Sometimes it feels weird to choose. How 'serious' to take things. Seriousness is associated with a lot of "bad" things for me. War is serious, death is serious, suicide is serious. Isn't it better to make things less serious?
"but I don't want to take war seriously." "but see China! see how they're making all the iphones. it means they're planning on world domination!!" "but this app takes 4 clicks, if I make it 2, i'll have achieved a 50% reduction in ..."
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Every argument is basically "you're not taking the right things seriously!!!!" Which means that every argument has an Adult and a Child. When 2 Adults see the other as an Adult, no argument is possible.
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Arguments can be solved by taking nothing seriously and taking everything seriously. In theory, these 2 pure states are equivalent. Enlightened monk takes 100% of life seriously but also is a jokester/trickster.
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In practice few can wield these infinite states and arguments are resolved by creating large but bounded fields of seriousness and non-seriousness. E.g. "Play Hard Time" and "Work Hard Time"
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There's a flawed sort of anarchism that believes that destroying all structure and hierarchies of value will make it so that the non-seriousness field can become infinite. It's sorta right. The field of non-seriousness always sees itself bounded by the serious.
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The problem is that what it will do instead is create a huge field a seriousness when at every moment you have to worry about dying or getting your next meal. This is actually just Regular Nature. It's actually idyllic.
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Animals, because they are in the infinite states of taking 100% of their life seriously, actually end up taking 100% of their life unseriously. They are cute, happy, sad, tragic, heroic, etc... they are the full drama of life.
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Without achieving the 100% state, a 99% states of seriousness is actually a terrible state to be in if that 1% of non-seriousness is your "home". You'll feel surrounded by intense darkness and danger all the time because you can't inhabit serious space.
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No one can actually live in serious space as a home. It's possible in a limited capacity for young adults but they eventually can't keep up with the new young blood.
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(side thought: ageism isn't seen as a problem in tech b/c the current crop of programmers is too shortsighted to see how they themselves are headed towards this meat grinder. they don't think about the future much.)
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Not taking yourself seriously is a quick and dirty defense mechanism. "Haha you got me I was joking/I wasn't trying" If used too much, it disconnects you from seriousness. seriousness becomes like the feeling of jumping into a cold pool but x1000.
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Vs if you swim everyday eventually you reach a state where going serious just isn't a big deal. They have the energy to lead heroic lives.
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Seriousness always has good intent. Two serious people reading bad intent and arguing is always due to bad communication. They aren't "seeing" each other properly.
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Example. Racism is serious. They are always born of real life experience creating real scars. (Seriousness NEED scars). E.g. there are many people who are scared of black people b/c of actual life experiences.
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Their children don't have that experience. While the parent is just trying to be helpful. "Stay away from black neighborhoods." it's interpreted as a kind of non-serious "I'm just being a jerk." If you don't have the scar, you can't feel the "realness" of the seriousness.
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It's the ability to see these scars that allows us to see why people's souls move like they do with a limp and a shuffle. We see how they're damaged. That's why we don't disown them as Satan's Spawn. We see the link of love and see the intent.
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The scarred *always* see the non-scarred more clearly as softer and weaker and less wise. But... the non-scarred have a gift. They can see that the PTSD ghosts that haunt the scarred are NOT there. Their innocence allows them to banish demons.
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This is the reason many families have children. They want to birth Light into the world. The light that banishes their demons. This is THE gift children can give their parents. Banishing their demons.
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Yet most people don't do this. e.g. force watch a few youtube videos w/ your parents and you can banish or weaken their demons. but we'd rather have the easy crutch of hating them for yet another reason so we can go 'nah nah nah I was right.'
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Or better yet, live your life that indicates or outright say "I'm glad you two had me. This life thing is wonderful and I'm forever grateful to you."
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Yet most people would instead hate their parents. "Disown all racist people." "Hell yea! I just so happened to need a reason to hate my dad for not being there for me."
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Even the nicest will something self repressive like try not to hate them. or minimize communication to avoid triggers. or deal w/ them begrudgingly. Pretending to be happy is the big one.
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E.g. if you've had thoughts of "i wanna kill myself." but also don't want your parents to be sad b/c they might blame themselves, it's a form of hate. It's a form of hating that they see how far you've drifted that intimate communication is no longer possible.
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It's a love that's wrapped around hate which is just as bad as hate wrapped around love. It's just that the direction of the wickedness is projected inwards in a self destructive fashion rather than outwards towards the world.
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A peaceful world that has it's energy directed inwards presenting a smooth ball to the outside is not at all peaceful. It's a fake peace. There's tremendous internal tension that can easily flip it into a an exploding shrapnel mine.
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It's the explosive version of coming home and kicking the dog because your boss criticized you unfairly. It's a peace that *requires* a tyrant/bully figure arbitrarily enforces some standards in order to provide the pressure to direct these shadow projection spikes inwards.
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You can argue that a hierarchy built on mastery of mathematics is more useful than one built on big muscles or ability to juggle but they're fundamentally all arbitrary.
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E.g. ability to make money is the current largest one. Because it's correlated w/ many other skills like leading people, managing people, accurate numbers, etc... it's the value hierarchy that's produce the largest stable system.
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It's not Obviously a Good Thing because it assumes that large stable systems are good. It's implicit assumption is the same as All Under Heaven:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianxia
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Maybe if there were *no* countries that's be better? Maybe countries of size 1000, 10,0000, 1M, 2M? Producing One Giant Peaceful System has never been done. Even our best authors can't seem to write a fiction book about Utopia.
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Like, even pokemon is dystopian. Forcing your pets to fight other people's pets. The whole world is on a constant drip of ecstasy or something.
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