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.

1 is a number that is meaningless on its own, as all numbers exist solely through their relation to each other and the ways they can be manipulated. So what is the ego, 1, in relation to?