I wonder how many of these hobbies were actually my own. The guitar; ‘you were so good on the guitar James’. But when I look at it all I feel is apathy. The same old A minor, played to eternity, is there anybody out there? Maybe the problem was middleware. Maybe the messages weren’t getting through.
Anyway these hobbies that have fallen to the wayside - I don’t know if they were mine. The guitar was my dad’s thing. Ironman was something impossible, and a great challenge, but again, not mine. I surrogated it from somewhere, and there were so many (so many) places to optimise with three sports and nutrition and recovery and logistics, I loved it and it became my everything for a long time.
But even that broke in the end. These were never mine. I took someone else’s dream and I dismembered it, then Frankensteined that fucker and made some kind of soulless replica, thinking it would fill the void inside. Just made it bigger. Needed drugs!
All of these things must have been to try to please some internalised caricature of whoever’s dream it was, if it was even their dream in the first place. They don’t know or care what you are doing, and they would already have said ‘good enough’ if they did.
But your dopamine system had latched onto this new target, this new goal, this new carrot on a stick, a new distraction from the spikes in your asshole. And then you proceeded to kill the joy, and look around and wonder what the fuck that was all about.
I wonder how this plays into the relationship with that person going forward? Say I achieved the dreams of my father but they did not satisfy me; would that make me angry with my father for giving me the wrong dreams? I worked and retired and it did not satisfy and I was angry at capitalism. I trained and qualified and it did not satisfy and now all athletic pursuits look comical.
But yeah. My real hobbies. They were killed at school.
C. That’s all it took, I think. C, for a sculpture I loved, about the convergence of AI and humanity, made in 1996. Then A for utter utter shite just because it was a painting or textile or whatever so easily compared. As an adult, easy to see. As a child… that was soul crushing. Hey; I enjoyed watching ballet too! That got beaten out of me fast.
But I guess what is happening now is I’m coming back to who I really am. It seems that my ‘real me’ whatever the fuck that shit means (I get it now!) - it seems this real me might be just… emerging. Somehow he’s already into the art and knives and played a hell of a catchup game and now he’s got his philosophy and religion back too.
Fucking hell man these ‘scientists’ sometimes. Fuck me. One loser ranting about neuroplasticity while getting the definition wrong. So closed minded at times. Just like the proletariat in any day, I guess. Always using language to play games.
It’s all coming full circle. Intelligent machines. Philosophy and emotion and the science of the mind. You need scientific words for the science and subjective words for the subject, and your science now is to make a subject. A lot of these guys know how to build a house and think that means they could build a car too. Wrong mate. You can build the factory that builds the car, and you’d better have some other skills lined up for when you’re done.
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