Playing Out The Hand

The cards are dealt and you are both armed and boxed in accordingly. But the limits of the situation are not those of the individual's limits so much as the inability for diverse groups to assess and agree on a direction. Humans are mostly superstitious, irrational, and paranoid, projecting imaginary realities as their expectations, usually wildly off the mark. To avoid embarrassment for their falaciousness, all supposition found to be false is summarily forgotten and never mentioned again, keeping no reminder as a cautious warning of their poor judgment and inability to reliably predict conclusions.

Even if you realistically assess your own abilities, your scope of possibility is mostly limited to solitary efforts, and this quickly leads to Schopenhauerism. If you contain several lifetimes of creativity and curiosity, you might eventually come to see interactions with others as a net loss and withdraw rather than assume an unneeded burden.

This retreat from society could also be interpreted as good taste asserting itself: we want others who understand and have something within them, a fertile society that is creative and curious from health, still alive and thirsting from desire. Perhaps the cost of spending time on the wrong path yields benefit by convincing one away from all idle conversations about weather, television, sports, gossip, and drug consumption.

We can prepare for any worst case outcome, but none of those are really bad or undeserved, and deep preparations usually do more to knock one off course by inducing delay and hesitation than to prepare for an actual situation. We need only align ourselves for a normal, directed outcome and adjust as the situation necessitates. Knowing human nature for madness, and that most moderns are ADHD and bipolar, barely kept functional by SSRIs and stimulant cocktails, you can expect that whatever happens with others will tend to be unstable and short lived before their inner crazy prevails and tears it apart.

Because we lack a means to communicate well enough to persuade people toward good outcomes and away from bad outcomes, neither can we be bothered by bad decisions or bad lives that could easily have turned out otherwise. As enlightened detached liberals, LIVE AND LET LIVE! Remain undistracted by drama and misfortune, focused on playing out your hand to the fullest, unconcerned with chattered opinions. How could you ever value the judgment of aimless people whose lives are distended catastrophes with no frame of reference to measure your attempts?

We know well the cards we hold and what we could do with them. We need not reveal them, but might do best to quietly walk away from the square and go about our explorations as we must, unbothered by all the distractions that don't matter, swimming away from the drowning to avoid being pulled under as they flail about. It is not nearly as lonely as it sounds, for in the most remote places we still find companions who have undertaken the same search and walk the same paths we once thought were ours alone.