I program a lot but I’m not necessarily a programmer. And I may write a lot but I’m definitely not a writer. Learning languages but I’m no aficionado.
Still, I scroll around a lot too and it took some reconsideration and painting the sorry state of hunching over to fan through Wikipedia for the Nth time in an attempt to finally solve the case of a fleeting thought, even if another thousand shall flutter in and makeshift this screen into a prison. And in the same vein I concede that, though I am not a full-body programmer nor writer, these activities still construct some sense of What One Is.
So one can wonder, can you give up the Identity game? To still do things and not assign any sort of Status to it.
That’s how each of these activities I mentioned started, but I can’t discern whether it really makes who I am.
Only through identity can one ground the narrative. You gotta have the hero of the story, taking selfies for an abridged victory lap. Through the narrative lens one can glam up the more boring chapters.
Bryan Johnson talks about how you have to shift your perception and believe you’re a professional sleeper to make changes. Derek Sivers talks about how you ought to confront what you’re doing by identifying correctly: are you the businessman or play-pretender? And I’m not denying it, it does work. Who wants to envision themselves as the attention-captured cog?
But when you’re used to looking twenty years ahead, you get real sick of narratives. It’s always the same scene envisioned: stuck in a bar and sauntering to some studio apartment. When you know how it ends the story loses the magic – watching everything slip through your fingers.
Some could argue, with enough hours into a particular craft, you invest parts of your soul. What does it mean to see all your soul-fused outputs tattered twenty years later: seeing all of the younger programmers crafting quantum trading systems, or the new writers making a story cataloguing our transition to autonomous cities – if you’re optimistic, maybe, though a barbarous disintegration just as likely. Getting older is a continuous exercise of humility.
When I first started writing on here, couple years ago, I linked a song from DJ Shadow. It quotes an interview with some jazz drummer. Teaching yourself the art of jazz drumming.
The sample caps off with this idea that it isn’t him drumming anymore, but something beyond him. “The music is coming through me.”
Maybe you could use Identity as a bootstrapping process, climbing the ranks of whatever you fancy, but I think the names which echo through history are the names that yielded everything for some higher power to drive them, becoming an instrument.
That it isn’t your soul, but the oversoul found in all your fragments, and there’s an infinite well to dip into. You only access such wells through an honest empty love, maybe. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, when you do something long enough, time dissipates and you’ll blink to find your hut built, outline drawn, ingredients prepped. Evicting oneself to let heaven’s hands take control.
The essence of worship is devotion and time, an unavoidable fact, whatever you spend the most time on. What better way than to offer your very existence for nothing?