My telos in life right now

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My telos in life used to be something along the line of 'Learn, grow, move closer a higher power'.

For the past fifteen years or so though I think I figured out how I'd describe what it's pivoted to:

'I want to make sure I can survive the world as I find it, which means I have to accept all of the awful things I see, and I have to survive other people without that turning me into someone I never would have wanted to be'.

I feel like I have to walk an extremely careful and almost tight-rope narrow walk between an abyss on one side and fluff-bunnies who'd pick me up and throw me into that abyss (I think Rudolph Steiner was trying to describe something similar with his concept of the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic or excess severity or mercy on the pillars of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life).


I want to be useful, I want to be able to have some agency in improving the kinds of things I see in the world that make me sick to my stomach in ways that I really can't escape my own awareness of. That also means I also have to be incredibly aware of what's sapping my energy because anything that's low trade-off friction is really wasting my time and my potential, and I particularly think about work when I say this. I'm investing aggressively, hoping for the best this fall or in spring of 2025, and I'm wedged into some micro caps that I feel really good about.

What I think of day to day life and how we customarily do things though - I don't think we really have an excuse to be working people hard enough, or pushing competition so hard, that we actively change anyone for the worse who cares about 'winning'. There was a Youtuber who did an analysis on Junji Ito's first comic 'Amigara Fault' and explained what the underlying philosophy and inquiry is about in that story, and when he explained it

and how it related to the work world and professionalism I instantly though - 'I see this man!'. I always wondered why older people seemed gnarled, twisted, and belligerent, from the way we do things - no kidding! What's even worse is we flat out lied to generations about what the real world was. Thankfully the internet is starting to break some of that propaganda and John Stuart Mill turned Scientology (liberals circling the wagons on 100% human supernaturalism like bible-thumpers inverting the world on the bible and in the former case clinging to blank-slatism), and sadly for as much as I hoping liberalism will work out somehow in the face of the rising tides of increased technological leverage at the individual level (ie. far fewer terrorists can have increasingly outsized effects and leverage for destruction) as well as the really bizarre and tragic malaise our popular culture and seemingly most people have fallen into, I'm sincerely anxious about the future. I'm not only anxious about whether or not I can avoid being subjugated by other people if things get bad enough but I'm afraid for all of the suffering that would get unleashed in the world and what kinds of trauma would ripple out from that.

IMHO life is only worth living if some quite significant, in my own case majority holding, has to be the 'best guy I could be' - ie. following my own ethos as well as I can to where I can actually and genuinely like the guy I see in the mirror. I feel like the world quite often is threatening to break my arms and legs if I don't become a psychopath, as if psychopathy and male adulthood are supposed to be the same thing. If you lose internal autonomy, ie. cannot be you any more, because circumstances of survival will not allow you to be you or your better angels will get your throat cut as a failed victim interview (showed weakness) - without internal freedom and right to autonomy your consciousness itself completely has its very purpose - ie. agency - erased. It's to live as a mockery, a joke.

I really wish we had a world where these concerns weren't valid because David Sloan Wilson, Bret Weinstein, Daniel Schmachtenberger, or some other complex systems big-head hacked the code for making cooperation reassert itself over defection. That we could actually have an autopoetic or self-driving dynamic that's memetically powerful, that launches out there deep and strong, to where liberty, well being, and most important - peace, become the attractors. The problem is we're animals in animal frames, which means there's a distinction between the law of minds and the law of bodies, the one can live in it's own cosmos, the other is a 3D object there to be beaten by the elements both human and otherwise. While I don't really think our having bodies is the core problem - we really need to solve game theory. If we don't things are going to get really, really dystopian even if we survive.


But yeah, that's what I'm feeling. I'm feeling like the light that glows behind my eyes is made of a drive for freedom from subjugation of other people. It's a drive to equally get that freedom, say 'Okay - I have my oxygen mask on, who else can I help?'. Obviously with game theory in play I have to be careful not to be a sucker there but I want to orient myself toward solving problems in the world, not just making business to business applications or working with spreadsheets but I mean dismantling deep human problems, finding their weakest spots and figuring out the right attack vectors to resolve those problems.

The thing that matters most to me maybe is that as conscious beings the quality of our conscious content is paramount. It's the difference between at least passable enjoyment of life and outright misery. The problem is... here we have it again... that's the 'infinite game', it's the game of minds. The game of bodies sadly is Darwinian evolution and that brings brass knuckles, black-jacks, knives, and even guns to the philosophy and economics club meeting, ie. the game of minds doesn't have a prayer of surviving unless it really grasps full agonizing awareness of that fact and never leaves awareness of it and finds a self-defense mechanism that actually works in a way that can neutralize the tyranny of the game of bodies or what I've heard Eric Weinstein refer to as sharp elbows over sharp minds.