Musings on contemporary existence, the superiority of certain societies given a particular criteria set. Existential horror is a modern invention.

editing optimally becomes a reliance on resonance rather than rationality or logic. your eyes glaze over and you proceed just completely without intuition. like literally digesting the sh*t you've written by osmosis. literally not even short term memory works. and then the edits you make are just totally on faith. etc.

bruh. our society is just a set of manufactured choices. option a and option b both lead to you funneling yourself to another location in the funnel of consumption. but they are socially identical, despite their superficial differences. we have an array of potential choices, all ultimately unfulfilling in their yielding literally nothing other than the continued shackling and recreation of your artifical substanceless identity. this is not a conspiracy. literally rooted in fundamental principles of game theory. we live in a competitive context with organizations vying for your attention. necessarily they have to do it better than the other organizations they compete with. the attempt then is to acquire your attention, and leverage the best strategy. this entails optimized UIs / UXs in the digitial landscape, designed for your consumption, and nothing else, because that's the end--and not the value that can be provided to you as a consumer.

All over the place in this p-cast (no surprise). Long digression on the universe as a mirror and how this enables you to undergo radical character transformation, like all the time, and how this is the true function of a life. Furthermore, acceptance of all things, recognizing that everything you hate and deride is really just a part of yourself, is how you eventually come to terms with yourself and make the world a better place. Because accepting the horrors of humanity does not mean endorsing or perpetuating those horrors, but rather preventing their occurring again, because it's only in aversion or hatred that the perpetuation of horrors can even occur, and to meet something with love, to meet fear with love, or to meet the darkness with light, means to make the fear / darkness impossible, this is what acceptance does. This is what forgiveness does, as Jesus forgives on the cross those who know not what they do.

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Our society is creating a more distorted and more illusory reality within the already illusory experience of life. This is the metaverse. The attempt is to create infinite consumption. Like Infinite Jest. In doing so, there's some ethical considerations. Does the more distorted reality mean more suffering? Resounding yes. Lol. Further discussion on Nietzsche and Buddhism, and how Hitler's arrogation of Nietzsche for fascism is actually not that surprising, because Nietzsche's philosophy is ofc all but altruistic. Discussing master and slave morality. Additionally concluding with the real possibility of living through compassion / empathy / altruism / love for all beings, even without any arbitrary ethical framework decreeing that you must (this conclusion being directly at odds with Nietzsche).

At any point in a funnel you have to meet the audience with a kind of media which is appropriate. At the top of the funnel, for a more general audience, you dress the content in rhetoric such that it's consumable by the least common denominator. (lol). The content gets increasingly more niche and aesthetic as you get closer to the point of sale. Commerce itself is fundamentally not altruistic because it makes an assumption as to the exploitation of the audience. It's a fundamentally self-serving activity. In this sense you can't actually act altruistically and still achieve the end you've set out to, like tautologically. We live in a dystopian nightmare (lol). And the artist has to make concessions to rhetoric in order to participate, to acquire attention.

It starts with me talking about formatting a book or choosing a cover design for a book which is not just soulless and derivative, and then also the notion of reasoning from first principles in terms of the optimal way to reach a goal, such as having a profound impact on the consciousness of a planet, and the inevitability of when reasoning from first principles you adopt conventions which mirror those of what has historically worked, but simultaneously find that much of the guiding principles that people rely on (i.e. not first principles) are bullshit, anyway. Then discussion of what comes after postmodernism, and how it has to do with embracing rhetoric, and abandoning the phenomenological attempt to get at the heart of things, understanding now that to be without a filtering personality is impossible, and then creating art from this perspective, you end up with some profound, gripping shit.