I am narrow minded in my thinking.  Debate tends not to work on me because I cling defensively to my opinions.   I fight for my generalizations, and defend.  I sideways attack because somehow i feel "gaslit."  Part of the reason I draw lines or make judgments is that I see things, a recurring pattern and I don't want to sugar coat it by saying that "no two people are the same."  When people retract what they told me and tell me I'm generalizing about them, I feel gaslit because they're lying to me.

 I chase my own tale tail and defend my half baked opinions because I'm mad, but also they have more than a sizable grain kernel of truth.  I think I'm fighting through a fog and ultimately fighting

myself.  The term gaslighting came up. I feel like the idea that "everyone is different, no two people are the same" can frequently be gaslighting for someone observing and remarking on a pattern in human life. It diffuses any attempt to draw parallels between people.  To categorize, describe, synthesize, and cut apart, to explain what we see in people.  

I tend to hold on to these opinions until they're wrested from me because I never get to the point where I deepen or test them.  I simply keep describing and defining them without a structure.  The introductory paragraph without the middle that moves the story along.  Deconstruction is what I'll blame for this because the half baked way deconstruction was imported in my school was that terms are rehashed but not defined in  their beginning continuously, and never accepted to a point where they can be used and a story moved along.  I.e. That neighborhood was sketchy.  What does that mean?  What is sketchy?  How is that bound up in our institutionalized dialogue?  What is a neighborhood?  Have you read bell hooks?  You don't have the right to use that word.  On and on.  The argument stalls in its beginning stages.  This is a crime.  No one's mind gets past square one.   

Whenever I state an opinion I'm angry in advance.  No matter what.  Because the first sentence will be challenged.  The beginning principles, the fact that I made a generalization or a definition challenges people who do not immediately and facilly start a story with undefined terms immediately, but hash over the beginning because their terms don’t deserve to be taken at face value.  This is our education.  To consider all things that are PC.  

I fight in a deluded way, swiping with my eyes closed.  I refuse to let the alpha dog get to my mind.  In my mind I can rewrite the story right?  But this in itself is lying about history which is EXECRABLE TO ME.  The only way to fight to grow ones ideas is to develop them in writing, then have them critiqued and force them to move past square one.  To listen and slowly ingest the criticism.  Then decide if it's correct when not drunk on defensive emotions.  

And it's hard to pull me out of my narrow mindset.  It may be making me stupid or deluded. 

I'm mad all the time.  I think that a professor would get me for my half baked arguments and ideas but no one's here to check me.  To expand my mind.  Who wants to go through life believing in a falsity?  To be glib and sophomoric?  Without knowing that they are?  The big fish in the small town, the "'realll nice writah," says one's aunt while doing needlepoint.  

Fighting through a fog of one's own ideas is pitiable.  Without having emerged with a goal, without having emerged with insight or truth.  It's possible to never bring an idea to fruition and reach truth.  This means bringing it through a middle paragraph and end crisis.  To test the idea against itself and others.  One can live perpetually deluded, in a pink fog.  I can and do.  The minute I start elaborating an idea I'm in my comfortable place.  It is never challenged in a way I can't foresee.  One can spend life unenlightened.  Untested by wise critics.  Sitting in one's own juices without anyone alerting them to the state of things.  This is the way with talent that doesn't get tested.  Who in the small town is going to tell their only writer he is glib and has to know to develop?  

I don't think truth comes from debate.  Not when either person clings to their opinions.  Truth can arise from discussion.  Debate is an argument, a verbal fight.  The winner can leave feeling like their appendage got really hard.  Or call me an "emotional" girl.  I'm a sore loser.  In hand to hand combat.  A fight dirty.  One who is accustomed to feeling emasculated by fighting in honorable combat and losing.  Women can feel emasculated.  As two dogs in the park, puffing out their chests to see which is dominant.  The A dog wins and the B dog honorably removes himself but with humans it's more chaotic.  The B dog can delude himself or covertly undermine the A dog or simmer and wait for revenge and never get over it.  The A dog can boil over.  Denial powerfully copes against stark defeat, denial, isolation, and reworking the story.  Becoming drunk on reliving and repositioning events.  Epiphanies are cheap, they are tacked on to the ends of 20 minute episodes like SATC where every break up ends in an epiphany.  Relationships are broken less than a character learns something that will later be proven useless to him.  Jack Donaghy thinks he provides a solution in every other 30 R episode, epiphanies appear longer than lasting relationships, thus insight is cheap on television, the one solution, the magic bullet is repeatedly revised.  Relationships are entered into rapturously, like the "happy ending" of star crossed lovers in Golden Age 1940s movie, both kissing ferociously with their mouths closed and necks wrinkling.  Yet, the raison d'etre of the relationship, what each liked about the other, what keeps it moving, this is not allowed to be developed.  A couple is not allowed to stay together and grow.  But, damned if a character isn't moved to learn a disparate thing every episode!  What brought the two together, what were their separate worlds like and what brought the two to meet?  How do they survive on a daily basis and their union still stands?  These questions aren't answered as much as a character making a conclusion about their life direction based on the events of the day.  I don't think this is realistic, other than someone driven to find stereotypical "self help" and "purpose" in their life, I meet few people who have an epiphany a day.  The epiphany is true and precious.  It is approached with the integrity of wanting to find the truth and being willing to discard an idea if it is false.  This is mental integrity and philosophical integrity. 

The idea that we may be fighting ourselves through the fog is a fascinating one.  The topic must move, it must move toward resolution, insight the petit enlightenment.  Critics may hold value because they jolt us out of our own perspective, of our own movie that we set up about our work, our own narrative.  Having only one's own opinions to go by has a potentially drunk effect.  I remember that when I would be stuck in a string of thoughts, soundtracked by a song in my head, a movie with a different storyline had a potentially sobering effect.  Perhaps generalizations would tell me that women don't act this way or that men who are estranged from their families must be avoided.  Little jokes like those on Mindy's show.  Jokes that reference deeply held generalizations.  Like the episode in which she tries to sleep with someone she has diametrically different ideas from and doesn't respect so she doesn't get attached.  Or Meg's scene at Katz's.  Sometimes I'm shocked that televised rules of behavior are so far from what I've known.

How to combat narrow mindedness?  How to get to the correct, the true idea and not be deluded for the rest of one's life?  Intuition?  Maybe being deluded, but alive (which is true) isn't so bad?  The truth may be more shocking than we know.  Maybe the arrogant wrongheadedness of a college sophomore isn't so bad.  Battling for my opinions against people who know more than me.  Maybe we have to be more gentle with ourselves as the truth is unconcealed.  The people that know view our divided ideas with a kind pity.  A compassion and love and wrongheadedness.  When we get it we'll shit bricks right?

The key takeaway today from my friend is that I need to structure my writing.  My friend says find which thoughts and sentences work well together, and in what order they are at their most riveting

My tea has roses in it.  The truth may be more shocking than what we know. 

Treating Happiness As A Goal Does Not Work

I was watching the last episode of 30 Rock, my favorite show, which I don't even know I want to talk about.  But Jack's goal oriented, strategic approach to gaining his own happiness made me think.  In art as well as business, the process is streamlining a plan toward a goal, removing the extraneous, and making the path easier to achieve that goal, analyzing, refining, and moving in a targeted way to add to a check box.  I understand this in terms of segmentation.  For instance, a campaign for a particular product is one goal in a series of goals to boost profit margin.  The analytics team's complex task is to review the past strategy and its success against predictors, examine the current market of customers and refine the attributes of possible responders, refine the attributes of a new campaign or who gets offered what, test a campaign for those responders with a control, send it out, and then check the lift of their segmentation.  If this customer segmentation is successful, there is a higher profit margin for the particular campaign and product.  However, the product still has to be refined.  There have to be strategies to stay on top and diversify.  In other words, analyze, strategize, and succeed only checks off one success in the continued success of one or the other brand in its competition against others.  One has to A.S.S. again.  The creating, strategizing, and overcoming of goals is satisfying during the process and at the resolution, particularly in a high pressure workplace, but happiness peaks once the goal is achieved and another has to be set.  In this sense, one who thrives on overcoming diverse challenges in a strategic way thrives in the workplace due to testing their capability and continually proving themselves able.  The artist similarly refines whatever product they are producing, there is the planning of a new project, the process, the result, and further refining.  The drive to create and perfect is torturous because it continues despite achievement and the creation of even a perfect product.  The goal is to refine one's art until one achieves what is wanted, but the artist is defined by their continuous process of creation, therefore the refining never ends and the artist is not happy in simply achieving their goal.

I read articles on lifehacker that provide a streamlined approach to achieving happiness, ticking off check boxes, "thinking outside the box" or repositioning one's thinking.  An article volunteers removing distraction, adding organization, removing work one's unhappy about, thinking about one's life in a different way, taking hold of riskier projects, tweaking, rotating, kerning.  I don't know if a targeted, goal oriented approach is the way to achieve happiness because if one views life in a goal oriented way, in taking certain actions to achieve happiness, the satisfaction after achieving a goal fades rather quickly.  A Type A approach to happiness is similar to a hyper regimented approach to eating, trying to "win at life" structures it into a series of initiatives with strategy, self status meetings, next steps, onboarding, and whatever else, it can be as execrable as a personal brand.  I strongly believe that regimenting one's eating, something that involves pleasure, society, and adventure, into a series of numbers, quotas, or something based one having one's body look a certain way warps eating to a form of control that may lead to an eating disorder.  As an activity that is bound up not just with family, friendship, and culture, but emotion, sensual pleasure, and broadening one's horizons, eating merits a certain degree of disorder, spontaneity, abundance, and enjoyment.  When one structures one's "happiness" to literally, it is placed on a grid or pie chart as the case may be.  The life conforms to a structured outline and is subsumed by a graph.  I think that spontaneity, mess, idleness, failure, and creativity is required, a breather from the structure of constantly winning and snapping at happiness is required in order for life not to become a drawn out campaign initiative.  Minimalism is a targeted process of removing the extraneous from one's life to achieve happiness, it's currently popular and may be overdone.  Recreational assumption of any of a suite of philosophies native to India such as yoga and Buddhist philosophy does not fully respect the deep cultural context this comes from and is tantamount to cherry picking.  As I understand, Buddhism takes into account the acceptance and understanding of the full reality of the present moment and the pain of desiring and the various ways the ego expects it to be something else.  Such a path toward happiness is not easy, nor is happiness necessarily the goal. 

I think that happiness is a byproduct of achieving other goals.  Subsuming one's other duties in favor of achieving a temporary emotional state is not the way to achieve happiness.  All the acquisitive, creative, process or goal related things that are supposed to give us happiness or even statistically make us happy, may not, the right job, love, marriage, children, and I think children make life complicated, but in the process of sacrificing, of making the children the goal rather than the achievement of happiness, a segment of us is happy, that was the segment that lived for ourselves, that subsumed none of our desires for others, or the segment that provided service to a well oiled corporate machine, service that was not necessarily constructed, but built in an efficient way to bolster the bottom line at the least.  I think humans recognize a discomfort as they violate certain basic choices in favor of other responsibilities, especially during their non on the clock time, whether those are sleep, dinner, using their free time the way they want, or not reading emails at 6 in the morning to prepare to put out any fires the next day.  If this is in service of their update of a presentation or the big pitch to a potential client to help them convince the American populace to buy their unhealthy grub, it may be less of a meaningful service than the care and maintenance of their child, whose link to oneself due to love is intrinsically motivating, more than a significant other who we build a relationship with out of compatibility, compromise, and chemistry.  Ideally, the goals and work we achieve should be satisfying, to be satisfying, they have to be externally oriented, other oriented, service oriented, to be specific.


Any achieved goal that is particularly satisfying and meaningful is done in service.  We are driven to other-oriented action, we are shored up by it, and it gives us a more lasting kick of satisfaction when we achieve an other-oriented goal.  Whether we are driven to love our significant other or immediate family, to create art, to communicate, to extend our spiritual reach and broadcast knowledge, to make the world habitable for others, to advise and shore up (had a little help from a little certain wheel there), I know that people are driven by different things.  I also do not think that the answer to happiness is to maximize our other-oriented action in a quantifiable way.  I think the answer is to be slapshod about happiness, to let go of the idea of moving toward a faraway goal of happiness and focusing on other achievements, just as we are not goal oriented about friendship or family.  The friendship between Liz and Jack Donaghy progresses naturally and in a free form way as they play around with the sources of their happiness, the sources of their dissatisfaction, and their countless epiphanies of possible solutions of how those are shot down.  The communication of friendship and the bond requires no rote series of hoops like dating, it requires little impression other than growing to tolerate and support each other, it is very goalless unless we find that we are no longer making friends as easily, then friend dating gets awkward.  Friendship is oddly goalless in this example, two people simply going through life changes together and trying to support.  Happiness can be outside the realm of goals, too. 


At the same time, I know that living without challenging oneself, without creating and producing with the desire to fulfill a goal will not make you happy.  It will put you in a stagnant place.  I am not happy when idle.  While idleness apparently breeds creativity, an excess of idleness feels purposeless and leads to depression.  Each person is an instrument for the possible larger benefit of other beings.  This benefit can be oblique.  Working toward this benefit is satisfying.  The corporation that is large and successful is a machine with varied cogs and an inner structure with little excess or a program to trim the excess that is not related to achieving its goals.

All these tips people give about rising in the office, achieving their "personal brand," and growing up and not being so entitled are simply about becoming more of a honed, sharp instrument for another's goals.  For instance, we are meant to be both detail and big picture oriented in the job, to succeed and be promoted we must be leaders, take on more responsibility to be indispensable, think like an entrepreneur (act like we own the company, which we don't, and have personal investment in it and think of more ideals to drive them forward).  This is in service of taking up as many possible functions, to be small and big picture oriented, to be the ideal leader and the ideal follower, to work well under pressure and to also structure one's time planning forward during lulls, to be an entrepreneur and a team player in someone else's company, to thirst to learn but require no resources to do it, to be a one man band and require nothing, but give everything.  This is a worker who succeeds.  One who is instrumental, who is all instruments to the point of being a one man band.  If one is to perfect the craft of being instrumental, to know their businesses needs and fulfill as many as possible, one needs to be satisfied with the machine that they are a tool in.  One must be throwing oneself into working toward the correct goal.  If the purpose of putting in all this energy to be indispensable is to put food on the table and make money, then the dislike of the end goal will bring cognitive dissonance and discomfort.  You are moving in concert with others toward a goal, you must want to go where you are moving with such great energy.  Vague dissatisfaction is common when you are not liking the goal you're working toward, if you don't like being a criminal lawyer or tax assessor or in my case an analyst who tries to get a fast food restaurant chain more money. 

I think the personal brand is the saddest attempt toward full instrumentality.  Off the clock, our private life is our own, and as disorganized as we want it, in service of divergent goals, whether the sensual like going out to eat or drink, or directly instrumental like being with our kids.  The personal brand regiments the hobbies, internet presence, and side projects of one person outside the work place to fully sell their work persona, with no fat like drinking photos, etc.  One does not have the freedom of one's private life because one's off the clock time becomes a tool for personal advancement, whether to hone the personality as a jewelry designing, cartoonist, web designing, life coach renaissance man whose personalities are united on one's blog, or to be a super Consultant, day and night.  Each word and descriptor is chosen carefully.  I understand that one's internet life is not fully private, but when did it come to this?  To subordinate one's personal life to the advancement of one's career goals?

My advice for happiness is to neither be slapshod nor goal oriented in the pursuit of happiness.  Riches, fame, ham, artistic talent, entrepreneurial risk taking, most of this success thrives on the unhappiness of constantly going toward the next thing.  In the situation of the great talent, there has to be deep resignation for the being unhappy for the rest of your life.  Monomania may breed greatness, but unhappiness as well.  Perfect organization or treating one's life as something you can hack with tips becomes an obsession, an overfocusing on the day to day, a way to consume one's life without taking the time to produce an external product in service.  This is why I think life coaches are often crazy.  People who went through pain to pitch a style of life, to turn a lens on their life and make it something to be analyzed and theorized about.  To not let the frayed ends stay.  To not allow for vague malaise or moments of happiness.  There is not a perfect life, I don't think, my idea of a good life is one where there is room for dreams and imagination, one where the next turn around the bend is mysterious because I don't yet have the yacht and the bitches.  I think the guy with the yacht and bitches, Jay Z, is extremely hard working, risk taking, and goal oriented, to the point of not ever being on that yacht, and Beyonce apparently catalogues every appearance she's ever been in.  This level of success requires constant, dogged professionalism, which makes moments of happiness and leisure as we hoi polloi see them or our image of their lives as a great Cristal and love fest be far from the countless hours in the studio, them asking and demanding to stay the longest to get a hook right.  Treating the ideal life as something to be won with pig headed pursuit means that when we get it, we are a person whose character is one of constant pursuit.  Thus the build of the process and the high of the goal has to just keep on going, with the goal becoming larger and more momentous, until we reach our final goal and find that we still aren't happy.  The marriage of A.S.S. in one's work life and the amorphous bond of friendship in one's personal life.  This is when we realize that we love business, we love to strategize, and we love Liz Lemon.