I don’t know what motivates people besides pettiness and resentment
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I think this is basically wrong. If you know what motivates you, you will generally find other media to express yourself, not blogging. Like Twitter. Blogging tends to clarify very illegible motives into less illegible ones.
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By "blogging" I mean specifically something like the meaningness project, your "gonzo density", manifesto-building etc.
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Yeah, chip-on-shoulder is not very workable for that. It can power things like standup, music, entrepreneurship, polemic, journalism, etc. Taleb is a rare longform resentment/spite guy.
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Entrepreneurship/polemic/journalism is roughly the exact combo I'm going for. Good disentanglement.
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Except in the rare cases of actual Count of Monte Cristo style actual revenge against people who provoked the resentment/spite, the emotion is generally an instant-gratification one, like scratching an itch, not an anticipation-based one in striatum circuitry
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We should deconstruct "resentment". I mean something like "desire to fight", which seems heart of all writing/shakering.
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Desire to fight can come from other sources, like the sheer joy of exercising your skill at it against a competent rival. Or basic survival.
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I don't have enough "theories of war" to know full difference between basic survival & narcissistic head-game.
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But I do feel my country (America) is dying and I want to "save" it somehow. (giving you my own worst strawman of me)
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Yeah that's a toughie. I don't think anybody has a motivation problem with that particular goal. It's just a very, very hard goal. Like getting to Mars. Remember V 1.0 of the idea of America took a bunch of people going on perilous land/sea journeys. V2.0 was a bloody civil war
Happy to talk more if you care, but I suspect you're more on -level human interest beat & don't care at all :)
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Yeah, I'm an unrepentant cosmopolitan globalist. "Saving" particular national or identity narratives makes me yawn as a mission.
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