2023-09-11 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: 🌞 Summer 🔆 Weekday: Monday 🗓 Date: September 11, 2023 📅 Week: Sep 11 – Sep 17, 2023

That’s right baby, I’m bringing back morning pages! I’m writing this one late in the evening, but so it goes. I’m actively doing this as a way to slightly divorce “journaling” or “writing” from the act of just brain-dumping, basically. I see the more concrete “writing” part as being a bit different. I liked Neil Gaiman’s approach of “you can write, or you can not write, but you can’t do anything else.” Morning pages though is only writing. There’s nothing else! The words will come out as they may and I won’t think too much about it. That’s also one of the original reasons I did it on Notion and why I want to keep it here. Handwriting these simply takes too long, no matter how fun it is.

That said, I don’t really have a ton to write about. I journaled before about Existential Kink, and I think it’s been continually helpful for me as a way to relieve a lot of tension, but it’s still in the “getting me from -1 to 0” phase, and I’d like it to be getting me closer to the positive side.

I’ve had this feeling for a while now and I have no idea whether or not it’s true, but I’ve had this increasing feeling to try psychedelics. The reason I don’t, though, is mostly that I feel like I’m in this “nah that’s what’s gonna fix me, I swear” phase, which I don’t really want to be in. I don’t want to hold that experience too tightly where I just know it’ll save me. That feels a bit wrong, but I’ll also admit that it’s a far cry from what used to be my perspective on psychedelics, which was “I’m not going to touch those things because I simply know that my mental will crumble because I’m too unstable.” Progress is progress!

Ho hum, what else is going on. I keep having this nagging thing where I hate my job and want to not do it, and it makes me want to start a side hustle, but I feel like every side hustle nowadays involves sitting in front of a computer or writing code or something, so I’m trying to move forward with some kind of intention that’s not that. I want something that ideally is more creative, something like writing. I’ve even come around to the idea of something like making videos, although I’ll admit that I’m a bit intimidated by the learning curve on that one, and much like my writing fears, I’m not really sure what to write about. I watched a video about “why journaling works” and one of the things it mentioned was that one interesting measurement for “progress” on journaling is pronoun usages. It notes that the two broad categories are people that overuse “I” and people that overuse “they,” the two categories generally being narcissists in the former and depressed folks in the latter. If you look at my writing, I think I generally fall into the narcissist category, which tracks, as far as I’m concerned. I generally think quite a lot about myself and my Purpose, as if the whole universe were lined up on a tee just for me. It’s almost as if I actually do fall into the trap of sophistry, like the whole world is a bunch of messages from God telling me how these are things I’m meant to do. But that’s not really how things work! It’s mostly just that a bunch of things happen, and we react to them.

I was reading a bit of Charles Eisenstein’s book The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is True recently, and while I have quite a few issues with that book, one interesting perspective he shared (that admittedly at the time I kinda scoffed at, but in this moment is a pleasant feeling) is that there’s a possibility that the world has a fundamental property of choice. He starts linking all of this to quantum mechanics, which is where I personally get a little fuzzy on the whole thing, but the idea being that physics and the way see the world is ultimately the mind’s projection at making sense of things, but that at more fundamental levels, there exist multiple properties of a world that are simply not cut-and-dry, like the particle-wave distinction that we see in photons. Of course my reaction to that is okay so how does that choice get made, which is perhaps operating under this fundamental assumption that choice is made up of stuff (e.g. neurons) and not that it simply exists, but that perspective is at least horizon-broadening.

Well anyways, this was surprisingly easy to get to 750 words today (and in fact I’m quite over 750), so I’ll leave more of this for tomorrow morning. See you then, my lovely.