I Don't Want to *Talk* About It 1/2: Fragile Egocentrism

Disclaimer:

So relatively speaking, I've been on a tear on this blog, my most active since like the first I don't know, 7 years of blogging. There were periods of my life where I posted like once a day, I'd say the average dropped to like once a month and the accumulation of unfinished drafts...

Anyway, 'nobody likes a meta-blog' or something to that effect from nemesis John is ringing in my ears, but in my recent exuberance I may have assumed a kind of familiarity that doesn't exist or isn't earned and have been neglecting to properly flag or disclaim my own mental short-hands for concepts I'm grappling with.

Suchly, this post is no exception (nor are their exceptions) that I am some guy in terms of qualifications, and I am most often making shit up with no soundness, validity or rigour. Please keep that in mind, I mean sound and valid concepts like 'bullying' 'gaslighting' and 'narcissism' as determined through processes like research and field testing often get diluted and skunked anyway, and I don't anticipate any of my neologisms taking off, but I just wouldn't want it to start with me, writing confidently and impressing upon someone that I grasp something, when the reality is that I am only ever grasping often desperately for a hypothesis to go out and test myself, or that fits the facts of only the very narrow window of my experience.

Onto the meat.

Darwin's Gifted Children

I like Dr. Todd Grande's breakdowns of, most often, true crime cases that involve some psychological dysfunction on multiple parties accounts. This morning on my way to the shops I listened to a particularly grisly case involving the conviction of murder for a 9 year old child. I'm not going to link here, it is pretty bleak.

Its also the extreme example of how helpless we are as a species, even a society. The low hanging fruit of clinical psychology practitioners is to ask about a patient's parents and early childhood experiences. This in turn is a kind of social occupation that exists in a process whereby we allow eggs to fall off a shoot and regularly crack, then we have a job that slaps a band-aid on the cracks.

What I'm getting at, is basically it is unworkable to create something like a parenting-license, where humans are prohibited from having children until they can demonstrate a level of competence. Biology works against us as do our moral intuitions, I believe rightly, that don't want a state that dictates who can have children and when and how many and who with.

We also have access to this counterfactual in the very civilization and societies we live in that show that the impact of inept and incompetent parenting is not an existential threat to society. 

Here then, is not the brilliance of parents, (well maybe some), but the brilliance of children.

This is really the thesis of evergreen book "The Drama of the Gifted Child" that predates "gifted" as it is employed today to describe academic potential. The gift in this context is the way a child can adapt to the circumstances of its family, a process that produces drama in response to drama, a performative empty adult that has survived childhood by becoming who they need to be to survive their own parents, rather than become themselves.

As such, the book skews heavily to the gift of appeasement - a child recognises the conditional nature of their parents love, and the corresponding conditional nature of parental anxiety, and appeases the parents they rely on by becoming who their parents are comfortable with them being. Basic behaviorism or reinforcement.

But (and my memory is not good enough to recall if this is a specific example) there may be another response particularly for children whose parents neglect them that isn't appeasement (or self-neglect to go along with parental needs and thus get rewarded) and that is to become ego-centric, or simply adapt to neglectful (and perhaps even hostile) parenting by becoming parent to themselves.

This is what I'm positing, I'm speculating as a kind of fragile egocentrism. A brilliant, amazing, intuitive response a child can adapt in order to survive their childhood - physically, nutritionally, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, financially etc. any combination of those.

What I am picturing is a child who learns they cannot rely on their parents to fulfill their needs. They have to advocate for themselves, they have to "lean in" and hustle and grind. They have to hunt and gather resources.

This is a fucking amazing thing our biology is capable of. The kid that walks themselves to the library and entertains themselves on a rainy day afternoon. The kid that aportions to themselves a disproportion of teacher's attention because they need it like the other students don't.

It is also, hopefully obviously, a very tragic brilliant thing that we can do. There is a degree of moral-hazard in having this risk-smoothing biology that allows bad couplings to produce beautiful children. It means that what is naturally selected is gifted children, likely because for most of human history there just was no such thing as birth control, and what isn't selected for extinction is attachment theory where we gravitate toward partners who will replicate familiar suffering. That is where IMO we are stupidly, rather than brilliantly adapted.

What Got You Here Won't Get You There

This is the name of another book, I have it sitting around somewhere but not within my eyeline so I can't read the author and I've already expended as much energy typing this as the google search would have taken.

It's almost in that category of books you don't have to read because it is all in the title self-help like "feel the fear and do it anyway" and "He's Just Not that Into You" but not quite, you probably can get 90% of the value from a blurb so here's mine:

The book is about the diminishing returns of our innate strengths, and the Peter Principle which states that everyone will be promoted to their level of incompetence which has been robustly tested and is generally regarded to be real. Your career will stall when the thing that "got you here" begins to work against you preventing you from getting any further it won't "get you there."

So if your career has been based on speaking confidently and commanding attention, eventually you will rise to a level of responsibility where you need to become cautious, conscientious because the stakes are too high to just take big swing after big swing for example. Or if you've risen through the ranks because you produce high quality work thanks to your attention to detail and work ethic, you will eventually be promoted to a role where to scale up your strengths you need to become sociable, patient, understanding.

Okay so that's basically the book, and it has some advice and things you can do to get over this hump in a career, but the first step is to acknowledge the problem.

What I would guess is not unique to the child who has to remain egocentric to survive childhood and their family of origin, is that not just in work but all applications this begins to work against them in adulthood. 

The simple reason being, not everyone is their parents. Now if we take a longer term view of history, going back to the majority of human civilization which is like 6,000 years, so 10 seconds to midnight compared to human history, but when your parents were dirt farmers, and gave birth to you and your sixteen siblings, nine of whom died by age two, you grew up to be a dirt farmer working on your family plot so whatever adaptation you made to survive childhood among your extended family (nuclear families are a very recent thing) it probably largely applied to your adulthood too. So if you needed to be an egocentric child to glom onto a competent aunt or uncle and get some much needed resources off them where your parents came up short, likely nothing much changed by the time you were thirty and the previous generation were 43. 

Hence, its probably not natural to proactively reconfigure in the complex economy we now live in, where people hit 22, have largely not become parents themselves and are moving to a share house for the final 5 of 7 magical years it takes to complete a three year degree before your first warehouse job and moving back in with your parents. (Also very recent, it used to be possible to become an adult by 21 for most people within living memory)

Bringing me to the thing I'd rather shout into forgotten but not defunct web 1.0 than talk about with the people most effected by it - fragile egocentrism.

Why not "Vulnerable Narcissism"?

Because, despite their being a 'healthy narcissism' present in most functioning adults, an ability to see themselves as something of unique value and seek validation by asking for things, applying for things, generally advocating for themselves so they don't just wither and die in endless reflection about their own insignificance - Narcissism is a thing, and specifically that thing is a personality disorder so it has a highly negative valence - basically we think of villany, of abusers etc. these are the images evoked for me at least, when someone uses 'narcissism' 

Secondly, I'm in no position to diagnose or misdiagnose anyone with narcissism. It may well be that what I am talking about is completely overlapping with 'vulnerable narcissism' but I have no expertise with which I could determine that. 

So I want to break down specifically what I don't want to literally talk about:

Egocentrism

Here's how I usually explain it: say you want a romantic partner, or you want to fill a job position. So you create in essence an ad to say I'm available.

The challenge we face, that force us to think or suffer, is that people will swipe-to-match our dating profile that would make good partners, but also people who will make terrible partners. Both broad groups of people "want" to have a relationship with us, but one will punish us in fulfilling their wants, whereas the other will reward us in fulfilling their wants.

The one that punishes us, I assert, will likely be highly egocentric. They want to be seen with us, they want our attention, they want our validation, they want to fuck us. To be lowly egocentric, they will want to connect with us, they will want to learn us, they will want us to enjoy sex with them as they would enjoy sex with us. They want a reciprocal give-take win-win relationship where ideally the line between giving and receiving will be blurred.

Same-same with filling a job opening, you will have applicants that simply want the job because of the benefits it can accrue to themselves, they want the income, they want the title, they want access to a social life, they want to dispose the income on goods and services they also want...but they may have very little interest in doing the actual role and will make for a terrible employee. But there will be other candidates who may want all of the above, but also to do the role, to produce a good or service, to take pride in the work and form a mutually beneficial employment arrangement.

Again I am going to assert, that if investigated a reliable predictor of good and bad job applicants will be the level of their egocentricity.

Now again with John's words echoing in my mind "meta-blogging...meta-blogging...meta-blogging..." take this very post for example - I am thinking about my audience, choosing this medium because it is active, rather than passive, a party that might benefit has to read on and can quit at any time, it's also impersonal I'm not confronting someone with "I think what is holding you back is your egocentricity" I leave that self-evaluation up to the reader, whereas an egocentric approach to this subject would be to not only confront someone with my impression of them, but to do so because their egocentricity bothers me and me alone. 

I don't believe in purely selfless acts, I wouldn't go that far. I just actually see it as win-win if I can give someone a piece of information that can in someway, lessen their suffering and in doing so, my own is.

What I would wish to make painfully clear is that I don't feel it necessary, warranted or constructive to attribute malice to this egocentricity. I am trying to point to an incompetence, the same as having salad in one's teeth, a procedural step is often missing that others possess to the level of an unconscious-competence or 'instinct' or 'intuition' and I believe can be built by anyone with practice.

This brings me to...

Fragility

A vending machine technician is servicing a machine. A resident of the building is telling the technician her opinion of the policy that the machines do not issue change. 

This is a banal egocentric exchange. The complainer is just demonstrating an incompetence of insight - what I call outsight. Their opinion is very much egocentric - sometimes they don't have exact change, its a hassle for them. They either have to buy more than they want or go without, or go to extra effort to break notes into exact change. These are legitimate grievences based on legitimate preferences, but the technician occupies a position where she can politely write it up for the person, but very probably little else. They are not in a position to change the policy, nor may they understand the policy by which to offer explanation and apology to the complaining consumer. 

They likely have no clout.

Now this example I have adapted from a real world scenario, where the complainer also has the first-hand experience of doing cold calling on behalf of the government. A not uncommon scenario for them to face at work, was to have a member of the public relay a message for the then prime-minister. 

Here then enters the fragility. This person had a personal experience with which they could relate to a vending machine vendor. The idea that the leader of the government of a nation had an office in the corner of a call center, where we could go tap on their door and say "some guy asked me to tell you Prime Minister, that he thinks you're a cunt and not to call at dinner time and he isn't going to vote for you because you fucked up the whole country by letting all those immigrants in."

Then I feel, to de-centralise our ego from this experience and generalise it to a fellow human being and be like "oh yeah, as if the technician can walk into the board meeting and say 'some lady thinks your vending machines should be stocked with ample change because it would be more convenient for her and I guess we can just absorb the additional logistical expense, security expense and incidences of vandalism to deliver that level of convenience.' how foolish of me, that's so annoying, just like when random members of the public tell me to tell the Prime Minister or latest minister to appear in the papers with an expense scandal something."

Right it should be an "uh huh" moment, and not an existential threat, which is how I've had others report the effect of any mention of their egocentricity come across. Perhaps one of the most publicly documented examples is in the 2002 documentary "Comedian" (spoiler, the documentaries climax is Jerry Seinfeld meeting with Bill Cosby) the doco follows two comedians, one being Jerry as he retires his material and painstakingly builds up a new set, you know, you remember his new stuff. The other is Orny Adams, who is an up-and-coming comedy prospect. Orny appears in several scenes, notably an appearance in from memory, Toronto, where on stage he reacts (in 2002 Youtube was barely a thing, let alone "reaction" video content) to a bad review of his act in the Toronto Star.

Afterwards, a veteran comedian, I can't recall who, gives Orny the blunt feedback that basically he needs to stop being fixated on himself and make the audience laugh. This exchange upsets Orny, but gives his agent/manager sufficient courage to take a break from enabling Orny and says something like "I don't disagree with anything he said." 

Another go to example for me, is Derren Brown's breakdown of a scene from 'L'illusionist' a 2010 animated feature:

"Magicians I think [need to] make the performance about something else other than just 'look how clever I am look, look at what I can do' which is the mistake this otherwise technically brilliant magician is making in this and the reason why his audience is so small and why the kid is just only interested in how the tricks done because ultimately then that's that's all that's left isn't there"

Like when I consider how fucking valuable this feedback is, it can literally 180 the direction of someone's life from unmitigated disaster to realised self-worth, it is devastating to encounter this brilliant gifted child who in part or wholly raised themselves gatekeeping the adult's ability to function as a free human in society. 

This is the fragility and it's a death-spiral to couple fragility with egocentricity. 

Why I don't want to literally talk about it

In brief: incompetence and impotency. Like I have tried to talk about it in the past, and it came very close to just blowing up a friendship.

There's a saying that doesn't apply here: "If this is what it feels like to be wrong, I don't want to be right."

From my perspective, limited though it is, what it feels like to be egocentric as an adult, is mostly bad. These people are suffering. 

But what it feels like to be right, is in this case incredibly scary. 

So the above saying doesn't work, because this is something you say with a nose full of cocaine and a prostitute wearing your wife's old high-school uniform while she is in a clinic having her post-partum depression treated. It's not like it's actually ever wise to be wrong, but there's a hedonic payoff in the moment that makes the saying cogent, if fundamentally false.

I would guess, as a lay person with no capacity to know that having unreliable parents is the kind of existential threat that can justify a classification of trauma. In this way perhaps there's some aptitude to identify thinking of others, perspective taking etc. as an existential threat, causing stress, post-trauma; and that it is disordered basically once one becomes legally and financially independent from parents or primary carers.

There may also be an aptitude in phenomena like "scarcity cultures" Melbourne youtuber klaize has a video on the theory behind the "greedy Chinese" stereotype which cites a bunch of memes like Chinese appearing people loading up on single use plastic bags in produce sections of grocery stores for example. He cites research using economic games with children that from memory suggests a kind of intergenerational trauma arising from the famines caused in China by Mao's reckless and irresponsible social experiments that characterised his control of the People's Republic of China. 

Now, to suggest that the infants are experiencing trauma I suspect might be a stretch, though as adults they may develop anxieties learning oral histories, but it seems a culture can also, I'm going to say 'collapse' into egocentricity - a 'fuck you I got mine' arising from actual, or anticipated scarcity (as is likely happening now that every moron is parroting predictions of 50% unemployment in the future and then acting like it isn't completely fucking insane that anyone is enthusiastically charging toward such a destabilisation of human civilization. This is also, simply in addition to all the fucking news coverage for 10-15 years about housing becoming unaffordable, and young people not being able to ever own their own home, and at the same time, journalists on the public broadcaster basically masturbating on live TV over the prospect of rate cuts from the central bank pushing property prices ever closer to the moon.)

I don't want to talk about it, because there's a fundamental difficulty in discussing it intelligibly, let alone intelligently. 

I binge watched House M.D. one time, finding its formulaic episodes following A, B and C plots on the same predictable beats episode after episode, season after season. For those who no longer recall House, or terrestrial television, Dr. House worked in the diagnostics department of Princeton Teaching Hospital in New Jersey, his job was to figure out combinations of weird symptoms and patients resistant to treatment that defied the run-of-the-mill presentations.

A guiding principle for the diagnostics, is that you are always going for one condition to explain all the symptoms. So like if someone presents with yellowed skin, abdominal pain and an ear ache, you don't want to explain all those symptoms with three conditions if there's one that can explain all of them. So I don't have the medical knowledge to come up with a valid example, but let's say "Dave's syndrome" explains all three and is treated with massage, that's better than "jaundice, appendicitis and ear infection."

But this is what I've found, so let me try and noodle it a bit here - egocentricity is an adaptive response to early childhood adversity, the parents, guardians, carers aren't doing their bit so the child steps up; that becomes maladaptive in adulthood where (dysfunctional economy aside) your peers are expected to rely on each other, not their parents. So that's (1) and this egocentricity co-exists with a background level of existential dread, like being cutoff or something so (2) is that someone who is egocentric also doesn't like to hear, let alone be told they are 'egocentric.'

Which means (3) that we can't talk intelligently about this perfectly reasonable, in many ways admirable response to childhood adversity because to acknowledge it is somehow to send someone back there.

My greater problem

Is not only do I not want to literally talk about it anymore, with anyone, I don't want to watch it. I don't want to see it. I don't want to be around when it happens.

It's painful to watch someone say "buy this thing about me" with, and that is a crucial "with", no consideration as to why anyone else should but that thing, and that thing about you, and what they get out of it in return for what me gets out of it.

It's this awful thing where I cannot resolve the pain of caring about someone with fragile egocentricity, so I wind up having to avoid them so I don't have to exist in that place where a dysfunctional adult hurts themselves, and I feel bad for them.

Dream, Dream, Dream, Dreamy Dream Dream Dream...

 Dreams for me are an opportunity to experience rapid memory decay, dreams and people's names. I definitely get afflicted by the Baker/baker paradox for some reason seeing someone's name in writing helps, but I suspect only with social media because it is about making meaningful associations. Names are seldom meaningful, they are more often commonplace.

Dreams for me I suspect decay in retrieval for the same reason, but I do have a sense that some of my dreams are more vivid than others.

I recently dreamed vivid dreams of people I know, and they've all decayed to about 10% of what I feel was the experience. As usual with my dreams, the plot was a series of non-sequiturs, as such remembering part of the dream does not enable me in any way to reconstruct the whole of the dream.

My original, sexist, conceit was that it might be amusing to try and hold the people that appeared in my dreams accountable for my dreams and call it "my feminine side" don't think I'm backing away because I've realised that it's sexist. I assume it is, I've only had one person ever ask me to explain what I was doing in their dream and they were female, but that is not a sample that rises anywhere near to statistical significance. In fact it is more accurate to say that women are very unlikely to hold a person to account for an action in their dream.

No the reason I'm abandoning that conceit is that I wouldn't even know where to begin.

Rule 1 of Dream Interpretation

I will not answer for my own unconscious (subconscious in the US) just like a law court wouldn't. I mean a court of law might hold me accountable for being unconscious, but not in regards to things like malicious intent or criminal culpability.

For example, I was once accused of saying "I want a divorce..." in my sleep, or something to that effect (I've never been married or even engaged) and I've been told I've said shit in my sleep and I know I can have night-terrors that result in short term hallucinations - usually of a rodent or snake being in the bed - so It's plausible I said something in my sleep.

It's also plausible to me, that given the mystery of dreaming, my dream might have had nothing to do with what I might have said in my sleep, but I do like to think that dogs when they are dreaming are having somekind of visual experience internally that they are barking at and twitching their paws toward.

I had no such dream of going through a seperation, and I recall dreaming that I was asking someone if they "parli italiano?" (do you speak Italian) and as the most memorable verbal interaction, it seems the likeliest candidate for what I may have muttered aloud, and someone listening for a meaningful english phrase might have got some variation of "I...anna...vorce" or maybe "api...ation" or something.

This was interesting for me, but in the moment I answered honestly, and most relevantly that I could recall having no such dream, do not feel any such sentiment and as such felt obliged to offer no explanation for what I may or may not have said while unconscious.

So that basically is the rule, and I feel it should be respectfully observed where one has the presence of mind to do so. Of course, it is another level of absurdity to be asked to answer for someone else's unconscious impression of you.

That said

Clearly dreams are not entirely random. I have never dreamed of being Xaphod Beeblebrox Intergalactic President with Two Heads. They can be untethered from reality, but never that untethered.

The usefulness of dream interpretation for me, is in identifying stressors that we may be denying in our waking lives.

They have helped me discover, that actually I need to do some minor confrontation to say something will be delivered late, or I don't want to take on some responsibility, or do some activity that is only nominally fun.

They've never helped me figure out I'm gay or right handed or anything useful like that.

Miami Sunset 198X

Is what I'm calling the first dream, so this is as much as I can remember.

I was in the car with her, asking her questions when we simply ran out of road and started driving on the water. It wasn't as clean as you might be picturing, I knew this was a dumb thing to do, I was a passenger forced to accept this new reality.

I was talking to her, trying to ask her questions, we were bobbing over the swells, coasting on momentum. Her job was to keep the wheels straight as possible, and I pointed out to her a couple that had shot past us at greater velocity in a modern 4WD and had flipped a wheel causing them to capsize and sink in the shallows, I believe they managed to push off the sand bank by turning a wheel hard enough to roll all the way over, but then they were kind of adrift.

We kept heading straight, toward like some mangroves or something and I thought we could make it, and I had no care for the car. This was obviously a stupid way to travel, but our convo was not about the regrettable decision to drive out into the water. 

I was asking her questions, questions about her.

The dream just ended, I think the action may have moved to another location, a different cast. Above is all I can recall now.

Now I actually think the metaphorics are all pretty congruent. This dream was a pretty good tone poem of the relationship I have with this person. In terms of feel, there's the instability, but it isn't a frightening instability, a familiar instability. There were oddities like left-hand drive, but everything about where I was was aesthetically pleasing, the only exception being the 4WD in many ways a symbol of where I am. We were riding in like a Datsun or Renault 70s type car, or a muscle car from Street Rod II like a Corvette even. I don't know I was in the interior. 

I think it is a dream about longing and impermanence. A very vivacious dream, it had a positive valence, feeling more like Waverider on the N64 than a watery death. She would be steering, I was the passenger. 

I can't recall the sequencing of my dreams, but it's possible the underlying stimulus, the prompt was the first of the dreams I had about her, a different her that the her from this dream compares herself to, for fear that I would compare her to her, and look where we are.*

*I guess I am holding someone accountable for what they do in my dreams.

Don't Mention the Exile

I'm going to smush together the decayed memories of two quite vivid dreams I had here, because they are very similar to the point of being a 'recurring' dream. 

The first's stimulus was obvious to the point of being conscious, but not a lucid dream. Red Letter Media published one of their "Re:View" features on "Wet Hot American Summer" and I watched it, and "Wet Hot American Summer" was originally introduced to me by her, it has a strong association.

What I'm also conscious of, is that while a seasonal cue to dream of her should be between August and October somewhere, where she ended our friendship in response to my conduct, I feel as though I often have the seasonal activation months early, and can forget about it completely in the time of year where events transpired.

Anyway, in the first dream she was just there, wearing green flannel and just wanting to catch up and discuss all the things we used to discuss like whether "Wet Hot American Summer" is comedy gold or not, and I got this sense of momentum from her speech that the friendship ending had never happened, but I was very much conscious of it, and my recollections of this dream end with me confronting "are we not going to talk about the ostracism?" 

I recall waking up asking myself questions I hadn't for a long time, wondering if I should actually seek to confront this person. Then I put together the stimulus with the dream, and didn't think much more about it.

Then a few nights later, a youtube music playlist worked it's way to Kelis' "I hate you so much right now" and I was reminded of her because I think she told me that Pharrell produced that for Kelis and she liked it more than "Milkshakes" and we were probably discussing it back then because I prefer "Trick me" to "Milkshakes" but we can all agree, Kelis is great and we're glad it happened.

That night I dreamed of her intruding into my life again, this time she tapped on a window like she'd just spotted me walking by after more than a decade of estrangement, and again, the rage was there that she wasn't acknowledging that I'd been held irresponsible for over a decade, for my actions.

Competing with that rage, is the desire to realise the undoability of my grief. So I kind of just followed along, hung out and tried to enjoy her company. At some point I was left talking to her dad, whom I've never met, so he was just what I pictured - a Conservative pro-free markets, pro-Neoliberalism white dude from the wealthy side of town, I had to listen to him exposit about himself to me as we walked to the local footy oval that was being torn down for renovations or a rebuild or something to build some new state-of-the-art facility, and I expressed some remorse that another piece of heritage was being demolished, and he was making arguments to the effect that it had fallen into disuse and the old had to make way for the new.

I pointed to like this brick art-deco feature and said "I'm going to miss that" and got the concession from her dad that he too would miss it.

Anyway, I woke up, kind of stressed that I'd dreamed of this same person two nights within a week. If there was something I needed to resolve to make these dreams stop.

Again, tonally these dreams are pretty coherent to me, and it's also fairly easy to explain what stimuli caused them to happen - two abstract associations cropping up thanks to Youtube. 

There's the literal cognitive dissonance I feel at desiring the reconciliation, the forgiveness, and that while I accept and have long accepted what I did that caused me to lose the friendship, it's that the way that was handled was both understandable but cruel and unusual too.

Is there anything to be learned?

In the case of the first dream, the driving on water dream, it doesn't stress me too much. I think I have the opportunity to ask the questions I want to ask because we are friends. Maybe I just need to figure out when and how and what. I think we are aligned as people generally, in wanting healing.

The other is difficult, and all I can think to do is shout it into the internet hole.

The first thing is that rationally I can just accept that what happened, happened and it's not a fucking mystery. I applied stress in a fairly douchey way to a friend at a time when they really needed support.

I've written about it before, but in having the receipts for what I'd done, I was able to really examine my own behaviour that can't be done if its a conversation or something similarly ephemeral. I know in the first 6 months, when the status of our friendship was by communication an ambiguous hiatus, and I was conducting the autopsy of my actions, I felt such shame that trying to read my own writing seemed to bring on hysterical blindness.

At some point, maybe after one or two years though, when rereading my own writing, while some of it remains cringe - largely attributable to nerves I feel, in writing, that I do not have on rereading - I was actually surprised to experience less shame, less cringe, less embarrassment. To find myself experiencing my own behaviours as fairly reasonable and conciliatory.

Now, there's not actually anyone else to blame. The causal chain is one of the easiest to determine in all the times I've blown up my own life in some way. Just clearly some trauma remains unresolved for me.

I want to bury it, or rather have it be an inert chapter in my life. The easiest way would be to talk about it with the offended party, get information that can allow it to reconcile in my mind and stop agitating there, but that is only easiest on paper. 

What was striking about the dream, was that I felt a renewed burst of shame, embarrassment, guilt.

All I can think of as catalyst for that though, is all that remains unacknowledged by me. And it's not something I'd try and reach out to them with anymore. We are thoroughly estranged, to the point that most days I don't think of them at all, they only reappear with certain triggers, that are generally so intermittent as to not be noteworthy, except this recent "Wet Hot American Summer" "Kelis" double feature.

Unsent Letter Nth

I realised late that I liked you. I noticed you complain publicly about your partner, but even then I didn't realise. It became a conscious thought only after your breakup.

I took advice on what to do, and I ignored it. Because at that time, I had my own needs, and what I needed was for your breakup to stick. We were having lucid conversations, I was asking you pointed questions and you were giving me cogent answers, answers you were contradicting.

I was acutely aware there was history there of overlapping partners in a messy way that I didn't want. I wanted to see growth before I risked anything. 

I guess my problem was twofold, I didn't just want but expected growth, I was hoping, not impartially observing and I didn't anticipate my own emotional dysregulation when you didn't grow. 

I suspect, but don't know, in fact I kind of just assumed, that you knew at least enough to be confident I was interested.

I think I wasn't up to being your friend and broke because I couldn't accept the decision you went with. I likely blew up our friendship because it was too stressful for me not to resolve it in some way. I think I did so gracelessly, mostly due to inexperience, but also out of hope that it may turnaround if I just applied enough stress.

In which, I think you deserve credit for resolving it. In many ways it was helpful to me moving on, and enjoying my life.

I just struggle with the finality of it. I think that's what scares me, and haunts me about my lack of control. I've tried in myself, to be a safer person for my friends to blow up at. I don't know if I succeeded.

Inconclusive Like a Dream

I hope that's broad enough to be generally applicable, like how I relate to Jurassic-5's "The Thin Line" ft. Nelly Furtardo or even Mya (her solo hits softer) The nature of my dreams themselves indicate I'm conflicted as to the worthwhileness of a hypothetical reconciliation. I think an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and I would like very much to discover an adequate prophylactic even though, in the decade plus since losing that friendship, I haven't lost another, I'm still scared.

As to whether this exercise has helped, remains to be dreamed.

Out of Warning Signs

At some point, the Victorian Board of Education set as a text a play set in Newcastle about a blue collar worker who had a friend in management, a deadbeat girlfriend and a sister with special needs and the play followed his life basically falling apart.

We had to read the play script, and I think my school even had the budget to bus us to Melbourne to see a theatre company put on a couple of key scenes from the play.

I can't remember the name of the play, I could probably find an archive of set texts for the years I did highschool but it's not important for setting the scene here.

The play was about the deindustrialization of the late 80s that happened in a lot of places. The climax of the play involved the worker grandstanding as he realised he was going to become structurally unemployed, have to put his sister in a home and his girlfriend would leave him and his best friend betrayed him, so he douses himself in petrol and makes this big speech before revealing it was just water and getting arrested or something.

At some point in his speech he says "if the writing was on the wall how come it wasn't read aloud?" and that probably makes an impression on me, because it was this complaint of a type that the obvious was not obvious enough.

I hope, the playwright wasn't meaning it literally in terms of a steelworker being illiterate and so newspapers and P&L statements etc should be read out to people.

Now, where I'm at in terms of navigating "the world" as we call it, is this space where I'm bracing for just a wall of stupid to come crashing down. It's really hard to define, but I think we've been networking stupid up and some of it is obvious - like the flat earth conspiracy community - where not so much new forms but new levels of stupid have been made possible by not just the internet, but social media, algorithms etc.

It's the less obvious stuff. Like, go back to 2004, smartphones aren't quite a thing yet, and if they are only executives use them to email. People are commuting to work driving their Hyundai, with a bowl of cereal between their legs, texting their mum using a numeric keypad on their Nokia to confirm plans for Easter, applying lipstick and listening to talkback radio. This is stupid, and a daily routine. What makes it nefariously stupid though, is that it's reasonably safe. This person stop-starting through peak hour traffic may have increased their chance of having a traffic accident a thousandfold.

But what that looks like, is that when they are driving with their hands at 10 and 2 on the wheel, watching the traffic and doing headchecks and mirror checks, they may only have a 1 in 100,000 chance of having an accident. With their phone, the cereal, the makeup the whole morning routine, their chances of having an accident jump up to 1 in 1,000.

That means this individual can be expected to maintain their morning commute without incident for three whole years. In the meantime, to compound their stupidity, each time they drive dangerously and don't have an accident, they build their confidence that their driving practices are safe. This is likely how someone winds up driving through rush hour with a bowl of cereal between their knees, applying makeup while texting their mum.

Now, we live in a world where reports are being written by nobody, read by nobody, executive summaries are being summarized, people are subbing in statistically generated grammar for thought, simply because they can't tell the difference.

People are potentially already making hiring decisions, where they are like "well I could hire a receptionist, but what if my receptionist could also give me legal, medical and fashion advice..."

And it seems likely to me, that the potential cumulative stupidity we are building up, is likely far far larger than I can imagine.

Now I've steered this in the direction of generative "AI" or LLMs but I suspect my real concern, and the real subject of this post, about writing on a wall and it not being read aloud, has been with us longer in the form of siloing via algorithms. Internet echochambers. 

Its the conundrum of even being able to warn anybody anymore of anything.

So Hard to Describe

I don't think it's a "chicken little the sky is falling" thing, or a "boy who cried wolf" thing even, this is more something sci-fi short story writer Harlen Ellison put his finger on:

You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.

That's from 1993 according to wikiquote. I'm talking about something that has evolved into something more. 

It's sharing a planet with a population for which if you put up a warning sign, the response may be "I didn't think I had to take it seriously, nobody warned me that I should pay attention to a warning sign."

So you put up a warning sign that says "warning: things warned of in warning signs may be real and actual." and then someone with bleeding stumps says "well nobody warned me that the warning about heeding warning signs was something I needed to pay attention to. I thought I could choose to ignore it."

The world we live in seems to have become a little more "Land of do as you please" and a little more "Global Cassandra" where Cassandra is the priestess of Apollo who was cursed by Him with the gift of prophecy but nobody would believe her. As such in Greek classics like the Iliad and Odyssey and plays, she gets all these scenes like "That Horse is full of Greeks that will destroy Troy if you bring them inside the gates" and "Agamemnon your wife Clytemnestra is having an affair and they are going to kill you in the bath and then kill me." and so forth.

A few weeks ago, I was watching a guy present to a group of old people about basically how the "Awokening" has collapsed, that loose cluster of memes and rhetoric that hung about for a decade, accomplished some things, but not what they were intended to. I felt in my waters that the fever broke pretty much in 2024 after Kamala lost the election and it seems to be an insurmountable reckoning that rather than being wrong, the memes were just insurmountably unpopular and grossly unequal. This guy was pretty much doing a post-mortem, very clinically and citing data to serve as proxies for the nebulous thing.

And Bitcoin's value in USD I believe crashed far enough that somebody with their money in an index fund for the past five years will finally have outperformed the bitcoin bubble. It has almost halved in USD since October of last year.

But then there's the Space X IPO, and I still have to hear about "AI" all the time in my contact with educational institutions. In terms of being a Cassandra, it was this depressing moment when I perhaps became truly old, understanding that there is always going to be something.

Like I already was persuaded to accept tentatively the position of moral-progress skepticism, but I was thinking in terms of living memory. Now I'm thinking, moral-progress has a half-life of less than a lifetime. 

And it's not young people, like I don't think the young can really put the thumb on the scale, and people are remaining infantalised longer and longer. It's this strange thing of like, like today the media got details of the agreement signed between Trump admin. and Iran to open up the straight of Hormuz for 60 or 90 days or whatever. And fucking journalists this was their moment to finally suggest that maybe the US had gone and done a debacle. 

I've heard people comment on access-media, both for Disney and the White House, but I think there's something bigger than that at play too. It's like journalism at some point, began to see themselves as diplomats. Or rather, constrained as diplomats, but not just in what they could say, but what they could think.

Like journalists by and large, had to pretend that a President had some kind of strategic interest in the decisions they make. I don't think I want to live in this world where presentable people in good suits sit at desks in big fancy studios on the BBC and ABC and situation room and wherever else who all seem decent and respectable and constantly confused by the news they are reporting.

I think I would prefer to live in a world where a sleazeball ashes their cigarette into a crystal ash tray with dark rings under their eyes and sweaty patches under their arms and they are astonished by nothing that they read because they are a real journalist whose investigations and experience of the world have turned them cynical.

I fucking hate the "Leopards ate my face" meme, it is so improv, alas, it's true, but what I'm saying is that we seem to be living in some kind of world where we have to assume that the people who vote for the face eating leopards party, are the people who will say "I had no idea leopards were dangerous animals that eat people's faces" and then we say "but we told you they were dangerous animals that will eat people's faces, and not only that but they told you they were dangerous animals that eat people's faces and if elected will eat your face AND WE TOLD YOU THEY TOLD YOU THAT." and they say "oh...I just thought you were brainwashed or had some agenda."

That's the scary nature of our times. Some fucking mind bending bullshit where to say "you were told" earns you a "yeah but you didn't tell me you were telling me." or more simply "oh but I was also told something else" and if you are like "so how did you choose?" they are like "I chose what felt good in the moment."

Ghostbusters 2 finally available on VHS as New Rental in Blockbuster Australia!

The title of this post describes roughly what it feels like to see unavoidable news coverage of Australia's far-right fringe political party "One Nation" experiencing a surge in the polls.

In this regard, Australia is not so much "fashionably late" to the global right-wing populist phenomena as humiliatingly late. I'm aware we can turn and point to Reform UK as a virtually identical political development buuuuuuuuuuuuuut still, I mean it's also quite embarrassing given what people already think of Australia to have to sit here when people ask us "Is their an Australian Trump/Farage analogue?" and we've gotta be like "It's my mum she works in a fish and chip shop."

I Lose, You Lose, We All Lose for Losers

This is a global phenomena, and Australia is particularly analogous to the UK - the traditional "right wing" or Neo-Liberal Conservative party got obliterated in the last national elections largely because interest rates were high.

The only real difference, was that in Australia the Labour party, a left-wing neoliberal party were incumbent. All the polling showed that the traditional conservative party of Australia were set to take government, Albanese had no real answer, all he could do was delay, and delay, and delay calling an election until...Trump had his liberation day and announced all his Tariffs, causing a sharp drop in people's retirement savings and economic forecasts to worry about a recession.

Meaning the reserve bank of Australia began to cut interest rates. The polling literally did a 180, and by the end of the brief election campaign, the Liberal party was cut back to a single gangrenous foot representing almost entirely rural seats in Queensland the Alabama/Mississippi of Australia. 

So the UK Keir Starmer labour government has basically previewed what is now happening in Australia. The UK elections were 2024 where wherever you were in the world an incumbent got ousted, UK changed the Tories for Labour, the US changed Dems for Republicans. 

It was all interest rates, cost of living. In 2025 interest rates began to fall, and so an incumbent could hold on in Australia. Credit needs to be extended however, to the US who switched parties from a serious but ineffective party, to the clown party. The UK did not do this even though they've had a bunch of blunders and scandals, it is nothing compared to the succession of debacles and shit sandwiches and dumpster fires that have been the actions of the Trump Whitehouse, I mean they pretty much can't even be called a government.

Pauline Hanson, is closer to a clown like Trump however, than someone merely ineffective like Keir.

The Gary's Economics Dichotomy is I fell, right

The democratic moment we are living through, have been living through is basically some threshold being crossed likely in 2008, the GFC. That was the end of the economic paradigm people could tolerate because they were invested in riding speculative bubbles.

After 2008, there's been a demand for change growing, that legacy political parties answer in one of two ways - 

1. Ignoring the call, kicking the can up the road, trying to keep the old mule wheezing on a bit longer.

2. Blaming immigrants.

Neither of these will address the underlying issue. The problem is, one of them obviously isn't going to address the issue, and the other looks like it is addressing the issue.

Gary Stevenson, a youtube celebrity, former Citibank trader and campaigner for an undefined wealth tax, says that the dichotomy we face is: tax the rich, or blame immigrants. 

I believe he is fundamentally right.

The thing is, the UK government, the Labour Party, just will not tax the rich, so they are doing the kick the can up the road, doubling down on neoliberalism.

Tragically Australia is doing something about cost of living. There's a couple of problems though - the Labour party (Australia) recently declared its intentions to grandfather out Capital Gains Tax concessions, and Negative Gearing.

This is in terms of results exactly the kind of change democratic voters actually have been demanding since 2008. People forget that the GFC ultimately had its roots in housing market speculation, it was so bad because the doubling down reached the stage where the US property market had been inflated up to the point that to get people to buy useless houses in nowherevilles across the nation, they had to get promotional interest rates on mortgage loans with no documentation of their incomes and jobs (NINJA loans) and to feel safe in doing such a financially reckless thing, by knowing they could just mail back the keys and walk away from the debt at any time.

Basically, one of the best ways to attack the growing wealth inequality is to shut down "investment" in residential housing. 

The Labour government took some unpopular but long overdue steps in the direction of becoming merely as bad as countries like the UK and Canada and US already are.

Australia's tax code was, and is, to be blunt, fucking suicidal. People are basically forced to mortgage themselves up to the eyeballs and speculate on their own homes, by the tax code. They have to outbid dentists who can deduct mortgage repayments on an empty second home, from their income tax via negative gearing.

There is another thing that Gary is fundamentally right about, which is, the media are going to amplify the story that everything costs too much because immigration is too high, it's not going to work, and here is the fundamental part - things don't cost too much because of immigration.

So the US is in this one dimension, ahead of the game - the Trump administration smoked a bunch of ICE possibly injected ICE into the tips of their penis. It hasn't worked at all, and doesn't work and we know this because immigration went down and deportations went up under both the Obama and Biden administrations. The same is true of the Labour party under Starmer in the UK, they've got the immigration down, they've stopped the arrivals by boats.

The fundamental problem is that the economy is too complicated for voters to understand, nobody explains to them the counter intuitive shit that is FUCKING BORING it is so well determined - like if you cut government spending the economy will shrink - voters don't understand that money the government spends becomes someone else's income, so austerity is like implementing an economic recession. They don't understand that immigration can help lower the cost of living, not raise it, by filling gaps in the job market and reducing the cost of services, bringing in workers to support an otherwise ageing population.

Instead in the case of austerity, people make a false analogy between the government and an individual "If I'm in debt I need to live within my means and tighten my belt." 

And in the case of turning anti-immigrant, they don't see it as someone running up to help you push your stalled car, they see it as more people turning up to their job interviews, to their auctions, to their kids track meets. They just see immigration as more competition, so they experience the government basically saying "we know times are tough right now, so we thought you could use more pressure."

Non-Multicultural Voting

Earlier this year, King Chuckles went to the US and made a speech to Congress that was essentially a comedy roast of Trump. He gifted Trump a bell and lectured the people of the US about liberty and democracy. Shortly after Chucky's visit, Trump went to visit Xi in China, Xi gave him a packet of rose seeds and said something like "I heard your Whitehouse Garden got a bit messed up." 

The world is basically laughing at Trump now, and have switched from sycophancy giving him gold baubles like he is a great and powerful dragon, to giving him jokes.

It was very apparent in the US, going back to 2016, that the voters' egocentricity in electing Trump meant that while they voted for who they wanted and got a nice 'fuck you' off to the US citizens who very much didn't want Trump; they were also electing an ambassador to the world. So it is one thing to troll the half of the nation that looks down on you, it doesn't really work when you have to send your embarassment out onto the world stage to talk to serious people, however you feel about their ideologies, policies and cultures like Xi, like King Charles, like Keir Starmer, Angela Merkle, AMLO and Claudia Sheinbaum, like Putin, like Trudeau and Carney etc. etc.

Pauline Hanson is even less serious than Trump. As Destiny said "I love my mom but she'd make a terrible fucking president" or something to that effect, Pauline Hanson is, in the most derogatory way, somebody's mum. Seriously, you could go to any public primary school, and find someone who is as qualified to go out there on the world stage and represent to very serious people as Pauline Hanson.

Again, to lean on Destiny, he has this standing challenge, for anyone ever to find a single video of Trump where somebody would be like "man, that dude really knows what he's talking about." A beguiling, fascinating challenge that should make you go "aha!" to think that Trump has never once uttered anything that sounded like anything approaching expertise on any subject.

I think Pauline might be better on that front, like she writes speeches and reads them, can pronounce a word like 'divisive' but she's in tallest pygmy territory, and she is certainly too advanced in age for anybody to reasonably expect her to step up and have serious energy policies, serious tax policy, even serious immigration policy.

Conclusion

I actually don't think Australia is a particularly racist country. I've lived in other countries, I have access to the internet. It certainly has a violent history where the indigenous were dispossessed and then ignored and vilified while continuing to exist as best they could in the superimposed nation state. It certainly has overtly racist and discriminatory policy in its past, like the white Australia policy and what not.

But I don't think Australias modal voter wants racial purity and believes the nation exists within the blood of 5+ generation Australians with maybe a bit of Aboriginal or a bit of Greek or Italian or Vietnamese or Hong Kongese or Dutch or German or Philipino or Argentinian or Samoan or Fijian or Vatu or...you get the point, in them.

I think they care about interest rates, and their kids living similar lives to themselves. I think they largely can't connect the appreciation in the value of the home they are paying off, with the fact that they are somehow going backwards in quality of life because the maths is too counterintuitive.

That a One Nation lead Australian government would not succeed in any way shape or form of making any of their constituents lives better, is one of the easiest predictions to make.

The shame is, on a greater set of shoulders that sets the editorial tone of public discourse. Australia is, for example, one of the places making strides on opening up the conversation on our housing policy, and allowing the public to hear voices explain the drawbacks of negative gearing, and giving capital gains tax discounts to real estate sales that are not given to shares or other productive investments.

Australia remains a media silo where I don't think you will ever hear anyone say "The housing affordability crisis is because of investment."

The relatively good and decent government we have right now, is trying to address this on the downlow, because Australia the nation, is not emotionally mature enough to be spoken to like adults, and we don't really have any voices both large and independent enough, to begin the tantrums and the sobbings and get us to where we can restructure our tax code to make people pay for what they take, and not for what they make.