Read on Twitter
When we watch TV or play video games, we form one-way friendships with the characters, called parasocial relationships. The same thing can happen on twitter, especially with the bigger accounts you follow.
You see someone in your feed and it feels like they are talking to you personally, and you feel you have established rapport, but the object of your parasocial relationship is not aware of you, and generally can't be, due to the asymmetry of the medium.
These parasocial characters fill up Dunbar slots and they feel like your real friends, so without thinking, you try to mirror them socially, in order to fit in. A popular show like Friends or The Office can do more to the overton window than every politician in America
Many years ago, before I was Lovecraft, I reached out to a big account in a DM, and he ignored me. I don't blame him, but I think about it often, because so many of you DM me, sometimes with encouragement, sometimes to fight, and most of all, to ask me for advice
Make no mistake, anyone who enters the public space and becomes known is a clown, a dancing monkey, whether they're a politician or a CEO or an actor or a writer. And I often feel like that up here, writing my little threads. Dance monkey, dance for applause.
Anyone who says they're on twitter for a different reason is lying, probably to himself most of all. Attention is the most powerful drug there is, only some of us like the medicine with sugar, while others prefer a bitter taste.
And it doesn't really matter how strong your internal character is, this changes you, because there are two parasocial relationships going on here, there's the one that the audience has to the entertainer, and the one the entertainer has to the audience
Because there is no "audience", there are a bunch of individual people, but that's not how it feels when thousands of people are listening to you. It feels like maybe four people (each standing in for 1000s), and you tend to mainly notice the angry one who barks at you
So I get up here and I give you my (ok, yeah, I know) polished thoughts according to my own best clarity and conviction, and if you like hearing from me then I imagine that's part of what you like, and you tend to expect that when you talk to me "backstage" as well
And I had a guy who joined a DM group I'm in who just wanted to see "where my conviction came from" so he lurked the chat for a while then left, disappointed (disillusioned?) because I just post dumb memes and talk about my coffee addiction like anyone else
And but I don't see myself as a leader or a scholar etc,. (I do see myself as a preacher) To the degree that some people form that image of me, it's the same way you feel about any other leader, teacher, etc: you don't want a man, you want an image
People say that great spiritual teachers are able to talk to you so that it feels one on one, right to your heart, and you feel like even out of the crowd they see you, personally, and hear you--
but when someone comes to me for advice, all I can do is give it in the most general terms possible, and it's pretty much bound to be generic and common, because (preacher hat on) all the best advice about how to live your life is ancient and common and boring
It has to be that way because anything that requires a rare intellect or a singular courage is by definition not for everyone, it doesn't scale.
Highly specific good advice requires an intimate friendship, and parasocial friendships *feel* intimate but of course the intimacy-as-such only flows one way.
The boring, common advice is this: be generous in friendships, care for the people close to you, respect your parents, exercise temperance and guide others away from vices. Forgive small failures and never tolerate betrayals. Invest in your future and develop strength
There, that's all the good advice in the world, but the problem is good advice doesn't stick if you just hear it once. You have to hear it over and over, you have to affirm it, it has to be a litany, a devotional; that's why preachers exist
The function of a preacher is to take timeless advice and make it seem timely, to expound on it and repeat it in a thousand variations.
Something I learned a long time ago is that everyone needs to tell a story about themselves that sets them apart. And sometimes that story is "I'm just a regular guy" -- fine, but that's as opposed to all the non-regular guys out there.
If you challenge someone's story that makes them special, if you try to take it away, that's when you get the anger, that's when they attack you. And often your mere existence, just the fact that you visible and you are speaking, that damages their story
If you're trying to construct a story about yourself, which is the same thing as trying to construct yourself, that is when philosophy can sometimes be useful. And if it doesn't help you with that, it's no good
Don't believe anyone who tells you that instrumentality isn't the point of philosophy. If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee. In the process of building yourself, you must also learn what to throw away
It's long past time that we in the West admit that not everyone is up to the task of building their own self, that most people who try it will come out half-formed, that "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" is the kind of half-ass recipe you find in a $47 cookbook
A huge part of what "culture" is supposed to do is provide you with a good prefab self; that's what religion is for, that's what "society" is for, and that's why it can't just be every man for himself. It's neither good nor necessary that the average person should do this
And let me just hedge here that I'm not so self-important that I think I have all the answers or that I am uniquely worthy of this projectâI see clout go to a lot of peoples' heads so here's one more piece of advice: don't buy into your own hype https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1023551362066407425
But it is a project I take seriously and if you want to know why the world feels this way it's because in the early 1900s the most powerful people in the world tried to build a new self from first principles, for everyone, and now we're all the flaming wreckage of their failures
We're all groping in the dark, like John the savage, trying to reconstruct faded mythology without ever seeing how it's supposed to work first hand. Or worse, when we do see it working, we recoil in horror, and convince ourselves that we haven't seen what we've seen.
People joke about infohazards but the fact is that they're all around us, we're constantly showing them to each other, like, hey, this drove me insane, you gotta see it. All the things we talk about on here, you can't unsee any of it, and it all hurts
General advice is about what not to do, so to stop thinking your beliefs are based on logic, or that they're self-evident, or that they come from first principles. Justifying faith with logic only does injury to faith. Own your convictions instead of trying to weasel into them
But I can't tell you, specifically, what to do, because I'm up here trying to tell myself, specifically, what to do, and perplexingly, more people than I can fathom have chosen to listen.
