ArrogantAmerican

genuinely too old to be an iPad kid but here we are.

[arrogantamerican]

I have no clue how these intro posts work and I don't really care to do it correctly lmao

I have no idea what poor decisions you've made prior to this that have caused you to stumble here. Since you're here, I like art, art history, history, math, music, and politics.

I think art is a really good way to express anger, so that's one of the reasons I like it. Also, if you take a look at art history and the ways that people in the past expressed disdain for the system through art, you can draw a lot of parallels to modern hatred for the systems that were supposedly built for the people but that we have to fight tooth and nail every day of our lives. Some things never change unfortunately.

I hate the government and I think factions are a poison to the very fibers of what we think of as freedom. Don't tell me to pick a side because I will laugh in your face (I wrote a post about that if you're wondering why).

I like math because it's the only thing that exists that is concrete and certain. Obviously this comes with a lot of nuances, too. But proofs are proofs, x equals what it equals, ect. I really like this contrast from the rest of life because sometimes something tangible and concrete is nice.

Anyway, if all that shit sounds boring, I'm not sorry.

[arrogantamerican]

I'm back. Not “we are so back”, but I'm back.

[arrogantamerican]

Do you ever play/listen to music with your friends?

Yeah my entire music taste is a combination of my friends

[arrogantamerican]

I started writing at the end of 2025 and this lineup basically summarizes my year. I'm so scared for whatever 2026 has in store.

[arrogantamerican]

I am trying to learn how to draw heads from the front (fuckass loomis method) and I got really bored of all the rules real quick, so I started making all my practice heads super zesty. I tried drawing a skull to practice where the features and shit would go and hell even the fucking SKULL came out looking like it would wear quarter zips.

[arrogantamerican]

(thoughts on persistent emptiness)

If I'm so happy with the person I've become, why am I not happy with my life?

It wasn't self hatred that served as motivation to undergo such dramatic changes. If anything, it was such strong self love that resulted in my refusal to watch as I rot. For months, I watched myself gradually lose every aspiration, every last ounce of care. Slowly replaced with quiet, cold apathy.

For months I watched as a body with a mind, I guess my body with my mind, lived my life. Inhabited my life, because it wasn't doing a lot of the stereotypical ‘living’ things. I watched as the mind that inhabited a body that’s not mine inhabited my life.

This begs the questions, what life preceded the livelihood this stranger was tasked with filling in?

When did they move in? Did they leave?

Move in day for them came so slowly that I have no idea when it happened. Clearly efficiency was not their biggest priority, but effective they were nonetheless. Slow and steady won the race, and I was the one that lost. So slow that I never noticed but so consistent that when I did, I almost believed it was too late.

I made my first 988 call that night, mostly because I was too cowardly to stay in the room with me, myself, and I, or so I incorrectly thought. It wasn’t even a call. I couldn't bear to be in my own company, but I also couldn't bear hearing the voice of another in a moment where I was so weak I was scared of myself. Coward, no?

That night I realized I was not scared of myself. How could you be scared of someone that doesn't exist anymore? That was the far more terrifying revelation. The lack of familiarity with the person living my life.

The dichotomy is that I couldn't even remember who preceded this person. Who was the person who daydreamed about a life so fulfilling that it was worth wasting my time fantasizing about? Who was the person whose highest fantasy was not the quiet bliss of death?

My highest fantasy was death. A disgustingly selfish fantasy rooted in incomprehensible levels of vanity. Death remains solely a fantasy.

The realization that my greatest desire was death was the first instance in which I was aware I was a body living with what felt like a corrupt mind. I was completely unfamiliar with this person, this mind, these thoughts, yet they felt so inviting. Like the quiet comfort of engaging in the highest forms of self-indulgence.

The person living my life was inviting me home.

And what a fool I would have been to refuse that offer? I am vain, not a fool.

I begun to call an unfamiliar place, an unfamiliar person, home in a desperate attempt to imitate the camaraderie of a person I barely had vague ideas of. I had moved in with them because I am intelligent and full of vanity.

I made a home there with them. Got quite comfortable too. So comfortable that neither of us has left the other. They leave sometimes sure, sometimes for weeks at a time, leaving me wondering if I am all alone again. But they always return, since my body, my mind, is the home for the both of us now.

I can barely hold onto vague fragments of the person that lived there before that sharing a home is hardly something to mourn. There's no surprises anymore. They come and go as they please and I've learned to live in an inhabited, unpredictable, home by taking great comfort in the predictability I can manufacture for myself.

In a way, their coming and going, and the unpredictability of it, has become predictable. So predictable it's become a comfort. A great comfort that will follow me, and I it, as I find the strength to pursue aspirations greater than death.

[arrogantamerican]

Put a gun to my head and I still wouldn't be able to draw a hand properly. 2nd try as well. My first try is below.

[arrogantamerican]

Proof for The Remainder Theorem when dividing polynomials by (x - a). The theorem states that if you divide polynomial p(x) of degree n ≥ 1 by (x - a), the remainder is equal to p(a). Here's a simple proof for this theorem and happy thanksgiving 🦃

[arrogantamerican]

Today I learned about multiplying matrices, inverse matrices, and breaking up matrices from the goat of Linear Algebra Gilbert Strang. His lectures are actually so entertaining to watch and the textbook (Linear Algebra 5th edition) has some very challenging problems that I guess can help you build intuition for the subject. Also cooked up this proof (second pic) for the associative property of matrices in the case of square matrices (number 18 problem set 1.4 fifth edition).

[arrogantamerican]

My life is never boring because some days I want to die and some days I want to live forever. That’s not a bad thing in my opinion. The extremes give it flavor. Keeps the guessing game going, keeps me running from a feeling. 

Because there’s no greater motivation for chasing after external things than running from the seemingly inevitable feelings of despair and emptiness. So we keep running, and running on empty sometimes. Running after things is tiring and taking the time to rest is obviously not an option. 

I have become the exact person I’ve wanted to be. I have things to live for, goals to chase, chosen responsibilities to fulfill. It’s a pretty effective coping mechanism. Become an idealized version of yourself and chase that emptiness away. Fill yourself, your schedule, your life, to the point where you don’t have room to be empty and detached. 

Except you still are, or I am. It’s an underlying feeling that follows you. But it’s not bad, after all, it’s the reason for all my accomplishments, responsible for all my motivation. Responsible for the cleanly defined person I am. Responsible for my happiness too, quite the dichotomy. 

Because in running from emptiness, I was forced to create a life for myself filled with things and people that make it feel almost complete. It will never be enough because if it was, continuing to run from emptiness would be pointless. And the process of running from emptiness was how a life that felt almost complete was created in the first place. 

That’s the paradox of this all. As exhausting as it can be to run on empty and chase something I will never have, or run away from something I’ve accepted I can’t escape, it is more exhausting to sit in that emptiness. To live in a way so bland in which the only option is to sit in the emptiness I fear so much. Except the true paradox is how difficult those lingering feelings make it to discover or rediscover your ambitions and goals. Things worth chasing after. Things to run towards when you’re running away from that emptiness.

So for a while, you run towards things that you know aren’t worth chasing after. Material things, external accomplishments, whatever. But after a while, the act of running after things that by themselves aren’t actually worth chasing helps you outrun the emptiness inside. That is what makes them worth chasing after. Not obtaining whatever it was to begin with, but the bliss of having the ability to ignore how worthless it all feels. 

It’s kind of a careful game. A fragile one too, because you know you are running after something that is only meaningful because of how meaningless your existence itself feels. It’s not a fake game either. The joy you feel chasing after and obtaining these things is very real. It’s as real as the emptiness inside. Two things can be true at once. Both ends of the extremes are real: the one you’re running from and the one you’re running towards. 

The dichotomy is you need your internalized worthlessness to give your joy any meaning, and it is not the same the other way around, obviously. The emptiness you are trying so desperately to escape helps you outrun not only the emptiness, but exhaustion and even instinct. 

You reach a point where you look back and down on your past self and realize you’ve become everything you wanted. Then your next task is to find something new to run after, using the novelty and your fear to fuel your next marathon. 

You fell in love with the extremes because you can obtain everything you’ve ever wanted except the stable sense of fulfillment you crave, that everyone seems to have. Except if you were to achieve it, what purpose would your constant marathons serve anymore? 

Since you built a life with emptiness as its foundation, why does it surprise you that you need that emptiness to maintain the life you carefully built around it?

[arrogantamerican]

Here's a graph I made of the correlation between the youth depression rate on percent and the US GDP from 2011 to 2020, with a correlation coefficient of 0.98. The line of best fit is graphed. Sources linked.

Equation of the line of best fit is y = 2.5x - 22.5

https://www.multpl.com/us-gdp/table/by-year

https://www.statista.com/statistics/252323/major-depressive-episode-among-us-youths-by-gender-since-2004/?srsltid=AfmBOoqGmSPN6at_oItbXBclgySSZXbAoj8GUVZ13mFAaVdWg0Lvua8O

[arrogantamerican]

The emotionally stripped definition of beauty is “a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight”. Aesthetically pleasing. Something that makes the eye happy to see. I referred to this denotation as emotionally stripped because it does not, in fact it cannot, account for the nuances that humanize each person. 

Obviously, personhood is quite an objective thing. Simply “the quality of being a person”. A human. Each human has their own personhood. This realization can lead to magnificent moments of sonder, which is simply the idea that each person is an individual, with lives as intricate as your own. 

Although personhood is quite an objective thing, the complexities that make up each individual’s personhood are very nuanced. This idea, or fact rather, makes up the idea of sonder. It’s important to differentiate sonder (the realization that each person has their own personhood) from the nuances of each person’s personhood. This idea is important because these nuances, complexities, and intricacies make up worldviews and perspectives. 

The perspectives formed as a byproduct of lived experience interpret the world and interpret what beauty is. In the 21st century, our culture is very comfortable with the idea that beauty may be subjective; the things that one person finds beautiful are the result of their unique perspective. This idea of the subjectivity of beauty is a relatively new phenomenon, when even 100 years ago harsh criticisms would be bestowed upon art such as Picasso’s The Blind Guitarist, in which the artist distorts the body of a man playing guitar. 

Numerous philosophers attempted to boil beauty into a formula. Pythagoras famously developed The Golden Ratio (1.618) which solidified the seemingly concrete link between mathematics and beauty, which was seen in symmetry and proportion. This goes back to the idea of aesthetics and conflating beauty with aesthetics. However, aesthetics do not account for lived experiences, complexities, and intricacies. 

The idea of aesthetics is quite objective. You would see a sunset as beautiful and a maggot as ugly. The things that humans find simply aesthetically pleasing go back to the link between mathematics and ‘beauty’. Symmetrical things, proportionate things. Things that make your eyes happy to look at. But beauty is more than aesthetics because your eye is not stripped of your perspective. It is almost impossible to look at something completely objectively without our lived experience influencing the way we view it, in other words bias. 

Bias has a negative connotation, for good reason. Bias can skew the news we read and distort the things we see. However, arguably, bias is one of the characteristics that make us human. The reason why artificial intelligence has bias is because the human data set it derives its output from is biased. Lived experience should influence the way you view the world. Are you even human if it doesn’t? 

Bias is the collection of nuances that humanize each person, or rather the product of these nuances. It’s the way your lived experience changes the way you view the world, art, and your perception of beauty.  

[arrogantamerican]

Decided to start learning linear algebra to distract myself from my thoughts. Matrices.

[arrogantamerican]

Day 1 of terrible advice that I follow:

The cycle of burnout is actually a good thing. Work yourself to exhaustion, crash out, rinse and repeat.

[arrogantamerican]

Visual demonstration of completing the square. Never understood how/why completing the square actually works and understanding how completing the square works helped me in understanding the derivation of the quadratic formula.

[arrogantamerican]

Proving the Binomial theorem, which states that the sum of the nth row of Pascal's triangle can be written as 2^n, using combinatorics

[arrogantamerican]

Proving De Moivre's theorem using induction.