Deliberate Intentionally, and Explore (DIE) - Thiiiiiiis iiiiiis the Way I Live

Week 27: Experimenting with Absurdism

Read this now, or go away and don’t come back.

Jk, jk - sorry I’ll make it up to you*, I promise.

See the Free workshop info for SUNDAY MARCH 30th at 17:15 CST at the bottom.

Really though, I'd like you to stay, and if you bookmark this, you probably won’t come back… unless you’ve established a deliberate practice of saving newsletters and coming back to them - I haven’t. But I do have a practice: it’s called Doing Whatever the Fuck I Want, and Then Thinking Deeply About It Later. Not necessarily deliberate, but certainly deliberating.

And there is a difference.

• "Deliberate" (adj.) intentional;

• "Deliberate" (verb) to think carefully.

One implies a continual process, the other a finality, and as long as we exist (and maybe beyond), it’s all process.

I’ve been very excited to introduce you to STEP 3 of the process of Experimenting with Absurdism, show you around my crib - how I live for the next 13 weeks**. Just a reminder:

• STEP 1. Accept the Absurd.

• STEP 2. Embrace your freedom

• STEP 3. Live with Passion.

• STEP 4. Keep on keepin’ on despite the fact that it’s all pointless.

I’ve been so excited for this step, that I thought to myself:

‘I need to write this shit realllllll good. I need to be deliberate about it. In fact, I’m gonna to title the first piece in Step 3 The Sacrifice of a Deliberate Life!’

Womp womp.

Sounds more like Step 3 is “Do your chores, bitch!” But, I set my intention, and decided I’m a deliberate-ass-chore-doing kinda bitch, so there was no retracting that very reactionary and not at all deliberate first thought. mmhmm. Makes perfect sense. I decided, that I must have done some chores*** to get where I’m at, and I want to show you how I’ve done it. I know for a fact, I’ve very deliberately accomplished some cool things! So, I started writing, begrudgingly, doing my chores. About 4000 words and 20 pages of journal entries later - I had no cohesive newsletter to speak of. But I figured out The Sacrifice of a Deliberate Life: You sacrifice actual Life.

Deliberate Accidents

I’m nothing if not persistent, and I’d convinced myself I couldn’t change the intention I had set. If had to live a deliberate, ascetic life, then so be it (this is what reading too much Simone Weil’ll do to a bitch). So I deliberately looked back on what kind of fuckshit done for the past few weeks. Flipping through journal pages, and scrolling down the Word doc it appeared that I at least tried to make it fun, like I do with most chores, flitting about, putting feelers out for things that I’ve done that were deliberate.

I tried listing a few deliberate things I’ve done:

✅️ finding a life partner

✅️ buying house

✅️ having a kid

✅️ publishing

✅️ getting a PhD

✅️ seeing the Louvre

…but these things didn’t happen just because I set the intention of doing them. They required a combination of intention, deliberation, discipline, and exploration. So, the next set of experiments was on a flight I took to Detroit. I tried being deliberate about certain things and then writing them very de-lib-er-ate-ly:

• the rim of a plastic cup pressed against my mouth, careful not to spill amidst a light jostling from the jetstream

• a sour thought, sweetened by a belief in kind deeds

• an hour spent, pencil-in-hand, mushy gears grinding in an osseous shell

• repeated, active resistance against grasping the rubbery housing of the dreaded black mirror

• gingerly maintaining a nail-grip on the silver lobster clasp of a bracelet draped over my dominant wrist

There were more strikethroughs than entries, because it occurred to me with each experiment that even if I dedicated all of my intentionality to deliberately doing a thing - the fucking plane could drop out of the sky, and I had no idea how a thing would ultimately turn out. And besides most of the things I was writing were just a consequence of me trying to make up for some clumsy brash thing I didn’t mean to do.

I was not deliberately trying to:

• get motion sickness in the Lyft that took me from the airport to my hotel, and fall asleep once I put my stuff down, missing a meeting and a half.

• bash my shin into the sharp faux wood bedframe of my hotel as I scrambled to get my laptop

• sleepily tell my team, including the new girl I’m mentoring, that “No I really am just a hot mess like this most the time”

• misspell “announce” in the tiktok I made or “strength” in that Thread

• draw that last breath… even if I decide to be intentional about it now, it’s only because I recognized that I’m accidentally breathing.

After reviewing the footage, it would appear most things I do are not deliberate.

At best, I have a limited range of control over my decision in a very bounded rationality kind of way.

But I’ll be damned if I don’t deliberate.

Anamnesis

So, I continued doing that. Reading another passage, I deliberated the meaning of another bumbling idiot thing I did last week:

I watched the speech I gave at my high school commencement - on a whim for the first time ever.

Funny story, I almost didn’t graduate. I had the second-highest GPA in our class of 700, but I took a borderline truant amount of “mental health” days with Ken. I made it, with one day to spare, but when I did give the speech, I couldn’t possibly just read the one I’d prepared. I felt like I needed to be more off the cuff. You should have seen the admin’s face when I said I wasn’t going to read my speech. (See how deliberate I’ve always been?)

Of course, there were no typos or misreadings. But one thing’s for sure: it was heartfelt, and you could tell I went back and forth with what I wanted to say about the subject of “personal truth”. I needed to address some fuck shit my friends were on and gently call out my “dysfunctional emesched” family - intuitively naming an actual clinical pathology described in the 1920s while also thanking them for making me who I am. You can’t do that with a prepared speech, you just gotta free-wheel! I gave the speech, took off for college the next day, and didn’t think about it again until a couple of years ago when I joined the Facebook for our 20-year reunion. A classmate sent me the DVD, and I popped it straight in the Xbox, with zero intentions last week while I was in the midst of my Very Deliberate Experiments.

It was beyond mortifying watch. I’ve always hated watching myself back on video, and if I had given that one ounce of thought, I could have predicted that it would send me into a tizzy for the rest of the day. But no, I just wanted to explore what would happen. For the next hour, I was crumpled on the couch moved only by the mental image of Karl Flopper’s soft coat hanging over an emaciated body. I pulled myself up to delivered some carrots and touch grass, something I hadn’t done last summer. (We’re in a full blown If-You-Give-a-Mouse-a-Cookie-scenario now.) The grass made me think of how I haven’t touched my piano keys in almost a year. So, I went upstairs and they were grimy with a residue of dust. This brought feelings of sadness and guilt for all the things I haven’t done… all the things I wanted to be deliberate about but just wasn’t. I was lost again as I so often am, and I was not at all deliberate about putting pen to paper to tell the tale. It just happened. I guess when explorers get lost, they just instinctively pull out the map.

When your default intention is set to “explore”, deliberate reflection can lead to a feeling of anamnesis - the process of recalling something that our soul already knew from a past life ( ana-, "back," and mimneskesthai, "to cause to remember”). It feels like remembering… and it kind of is, since by exploring first, you’ve already lived it. It’s like taking a tiny bite of death because you can’t change what you find, the past is dead and gone, but yet alive in your memory, and in the next thing you’re going to do. Socrates believed anamnesis is the way we acquire knowledge from our immortal soul, but Kant developed a priori knowledge, tossing out the soul and placing our “recollection” squarely on our God-given reason. I think there’s something in-between - something between the living moment and the death of the past that we’re able to reckon with only after experience. There’s also something inherently human about our bumbling about. In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt calls “action” the highest of human activities (vita activa). Action includes speech, art - really anything that includes other people. This essay is an action. It creates a ripple that touches other people and cannot happen in isolation. Once an action enters the world, it cannot be changed. So when we act, naturally, we err. We reflect, and we attempt to correct or not, but we forgive ourselves and others because we can’t exactly predict what’s next. Thomas Bayes might have called this inference - the continual process of refining information based on new data, but it’s more than that. It’s weaving ghosts of meaning out of our foibles that we can share with others even after we’re gone, creating a sort of longitudinal anemnesis.

So yeah! This is what it took me several thousand words, a small vat of tears, and weeks of meandering to discover: that the way I live is the way I DIE.

Thiiiiiiis iiiiiiis the Way I Live

Deliberate Intentionally and Explore (DIE)

For our experiment this week, I challenge you to DIE. Heh. But pick a small project and set the nebulous intention of “exploration”. Then

1. Start the damn thing.

Exactly what I did, unwittingly. Actually, it’s kind of what you’re doing right now…

2. Explore what brought you here, as objectively as possible.

You can practice this with this essay. You’ve already begun the process of DIEing, because I’m sure you didn’t set any intention before reading it. But why are you reading this? Because you know me? Bc I guilted you into staying? Bc you’re interested in philosophy/science/newsletters that oscillate between swearing and words like anamnesis? Dissect this a bit. Be crude if need be. For me, this time it looked like writing down things that I did “intentionally” next to little checkmark emojis.

3. Do a little more, but look for emotion.

How you feeling? Entertained I fucking hope. If I’ve done my job, you’ve been on a rollercoaster (sorry and you’re welcome). If you felt something, what were the triggers? For me, seeing my own stupid, cherubic face mumbling through the most important day of my life up to that point made feel sad. Disappointed that I’ve always been DIEing, but it also made me realize that DIEing is a decent way to live.

3. Deliberate on how to proceed. And then Do.

Maybe you’re feeling inspired to write something yourself. Or look up something/someone from high school. Or write a list of things you want to be deliberate about. Or journal. Why? What’s been stirred up for you?

4. Course Correct and DIE another day.

Adjust as needed. And be sure to forgive yourself and others. It’s our first time living - well Socrates might argue against this, but I feel like each day is cloudy with a chance of meaning. So, have some fun with this shit. It’s all for funsies anyway. You’re going to die.

Forgiveness

Speaking of forgiveness, Sorry for telling you to go away and never come back. It was the first thing I wrote (and I was being serious at first), but when I read it back after watching the dorky speech I gave, I laughed out loud. It’s true though, that, these days most media we consume (and it’s a LOT) goes in one ear/retina and out the other.

So when you get something that actually stays with you… ooohweeeeee! It's like warming yourself by a crackling fire with your bestie on an cool autumn night or that one Christmas where everyone was really happy, or that sunrise on that trip you took - the one you’ll never forget. It moves you, and you come back to it trying to extract more from it. I hope this does even a fraction of that for you, and you’ll accept that as a partial consolation for the little deaths you have to face now.

And as an apology for being corny and off-putting as fuck, I’m offering you my Monthly Rabbitholes and Reflection Workshop for free this month. I designed this workshop to be a little bit more deliberate about how I deliberate. I’m surprised every month when I look back at the shit I’ve stumbled into. I DIE a little every time. hehehehe

Ok I’m done. Byeee

*Worksheet

Workshop (17:15 CST - 18:15) **TODAY SUNDAY March, 30th**

**week = week. Week = however the fuck long it takes me to write each of these 13 essays.

***Honestly, I’m terrible about chores. I once did a redacted Tiktok about the way I clean and my bestie was like “girl, Ily, but you have ADHD.”