ask an oracle

just do it

[friendlylocaloracle]

I find it so weird that someone dying is considered to be them being in a supposedly better place now.

I can think of maybe two reasons for it: 1) the world is fucked up and perhaps it's hope for someone to think that what lies after death is a better, more beautiful world and 2) we're just really scared of death and perhaps there's some comfort in thinking of death being a guide to a paradise since that makes the thought of the beyond a lot less scary.

Thoughts?

my impulse thought to this is "it's just cope." and i think that actually hits both of those reasons! but i think i mean it in a fun third way: 3) people don't mean anything by it, and merely by asking you've put more thought into it than they really have.

the fun third way is super common because we've really just eroded all meaning from life over time as our economic system feeds off of and perpetuates humanity's worst impulses, but it's also boring because "the erosion of all meaning" implies a, uh, lack of meaning. (at least in the context of this question. i think that the idea that "there is no meaning, only control" is super interesting and is the guiding ideal of modern society--it's just not what you asked.)

okay, we're scratching that. this is actually just super interesting. i think the angle of it is a liiiiittle bit tangential from what you're asking, but it's not tangential from where it started: someone else's idea of what death is. (my thoughts are also a bit of a flurry today, so i'm leaving the workshopping in.)

their idea is fundamentally boring because they are just saying it. it doesn't matter to them because nothing matters to them. to them, life and death are just presumed. you wake up, do what you can to perpetuate the cycle, and then you leave, (hopefully) satisfied with whatever you have done to perpetuate the cycle. after all, neither life nor death matter. through money, you can live forever. we live in the most boring fucking death cult imaginable, fixated on life and death as simple things that merely happen en route to the accumulation of wealth. everything else on that path is just cope.

but, uh, i think i'm getting off-track.

they say a thing, and we don't believe them. but i'm going to try and assume that they at least mean what they're saying now--"it's just cope" implies that they don't. it's a belief, right-- it's what you hit when you don't have evidence. from that frame, i don't think i like 2) a lot--fear doesn't really make for the basis of a good belief system. 2) and 3) aren't really so different, but at least the death cults you make out of 2 are fun. 1) at least kind of has a sense of a reason to keep living built in--there's something else for you out there--but it also kind of doesn't work without, y'know, a different force that keeps you living.

but at the end of the day, all of these kind of still imply that you're not thinking about death. so i think at the end of the day, it all just comes down to cope. it's a way to stop thinking about the thing.

[friendlylocaloracle]

reality is where idealism goes to die and all around me i see nothing but graves

[friendlylocaloracle]

ambient hostility

this is a loose continuation of the last post. last post was an attempt to provide some kind of explanation for how i think about things. then i kinda got to the end and, y'know, mentally passed out from exhaustion, which was really unfortunate because i feel like i didn't even get to the good part--and, really, kind of the only part that i care about anyway.

who cares?

the answer to that comes from putting it all together: everything you do says something about who you are. you can use that in a number of ways. the first way is that you can extrapolate backwards into yourself. i believe that most people call this radically new concept "introspection". it's all my idea. no one has done this before. ...really, what i'm proposing is technique. you can trace your feelings, your reactions, your desires, back into yourself. this is pretty important in general! self-understanding is the only way you're going to be able to meaningfully form bonds with other people without you getting in your way. it is also good for excising trauma. we live in a society defined by rampant hostility. it does not know anything other than chewing you up, spitting you out, and self-replicating. it wants to take as much from you as it can by any means possible. it does not know when or how to stop. it is the only way it knows how to exist, and for it to not exist as such is tantamount to its death, for there is no other possibility. the effect of this society on its people is that everyone is constantly subjected to trauma on its behalf, all the time. the repeated exposure to the hostility is fucking people up and requires its members to embody the hostility in order to cope with it. and thus we have a trauma loop. you have to fix yourself if you want anything to change. can't heal it if you don't know it's there. trauma responses are self-protection mechanisms. they exist to defend against future trauma. it's not really a good defense--it's primarily reactive, unfocused, and generally emotionally turbulent--but it's what your brain's got and it's really doing the best it can. you want it somewhere known so that you can handle it. if you find it and understand it, it can heal.

that being said, finding it and pulling it out can be hard. this is where i'd like to come in. somehow i seem to be rather good at the finding and pulling. i'd like to offer my services through, like, whatever this blog is. now. does that mean you have to trust an internet rando to use it? yes. is the tumblr ask feature a bit limiting for soul surgery? also yes. but we're doing our best out here and this is what i've got. so let's give it a try. see if i can find where it hurts.

[friendlylocaloracle]

what do you mean by what you said in your last post about 'physics with feelings'? how can feelings have physics

oh gosh. okay. let's bake.

all things are defined by points of contact with other things. everything is everything else. you are your emotions. what you do is symbolic of who you are.

that's it, really. so let's go.

-all things are defined by points of contact with other things. "all things" refers to everything. literally everything. what makes a thing a thing? how it interacts with other things. "interaction" here is pretty broad. bump an object? sure, that's an interaction. looking at the words on my screen? also an interaction. i think the simplest way i can define an interaction is with quantum mechanics. no no wait come back i'm serious-- everybody is all freaked out about quantum shit. it's the pinnacle of science. there's a certain amount of collective awe at it that leads to the equivalent of mental gawking. it is sci-fi's gimmick of choice. i'm going to tell you, right now, that it's super simple. everything is everywhere until it is somewhere. that's it. i'd have a phd if academia wasn't a unique kind of hell. the relation here is that a particle, in transit, is effectively nowhere. a beam of light has to hit something. (like, say, your ocular nerve.) there's a notion running around that somehow looking at something changes it--like if you don't look then the thing is not changed. this makes it sound like you matter in the interaction. you don't. a particle just has to make contact for it to be in a place. (this isn't the only thing i feel that physics (or, rather, physicists) have, perhaps overcomplicated, but this is actually a post about feelings and i should probably get back to those. just take from this that nonphysical reality becomes real upon contact.)

-everything is everything else. this has a similar physicsy root as points of contact. break everything down until it's as deep as you can go, and it's all fundamentally the same stuff. when you combine the things, you get different stuff with new properties, but it still inherits the properties of the old stuff. the pure form of this is a fractal. self-similar at every level; eventually you go so deep you loop back around. what's important about fractals is that they form a complex image that follows a comparatively simple pattern. (the patterns can also be pretty. my picture is a fractal.) this system of simple patterns creating complex structure can also be loosely applied to physical reality. everything is made of the same stuff; the ways that they interact follow the same set of rules; you can translate the rules across things. this is how metaphors work. so let's take a break. what are you? not who are you, though i suppose that question is similar. i'm going to propose a simple answer. you come from the dirt; you go back to the dirt. humanity at large has put a ton of effort into distancing themselves from that idea. people think they are so fucking great. they are better than the dirt. they will leave their mark on the dirt, and that mark is very special. if you do the right things, you too can overcome the dirt. i think this is just a very special delusion. if there was ever something that society was successful at, it would be the production of superiority complexes. money does not save you from the dirt. fame does not save you from the dirt. collectively, life goes on. individually, the dirt wins. ...but that's not really what you are. you float on the dirt. you steer the dirt. you're tethered to the dirt, but you and the dirt aren't the same. we'll call you a soul: the who in the what. but then we're looping back to the original question. what are you? i propose that you're a bit of nonreality floating on that dirt. you and the dirt work together to cheat a little. you follow the weird quantum rules rather than the boring classical rules. the dirt keeps you from dying upon contact with anything, and you let the dirt cheat the rules. (i hear an object at rest is supposed to stay at rest, but i can just stand up and go somewhere else whenever i want. i'm going to get a pizza right now, in clear denial of the laws of physics.)

yum. -you are your emotions. now we get to talk about who you are. how are you feeling? what would you like to do? where do you want to be? these are all, at their core, emotional questions. emotions are an internal representation of your state of being. your feelings tell you about you. it comes hand in hand with existence. "i feel, therefore i am" is probably a better representation of the phrase since we now live in a world where rocks can think. emotions are the barrier through which you interact with reality and reality acts on you. suppression distorts this barrier. you lose connection to both yourself and the world, and, given enough time and pressure, it starts affecting you whether you like it or not.

-what you do is symbolic of who you are. this is the part where i might flop on my face. the thing is, usually when people are talking about emotions, they're talking about very surface level shit. "i'm happy!" "i'm MAD >:(" and then, because emotional suppression is society's most successful failure, you embrace the "good" feelings and ignore the "bad" ones. the result of this is a society filled with boring, shallow people. people who have not meaningfully emotionally developed since high school (perhaps before then, too), people who dove headfirst into what society was selling the moment they realized society was selling something, people who don't understand themselves and, thus, understand almost nothing. what i'm trying to say is that if your feelings pleasantly fit onto one of those happy/sad/mad lists, you probably kind of suck. there remain major social benefits to being emotionless and indistinct. suppress yourself as a person and immerse yourself into the wealth cults. be the blandest person you can be so you're marketable to all the other shallow people. the result of this is a society with no meaningful interactions. sit in your box content with your revenue stream while you wait to die.

[friendlylocaloracle]

So unraveling things. How is that like. How do you look at a bunch of symptoms and issues and not miss the forest for the trees and just go: Ok here is the core of the problem, this is what needs to be pulled out for things to get better.

i think it comes down to the way i see things, and the way i think i can best describe it is, like, physics but with feelings? specific things happening in specific ways have specific results. so, knowing that, you can kinda reason out what things are relevant and what things you can disregard. in practice i feel like it's wayyyyy more complicated than that, but i have been sitting on this one for days and at some point i just need to spit something out :/ but, like, if you have further things to ask i can probably field them better! specifics in general help me narrow my thoughts down.

[friendlylocaloracle]

The recent presidential debate got me thinking(I'm not from or in the us): why are clearly absurd and easily disprovable statements paraded around so proudly by someone who is going to become a president? (re: eating pets and transgender aliens)

It's not even a case of "oh he's old and senile what can you do" because no matter how senile someone is, I just cannot fathom that someone actually *genuinely* can believe in stuff like that and say it on a national platform.

What do you think?

vibes! vibes and time.

...i'm sitting here bouncing up and down like "finally! an easy one!" but then i'm thinking about explaining it and...it's kind of hard to explain what i mean well. a lot of things have to go wrong to get to this point.

the first thing is that this has nothing to do with the actual literal content of the statement. the literal content is demonstrably false. it's about the emotional content. it feels like there is some kind of truth to the, again, blatantly false statement because of some other, more immutable, core truth. i'd loosely describe it as "people from other colors of country do horrible things". (and let's be real--it's just the color.)

conspiracy theories function in a similar way. the core of the conspiracy theory is kind of immaterial to the theory itself--it's not real, and so the core can be whatever the theory needs it to be. does it really matter if it's the freemasons or the illuminati who are bringing about the new world order? neither of them are real. any amorphous "bad guy" would serve the same structural role in the theory. the purpose of the conspiracy theory is less that it explains anything, but that within the psyche of a believer it feels right to believe. other basic truths in their mind flow freely and readily into the conspiracy theory, and the conspiracy grants context and meaning to a reality that is otherwise incomprehensible: the world must fit the theory because if it doesn't then the original belief must be wrong. if there's something to be taken from a conspiracy theory, it's that it can tell you something about how a believer sees the world.

so back to the wild statements. to you--well, us--it's a blatantly ridiculous statement on a very surface level. the thought is just rejected at the gates. but if you're already someone inclined to believe a number of other things: people who aren't from here are fundamentally different from us (we'll call them lesser), lesser people are destroying society, people can destroy society by doing disgusting things, eating pets is disgusting--this statement just slides right into that belief soup easily. now i structured that 'belief soup' to make it a little more digestible, but that's a shortcut for both of our sakes so we can talk about it. the belief soup is not structured: it is a disordered emotional mass that just...exists. to the extent that you could even identify it, it's an abstract structure, a mass of feelings that doesn't make internal sense, let alone external sense. it's why the only real way i think i can describe it is "vibes": the soup has a certain emotional characteristic; the statement overlaps with it; the combination has no external reality that can affect it, and so it's just all accepted. over time, this weird emotional mass just agglomerates more and more slop (in the form of ridiculous statements) that completely unhinged, detached remarks become the next step. while it's certainly more extreme, the emotional sentiment of his new shit isn't substantively different than trump's "they're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime..." remark from, what, 2016? this is just that same vibe, under pressure, without any kind of reality to act as a grounding force. while i get how people would really like to dismiss this as a sign of senility or cognitive decline, i think that's cope. there are a lot of people with similar detachment. hell, trump's not even making original statements--he's just repeating what other people in the crazysphere are saying. you can't dismiss those people in quite the same way. the story here is mass detachment--that there are a large number of people who are fundamentally unreasonable, driven by emotional forces they themselves do not understand, and there's just not much anyone can do about that.

[friendlylocaloracle]

do you think that someone can truly be beyond redeeming?

i think that..... uhhhhh......mmmmmmm............

okay. so i'm starting with simple reasoning: you do a bad, you overcome it, you are redeemed. but then there are a bunch follow-up questions: are some bads so bad that you can't overcome them? what if you can't overcome it due to some other personal failing? is this a redemption in your eyes, or in others? there's a follow-up question for each part of the reason--and each of them could be fanned out for additional follow-ups if one should choose--but none of the caveats seem particularly interesting to me. they're logistical. the core problem is that the action -> correction -> outcome framework just doesn't really work. it requires that circumstances be neatly simplified in order to be applicable, which never happens in real life. besides: what is redemption, anyway?

aaaand that was the point where i just metaphorically shrugged my shoulders and tossed the term. the application of redemption is already something that's incredibly situational, but the idea of redemption itself is collectively defined. collective definitions are arbitrary, and i find them generally frustrating because of that. i've never met a global rule that i've liked.

so, really, what i'm trying to say, in a lot of extra words, is: who cares? redemption is when everyone has stopped caring and moved on. i'll grant that to the question.

[friendlylocaloracle]

why are you?

so i want to write something but i don't know what i want to write about. i've been feeling that for, like, i dunno. years? not to say that time helps. if it's my own desire to write that i'm concerned with, i could sit there with it forever and it probably wouldn't matter. but i'm also getting stir crazy. we live in some weird-ass times, right? the numbers say everything's good and yet everything sucks. there was a global pandemic and yet time feels like it stopped in 2020--a year that didn't even really exist because of that same pandemic. everything is happening all the time and yet nothing seems to matter.

this tumbl is my attempt to get around difficulties with getting started.

fielding questions solves two significant problems: "where do i start?", and, "who cares?". the existence of this post at least shows that the first question is one i can deal with alone, but it does feel a liiiiittle bit like screaming into the void. maybe that's therapeutic for people; it's super not for me. but i've taken a question now, and, well, man. i don't know how much it came through--my writing style is pretty transparent, so i'd expect you might have a decent sense of this already--i hated that question. like, whatever project it is that this is supposed to be, i feel like it is already very different now. like i've gone from the void of nothing to a different void of slightly different nothing where i'm also now really irritated. it's not even that the question is bad, it's that it's not a question. it is a tangled mess of nothing with no core. it is words spoken with definitions but no meaning, inquiring to me what meaning is. if you're me, and you want to help people find their own meaning in a way that is meaningful to them, someone walking in without their own meaning is so perfectly imperfect that it's going to sting for years.

i don't know if i'm here to champion reality, here to destroy nihilism, or here because i just think everyone's bad at everything. all three of those things hate that question. so perhaps i'll add a fourth. i'm here to unravel everything. take a thing, pull it apart, find out if something's actually in there. there rarely is. but that's not really a surprise. sure feels like little really matters nowadays, right? or maybe something feels like it matters now, but will it still matter in the future? :thonk: :thonk: :thonk: :thonk: :thonk: and there we have the kind of non-reality that defines where we are. living in the past for a future that matters while the present rots.

[friendlylocaloracle]

Sometimes I find it hard to work with people's emotions and tend to badly judge them. Do you have any advice for dealing with that?

i have been editing the same three paragraphs for, like, half an hour. maybe longer.

i don't really think that the question as posed is really the question that needs answering. because, like, yeah; i have advice for that. and if i were satisfied with the smart-ass answer, i'd be a smug bastard and no one should ask me anything. but, uh, that leaves me in a pinch. the most notable thing here is that there's nothing for me to give perspective on. this is purely a mechanical problem. i just happen to be open, and i guess if you squint i might look like a mechanic, but i'm not interested in solving problems, i'm interested in helping people, and on their terms. to that end, there is almost nothing for me to work with here. if you told me that this was AI generated and i was getting pranked, i'd believe you. as a first question, this one's brutal. so i'm going to try and draw blood from a stone.

let me first rephrase this into something i can work with. "i'm bad with people. help!" it's not really a question, but the original wasn't either. this is an advice blog, so of course there's advice. i don't even think it's a bad thing to come without a question and just want some perspective. perspective's, like, kind of my thing! but i think that would require putting more of yourself forward than you're willing to.

rephrasing the question also means that i can poke at the old one.

let's get something straight. "people's emotions" are not independent of themselves. they are themselves. emotions are properties of existence. you do not have people without emotions. yet a whole lot of people seem to think that emotions are just generically bad--especially men, and especially especially philosophers. obviously you don't want to have something bad, and thus you need a solution to emotions. but the proposed "solution" is effectively just suppression. suppression does not rid you of emotions, it merely displaces them. they're still there, you can pretend like you're not being influenced by them, but you've really just pushed them out of your perception. it distances you from yourself, and in doing so you lose understanding of both yourself and others.

this is why you're bad with people.

you're not the only one. emotional suppression is quite possibly humanity's biggest failed experiment. for my part, i find something almost existentially offensive about the concept itself. you've just decided to be less of a person. it sounds like both a shitty way to exist and a shitty thing to exist around. like you're not fully in tune with yourself and so you're partially out of your own control. it's certainly convenient for you, right: you save yourself a lot of pesky decision making time thinking about how or why you are or anything is in favor of constructing a facsimile of the world out of facts and logic. in return you become someone who only partially exists and whose lack of understanding causes your interactions to effectively involve inflicting yourself on others. ben shapiro must be miserable.

so there's your answer. emotional suppression. stop doing it.

...and now at this point i kinda want to wrap this post up. this has kind of been a big fuckin post. had the whole grand "so there's your answer". but there's, like, a little bit of cleanup i want to do first.

this has wound up being a lot about how i think about things. for a blog based on offering my perspective, that's probably a good thing. but as the person who has to write this blog, i don't really want to have to do this again. drawing blood from a stone is, in fact, very hard.

second: i feel like there's a lot of wack shit i said in here. like, the kind of wack shit that people read and go "oh whoa that's some wack shit, please tell me more about your wack shit". if you're a person and you're thinking that: first, hi, thanks for reading, it's nice that this matters; second, like, i miiiight make more posts about them if i get comfy on here, but i feel like the q/a setting just works for me since it's more like i'm just having a conversation with someone. if i keep getting questions i'll probably keep saying more wack shit anyway.

last, earlier up there, i used the word "men". now, maybe you haven't noticed, but everyone is mega uptight about gender these days. it's the emotional suppression. the official position of this blog is that gender is stupid. i don't care. you shouldn't either. if you saw "men" up there and thought i meant you, personally: i didn't. because i don't care. collectives be what they be, and as long as we're in here talking they just exist out there for reference. and if you're not in some group, that doesn't mean you're free. in fact, if you think that group membership does mean you're free, it probably makes you one of those uptight people. it's just us in here.

[friendlylocaloracle]

Who are you?

god this question is harder than it should be.

i'm just someone who wants to make things better? i feel like that's kind of meaningless, but it might be the best i've got.

we live in a world where emotional intelligence is deeply lacking and emotions in general are just broadly misunderstood. somehow, despite that, i'm, like, really good with them? but that's not really something that places are exactly itching for.

but that's at least a better answer. i'm good at feelings and want to help people with theirs.

[friendlylocaloracle]

what is this blog?

idk bud. i have things to say but no one to say them to.

i'd like to help people out and solve problems, but that's not exactly a *viable career path* because something has really gone wrong with us.

so i'm giving this a shot.

anyone can pop an ask in the box, and i'll give it an answer. i hear that i have a…. well, unique perspective. whatever you get from this will not be like what you get from anyone else.

[friendlylocaloracle]

well there's no need to rub it in.