Conversation

No matter what the challenge or environment, I've found that basically the only way to tackle it in a generative way is to come at it with an attitude of abundance. There must be some X factor you're willing to simply waste in responding to the challenge.
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Time is the most powerful X factor to be able to waste, followed by money. But many other factors can be be X, depending on the situation. Marketing reach is a surprisingly good one. If you treat it as a scarce resource, it will act scarce. Shitposting creates reach abundance.
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Waste time Waste money Waste reach Waste compute cycles Waste paper Waste space (hard unless you have a mansion) Waste literal energy
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I have long suspected a deep physics to the capacity to waste. Waste is some resource going brrr. The reason the meme works as a joke is that money printer going brrr is not actually waste. You're rapidly locking up the economic future with inflation and debt.
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But there really are things that go brrr and create the very abundance assumed in their unleashing. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. Network effects are generally things of this sort. When you see a network effect, ask, what is being wasted generatively here?
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Work shaped by abundance usually looks mediocre, rough-edged, and unfinished. Work shaped by scarcity looks excellent, polished, and finished. The presence of profligacy in the making of a thing throws it off balance aesthetically but removes fragility.
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When some input factor X is being wasted the optimization of the whole becomes impossible. When diminishing marginal returns to more X are ignored, it is the underlying idea of value that breaks, not the drive of X to new regimes through passages of over-development to absurdity.
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Work shaped by abundance can only be beautiful in partial aspects. It resists notions of beauty applied to the gestalt because it is defined as much by the unseen potentiality being wasted as by its present embodied form.
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Scarcity is usually understood as limits on the availability of a specific thing, but is better understood as the absence of some vector of abundance. It doesn’t matter what you have less of than you’d like, so long as you have an effectively infinite supply of one thing.
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There is something deeply transformative about being able to tap into a potentiality that replenishes itself faster than you can expend it, no matter how hard you try. When you’re going brrr on X, everything not-X is distorted into insignificance, including specific scarcities.
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It’s not that scarcities stop hurting. It’s just that “I don’t have enough money” looks very different when (say) poetry or code is just brrrring out of you than if nothing is going brrrr for you. It doesn’t even have to be good. Just come from some illegible place of abundance.
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Scarcity as in insufficiency of a thing is just ordinary hunger. It can be satiated. Scarcity as in absence of abundance is existential hunger. It often becomes displaced into an insatiable hunger for certain things — money and status being the big ones. But that doesn’t work.
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If money or recognition is an ordinary hunger for you, at some point you’ll have enough to be bored by it and move on. But if it’s an existential hunger you’ll go insane chasing it. Because the void you’re trying to fill can only be filled by something going brrr inside you.
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Existential hunger is a debilitating thing because it comes from a place of deep fear. Going brrr isn’t too hard. It’s too easy. But most are afraid to do it because it means accepting being truly alive in a way that implicitly acknowledges inevitability of death in the future.
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Going brrr is just shitposting as a way of life. You just lower some standard around something you enjoy to the point that some invisible restraint inside snaps and you go brrr. It really isn’t hard. At all. The only limit on it is physical energy and the need to eat/sleep.
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Interestingly often the restraint/standard has to do with a typical existential-hunger displacement focus like money or status. “This is beneath me” “I am worth too much to give this away from free” “I can’t post writing that is this embarrassingly bad relative to Hemingway”
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People trying to fill a void created by an absence of brrr via insatiable displacement are trying to fill a bottomless well by pouring fuel on an unrelated fire over there. It’s a mismatch they can’t see at some deep level. And it makes them miserable, resentful, and exhausting.
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I’m not helpful or nurturing type, but I can help/nurture people through almost any problem if I care enough about them. Not this one though. I have uniformly failed to help people lacking brrr in their lives, lacking an inner abundance. It’s like they’re in a place I can’t reach
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If you’ve figured out your inner brrr, I can probably help you with almost any other problem at least a little bit, no matter how hard. But if you lack the brrr, no matter how much you have going for you in every other way — talent, resources, whatever — I can’t help you.
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It’s not just me. I think people lacking a brrrr are kinda beyond all help from others and are the loneliest people in the world. Because brrrr is how we appear in the world as individuals and connect with others. Without brrr you can’t be seen, no matter how hard you try.
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I have seen one thing kinda-sorta work though. If you build walls around yourself, like tribal ingroup ot whatever, you can get a sort of ersatz brrrr going. It’s like locking out the infinite expanse of the universe so you inhabit only a finite subset unlocks inner infinitude.
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That wall though has to be kinda absolute, conceptually and in practice, like an event horizon. You really do have to irreversibly shout out all but a whitelisted part of reality. If it breaks in, you must resist and turn it back like it’s the forces of hell.
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Haven’t yet worked out the mechanism. And anyway it doesn’t work well. It keeps breaking down. The walled-in pseudo-brrr is not robust. So the bad9c problem remains unsolved. This is more palliative than solution. But it’s better than displacement into inexhaustible hungers.
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This whole phenomenon makes me sad. Wish there was a way to reliably teach the discovery of inner abundance. I don’t think there is. It’s a lemon market of pretenders.
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