Writer's Diary
7/13/25
The self that's afraid claims objectivity over the other selves, claims it knows best and should be authorized to put everything in order, to restrict risks and sudden spontaneous movements and choices. The fear-self is Machiavellian, manipulative, and slowly eliminates the functions of the other selves within, and consummates its rule.
The houses are quiet, and the air is very humid. A rabbit hops away. There's the low hum of crickets. It's dark, and I hear the sound of my own footsteps. There's a breeze. You would almost not know that people live here. It's so quiet, even though there's a house every few yards.
On a summer night 20 years ago, I would have been driving around with friends, maybe playing poker on someone's porch, or riding my bike downtown and back, or going to a house party.
I weirdly feel no nostalgia. I'm just summarizing. I like my life better now because I know myself better, but if anything, I'm astounded at the feeling that I've lived several discreet, self-contained lives already. Adolescence is a whole lifetime, which moves fairly slowly.
Freedom and freedom of personality is not easily won and is easily lost.
When I was younger, I always anticipated that I would have a reputation or a public self. And I acted unaccordingly, which made me, maybe, to some degree, unbearable to others. Because here was this person who, in a way, acted famous. Acted notable, or like they were someone. But there was no one: a failed athlete, an average student, a failed musician. A non-filmmaker, a talented but erratic writer, a poet. What was I thinking?
Philosophy is consolation because it's a way of standing outside of time, outside of the aging body, outside of mortality, and entering into dialectical play with the realm of ideas. Philosophy is pleasurable, first of all, and useful, least of all.
I find it interesting that people say they live in intentional communities, but never in philosophical communities.
Don't think about how something will affect you when you're 30 or 40. Think about how it will affect you when you're 70 or 80 or 90. Loss of something precious doesn't abate with time, but accumulates and compounds. The goal is not to die haunted.
The subject is metaphysical. The subject is necessary for metaphysical thinking and therefore the subject is itself metaphysical. The subject floats above the brain, thinking about what it is—and then invents the science of this thinking and invents a religion of this thinking and a mysticism of this thinking. And a poetry of this thinking.
If you don't want things to happen to you, then you have to think about what you want to happen. If you want agency, then you have to start by developing it.
I think philosophy is more important than ever insofar as we have given away our agency to so many machines. Philosophy might be the ur-technology that helps us resist the visible technologies we have at hand. Philosophy might even evolve into the following: the art of remaining a subject. The art of synthesizing representations and can becoming and remaining self-conscious (and more than a meteor shower of sensations and digital shocks).
A life of great wealth is relatively common relative to a life of great art, great experience, great doing and making and loving. And a certain amount of magic is driven from the world when we closely equivocate between the rarest aesthetic moments, movements, people, and material or social success.