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worst possible worlds

With regards to faith we are in the worst possible worlds.

We could be in a world where God didn’t exist and there was no innate desire for God.

We could be in a world where God did exist and there was no innate desire for God.

We could be in a world where God did exist and there was an innate desire for God which was satisfied.

But we find ourselves in a world where God doesn’t exist and yet our soul cries out otherwise.

overspent my poetry budget

i am on a fixed income of mental energy
your pep talks and crowing about suffering being redemptive and strengthening
do nothing for me

the soul is the brain’s shadow
the former shrinks with the latter
despite the light shining on it

i’m an etch-a-sketch
shake my head
and i am new again

no amount of money
can buy platonic touch
from someone you love

we stigmatize people who need treatment
for their pain, anxiety, depression, and ADHD
saying they exhibit drug seeking behavior
we need to reframe this
as peace seeking behavior

left is an industrial press you stand inside of
abortion is the floor
and euthanasia is the ceiling

people who say “what goes around comes around”
are half right
your sins will definitely found you out
but your good will get you nothing

lots of anger and bitterness
is borne out of the constipation of creativity

Fractal

Some preferences are pretty inconsequential like whether you prefer strawberry or vanilla ice cream. However, some have huge ramifications. I’m going to focus on a person’s religion here though this could be applied to other things. A person’s spiritual state is like an equation, what comes out of them is a fractal that can be zoomed and zoomed and all kinds of structures seen. I’m like this. There are good reasons why I am not a Christian (destructive experience of God, lack of evidence for the existence of a personal god, being treated like garbage in church, etc..) but those don’t really explain it all the way. So much of what I am stems from my beliefs just like a simple formula for a fractal can get you a structure that you can zoom and zoom in on to infinity.

I think this is why Christians drop out of people’s lives who have left the faith. It isn’t so much what they believe is different, it’s that it has manifested itself and everything they are is different.

The most powerful testimony for or against the faith is lived. I live Christianity being a lie by what I experience with my mental illness, what and how I think, ostracism, and low value. Christian friends (who haven’t already ghosted me) won’t even read my writing, that’s how far gone I am in their eyes. I’m speaking my truth and it flies in the face of what they have been taught to think and believe and is often literally off their map.

Work Comments

Great discussion on LinkedIn replying to this:

Good thing I didn’t get used to these crazy salaries and perks because all that is about to change. Tech salaries are way out of line with reality in these FAANG companies and all it takes is a recession to shine light on it. Back to reality!

Replies:

Nato R.

“or going up against their corporate overlords during the pandemic for the right to work however and wherever they wanted.”

It’s 2022, if a “corporate overlord” is trying to be overly controlling, it’s big companies and those who struggle to drive cashflow that will struggle harder in an incoming recession. Folks who are the ones who drive capital and cashflow at big corps can just quit and make the money without a corp if they have to.

Just because a recession is coming doesn’t mean employers have leverage over advanced employees their department can’t survive without.

We’ll see how stern managers get when folks are quitting mid-recession to either work for themselves or competitors. Just because someone is in charge doesn’t mean they can manage folks who won’t stick around.

Don’t go up against the corporate overlords who get abusive, leave them for better and the only one who loses is the corporation who can’t treat folks right.

People will opt for pay cuts to work where they are treated better over staying at companies who just gave a paycut… where that employee was just there for the money anyways. Some companies pay more, particularly because folks won’t stay otherwise without excessive payment at some companies.

Naimi D

I disagree. A key point these predictors of power shifting back to employers miss is the generations that dominate the workforce today: millennials and Gen Z. Unlike Boomers and Gen X, they are ok with sitting out from work, getting roommates, going back to live with their parents or hustling in gig economy to make ends meet while taking their risks in retail investing and crypto. They are not as obsessed with working their way up for “the man” as Gen X and the boomers. Generations like these have never been seen before. We still haven’t raised the federal minimum wage, yet these generations have forced places like McDonalds to pay their employees upwards of $16/hour by refusing to work for less. The power has always been there for employees to take, but Gen X+ all bought into the same lie and viewed it as a failure to not be living on our own and at certain point in our careers by a certain age. These generations don’t care. And in tech, many are capable of building platforms that could be direct threats to the big tech firms that need to keep young, innovative talent coming in. They can’t afford to be stuck with mediocre people who will just fall in line. They need that top talent. So they will comply for their survival.

Jono S

Same old shit – the whole article is about how “workers better wake up” when the hiring and salary ranges were completely determined by the companies in the first place. For once I’d love to see an article about work that didn’t threaten workers in some fashion. I don’t understand why we talk about work like it’s war and we should be grateful that someone took pity on us and gave us a job we didn’t deserve.

predestined

divine election is like the Harlem Globetrotters
God needs a bunch of stooge opponents
to lose and be dunked over

the gospel is fresh water
to those who are being redeemed
and salt water
to those who are perishing

if you aren’t one of the elect
loss of childhood
is
loss of God
(and I did so listening to Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine
on my big brother’s $300 CD Boombox)

for the non elect
there is more or a shock leaving childhood for adulthood
than leaving life for death

i only knew God when i didn’t know i didn’t know him
when i was six climbing tall pines i had no internal concept of God
and did not need one or have it occupy my head
i just communed with nature and played with my siblings
once i knew i didn’t know God things changed
(the “age of accountability” for me was just
when i failed to build an image of God in my head that helped me function)
the only time I “found God” in my adult life was when i was psychotic manic
after my psychotic break i was left with the pieces
deciphering things that felt so real
but now these things had to be split into what i was told wasn’t real
(delusions about the color orange)
and what i was told was real
(religion)
but just as i couldn’t feel the difference between the two in mania
i couldn’t in depression either
so i lost my faith

Own Free Will

The lower you are in society the less people associate with you on their own free will. I am neurodivergent, bipolar, and visually impaired and every decade I’ve been treated worse (though the outlier to this was junior high where I had the typical crappy experience).

One of the interesting things about being on the bottom is the responsibilities all apply but the privileges don’t. For example I’m still expected to help in church but the people are free to reject and ostracize me.

For a while I was volunteering moderating for a mental illness support group and I found that the people who were the angriest and most disruptive were not the lowest functioning but the people who were scraping by but at one time had been higher functioning and actually had friends they had a deep rapport with.

I am like this because people used to enter my life on their own free will. But that doesn’t happen anymore because of my negative value as well as my negative symptoms.

expect = respect

If I hire someone who promises to do good work and they do shoddy work do I have the right to be angry with them? Wouldn’t it show I respected them less if I weren’t?

Our generation expects God to act the way he is sold as acting not because we are skeptical but because we have faith. Rejecting someone that breaks their promises is not a sign of disrespect but of respect because we are respecting their word and we would expect them to do the same to us had the situation been reversed.

Trust goes both ways. I would need to see God trusting me before I trusted him. People accepting and including me in church; Christians not pulling away, ghosting, and cutting me off; having non destructive experiences of God. And experiencing small things that point towards a hopeful future because if I don’t see a trail of crumbs I correctly surmise there is no bread.

being judged

One of the therapist’s tropes about being self conscious is, “people think about you so much less than you think”. But that’s not the problem, the issue is what they think when they think of you. And if they judge and write you off the might not be having any novel thoughts about you at all. When they meet you, people usually give you a, usually vanishingly small, window of opportunity to “prove” you are worth their engagement. If you don’t pass the test they’ll write you off and won’t engage you in subsequent meetings. They aren’t thinking of you at all but that doesn’t mean they don’t think of you negatively, they just judged you and you are not worth the effort for even their negative thoughts.

About 30’s

A Reddit comment of mine about life in your 30’s.

I just turned 42 and this resonates with me. People would hit 30 and they’d cut me off or ghost me because I wasn’t vocationally successful. This happened for around ten years (as the first person was 30 when I was 27 and the last person was 30 when I was 38). Over 30 is like they playoffs, you have to keep winning to remain in people’s lives. Everything is so commodified, human contact becomes something that isn’t given by default anymore but as a reward for jumping through their hoops. It’s an effective system because people over 30 are often so lonely so they will play those games so they’re not just always alone living in their heads.

I will say the 40’s suck too but at least not everyone else is having perfect lives by then. There are divorces and other things that knock people down a peg and make them more humble.

See full thread

Mental Illness and Wellbeing

It’s encouraging some people bounce back from mental illness but I’m bipolar.

The results of the comparison showed that about 10% of Canadians with a history of mental illness met thriving criteria, compared to about 24% of Canadians who did not have a history of mental illness. People with a history of substance-use disorders (10%), depression (7%), and anxiety (6%) were more likely to thrive compared to people with a history of bipolar disorder (3%).