I created this blog to help me sort out some thoughts about the thing I’m starting (placeholder name: The Human Ant Colony.) As such, the blog is intended as a service to myself. Practically speaking, that makes this site a part of my therapy. I deleted the two previous threads because they were not serving me. I struggle with hopelessness and that conversation made me feel pretty damn hopeless.

The defining incidents of my life have all revolved around my personal insufficiency. I’ve become someone who is driven to be “good enough,” and who is terrified of falling short. Until recently, I’ve been able to deal with that pressure by improving myself, but the metaphorical bar raises faster than my skill at jumping over it, and so, it seems hopeless that I will ever satisfy my own desire for performance.

The problems I choose to notice grow more urgent and more serious with time, and I am just one person. And I hate myself for being one person. For not having the vast empire and limitless resources with which to solve the problems available to me. Words fail to express the exact nature of the discord within myself. I want to be so much more than I am capable of.

To say that I am working on forgiving myself is grossly inaccurate, but I can’t think of a better phrase. Precision in language here is crucial: I am a meaning-making machine, and everything going on with me lives inside of language. The fact that I haven’t yet described it with words is a sure sign that I don’t understand it adequately, and that’s a problem. So this is becoming a focus of my meditation. The problem I’m working on is how I can relate to myself as I actually am, regardless of how I wish I were, or how I hope to become in time; and, reclaiming the part of my life that has been spent on depression due to this defective self-relationship.

Some thoughts:

There’s nothing about you that can’t be explained through your body and your mind, and your mind is just a word to represent the unique and quirky network that your brain creates. A “spirit” or “soul” is totally unnecessary to understand you.

The proper distinction between your body and your mind is that your mind is a meaning making machine (that is to say, a machine that makes things mean things), while your body is a meaning making machine making machine making machine (that is to say, a machine for making machines that make meaning making machines.)

I hope that clears up some confusion.

The Location of Meaning is becoming a more pressing topic that I must write about soon.

There’s a great quote by Albert Einstein: “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” My problem is that humanity is collectively deciding that it would rather divide and separate along ideological lines than reconcile and communicate, and that doesn’t work for me. It’s a problem that I think most everyone has long since given up on. I’m not OK with that. I’m staying with the problem. I think it’s worth solving.