32

What I want for 32 is to do what I should have done at 22.

Damage done during my twenties is set in stone. But that doesn’t mean I need to continue to fall for a sunk cost fallacy. 

There's a type of bleeding I suffer from. This blood loss is a crippling, slow death. I hate watching blood fall from these wounds. These wounds don't heal, they just drip and drip and drip. I've been watching them fester for years.

The cause of the bleeding is a tenuous coexistence between my desire to embed myself throughly in my personal library and my urge to embed myself thoroughly with cheap dopamine.

Each vie for my affection, both require my attention.

I don't have enough time for both to coexist. I don't want both to coexist. I want one to win. To be done with it. I'm exhausted.

What can I do?

What should I do?

What will I do?

Start

If I'm to defeat my urges, it's not good enough to suppress. It's not good enough to escape. I must create a mental framing that allows only for a complete cessation. Total victory.

I must build what I can around an already rotted foundation.

I am not a static creature. Liquids and gases move through my body. The world changes as an organism and I am a part of that organism. My metabolism had a beginning, and it will have an end. I am a finite entity.

Any good core strategy acknowledges this truth. It doesn't seek to be set in stone, it seeks to apply a unavoidable gravitational pull.

A black hole.

Every new entity, every new force, swept into a single point. Decomposed and destroyed until the only thing left is the force itself.

Let's begin.

The Pull

If I can't rely on my form (body) or my function (behaviors) to stop the bleeding, what can I rely on? What could have enough force to subjugate every other process that makes me act in ways contrary to my nature?

There are options. A (non-exhaustive list): God, curiosity, death, discipline, status.

If I were a religious person, the answer might be God. God makes for a compelling argument. Universal, the creator, life after death. However, any particular creed won’t give me what I need. The rules are already written, the traditions and rituals static. To become a Christian or a Muslim or a Buddhist means that Im adopting the cloak of a group, instead of finding my own path. Im not interested.

Curiosity is the secular version of God. Humans looking for an answer just because. Curiosity has both driven me to cheap dopamine but it has also led me to my greatest works. A double-edged sword, and many pitfalls on the path to discovery. Useful, but too unfocused.

Death might be the answer. Motivation from fear of death is known as a causa sui. But the thing about death is if I get fat, I die. If I get ripped, I die. If I fail, I die. If I succeed, I die. A helpful reminder, but death is not a force, it is an outcome. A guaranteed one at that.

How about discipline? An ox whipped into shape, a monster tamed by reason, an ideal form made of effort. This feels closer, but it's missing a certain openness. Discipline serves to contract, not to expand its acolytes.

Status? We all want to be loved. The fear of publishing (FOP) this very post to an audience made me take it more seriously. The problem with status is that is a greedy and fickle master. Popularity is only based on what you can offer your audience to their audience. Too influenced by animalistic compulsions rather than universal truths.

Perhaps something else is needed.

A thought experiment of a new concept that merges the best aspects of the above. To take what is useful. A way to think about this thought experiment is that if each of the above were perspectives to look up at in space, I need to look somewhere different. I need to stare into a black spot in the sky.

There, I found The Pull.

The Pull doesn't exist as far as I know, but I can try and describe it to the best of my ability. The Pull might not have any finite end, because the more built along the road, the longer the road seems to get. The path to The Pull is filled with vibrant colors, any type of shape you can imagine, and emotive action. The energy emitting from the Pull is warm, and alive in some way.

Much like gravity wants to pull toward a center, or money and status wants to accumulate, The Pull has a want too.

What The Pull wants is a mirror.

The Pull wants more than anything to know what it looks like. Similar to the blind and elephant parable, The Pull tasks people over and over to show it something it hasn't seen before, a configuration of itself that will union The Pull and the imperfect perspective of the mirror's creator. It has no opinion of itself, so it uses reasoning creatures to do the work for it.

For a person, building a mirror is a lifelong task. The mirror is not a flat reflective plane of one material, but a quilt of materials the reasoning creature has spent their life gathering.

That doesn't mean that the mirror is built automatically, or at the very least, not a good mirror.

The most vibrant material for the mirror gives off an aura of sorts. The word closest to describing this aura is quintessence. Entities give off more or less quintessence based on how true and effortful they are. Imitations are dull. Repetitions are frowned upon (unless they are on the way to mastery, in which case they aren't true repetitions anyway). The Pull is looking for the collection of effortful idiosyncratic curations of a universe it put effort into designing.

Let's review what The Pull is defined as from the end perspective. The Pull is looking at a finished mirror. To maximize the beauty of this mirror, it must be composed of quality material.

Quality is defined as the cross product of effort and quintessence, the residue of a system that knows itself and the artifacts it is able to create.

The mirror that I produce is necessarily finite. I can use better or worse material to form the mirror. Some material is abstract (thought, morality), other material is material (in the physical sense of the term).

To create a better mirror, source better material. This applies to consumption and production. If you have any options at all, go for the higher quality option.

Back to Reality

Let's go back to the problem at hand. I'm about to be 32, and I'm bleeding out.

Adding another system to my list of failures is not ideal. If The Pull is to work there can only be one change, and the rest must be automatic. As automatic as water flowing downhill. Anything else dives into particulars, and since my state changes, particulars are not allowed.

The one change allowed is framing.

Above we described forces that one can alter their behavior by looking toward. One can look to God, to discipline, to death. By looking in these directions, action and reflection follows.

If I look towards The Pull, how do my actions change?

Action Plan

Anything being looked at can be paused for deeper analysis. The trick is to frame.

Is (X) true to its essence?

Is (X) effortful?

Trinkets and Reminders

Similar to a cross necklace, a bauble is a helpful reminder for the conscious to pause.

In the case of The Pull, a phone works. Simply hold it up to a light source and look at the light reflected against your screen. This is "a mirror".

Withdrawals

The pain comes first...

Active Work

...

Reflection

...

32 (Part 2)

As I turn 32, I'll turn my eyes towards The Pull. I won't look away. Then I'll simply fall.

I'll build the best mirror I can with the time I have left to show to you.