Conversation

The world makes it easy for you to believe in your own specialness, but incredibly hard for you to truly discover your own ordinariness. A side effect of specialization under modernity is that everybody gets fractionally distilled from birth to "special" by age 21 or so.
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This doesn't mean exceptional or remarkable. If you took the median outcome from every sorting process: B-average student who ends up in vocational training and the most common kind of job has *still* been sorted into "specialness" by being "chosen" in stages for something.
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The center of the bell curve of humanity is *incredibly* finely grained, sorted, graded, and classified into tiny cells where each person can feel a sense of industrial predestination and chosenness.
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To get in touch with your own non-specialness on the other hand is a shit ton of work. You have to deconvolve your life stream from the defaults and statistical filters that have been setting you up for various choices/being chosen throughout your journey to specialness.
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For eg, I was selected for being "smart" at 3-4 crucial junctures between 0-24 (being selected into schools, testing well) and it took a long time to figure out what exactly had set me up for passing those filters, and how to think about people who went down other filter chains
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My view of myself as "special" on the smart vector probably peaked at 18, but to climb down the hill on the other side, I had to make sense of all the vectors where I'd failed filter tests at various stages and been marked not-special (eg. athletic ability or musical talent)
Replying to
School is at least a legible part of everybody's story (including being home schooled or unschooled or not having good schooling opportunities at all). But everything works this way: caste/class membership, wealth at birth, geography, linguistic environment, cultural programming
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The entire damn environment of human life is nothing but filters. It's filters all the way in every direction. Up, down, sideways. Even crashing through on "failure" paths is a series of filter tests (you just swap out SAT testing on the way up for means-testing on the way down)
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The big secret they don't let you in on easily is that the more you connect to your ordinary side, the more weird-mediocre superpowers you unleash. Haven't yet fully formulated this thought yet, so don't bug me for examples rn.
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You are probably "ordinary" like me when it comes to going splat if you jump off a roof. Yet you're rarely aware of the ordinariness there. You are rarely reminded that you are NOT an Olympic athlete or a circus performer who could parkour around safely where you'd go splat
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99% of who you are is made up of such ordinary ways of being. If you choose to attend in some ways to those aspects of being too, your relationship with yourself starts to change. It's like growing roots into the soil of your own being, previously rejected as "not me"
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You don't have to invest in those aspects or sort yourself into "strengths" and "weaknesses" and shape yourself (eg: focus on strengths, mitigate weaknesses or the reverse to become "well-rounded"). But being aware of ordinary bits is an interesting thing to do.
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It's like a superstring theory view of yourself. Your "special" self is like the unwrapped 3 dimensions. The rest is like those 7 or 8 extra curled up dimensions. Degeneracies in the possibility metaverse of you :D
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I'm not exactly sure why I'm down this bunnytrail (it's related to, but not the same as, the mediocrity bunnytrail). Ordinariness is more basic. Seeking it reveals a completist attitude to the territory of being. Something like trying to perversely visit every lighthouse in US
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Ordinariness is the Big Data view of yourself. It’s all in scope. Another example: we view relationships through the lens of “special” aspects. But an ordinary view of a relationship is simply “all the time spent entangled together”. Not just the highlights reel of specialness
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