urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
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User ID: 226
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urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
4mo ago
Like most men under 40, I enjoy gaming as a way to spend my free time. However, I feel guilty about struggling to enjoy or be successful at gaming 'classics' like Super Mario Bros or Skyrim. My gaming interests are narrow but deep, and I find e-sports games transient and fast-paced games too demanding on my hand-eye coordination.
I really like Quantic Foundry's Gamer Motivation Model. According to my results, the two components of games I really love are what they call "Creativity" and "Immersion." I like playing games that give me the opportunity to enter a different world and role-play as a different person. I also like games which provide opportunities to build and customize things.
Games like Star Wars: The Old Republic, despite flaws, satisfy my desire for a complex storyline, character customization, and player housing. Further, while BioWare games often fulfill me with their strong stories, Bethesda games don't. I find their characters wooden, with bland dialogue and settings.
But I feel like I'm the sort of person who ought to be playing a broader range of games. I have the personality type, and my friends throughout life have always been inveterate gamers.
At times, I feel like a dog eating crumbs that fall from the master's table, satisfied only by limited (and often buggy or underdeveloped) aspects of games which focus on motivations -- like competition, or blowing stuff up -- that are more common among the core gaming demographic.
I suppose my struggle is to identify what is actually valuable to me -- is it to play the 'gaming classics,' or is it to focus on games that satisfy my unique preferences? Can anyone relate to having such unique tastes?
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And yet, as I say, the women I know who seem most drawn to therapy culture and counseling seem... not great.
This has the same vibe as “all the people I know who seem most drawn to oncologists all seem like they’re sick.” Um… yeah?
I don’t think therapy works for everyone. It works for some, and not very well for others. I’m rooting for myself being in the first group. But I hear testimonials from people who it has definitely helped, and I don’t see any reason to doubt them.
There might well be people of your acquaintance who went through therapy, found it helpful, and then moved on. They don’t talk about it, because it’s not an identity for such people, and mental health is very personal. The people for whom it is and identity and doesn’t work well are definitely the ones who are going to talk about it more. I’m not sure you can make a good argument about its effectiveness from the people who talk the most loudly about it. I think you need studies for that.
But I agree, therapy culture is toxic. It’s the equivalent of WebMD making everyone think they have cancer. It takes something private and useful and turns it into a very public weapon. Most people don’t need the tools of therapy, and I think the idea that they do is silly. It’s a condescension to the needs of a select group of suffering people. It’s like chemotherapy — it saves lives, but you shouldn’t give it to someone without the need for it.
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urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
26d ago
Yeah, I think a huge part is insufficient pair bonding. I wonder if perhaps the problem is social media and porn -- unrealistic expectations abound there.
The Buddhist to Eastern Orthodox pathway demonstrates itself yet again, hah. I personally come at things from a different angle -- I find Buddhism, even in its secularized form, off-putting, especially in its denial of the self and its total repudiation of physical pleasures. Desire certainly brings about suffering, but it also certainly brings about joy.
I do definitely wonder if there's a "intellectual faith" vs "mystic faith" personality difference, that tends to define where a convert ends up in the spectrum of Christian churches -- and the latter attracts people to Eastern Orthodoxy like flies to honey. The former, of course, pulls in people to western Christianity, especially to Thomist Catholicism and confessional forms of Protestantism. I find myself compelled by the intellectual distinctives of western Christianity, even as I agree with the Chalcedonian Orthodox on many of the historical and theological issues about which they contend.
Probably no one believes me on this, but I have a stronger emotional reaction to western liturgical services than to the Byzantine liturgy. It is undoubtedly beautiful, but also Byzantine in the fullest sense of the word. Western liturgies seem to operate in a different way, even in its most accumulative forms -- there's a more easily perceptible progression towards the Eucharist and and then down from it.
Several years ago I had my come-to-Jesus moment where I took to heart Camus's assertion that an atheist who sees the absurdity of our intelligence and spirituality within a naturalistic materialistic worldview has but three options: accept the absurdity, commit suicide (The Myth of Sisyphus begins with the eerie line that "there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide"), or commit philosophical suicide -- and accept faith. I found the absurdity intolerable. And so I thought about these options within the context of Kierkegaard's "leap into faith", and, having rejected the choice of suicide within the confines of a psychiatric ward, I took the leap.
I began with my belief in the Bible (which I never truly lost; even as an atheist I believed it was invaluable as literature in a Jordan Peterson sense) and, on that basis, I investigated the various churches, seeking what was testable and true. During this time I wrote a 10,000-word treatise on the Biblical model of baptism, demolishing arguments against baptismal regeneration and infant baptism with facts and logic (TM). I also wrote a nearly-as-long treatise in favor of the Eucharist.
During these explorations, I flitted from Calvinism to Anglicanism, and finally found a stable place in Catholicism, where I remained in worship, if not in sacrament, for years. I met some wonderful, kind, young Catholics who were, and remain, passionate about Jesus Christ and his most pure mother. This faith got me through COVID, at least, and for that I thank the Lord.
But I had all sorts of lingering doubts about the Papacy, about the Vatican councils (both of them), about The Magisterium (TM), about Mariology, about clerical celibacy -- the details of these are painful and frustrating to me, and do not bear repeating. But suffice it to say that I found myself increasingly distrusting the claims the institutional Catholic Church made about itself, despite admiring, in many ways, the theology. I have been assured a thousand times that Catholicism cannot be separated from the Pope. But I find myself admiring the shape and form of Catholicism before the time of high Papal supremacy from the 17-1900s. Where, pray tell, are the trads who reject Vatican I?
It was in that mode that I first walked into an Eastern Orthodox church. I saw it, not as the bride of Christ, but as the homely single girl in a town where everyone else was married. I saw no other option to continue believing in the Incarnate God, one person in two natures, and I seized upon the option I was given.
If I'm being honest, I see no bride of Christ within the world: I see her in the saints beloved of our God, not in the institutions who claim to wear the mantle of their holiness. If there is anything that remains Protestant about my faith, it is that the Church in her holiness is fundamentally visible only to God, who judges all hearts.
During this time I worked with a priest, a convert, a good man, though I'm not sure we ever really understood each other. But I increasingly felt out of place: worshipping with strange music in a strange church full of strangers. There were definitely young converts to which I related quite a bit. But the one I related to the most, an argumentative but faithful young man who wanted to be a priest, seemed more infatuated with the cultures of far-off Eastern Europe than his own, and I found this cosmopolitan attitude of fascination with all-things foreign as more reminiscent of blue tribers who hate my country rather than the red tribe Christians with whom I argued, like (and literally as) family about not putting the stars and stripes within the church sanctuary.
Actually, I felt like, in some ways, I fit in all too well -- a young, neurotic, book-obsessed young man brought to interest in Orthodoxy by the internet. But, in another, I fit in poorly: the model Orthodox convert very much seems to be an evangelical Protestant, spiritual-but-not-religious atheist, or Buddhist, who would never consider Catholicism with a 10-foot pole. I have heard nearly as many bad arguments against Catholicism within Orthodoxy as I did growing up Protestant, and I have never met a Catholic-to-Orthodox convert.
Although in serious terms that term also would not describe me, I would say that my mode of thinking and praying is fundamentally Roman Catholic -- I find much to identify with in the "greats" of Catholic theology, like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and I am compelled by the Catholic view of "faith seeking understanding," of reason not against faith, but in support of faith, in favor of faith. I find the rejection of this concept with Orthodoxy off-putting, like I am being asked to cut off my nose to spite my face.
If reason is not a potential part of a healthy breakfast way to communion with God, then why was it the only thing that ever got me to knock on the door of an Orthodox parish -- and for that matter, the only thing that got most converts to do so? I was frustrated when my priest, after many meetings of saying, "reason is not the way to God," then said, "you have to look at the history, how people did things," in response to my doubts about Orthodoxy. In other words, it was tolerable to use the rational analysis of historical evidence to get to Orthodoxy, but once you're in it, suddenly rationality becomes useless. This seemed to me uselessly self-serving, and it was not long after that I walked away from Eastern Orthodoxy. I did the Orthodox endorsed (TM) thing of Asking My Priest (TM), and it led me away from the Orthodox Church, not towards it.
All this co-existed with me trying hopelessly to convince my parents and my girlfriend that I wasn't insane, or about to lose my soul. Catholicism was enough of a stretch for my parents; my girlfriend admires Catholicism, though I'm not sure she has a religious bone in her body. Our fiercest argument, and the closest we've ever come to truly splitting up, was based around my own interest in Eastern Orthodoxy and desire to bring up my children in my Christian faith. I met her in a college atheist club -- where we were the two least anti-religious people there -- and up until that point I think she saw my religious beliefs as a weird phase, which, to be fair, I am wont to get into.
(I once spent some time as a teenager engaging in "floor living" like some kind of Japanese LARP, cursing the invention of the chair as an insult against the natural ability of human beings to squat and sit without furniture. She teases me about this relentlessly.)
But at that point I think it crystalized for her that I really believed in it, that my faith in God was a real part of my life that would motivate real decisions. And, in response, she made no secret of the fact that she would never baptize her children in a religious faith before they could choose it for themselves, and that she found Eastern Orthodoxy in particular to be a bizarre religion. She expressed open and profound displeasure at their weird music, and the weird parishioners, and the overly-intense fasts, and the total foreign-ness of that faith.
To be fair, I actually think she's right about this from the American perspective -- Eastern Orthodoxy is a weird religion by US standards, and its culinary rules and cultural outlook is indeed quite foreign. Not only that, but, no offense intended, the converts are kind of weird -- there is one guy at the local Orthodox parish who wears a kilt for the Liturgy. In the United States. That sort of nerdy, male oddness is normative -- so is simple "male-ness," to be blunt. And my girlfriend, though she loves ideas, hates hates hates cultural weirdness and is a very feminine person, and in that sense she is probably more conservative than I am. (I once had her take a Big Five personality test, which said she is high in the segments of Openness to Experience that relate to appreciation for intellectual thinking, but moderately low in the segments that relate to appreciation of unusual aesthetic preferences. This explained a lot about her.)
I think my we very nearly broke up then and there, during that one tense conversation. But where in God's green earth would I ever find another woman who cares for me as much as her, or agrees with me as much as her, or holds as similar a worldview to me as her (faith excepted), or shares as many beliefs about how to run a family as her?
It certainly wouldn't be in the American Orthodox Church. Much more attractive and eligible men than I struggle there; most seem to find Protestants and convert them; it seems like Rod Dreher lost his.
I think you shared at one point that your wife is Eastern Orthodox -- this surely makes that process much easier for you, as your conversion experience hopefully bonds you to her more closely. For me, it did the opposite. My partner enjoys listening to me talk about Christianity as she does all my thoughts, but I could tell that she appreciated them as ideas, almost as fiction -- in the same way that @FarNearEverywhere likes Tolkien -- rather than as a living faith that she would care to base her life on. ("I think you're taking this too seriously, urquan," she would tell me, "faith is not about ideas, it's just what people believe.") "Seeing, she did not see; and hearing, she did not hear, nor did she understand."
It was around this time that I gave up on faith, started having sex with my girlfriend, and adopted a sort of vaguely Christian agnosticism. I knew at the time -- I knew -- that this would end up in a dark place, perhaps a darker place than I had been in even during my periods of "new atheism". And, on that matter, I was right: my time as a post-Christian has been, bar none, the darkest and least functional point in my life. Angry at the world, frustrated at myself, critical towards all, charitable towards none, eager to judge, slow to mercy, I am like the prophet of a wrathful God, bent on inventing Hell for lack of Heaven. If someone told me they thought I was possessed by a demon, I would believe them. I am as disconnected from my values and my spirit as any daemoniac, and my torments are legion. "O how unlike the place from whence I fell!"
These are just disconnected thoughts. But nevertheless they are real ones, more real than any of my actual "arguments," such as they are, against Eastern Orthodoxy. But, as I said, I am at my low point, and about to the place where I'm willing once again to commit philosophical suicide for want of the alternative. I suppose I am praying that somewhere, some way, I receive some of this "confirmation" you speak of, something to push me, or pull me, kicking and screaming, towards something, anything, some new path, that I might live, and have life abundantly. I am begging for something worth living for.
Several months ago, I was PMing with @dovetailing about the Eastern Orthodox Church; he is also a convert to Orthodoxy. I dropped the thread despite wanting to reply, because I just couldn't find the right words. He sent me a very kind PM during that radio silence, which I appreciated very much. These, I suppose, are the right words, and I would ask him to take my reply to you as a reply to him.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
4mo ago
Oh, if only my parents were like that. They go on a frenzy to remove Christmas decorations at their house starting December 26, and it's usually gone by New Years'.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
4mo ago
I'm trying to convince my parents (who have decorated their house with huge numbers of lights since I was a kid) to keep the lights up into January. I'm hopeful they'll actually do it this year, that always makes me joyful to go to their house and see the pretty lights.
I hate January.
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urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
14d ago
I would also want proportion to the amount of non-violent usefulness for the item, and the amount of necessity for the item in society. No one needs a firearm to get along in society. Yes, it may have usefulness in a law-abiding way, but even the closest thing to a necessity for firearms in society in self-defense -- which involves, inherently, violence. It may be justified violence, but it is violence. Someone who shoots a carjacker is doing the same thing an armed carjacker-gone-wrong does -- using a firearm against a person. And there is no necessity in the 21st century to hunt for food, and certainly no necessity to hunt or shoot for sport.
A car, however -- using a car to run someone over is incorrectly using a car. No one for a lawful or legitimate purpose runs over a person with a car. There is no sense in which a car is supposed to be used to run someone over. There are no sports in which people get run over by cars. There is no such thing as driving through a crash test barrier made of clay for sport. A car, used properly, is not a weapon, it's a means of transport. Firearms are weapons.
And you also kind of need a car to get along in society -- especially in places where public transportation does not exist or is woefully inadequate. It makes a lot more sense to give your depressed teen (with a drivers' license, of course!) access to the family car than to give them a gun. After all, if they can't use the car to go visit their friends, or go to their after-school job, what they'll be doing is moping around the house. And that just sounds like more depression.
Perhaps he could have used the gun at a firing range to let off some stress. But if I were the parents, and actually paid attention to the kid, I wouldn't let him do that without supervision. And I wouldn't even do that, personally. The parents made an active choice to put a weapon in the hands of their depressed, angry son, unsupervised. That's not bad parenting, that's ludicriously harmful parenting. I would even say negligent.
All that being said, it's interesting to me that owning a firearm is a right, but driving a car is a privilege -- yet the former is optional and the latter, for many people, a necessity.
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