S.C

Dr. W's Space Travels
2019-07-27 00:39:00 (UTC)

Space Cadet Codifies the Levels of Thought

Wow my last entry was only two and a half months ago – go me for being in touch with myself on a more consistent basis! Although can I really say it’s “more consistent” based on a sampling size of two sessions? Whatever. Every additional one I do is a step closer to understanding myself a little more. It’s also a step closer to realizing how much of myself I have yet to understand. They say the more you know, the more you don’t know. But anyway – I’m here to talk about some recent goings-on between Evelyn and I. We’re still broken up at this point, but she has asked me to help her to move on. One of those things is telling her why I still love her but still want to move on.

Well I was gonna break this up into different parts but I’m just gonna speak as I think. One blatant thing in my mind that I don’t like to share with others is how selfish I am about this relationship. About any relationship, really. Ever since breaking up, I’ve been living a peaceful life. Everything is in my control, and it’s amazing. The amount of money in my bank account is actually growing. I can go wherever I want. My obligations are limited. I’m materialistically living the life. At the same time, in the very back of my mind I really miss her company and I think I will one day regretting breaking up. But maybe I won’t, I don’t know. As hard as it is for me to say, I think I need to move on because I can’t get past my own selfishness. Or does that make me sound like a victim. Maybe that’s my problem – every reason that I try to come up with for me moving on makes me seem like I’m not at fault, or that I’m the victim of fate. What would be more appropriate is that I’m moving on because I don’t want to be in a relationship any more. It was like the negatives outweighed the positives, and I no longer found the desire to make it work. I don’t want to move to Hong Kong (where she lives - it was a long-distance relationship, if I haven't mentioned it already). I don’t want to move outside of PA even within the States. I want to do things my way. And the thing is, I feel conditioned to loathe myself for that. Inspirational Facebook quotes that people share from the “Quotes About Relationships That You Should Live By” tell us that any hardship can be overcome if you truly love your partner, and to put all pride and ego behind, and to fix things that were broken. But then you get the page called “Quotes About Life” and it tells us to be ourselves, to follow what we want, to not let ourselves be too strongly influenced by the world. It feels any more like Facebook is just a breeding ground of being influenced by stuff. And my behavior right now is very indicative of that, which I’m aware of. I’ve never felt so judgmental before about people, but when I’m on Facebook I feel like the Jim Carey Grinch going “hate hate hate, hate hate hate, double hate… LOATHE ENTIRELY”. I mean it’s definitely not to that degree – I’m exaggerating – but like, it’s the same stuff over and over again. Look at this cool video, pity this person, judge that person who’s asking for pity, look at this selfie, look at this baby, read this quote that I shared, endorse this political position, etc. And I feel horrible even saying that much, not to mention hypocritical because I will occasionally like a photo or comment on something. I claim to primarily use Facebook to manage my page and respond to and send messages, but I darn well know I scroll plenty through my feed, looking at people aging themselves, looking at people ridiculing people aging themselves, looking at memories, looking at stuff I’m tagged in, looking at J-List waifus, looking at postcards, looking at things that make me happy, looking at things that make me jealous, looking at things that make me question the standards of what I care about…

I was just thinking of a way to word when people share common seemingly countercultural sentiments that are supposedly a step up from the “normal” way of thinking. For example, let’s take tier one consciousness: “Facebook rulez! Facebook is so much fun!” Actually I can appreciate this in that it is completely ignorant and bears roots solely in instinct and base feeling. It’s like the very thoughtless yet uninfluenced perspective. Tier two is this: “I hate Facebook. Facebook is a waste of time.” And a lot of people who have this perspective – at least from what my own limited perspective can see – use Facebook a lot, sometimes to even share that hatred of Facebook. Or am I just making that part up? Like, sensationalizing the hatred that Facebook gets just to convey my point? I don’t know. Sometimes I fall in tier two, but I try not to. But I do. But I try not to. Tier three is this (oh, and I made all these tiers up as of the second I’m writing about them): “Facebook is Facebook. It’s all in how we use it.” Oh I should also mention that my idea of the tiers is limited to my own perspective – obviously, since I’m not anyone else – so one that truly hates Facebook might not necessarily be in tier two. But going back to the Tyler-made tier 3 – this one is accepting of Facebook, and also accepting of the hatred that Facebook gets. And it doesn’t slam Facebook nor the tier two Facebook haters. I don’t know how that can be discerned from what I wrote but since this is all in my head it makes sense. Basically I’m trying to say that the higher the tiers are, the more thought that goes into it. Again, from my limited perspective. What tier am I in? My answer: it doesn’t matter. I don’t really care. Tier one, tier five, tier four-twenty – doesn’t matter.

My natural inclination is to put myself in the tier that makes me look best, obviously. So I’d put myself in tier four, which is somehow expressing that I’m the most enlightened motherflooper of all. Like I gotta go out with a profound bang by putting myself in the secret tier four. It’s such tier two thinking. And I might actually be making this sentiment up out of tier two or tier three thinking. Maybe these sentiments aren’t as common as I think they are. But my counter-countercultural thinking might be so inflamed that I’m led to believe so. It’s like I’m constantly on a quest to get my ego stroked. I wanna be smarter than everyone. I wanna be a deeper thinker than everyone. I wanna believe that I am more self-aware than others. And it’s all a fallacy because of how limited my perspective is on how others are. Of course I can believe that I’m more self-aware than others because my “self” resides in me. I have the upper hand against others in the self-awareness wiener measurement because I know my own thoughts and thought patterns, and I erroneously compare them to the image that I have of another person based on what little I know about him or her. Ooh hang on, side note going back to the tier thing: another good example of this is the anime fan base. Tier one: “Anime daisuki! Dank memez bronii-chan!” Tier two: “God I hate weebs. Did you even read the manga?” Tier three: “Let’s coexist you guys. Anime can be a lot of fun.” Okay back to what I was saying – actually I don’t think I had anything else to say about it. Just that I love having my ego stroked and I hate how aware of that I am. But I also like it, probably because being aware of my own big ego makes it even bigger, because awareness equals enlightenment, which can either equal wisdom or pride. I’d like to think I fall in the wisdom and oh-yeah-can’t-forget-humility bucket, but in my mind I sometimes fall in the pride bucket.

The issue that I have with myself (among many, many issues) is that I’m so good at hiding my elephantine ego by being humble. Brushing off compliments, giving compliments to the one complimenting me, thanking people profusely for their compliments so I feel like I’m giving adequate appreciation and thus securing myself further in a compliment-reaping position, etc. The question though, is whether or not I truly feel that way, or if I rather actually exhibit humbleness in those situations. Where I struggle is knowing if I’m being prideful or humble. Man after like two pages of writing I’ve finally gotten to the real question at hand. I was gonna talk about things related to moving on from my relationship but that’s taken so many detours my mental Garmin is recalculating indefinitely. Anyway, the paradox is that I would need to find an objective way to figure out if my actions are out of pride or out of humbleness. Is humbleness the same thing as humility? Okay the web says pretty much, so I’m gonna use “humility” because “humbleness” sounds a tad less intelligent. Okay that was definitely an ego thing but let’s let it slide for now. So I need to find an objective way to see if I’m acting out of pride or out of humility. The catch is that no outside actor can tell how I truly feel. Only I – the most biased judge – can do so. So I really don’t know. And I feel like the more I think about it, the less I’m going to know. So that’s that I guess. More to follow at a later date.




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