Being Childish

In order to be in touch with myself,
to be honest, passionate, emotional, to have these feelings and take them seriously,
I run the risk of looking childish.

It's like with my old hipster "friends" and acquaintances. Where everything is held at arms length with them. They are too advanced for emotions and vulnerability, they cannot be in touch with themselves. And for being otherwise I was at best a bit ridiculous to them. I really think that above all other adjectives, "insincere" describes the hipster best. As well as most others. They think they're something new and special. They're not. They are a primitive-at-heart albeit sophisticated attempt to gain superiority, and are horrified by vulnerability.. They've got a million judgments for everything that they think sets them apart from and above the rest. They're desperate for that high, but it just makes them soulless.

Do you see what people are trying to do? They're trying to castrate my soul. I'm supposed to try to fit in, prove myself to others, and as long as I remain emotional and have these passions, as long as I take these passions I feel seriously, as long as I take anything I feel seriously and don't put it beneath me, I'm lost to them.

I hate them. I hate their phoniness, I don't know how they can stand to be who they are. They gather around the sofa to watch a movie and flauntingly talk about pop culture references, thinking they're so cultured and so advanced. And never in their conversations does any sense of genuine feeling enter, it's just a constant orgy of trying to feel superior with each other. They're disgusting. I can't recall ever in my life being able to keep that act up for more than two minutes. It makes me feel like a whore piece of shit and meanwhile I feel my soul strangling. I've got these feelings and longings inside me and they've never been able to be very quiet. I have got to be passionate and feel that meaning or I can't stand the thought of my existence. Why are we trying to drown out our emotions like that? It's despicable.

So I am childish, and cannot let the fear of this judgment alter me. And by recognizing this consciously I can look at this accusation and disarm any defensiveness I would have about it - I can say yes, I am childish; I believe in it.

I feel like in writing all this, merely the way I write these entries, the way I intellectualize things, I fear may be enough to betray myself, even. I know that to others, for my art, for my feelings, for my desperate search, I am childish, and this is at least partly kind of defensiveness over it. I want these idiots to know that I'm aware and thinking about it, and even understand it to quite some depth, but still defend it.

But I also hear my heart speaking. And there's this passion that screams words I can only imagine from where, saying the most incredible things, surprising me most of all, and when I can find a moment to let it go and really speak what it will, unadulterated and unrestrained, I can't believe what I hear and how much it hits me what I really feel. And in that is the overwhelming knowledge of who I am and what I want to be. And I don't want to be this petty garbage, I don't want to allow my soul to be silenced, not even if it means dragging the whole world down with me. I love this person that's inside of me, the way he speaks openly against every influence in the whole world, managing to gasp out, profoundly, an actual unique thought. A truly unique thought, as this comes from a place so abstract and at the overcoming of all influence. I love the way this person inside me recognizes that life is not worth a god damn without the underlying meaning of the passions and emotions that can only be seen in self-honesty and an in-touch nature. I love the way this person inside demands that I listen to him and not back down and not shut up, even while on a more shallow level I remain hesitant. I can hear the ridicule I incur for speaking passionately, in any instance I may choose to, yet I love that this guy inside me cheers me on anyways because he recognizes that this is worth more then that concern, and I am only betraying myself in the end with concerns of such non-childish, "adulthood" vanity.

And it's like, what is all this adulthood bullshit, anyways?
"Maturity", yeah. It's just like, lose contact with yourself and the passions you really feel. Deny yourself, your dreams and innocence, sell out, be advanced, become desensitized, and deny everything. Grab a phony romance and do the bare minimum to keep it "stable", to prove to the world that you're "well adjusted" and doing ok, a "success", and claim there's no turmoil going on down there. Are you kidding me? Is that what we came to this planet for? How can we justify this?
And that's what they mean by maturity. That's seriously what it amounts to, becoming a whore. They won't tell you openly, but there's no choice, you are to deny your innocent dreams, and what love intrinsically means & the ferocity with which it can only speak. The only volume level it knows. To tone down such passions until you take them casually, and allow them to be used and destroyed. And in that is the destruction of the meaning of love, and in the destruction of love is the destruction of all of life.

My parents and culture in general always pushed me down the path of career, success and all that nonsense. All I could ever think about my whole life has been the way I have seen love constantly being destroyed around me. Don't they know that's the only thing that actually matters? I'm supposed to get a solid career going, for what? So I can soak in all that material security and just be miserable in a nice big house? Like it's supposed to make me happy despite the central point of life being destroyed? I can't understand why people like my parents were so hung up on that crap, trying to get me to "succeed", while I was just constantly miserable! And never a thought given to that, not once. At least not in any other context than treating it like a defect to be coldly fixed by some psychiatric institution so I can get back on my worker ant track. Like, isn't this the point of life? Doesn't that come first? Love and happiness? The whole central thing. Am I just a worker ant to them? It's all just evolutionary instincts, everything they operate on. It's the whole school culture idea, this false association we made between education (training/prepping) and a bright future. Like we're building a future by doing this. Like this is important or something. Like it's going somewhere in the end. All a big illusory construct.. Fuck you, I'm not happy! When did that become so unimportant?

But that's adulthood. Just the act of making the world soulless.
There's no reason it had to be this way.

"Childhood"

What can I say?

Phony optimism, phony hope, trite inspirational quotes shared around online, which sound pretty and life changing, but change nothing.. They're like candy, they get people high on some half-witty little statement about life that's just a lie, giving them a plastic sense of hope. They get their fix, and then they're back next week for another, but nothing is different. It's like when people say how this or that musician changed their life. Saved them. "I wouldn't be alive right now".. and this they always say with slurring words, as they drink themselves into oblivion in their pointless mess of a life.

My mind recognizes patterns. All human minds do, we are incredible pattern-recognizing machines. So when it comes to salvation, to happiness, meaning, I can't help but observe the events unfolding in my life, and it's always - trying to analyze the data, what's happening.. is this something special? I'll do something new, something I haven't done before, or haven't gone as far in, or whatever, I'll see this or that situation, this or that success, failure, odd event, different event, and my mind is always analyzing it, like, "am I on the path to meaning?" "does this mean something special?" "Am I finally making real, meaningful, substantial progress, spiritually?" But of course, it's never anything. I am here wasting time with this elaborate mental structure that tricks me into wasting a life's worth of time.

The world is full of phony romances, I have not observed otherwise, not once. People are lying to themselves, out of desperation.
And isn't religion kind of the same? Romance and religion, they go hand in hand, on a deeper level. We are looking for completion, one way or another. I mean what is 'god'? For me, the meaning in it is the idea of a being which can love me and lead me and overall complete me, and finally make me not feel alone, for once truly not alone. And we as people tell ourselves constantly, you know, this new system, this new theology, religion, this new romance, we've finally figured it out, we've finally found completion. But we're lying to ourselves in desperation. We're phony whores and it cheapens us and it cheapens the value in existence. But maybe if you stay together long enough, maybe if you stick it out it will come true? But it won't. We're trying desperately to be in love, telling everything to ourselves to convince ourselves, when we do not truly honestly feel it.

And worldly justice: if you're really good and you really believe.. well, there are still no promises. Do not be fooled by the lies - the world does operate by cruel social hierarchies which are not only just unfair, but which punish the meek and loving most. That is not to say "oh we know that, just keep trying, it will eventually turn out", "you've just got to believe or.. or keep suffering forever, and then it will work."
Like, oh, I'm sorry, was I caring wrong? Was it not enough that I gave while you took?
No, it is corrupt to the bones and sometimes will destroy well more then just a small helping of justice. You will not get what you put in.

Don't entertain the lies they tell you in the stories they show you, about people getting what they deserve. You don't have to feel like a big bad negativity jerk for not buying it. (if) You're not the one who made the world this way.

Oh, and self improvement, here we go. College, career, working out, raising kids, the channeling of oneself into a task and watching of its results as a way of simulating the experience of the illusion of improvement, progress, in one's existence in this realm. To subtly make oneself feel they are progressing on the deeper meaningful level too.
And, watching the "progress" of humanity, the development of nations, technology, exploration, science, etc. It's the same thing.

And you'll find a huge amount of lies in all of the religions, and all of the drugs, and all of the life-changing lifestyles, self-help books, music lifestyles, etc. It's multiplicity, it's insanity, the human organism desperately looking for answers and branching out into every conceivable possibility, but finding nothing.

Someday you will die, and it is indeed possible it will be quite senseless. You will not gain a sense of completion or purpose to life simply by getting older, being old, living a long life, "full life".. You will be left with the same non-answers you have now, and wonder "what was the point of this?" as your candlelight is burning out.

"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing"
(Shakespeare)

"— (3:14. everything that god made, that will be forever.) "

People like to ridicule this, they say, "yeah we all know, tell us something new Ben"
Or they say, "Man you've got to change your attitude"
As if to imply my seeking hasn't been honest enough, selfless enough, intelligent enough, or otherwise. But when I look I observe that it's exactly those things that have precisely formed my attitude?

What is passed off as positivity I perceive less to be good, and more often to be an attack on the truth. You want me to forget all that I have learned. You want me to be weak and relinquish the answers I have honestly observed, in favor of drunken-ing myself towards some positive outlook, like maybe everything will be ok in situations in which it won't, like sedating myself for a time.. Mulling the positive lies over in my mind until I can't help but find myself back in this predicament, ultimately remaining lost. Forever. No! I won't accept it and I don't feel guilty for my negativity. Why should I even? I don't want to close my eyes on what I have learned, because I fear that if I do, an entire picture will never form and I'll never understand existence. That I'll just be stuck in a permanent cycle of lies and false progress, forever. Do you understand what it means to say you want the truth, you want answers, understanding, fulfillment, and won't tolerate waiting a second longer than you judge you have to? And maybe an entire picture will never form. Maybe it's not even possible, I have to be willing to accept that.

I find the optimism and show the world makes to be so ugly.. always on to some new thing, some trendy thing, but it's always just the same old nothing, and unbearably stale. It's just the damn phoniness that revolts me.

"Pineal Cones, Stars, Eternal Loneliness & Overwhelming Insignificance"

Why does every path seem to be a dead end to no answers? False hope? What is a conceivable purpose for this nature? I'd rather not trade in the latest one for another lie. I don't want to be old and still mulling over the same garbage. What kind of lives are these that we lead?

The Great (Inner) Struggle

When I was younger, I felt like our inner struggles were a metaphor for the struggles "out there", the big action packed ones we see on the screen. Like an inferior version of them, and don't really compare, and it's only a real struggle if it's physical and visual and superficial. It's only a real struggle if it's World War I, and that's important.

In my shift of valuing the internal more, I understand these big struggles we see on the screen only to reflect our inner turmoil. Indeed, most of us will never even get involved in some big awesome gunfight like we see on the screen, (and most of the time we do, we're just being posers and trying to imitate what we see on the screen), and yet we still have this obsession with creating those struggles on screen. These battles and big acts we see going on in the world are the inferior reflection of what we feel within. They are merely a symbol and expression of the struggle for meaning we feel within ourselves.

Let us not marginalize the internal just because it's not as tangible, "real". It shouldn't be belittled, as if petty, silly emo nonsense by comparison. It's a lot more real. It is our inner struggle which creates literal wars, through which we get a sense of escape from the inner discontent, not the other way around. Frustrations build up and build up until, inevitably, war erupts as an outlet, and it is through war that we get a sense of meaning and hope that we may escape our troubles.

The struggle of life, what basic human validation means, the ego games we play, loneliness and the meaning of love is far grander and more profound & meaningful then anything you could make a movie about or begin to fantasize about.

"Have a Nice Life"