I’ll occasionally post photos and not explain them. Chapter 3.

 

What is it they say about time and tide?

Your Origin Story Is Bullshit

A 22-year-old in a black BMW shot six people, killed three more with a knife, killed himself, and created a lot of angry media content.  Not in that order.

Because this happened, we are supposed to talk about guns and gun control, because that’s the pre-approved, story-selling fight that we all know and love, and the media knows we all love.  It is a totally pointless fight in which the last interesting revelation came about right around the same time the wheel-lock rifle did, but it sells stories and that’s why we’re supposed to embrace this debate.

“But it’s important that we have this conversation.”  No it’s not.  It’s distracting that we have to have the same conversation we’ve been having about guns since the 1960’s, especially in a political environment where compromise is as impossible as it currently is.  It’s important that we have this conversation when there’s a way forward.  There isn’t one, and hey, maybe we should make one.  But If over twenty dead elementary school kids in Connecticut isn’t going to force a national compromise, and you’re hanging your hopes on a relative handful of relative adults out in California, you need to be on antipsychotics.

So let’s skip that.  Instead of buying and selling page views for an eternally pointless media by having their conversation, let’s have our own.  This will tell us some ugly things about ourselves, but if it spares me from watching the 800^th round of phoned-in NRA vs. Brady Campaign on pay-per-view, then let’s get ugly.

What does the spree killer want us to see?

He (invariably “he”) wants you to see the same thing that you want people to see when you turn a camera on yourself.  Remember, cameras don’t capture reality.  They create the reality that someone wants you to see.  You are not taking a picture of yourself, you are creating a representation of yourself, editing it, and telling your audience to accept it.  You’re not showing yourself, you’re showing your identity.  These are different things for the vast majority of people.  You aren’t usually showing us what you do, you’re showing us “who you are” completely independent of you taking any action, other than snapping a photo.

Fortunately, the identity that most people ask us to accept when they point a camera at themselves is something simple like “hot chick” or “quirky chick” or “chick who eats food.”  Or if you’re a guy, those same things plus “guy with serious thoughts on his face.”  These things suck, but they’re not all that dangerous. Until they are.

Our shooter wants us to see his identity when he’s on camera, not his real self, because his real self probably isn’t all that interesting.  Most spree killers have boring backstories.  But he’s not showing us the truth, he’s showing us what’s in his own head more capably than a team of Harvard psychologists could.  He’s showing us his origin story.  He’s giving us the first 30 minutes of his revenge movie.

If you just had the thought, “but he’s insane, and his grievances don’t give him the right to kill,” then it’s past your bedtime.  Everybody knows that, grow up.  “He has such a skewed version of reality.”  Ok – you in the footie pajamas, you can stay up late.  Let’s talk about that.

Identity feeds back on itself.  You tell people who you are, tell them to accept it, and every time you do it you reinforce in your own head that what you’re telling people is true.  As you try to convince other people, you convince yourself even more, because you want to believe it more.  This is true whether you’re promoting yourself as “deserving man wronged by women” or “fun-loving college girl.”  Make the packaging compelling enough, and people will buy it even if there’s nothing inside.  The version of reality isn’t what’s skewed.  It’s your version of you that’s skewed, and when reality doesn’t accept that version of you, you have to change (which is painful and hard) or aggressively defend (which is what most people do).

In the shooter’s life, that meant that the women he wanted didn’t accept his obvious superiority.  They didn’t slight him, they didn’t target him for bullying, it was worse than that: they ignored him and his identity as a superior male specimen.  In his mind, it wasn’t that they couldn’t see his superiority, it’s that they knew he was superior, ignored it, and gave what he deserved to someone else.  And eventually, this identity collapsed, and what’s left when that happens is rage.

Dr. Arie Kuglanski talks about “self-love” and terrorism, you can find this in The Canon. His point is that suicide bombers are not depressed, any more than Kamikaze pilots are depressed, any more than a soldier jumping on a grenade to save his friends is depressed.  These suicides are not for the sake of ending one’s own misery.  Nor are they necessarily altruistic.  Instead, they do this out of “self-love.”  They do it because they have extremely strong self-identifications as warriors, sacrificers, and protectors.  These identities are cultivated by cultural celebrations, but without these identifications, this behavior couldn’t exist.

Depressed people kill themselves at home.  People who love their identity kill themselves to maintain it.

So what does it say that our shooter turned the gun on himself?  It’s not just a suicide, put it back in context.

This is not a person who, deep down, is filled with some kind of subconscious self-loathing.  He truly thinks the world illegitimately, wrongfully hates him, yet he is pure.  Revenge isn’t born from despair, it’s born from being cheated.  The world cheated him, and now it has to pay, and now that it has, it’s time to die before he lives to see the identity he’s worked so hard to create destroyed at the hands of the media, the justice system, and the public.  He’s dead now so he can be what he thought he was.

Now here is where you have the chance to grow as a person by embracing your ugly, or you pretend this doesn’t apply to you, coo softly to yourself not to listen to the crazy man, and go read Salon’s next story about gun violence and how the Nordic countries do things “just, soo differently.”

You have to accept that the identity you fabricate for other people to consume is a hazard.  To you, to your relationships, and maybe to other people if you own a Harley Davidson vest.  Unless you truly are what you say you are – unless you do the things that your identity demands – then your identity collapses when challenged and you are forced to change (and you won’t) or find some way to defend it.  That defense won’t necessarily be violent – but it may – and it will definitely be destructive.

What to do when you aren’t inspired.

Introductions suck and you know what I’m talking about already. It’s why you came here.

When you aren’t inspired to create, do it anyway.  Inspiration is accidental and unreliable, but trial and error is what brought mankind out of the trees.  Trial and error is long, and irritating, and simply has no substitute.

So if you’re waiting to feel something before you create, stop waiting and create.  Sure, it’ll be crap, but you can’t have anything nice unless you’re willing to punch the clock and slog through the ugly shit to get it.  If you’re going to write something awful, or paint something boring, then get the hell on with doing it so it can be out of your way and you can learn something about it in the process.

There’s a guy at Pixar who says you should make mistakes as fast as possible, and you should.  And that means you have to make mistakes.  And that means you have to have the chops to create something awful and then move on.

And stop reading this.  You’re just stalling.  Get on with the process of screwing up and doing better.  The alternative is going to bed knowing you failed your potential.

What, is there supposed to be more to it than that?  No.  There are no tricks.  There’s no clever way out.  Just like your job, you’re tired after lunch and there are four hours left, and there’s no faster way out of it so get your head down and barrel through.

If it helps, think of it this way: why will you grind so hard for your employer but you won’t do the same for you and your craft?  Make the investment or you’ll get nothing.

Get to it.