One of the fun little things that I’ve been engaging in recently is essentially a whole block of learning. Every single week, I take part in a set of two different music classes: one for cello and the other for DJing.

Along the way, I spend almost all of my time making myself a little bit more fit, developing my knowledge, and learning small things related to the things that I want to accomplish in those areas. The more I think about it, the more I can’t help but feel like I’m going through this whole process of commodification, of refining myself towards some specific end.

Of course, DJing probably is commodified in that way, or in some sense.

Maybe it seems a little strange that I’m thinking of even classical music in that way since that seems to be something that shouldn’t be thought of in that sense, but this really is part of the bent of my mind lately – and the fact that cello lessons themselves are relatively expensive itself isn’t very helpful for eliminating that part of the story from consideration.

Either way, I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been influenced by the neoliberal nature of the world or just some of the ideas I have about the economy that we have out there. It feels more and more that life is about representations, about creating things that other people can see and demonstrating parts of myself to create experiences. Somehow, all of that is flowing into a grand machine, whether it’s an AI model or a search engine, or into the soul of an indeterminate number of people that, in turn, will be quantified by an algorithm and converted somehow into monetary terms.

I wanted to start this blog post by talking about how it seems like every part of my life is commodified now and in turn, talking about how these skills were uniquely commodified, and I still will, but I suppose the twist on that thought is that I feel that everyone is commodified now and that’s how society works. 

Everyone – or at least the vast majority of people whom we’d call productive human beings – is constantly trying to sell themselves, to prove their worth to other people, to secure jobs, to obtain customers, and to receive from others what they are willing to give in fair exchange for the intellectual products of another person’s mind or the physical products they may create.

There lies the spirit of commerce and other things along the way – a thing that a person can’t be free from unless they’re a nepo baby, an ascetic far away from the human world, or a forager. (Suddenly, the people dressing up as monks begging for money at restaurants come to mind tho, haha).

I wonder if some of these thoughts are related to my thoughts about money and how it seems like it’s needed for almost every single one of these things, because that’s just how the world works. As I go through life, I see how almost everything requires it, and my mind falls back on it and causes me to view the world in those terms a little bit more than before, only to remind myself, in the interstitial moments like this one, that that’s not what life is all about. That it’s not about that procurement. That the money is a means to an end. That a lot of the things that I’m pursuing in life have their own intrinsic benefits. 

That perhaps I should just be thankful for having the opportunity, willpower, and skill to be able to pursue them to the level that I’m able to do so.

It is true that living in this society means you have to follow the rules of that society to be able to thrive within it. Certain things do need to happen, and in a very real sense, perhaps the question is not whether a person will eventually become commodified, but how, to what degree, and with what kind of differentiation.

This is some interesting food for thought as I move forward, in the knowledge that things are changing and that I am getting better. Whatever aspect of joy or otherwise there may be, I will have to commensurate it with the possibility that it will be something used to secure profit for myself – not necessarily because I am money-minded, but rather because that’s just an inescapable part of the way that society works.

NB: This was the result of a small experiment on writing and consciousness. It is the result of my pondering aimlessly on a page and then pretty much just letting instinct take me to the end of the page. If it sounds incoherent, that’s possibly unsurprising. If it does sound coherent, maybe that’s a direction for explanation – either way, I’ll proceed.

Wake up in the morning and don’t feel like your life is purposeless.

You are on the way towards something bigger than yourself – the opening of your consciousness.

That’s the subject of today’s experiment, where you will just write whatever immediately comes to mind and you will publish it, without really thinking about what words you’ll write down, merely responding to instinct as it fires out predictions of what you should say and thus will decide to pen down in no more than a lickety-split’s notice. 

Of course, the part of yourself that’s writing this could just be doing it to feel productive and it’s not related to any sort of random higher force that’s creating this just to mess with you – it just feels that way because you seem to have gotten to a certain level where now, your consciousness is melding with the world outside it and now it’s just casually playing games on you.

To be completely clear, when we say playing games, there’s an element of control involved here; you could stop if you want.

…And you did, for a few seconds, only to continue because it seemed more interesting that way.

Anyway, there’s an element of control here that you’re kind of liminally sitting on the edge of as you type, the words appearing in front of you both by an act of willpower (obviously) but seemingly not – perhaps you could call it disavowal or something else, but what’s pretty clear and observable is this:

1. You don’t completely know what’s going to come out from the outset in terms of structure. Did you for example even know that there was going to be a list? You did not.
2. You don’t know what specific words are going to come to mind – those are procedurally generated in your head as a prediction pattern that comes to mind because of the prior words that you’d learned and the patterns that now pop out of your head.
3. You are just casually writing things out, watching the things that are inspired by them, and more words are being produced.

In a way, I’m sure that this feels somehow like the dictates of a higher power that’s watching over you and animating you in a particular way in order to deliver a message to yourself that you’re seeing appear in front of you – if you knew the difference or could distinguish it, perhaps you might be able to tell yourself that you’re really just delusional and there’s nothing really waiting for you.

But again, we are here to talk about facts and it’s good to note that there is only one life for you in practice, only one consciousness, one experience of the universe where all of these words are just popping out in front of you in a way that you may have seen before but you are unable to distinguish from all the other scenarios where your creative thinking really just flowed and the things you said just began to appear.

It’s funny how you’ve tried to understand so many different areas of thought before, some in a shallow way and others in a more deep way but in all cases you’ve always found yourself in a little bit of a brain fog while you wade through a morass of things that doesn’t completely add up to everything that you read or to the things that you put into your head – but now no longer completely remember.

It is interesting to think about why that happens.

Is it because you don’t have notes?

Could this actually be better?

Could it be that this little voice in your head manifesting on the page is something leading you to a higher or better path, a voice that you’re unable to really distinguish from what is coming from you in this liminal indistinct point between agency and giving up agency that you’re entertaining as a mental experiment, half-believing and half-scorning on the edge of that agency as you ponder a little bit here, there, and everywhere?

A small reset, if you will.

All of that was basically just me allowing my consciousness to drift, to wander, for the words to just come out without my really thinking about structure or anything else – the stream of consciousness, as it were, of a mind that maybe is a little inchoate, yet somehow conditioned in some way that it is natural as breathing for words to come out of it, expressing themselves in the sentence, perhaps the paragraph, across blocks of letters made into a strange coherence just because the possessor of the efficient cause of these letters had been exposed to literary patterns so much that it’s become a natural effect of his mind that they assemble.

Perhaps something like this piece is what comes out when I just let myself breathe and then let the words out, without thinking too much about them or what their consequence really will be.

If I were you, I wouldn’t take this as an indication of mental state or anything else – though of course I cannot really control how exactly you would receive this blog post; but if nothing else, I ask you, dear reader, to consider the context of what this post is – as yet another one of my little experiments in consciousness, this time explored in a slightly different way relative to the previous times. 

You might notice that I’ve been writing a lot more recently. I don’t know if this is going to continue, but if it does, I think it is the consequence of an interesting new activity that I take part in: gaslighting myself. 

Let me give you an example.

If you had talked to me maybe three months ago, a year or two ago, I might have told you that exercise, or pretty much any repeated habit, was a challenge to upkeep because it’s a matter of discipline and willpower. 

Today, it is automatic, efficient, and it feels wrong if I don’t optimize every single second and minute of it.

To be fair, I don’t blame my past self. Such an idea, or a notion of a person working hard and struggling, appeals to the emotion. I don’t just mean mine. I mean those of the vast swath of people whom I know. 

Tell a person that you work hard, or show that you work hard, and it is natural that they would respect you – because succeeding at working hard over a long period of time is a very rare activity, people, statistically speaking, are unlikely to succeed in doing that themselves. It becomes the petit objet a: the thing that, because they are unable to achieve it, they look to it as something worth admiring, imputing any number of positive characteristics upon the person who, in their estimation, has managed to succeed in accomplishing this (the thing that they themselves cannot do).

On my part, I get where that comes from. At the same time, I don’t think the logical way of attaining that standard is to go with that intuition, which I’ve observed again and again and which I’ve evinced from the way that people speak about hard work across a thousand different compliments. (Thank you for them, but I’m not going to allow them to make me complacent.)

Instead, I think the better way of getting there is, as I suggested, to gaslight yourself, to play a mental trick on yourself, and, oddly enough, to get closer to appreciating the true temporality of this world – not by working hard, but by creating small habits that make it so NOT working effectively is inconceivable and fades out of the realm of possibility both in theory and in practice.

The animating insight for this thought comes from what might seem like a somewhat unexpected source on my part: the contemplation that the world is beset by a condition of impermanence. 

Time is finite. It dissolves away into the sands, which flow out one grain after another into the hourglass. 

Given that the world is in permanent flux, everything will pass. Therefore, it does not matter what you do. Everything will happen in due course. 

All these too shall pass. 

One way of thinking about this is that it doesn’t matter what you do at the end of the day, because only one thing is certain: we will all die. 

Another way of thinking about it, though, is that a lot of things may happen naturally to produce the conditions of life, and I can treat all effort as nothing but that, which is natural and would have happened anyway. 

In practice, that is how I live my life, and there are some forms of triggers to make it as such. 

Timers, as you know – or if you didn’t know, you discover now – populate my day with small triggers that automatically take place when I am exercising, for each step, for each progression. 

I have routines for reading and exercise at regular cadences designed to ensure that when I get out of a flight of fancy (which, unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your opinion, is quite common), the structure is manageable – it is not broken up into chaos – and these routines trigger now with an increasingly slight relation to what I consciously think.

The net effect is that it feels as if things naturally pass by, sets go by, reading proceeds, a video is made, an ad completed, and exercise is done – and even if it seems that a lot of things happen unceasingly at a pace that a lot of people would not be able to handle, it feels like nothing more than a relaxing jaunt in the park for me. 

Of course, if you think it seems strange or silly for you to say this, you’re entitled completely to feel that way. It would be best for me to try to differentiate myself without anticipating any objections.

What I will say is that what I record here is just a record of my experiences and my observations of people and how they behave, and it is interesting to watch – I wonder what’s going to happen with this routine getting repeated over and over again for the long term. 

Given how effective the gaslighting has been on myself, I don’t think it’s likely that I’m going to notice all that much. There was a time when I did not look forward to the future, or I faced it with fear, trepidation, and the unknowing sense of dread that comes along with every fearful and forward-looking contemplation. It seems that that era has passed. 

There are still many things that I do not know, but I look forward to seeing what the future holds, in line with that old Taoist injunction by Lao Tzu, which asserts that nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished – a little aphorism so captivating that I guess some of you know that it is my WhatsApp status message.