drafting "An Egoist Faith"

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+Title: An Egoist Faith
+Date: 2022-06-24
+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/))_
+
+People mostly don't do things. [They really don't.](/2017/Nov/the-blockhead/) In order to defy fate and do a thing, you need to Believe in what you're doing, because if you don't Believe, then your motivational system will direct your time and attention to something, anything else that it can Believe in more, like [_Super Auto Pets_](https://teamwoodgames.com/).
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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_.