The grain

With life experience comes knowledge and with that knowledge a certain fatigue and even cynicism. We see things coming a mile away because pattern recognition has become part of our arsenal. 

We encounter archetypes we know how to deal with much better and know if we need to avoid them. 

It's as if we want to conserve energy and save it for the best experiences knowing that the majority of our lives are behind us. It is here where wisdom serves its purpose. 

We no longer want to take on someone else's drama because we may have already done the hard work to get us to a balance point. No matter how imperfect it may be. 

We find small talk fatiguing and irrelevant because we want to get to some grain of relevant truth we have yet to discover about ourselves and our world before our time here is up.

Schopenhauer was right

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer thought it pointless to argue with stupid people. Instead he suggested that we observe them almost mechanically and with some amusement. We should allow them their logical fallacies and not become angry with them. 

I am working on this in the age of Trumpism where the full array of human idiocy is on display. 

Most people aren't malicious but instead combine ignorance with obtuseness and disinterest. They are unable to connect the dots that get them where they are in life and only later wake up when they have been impacted by the incoming train of calamity. Their lack of curiosity is their Achilles heel. 

It was gas prices that finally got to some of the cult members. The misogyny, the racism, the cruelty seemed to suit them just fine and I saw the evidence with callers of political phone-in shows where their dim-witted bravado was on full display. The Dunning-Kruger effect is very much alive and well. 

If I don't temper my disdain for the stupid I won't have a calm remainder of my life and so I work on taking the advice of Schopenhauer and add a pinch of empathy for good measure. 

The old world order is over and the next few years will be volatile and messy. So I better buckle in and take long deep breaths in the process.

I think I'll end things here

I think I'll end things here. 

For quite some time now, writing became a daily habit and not a need. In 2012, when I first dipped my toe into the public online sphere, it was essential that I wrote about a lifelong dilemma I didn't know how to adequately grapple with. 

Today, at 62, I understand myself and the world much better than I ever have but even then no life is perfect. The world I was born into in 1962 was a very different place and yet the core motivations of people have stayed exactly the same because those fundamental human yearnings never change. 

To become your authentic self you need to stop being constantly afraid and carefully examine what holds you back and why. You need to question ideas about yourself that you accepted as gospel truth and allow for a forging of new paths which eschew complacency. 

Saying "this is just the way my life is" is not going to help us grow nor is sticking with the herd because we are afraid of being singled out. We don't mature fully while cowering in fear. Taking your own path is certainly not the easiest thing to do but it is ultimately always the most fulfilling.

Something I should have learned much sooner in life regarding people accepting your personal identity is this: good people who truly matter shouldn't care and those who do care don't matter. Also, I have regrettably learned in spades that the fundamental difference between human genius and stupidity is that only genius has its limitations.

Live your life and do so as honestly as possible.

Goals

Everyone wants to be both understood and loved for who they are; not necessarily warts and all. 

I spoke to my son today and he read me a passage from his personal journal which impressed me as it was so well written. It was the same type of angst many of us have when we don't feel we quite fit in and want to get to a better place. 

Whether we are autistic or gender dysphoric or have some other aspect of ourselves that requires effort, we all have the same basic goals underneath it all. 

We want to truly live instead of just exist.

I'm not buying

I'm too old to get fooled. 

The host of the Metaphor of Gender Channel is a Blanchard disciple and critical who is trying to remake her image by painting a softer and kinder version of her ideas. 

Fortunately I did my homework and saw her appearances on toxic channels where the same old poison was being peddled. 

Where I agree with her is that not everyone should or needs to medically transition and that much thought needs to be put into this type of decision. Where we disagree is in painting transgender people as creatures of dysfunction who need to be saved from themselves. 

Which is to say, that doesn't mean that no one should transition. 

Gender critical philosophy is about transgender people as predatory inconvenience to society and the place of women being usurped (they have less trouble with transgender men of course). Helen Joyce is the archetypal critical. 

Thankfully the traffic to the channel is tiny and she isn't going to gain many converts. However if she does manage to convince some youth to think carefully before leaping then I suppose that's something.

The work never stops

Living life successfully is a learned experience. It doesn't come automatically because so much of what we are exposed to is unnecessary drivel except we do not know it at the time. 

We eventually learn to recognize what feeds into our essence and well-being and what detracts from it but often through harsh lessons which aren't wasted if we have emerged from them with deeper insight. 

Some people say they would like to go back to some part of their life and relive it with greater appreciation that they didn't possess at the time. I don't share that yearning but instead look back at my experiences as a road I needed to follow to get here which isn't perfection.

My father used to say that life begins at 40 and he was correct. By then you have developed some skills and some basic defenses which get you through the rest. 

The work never stopping until our time here is done.

How to respond to societal collapse

Morality is not a buffet

Touche....

Careful with using only one paintbrush

Because gender dysphoria cannot be perfectly decoupled from sexuality things can become confusing when faced with life strategies to deal with the incongruence. 

Sexuality can be a driver but also form part of a larger portrait which is why we need to tread carefully when considering what to do. The reality is that since all human beings have a sexual component to them, we cannot analyze ourselves in isolation from it. 

People who have tried to turn gender variance into pathology (like Blanchard) used a single paintbrush approach which ended up making their theorizing convoluted since outcomes were not consistent with their postulating. Some people were quite happily transitioned because they had resolved a disconnect while others sometimes mistook a sexual motivation for a need to transition and then later faced regret. 

This is why getting to the underlying root of our dysphoria becomes pivotal. If the gender disconnect existed well before puberty and persists without interruption until it is treated, this type of person will have a better outcome with some form of transition. 

However, if there is no history of dysphoria to speak of prior to establishing a pattern of cross gender expression, then this person is more likely to regret some form of medical intervention.

This is one of the reasons for us to avoid self-labeling until we understand ourselves better.

World press photo of the year

The portrait, taken by Palestinian photographer Samar Abu Elouf for the New York Times, shows nine-year-old Mahmoud Ajjour, who lost both arms in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City in March 2024.

Abu Elouf, who was evacuated from Gaza in late 2023, lives in the same apartment complex as Mahmoud in Doha, Qatar.

The 25th

Illinois governor Jay Pritzker says it's time for the 25th amendment and he is right. If Brazil's former president Bolsonaro got 27 years in prison for organizing a coup, Trump was instead rewarded with a 2nd term in his own country which has turned out to be an unmitigated disaster.

Next year will mark 250 years since the American Republic was established and the man who is easily the worst and most frighteningly stupid person to ever lead the country, has no business being there because he is a national embarrassment. 

When the founding fathers set up their republic they arranged for an electoral college because they feared the general public couldn't be trusted to vote intelligently and they weren't wrong but then when your nation is in the right place there are usually enough voters to counter balance the clueless. 

Even as bad as things currently are in America, only a plurality and not a majority took a risk on Trump whose poll numbers are in the basement for good reason.

40% of people don't have 500 dollars to spare for an emergency which, for the supposedly richest country in the world, is a seriously fucked up statistic.

Maybe that should be a priority for another president who isn't a malevolent dipshit.