You know what the best part of being a gamer is? It is that you always have something to do. You know what the worst part of being a gamer is? It’s of course that you always have something to do.

Gamers can perpetually vanquish that ‘what am I going to do now’ feeling at will. If I ever feel uncertain about what I am going to do next or what the future holds I can just break out an RPG, or lose myself in endless hours of Tetris or minesweeper or challenge strangers to Chess or Go or Magic or logon to WoW and level build. There’s always a distraction to keep you busy and your mind off of other things be they trivial or important.

Further when in gatherings with other gamers, it is easy to rectify those uncomfortable moments where nobody knows what to do or what to say next.  Just pop in a video game, bust out a magic deck, or break out a board game. There’s always something you can play. There’s always a pleasant and fun way to pass the time. If you are a gamer.

On the other hand, just because that power exists does not mean it is always wise to exercise it. Quite the contrary, the temptation gaming provides can be a Siren’s lure leading us to our own destruction. How so? Because if you have something else to do, there’s always an alternative action.  Whereas for most people, they often reach a point where they have no more excuses they can use and no alternative actions to engage in to prevent them from doing a necessary thing. The gamer always has a choice. And it always presents for them an option that is at least marginally pleasurable to engage in.

Take for example if you have a homework assignment and you are not a gamer. You might start to think, god I don’t want to do this assignment, but what else am I gonna do? Because you are not a gamer, there’s really isn’t any default action that is particularly pleasant that you could be doing instead. Sometimes other pleasant actions arise, but there’s an element of chance to it. Maybe a friend visits and you can chat with them to distract yourself. Maybe you call someone up and they aren’t busy so you chat with them. Maybe you look on youtube and find a lot of interesting videos to watch instead. Maybe there’s a movie you haven’t seen on television that you can watch. But maybe not. It could literally be that there is absolutely nothing else for you to do that is easily within your grasp and the task of finding something else is onerous and boring enough that you aren’t particularly interested in exercising that work. Your natural instincts to procrastinate are thwarted by the simple constraints of reality. So your choices are do the assignment or stare off into space. Most people at least most of the time end up doing the assignment. Sometimes even to their surprise they find themselves enjoying the assignment. Rare, but it happens.

Not so with the gamer. The gamer can always infinitely amuse themselves with games. Take for example a game like Tetris. There’ just no end to how much time you could spend on it. There’s virtually no such thing as having ‘finished’ that game. You can play for eternity and still find joy in it. World of Warcraft is almost as bad. You could conceivably have all the best gear in that game and have fully explored every single instance and area and have max rank in pvp and so that point you might say you’re ‘done’, but really you could probably keep playing just to show off. And Magic is even worse. Infinite variability for infinite playtime. There isn’t even a maximum score you might achieve that would signal that there isn’t much point in playing any more. Magic it is possible to enjoy until the end of time.

But even finite games are bad in this respect. RPG games regularly have a hundred+ hours of playtime to complete. And there are tons of such games. Even platformers, strategy games, and fighting games can build up until you have so much to play through that you can remain occupied basically whenever you feel like. Certainly most gamers always keep one game in reserve that they can always turn to when they are bored and need something to do.

Given this, I wonder if it can be proven that there is a correlation between devotion to gaming and tendency to procrastinate? I suspect that there is.  That’s not to say that I am bashing gaming or gamers. Far from it. I’m a devoted gamer and I couldn’t imagine living without the fallback option of playing games. I’d be bored out of my mind. Literally. If you forced me to live a year without a single game to play however trivial, I might just have to shoot myself.

And honestly, I’m not even that big of a gamer. I’m far from “hardcore” as the expression goes. I’m not even very good at very many games and there are lot of times when I truly just don’t feel like playing any games. I’d rather talk or write or read a book or watch television/anime/movies or browse the web for random interesting things, or just spend hours reading articles on wikipedia, or even just stare off into space. At best I’m maybe a 30% of a maximal gamer. Many people I interact with are much more intensely into gaming. What would it be like for them if they were denied their games? A nightmare beyond imagination.

So maybe being a Gamer is kind of like being stuck within a perpetual kind of torturous middle ground. Ever must you run away from games in order to preserve one’s connection to things outside of the world of games. Ever must one perpetually turn back to games in order to retain their sanity. You walk a tightrope balancing gaming on one hand and duties on the other, ever turning against ones natural instincts toward one or another. It’s a challenging life to lead.

But really it’s not much different from the lives that everyone else is leading. Everyone’s got their tightropes. Everyone’s doing their balancing acts trying to measure the future against the past or one present against another. Everyone’s  fighting to figure out what they want and when they want it and whether and to what extent it is worth it to fight to get it.

Thinking of it this way, maybe being a Gamer isn’t all that bad a lot in life as all that. At least the Gamer gets to have a lot of fun.

Wow. So much? With 10 million it’d be tough, but with 100? That’s easy. I’d use it to try and take over the world!

Well not all of it. 10 million goes straight to my family. 5 of that to my immediate family to do with as they please. 3 into a special investment account from which anyone in my extended family and their close friends can draw should they have a need and 2 million directly to them to do with as they please. 

And I’d give 5 million to my friends. I’d find some sneaky way to give it to them so that they can’t refuse it. That should at least ensure that my friends can pay off their debts if need be.

And I’d keep 5 million in reserve. This I would use again to help friends and family (or me) but only if they get into situations the other aforementioned wealth can’t really help. Or else to pay for any cool special projects any of them come up with that they just need capital in order to implement. Of course this 5 million stays perpetually invested when not being used so that it can grow and grow should nothing else come up.

As for the rest? I’d pay off all my debts and buy a cheap house in the ghetto somewhere and spend whatever money needed to hide my identity and make myself hard to trace. And I’d use it to buy random stuff I’ve always wanted none of which I think costs more than a thousand. I mean like yeah I’d own an i-phone and playstation 3 too. A 4 black lotuses (magic).  Even putting all that together it won’t come to be over a million so the rest of the million just gets invested and becomes my ‘live off of’ money.

4 million I’d give away to random strangers. That’s right.  I’d travel the world, walking up to people and saying “Here. Have $100,000.”  That’s it. No strings attached. I’d even do it in a way that is anonymous so that nobody knows it’s me doing it.

So that leaves 75 million dollars to try and launch some kind of world changing endeavor to bend the world to my will. I don’t know what or how, but the world as it is needs some serious changing and I would spend virtually all of my time from that point on trying to change it.  No injustice would be too small to make just, no wrong too trivia to right. I’d strive to undo them all.  Until there is a world of universal peace and perfect happiness, I would forever be fighting. Of course $75 million wouldn’t even come close to solving even the most trivial of world problems but it could certain create a strong basis for an organization that could attract talented intelligent people who could then fight using their own talents and abilities to change the world. The money itself could then grow too. Both because of invested money and other donations we solicit and whatever clever ways the clever people the organization recruits finds to increase the wealth of the organization.  The only rule would be that to work for this organization you have to want to take over the world and make it a better place. If your ambitions are any less than that go join some other group.

************

An addendum to the above post.

On second thought I wouldn’t pay off my debts. I mean really why would should I bother? It’s not like I’m going to be worrying about my credit rating or anything. My return on investment on that money that would have gone to pay off my debts would probably be higher than the interest rate I am paying on my debts. Maybe I’d pay off the very highest interest ones but for the most part I’d keep on making the monthly payments. It’s silly to pay off ones debts just so one feels ‘debt free’.
   

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Nothing. 

That’s what I would have said a few days ago.  I mean there isn’t anything really important here. I’ve got all kinds of junk but who needs any of it. 

I suppose I could grab my hard drive. But really I’ve gotten to the point where a much more serious concern for me is if something were to happen to google’s servers than my own personal computer. I mean all of my emails are on gmail, all of my pictures on picasaweb, and a large chunk of my writing on google docs. Xanga going down would suck too for obvious reasons.

I’ve got a thumb drive with passwords and junk but I can’t imagine that wouldn’t already be in my pocket (same goes for my keys and my wallet and by cellphone) but even if it wasn’t so what if I have to go to each and every business I interact with and prove my identity? That’s annoying but irrelevant. I mean it’d be tough to prove I’m me, my SS card would have burned up too, as would any pay stubs and other identity verifying documents, but I’m up for the challenge. In fact it might be cool to be completely forgotten, have no way to prove my identity and be like a person who doesn’t exist. It might be easier than dealing with the bills. If my keys, wallet, and cellphone burn up too, well good riddance to those too. All that stuff can easily be restored.

Looking around at the other things I own. I’ve got a million burned CDs and DVDs with various cool things I’ve found and saved online, especially lots of anime, and it would suck to lose those. I’ve got lots of video games and movie and tv series dvds I’ve purchased that I quite love and it would be painful to lose those. But really not so much. One day I’d just buy them all again.

My huge magic collection. Now that would really suck. That’s a significant monetary investment that would go down the drain. But then I’ve got a big online collection too so I guess I’d just switch to that once I acquired a new computer. I never really collected magic cards for their value anyway. I collected them because the game is fun.

My mp3 player would be painful to lose, but music is easy to come by. It would just take time (and few scruples about downloading mp3s on p2p networks). I’ve got board games lying around, my Wii game system, various other cool toys  I wish I could keep. But it’d be impossible to choose one over the other. So better to say good bye to them all. Favorite clothing. Favorite shoes. Favorite chair. Calculator. Camera. Television. Maybe that sandwhich I half finished today? Nah. None of them appeal to me very much.

Some picture? Some momento? Something that reminds me of the people I
care about and the things that matter to me? I can’t think of anything.
Sure there are a lot of memory inspiring things around me, but none of
them are so important that it would kill me to part with them. I’d be
sad sure whenever I think about them but the memories are what I really
cherished and they are still in my head and I can preserve them
throughout all time in my writing, or at least preserve them as long as google’s servers don’t go down.

Now something perishable like a bottle of aspirin, that’s a serious
consideration. I’d imagine I’m going to have quite the headache
re-establsihing order in my life after such a traumatic experience. 
Still, I probably wouldn’t even grab that. Dealing with the pain might
actually make me feel better. It’s a useful distraction.

The books would be the worst. So many books I love would be lost.  Seriously, if you absolutely forced me to make a choice, rather than take nothing, my second choice would probably be whatever book I happened to be reading at the time. I love reading that much. I’d take that book just so I can finish it. Just so it will relieve the stress of worrying about what is going to happen next both in the book and in my own life. If that’s today then the book would be Freakonomics which is pretty decent. Yesterday it would have been Harry Potter 7, which was great.

But if nothing is a viable option, a few days ago I would definitely have chosen nothing. I think it is a good idea to make a clean break. To discard all worldly possessions and remove all connections to my past life. Why would I take something that just serves as a reminded of all the rest that I had lost? That would be torture. Easier to be just me out in the world and think of it as starting over fresh.

So yeah, I would have taken nothing at all.  But then a few days ago I got a beautiful hand written thank you note from a total stranger thanking me for something nice I had done. It’s a reminder that the good that I do sometimes actually means something to someone other than me. That’s something I always feel uncertain about and often convince myself isn’t true. Some tangible proof that it is true, however trivial the cause, it means a lot. So, now I think I’d take that.

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In the elevator everyone is so still. It is like they are straining not to move or not to be seen as moving. People sort of close in on themselves contracting their personal space about them like a little invisible barrier forbidding any others to cross it.

It is such a tight enclosed space and so many people pack into them that there is a desire to shrink yourself as much as possible, to be as invisible and unnoticeable as possible. Conversations cease, expressions are wiped off of faces. It’s all quiet. Silent. Still. Nobody is looking at one another, except an occassional glare when someone breaks the taboo.
It’s like everybody is secretly thinking, “please God let this elevator reach where it is heading as soon as possible so I can get the hell off of it.”
I hate this stillness. It drives me to madness. I am not a person who stays still. I fidget. I move. I tap my heals. I rock in place. Drum my fingers. fuss with stray threads or cords. Shift my weight from one foot to the other. Pace about in place. Tap. Rock. Fuss. Shift. Shuffle. Shake. There’s no rhythm, no beat to which I follow, just my own intrinsic inability to ever stay still.

I’ve always been this way. I don’t know why or how or where it came from but they are habits enshrined in me in the fulness of time and I am incapable of breaking. And I don’t see what the point of breaking them would be. They cause no harm, create no problems. Well, truthfully these things bother some people. I’ve even been told that it was so. Someone turns to me as says “stop fidgeting!” in an angry tone. And I do. For about five minutes and then all unknownst to me I’ve started fidgeting yet again. After a half a dozen tries like this the other eventually gives up.

And why should I have even tried to stop? Does my fidgeting bother them? Well maybe their stillness bothers me!

And it’s not just fidgeting. I move when moving too. My hands are ever in my pockets fussing with their contents. When I walk I walk the most unusual path, move in unexpected zig zag patterns. I step around the cracks or on them, if there is a thing to balance or a hill to climb I’ll climb it. And I move too quickly too, unless exhausted. I’d rather rotate around someone than walk besides them, or out pace them and walk back over and over. Truly a part of me wants to skip or hop about at times but that instinct at least I am, usually, able to constrain.

Someone once said that they can tell when I am really thinking really hard about something because it is the only time when I am ever completely still. I don’t know if that’s true. I think I’m still when I stop thinking altogether too and there are certainly times when I’ve been thinking hard that I don’t think I stopped shifting about. But that’d be pretty cool if it were true.

But in a elevator, I can do none of these things. I feel the strength and power of the social norm. Be still. Move not. Shrink. Disappear. That’s the atmosphere wrought by the elevator. It feels so radically oppressive. I really hate elevators. Escalators are a little better. People regularly move up and down them to speed up reaching their destination and they are more open air so movement seems more acceptable.

I wonder, are people afraid that if they move the elevator will come unhinged and come crashing down to the earth? Are they afraid that if they look about and move naturally that the others who ride with them will turn upon them like a pack of ravenous beasts and tear them limb from limb? Or is it just that nobody wants anybody else to think them weird?

When I am the only one on the elevator then I do my best to defy the traditions, to try and weaken their power over me. I pace about quite purposefully. And this gives me enormous amounts of pleasure. In particular it amuses me because I can imagine the path that pacing must be taking up in space relative to the Earth as opposed to relative from my own perspective. E.g. though it looks and feels like I am pacing in a circle, in reality my feet trace a spiraling pattern and if I pace in weirder patterns and the elevator goes up and down a few floors, the drawing of the path of my feet might be quite a bit more interesting still. And you can think even more interesting thoughts if you think about your path relative to other things in motion. It’s all so fascinating. Well at least these thoughts provide a momentary distraction.

But then the elevator stops and so do I. Someone gets on and the social weight of expected behavior comes crashing down upon me. And I wait again anxious, closed off, trying as hard as I can not to fidget.

I believe that there is a fundamental difference between just buying something for someone and giving someone a great gift.

Just buying something for someone is basically just being a surrogate who does the act of paying for something that the person would likely have bought themselves if it was important enough to them and they can afford it and they had thought about it.  So if in passing I mention that I’ve always wanted to read book X, and you give me book X, well then you’ve just bought book X for me. Had you not, I probably would have bought book X at some time in the future myself. It’s a nice thought for you to buy me book X, and I am grateful for it, but I don’t think it counts as a very cool gift.

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes people do extraordinarily selfless acts of buying something for someone else that are worthy of praise and for which I would be very grateful. If someone were to pay my way through law school for example, they’d be buying me a new education and I’d be extraordinarily grateful to them for the act if I chose to accept it, but it wouldn’t necessarily be something I would call a very great gift.

So, I think there are three ways in which you can buy something for someone and have the result actually be a great gift for that person. In other words there are three kinds of cool gifts.

The first, is a gift of the difficult to obtain. Here in someone expresses or somehow makes it apparent that they want something but it is a thing that they cannot easily obtain on their own and would be very unlikely to exert the effort to get on their own.  For example if you wanted  a  book that is long out of print, or a famous one of a kind painting, or maybe a copy of an old game that is really really hard to find these days. You might want these things but have no real expectation that you will get them or have just never bothered to build up the willpower to exert the effort needed to get them. If someone gets you one of these things then it is quite likely that it will be an impressively cool gift.

Interestingly, in this first category of gifts, how cool the gift is depends not on how hard it would have been or how unlikely for the receiver to get the object being given, but rather on how much effort the giver goes through to get it for the receiver. e.g. an extremely wealthy person buys you an expensive car that you like with remarkable ease you may be grateful but you aren’t particularly impressed. Buying an expensive car for that rich person is no more difficult than buying a toy car is for you.  In contrast, let’s say you have no mountain climbing skills but express a desire for snow from the top of Mount Everest, and your friend who has never climbed a mountain in his or her life, goes on a gigantic mission learning to climb, scales the mountain and gets some snow and brings it all the way back down for you at great risk to his or her own life. That’s a frickin cool gift, even if it is just snow.

Sometimes there’s some great confusion here because the receiver doesn’t necessarily know how much effort the giver went through to get them any particular gift and the giver very often doesn’t care to let the receiver know. Usually when people are buying gifts for people they care about they exert quite a surprising amount of unappreciated effort toward getting that gift, but it usually goes unknown because the receiver is unaware of how much trouble and energy goes into the very act of picking a good gift. But on the bright side any gift can be at least a little bit cool if you spent a lot of energy trying to pick it out for someone.

The second kind of extraordinary gift is the gift of something the person will appreciate but doesn’t know that they want.  The unexpected gift.  This is my personal favorite and the one I always strive for whenever possible. This is when you buy or create or transfer something to someone that they would likely never buy or think about buying or otherwise obtaining for themselves or that they might consider buying but is so low on their priority list that it is unlikely that they would ever get to purchasing it. These gifts aren’t necessarily expensive and don’t necessarily take a lot of effort to obtain, but they do express a great deal of thought and consideration and often reveal some knowledge of the person being gifted. How cool an unexpected gift is, is proportional to both how unexpected it is and how appreciated it is after the fact.  Sometimes there is some confusion here too, as the person receiving the gift might not realize that they even want it or care about it until some time after they have been given the gift.

There is great risk in the act of giving unexpected gifts. And indeed if you choose to try and make all or most of your gifts unexpected gifts you might as well resign yourself to very often giving people gifts that they won’t want and won’t appreciate. Unlike categories one and three, an unexpected gift is a true gamble as it is not based on any certain knowledge of what the person wants or needs. Ironically an unexpected gift might even be a thing that the receiver needs or would enjoy but the receiver may not even realize it. The receiver may toss the thing out in trash right away thinking “what the heck is this? I didn’t ask for it” without even considering what special meaning or thought went into its selection. This is sad, but must be expected when one chooses to walk the path of the unexpected gift giving. All you can do is next strive to give a better more extraordinary and yet still unexpected gift the next time. You may well be known as a lousy gift giver all the way until you actually finally find that one extraordinary unexpected gift that makes all the rest worth while.

The third kind of cool gift is the least impressive but can at times be the most personal. This is the gift of presentation or packaging. That is, you take what is an expected not particularly hard to obtain item that you know before hand that the person wants or would appreciate and you give it to them, only you make the act of giving it to them unique by packaging it or presenting it in a way that stands out. You make the act of giving and the circumstances around which the gift is given as much a part of the gift as the item itself. In a way the memory of having received the gift is the real long term gift of which the actual item given is little more than a memento of the experience.

Often the ‘packaging’ includes some personal significance between the people between which the gift is being transmitted.  The simplest examples of these kinds of gifts are like giving someone something with a special card that says something meaning ful or giving someone something on a special day of the year that has significance between them. More complicatedly you might go through some elaborate presentation to present something to someone, say fly them off to a deserted island somewhere or present something over national television. Alternatively the packaging might literally be the packaging. Say you might go through great effort to wrap a gift in personally drawn pictures or to carve a frame for a picture into an ornate pattern. Or the gift might contain little sub-gifts,  small mementos of past shared experiences or references to inside jokes.

Really the third kind is the easiest. You can add a presentation layer that means something to almost any gift if you want to. It can require some degree of thought and consideration, especially if you want to make it really cool, but judging by the great success of the greeting card industry its pretty straightforward to add something personal to the presentation layer of any gift and everybody pretty much does strive to do a little bit of that. You can even give cash and make it a cool gift if you add an interesting enough presentation. How cool a gift presentation is depends on how personal and meaningful and unique the presentation is though, so although it is easy to add something it can be quite a difficult challenge to make that something amazing.

Anyway, if a gift I am considering giving does not at least strive to fall into one of these three categories, or I can’t think of anything that does, I’d really rather not give anything. I’d rather not just be the person who buys something for someone else. I want the gifts that I give to matter and be remembered.  But that is far easier said than done.

It’s strange, at first I felt so much less stress. Nothing seemed to matter as much as it did before because of the simple fact that in two weeks I wouldn’t be there to face it. It’ll be somebody else’s problem.

But now two days before my last day I feel more stressed than ever. The last few nights I have slept barely at all and although I haven’t gotten much work done, I feel as if there is some great impending deadline is approaching upon which my entire future rests. Really I am so stressed, tense, worried and as far as I can tell for no good reason.

Part of it is how increasingly apparent how enormous an undertaking maintaining all of my code is going to be after I’m gone. I’ve been trying to clean things up, document things, make things run a little smoother, get things through quality assurance, finish up the last few projects, and have meetings with everybody to explain everything. But it is increasingly apparent that even if I worked twenty-four hours a day these last few days I wouldn’t come close to completing all or even most of what I would like to do or what I would need to do in order to make the transition seamless. My former coworkers are just going to have to deal with it and they are going to hate me for it. It’s not really my fault, but it is certainly my responsibility and not one I am likely to meet to the best of my ability and that just makes me feel awful.

I guess I had better get any references out of my coworkers I can *before* they are forced to face a nightmarish post my presence transition period that will sour their memory of me.

I don’t think that’s the only reason I’m stressed though. Probably uncertainty about the future is a bigger cause though I try not to think about that all that often.

I don’t think we fear most what will come in the future. Rather we fear most what could have been but likely never will be. Human beings are stupid that way.

It is an awkward and difficult and quite annoying thing to write a
farewell letter. I did not have any clue how to do such a thing, what I
should say, or even if I should bother. But the hardest part, was I
think, determining the scope.

I don’t know the protocol. What’s appropriate and what’s not. And I
don’t think I’d be particularly inclined to follow it if I felt it was
rather stupid too.

What I had observed when others departed was usually silence. Most
people didn’t bother to write farewell letters. Instead they told
everyone directly in person or over the phone that they wanted to tell
and let the trickle down effect do its duty. It wasn’t long at all
before everyone knew and if you didn’t find out. Too bad for you.

The other observation was the blanket letter sent on ones very last
day, saying good riddance to you all. Actually it says something about
how they enjoyed their experiences and blah blah and keep in touch and
I’m off to do bigger and better things that most of the people reading
it don’t care about and are only reading it for the research
opportunity so that they can emulate you when they write their own
farewell letter. That’s the only reason I ever read any of them
leastwise.

The other option is to write personalized letters to each individual
you want to say good bye to, and telling others in person as is
appropriate. This is what I elected to do.

The problem with this approach is that if you try to write person
letters to everyone with whom you have worked with closely, that can
get pretty out of hand pretty quickly especially if you are a person as
verbose in your writings as I am. So in order to limit the scope and
size of your emails in order to avoid spending the rest of your days
writing, you adopt two strategies.

Strategy one is the BCC emails. Basically to cutdown on the shear
number of emails you instead write blanket emails to smaller subgroups
with whom you have similar relationships or interact with in the same
way. E.g. you might send the same email to everyone in the same
department or to all the people at a specific center or everyone with
whom you go to lunch with regularly but don’t know particularly well or
some other pattern. But to be a little sneaky you bcc the addresses so
that nobody knows you didn’t send it to them. Hence even if you forgot
someone everybody thinks that everybody has been included. And on top
of that, everyone even feels the sensation as if the letter is being
sent specifically to them or to a small group. The more personal
details you can include that apply to anyone in the group the more
personal they will feel the email. You can get trickier still with this
kind of a thing but you get the idea.  I opted not to use this strategy
because it felt too deceptive to me. I did send a blanket email to one
‘group’ with which I interact in a similar fashion, but I didn’t do any
BCC stuff.

Strategy two is the ‘formatted’ email. That is although each of your
emails is personalized for specific people, each email still follows
the same format, paragraph structure, and consists of the same basic
overarching message just with details specific to the person you are
conversing with filled in. That works pretty well most of the time and
it is pretty much exactly what I did, though it still pisses me off. It took a long time and felt like cheating.
Plus anyone I didn’t get to feels left out or betrayed. Not that I care that much about that last. If I did I would have written that person an email.  But most of all it bothers me because it’s just too boring. There has to be a more interesting way to say goodbye.

Something clever. Something interesting. Something unique. There must be a way. It’s
probably too late to do anything particularly amusing this time, but
next time I will strive to be better prepared to shock and amaze.

sounds like either my graphics card or my power supply is dying. Hooray!

When I am at my most cynical I start to think that everyone knows pretty much exactly the same truths. I am speaking about philosophical truths of course. Like truths about justice and righteousness and courage and their opposites. You know they really aren’t that complicated. Sure figuring out what to do in any particularly situation is a nearly intractable problem for mere mortals, but understanding the concepts and principles that guide are actions. That’s nothing. We all know it. We’re all hard wired for it. It’s apparent.

And yet, we forget these truths all the time of course. We forget and lose them and feel lost. One day we ask ourselves, “what is this thing called justice? I just don’t get it.”  And then we think deeply about it and after a time we  remember. Then we tell others the same truths so they can remember for a short time and then forget again or just not care.

Oh we get it wrong sometimes too and say things that just aint so. But that isn’t because we don’t know them. It’s because we’ve forgotten and usually because we desire to believe the opposite. It flatters us. Or maybe we use the untruth as a means of manipulation to acquire some advantage. Or maybe we assert the untruth because we like how it sounds, because it is poetic and artistic and sounds like it ought to be true even though we know it isn’t.

So we lie for a while, get lead astray by one another and then we tell each other truths we know yet again and as always when we hear them we know them to be true. We are reminded. We remember. Yes this is a thing we’ve always known. It is real and all those other words were just illusions that vanish with the winds. But we might still choose to forget or choose to not hear again and then we’ll need to be reminded or remind ourselves. And so it goes over and over. We remind each other again and again and forget again and again. It’s a rather screwed up situation because that means we are never quite moral beings, like the reality is just out of reach, and that we’re all kinda just deceiving ourselves, pretending to be more than we are.

Sometimes when I am at my most optimistic I think, well, pretty much exactly the same thing. Only now it seems beautiful to me, how we rely on each other, lean on one another, strive together. And as we interact and grow we never quite act in perfect accordance with what we know to be true, but we can always get a little closer to being people who do. Isn’t that enough?