(og thread) people who are bad at generating their own meaning get much more troubled by disruptions and turbulence in external meaning structures
no man is an island. complete self-sufficiency is an illusion, and a potentially dangerous one.
still, there’s an obvious spectrum re: how dependent one is on external sources beyond one’s immediate control/influence
this is broadly true of probably all domains:
contrast Steve’s above reflection on the interdependence of things with how he talks abt NeXT’s relationship with their suppliers – negotiating from a place of strength. There’s an ayylmao dynamic here abt dependency. You can achieve a kind of independence THROUGH interdependence
they’re not in conflict. it’s about being very mindful, identifying and focusing on the things that really matter. most of everything in the human realm is overwrought, tedious, lossy, messy. if you cultivate taste and discernment you can do more with less, and walk through walls
my hope is to help more people get better at managing this stuff so that they can in turn help more people do the same. greater “meaning independence” helps people unplug from the “primary grid”, which has all sorts of negative externalities & side-effects if its the only source
restated without the word: people who struggle to situate themselves in the world, in history, to make sense of who they are and what they’re about, to contextualize their lives – are overly dependent on other people telling them how it is
restated again: people who can’t edit their own stories are mercy of external storytellers. the people who seek out those storyteller roles end up passing on their personal anxieties, neuroses, etc to the masses. and the pedestal dynamic itself introduces unhealthy effects
the hardest thing to talk about with sensitivity and skill is that sometimes, no matter how good you are with your own stories, you might still be somehow targeted or victimized by some other external story-lattice beyond your control. This is a very very hard problem
I’ve tried thinking about it from many different angles, looked to history, etc… what can you do when the wider world you’re in is messed up? I’ve come to prioritize trying to help individual people first. it’s not perfect, but it’s the best I know how to do with current config
once you have a cluster of people, you can do more together than any one of you can do alone. and then hopefully you can have bigger and bigger positive impacts. that’s the dream…
the tricky thing there is to always respect the sovereignty of individuals, such that you don’t end up just becoming another oversimplistic demagogue imposing their story, values and meaning onto everyone else. Each person’s self-authorship and sovereignty comes first