#140

Everybody wants recognition for their talents and ideas, which is perfectly natural and healthy. Seems like most people want a lot more recognition than they are due, though. Most people that end up as rulers of any description have a bad case of it. Basically a lot of demands for recognition are very premature, even if they are met. Actually it is worse when they are met.

Terrible as it is to not be seen for who you really are, to have your many fine qualities go underutilized and even squelched by those who could use them, it is worse to have your mediocrity championed and to reap adulation for simply having better-than-average teeth or excellent deception.

Harder, much less likely to be of any material use, and kind of embarrassing as it may be, it is better to stick to your guns and work on what you know you were made for deep down. To not morph into what people want to see, but to grow into what you are.

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In order to meet the expectations of a culture that capitalizes and enshrines the path of least resistance in all things, we become greaseballs eternally slip-rolling and wetly bouncing further from dignity and autonomy, committing to nothing except the performance that gets us the most positive reinforcement on social media and the most capital for the least expenditure. 

Those last two things are deeply intertwined. 

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Not that I'm not into it. If you can make money off of eyeballs, you absolutely should, and if making your internet avatar dance and shriek to the tune of chaotic decay makes you a buck and gives you a kick, who am I to judge? Be a king or queen of whatever scene. Monetize your identity as you politicize your body. Be a thinkfluencer or independent "journalist". Cacophonize synergistically. Get into imaginary real estate. Buy domain names by the dozen and remember the Parable of the Sower. Troll for a disinfo farm and if you're lucky it'll break legit. Who gives a fuck.

As I said, it is natural and healthy to want to be seen. 

Gotta eat. 

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It's not that it's not smart or adaptive, because it is, and it's not that it's not moral, because that is outside the question and a fake anyway. 

The problem is in gaming the world, which is interesting and tantalizing and fun, but attaching this kind of meta to history comes at something of a cost to our ability to actually play. When you have locked yourself into a game's language in order to manipulate it, you give up your ability to be creative outside of its constraints. The problem, then, is not our ability to change the world, but our ability to imagine it and how to live in it, becoming the people that we want to be.


--JL