i don’t think it really matters to much what i do with my life anymore.
the human mind has the capacity to make the best of a bad situation. with paraplegics and lotto winners, happiness asymptotes to normal.
the most you can do, if you have adopted a story for yourself, identify with it and be it, is to try and live the life who you are in the story. this will bring you the maximal meta-enjoyment.
another way of putting this, is to simply say, “be true to yourself”
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this of course assumes that what we want most is happiness. happiness is really only a surface feeling, prompted by conditions. conditions that are always changing.
what is most suspect lies in the identity construction — of having a story in the first place. as it seems, the creation of difference in identity creates a self and an other — the other serves as a repository for discarded affects, meanings that are lost, the extreme points on either side of the self, to define the self. NOT-ME relies on a fundamental recognition of other i’s as being i, a mistake of too much for the self, identified with others “like me” always, taking in too much substance for subjectivity.
what’s wrong about having a story, what’s racial about having an identity is the exclusionary features that by definition it needs.
true, having a story and finding that the world verifies that story — verifies YOU can lead one to happiness. it seems that being happy really needs a story to be happy of. the stricter the story, the more happy you can be, when the world fits it. no wonder people live in communities where everyone thinks like them, makes friends with people who are like them, find allies and constantly flock in groups that agree with one another.
and in this world, where change is constant and being impermanent, who doesn’t want to be happy? we aren’t hurting anyone! but making happiness requires a balance. if all things even out towards neutrality due to impartial statistics… you can expect as much happiness and you can sadness. furthermore, all identity relies on a formal exclusion. if people are more themself, they are also more not-someone else. by creating a self that the world can accidentally verify, you are also creating others for whom you know as they appear to you (Vorstellung), and not through genuine interaction.
being you qua identity also means being not-there and knowing others without ever really talking with them.
this is the root of all otherness — the self qua the image of yourself to yourself.
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