resist microstructural oppression
today I overheard a woman on the plane complaining about her boyfriend’s apartment
“he doesn’t have a coffee table, so if you’re sitting in his living room you have to put your drink on the floor.”
sure
“and he doesn’t have a lamp in his bedroom, so there’s no way to read at night.”
uh huh
“and you can’t open any of his windows, because all of his windowsills are totally covered”
okay
“with porcelain figures of Mao Zedong.”
uh wait what
People ask what your goals for the conference are. You feel something tugging in the back of your mind, but you can’t quite identify it. “Goals … yes …”
You ask people how their conference is. “Oh, I’m just spending the whole time in one-on-ones.” The one-on-ones are useful. The one-on-ones are always useful.
Someone has marked “interested” on the Bizzabo app. You don’t know what that means. Are you interested in them? Should you set up a one-on-one? Will they set up a one-on-one? In a panic, you close the app. For the rest of the weekend you studiously avoid eye contact.
You tell someone you went to a talk. The horror dawning on their face tells you that you have violated some dread taboo. “You know those are recorded, right?”
People ask if you’ve made progress on your goals for the conference. You think you wrote them down somewhere on Friday, but can’t remember where. You write everything down, hoping to keep your grip on reality, but it somehow gets lost anyway.
Luke Muehlhauser has not emerged from his room the entire conference. People go into the room, and people come out. When they come out they seem … different. No one will speak of what took place, but you observe a haunted look in their eyes.
Everyone is in a one-on-one. You don’t know where these are held, or what is discussed in them. You only know that they are always productive. You wander through an empty dome, looking for someone to talk to. You realize no one can break free of the sinister glamour of one-on-ones.
Amanda Askell is telling you that true propositions are easier to argue for than false ones, and thus reasoned philosophical debate tends toward the truth. It sounds plausible. You slowly nod.
People ask if you’ve achieved your goals for the conference. What is a goal? It sounds like one of those things you had, once. Like hopes, and dreams, and fears.
As of last week, I’ve lived in the Bay Area for a year. This feels like an intrinsically significant milestone, much more so than recent birthdays or New Years, so I feel motivated to reflect on the past year.
(self-indulgent personal reflections below the cut)
I think I’ve changed a lot this year, more so than in the years before it. That’s not surprising–in part, moving here was a conscious choice, because I felt like I was stagnating as a person and didn’t like who I was crystallizing into. I didn’t quite know how I wanted to change, nor did I feel capable of taking actions to make it happen, but I thought if I threw myself on the mercy of whatever supernatural entities govern San Francisco Bay, that something would come of it, and I was right.
I think I’ve become more agenty in a general way. Describing how I felt about my job a year ago sounds sort of silly to me now; I thought of it as like, part of my role in life or something? It was a thing that I went to for some number of hours a day because that was the normal number of hours a day to work; people gave me tasks; I tried to do the tasks at a pace that seemed reasonable.
The way I think about work now is so different: my “job” is to maximize the expected value of the money that my company makes, and to the extent that I have a defined set of roles I try to do well at it’s purely for instrumental reasons, because companies work best when you give people defined roles. But ultimately, if I waste my time on projects that aren’t valuable I’m not doing a good job. The more productive I am, the better (this seems obvious, but I think before I implicitly thought something like “as long as I’m an average level of productive or something it’s fine.”) If I work more hours, I can do more, and that’s better. If something needs to be done and no one else is doing it, I should just do it, even if it’s not my “job.”
This can definitely be more stressful, and sometimes you need to decide to care less or not take responsibility for something, but I think it’s overall the right way to think about things.
I think I’ve also become more self-aware, partly as a result of trying to be more productive. I started thinking about things like “why am I not doing work right now?” or “why have I made so little progress on this thing?” and realized that most of the time it really seems to come down to “I’m having feelings about something.” I have so many feelings! It’s crazy! They really fuck a lot of shit up.
I’ve become more secure, I think. Partly through becoming aware of and confronting my feelings, partly through failing at things and getting really honest and brutal criticism and realizing that … it’s okay, I can confront the fact that I have flaws and not run away from it because it’s not the worst possible thing and doesn’t mean that I’m fundamentally Bad. I’ve gotten way better at receiving feedback. I think my attachment style has gotten significantly more secure (though still in the anxious bucket), and I’ve gotten more into honesty and openness in romantic relationships.
A lot of things that felt important to my identity a year ago feel less so now. I’m less into femininity, and domesticity, and aesthetics, and being trad. More of my identity is centered around my work. I think I went a little too far with this; I think some recentering of my identity was helpful, but I also think that I genuinely like things to be nice, and beautiful, and I don’t want to destroy my aesthetic sense in the name of utilitarianism. I’ve been working on cultivating that side of myself more again.
I feel more motivated towards EA, but I don’t feel any more altruistic particularly. I think this feeling comes from being more ambitious, and I’ve started to feel like EA is just an inevitable consequence of ambition. If I want to do something with my life, what is there to do? Money is too easy. I could try to become famous or something, but that seems kind of lame. Making the future look the way I want it to really seems like the only worthy goal.
Maybe the most negative change is that I worry I’ve become a worse person to interact with in some ways. I’m more flaky, less likely to respond to messages, and less good at reliably keeping in touch with people. I’m more impatient and easily annoyed by people. I notice others’ flaws more easily. I’m glad about this in some ways–not everyone needs to like me, and I’m glad I went from desperately wanting everyone to want to be friends with me to thinking about who I actually want to be friends with. But I don’t like feeling negatively about others or fixating on their flaws. I think practicing more of an authentic relating-y mindset will be relevant here.
For the past week, I’ve had a strong feeling of things coming full circle. Things are so different from a year ago, and yet the same in some ways. The sun came out, and spring is starting to feel real, and it feels the exact same as last March did, when I moved here from cold and gloomy New York and it felt like anything was possible. I feel different in many ways, but I’ve also had the same job for a year now, lived in the same apartment, hung out with many of the same people. And yet things feel just just as uncertain, and I’m really interested to know what the next year will look like.
tbh when I decided to move to Berkeley I didn’t even consider “sometimes can’t leave my building because antifa are throwing explosives at cops right outside my door” as a factor
I used to think that I was One of Those Girls Who is Never Catcalled. I accepted it as my lot in life and sort of made it part of my identity.
And then I moved to Berkeley and … now I get attention/compliments from strangers all the time?
Like, I wouldn’t have predicted a geographical difference in that direction, and even if there is a geographical difference I can’t imagine it could be this stark?
I’m almost tempted to throw up my hands and attribute it to some kind of voodoo magic analogous to “radiant happiness” (FW), “producing serotonin” (JBP), etc.
I used to think that the main choice you made was between good and evil, and choosing evil was tempting but–it was signposted. It was evil. There were skulls.
Now I think maybe the real choice, the hard choice, is between madness and reason. Red pill and blue pill. Faerie kingdoms and the realms of men.
And every kernel of understanding you gain is a point closer to
Hiiiii, future mes! So I decided I’d be the me who found out what would happen if she just raised ERO as high as she could. And, oh my god, I can’t tell you anything because you are so not ready to hear it, but take it from me, you were all worried about nothing. This is great. I don’t have a name any more though.
and the understanding and the madness aren’t just related they’re two sides of the same coin
Magic shall be written upon the sky by the rain but they shall not be able to read it;
Magic shall be written on the faces of the stony hills but their minds shall not be able to contain it;
In winter the barren trees shall be a black writing but they shall not understand it.
I moved to New York expecting my life to be a cross between Gossip Girl and Sex and the City and that basically didn’t pan out
I moved to California expecting my life to be a cross between Silicon Valley and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and let me tell you that has actually been quite accurate
You are walking through Berkeley as the sun is setting, with a high school friend you haven’t seen in years. In the distance, a man calls out, asking if you’ve heard of the Book of Revelation. You ask her how she likes living in Oakland.
“Oh I love it. I don’t think I’ll be here forever, though–if nothing else, California will burn at some point.”
“You mean like–the state of California will burn to the ground? Like in a wildfire?”
“Or break off into the ocean. I don’t know, I just don’t think it’ll be around in ten years.”
You nod, not thinking to question the assertion further.
