2026-01-25 Journal Entry

I’m not really getting any words out right now, so I’m going to start moving my fingers until I do have something valuable to say. I sometimes think about what it was like back in the colonial days to meet entirely new peoples. I’m reading a history of Hawaii, and it strikes not necessrily how different the Hawaiians are or anything, but the certain contempt one hears from the missionaries about how others live their lives. Some parts were horrible, admittedly – blood sacrifice is a fair line, I think? – but things like promiscuity weren’t such a bad problem until the arrival of a lot of Western STDs.

But I think what strikes me is how arbitrary it all seems. Take the Mehele land reforms: Kamehameha III wants to do right by his people and starts divying up land into lots based on how much they use, but this means then that people own land, a concept they’ve never had before. Many of these lots are too small to be self-sufficient, and at the same time various pathogens rage through the native peoples (measles, etc.), so either because their land isn’t worth as much to them or because they need money to survive the epidemic or because they’d rather have the cash for any number of other reasons, all that money gets sold to hot-shot foreign landlords who buy it all up and start running businesses off of them. That’s a completely noble-minded attempt at land reform that set Hawaii off an entirely different track of history. But in some way history like that is the microcosm of what it’s like to live, how the many tiny micro-decisions we make in any given moment can come to completely shuffle our lives around.

Second-order consequences are hard.

Okay so now we’re switching into full Morning Pages mode. I’m reading a lot and I’m also kinda tired of everything. Tired in some way in the literal sense, and I am at least enjoying sitting around and reading a ton – that much is in fact truly interesting. But I feel like a cave-dweller, like someone who prefers books to real human interaction. I say I feel “like” this is the case, but at least at the moment that is in fact the case. I was writing a story in which I sort of came to the realization that I feel myself as a burden on everyone else, which to a certain degree is absolutely true, but the flipside is that I regularly feel as if others are a burden to me, and I don’t really enjoy the presence of others much or at all. I love stories, I love reading about people, and when I have some kind of privileged access to their inner imaginations, I do tend to like them more, but those are fictional characters, and I harbor some awful and cruel suspricion that they’re infinitely more interesting than the average person. Most people – myself included! (unfortunately) (this is some nasty self-talk, but I’ll table that for now) – do relatively little in their lives. I got a job offer (or like a “hey do you want to come back to Stripe, the door is indeed still open”) from a staff engineer the other day and while in some way all of that structure and money is tempting, it’s also in another way repulsive, and it seems somewhat surreal to me that most of the people that work there live lives that I find somewhat repulsive in their normalcy.

It reveals what I think is a foundational tenant in my life, something that I academically find incredibly repulsive in its aversion to the vast, vast majority of humanity but that I feel strangely important for myself, which is that I find normalcy repulsive. I think being weird and fucked-up and gross and otherwise bizarre is a virtue, and that embracing the cringe and ugly parts of ourselves is Good Actually. But of course the negative effect this has on my own life is that I build up a life which itself is sort of filled with these weird and ugly parts of myself that I hold before my eyes each and every day and it can lead to a certain type of self-loathing about one’s own day-to-day existence. And so the question becomes Well then how do actually deal with that? It makes no sense to hold as a truth the idea that repulsive and strange parts of ourselves are the most real and authentic aspects of living while also finding them, obviously but also paradoxically, ugly and repulsive and stupid and thus desiring to avoid them. Why hold both of those things to be true? Are they reconcilable? To reconcile them is in fact perhaps to hold the ugly as beautiful, to hold the stupid as esteemed, and to generally do away with the silly dichotomies that fill the mind but leave some residue. Give everything a deep clean.

The other thing being, of course, that it’s not so much that it’s the the “““bad””” parts of us are really the “““good””” parts, but rather that such distinctions are strange and uncomfortable and don’t actually make much sense. Visually unappealing food can be the most delicious, ill-spoken people can have rich and wild inner worlds. The old and decrepit have made it farther than those who died young and beautiful.

But this is all some kind of circling around the general value of the present moment and the arbitrary nature of aesthetic judgement. At the end of the whole discussion is the simple fact that we place judgements and labels on some things and not others. Though I must admit that the arbitrariness of this all is perhaps too far at times, no? I hate to come to the conclusion within this morass of relativism that there’s nothing more or less beautiful than others. Is that really true? It’s all in the eye of the beholder, but who are the beholders whose judgement we care about and cherish? Our own, surely. Is there anyone else? Is it the best life we can imagine to make things purely for our own perspectives and thus reiterate our own loneliness? Can we love ourself so much that it spills over to others?