APHORISMS 1-5
People have a tendency to judge actions primarily by what is seen, not what is unseen.
1.
Impostor syndrome doesn’t really exist.
If you’re a fresh grad or college student, you have a legitimate reason to feel this way. After all you are literally unskilled, inexperienced and untested. Just starting out.
But for anyone who’s been in the game for 5 years or more — really?
It is preposterous to me that anyone who has been working for more than 5 years is capable of doubting whether they are fit or worthy to do the job they are doing.
Five years is a long time.
Long enough to figure out if it is right for you.
Hell, some marriages don’t even last that long.
Everyone can theoretically be Good at a craft. Not everybody can be Great1 at a craft.
If you don’t know by Year 3 whether you’re Good enough or “worthy” I have some unfortunate news for you…
You done fucked up.
You’ve either not been paying the required level of attention and learning as much as you should, or
You are truly unfit and unqualified for whatever it is you are doing.
After 3-5 years you either know whether you possess the Skills/XP/Hunger…. Or
You should GET THE HELL OUT OF THE KITCHEN!
This might sound harsh, but it’s the truth and nothing but the truth.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying to you and trying to see you fail, or
They sincerely believe what they’re saying and are therefore so oblivious that you can safely ignore them because they are clearly Not Gonna Make It.
I don’t want you to fail.
I want you to win!
I want nothing but the best for you.
2.
Almost all socializing is fake, because almost all people live in the grip of ideology.
Ideology is the modern secular religion. People don’t stop being religious once they cease to believe in God. They only transfer their religious impulse onto manmade things. Ideology is THE ur-false idol.
People turn on you if you have the wrong opinions, so the wise choose to say nothing of substance, which means that you cannot have meaningful relationships at all, only partnerships of convenience.
Even more, in a modern democratic society founded on “Equality”, you can only lose your position. Notions such as Superior and Inferior, Beautiful and Ugly, Good and Evil, are cast out into the outer dark because egalitarianism cannot abide or acknowledge the existence of hierarchy.
So we are left with conformity to social norms and the “wisdom of the Crowd.” That’s basically what democracy ultimately leads to. Today you are accepted and high-status because you say the right things, support the right causes, and espouse the correct trending values.
Tomorrow the Crowd may change its whims and select someone else to take your place because they have even more correct opinions.
All human societies die the same way: they narrow all of life to a question of methods so that humans can control each other. If you are conforming and doing what everyone else is doing, you are accepted.
If not, you get destroyed by the Crowd. But even if accepted, you have nothing, since you are doing the same thing as everyone else. This requires that you pull ever more insane stunts and say increasingly bizarre things to draw attention to yourself.
That is the essence of the clown world we live in.
3.
When you reach a certain level of physical strength and intellectual acuity, the scales fall from your eyes and you begin to see.
Everything you’ve been told is a lie.
Not all is as it seems.
Most credentialed experts are grifters or bullshit artists. Or bought and sold like intellectual prostitutes by market forces and political elites.
Politics is mostly a scam. Democracy certainly is the biggest sham of them all.
The “food industry” by design is trying to fill your body with seed oils and poison. Empty calories.
Bottled water (really, any beverage that comes in a plastic bottle) is not fit for human consumption as it is heavily laden with microplastics.
The taste in your mouth when you drink bottled water? That’s the millions of microplastics that now live rent-free inside you forever.
Glass, steel, ceramic or nothing. No plastic bottles ever. Even the BPA-free ones. They are a scam.
Your doctors are not interested in keeping you at optimum health. They are interested in making money and receiving kickbacks from Big Pharma. Medicine should be conceived of as a process of Via Negativa.
4.
People have a tendency to judge actions primarily by what is seen, not what is unseen.
5.
One reason I keep referring to Modernity as a pathological condition is its hollowing effect on the human personality.
When all you have is your individual choices and preferences, unmoored from heritage and tradition, from concepts of rootedness in space and time and a living community
It becomes so easy to treat epiphany and revelation, once the most sacrosanct and holy of experiences, into a Sunday morning novelty.
You have become a consumer in the shopping mall of the soul.
Are you aligned?
Is your heart pure?
Are you oriented toward your god?
Are you seeking clarity and enlightenment to be of greater service to those around you?
Or is this just something to add to your bio? Another feather in the metaphysical cap?
Are you a true seeker of truth or just vaingloriously pursuing another high?
Beyond each peak there lies another mountain;
It is addictive, this climb;
And the path up and down is littered with the bones of the holy and unrighteous alike.
Do you understand?
Do you understand?
Do you understand?
For the sake of clarity I will hereby define Good as being merely capable of performing a given role or set of tasks, and Great as being in the top 5-10%, or 90th to 95th percentile of people in that craft.
Fantastic stuff.
Imposter syndrome is absolutely a thing, and is especially prevalent in the credentialed classes. However, this is because they are, in fact, imposters. Their credentials no more confer ability than the Scarecrow's diploma gave him a brain, and having been elevated above their station by affirmative action, they intuitively sense that they are unsuited to their roles.
The obsession with ideology - this is the devalued currency of 'values'. Virtue is hard work. Values are easy. One must only say the right things. Conversation becomes nothing more than a transaction of mutually assuring verbal tokens. An attractive state of affairs for bought and hollow men.
The one time in which professional self-doubt is inevitable - perhaps even healthy - is when you're attempting something so difficult or ambitious that it's not clear that anyone could do it flawlessly; when you have to accept that you'll have to muck your way through it for better or worse, and perfection is impossible.
The boldest tasks necessarily involve uncertainty about your capability. You just have to accept this and drive forward.