See "How To Live Like A Cynic" by Ansgar Allen, December 6, 2023 at psyche.co ( https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-live-like-a-cynic-and-challenge-social-norms OR https://web.archive.org/web/20231207101328/https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-live-like-a-cynic-and-challenge-social-norms )
For a while I thought this was it. Not quite, but it's close. It's inspiration.
I keep thinking that if I had my life to do over again, everything would be different. True. True of me an everyone else, but how? Definitely more along these lines:
- Improvise your life.
- Live shamelessly.
- Push against all boundaries.
- Act with courage, refuse to respect the powerful.
- Give up everything you can live without.
I also recommend "Mornings on Horseback" by David McCullough, an amazing and thorough book-length biography of Theodore Roosevelt. He lived somewhat along the lines of the principles listed above, better than I have, though much more conventionally than Diogenes. Everyone has lived much more conventionally than Diogenes, but it's the core ideas. Very similar in both cases. Both fearless beings.
Particularly, in my case, I come from people who try to fade into the background, and had almost no education in how to get through life from my parents. They were both clueless, both the youngest of large families, my mother being a good little girl and my father being a spoiled brat who never worked. Both incapable of actually dealing with what life threw at them.
Being shy, and bookish, and having no clue about anything, and seeing my relatives wander aimlessly through their own lives, I grew up making lots of mistakes. Mostly mistakes. All the way through. My whole life so far has been one continuous mistake.
I have missed nearly every opportunity, played by the rules, deferred to authority, hoped for the best, and continued getting it all wrong.
Now I'm revamping myself, reinventing, reforming, redoing. Though I no longer have to work for money, I am working, working at making myself the person I should have been all the way through. My one practical talent is that I know how to live within my means and with that have always been good at saving money, so I've got enough of that anyway, and its freedom.
I read Allen's "How To Live Like A Cynic" piece, and then got his book and a couple others on cynic philosophy and started reading them. And quickly gave up on all. Three academic works, going into endless detail about everything except the subject that I was interested in. The bullet points above do a better job, and Allen's piece is stellar. He hits the relevant points and covers them in enough detail to get the core ideas across. That's enough right there. You don't need more.
I'm thinking a lot here of software development, but I'm actually more interested in process than in programming, though in my so-called "professional" life, producing software was supposedly the goal. In line with this, I'm also working my way through Andy Hunt's "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware", which is all about thinking. Also great. Ground-breaking, earth-shaking. More than reformative. Revolutionary.
For me it's all about the principles. I'm abstract, more interested in "what" and "why" than in "how". Cynicism and pragmatic thinking have been key parts of me since the beginning, and I'm only now, late in life, realizing that, and identifying who I could have been and what I could have done. I'm an inventor, a designer, a creative, iconoclastic dirty-fingernail philosopher. For me, what works is what works, and I keep trying to figure that out, no matter how anyone else does it. ("If it ain't broke, don't fix it," and "We've never done it that way" have always enraged me, and will forever.)
OK-fine and too bad. My life has been a waste, but here we are.
At least I do recognize the truth of things and am working on it. I like clarity and direction, unencumbered by the clutter of life, so once again:
- Improvise your life.
- Live shamelessly.
- Push against all boundaries.
- Act with courage, refuse to respect the powerful.
- Give up everything you can live without.
These are things that I've been doing all along, but accidentally, too quietly, in private, internally, without a real plan.
I'm not now headed for the street to run up and down, howling, and knocking the hats off people to get my point across. No. I plan on asserting myself when necessary, standing my intellectual ground, never being intimidated, living bullshit-free, and just getting on with it. Anyone else wants to do it a different way, fine, go ahead. Not me. I won't get in your face unless you force it.
It's December, the Xmas season, again. When I was five years old I badgered my parents until they finally gave in and admitted that Santa Claus was a fake, didn't exist. That's me. I'm proud.
And that was about five years before we had television. Before we had television, so I wasn't seeing programs every night with plots about guys dressing up in funny red suits to lie to children. How I figured it out I don't remember, but I did. Santa Claus is the first deep societal evil perpetrated on children.
I got past that and want to live the remainder of my life getting past the rest. End of story.
Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@gmail.com
Me? As above.
Etc...
so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals