yungdeleuze

I never felt good about my aesthetic preference as a child. I always thought other people’s creative expression was better than mine, so I stopped trying. Eventually, I became “creative” by rebelling against the religion I was raised with.

Ever since, I’ve clothed myself in a spiritual materialism based upon a pressing desire to figure out a perfect goal to shoot for so that I could calm down and focus on living. I had figured out how to execute tasks and be a useful engineer in my teens, so I rode the momentum.

I wouldn’t stop searching until I was sure that I was right. I got better and better with philosophical word games, ever more complex.

I didn’t allow myself to grow too attached to my own personality, because I wanted as little baggage as possible as I continually constructed and reconstructed my ways of thinking and being.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_materialism …

I had a mathematics college professor who taught a small class part-time at my elementary school. He taught me to approximate and how to think about hard problems. If someone asks a question about mathematics and you don’t know the answer, the best guesses are: 0,1,infinite

For a long time, I subscribed to the Buddhist notion that one’s ego should be annihilated: 0. In the spring, I tried Nietzsche’s idea that ego should be maximized: infinite. Now, I’ve realized that ego is not harmful if it resides in the proper place: 1.