💾 Archived View for gemini.onedimension.net › thought › society-man.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 03:21:59. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-01-08)
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"You're trapped, man. All you care about is society and money and trivial bullshit. Can't you see how none of it matters?"
It's a notion that's always served up with a familiar smugness, a holier-than-thou sort of vibe. I pay attention to the important things. I took the red pill and can see the truth. You're trapped, I'm free.
Maybe. But I think it's impossible. It's a biological impossibility that you're really free of all that.
We evolved to be social creatures; to genuinely care about the sort of things that "distract" us. These are important to us, and it's not just a fluke.
So where did it go wrong? I can certainly feel that it's not quite right, that I can get taken away and swept up by these sorts of concerns to a point that just feels stupid. Things that shouldn't[1] matter in the long run; distractions. And yet they're a defining part of who we are[2].
I don't know. It's just one of those things, pushed to extremes, that becomes a cyclical drain. We stray further from the truth and push ourselves into imaginary manufactured worlds. But to divorce ourselves from that tendency is impossible. Doing so is contrary to our nature[3]. And straying too far from our nature[4] is a dangerous thing.
The answer is probably stupidly simple: moderation. Finding a middle ground between being engaged with the ephemeral world that people create and everything beyond that. Nothing fancy, no big philosophical revelations, just living conscientiously.
Last updated Fri Dec 03 2021 in Berkeley, CA
1: /thought/hypocrisy-and-contradiction.gmi
3: /thought/the-nature-of-something.gmi