When I was in fifth grade, we would play edutainment games every week in the computer room.
They were meant for kids our age, they weren’t kindergarten games.
I wasn’t good at them. I always relied on my partner.
The things I could do on the Sega Genesis and things I could do on paper just never merged together. Everything was a bizarre blur.
At the end of The Secret Island of Dr. Quandary, you have to put a bunch of items into a magic pot so you can go back home or something.
We tried putting everything we collected in. But my partner realized that you can’t put everything in the pot.
You have to read the ingredient list and put mostly everything in instead.
I remember getting powerfully resentful. I remember thinking, it was ridiculous.
We’d already done everything. We’ve done the work. We did the tasks.
Why would they have to be so clever?
I’ve been ashamed of this for a while. And more recently, I’ve come to see,
I have had a heart easily weakened by the little miseries of getting anything done properly.
In many ways, I’m the embodiment of the difference between school and everything else.
I would guess a few other students might have seen needing to take things out of the pot
as an experience that provides a sense of strength inside one’s heart.
Having to undo things you’ve done so proudly, to make a problem out of some your solutions.
Figuring out a new way to not be exploited, to get out of strange situations.
To savor the discomfort of knowing you can’t just expect things to work out when they already feel over.
All you mentally developed people, all you strong willed people. You bear so much. You do so much. You win so much.
Because you can find gratification inside the mires of feeling like a human problem worth solving, of falling into and avoiding traps, and never feeling too secure in what actions you take.
You have so much strength. But….as I’ve come to mimic that strength, and feel that next-level joy which lets me overcome human will,
I’ve found it’s the most poorly articulated feeling of all.
And the cause of so much unfightable misery.
But it’s also a solution, I believe.
If we can feel how we feel.
When I look at how people are trying to fight the ills of backward cultures,
it’s like watching someone throw every ingredient they own into a pot.
You want an antidote to all those bad vibes carried over too far into the modern day?
Sometimes you have to resist making a fight out of everything, and keep the water just a little flavorless.
I do believe a few concessions on who must be allowed to say what, or who must be allowed to go where, might just be the key to finishing the recipe.
Perhaps with just the right little dilutions, there’s a real antidote for cultural intoxication, you know, that positive energy mindfuck that makes a person punish someone for doing something your average modern American considers completely permissible.
Sometimes making progress isn’t about throwing everything you are into something.
But rather, the alchemy of the neutralization of your rivals.
To really be like water and not poison to them.
To sap them of whatever makes them feel like a good old fashioned, well-intentioned down to earth, super good vibes dude.
That may be the modern quandary.
To mix together a softer touch that makes crappy cultures dissolve.
The Found Emotion (Invoke Yourself) 