there were so many things i had to untangle here which is why i had to write for so long. one reason this had been hard to think clearly about is that "i have too much money and too many options for how to make more" didn't seem like a sympathetic problem to have
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my parents paid something like $175,000 of tuition to MIT out of pocket because they wanted me to have a good education and a good life. they were paying for all of my living expenses in both college and grad school. i never talked about this with anyone, really
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i had friends in college who would complain about money problems and i didn't know what they meant and was too embarrassed to ask. when they said they couldn't afford X i didn't know if they meant "that's not in my budget" or "i don't have the dollars in my bank account"
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i recognize that i'm speaking from a position of extreme privilege here but this wasn't all upside. my parents took care of me materially at the expense of taking care of me emotionally. it took me until this trip to even kinda experience the money they spent as an act of care
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acidQC said - the rest of these have been paraphrases but this one is a direct quote:
"your parents created a world for you where the most real thing was how they felt about you. they successfully used money to make everything else less real by protecting you from it"
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and like i kinda get why they did that but it led to me being incredibly sheltered in a bunch of ways. they never even made me do chores. i was very spoiled and in retrospect it wasn't good for me
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anyway i could keep going a lot of stuff came up but i feel like i successfully resolved a big confusion that was preventing me from making progress on my life and that feels nice. i feel like i am a little bit more confronting the "actual stakes" wrt money
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the stakes are that the less money i make the harder it'll be for my parents to retire. my dad literally told me that. he said he was holding off on retiring because he was worried about me
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a few days later i wrote:
"this was never like... this was never a one-player game, it was always a multi-player game and i spawned already in a guild containing my parents who had already been playing for 30 years"
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the other stakes are about dignity. acidQC said "you need dignity much more than you need money" and that sort of blew me away a little. like... shit
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like when i explain my current life circumstances to myself in a matter-of-fact way it does not look good. i literally have no job, no gf, no friends (in the sense of people i interact with irl regularly), no community, no mission, no purpose, no team, no religion...
anyway in conclusion i asked acidQC what i should do with my life and he said "literally just keep writing" and "you're literally allowed to just keep writing you literally don't have to have a plan for how the rest of your life goes that's any more detailed than that"
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oh, also, the *medium* dose of acid was incredibly important. some of the most meaningful experiences of my life happened on 100+ ug of acid and/but those experiences were really walled off from my sober life and interpolating between them with an intermediate dose was amazing
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lol
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I just found out Henry David Thoreau’s mother brought him a sandwich every day and washed his clothes for him while he was writing Walden.
That changes things a bit doesn’t it.
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you are blessed (by your circumstances) have the freedom to do whatever you want to do (which is write, apparently?), and for many, many people, that freedom is the only thing they truly want.
you get to decide your mission, choose your own purpose. Winner.
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look people think they want it but i'm here to tell you that freedom sucks and i want less of it
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Live without the safety net.
Get a camper van or live homeless broaden your perspectives.
If that is too radical for you rent a room and live with roommates from a different background if nothing else it is semi-forced socialization and maybe community.
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Easy for this to happen. Trying to meet new people / make new friends might help. It takes effort / is work sometimes but it’s worth it! Good luck!
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It's not easy. I made friends easily as a child because innocence had no inhibitions. As an adult, prejudice comes to the fore. You don't know if people like you for you or for what you have in your bank account.
I've got next to nothing in my bank but I totally get QC.
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If you break away from your parents' lifeline all those things are waiting. Everything that's real is on the other side of their money. Decline the support, find work you can apply your MIT degree to, and meet the rest of the world where it is. It's not as bad as you think.
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