Virtue signaling from a naked king who got rid of all children, just in case
You tell me, if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich? And I tell you I don’t know how to talk about money, anymore than I know how to tell you what you missed in not making a choice to alter your brain in high school.
Do you have anxieties that your sensations of the world sit across an experiental divide from the things of the world about which your sensations cluster/from which they emanate/to which they attach? If this experience-phenomena-thing gap is still a thing for you, even at this age of crumbled empires and factional reality, I wonder whether there is much chance of me falling in love with you at the same time as you falling in love with yourself. I also wonder whether aesthetics is not a subset of philosophy but a form of consumption.
If you’ve never eaten a thing whose life you took on purpose, does that make you slightly less human? When did the category human no longer necessitate a trait of “killing what it eats?” Not to get all Fertile Crescent and onset of agricultural practice on you.
I started beholden to the idea that this time I might actually say something. I have become arrested by the idea that for too long I was assuming that the work was a puzzle, and it turns out it just be a mystery instead. That this doesn’t feel momentous, and also doesn’t feel like a loss, is some indication of how far I’m come or how the shiny allure of a closed and comprehensive belief system has just never taken root. For me at least. They say work masochism bears a family resemblance to virtue signaling which bears a family resemblance to compulsive signifying activity, to which I say, to them and those their ilk, very well.
The reason I’m so smart and not rich (one might answer) is because I recognize the illusion of wealth for what it is. But that is a luxury, that recognition, isn’t it?
