May 2009
10 posts
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
—Henry David Thoreau (via asmallhope)
“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
—Douglas Adams (via asmallhope)
mamihlapinatapai
noun • a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start.
The word is from the Yaghan language, and its morphological structure is as follows: mam- (reflexive/passive morph.) + -ihlapi- ‘to be at a loss as to what to do next’ + -n- (stative aspect affix) + -ata- (achievement affix) + -apai (dual, here reciprocal, marker). [via snee, Wikipedia]
dromomania
noun • /DROMO-may-nee-uh/ • a compulsive longing for travel
When a bourgeoisie gets bored, he/she will be fused with a feeling of dromomania, which then turns him/her into a gypsy.
coup de foudre
noun • /ku.də.ˈfu.drə/ • 1) a thunderbolt. 2) a sudden overwhelming feeling of love for somebody; love at first sight.
Irregardless of your social class, whether you are a bourgeoisie or a proletariat, you experience coup de foudre every once in a while. And sometimes, this feeling goes on for ever.
10 Reasons to be Antisocial
Everything important in your life, the correct decisions, the perfect work, the life-changing realizations, they all come when you are alone. Being antisocial provides you with the time for these.
1. Genius is antisocial
This does not mean that by being antisocial you automatically adopt the status of genius, but it does mean that if you, by some slim chance are, in fact, a genius, you will have no patience for average and below-average humanity. You will see it as annoying and distracting like a high-schooler being forced to endure a day in pre-school. You will seek to isolate yourself and work. Again, the choice to isolate yourself and work does not necessarily indicate genius, just a slightly higher possibility of it. Very slightly. Writing, painting, working on complex math problems, all solitary work for the most part. Genius needs room to concentrate.
2. Less drama
Which is not to say no drama. If you are human and you live around humans you will have drama. It does not matter if you mind your own business and keep to yourself, trust me, the cunts and assholes will find you. Being genuinely antisocial ensures that you will run into this less, which is not to say, never. Be ready for it, but going under the radar means that you probably won’t have to dig more than one shallow grave per decade.
3. You gain insight
You cannot ever be rid of people entirely. I know this, I have tried. Hell, even Howard Hughes, the modern prophet of anti-socialism still had to deal with his lawyers. People, however, will be reduced to bite-sized chunks. You will be able to analyze them as you take your breaks from analyzing more important things. Spend enough time thinking about enough data and you come to some pretty interesting conclusions. The fact is that most people reveal far more than is immediately obvious in the course of a casual conversation, you just have to put it under a microscope, which means it needs isolated, and you need private time look at it.
4. Relationships require effort
Usually of the non-rewarding kind. Relationships with chicks involve doing things that serve no practical purpose whatsoever, as gestures. Chicks love gestures. You take this much effort it means that you love me this much. The idea that there is no correlation between love and effort for a man never occurs to them. I think this all started with that old Percy Sledge song “When a Man Loves a Woman” in which the singer tells all the things men will do for women they love. It was BS made to sell records. Effort is what men put out when there is a tangible reward at the end of the job. Like sex. The gestures are all about sex, not to show affection. Those flowers are not merely because I know you like flowers and I want to make you happy, they are because I know you like flowers and I want to fuck you.
5. Conversation-padding
A 2-hour conversation usually only consists of about 10-20 minutes of actual worthwhile information sharing. The rest is padded out with small-talk, awkward pauses while somebody thinks of something to say, and boring droning that blends into the background for the listener. Long conversations usually only happen when both people are stuck in one place together and want the satisfaction of “having shared” at the end of their sentence, meaning that they want a conversation for the sake of having one, not because it actually makes sense to communicate. This results in a lot of your life being wasted talking to people and needless stress as you share meaningless nonsense.
6. Low expectations
Nobody expects you to be the life of the party, nobody comes knocking on your door at 3am looking for a shoulder to cry on. This means you don’t get invited to tedious functions and you get to avoid the truly thankless job of being a free therapist to your friends and acquaintances. Being antisocial means that people see you as a closed door, one that they might as well pretend is not there. This might sound like a bad thing, but it is not. We have been taught that happiness depends on being social, but there is no happiness, just the pretense of it. Why waste time looking for something that does not exist?
7. You get balls
What it is is that you don’t care what people think of you. It may bug you that some piece of trash out there has the balls to insult you (different from taking offense at the insult itself), but then you know they are a piece of trash and you get over it. Being insulted by someone you have no respect for is very different from being insulted by somebody who matters, who you at some point thought highly of. I will give you an example: your neighbor’s chihuahua barks at you from his owner’s front porch, does it offend you that this dog does not like you, or are you just irritated by the bark and annoyed that it does not know how small and contemptible it is? For the antisocial person everybody but a very select few (with whom you have limited contact) are chihuahuas. Fuck ‘em.
8. You don’t miss out on a whole lot
Most people have little to offer aside from the psychological comfort of being around another human being. They are not fun or interesting to anybody, least of all for the people who settle for them. In all but a few instances you could lose a relationship and feel very little, but even when you do, it’s pretty much always survivable. You lose that comfort from being around a particular person, but that’s more about adjusting to change than anything else. The point is that people are not all that important, not all that interesting, not all that fun, not all that essential. You would be making a better use of your time doing a crossword puzzle or learning a few words in a foreign language than hanging out with them.
9. Comforting self-deception
If you are just an antisocial moron, then it’s probably a good idea to isolate yourself so that you can tell yourself that you are, in fact a genius and that nobody recognizes what you are because they are all so stupid. Self-aggrandizing delusion needs isolation in order to reach it’s full annoying potential. It’s annoying to everybody else, but rewards the bearer with a tremendous sense of martyrdom which, in many cases, is the only reason they have to not commit suicide.
10. It helps you deal with loneliness
The most sociable, chatty, clingy, blowhards out there, the ones who try to spend as little time alone as possible, for them being alone is the same thing as being lonely. For the antisocial loneliness is very different from the sensation of being alone, they are two distinctly separate feelings. The anti-social can feel loneliness, but it’s rare. You treasure the moments with no distractions, no background movement, no responsibilities beyond what you have in front of you. That is largely, I suspect, a learned reaction to being alone a lot, but it’s good since everybody has to be alone at some point and it’s best to see it as a gift rather than a burden.
Interesting to note the different ways you could look at the formation of an antisocial from an anthropological perspective, a psychological perspective, and even a sociological one. Cultural capital is perhaps implied as a benefit of acting aloof.
