My real fear is death before death.

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I say this as someone who came into this world very curious. By first grade I couldn't get enough of studying the dinosaurs, reading what I could about astronomy studying the galaxies and nebula, collecting gem stones, I came in to this world with sort of a natural Sagan-esque wonder with my surroundings. I did okay with that for the short time where my peers, somewhat by necessity, were trying to boot themselves up and so were running a similar game. After a while, and I think I noticed the curve around second or third grade, other people started dropping away and doing something different. That something different was something I'd come to associate later with game-theoretic behavior, which seems to come as an abdication of raw curiosity in favor of doing what the collective social resonance in your environment demands of you.

I think of Aaron Clarey's 'Curse of the High IQ' where even if you're doing really cool, interesting, and enjoyable things even in other people's books the more you do them and the more they don't the further you wander out into second or third standard deviation territory and where people will have less and less in common with you and less and less to say to you. Admittedly I'm not a genius, I have taken credible tests and while I'm not doing bad in that regard I am south of 130. Being on the spectrum seems to cause similar, even identical, problems hit at an earlier intelligence level rather than it taking three standard deviations or more.

The point though - I feel like my very soul is comprised of curiosity, learning, and making contact with what I'd think of as the sublime whether in music, in art, in mathematics, wherever I can find it. That collective sibilence, the constant din of social climbers telling me in every reflex that Conformity is the only God (well Conformity and Violence), that if it doesn't help you make copies of yourself or help those copies socially and economically dominate other people's copies that it's both a social and biological failure mode and that there's no reason people should want to associate with you.

That's where one is really left - by society - to dry rot. It's a place where if you can't bring all of your own substance for yourself and supply it yourself by every act of your selective attention you begin to mummify or petrify.

To really let that sink it would mean me losing my velocity, slowing down, and in what I fear would be worst case - becoming an average rock in the landscape, slowly having the 'me' bleed off until I approximate an NPC of sorts.

That's what I mean by 'death before death'. It would be the ultimate statement of 'the world won - I lost'.

I've thought about it some more and.... I seem to be okay so long as I have at least two or three people who I can really talk to on a heart-to-heart level about anything. I haven't had that lately. I still have some people in relatively high places throw me signals that I'm doing it right, or I can find those signals from places like Rebel Wisdom, Stoa, watching what someone like Samo Burja is doing with his life, lots of nerds, creatives, and problem solvers who seem to be deeply committed to being life long learners. I want to stay in that, and the trick then is figuring out how to keep this from constantly being drained off without replenishment or with diminishing capacity to replenish by a consensus of what seems to approximate pure social climbers.


Thought I'd get this out there partly because writing helps me organize my thoughts, also I delight in thinking that anyone else whose going through something similar things 'YES - I'm not going crazy!' when they read something like this, and I might also be helping them formulate their own choice of words, preferences, and strategies around this issue.