The Legend of the Phoenix — All Ends with Beginnings.

Every story is just a sequence of events: it starts at a certain location in space-time with an event usually involving a character, or an entanglement of characters, and the relevant information for the storyline is given so the reader can follow the logic. It is often written in a manner that even predicting what will happen next is possible for the reader. As non-relevant information for the storyline development is just not presented, prediction is often easy on the basis that every information is given for a reason. We love these stories. We like the feeling when we can predict what will happen and it turns out we were spot on right. Those are stories — that is not life. Life-stories have a vast span of information and only in retrospect we are sometimes able to connect the dots of what was relevant and what was not. However we can never be quite certain we connected them correctly, because we can seldom look beyond the horizons of our own reality to actually understand how it looked from the actual viewpoint of others. Moreover we can just judge from a relative timeframe connecting present and past, with no idea yet how events in actio-reactio-principle chains will ripple into the future causing infinite possible outcomes.

Narrating real life events is not so easy, especially if done in present time — so no one can know which information may become relevant and which will not (or at least it will not appear that way from our perception. Various artists did attempts on trying to capture the essence of a story in real time. Their attempts were either considered as boring to the audience or not feasible. Even observing the dimensions of real time events of our own lives leads our brains to relieve us by default from the vast amount of information with the mercy of unused neuropathways being dissolved within hours or days and we forget everything not rendered as important enough. So which audience spends years of their own life watching/reading/observing a story in real time that captures those time frames, though the artistic idea to show a story in real time is of course appealing. That may sound all very self-explanatory and intuitive or even tautological and in some ways it is.

So why do I start with telling this? Because the absence of Information is also Information. As attempts to tell a story with every information in real time is at least in our perception of time rather absurd, I want you to be aware that to express our thoughts, our visions, our feeling, our experiences — we have to summarize. And summary always means information loss.

Every story in an excerpt — the information before it is missing, the information afterwards is missing too and all not directly connected logical information is omitted to summarize the story in an exciting and compact format. We are addicted to those kind of stories, because we are bombarded with vast irrelevant information all day long in our daily lives and even our brains have by default an inbuilt neurological filter to separate necessary from unnecessary information (measured at our own relative standards of importance).

As I will attempt to tell a story in real time, without boring you to oblivion, I will try my best to achieve the balancing act of summarizing with least possible information loss as it is my goal to show a full picture the best I can — sometimes idealistic, sometimes depressive, sometimes funny, sometimes sad: bittersweet as life always has been and always will be.

This is an excerpt. There was a before, there will be an afterwards, there is information in between I have to skip to tell this story — but it does not mean this information does not exist. I suggest you always keep in mind that the absence of information does not necessarily mean there is not more information, nor is it per se irrelevant (as that is highly subjective) and that there is never such a concept possible as a “full story”. Not even if you think about your own life, your own memories — you do not have a full story and the dilemma about our brains so perfectly getting rid of (in that moment rendered) unnecessary information makes you not even able to remember that there ever was information you forgot. Though with that in mind, how our own brains constantly trick us in believing what we perceived and memorized is real and has happened exactly this way, though we have neither proof for this being true nor proof for it not being true. Keeping this problem in mind of knowing that a somewhat “whole body of information” is only an unknown fraction of the real unknown whole of reality you are may be able to empathize more with the story I want to tell.

So after this little warning of “no accountability by the author for anything stated further — this is my story, my opinion and I do not claim to know any answers, nor am I responsible for the actions of whoever reads and interprets this and keep in mind there is never only one truth, just over seven billion subjective opinions about it” — let’s get started.

Blogs are used for many reasons, just sharing thoughts, sharing information that is not available or censured through mass media, a starting point for aspiring writers, advertisement, art and I assume much more.

My reason to start this blog is accountability. I got myself into a situation where I have basically no accountability to anyone anymore, but myself. I suppose for many humans that must sound like the ultimate freedom, do as you like, what you like, when you like it. And yes, I am not denying that for some time it is quite nice — but at some point you find yourself living like a hermit. If all social pressure, we usually dislike so much, is gone — so are all reasons to care for yourself. Or at least that is if you have a personality like I have and without another entity besides myself benefiting from my existence, I have hardly any other reason to exist at all.

So as I have almost no friends and not one that lives in visiting distance, as I have no ties to my family anymore and based on how my government and healthcare system left me hang out to dry when my sanity as well as my life was in immediate danger, I do not feel particularly connected towards the culture and the society I was born into either.

But I need to be accountable to at least use the nice and needy western life I was born into by chance, to contribute to my family of bit more than seven billion humans and a few hundred billion other species living on this planet (as I am trying this attempt to contribute for the second time now after I got a bit side tracked). Individual life goals of other humans are often defined by vague criteria as noble, social, beneficiary, or just feeding your kids, surviving the day or some are considered as “wasted lives” (usually by those who have very different ideals about their purpose in life). At least for me I can say that I am “wasting” as long as I am alive and using up resources of this planet and other humans but not feeling as I have given back in a way that made this investment in me justified.

So what am I aiming for? I spend enough time just bearing the world’s suffering on my consciousness, feeling so helpless and not able to change anything (my work in social academics just showed me more how “help” often makes things worse than better…) that the only escape was to shut off from the world, I stopped watching the news as they made me feel like watching snuff movies and as even that was not enough, I tried to make myself as unconscious as possible with large amounts of various substances for years to just make living in this world bearable as they helped me to stop caring — for humanity, but also for myself. But at some point even the option of narcotics is exhausted and no matter how much I took — my morally hardwired consciousness always found a way to come through again and made me care, though caring means constant compassion for every entity there is — without any discrimination for mindlessly used categories of good or bad humans, for rich or poor, for those appearing to have created their own mess or those appearing to be just struck constantly by bad luck — understanding actio-reactio-principle chains in large time and space dimensions weaving events together, nothing is ever easily categorized by adjectives. And this is not about just the estimated two billion humans living in constant suffering of being threatened with basic survival everyday — the worst suffering is always in the mind, and suffering is completely relative to what this mind is used to, what is within its own reality considered as normal or deviates from standard to a relative better or relative worse. So there is no possibility to compare suffering of people living in realities so vastly different that it is hard to even comprehend the rules of their daily reality. I am certainly not arguing that war, poverty, exploitation, crime, violence, diseases, starvation, poverty, environmental destruction and economic corruption rippling down on the weakest are not very real and they certainly count as suffering — in often unimaginable ways for those who did not experience them (yet). But humans can suffer in so many ways. It appears as half of humanity suffers from constant threat to their lives, the other half suffers from purposelessness and boredom and not knowing what to do with all the freedom they have. If one looks from a global and methodical perspective of system theory, both ways of suffering feed each other in a codependence of equilibrium they hold with each other. Suffering is suffering — same as other emotions like love or pain or anger or devastation — you cannot use a measuring tape to compare (I worked in social quantitative statistics, no matter how much variables are combined, the data itself cannot be pressed into schematics to determine life quality or life misery).

Every second three humans die and five are born — to be honest, in this insane world I am not sure for which I feel more remorse, those just born into it or those who just left it.

So as I tried my options methodically to live up to my strong morals and make things a little bit better, I went through the academic road to understand humanity’s problems on a global, social and economic scale and while learning more, I just felt more helpless, as it seemed that we just put patches on cuts on the little finger of humanity while ignoring the massive brain bleed. As it almost drove me mad to feel this helpless but responsible (as I am a part of global system economics and to phrase it in the disgusting but sad truth — people die, so that I can wear clothes or eat exotic food or have a heated home and the energy for electricity to waste my time surfing on the internet), as I did not have the balls to end the exploitation my very existence put on others, I spend a few years half-comatose trying to forget, juggling with nihilism, even trying to question the foundation of my perception, my reality — asking if it ever has been any different in homo sapiens rather violent last fifty million years…it appears the equilibrium stays, it just shifts who the winners and who the losers are in this Massively Multiplayer REAL Role Playing Game.

So science did not help, drugs did not help, nihilism, existentialism, questioning the nature of reality and life in metaphysics did not help either. My consciousness still craves to just do something about this world that appears to have lost its grounds and the very ideal we lay as a foundation to call our species evolved and civilized and social and most of all “human”: common sense.

I hope I explained so far sufficiently what makes me sleepless, what makes me torture my brain every waking moment. Now I will explain what I try to attempt. If one goes through the world with open eyes, we can find even deep philosophical life lessons in most banal appearing things, so I will quote something that is most likely said about 100 000 times every day in all languages all over the world: “In case of an emergency put on your own oxygen masks first and then assist others!” Well there is a simple and valid point to this over and over repeated sentence by flight-attendants: you cannot help anyone else if you are knocked out by oxygen deprivation, you even add to those that have to be helped by the few who followed that rule and therefore you risk more lives if you do not first secure your own functionality.

So as the way I tried to deal with my existential need to be able to have a clean consciousness lead me to knock myself out of society, life and any other way of contribution, to take a second attempt and trying to do something that will hold meaning, to get up there and do what my inbuilt ethic traits apparently leave me no other chance to do: it is time to help myself so I can help others. Torturing myself cognitively but not being able to apply pragmatic contribution will only add to the global system failure and certainly will not help anybody.

Now comes the tricky part, human psychology. Having push and pull factors to get my life on track is essential. And a major part is accountability or having to answer to at least somebody. Yes, it is valid to argue that one just needs a bit of discipline and then everything will work. Discipline is something that can be de-learned, so it needs to be re-learned too and a few years half-comatose certainly did not add to my ability to get it back easily. But something far more important to me is having at least the illusion someone gives a flying fuck if I make my life worth it and then can help make those of others a little bit better.

So I am using this Blog as sort of a mirror-diary. To make an analogy: Imagine you are a kid wanting to jump from the highest diving platform, but you are scared of it as well. Being at an empty swimming pool, standing at the edge, no one there to watch if you jump or if you just climb back down — anxiety may very likely win. Though the same situation and people watching you may create a lot more reasons to get over your fear. If they cheer you on, well it is nice to have someone believe in you. And if they tease you, you will not be brave enough to jump, then you have a good reason to prove them wrong. Either way — all of those situations are better than the one where you are alone and it is just you versus your fear of failing.

And this is me asking for you to watch me. Cheer if you like, hate if you like, tease if you like — as long as I feel accountable to not waste a perfectly good life and a reasonable useable brain capacity for contributing to make this world a tiny bit less insane — it seems worth it.

There is a long and hard road ahead of me and as I seem to attract black swan events like a magnet — you can watch either a true underdog story of an outcast with surreal aspirations to make the world a better place or you can watch a naïve idealist fail as hard in cosmic proportions and all in “real time” as it only makes sense to use a blog as a mirror-diary if I write every day and share my life and every wonderful or miserable detail with all the candor I am known for.

I Guess “never trust someone on the internet” still goes, but no matter how the next 14 month will work out, I can guarantee some entertainment — life usually makes the best stories.

I am not a writer, or at least not an experienced writer. Besides writing what was expected in school and university, I never took any writing courses, nor used any other sources about how to write — so I will just write in the way I feel is appropriate for what I am trying to tell and share. This is my first blog, my first publicly accessible written word as well and I only started this year writing in english. So go easy on me, but I will try my best to improve over the next 400 days.

As all ends with beginnings and all begins with endings, I will conclude with evolution: Good luck to me and all other trillions of entities on this small planet — see you on the other side!

Title, source of quote: Daft Punk, “get lucky”