It was a day to remember, not because of anything like a gift or an event. Rather, because of the lack of those things. It’s a testament to the need for vigilance, as well as self correction. So much life happens in a day. Its pretty mind blowing. I don’t think we have the capacity to understand, even if we’re smart, even if we’re the best of our species. The driving force and weight of the great push forward. Like a continental shelf of ice sliding across a land mass. The tsunami of things that happen everywhere you are not standing. It would be wise of me to reflect on the last year and catalog my advances, my retreats, and my unchanged nodes I have highlighted on my path. I still struggle with my own hard lines. As I found myself last night feeling the all too familiar drag of holding expectations, and even more… just thoughts of the uncountable moves I did in just 365 days. The people I’ve existed next to. The transactions of effort and attention that could fairly be considered wastes of time. Even after 44 years, I have to closely watch my hand reaching beyond my threshold of control: handling the disappointments of not being where I’d want to be in my life. I’m saying this with a big grin on my face and shaking my head at the sheer lameness of it… but you know how you get that feeling on your birthday, where you want to call every body you chill with and tell them its your birthday… also half because people are narrow in perspective so you understand how they could forget… but attention and to hear their voice speak of you in a positive way? I got a lot of that yesterday. Just the feeling: I didn’t make any calls.
That feeling makes me very exasperated in myself. But that inner need of tribal belonging is imbedded in us very deep. I’m not even a social person. I’m extremely comfortable by myself and actually seek it out when I’m too busy with society and friends and all that. But I don’t want to be alone because I don’t have a choice. Much of the time I choose to be alone in order to “recharge” and reset my energy. But I also want to be a person whom other people want to be around. It’s complicated and tedious to balance all of these pieces of my mind to be as movement ready as I am. “Make time” for work, friends, goals, dreams, planning and executing… It’s a lot, to me at least. There are those who do all those things in stride and still have time for hobbies and a side hustle. But I’m not one of those people. But I did find myself feeling disappointed yesterday because close people said that they would do some things, but instead, no one really hammered it out. No one made it happen for me. But that’s me being ridiculous. Me being selfish and thinking that I am more than I actually am. I would like to see more preparation for these moments taught to children, because I was not taught any good defense for the condition. But then I realize… there really isn’t a way to train yourself or any one else against monocentrism. How do you avoid arrogance and selfishness inside of your own perspective? But not forgetting that you are important and you must take care of yourself. It’s a balance and a trick for sure.
But recognizing the trick is only the first diagnostic step. The real friction lies in what you do when you catch yourself failing the balance. For a long time, I looked at those little bleeding thoughts—the disappointment, the silent demands for external validation—as cracks in the dam of my own mind. And after 44 years on this earth, the immediate instinct is to judge those cracks harshly. You think: I should have control over this by now. I should be able to pour another thick layer of concrete over the wall, seal it up, and stop the bleed.
But the architecture of the human machine doesn’t work like a static wall. I am not just dealing with the software of my logic; I am fighting the hydrostatic pressure of biology. The need for tribal belonging isn’t a glitch in the code—it is hardwired into the motherboard. If you just keep slathering concrete over the cracks without addressing the unrelenting pressure behind them, the water doesn’t stop. It just builds up until it finds a way to catastrophically blow out the foundation.
Playing whack-a-mole by shoving my fingers into the stress fractures of my own neuroses is a losing game. It requires a different kind of engineering. I don’t need a thicker dam. I need a spillway.
We spend so much of our lives waiting for people to provide a return on the investment of our attention. We sit silently, expecting our friends, our colleagues, or our loved ones to flawlessly anticipate our needs, all while forgetting that they are occupied surviving their own continental shelves of ice. When they fail to show up, the circuit shorts out. The anger isn’t really directed at them; it’s a deep, exasperating frustration with myself for allowing their inaction to dictate my significance. It is the realization that even with a heavily fortified, deeply independent mindset, the human animal still wants to know it holds value in the eyes of the tribe.
Logic alone cannot delete that biological code. You can write the most elegant, self-reliant philosophy in the world, but if it runs on a physical nervous system wired to receive social input, you are going to get an error state every time the system is tested.
To fix this requires stepping into the dark, messy, unglamorous phase of absolute self-deconstruction. It requires looking at the chassis of your own consciousness and refusing to accept that you are bound by its factory settings. I don’t mind being a statistical anomaly. I don’t mind being the one in a million who is willing to reach down into the guts of my own identity, rip out the old wiring harness, and fundamentally change who I am because I choose to be someone else.
But that kind of fundamental change doesn’t happen just because you drafted a beautiful blueprint. It happens through relentless, repetitive, mechanical friction. It requires taking the abstract concept of taking care of yourself first and turning it into a physical, diagnostic protocol. Taking care of yourself first is not some soft, comforting platitude. It is the ruthless, active severance of the expectation that anyone else is coming to fix your foundation.
When you feel the sting of disappointment that a plan wasn’t hammered out, the instinct is to forcefully shut the thought down, which only creates more pressure. The spillway is the controlled release. It is the mechanical detachment of observing the thought in real-time: I expected something. They did not deliver. My hardware is reacting. You acknowledge the sheer lameness of the expectation, you accept that the thought occurred, and you let it wash out over the spillway without judging yourself for it. You stop the bleed of your own energy. You transmute the frustration of an open, ungrounded circuit into the quiet power of complete autonomy.
We are the architects of our own becoming. We have the authority to tear down the walls that no longer serve the structure and rewrite the base code of our daily reactions. It means auditing every transaction of effort, recognizing exactly where you are silently waiting for validation, and grounding that wire directly back to yourself. You cannot train the human animal out of monocentrism, but you can build a system so uncompromisingly solid that it no longer requires the temporary attention of the outside world to remain standing. The tsunami will keep crashing, the ice will keep sliding, but the structure holds. Not because it is impenetrable, but because it finally knows exactly how to handle the weight.
