The Conscientious Yet Disagreeable

They walk a ledge so tight and daunting it appears more like a ravine. But why?

I don’t ruminate on it anymore, but I often look back on the years I spent as an adolescent and young adult online, wistful about how things never seemed to last, yet steadfast in my reasoning about the problems I faced, lest I become inconsistent. I was inexperienced, yet always earnest in the reasoning for the claims I made and the questions I asked. I won’t pretend that I was tactful about much of any of it, but I can’t help but wonder if that ever would have mattered like people thought back then anyway.

There is a lot of loneliness in being disagreeable. But some part of me was just possessed, I simply had to speak, I could not rest my mind, I had to ask, I needed to know. To suffer in silence with people in a contrived equilibrium would be an obvious hell to me. That was as true to 15-year-old me as it is to me now.

But I was always cautious and careful about why I wanted to know. Of course, upon figuring some things out I would find a callous humour about it, which sometimes got me into trouble. But my focus was always on what’s next. What do I not know? What do I need to know? What are the most important things to work on? Once I answered those fundamental questions, I could relax and turn to simpler questions of engineering and logistics in service of those fundamentals.

Even lately, I still occasionally repeat the classic pattern of mine. I find a new group, float around its margins, start interacting prolifically without ever properly befriending anyone or creating an inner circle like everyone else, eventually get bored with the sameness and start questioning basic premises, which upsets the usual suspects who then move to ban and/or block me for heresy, and it’s game over. I’ve done it enough times that I have stopped trying, at least online. I have a lot of close people who understand me better than I sometimes know myself, so I’m not truly lonely. But the Worldwide Web can be ridiculously stupid.

But it still pains me to say that some of these things have even happened at immense short-term financial and opportunity cost. I lost money by doing things this way. I lost connections and possibilities I may never know the scope of. Why wouldn’t I just shut up and do the ol’ smile-and-wave?

I would be a liar. It’s one thing to wilfully overlook details, but it’s another entirely to knowingly become complicit in a social regime for its own sake. It’s not hard for me to find the foresight to anticipate where this leads: social lock-in, where the limits of the people I’m with also become my limits, clipping my wings and preventing me from attempting many of the things I want to try in this short little life of mine. You are a product of the company you keep to a larger extent than you may realise, and life is pretty short.

I’ve been working on the most important problems I could conceive of, and have made fruit on solutions to some of those already. The loss of some chump change six months ago pains me now, as I am forced to live on working blue-collar jobs and wanting to saw my jaw off from toothaches that are simply a fact of life for the poor, having no money or toys or savings to ever spend on a reprieve, vacation, or business trip to promote my work.

But I do not deal with the devil, and I know such a deal when I see one. Such comforts taken now would come at a great cost of personal integrity down the line – integrity which I cannot afford to give up if I wish to attempt some of the greater things I wish to do. I cannot become complicit with people whose judgment and integrity I do not absolutely trust. And since meeting such a surprising number of individuals whose integrity I do absolutely trust, as much as I could trust any imperfect human, I’ve been all the more steadfast in this approach.

I’m playing a longer game in life here than I can afford to currently elaborate. I’m not sorry to say that it actually computes for me to, at least by default, not be overly defensive when it comes to upsetting the vapid self-perceptions of people, because such people tend to be more worthless than they appear. The truly successful or important simply can’t get where they are with such debilitating issues, and I need to work on that level. Felix Kjellberg and Johnny Depp don’t become successful while nursing huge grudges or bruised egoes. People who get as far as they did are ticking time bombs, waiting for their fall, like Shane Dawson or Amber Heard. Time inevitably comes to put the phoneys to bed, and I am not a phoney.

I know it may not look like it, but I am very careful. That’s actually the impulse that tells me to eschew dumb social games earlier rather than later! I don’t say this as a plea (quite frankly it would be foolish for me to care whether you or anyone believes me on this), but I genuinely harbour no hatred or jealousy for others in my heart. Honest. But I know a lot of people who do, and they make playing positive-sum games extremely difficult. I hate them for what they do, not who they are.

This will suck more for now, up front, so that greater things than many even think possible will be realistic decades down the line. I hope that you will have faith in everybody who is operating like this in the world, because it’ll be so worth it, and they’re going to do it as long as they continue breathing, so at the very least anticipate it for your own sake.