relationships

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I was out sick yesterday

It’s Friday, and I apologize, but I did not write a blog post yesterday (Thursday).  I also did not go into the office yesterday.  I was feeling a bit on the mend Wednesday morning, but by the evening, I was totally wiped out, and yesterday morning, I realized that I did not really have the strength to go to the office.  So I stayed at the house.

Believe me, I would have preferred otherwise.  I don’t really like the room where I live.  The only really positive things about it are, it’s where my stuff is, for what that’s worth, and it’s where I can’t randomly have people intruding on my time and energy.

It’s a bit of a paradox, or at least it’s a state with competing/conflicting forces and pressures acting upon it.  On the one hand, I am very lonely, and I really wish I had friends with whom I could speak and interact comfortably, and with whom I could do fun things.  But on the other hand, social interactions have just gotten more and more stressful for me over time, and I always feel like every relationship of any depth, that I have ever had in my life, I have screwed up, and that any future ones will likewise fall apart and fill me with regret will make my depression and loneliness even worse.

I’ve said it here before, but I am most certainly not convinced that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.  There should be caveats about that skepticism, though, since simple answers are almost always incomplete.  The answer to that issue can depend very much on how one lost one’s love.  If one lost it because of basic force majeure, something beyond anyone’s control, it might not lead to a state of absolute regret, and is much less likely to engender (or worsen) self-loathing.

But if one loses love because the person one loves, and to whom one is dedicated, decides that one is just not worth it, that they don’t want to be with one anymore despite years of time together, because one is…challenged by various issues‒well, it can be hard to blame the other person for wanting to leave, or to blame anyone else for wanting to leave, and so it can be all the more devastating, making an already tenuous self-image ever worse.

And of course, romantic relationships are intrinsically difficult.  They are also very important in many ways, though I suppose that in a brutally “red in tooth and claw” world they would be a luxury at best.

I don’t know what point I’m making.  How did I even get on this subject?  Oh, right, I was discussing the fact that I don’t like the room in which I live but that at least I’m relatively free from having other people interlope without my invitation.

The prospect of moving somewhere else also feels too stressful to contemplate, frankly.  Again, this sort of stuff is easier if one has friends and loved ones/companions.  Even if they don’t contribute to a process, just having someone with whom to be able to relax is beneficial.

I didn’t realize how lucky I was in my young life to have been the third born of three kids, so I always had people older than I looking out for me.  I also stayed in the same school system from kindergarten through senior year of high school.  Then I stayed with a new, basic friend group through college, and that was helpful, especially since they were all people with similar interests and intelligence levels.

Then, of course, after college I got married and (apart from medical school) my wife was basically my “special interest”.  I think that’s sort of the way I am, at least about friendships and romantic relationships (though there is a very small sample size of the latter).

So, I didn’t really seek out or desire any serious other friendships while I was married.  Unfortunately, that meant that, once my wife “broke up” with me, I didn’t really have anyone around for support.  But there were people who were more than willing to take advantage of the things I was good at and who relied on the fact that I was not good at recognizing manipulations and ulterior motives and so on.

Then, of course, I ended up being a guest of the Florida DOC, precisely because I was such a handy sucker/fool.

I don’t know why I’m going into all this nonsense.  I don’t think it’s likely to achieve anything, except to convey the fact that I know I have gradually lost a lot of good things that I had that made me able to tolerate and even enjoy living in the human world.  But I didn’t know they served that function, and now that they are gone, I don’t know how to do it on my own.

Oh, well, it’s not like anyone is guaranteed any good things when they’re born, and even most of the things we think of as “rights” are not really something any part of nature lets us take for granted, apart from death itself.

On that upbeat note, have a good day, please.

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Detritus

Well, I’m getting ready to go to the office this morning.  It’s payroll day, which means I’ll be more stressed out than even I usually am.  It’s really gotten to be more complex over time, with different people being paid in different ways and rates and with different incentives, and people in our new, other office.  Oh, and now we’re getting yet a new “product” to sell which is going to require more differentiation and so on.  Huzzah!

I don’t know why I keep writing this blog.  I feel like I’m just continually rehashing the same things, saying the same things over and over again, not even really expecting different results.

Incidentally, there’s no actual (reliable) record anywhere of Einstein saying words to the effect of “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.  Frankly, it doesn’t even seem like anything he would have said.  It doesn’t make sense, either‒it flies completely in the face of the idea that someone can improve with practice at something, or that in some circumstances retrying something over and over again occasionally brings about different outcomes.

Einstein apparently did say that there are two things that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and he wasn’t sure about the universe.  Of course, as a Jewish scientist, he left Germany in the 30s (I think) because he saw the products of the breed of human stupidity that arose there at around that time, so you can understand why he might take a dim view of human intelligence.  I wonder what he would think of us now.

Anyway, I’m still taking my “antidepressant” and also trying to adjust things better to control my chronic* pain.  I can feel the immediate effects of the St. John’s Wort, which I always do when I take it.  Dry mouth, slightly less reactive, and feeling a bit stiffer (metaphorically) and more socially withdrawn in the morning for a while after I take it.  It’s not making a difference for my sleep, that’s for sure.  But, again, maybe it will at least give me enough of a boost finally to act on my desire just to stop existing.

It would be nice if it at least gave me more will or drive to exercise, which it has done in the past, though not every time I’ve taken it.  At least it doesn’t tend to give me the asthenia that I would get with SSRIs, and it doesn’t give me the rampant and intolerable tension and anxiety that Wellbutrin and Effexor gave me.  It’s closest in character to the old tricyclics‒amitriptyline and nortriptyline‒but not as groggifiying.  Anyway, hopefully it does something to help me make some changes.

I think of depression as being at least partly a disease of gumption, a disease of the will, where the sense of motivation is impaired.  Or perhaps it’s more of a psychological autoimmune disorder, where the mind turns upon itself.  That’s an oversimplification, and there are certainly more aspects to it than that, but that is at least part of it.

Of course, there may be other factors at play in my brain.  I’ve encountered a place online that does reasonably priced autism assessments (I found it through Threads) and I may avail myself of that.  It is slightly worrying, of course.  It sometimes feels nearly certain that, if assessed, I would be told, “No, you don’t have ASD or anything related to it.  You’re just fucking out there like Vega, you don’t even count as human.”  Which would come as no real surprise, but it would be somewhat disheartening.  How does one treat, or at least accommodate, someone who is an alien?

I don’t know what I will do with any knowledge I gain through that process, if I do it.  Maybe I won’t do anything.  Maybe I’ll just flush it all away with every other bit of information I’ve ever taken in.  I guess that’s what’s going to happen one way or another, anyway, right?

Whatever.  I hope you all have a good day, or have good days, if that should be plural to match the subject.  I suppose I’ll probably write another blog post tomorrow.  I’m sure you can hardly wait.

In the meantime, here’s a little “video” (really more of a slide show) that I threw together this morning, to the tune of Another Brick in the Wall Part 3.

*I originally made a typo there and wrote “chromic” pain, which sounds like something from which a synesthete might suffer‒a chronic discomfort that they experience with all the colors of the rainbow.

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Oh what a tangled web weaves itself

Good day, everyone.  It’s now the last Saturday before both Christmas and Hanukkah in 2024.  The office is open today, and I am on my way to work (quite early, because, you know, it’s me, and I don’t sleep very well).

Sometimes I wonder if writing this blog, in which I basically share my random thoughts, is somehow narcissistic.  Maybe it’s just because narcissism is in the news so much lately, especially with regard to politics*, but I do worry about it.  After all, when one is as gifted and skilled and brilliant and creative as I am, there’s always a danger of losing one’s truly exceptional humility.

I’m kidding, sort of to make a point and sort of just because I like to screw around with things that way.  Don’t worry, an overabundance of self-love has rarely been an issue for me.  Sometimes I pretend to be egotistical, mostly for amusement, and in my teenage years, it also helped stave off my already developing self-loathing and depression a bit**.

Still, with all the people on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube, etc., to say nothing of podcasts, and blogs such as this one, and so forth, one might think that the modern world is beset by a pandemic of narcissism.  I think this is not correct, however.  Although there are divas out there, I think there are more innocent reasons for a lot of what we see.

Humans‒bless ‘em‒are extremely social critters.  They are by far the most social of primates, and really, given the power of language and shared “fictions”, they are the most social species the planet has seen.  They are highly interdependent, and they must not merely cultivate but tend to and nurture many relationships.

When a creature’s survival is strongly dependent on certain behaviors, those behaviors tend over time to become pleasurable; they can even become part of play, and creatures will engage in them purely for their own enjoyment.  Many predators, for instance, will hunt and kill even when they don’t need to do it.  (That’s right, plenty of other animals in the world kill for pleasure, sorry to break anyone’s illusion that this is a feature (or a bug) solely of humans.)

Of course, with ultra-social creatures who need constantly to reinforce existing interpersonal threads as well as to cultivate new beneficial ones and to prune detrimental ones, the exchange of goods or even favors cannot possibly be enough to satisfy.  There’s just not enough time and only one body each to go around.

But when one can share information (even seemingly pointless or banal information) with multiple others, one can develop and strengthen numerous threads, cultivating them even from afar, and one can make oneself seem a useful potential connection for others who are themselves useful, and with minimal cost.  After all, information shared is not lost from its source, it is merely reproduced.

Take a moment to ponder that last sentence‒that fact is a big part of what makes life possible at all.

Anyway, now people can share thoughts and jokes and amusing pictures and helpful tips and even serious, high-level expertise, with millions and even billions of other people, and they can get rapid feedback as well.  Of course people are going to do it, especially since it can even be “monetized” in an almost baroque/rococo**** arrangement of fictions and networks, real and virtual, all interacting in astonishingly complex ways, each entity operating entirely under “local” pressures, which change from instant to instant depending on all the other forces at work, spontaneously forming into a structure of tremendous complexity, a thing not merely unplanned but probably unplannable.

So, although narcissists can thrive online, I think they are a minority, and they seem often to self-destruct.  I think most of the various personae telarum are just humans (and other somewhat similar creatures, like me) responding to instinctual drives and enjoying the process.  One should not think of them in the same way one does those dangerously insecure narcissists who seek great political power.

*Though politics has always been a great bastion of narcissistic pathology.  Not everyone who wants to try to contribute to governing their community, state, nation, etc., is a flagrant narcissist; some are surely well-meaning and even humble.  Nevertheless, the field of politics attracts narcissists like the priesthood attracts pedophiles.

**I don’t remember how old I was when I first experienced true depression, but I know that I first started having suicidal thoughts no later than my first trip to music camp (which I loved, by the way, but the separation from all my usual settings didn’t help my depression, which makes sense if I truly do have the second version of ASD***).

***The first ASD, which I definitely had, was an Atrial Septal Defect, a congenital heart defect that required surgical correction when I was 18.  The second, rather amusingly to me, is Autism Spectrum Disorder, the criteria of which I very likely meet, though I have no official diagnosis.  This overlapping of acronyms‒because there are far fewer combinations of, say, 3 letters than of 3 words‒is an example of a problem inherent in all forms of data compression.

****Barococo?