Fell for the IQ meme

Unease, I can’t escape it. I would say that it’s the only constant in my life, the forms just morph or intensify. I’ve had a really tough week, but at the same time it’s been really easy. I’ve had four days off work, I’ve had all the free time I need to write, yet it’s now sunday evening (a week since my last upload) and I’ve got nothing. It’s not that I haven’t tried, it’s not that I don’t have things I want to write about or at least did want to at one point. I’ve just not been able to actually do it. I’ve been thinking a lot this week, about all my failures and about how silly all of this is, and it’s really hard to sit down and write when having such thoughts. I suppose I’ve just been reminded of how much of a midwit I really am, and it’s difficult to feel confident sharing anything when you’re in that state of mind.

See at the thing last sunday (which actually went really well, this spiral of insecurity I’ve been on started after saying goodbye to everyone) one of my co-workers mentioned that she’s writing her dissertation for her degree at the moment. I think I remember her saying it was an English degree, although there are all kinds of those so that’s not very helpful. Anyway, even though I knew she was a student already as she mentioned it the first time we met when I was still training, I guess I didn’t really know it until that moment. Now, I always feel bad saying something that might be insulting or rude about someone who has only been nice to me, but if I’m being honest this girl seems to fit the “thot” archetype in some ways. Not just in the way she looks and dresses, but in the way she communicates, after all these things kind of go together.

To be more clear what I mean, because that term is used in two different ways, sometimes just as a synonym for bimbo/ sloot/ etc. updated for the 2010s which is not the version I’m using, and on the other hand to describe a certain and very specific kind of person that has only really existed for the last decade at most. It’s of course a young woman but with a certain style of dress that contorts their body into a pretty uniform shape, and a particular kind of make-up use, but also it’s the way they seem to interact with the world. It’s hard to really find the words to describe it, but I suppose I’d say it’s like talking to someone who is only half lucid. It’s more than just the words they use, think of someone who only engages with the world through the various artificial constructs and systems we use to make sense of everything. Not that to do the opposite and oppose any kind of systematisation is necessarily “clever”, but it’s like someone who never went through that phase that I imagine a lot of kids go through in their early teens where they will obnoxiously point out how everything is “a social construct”. It’s this weird feminine stoicism you could call it, where they just sort of take things in life at face value without giving it too much thought.

I’ll give an example, an ironically rather appropriate one given the subject of this post. Some months back we were switching shifts and she asked me what A-levels I took (A-levels are the qualification you study for at the ages of 16 to 17 here in the UK, although it’s isn’t unusual for people to take three years) and I told her that I took Physics, Chemistry, Maths and Psychology. Now her reply, which I can’t recall word for word, went “oh wow those are really hard how did you do it?” or something very similar. I then told her that I didn’t, I failed the first year and never went back to try again. That’s not important though, I mean it is actually because I’ve been thinking about it a lot this week, but for this specific example I mean. See it reminded me of how I used to look at school/ education before I went through the phase I was just talking about above. I suppose I saw it like a collection of various completely distinct subjects. See they call them subjects and you have different teachers who are trained to teach each one, and of course you have to take different kinds of tests, but in “the real world” knowledge isn’t separated into subjects.

See when I did go to do my A-Levels, the physics and maths curricula specifically were heavily reliant on one another and the chemistry course also was much easier for the students taking those two courses. The reason I was taking them after all was because I was advised to by a lot of my teachers from secondary school, including the ones who had taught related subjects, and I took their advice because I had no clue what I wanted to do and I just thought those subjects were the most impressive to do well in. I’m getting off course though, or at least I’m jumping ahead a little. See, I never completed these courses as I’ve mentioned. After a few months I started skipping lessons, something I’d never done back in secondary school, and the last third of the year I was there I was going to only two or three lessons a week. I didn’t even turn up for all of the tests when they eventually came up, not that it would have mattered as I did absolutely terribly in the ones I did go to.

Now, this co-worker of mine (and I know it’s unhealthy and kind of gross to compare myself with other people like this) was for some reason impressed by this when I mentioned it as I’ve said. Or at least she was impressed when first assuming that I had completed the courses in those subjects, although I don’t think it’s unreasonable of me to assume that (given I was advised to take them by teachers of mine who had themselves done so in their younger years, and that I was allowed onto the course at all) I potentially could have passed if some circumstances been different. It’s impossible to ever know what could have been, and part of me is inclined to say that any assumption about how I could have got through it if say I still had the environment I had at secondary school (that is, friends who were also studying along with me, teachers who truly believed I was capable and liked me, someone at home to actually enforce some fucking discipline and make me study, etc.) is just a cope. After all, no one with a shred of self awareness wants to be that guy who claims to be “smart but lazy”.

I’m also aware that I really really don’t want to be stupid, my sense of identity and my pride has always rested on this conception of myself as an intelligent person. There could be all kinds of reasons for this, but I believe that being told I was clever over and over as a kid and really right up until that year I started my A-Levels by all my peers whether it be teachers, relatives or the other kids in my classes is the primary factor. So knowing that this matters so much to me I have to be on a constant watch because I’m very weak to being convinced that I am in fact just as clever as they told me I was. It’s like I was talking about last week, and have several other times, about the story of the slave at the roman triumph. There’s a reason that imagery resonates so well with me, and it’s because I have to constantly have a similar voice in my ear to keep me free of conceit. I’ve always disdained unjustified arrogance, nothing makes me lose respect for someone more quickly.

This of course only became a problem when I went to do my A-levels though, before that I was always just about able to maintain this delusion of a great intellect I supposedly possessed. Maybe that’s hyperbolic, I never really considered myself to be especially brilliant just quite a bit more quick witted than most of the people around me. This kind of goes back to an early post I uploaded and I don’t want to repeat myself. Basically, I became very good friends with this guy in some of my classes and I think he had a similar view to me in this regard. We would basically LARP as intellectuals, we talked about political ideas and philosophy and poetry, but it was all very superficial. Neither of us actually knew anything at all about what we talked about, we were nominally left-wing/ Marxists because that was what we perceived as the position of the academics we so idolised, but neither of us had actually read any theory. Not that we didn’t read interesting and difficult things, at least for kids that age, I remember thinking I was so cool for having read The Iliad and Odyssey at 12 years old (The E. V. Rieu prose translations) for example, god I really cringe when thinking back on how I used to be.

We both even wrote some stuff, him more than me though. One of my poems actually ended up being used as a sort of prologue/ opening thing to a novel that one of my mother’s colleagues was writing actually. I’d completely forgotten about that, I’ve just been trying to find the book online this afternoon since reminding myself of that but I don’t know for sure whether it was actually published and I’ve forgotten the woman’s name now along with the title of the book. I think the last time I saw her was at the funeral, she told me to keep writing..

To bring things full circle, I just want to say that my co-worker really isn’t that important here. These feelings were under the surface just waiting for a reason to come out, and that exchange last sunday was the excuse. I could be entirely wrong in my judgement, I hope I am, it is true that appearances can be deceiving and because I’ve never really taken the time to get to know any of my co-workers I haven’t had enough of a chance to really tell what they’re like. At the same time though, the judgements we make about people are rarely unfounded, and don’t forget that people choose to conform to a certain “type” in order to deliberately indicate what kind of person they are and what their social role is.

Or at the very least what social role they want to be seen as having, and dissimulation is certainly the reason for that in some cases. It was just kind of shitty to realise that this person I (again, very possibly entirely wrongly) judged as not especially clever was still far more accomplished in an academic respect than I am and probably ever will be and therefore more intelligent. Even if I for some reason completely change my position and decide to go into academia and manage to succeed, I’ll still have failed the standard path that so many people have trod with ease. That being of going to school, and then straight on to uni. That doesn’t just make me a middling intellect, which itself would have bothered me greatly to realise as a kid, but maybe even worse.

It’s lonely at the bottom

I’ve talked before about how I, and I believe a lot of people like me, fall into a trap of sorts. People who tend to spend a lot of time, perhaps too much, dwelling on things. I suppose being this way is what led me to eventually start this blog. Anyway I used the word “thoughtful”, and spoke about how these more thoughtful people can often convince themselves that they’re more intelligent than all the “sheeple” or “NPCs” or whatever new term might exist. Of course this is a fiction, at least that’s what I was trying to get across before. I don’t really want this post to be a rehash of that one, so I’m not going to spend too much time covering things I already spoke about in the past, but I just have a problem with those kinds of terms and the mindset behind them. The post I’m talking about was called “Thinking about thinking about things”, and it was posted October last year, if you are interested.

I’ve talked before about the probably not actually real roman tradition of the slave standing behind a general during a military triumph and whispering “memento mori” in his ear. This idea that it takes relatively little to convince people that they’re above everyone else, that they’re divine and “better”, is clearly something that has been understood since antiquity and I really do believe that the whole “sheeple” idea is another expression of that, the degree of seriousness is just different. Nowadays instead of great statesmen and military leaders getting that feeling from the roaring crowds cheering their name, you have normal people who commute or whatever who have a sense of superiority over the other people in the train carriage like in that pic I used in that other post. I say nowadays, but actually to be honest the normal day to day citizens of the roman empire or any other ancient civilisation were probably just as prone to such thoughts and the major political figures (or corporate leaders) of today are probably no different than the great figures of the past either.

It really does just seem to be something inherent, at the very least inherent to men. Now this is pure speculation, from someone who doesn’t have any kind of academic credentials whatsoever, but one idea I’ve had is that perhaps it’s an evolutionary trait. See, you kind of have to convince yourself you’re the best in order to justify being the one who reproduces, in an ancient/ stone age ooga booga times kind of environment I mean. Obviously I’m being a bit silly here, but hopefully you understand what I mean. I don’t want to just be another goof online who spouts “redpill” ideas because most of those people are just repeating things you’ve been told before but in increasingly dumbed down and less accurate ways. It’s not even that I disagree with most of it, what people call the 80/20 rule, terms like hypergamy, sexual marketplace, alpha/ beta male, etc etc. all the usual stuff. I’m kind of on board, a bit, or at least I have spent a great deal of time since my mid teens with those kinds of ideas around me. I’m trying to do my own kind of thing here though, and when those ideas influence me I might need to mention them as background, but that’s about all.

As I said I don’t really want to talk about that because having heard it all before, and I’m sure the same is true for some of you, it’s rather boring to go over. Rather I kind of want to build on it a little. See there’s a common thing that gets said, that you have twice as many female ancestors as male ones or something like that. This isn’t just a total asspull from incel philosophers like me (that’s a joke, I don’t have so little self awareness to seriously consider myself a “philosopher”) but something I’ve heard from actual legit academics and science magazines. I think it’s all something we kind of recognise, the whole meme about how women live life on easy mode being an expression of it. I think that it is undeniable that “finding a partner” being an actual difficult task is a male problem. I mean, the way women talk about their future children like it’s just a guarantee is really what gives it away. At the same time though they also seem to not get it, I mean you hear women ask things like “why are men so obsessed with sex” and it’s not a perfect analogy but just imagine someone from a modern first world country who can go to the supermarket and just pick food off the shelf asking why hunter-gatherer tribes in the amazon are obsessed with food. It’s absurd, isn’t it? I guess I’m just gatekeeping hunger now, I mean you still have to walk to the supermarket and pay for the food, people in modern first world countries get hungry too y’know, I’m just clearly a misog.. anti-firstworlder.

I’ll get back on topic in a second though, I’m giving off major incel vibes. I really like that expression btw, incel v i b e s, my friend said it to me last summer when talking about someone. It was when we were away on a camping trip, me and the only two friends I really have. I think I’ve mentioned this trip before briefly, but we were away for a few days and just went walking most of the time. It was also my first (and as of now only, because I haven’t found a good time to take those morning glory seeds yet) experience with psychedelics, but it was a mild dose of 2cb which is itself a very tame drug. Anyway, one of the days we took a really long walk over to this island (connected by a causeway) off the coast near where we were staying and up to the tip opposite the mainland. It’s shaped a little like a diamond or oval, and at this other end there’s loads of crags and cliffs and a lighthouse. It’s really spectacular, the waves smashing against the rocks can come really high up. I’ve actually been several times before with my dad when I was a lot younger. The area, a few hours drive from where I live, is very special to me and I have a lot of memories associated with it which is why I brought my two friends there.

Anyway, we were walking along this big open field just before getting to the end of the journey and were very tired. It was the height of summer, and one of my friends was struggling so much with the heat and a blister he got that he had to stop and me and the other friend went ahead to the café at the cliffs to get drinks for us all. So the final stretch before we got there was this long and wide open field, and we chatting and joking about this guy he knew of. Well, first we were talking about the heat and I said something like “right now I wish I was in Finland” and we were laughing about that and he mentioned that he actually knew someone who moved to Finland. This guy apparently met a girl online, some online dating site I think, and the madman actually moved to fucking Finland to meet her. So that was amusing and he was telling me more about the guy, and how he would often whine about tfw no gf, and that’s when my friend said it. It wasn’t “He gave me incel vibes” or I got incel vibes from him” it was just standalone. He said his story about the guy and then just at the end, like a cherry on top, “Incel vibes” and he chuckled a bit.

It’s a pointless story honestly, but for whatever reason it’s really stuck out to me. I like it a lot, it’s kinda funny in a way. In fact I was almost going to use it as the name for this blog, I’m actually still not sure whether I made the right choice. I think my mood, because of the situation at the time, may have influenced me to go with the title I have instead but looking at everything I’ve written both work fairly well. I mean this very post that I’m writing right now would fit perfectly under either title. On the one hand like I said (and what got me on to this topic in the first place) I’m certainly giving off incel vibes. This is not an “incel blog” by any means, again as I said I don’t just want to repeat things that have been said before because stagnation is death, but those very ideas have clearly had an influence on me and they do leak out. On the other hand, this post is very much me just rambling and the reason for that is indeed my neurosis. I hate to self diagnose, and I know it seems like nowadays everyone has a mental illness, but I think it’s fair for me to say that I’m not completely mentally healthy. After all I’ve been very isolated for a long while, take those two friends I mentioned who were on that trip with me. One of them I haven’t actually seen in person since, and that was like half a year ago now. The other I did see last night, but still I only see him in person an average of perhaps once every two or three months.

I do think being quite secluded most of my life has made things difficult for me in a lot of ways. I get unhealthily attached to people, and I don’t necessarily mean infatuated here it’s not a lower case romantic kind of thing. At least I don’t think it is, it’s hard for me to tell and that leads to further confusion. A lot of people are much more in tune with these kinds of things than me, and I’m realising now that I’ve come back around to what I was initially intending to talk about in this post, in a roundabout way. People like me, who will just endlessly waste their time thinking themselves to death tend to assume all problems can be solved by them thinking their way out. They might think they’re depressed because they don’t have friends or a gf or any goals, but then you’ll listen to some normalfag say something about how they started adding some herb into their meals and they felt better. Or they’ll suggest listening to music, and admittedly upbeat/ high energy music can in the short term affect my mood rather significantly. The weird thing is they just seem to know this stuff, and it’s so fucking alien to me because they’re literally talking about thoughts. Depression is ultimately just bad thoughts, and they chew some ginger root or whatever and something about hormone balance and bang! no more bad thoughts.

Not only does it just come naturally, the idea that if you’re having bad thoughts you shouldn’t continue with them and try to solve things internally but that you should just “do exercise for those endorphins bro”, but it’s not something that bothers them at all either. To me that’s kind of horrifying, that your thoughts aren’t really your own (and this is something that I do spend way too much time fretting over) is a scary idea. That you just need to min-max nutrients and vitamins like life is an RPG and that will literally change how you perceive what’s going on around you is a big deal. I’ve spoken before about religious stuff, and yes I have a very limited knowledge of religious philosophy and theology, but my current way of seeing things as I explained in much more depth in older posts is that God is kind of like all possible knowledge at once. That thought, ideas, etc. are our divine aspect. We are all made in the image of God, at least I think that’s what the bible says, and people take that to mean our material forms, two arms, two legs, standing upright, relatively hairless, and so on are what is meant by that. This is where the whole bearded man in the sky thing comes from and perhaps that’s part of it but I imagine pre-Christian depictions of deities like Zeus/ Jupiter are as well. My point though, is that God is a metaphysical being, the anthropomorphic God is silly and this is why fundamentalists are such cancer. No, it’s thought or reason which separates us from animals. Divinity is immaterial, you cannot touch or smell it. I also see ideas of enlightenment in eastern traditions like Buddhism as getting at the same thing, but again I have even less understanding of those.

If thought is just another part of instinct, which I guess I kind of also contradictorily agree with sometimes because a lot of evo-psych ideas sound rather plausible to me (clearly, after all I was spouting similar stuff myself in this very post), then how can you take any thought you have seriously. It just puts me in this constant state of self doubt, which again I can’t help but obsess over like I always do. It’s quite the conundrum, I feel like I might never achieve any sense of freedom from these thoughts, it can be quite oppressive. I know that these evo-psych ideas have this negative effect on me because of something that has been happening recently in fact, and which I was hoping I’d find a reason to talk about in this post actually just to vent.

So I found out my manager is quitting, she’s been here since I started of course and is the one who gave me the job. I know it’s the boss I work for, but it was her who gave me the interview and I imagine ultimately made the choice for me to start working there officially. So, I’ve been thinking that I should say some kind of thank you for that, but it’s very difficult for me. I don’t speak a lot, I’m not articulate at all or able to just rattle on forever about something like I do in my head or in writing here. I’ve explained it how I see it before, like there’s a cage that I’m trapped inside of when I’m outside with other people and I can shake the bars and scream all I want but my body (the cage in question) will just continue on awkwardly brute forcing through any interaction in a very forced and unresponsive way. The only sign of life is my hands shaking noticeably when I’m particularly stressed. I imagine that some of you, those who came from /r9k/, experience a similar thing although maybe not as severe.

So I decided that I had the right idea the last time and that I should write a letter, a more substantial one this time not just a little note but a real letter. Which is why this post is kind of a hastily done thing, I know I’m no longer holding myself to the weekly upload thing but I still want to be writing something always and this is kind of what I’ve been doing to take my mind off of the letter which is what I’ve been giving most of my attention to. I know it sounds silly, it’s going to be a few paragraphs long, shorter than any post I’ve made here so why is it taking such focus and time? Well the thing is it’s like every line I type I have to redo 100+ times, it’s like a minefield because as I was saying I’ve been isolated for a lot of my life and I have a lot of difficulty knowing the various societal boundaries there are. I really have a difficult time knowing what is and isn’t appropriate, after all this is a married woman. So I’ll admit I’m nervous about it seeming like I’m trying to confess my secret feelings for her or something when (in this specific instance) I’m really not. Yes, the fact that last time I actually did have secret feelings for the person I left the note for might also be causing me to worry this way I’m aware of that too.

I’m just not sure, I know I’m not able to say something in person whenever the last time I see her may be I’m just too much of a coward and I can’t get more than a couple sentences out without spilling my spaghetti. Not just with her obviously, with practically anyone even other guys. I’m saying that because the whole spaghetti meme is usually really only associated with an object of one’s affection, oneitis I suppose. Not that this woman is unattractive, although she is quite a lot older than I am, in fact I think she’s rather aware of how pretty and pleasant to be around men find her given some things I’ve heard her say before. Which is exactly my problem, I can’t help but think that when you’re a good looking woman and have been hit on by countless men since your late teens you must become a bit jaded. Any expression of genuine affection or appreciation from a guy (particularly a younger one) that isn’t an attempt to get something, that isn’t anything other than just a “thanks for what you did for me”, will not seem so. It will appear to be just more of the same, just more empty male words to get in your pants.

It’s back to the whole “nice guys” meme again, you know this idea that “nice guys” aren’t actually nice they’re just trying to get you to sleep with them but in a sneaky way. It’s easy to dismiss those people at first, after all you know you’re actually genuinely nice right? and you know truly internally, you understand your own motivations and they’re not just to “get laid” or whatever a few harpies with the thousand cock stare have to say. Then the self doubt creeps in, all that evo psych stuff you’ve been surrounded by. What if it is all some strategy you’ve adopted without even being consciously aware of it. Is everything I say and everything I think, not actually what I say and think truly but entirely at the whim of the animal I inhabit’s needs and urges? Is free will, true choice, an illusion. Now I’m starting to get into the hard determinism thing, which I have also been thinking about a lot lately after a really fascinating thread on /lit/ but I do plan to make an entirely separate post for that subject so I’m going to steer clear now.

I know that last time when I left the note for the other girl who left I felt bad after, I kind of regret it now and instead wish I hadn’t done it. The reason though is because I regret having feelings for her at all, because between thinking about how little I really knew her and understanding the way desperate people can delude themselves I realised that my thoughts were kind of “not my own”, which as I was just talking about is something that I spend a lot of time thinking about and being concerned by. This case is kind of different, even with the weird evo-psych ideas about secret unconscious mating strategies it doesn’t matter, because consciously I know I’m not trying anything with this woman. I’ve never had any kind of fantasy, or daydream, like I would have fairly often about oneitis girl. I’m so conflicted, I know it seems so stupid that I’m almost having a crisis over this crap but it’s really kind of more a catalyst if you think about it.

Here’s the situation, I’ve had a couple days to think now. This entire post other than going forward of course was written primarily in one evening, kind of rushed over a few intense hours and now I’ve had a couple of days my head is a little clearer. I stopped writing that letter, but I think I will finish it. I don’t think that I will be giving it to her though, and I will explain. Tonight there’s a gathering/ social thing and the entire team is going to a restaurant and the pub. There was a group card and we all had to leave a short note goodbye there. I didn’t get to say everything I feel I’d like to, but after that and also the goodbye messages in the group text chat anything else would start to feel a little cloying and excessive I feel. Which is exactly the opposite of what I want, see I’ve had time to think and I realised that I was more doing this for me than for her.

I was thinking about it and I realised that I was being kind of reductive by assuming the only desirable role that women can play in a male’s life would be that of a romantic/ sexual partner. See my thinking was that even though I feel quite sad about this woman leaving, because I don’t see her that way, the warm feelings I have for her are something “pure” or “true” or dare I say it “platonic”. Then I remembered what I’ve spoken about before, that maybe because my mother passed away I’m looking for a mother figure almost as a replacement or at the very least to kind of fill that missing need, and that maternal role may be how I’ve been seeing this woman. As I did with that other woman who trained me and then was fired right after I started. Now on the one hand this is quite helpful, it would mean that I’m not secretly and unconsciously trying to long game my way into getting laid which would kind of make me disgusted with myself. On the other hand though it still means that my feelings are conditional on biological or at least psychological needs, so I’m still to a degree not in full control of my thoughts if this is an accurate way of seeing things.

Anyway, whatever is the case I cannot know what other people will think, and I care a great deal about what other people think of me. I don’t have any good reason to assume that were I to write such a letter, this woman would give even half as much thought to these things as I have. It’s very possible that she’d just assume I did secretly have feelings for her all along, I mean I have good reason to think this because of something she said at the last social event. The topic of tips came up, we leave a tip jar at the front of the counter. Now most of the time people just drop change loose change in there they don’t want to keep, and an actual larger tip is less common. So we were talking about those larger tips, I don’t remember exactly why, and she said something about how it’s “usually men”. This is the problem I face, I remember these little comments people make that usually go ignored and I read into them maybe more than I should but I can’t help it.

So, if I leave this letter and that is the assumption made about me then her last impression of me will be forever tarnished, any positive memory of me will be stained by this idea that all along I had some ulterior motive. If she has a similar way of seeing things as I do, and she thinks I’m just a kid looking for a mother figure, she probably would be more understanding at least. Nevertheless that is still an imposition, I’m putting her in a role that she never wanted to be in. This is an adult with a life of her own, I’ve developed some kind of warmth for her because I have very few people in my life and most people in my situation wouldn’t have. It is certainly inappropriate either way, and while at least it would be accurate to be remembered this way it would still be unfortunate. So it’s a 1/3 chance that I’m remembered as… idk a sleaze? or maybe more accurately a failed one (either of which are completely absurd if you know anything about me), a 1/3 chance that I’ll be remembered as a developmentally stunted weakling, and a 1/3 chance that I’ll be remembered fondly without any baggage placed on top..

Wait, no that’ll never happen not in this culture. Outside of maybe certain reactionary circles I don’t think anyone believes there are pure intentions anymore, in fact I think even those people are just pretending to themselves as well. So it’s more like 50/50, and I’m not sure I’m willing to take those odds, when it comes to something like how I’ll be remembered, which as I said is incredibly important to me. Like I said I do still plan to finish this letter, so I haven’t made my mind up 100% yet. I suppose that my decision rests on the answer to one more question, if I don’t leave the letter what will be the impression of me that is left with her? Will I even be remembered. or is this just another person quickly drifting through my life with me as a brief distraction?

A change of pace

I haven’t been on the ball at all lately, I’ve really fallen behind and I’m not quite sure why. Nothing has really happened, in fact I’m actually quite motivated at the moment, but I’m just not doing anything about it. I started my last post, thinking it was something novel and interesting, but while working on it I lost faith in the whole idea. Now this is only a part of it, because I also just became less engaged because the idea was not as good as I originally thought, but I’d say that not having a single visitor for around two weeks might have affected my losing interest. I don’t like that it bothers me so much, and that it’s becoming something I seem to whine about so often, but it certainly is interesting that when my posts are well received (or actually more importantly, just often received) I find it easier to write and I write better. Not that I’m saying I ever write well, I don’t think I do, but what I write is better I mean.

So that post was one of the longest to finish of all of the ones I’ve uploaded, and partly this was because I took a break for about three or four days and didn’t even look at the blog at all. Instead, I’ve been trying to read more, for those few days I read for a good few hours each. The book I was reading was Herodotus’ The Histories, which I bought a copy of (Translated by Robin Waterfield) a long while ago, but dropped it about half of the way in and I didn’t pick it back up until last week. Funnily enough, the second half is quite different and much more focused than the first. So I’ve found it a lot easier to stick with it. The winding first half which follows the first three Persian kings as they build their empire, veering off into various fantastical stories from the many places they conquered, is interesting sure but it also drags in places. I’ve just found, surprisingly, that the story of the invasions of Greece by Darius and later Xerxes was much more engaging.

Anyway, I’ve also been spending a lot of time on /lit/, which is not my usual board at all. I’ve spent more time there this last week than the sum total of time spent during all my other visits. I did originally just go to check the sticky, because I know they have that start with the greeks chart and reading what I was and the fact that I’ve been reminded of when I read The Republic (and probably barely understood it) a few times over the last couple of months I thought maybe now is the time. I ended up just sticking around though, and enjoying it quite a lot. It might sound strange, but I quite liked that there were conversations that I felt unqualified to join in with. Feeling out of my depth almost, it inspires me to read and learn so that I will be able to keep up with the discussion some time in the future. So, over this week I said to myself I would do exactly that.

I’ve mostly stuck to it so far, I’ve definitely spent at least some time reading (even if only half an hour some days) every day since that period of a few days where I finished The Histories. I’ve had to make do with this book I got as a present years ago and never gave a read, The Crying Of Lot 49, it’s awful if I’m being honest but pretty short and it’s something to read until my copy of Thucydides’ History of The Peloponnesian War arrives. That’s the next book I’ve ordered, and I’m not listing all these off just to flex on whoever is reading this so I hope it doesn’t seem that way. Honestly it might sound rather impressive hearing all these ancient greek names, but the books I’m reading are famously written in simple language. Herodotus’ writing is a common choice for people trying to learn to read ancient greek because it’s so clear and easy to grasp, and I’m just reading a translation into English. I do have a MEGA link to all the works attributed to Plato though, which actually is pretty fucking intimidating, and if I get through all of that and actually understand it well then I think I’d have a reason to be somewhat impressed with myself.

So because of all of this, and because I’ve kind of been finding it harder and harder to consistently write a good post every single week, I’ve decided to upload more irregularly. I’ll still try to consistently be writing, so at any one time there’ll be a post I’m working on, but I just don’t want to have this deadline hanging over my head. Instead of feeling I need to rush to finish a post that I’ve been having more trouble with, I’ll just keep working on it longer. It seems to me, that I’ve established myself now on here, I don’t really see anything changing where I’ll suddenly experience any kind of significant audience growth. I might gain a new regular reader every couple months, but I also lose one as well. What I’ve realised, after this most recent long gap without any visitors, is that those few of you who have stuck around this far don’t even want to read a new post of mine every single week, but you probably will check back in eventually. There should be something new, most of the time. In fact it’s already been a week since the mess I uploaded last week, and I doubt I’ll be able to finish this today as I’m working until 22:30 tonight and going in soon.

Another good thing that should result from this is there’ll be no more of these shitty update/ filler posts, like this one. It’s hard to really tell what you few regular long term readers like, but I know that the only “likes” I get from one off visitors are on the posts where I talk about ideas rather than whining about my own life. I mean, I talk about my life and things that happen to me in those posts also sometimes, but it’s a case of me using observations, memories, or dreams as a jumping off point to talk about something more… cerebral I suppose (is that a pretentious thing to say) rather than writing a post about those things themselves. I also prefer those, as even though it is sometimes satisfying to just use this blog as a diary none of the posts I’m really proud of are those kind. There’s this kind of non-story of my life which one might pick up if they were to read through everything I’ve uploaded here, and there’s these one off vignettes which while they also build on one another could be understood without any context.

Well that’s not entirely true, I do write my posts with some kind of prior assumptions about the world settled already. The problem is, I hate talking about something that has been done to death, for the same reason I very rarely watch a film more than once. It’s easy to forget that what a lot of the ideas that I talk about here are built on top of isn’t actually accepted by most normalfags. I’ve spent so many years of my adolescence on 4chan and so on that I forget how different my perspective was before, and how differently I see the world. I’m not the only one who does this, nowadays (and ironically I’m about to state something that is exactly what I hate, an opinion we’ve all heard hundreds of times that is always presented as a new or fresh perspective) it is true that a lot of people, at least online, are stuck in echo chambers. So because of only talking to likeminded people all the time, all the assumptions and nuances of their underlying worldview don’t even come up when they start expressing ideas of their own.

Not that that means anything, even if the whole world is doing things the wrong way it doesn’t mean you should too. I’m not sure that it is “the wrong thing to do” though, in this case. I mean maybe it’s another factor preventing me from gaining more readers, and that’s a shame, but what can I do about it? I’m not making any money or getting anything out of this, other than the very enjoyment of writing and expressing my ideas. If you just want to hear people express ideas you already hold there’s thousands of blogs, and youtube channels and online magazines that will cater to that demand. This ties back into the main point of this post, why I’m going to drop the weekly schedule thing. I’m doing this for fun, I don’t see the point in holding myself to this arbitrary standard that only adds stress to my life when the whole point of the blog is to wind down and/ or vent about things in order to lessen some of the stress I have. So, I’ll be uploading less often but not a great deal less. Other than that, not much else should change.