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+.SH
+What is the purpose of this website?
+.PP
+I am afflicted with a terminal sense of ennui and constant feelings of dissociation. I think this is a very common malady amongst people these days. How often do you consider doing something interesting or creative and then stop yourself, thinking "what's the point?", or "its been done before". How often is it simply asserted as fact that life is meaningless.
+.PP
+People don't dream any more. If you ever read Jung or something you might think its strange how much material there was within peoples dreams to analyse, and how rich that material was. People used to regularly have very vivid dreams, almost every night. And it was generally accepted that these dreams where rich in meaning, even suggesting some kind of collective unconscious or a universal eternal symbolic language that our unconscious communicated to us with via our dreams, or that our dreams allowed us to commune with a world filled with something like platonic forms. But nobody dreams any more and nobody seems to talk about this fact. This is just another example of the ways in which man is totally estranged from his nature in our current century.
+.PP
+Causes:
+.IP \[bu] 2
+Commercialisation and specialization: People are encouraged not to step outside of their lanes, everybody must choose a career and stick to it. People internalise this, they think subconsciously "I'm a software engineer I can't go to the gym" This is reinforced by over exposure to simplified character archetypes presented in social and traditional media.
+.IP \[bu]
+Over exposure via technology: No matter what you do there will always be millions of people that will always be better than you. technology exposes individuals to this on a massive scale, causing demoralization.
+.IP \[bu]
+Psychological fallout of 20th century and existentialism: The meaning of life used to be very rarely questioned, that life was a meaningful experience was just a given. People never used to require some grand unifying meaning from the things they did.
+.IP \[bu]
+Fear of sincerity. Irony is the dominant mode of experession in this time, so much so that people seem to find it humiliating to engage sincearly with anything in front of them.
+.IP \[bu]
+I am sure there are many more causes but these are the ones I can think of for now.
+.PP
+It is important to do things just because you want to and to really try and engage with what you're doing. It is important to be deliberate in your actions and act with intentionality and to disregard nagging self doubt. This is not the cure to meaninglessness, but its a step towards actually feeling engaged with your surroundings, and maybe actually doing something for once. By creating this website I hope to add a sense of intentionality to the things I like to do. By collating my various hobbies in one place I also hope to run a thread of coherence through everything. The ultimate goal to be being a more engaged, creative and generative person.
+.PP
+Some principles of this approach are:
+.IP \[bu] 2
+Specialization is for insects.
+.IP \[bu]
+There is no such thing as a waste of time. This has obvious caveats that don't really need to be mentioned, but basically if what you're doing ultimately creates something that didn't exist before, even if that is just a deeper understanding of that thing within yourself, then it is not a waste of time, regardless of if its been done better before. If what you want to do ultimately has no outcome then extend the activity to create one.
+.IP \[bu]
+Avoid skinner boxes. This is the counter point to the above. These are surrogate activities and you may as well be dead if you engage with these. If you find yourself in one, escape it by generating something that transcends it.
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projects / website.git / commitdiff