Talent estimation

If you’re good-looking / charismatic / known to be skilled in certain areas, people automatically generate positive prejudices about you. When people have a good idea of what it means to be skilled in a certain area (or are skilled enough themselves to confidently generate their own criteria for what constitutes skill in the given area), and see that you’re skilled, they give you the benefit of the doubt that you’re skilled in areas they have no idea about. Even when they’re fronting like they know all about these other areas. You can see it in their eyes. It’s obvious the moment they switch from confident equality to disadvantage and deference, even when they’re trying to hide the deference. This gives you power to create your own discourses/skill areas, stipulate their axioms/principles/structures and stipulate certain criteria for “skill”. This gives you responsibility to make sure you don’t send the sheep down unfruitful/futile/destructive paths.

Pained nostalgia

I always take comfort from realising that I’ll be able to laugh later at the dramas that are happening now. But I always feel desperate because I know the things/people I value now will be small on the radar screen later.

One constant I return to again and again throughout my life is a feeling of absolute nothingness. Knowing that nothing has or ever will have value that doesn’t fade quickly. Nothing will ever lead to satisfaction.

It’s a feeling of yearning mixed with boredom. Looking into the past with yearning as if the satisfier is there. Even though you don’t remember it. Looking into the future with vague hope of the satisfier coming but knowing it won’t. It’s like a yearning for the twin you dominated and absorbed in the womb.

And all your feelings and values change but the constant nothingness feeling is returned to with such precision each time that it’s like déjà vu. It’s the most reliable feeling. It’s like you hit an objective limit like absolute zero temperature. You miss your past and mourn its passing. You know your future will see you mourning now. You won’t be sure what you miss. And it’s mixed with a feeling of regret for the things that should have been. And you find yourself not wanting to look back at the flawed present and miss it later. It makes you desperate to spend now with the people you love doing things that are worthwhile, but despair of that being possible.