History
You're not the main character. You're not an NPC either. You're a stage light!
Looking at yourself in the present doesn't make much sense. You're not going to understand yourself this way. In general, you're nothing but a history. In the present, you're an unbiased observer reading a history book. This way of thinking is hard to pick up, but in a nutshell, for every emotion you feel, ask yourself: “Where did this feeling come from?”
This framework immediately takes my guilt away. It is what it is, the history doesn't entertain what-ifs. Once you memorize your own history word by word, only then you can really understand yourself and be free of trauma.
Two parts
My first and perhaps most important insight stemmed from not being able to overcome a persistent identity crisis. I spent seven years trying to figure out who I am and what my worldview is. I realized however that it was impossible. It makes no sense to be rational while your irrational part is hovering over, judging.
So, I split my “me” into two parts: rational and emotional. Usually, they coexist peacefully.
When presented with a complicated case, I let both speak. It doesn't matter if they contradict each other. The consensus is never reached, but at least both parts spoke their mind and are now calm.
My autistic brain doesn’t have a garbage collector, so as the day goes by, noise accumulates, influencing how I act. In the morning, I'm cold and calculated, albeit a bit robotic. In the evening, I'm creative and talkative, albeit a bit unhinged.
Insanity
Insanity is not a special state of mind. It's the inability to change that state.
Hygiene
Aggressively eliminate from your life everything that causes the slightest mental distress. Replace everything that has even a hint of undesirable emotions to it.
One million seconds is eleven days. One billion seconds is 31 years. If you have just one second to spend with a person, you won't run out of the population for 248 whole years. There is no such thing as an irreplaceable person, no matter if they're your father, mother, best friend, wife, or husband.
Pain and trauma won't really go away, but they won't get bigger. You, however, can. One day you will be dying, and realizing at that moment that you didn't live the life you wanted to live, while knowing it's too late now, is the scariest thing that can happen to a human being. As you fade away, the sense of time will slip, and whatever you're feeling will stretch to eternity. Make it an eternity of calm happiness, and not an eternity of doubt and sorrow.
Make sure that when this moment comes, you're ready and comfortable with the life you lived. At least be confident it was *your* life, and not someone else's.
Doubt
Doubt.
Doubt is what makes us free. A cog spinning inside the mechanism has no doubt. I can't call a person who is always certain, always knows what to do and never has any doubts a free person.
Emergence
There is a thing called “emergence”. This is a fundamental property of our universe. It works 100% of the time. It can't be stopped, it can't be mitigated.
Emergence is triggered when a lot of similar things come together and interact. One water molecule cannot be dry or wet, but if you have many, after a certain number the new property emerges — wetness. The system becomes *wet*.
Professionalism is an emergent phenomenon too, and its water molecules are abstract knowledge. Learn tech things you're interested in, complete random tutorials, code, and after a certain amount of knowledge molecules is gained, something clicks inside your head, and you become a professional.
Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts here. Formal education can make you a professional seemingly quicker, but it's not because uni knowledge is special, it's because uni is a perfect environment to absorb a lot of knowledge in a short period of time.
It happened to me too. I started coding in Pascal in fifth grade of high school, and I did it till sixth. Then, seventh to ninth were spent on my uni's after-school program. After ninth grade, I drop out of high school to get to this uni's experimental program. First grade of uni, and we're making a CPU. Second grade, and we're doing hard math, C and assembly.
And finally, in the third grade, it happens. I was sitting there in the classroom, it was late, and I was writing a recursive Sudoku solver in Python. And I *felt* the click. You cannot mistake it for anything else. It clicks, and you're a changed person. Immediately, I realized I can write everything. Needless to say, I was passing everything related to code afterward with flying colors.
Emergence is forever. If you learn constantly, even without a concrete defined path, I can guarantee you that you *will* become a professional. This is backed by the universe itself. You cannot avoid becoming one if you're actively accumulating emergence points.
Depression
They say “think outside the box”. When you're depressed, the box is made of concrete. The more depressed you are, the smaller the box.
Our brain is wired to cut off thought processes that take too much energy. In depression, this mechanism works against you, cutting off everything but laying down. To me, get up in the morning and go brush my teeth is too outside the box. Thinking about it is like touching a boiling kettle. Painful, ouch-y, and my brain doesn't even want me to think about doing it.
I'm working and living in my bed. I don't really get up. Should I even say about things like going out or cooking?
Lazy mom, lazy wow
…presented by Gail Swanlund was probably the most impactful piece of art to me.
Through simplistic form, this art piece presents the idea of caring about oneself and quit the eternal rat race for money. But somehow for its metaphor, Lazy mom lazy wow chooses the notion and aesthetics of death and decay. The closest analogy I can think of is the music of American Football. Some kind of liminal, eerie aesthetics. Think the movie Gummo.
The piece deliberately avoids being aggressive and celebrating its notion. It’s not “quit the rat race and celebrate because life is so good”, it’s “quit the rat race by putting yourself into coma so nothing matters anymore”. The descent into eternal comfort of realization that you don’t have to do anything anymore, but also sorrow of losing meaning.
It feels like launching Counter-Strike Source in the year 2051, only to walk around cs_office and realize there are no players anymore, and they will not return ever again. The sense of watching an old VHS tape of you having a conversation with your mom in the hospital as she’s counting her last days because of cancer. The sense of comfort of coming back to your hometown. You remember your childhood and your high school crush, only to realize that those moments won’t happen ever again.
Queer culture
If the result itself is the enough of a reward for the artist, it’s art. If it’s not, it’s not.
So, if you feel the need and the purpose to create your dream maximalist masterpiece of a project, and you’re okay with no one using it, because the project itself is the ultimate reward, you’re making true art.
Your real impact is immeasurable. If your project is the ultimate masterpiece that you deemed perfect, that you said everything you wanted to say, people will notice. They will feel the presence. Your project will be accidentally rediscovered again and again after you die.
This phenomenon has the name. It’s called queer culture.
Queer, as in “this is the single most awesomest thing ever, I'm in love with it, and I will take the memory of observing it to the grave”. Or, “this is an absolutely disgusting scum, I despise it, and I will do everything in my power to not become like it”.
I don't know which way makes a bigger impact. Either way, the impact is undeniable.
Toxic positivity
I fucking hate toxic positivity. Every fucking corporation pushes the notion that "lifE iS aWeSomE, wE cArE abOuT pEoPle" and other such bullshit, and when you point it out, they call you a bad, toxic person.
No, you don't care about your community, let alone the whole world. You're just trying to make people believe that spyware, wage slavery and being fired by a neural network is the norm. You're making money off of those who don't have a choice.
If you account all people, not just American white rich 1%, it turns out that for the vast majority of people life is either an uphill battle or straight up nightmare. People are working in shifts and have no time or emotional resource to spend on themselves. Most of the people can't afford a house or a flat. Even those who can still suffer from mental illnesses, to the point where there are more mentally challenged people than mentally healthy ones. The word "neurotypical" meaning "mentally healthy" is wrong.
You want nothing but to sell your stuff and earn more money off of Chinese and Indian factory workers who work 16-hour shifts. Maybe your life is great, but aggressively pushing this notion is a big, wet spit in the face of humanity.
Fuck you. Fuck your space rockets. Fuck your Twitter accounts. Fuck your institutionalized exploitation of the weak. Fuck your products. Fuck your "open source". Fuck your "GDPR compliance". Fuck your shell companies, your hedge funds and your tax evasion. Fuck your bailouts. Fuck your ships spilling tons of crude oil, fuck your factories, fuck your slave labor, fuck your anti-suicide nets in Chinese dormitories.
One day, because of you, our planet will become unlivable. You will hop into your fancy space rocket to go to that top-0.1% elite Mars colony. Nice job.
But I will pray for a solar flare to hit you and turn you and your fucking rocket into radioactive ash.
