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Friday, January 5, 2018

quick morning thoughts on the value of studying history

Significant and seminal moments define our experiences in reference to the rest of our lives and our understandings thereof, but the only people who ever really "make history" are, well, historians.

This is not to say "I'm a historian and you are not, thus bow to the might of my cultivated knowledge and know your place." It's to say we should all become historians in some way, shape, or form in our own lives through an unremitting study of the past (even if it's only your personal past) amalgamated and perpetually processing into an interpretation useful to leveraging ourselves past the visible spectrum of what our accumulated experiences and conditioning have taught us is sane, sober, realistic, and safe and into a wider space of possibility where one can draw on lessons fed from the aggregate nexus of all recorded human experience in its grasped entirety (or, all remembered / recorded personal experience if history as a larger subject really isn't your thing).

It's the act of creating meaning through adding your particular (mis)understanding to the greater dance of emergent meaning across space and time. To actively deny oneself such self-analysis and constant evaluation is akin to dancing in the dark with no music. You don't have to dance with others around you, and you can still dance in the dark, but tune into the music to guide your movements at the very least.

In this sense, history is the music, and your interpretation thereof is the dance. Find all the creative ways to move within the tempo the song provides, because our only genuine guides in life are coherent interpretative models which balance our sensations of "I" with our sensations of "everything (and everyone) else." There is no end to this process of general and self-inquiry, because the point is to join the dance. However, as has already been analogically demonstrated, even if you are alone, you never really dance alone so long as you move and gyrate to the music of another.

Thus, the point is to dance, but to something other than the exclusive beat of your own drum.

(If anything, learn to beat your own drum in a band cus I've heard percussionists are hard to come by these days).

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The world is meaningless,

there is no God or gods, there are no morals, the universe is not moving inexorably towards any higher purpose.
All meaning is man-made, so make your own, and make it well.
Do not treat life as a way to pass the time until you die.
Do not try to "find yourself", you must make yourself.
Choose what you want to find meaningful and live, create, love, hate, cry, destroy, fight and die for it.
Do not let your life and your values and your actions slip easily into any mold, other that that which you create for yourself, and say with conviction, "This is who I make myself".
Do not give in to hope.
Remember that nothing you do has any significance beyond that with which you imbue it.
Whatever you do, do it for its own sake.
When the universe looks on with indifference, laugh, and shout back, "Fuck You!".
Rembember that to fight meaninglessness is futile, but fight anyway, in spite of and because of its futility.
The world may be empty of meaning, but it is a blank canvas on which to paint meanings of your own.
Live deliberately. You are free.