Title: An Egoist Faith
-Date: 2022-06-24
+Date: 2022-06-24 17:50
Category: other
Tags: meta, procrastination
-Status: draft
_(Previously: ["a laziness born out of resignation and despair, a sense that I've outlived myself, that my story and my world is over, and I'm just enjoying a reasonably comfortable afterlife in the time we have left ..."](/2022/Apr/backlog-metablogging-april-2022/))_
Thus, it's not possible for a writer to think something like, "I just want to be _done_ with this stupid memoir of religious betrayal that no one should care about, in order to get the Whole Dumb Story out of my system so that I can be over it and move on with my afterlife and maybe work on something that matters instead." (Though someone who _self-identifies_ as a writer can think that.) You can't write in order to be _done_. It might be possible to produce text under that motivation—though I don't think I've seen it happen myself—but that would only be language-model output, not _writing_.
-If all you really wanted was to be done, you could just—decide to be done, without writing. Just walk away, and let everything left unsaid, _remain_ unsaid. If that doesn't seem satisfactory, it's probably because of some some deep, uncancellable convinction that the memoir is _not_ stupid, that the religious leaders _did_ betray you and their faith, that someone _should_ care, that telling the Whole Dumb Story—telling it _right_, so that every graf _sings_ and hits the exact notes of righteous fury and deconfusion and penetrating portraiture—is _part_ of your life, and not a prerequisite to indulging the part that comes after.
+If all you really wanted was to be done, you could just—decide to be done, without writing. Just walk away, and let everything left unsaid, _remain_ unsaid. If that doesn't seem satisfactory, it's probably because of some deep, uncancellable conviction that the memoir is _not_ stupid, that the religious leaders _did_ betray you and their faith, that someone _should_ care, that telling the Whole Dumb Story—telling it _right_, so that every graf _sings_ and hits the exact notes of righteous fury and deconfusion and penetrating portraiture—is _part_ of your life, and not a prerequisite to indulging the part that comes after.
-Even if you have to grant, without hesitating, that there _is_ an obvious sense in which these issues are not "important" in the grand scheme of things, that doesn't give you the obligation or even the _option_ to work on something that matters instead. You could produce text that you identify as being "on" something that matters, but that's not _work_—it's predictably not going to be work _that matters_ on something that matters, which can only be fueled by [a power born of having Something to Protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/). You can't _realistically_ do work that matters on something that matters out of _resignation_, during a reasonably comfortable afterlife after having been taken off the game board that really mattered _to you_, however "unimportant" it is to ulteriority or the Powers that be.
+Even if you have to grant, without hesitating, that there _is_ an obvious sense in which these issues are not "important" in the grand scheme of things, that doesn't give you the obligation or even the _option_ to work on something that matters instead. You could produce text that you identify as being "on" something that matters, but that's not _work_—it's predictably not going to be work _that matters_ on something that matters, which can only be fueled by [a power born of having Something to Protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/). You can't _realistically_ do work that matters out of resignation, during a reasonably comfortable afterlife after having been taken off the game board that really mattered _to you_, however "unimportant" it is to ulteriority or the Powers that be.
-The only way out is through. If I _am_ going to pivot to work on important things, it's going to be after I've _stopped thinking that this is already my afterlife_.
+The only way out is through. If I _am_ going to pivot to work on important things, it's going to be after I've _stopped thinking that this is already my afterlife_. Only after I've told my Story—not to get it over with, but because I Believe that it matters.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff