Liminal Being
Tomorrow’s event:
Applying Improvisation to Make Connections w/ Chris Sams and Paul Z Jackson. November 10th @ 1:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
***
November 9, 2020
I am going to try to unpack the “too weird” feeling I am experiencing, and I am going to attempt to get into the right relationship with it.
What does it feel like? It feels like a light pressure on the surface of my chest and arms, and if I were to translate this into words it would say: go away, leave, and be alone.
This feeling is inspiring me to retreat into myself and taste loneliness once again. Why is this?
Three theories are coming to mind: 1) a pressure to turn my truthfulness into a performance, 2) the latent egoic reason which inspired me to write in the first place has been achieved, and 3) something to do with the sense of community that is forming. I will consider each theory in turn.
People are liking these journals, and they are getting value from them, but I am uncertain as to why I am writing right now. I cannot tell if there is a daemonic pull to keep going, or if this pull is coming from other pressures. I do like the thought that my truthful words can be an art form. My friend Caveh Zahedi does something similar with his films, and he is a big inspiration for my style of truthfulness. I dislike having an expectation placed upon me to keep going though.
This expectation is ultimately coming from myself. People are liking these journals, and I want them to like them. If they like them, they will like me, and I want to be liked. Maybe this is the algorithm that is being invoked. If true, this does feel like it is coming from a lack. I do not want to write from this lack. I would rather write from love, and when I write from love my words feel artful.
The second theory is related to a possible secret motivation for writing here, which I sense could be my egoic machinations towards being recognized as someone who is important. Given all the positive feedback I have been receiving, it feels like I have achieved enough of this recognition already, and I see the pathway ahead to getting even more recognition.
I am pretty confident I could make this project more known, and personally become more known along with it. This could be personally helpful in a few ways, as I imagine it would lead to more money, more connections, and more opportunities. But there are costs to this. Less privacy, more parasocial projections, and people reaching out not to genuinely connect, but because they want to leverage my influence.
This trade-off is not appealing to me, at least not yet. This might happen whether I like it or not, but this is not something I want to seek out. I want to see if I can avoid this for as long as I can. My egoic desire for recognition has been achieved, and I know I can achieve more recognition, but I am satisfied now, and I do not want to proceed further, at least not from this motivational force. It is uncharitable to reduce all my motivations to this egoic pull, but I do sense it was an influence.
The last theory has something to do with the sense of community that is emerging, and this theory is the one that is least clear to me, so I am going to give myself more time to explore it properly.
There was a period in my life when I was alone often, and it made me lonely, but this loneliness did become an acquired taste, and I do enjoy being alone. I am a simple man really, but a lot does go on in my mind, and it can keep me preoccupied. I am never bored. There is a weird mix going on with me: I actually like being lonely, but at the same time I long for communitas.
I am having an energetic reaction to this sense of community that is forming at The Stoa. A sense of community is different from communitas, and I am not in the mood right now to engage in conceptual boundary-work, but there is a phenomenological difference.
I was beaten up when I was young by a large crowd, and this left me with post-traumatic stress related to social situations, and I had massive social anxiety for years. This is probably why I became a “chess player,” and put so much focus on learning interpersonal dynamics. I never wanted to become a victim to the social mob again. The resulting talent stack has oddly given me the social capacities to steward a community.
I still have an inherent wariness of group dynamics though. I wrote about the feminist Jo Freeman’s Tyranny Of Structurelessness idea before, which is something that Freeman saw in feminist collectives: an explicit advocacy of no social hierarchies or structure, which leads to hidden power dynamics that turn ugly. I am super wary of this, and even the most well-intended people can gaslight themselves and others into forming weird group dynamics.
This is weird: a Stoic who likes being alone, and is wary of group dynamics, has the capacity to summon “the others,” and possibly steward them towards communitas. I want to preemptively push back against the obvious suggestion that I just need to do some shadow-work to integrate whatever is behind this wariness. The reason why I want to push back on this is because something feels right about keeping this tension alive.
I do feel like a “liminal being,” who can vibe with many people, and who can code-switch in a way that affords me a “protean tribalism.” This is a concept we introduced in the memetic tribes white paper:
We speculate that if one becomes skilled at relating to another for its own sake, across tribal affiliation, it may allow people to bypass tribalistic affinities and a Protean Tribalism to emerge. One’s tribe would be fluid and context-based, in contrast to the increasingly rigid identities we currently find comfort in.
It is weird. I am currently part of this culture war discussion group that is full of progressive socialist types, and in the last week alone I have received warm emails sent by a range of people, from those with woke sensibilities to QAnon believers. I am friends with hard-core traditional Catholics, poly folks, and rationalists and postrationalists alike. I can hang with reactionaries, Buddhistics, normies and Chads, and I like them all.
I am inbetween worlds, and maybe the existential loneliness that follows me around serves as a beacon to find the others. Maybe I am not meant to experience a sense of community, and maybe I am not meant to get into communitas. We’ll see. It is not wise to rush to conclusions, but it is wise to do my negative visualizations, and see all of this as an opportunity to practice my Stoicism.
***
patreon.com/the_stoa