by Visa
This is obviously true about the big decisions in life, which are so overwhelming that it becomes easier to run away from them and blame one's circumstances, but what is surprising is how it applies to even the smallest decisions.
For instance, I have seen people walk into a restaurant, knowing full well how much they would have to pay for the food, and then complain that it was too expensive afterwards. The meme where someone on a bicycle puts a spoke in their wheel, falls and then complains about everyone and everything but themselves barely feels like an exaggeration sometimes.
One big reason for that habit of complaining seems to be that people can be so boring that they do not have anything else to say, and feel compelled to fill the silence with complaints, which are far easier to relate with than anything else. No need to be a good storyteller, or make discerning observations about the other, or be an interesting person, or even be vulnerable, when you can just complain about the situation you are in. It's rather sad, but like many hollow social dynamics, it's better to focus on being a better person rather than spend one's time describing it too precisely.
1 Darren Allen has an entire series on boredom on his Substack which is worth checking out. If I had to explain to myself why boredom is so prevalent in the modern world, I would say that the system we live in is aligned with control, which includes control of people and what they do, but even control of experience, to the point that genuine curiosity at something happening is increasingly rare as people grow up from being children, who are notorious for being fascinated by everything. So control on the individual level is a sort of split of reality, because how can you control something you feel right at home in? And that split is a major component of boredom. Then, at a societal level, control obviously limits people’s freedom to provide for themselves, use their time as they want, work on genuinely meaningful things—as opposed to bullshit jobs designed to keep them in the system—and so on, which makes the split of experience even worse, since now people are channeled into avenues provided by the system, such as consumerism, vacations and the industry of entertainment, to relieve boredom, a symptom of the very same system which removed all sense of adventure from daily life. As is often the case now, the poison and the "cure" are given by the two hands of the same person.
2 I am aware that this doesn't solve the systemic issue of teaching being an atrocious experience. But the issue being addressed here is the psychological game that people play.
3 This dynamic also shows up when young children start walking. When parents do not make a big deal out of the inevitable falls of the child, then the latter does not even see anything wrong with falling and will simply get back up and try again. Only when the parents treat each fall as a "failure" does it create an atmosphere of tension, which the child can feel because they do not even have a sense of self yet, and as such they are the environment, and so they become tense too. This aspect of children, that they take on what's around them very readily, is also why they can understand that their parents are arguing even before they understand anything related to language.
4 It's usually guys who are like this. Women being more social people tend to let go of their self-image more easily, and thank god for that, at least half of the population isn’t filled with as many egocentric pricks.
5 The clichés of the nerds, "popular" kids and so on have been a disaster for the youth. A way to filter people based on crude categories as opposed to actually paying attention to them. Very useful for the education system which is primarily concerned with sorting out people, terrible for human beings growing in the world and learning how to interact with one another.
6 I define a myth as a collective story which is used for making sense and navigating Reality. There is nothing inherently wrong with stories, but as always, it becomes problematic once it is untethered from Reality and becomes its own echo-chamber, and even worse, when the myth needs to be upheld at all costs. This is the case with the myth of progress, the myth according to which our society is on a perpetual exponential growth which will inevitably lead us to conquer other solar systems and bring a technological utopia into existence. Darren Allen presents many such myths in his book '33 Myths of the System' for instance.
7 Women are more sensitive than men, but are usually called out for being "too emotional". Very rarely does anyone wonder if that could actually be a strength. For more discussions on sensitivity (not strictly emotional), see Dr. Gabor Mate, for instance on this interview on the Tim Ferriss podcast
8 Though it can also arise from being stuck in your own head. Human traits are never in simple cause and effect relationships with one another
9 An idea I came across with the Generator type from Human Design. Apparently I am in that type, and it implies that I work best while "responding" (not sure what it means to be honest) to my environment or the people around me. I have found it to be somewhat true in that I need people to talk to otherwise work feels somewhat hollow
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2025-01-30