So it becomes an interesting experiment of the which being the more dominant, the cooling effect of the night that helps thinking, or the arrival of stupid o'clock that retards thinking.
I'll leave it to the reader to decide.
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I have been lamenting about the heat for the past few days, so I won't continue on that slant. I feel relatively well-rested with my mind slowly having more distance away from the past that was hurting, and that is also a good thing. Naturally, bits and pieces of future planning start creeping into my attention once more.
But what is out there though? Almost everyone is looking for some impossible set of criteria with a non-commensurate level of pay; basically looking for so-called ``rockstars'' at less than fresh graduate pay. I have a less pretty word for it: slaves. Almost everyone is looking for slaves. I have mentioned about this partly before, and today, nearly two months later, I have not changed my evaluation of the situation. What has changed though is my own perspective---if I choose to really lead a life apart from what society expects without devolving into actually harming the existing social order, then it is possible to do what I want without killing myself nor betraying my own morals/values/conscience.
I have already decided earlier that I cannot in good conscience bring new children into this fucked up world. Now I am starting to reach a quiet internal agreement that there are too few good reasons to actually have a spouse. The only good reasons that I can think of are:
- Someone having my back in the event that I am somehow incapacitated either temporarily or permanently;
- Uh...
I'm not needy. There are many different levels of survival, and the less luxury-bound I am, the more content and easier life can be, even in this Mammon-mad society that is SIN city. Didn't they always say 知足常乐? Then why is capitalism always demanding that we must strive to do more and more while we are also simultaneously told that?
The path that I am likely to be going on is one that isn't likely to be paying the big bucks. It is likely to be fraught with frustrations in a good way, and making just enough to keep both myself and my future-self from dying prematurely. Having the LORD with me as my strength is good enough---I will just need to start preparing for the event that my physical body accidentally dies when there isn't any kin left to dispose of it; I am frankly not expecting my sister to deal with it.
It's good that I have some concrete things to plan about. That does help matters.
I think that it is better to fortify oneself with the LORD and what He has provided than to seek out another flawed human being. As clichéd as it sounds, if it were meant to be, it would be---no one but the LORD knows if there is going to be a spouse in one's life. If there is anything that one should place hope in, it isn't in such uncertainties, but in the certainties that scripture guarantees us, and the actions that we ought to be taking to demonstrate that we are truly followers of the LORD.
I am not getting any younger. Seeking out another human as a spouse-candidate is but the first step of a multi-year project. And in my age demographic, society does not see the matrimonial union as a fruitful one, because it is a marriage that does not contribute to the total fertility rate, the other thing that capitalism worries about, because it does not have a solution to a scenario where labour is no longer abundant enough [locally] to have surplus to be used. Capitalism's ``solution'' to this is to always migrate the production to places where labour is sufficiently abundant that large amounts of surplus labour may be obtained. But considering that most people are less mobile, this ``solution'', while having large-scale benefits to capital, have local scale penalties as people find all sorts of jobs drying up, or finding their ability to provide maintenance to their labour impinged by the severe undercutting of wages due to country-level currency arbitrage.
Anyway, the point is, while we shouldn't let our past dictate who we become in the future, there are certain deep-set traits/ways that simply cannot be altered in major ways---this is what we call ``personality'', and I need to get used to that and not be apologetic about it. Sure, I can ``change'' my personality---all well-socialised matured adults know and often do adapt their personalities according to the situation, but keeping it up for extended periods of time is no different from keeping an elastic band stretched; it needs work done against the natural regression to the original personality.
I am not the most sociable person on the planet. I have never really been into girls/women ``that way'' for the most part (the few relationships that I managed to have when I was between twenty-four and thirty-five should be considered flukes of nature), and I was mostly happy then, feeling ``sad'' for myself only because I wasn't yet comfortable with walking on my own (with the LORD, but I didn't know Him then) and felt that perhaps walking with someone else would be better.
Just read the old posts on this blog for a sense about that old fear. I mean, I had/have shitty skin, so having a bad general external appearance is the norm for a very long time, and thus missing out on physical closeness is a real thing.
The big difference between now and then is that I've experienced more, much more, and have learnt that it wasn't some magical bed of roses that I had imagined in the past. It's bad, and can actually get worse, because while all that vulnerability can draw people closer, they can simultaneously hurt us a fuck-ton when things go south. And they often do go south. Even a relationship between believers can go waaaaaay south if they aren't in tune with Christ and each other the same way.
It's the human condition.
I think I'm done living as a human. It's so much easier living in my own fortress, entertaining myself, and doing enough to not get actively excoriated by society. Just like how it used to be all those many years ago, only this time, it's just counting down till it is time to go back to the LORD.
Reputation is a strange thing. Seeking a high reputation is much harder than simply avoiding a bad one, and that is definitely the main goal for me always: to avoid getting a bad reputation. So I should pay attention to that and stray little from it.
To most people, I'm just some kind of curiosity that they put up with, either because they have a need for me, or they don't know how to get rid of me. Chara used to call me ``intense'', but I think she's only partly right.
I'm not just intense. I'm also shallow as fuck. Because I only ``know'' impersonal knowledge and facts, and fuck-all about personal relationships with other people. And when people meet and talk, they don't give a rat's ass about impersonal knowledge and facts; they want to listen to stories. And I lost my stories a long time ago.
Somehow, I don't think I've ever been a proper human, not because I am emotionless, but because I am sufficiently selfish enough to see myself as the protagonist of my own life, and that everyone else is some NPC, and that when they are out of sight, they are mostly out of mind. All that talk about being better behind the scenes, being the thinker to look at all possible angles and articulating the associated reasoning for a chosen course of action is just hiding the painfully obvious fact that I am not a proper human.
I didn't abandon society. Society cast me out first. I just quietly climbed back in to play along, but we never really were BFF.
Till the next update.
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