Blue Saturday

enbb knows what’s up, high five

what i think i'm searching for - i won't say desperately, i'm far too listless for that - is a plan, a strategy, terms of reference. i don't know what i want to do next. not in the next hour, even. anyone can continue to exist, that doesn't seem hard, if anything taking the other option takes the effort. but existing alone isn't much of a motivation to do much more than lie on the settee, watch a movie, read a book. i look for clues in movies and books, look for clues in my own head, look for a plan. but there's nothing, meaning is nothing to me, things in themselves are just fine and meaning is a layer of ego we smear them with.

it's one of the reasons i go to the pub - it doesn't take any thinking about. the easy company of other people and steady intoxication is the most natural way of being alive i know. maybe i'll go out, maybe i won't. i've the beginnings of some kind of bug and a thick, dizzy head and it's cold inside and out. but going to the pub solves the problem of thinking.

god i want something and i have no fucking idea what it is.

― smashong pumpgong (Noodle Vague), Friday, February 23, 2018 2:45 PM (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

While I now just mostly crave macaroni pie too, this post has stayed with me today. No details, because an this is an open forum, but: I've always felt like the above, until a year or two ago, when I suddenly did find a meaning, a cause to fight for (or: it found me, but for clarity I'll just say I found it). I found it, it started flowing through my veins, became my oxygen, and I acted on it. Like a Don Quixote. What I fight for will in the foreseeable future cease to exist. It might survive me, or I might survive it: it's a coin toss, but in the long run this thing I am fighting for will end. Not in a 'everything will end' kind of way, but more in a: will I have to bury it, or will it be standing at my grave, sickly, lowering my casket. And I know how all this sounds but it helps to have something, however foolish, to fight for, to give you meaning. It gives this 'meaning' extra bonus points for heroism. I may be losing the war, but winning a battle feels pretty good.

And yet: I find myself at a point in life where having found purpose or meaning is seriously boomeranging back into my face. The frustration you feel, the indifference you face, all the endless hours spent thinking and organising and trying to wiggle your way in and trying to 'play' people to reach a certain goal, all for that greater good. It sure as hell keeps you away from the pub in the short run, because of the time it consumes, having found meaning or a goal all of a sudden. But in the long run: it's not sustainable, I'll crack under the weight of fighting for something considered by nearly everyone a lost cause already, frustration mounting...

Tl;dr: no meaning or purpose in your life is no good. But having one devouring your energy and time and dealing with the billion forces going against this purpose isn't a picnic either. Either way you'll end up in the pub, is what I'm realising.

Jeez, way to cheer you up eh? Sorry abt that. Perchance the answer lies in "baby steps", moving from one meaningful goal to the next. Going for a walk, picking up the paper. Instead of the great nothingness of all or nothing.

(not really sorry, this is Blue Saturday after all. Laughs aside though NV I feel you and having seen the other extreme now, I'm still not satisfied. The soul is a lonely hunter)

going to the pub solves the problem of thinking.

well said, this kinda nails it

enbb knows what’s up, high five

― NEW CHIMP THREAT (bizarro gazzara), Friday, February 23, 2018 12:52 PM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

:D

Wins - good. It was amazing.

LBI- strategy is a framework rather than an end goal

Big end goals are kinda idk I feel like setting them is a good way to have whatever version of god or fate u prefer to pick set u up as a punchline

nb I don't believe anything works out in the longer term the sweet spot for coping is to set up something you can have goals and structure around and make sure it's not anything you care about

Hi5

Idle hands are the devils playthings
The devil lives deep down

Right on. Needed that deems 👊

going to the pub solves the problem of thinking.

I realise that this isn't a healthy way of dealing with problems but it's the only thing that seems to work. Maybe not going to the pub as such, I'm not really one for going to the pub on my own unless there's bands playing or something, but getting drunk or at least on the way to drunk quiets down the thoughtworms because it gets them drunk as well. Combine with some weed and I can't keep a thought in my head long enough for it to twist into some kind of self-hatred. If only there were a way for it not to lead to morning-after regrets and the ever-present danger of addiction.

Nah lbi keep chin up got to have better ppl than civil servants in the world guv

Combine with some weed and I can't keep a thought in my head long enough for it to twist into some kind of self-hatred.

tru tru. dat pension tho. you'll be power washing like there's no tomorrow when yr 67

xp

And I saying I don't have a dream. I feel foolish when you lay it down like that.

You'll smile, hose down your Tesla 3000 hovercar, till you blast clean your brothers bmx. Believe.

4. And now thus saith the Lord:
Though you as little endure the word levelling as you could the late slain or dead Charles (your forerunner, who is gone before you ―) and had as lief hear the devil named as hear of the Levellers (men-levellers) which is and who indeed are but shadows of most terrible, yet great and glorious good things to come.

5. Behold, behold, behold, I the eternal God, the Lord of Hosts who am that mighty leveller and coming (yea, even at the doors) to level in good earnest , to level to some purpose, to level with a witness, to level the hills with the valleys and to lay the mountains low.

"Love me til my heart stops/Love me til I'm dead" used to kill me and it's gone, gone forever, dying alone on the sofa, so here's hoping I will not drown

when you think about wounding yourself bad enough so you don't have to go to work and/or listen to your own self-aggrandizing booshit

Tl;dr: no meaning or purpose in your life is no good. But having one devouring your energy and time and dealing with the billion forces going against this purpose isn't a picnic either. Either way you'll end up in the pub, is what I'm realising.

fuck it dude, let's just read montaigne

I keep coming back to the conclusion that I've lived a wretched selfish shitlife and deserve to be miserable for what's left of it

keep it in here because all things considered my mental health has been reasonable-ish the last couple of weeks. but you can't escape blather. so many useless intrusive words.

maybe we should introduce school lessons on how to shut the fuck up and just be at peace

These sessions will focus on;
 How to conduct a job search
 How to market yourself
 CV writing
 Interview skills
 Competency based interviews
 Managing online profile

what if i don't want to market myself?

card in a phone box or gtfo imo

just sat in a maths class having long complicated thoughts about teenagers, education, the cultivation of discipline, the possible intrinsic dickery of a sizeable proportion of human beings, my own relationship to all of this and to life and to what the point of anything is

primary conclusions were it's time to get out and i need to have a long deep meditate to work out where my head's aligned to the rest of humanity. secondary conclusions were a version of shrug emoji.

teenagers and classrooms will do this to you.

it knots together i guess, there's a self-centred willful stupidity and dickishness to others but then they're bored and lost and empty and why the hell is the universe making them sit there bored hour after hour anyway, perhaps nobody is expected to be a winner, perhaps they're the meat in a grinder that keeps turning to no purpose except the need to keep cranking its own handle

also tho teenagers are disgusting savages let it not be forgotten

i am certainly not disavowing that possibility but to what extent are they innate savages and to what extent do they have savagery thrust upon them and is the savagery taught by the people who don't care about them or by the people who actually somehow think they're trying to make them better and then of course they're not all abject savages, there is a definite scale to this

i'm sticking to my line that teenage savagery greatly exacerbated by concentrating them all together in institutions esp when their parents engage in vicarious 60s cosplay

actually the thought i keep returning to is that maybe in fact this is the smooth trundling of the best of all possible worlds and the only issue is me processing it thru a sick, jaded brain

xp Is this about the Thurman-Fiennes Avengers movie again?

certainly thats the part i latched onto

unless he meant corbynism idk

i was thinking maybe it was uniforms and other nostalgic mechanisms of control

right, school uniforms' performative anachronism is a good example of how childhood/youth is constructed by adults to fulfil their weird retrogressive fantasies

or alternatively a method by which kids are protected from the tyranny of consumer-culture oneupmanship

yeah cos they don't compare their phones or their shoes

school uniform is no protection. it's bullshit

dress codes are entirely ample

to be clear I'm not against school uniforms in general

what would you say the case for their continuation is

remembering the anxiety of non uniform day at school

cheap functional uniforms are not a bad idea, just no fucking ties or hats or brass buttons or whatever

maybe. certainly no ties feels important

to add to nv's point btw, last week i was teaching four kids who'd been expelled from their school aged 13/14 for a drugs offence. they were happy to do the work as long as i let them piss around. a teacher of 30 years' experience also tutored them and apparently things deteriorated so quickly that they discontinued the entire arrangement over the weekend. one of them filmed footage of this man yelling at a kid, who was yelling back - finger pointing, threats etc. he'd made the cardinal error of calling the big bully kid a twat to his face, and underestimating the power of the quiet, mature-seeming machiavelli operator beside him

what lesson do we learn from this? idk but unless teenagers see the point in the work they're set then i can see them becoming, culturally at least, increasingly intransigent, and maybe that's a good thing. the education system needs a total overhaul and this can only accelerate it

the one thing these kids were doing that i hated was bullying the girl in the group, and i told them as much

they were rich posho kids, yes, but i can see the intransigence becoming universal

yeah wherever the personal/social interplay lies i'm definitely not saying that the kids are just inherently fallen. the way we teach and what we teach is so much bullshit and its purpose is only to create malleable drones.

well yes. it needs to change and nobody's seriously trying to change it

because society needs malleable drones!

itt a defence of the rights of posh kids to be cunts

lol yeah sure

i don't think anybody has "the right" to be a cunt, if rights are meaningful in non-legal contexts

on the other hand i think if you mistreat animals they tend to not be better behaved for it.

the questions are really about the most effective methods of either not creating terrible behaviour or of training people not to exhibit it if you think it's an original component of human nature.

whether you could come up with answers to that without picking a side in the nurture/nature argument is an issue too i think

hmm fair

also an option to creating a system that works well for most and executes the other tbh