[AKN #48] Ambition, squirrel threesomes, and why the fuck you in Tulum?
another krappy newsletter #48
Sup homies?
Greetings from San Francisco!
Remember when I was telling you about how San Francisco has terrible weather.
Well now I come to you with data!
While the rest of the West Coast was hit by a record setting heat wave, SF kept on trucking.
Great city. Shitty weather.
On to the newsletter!
LIVE: Make America ambitious again
When we grow up, everyone is ambitious.
Go around the room in kindergarten and everyone wanted to be an astronaut or a professional athlete.
As we grow up, reality settles in.
Becoming a professional athlete is highly improbable.
We didn’t even want to be an astronaut. We just liked the way it felt when the adults made their “Oh wow! What an impressive young lad!” reaction after we said it.
Whatever the reason, around high school, most people let go of their childhood dream of being Michael Jordan or John Glenn. (And they were probably correct in doing so.)
Yet they remain generally “ambitious” with no exact idea where to point that ambition.
What happens to excess ambition in high school
If you are a high schooler with no “childhood dream”, American high school culture gives you three options to point your ambition at:
The tried and true path of a well established career: engineer, lawyer, doctor, etc. These are the people scoring A/A+ on all the tests. They end up enrolling in the best programs to become a credentialed card carrying member of that established career.
The high risk-high reward path of entrepreneurship or being a professional creative. These are the people who start selling candy, get really into marching band, or work tirelessly on the video yearbook. They end up aligning their work with what they believe to be their preordained passion.
Emo/Nihilism. These are the people who “would totally have gotten an A if they tried” or wax poetic about how children selling candy is everything that is wrong with capitalism. They end up doing nothing. Which is logical seeing as they find everything meaningless.
Group 1 and Group 2 are the people from your high school who do cool to moderately cool shit.
Group 3 on the other hand serves as a cautionary tale for what can happen when you’re aimless and point your ambition at the wrong target.
They generally end up as the person who is perpetually unsatisfied with their stock in life. The type of person you run into at the bar when you are home for Thanksgiving and the main topic you discuss is how everything is unfair or not going their way.
If you think of high school in this way, winning the game was really avoiding getting wrapped up in angsty nihilist culture.
Back to school
Pre-social media, the only time you had to focus on avoiding getting bucketed into the nihilist group was high school, college, and your first job.
But now, we all find ourselves in a 24/7 psychological war against the nihilists on the Internet battleground.
Armed with the pain of a life not lived, nihilistic losers take to social media with the goal of disapproving, rejecting, and disowning anyone who has done anything or has bigger plans, hopes, or dreams for the future.
Want to be a doctor? They will be there screaming in your ear about debt.
Want to be an entrepreneur? You can be sure you will have a legion of haters regardless what you put out.
And don’t even get them started if you are already someone with some semblance of power…
Will this group ever recommend a solution? Absolutely not.
Solving a problem is not the goal. The goal is negation.
They attack the dominant institutions of society with the intent to destroy trust in the “established order.”
They aim to convert the rest of the world into a loyal legion of nihilist zombies who’s sole purpose is to stand still and complain while we wait out the eventual entropic heat death of the universe.
This is the thesis of the book “The Revolt of the Public.” ** More or less. Ok. I added a little bit of my own flare there. Sue me.
But the crux of the position is that social media ended the monopoly that institutions had on “information” and empowered “the public” with newfound knowledge.
However, rather than use that power to build, the public uses that power to attack the traditions/structures/institutions/anything-with-power that came before them.
The public denounces respected leaders, overthrows governments, discredits institutions, and tells you your dreams are stupid.
Anyone who has spent any time at all on social media will find this thesis difficult to disagree with.
Watch your information sources
The nihilistic public is so pervasive on the Internet that it is hard to be active online without being immersed in their profound emptiness.
This can be dangerous. It is so easy to listen to the siren song of meaninglessness if all you have in front of your eyes and ears all day is a cacophony of haters, detractors, and pseudo-revolutionaries.
Nowadays, it is not uncommon for an ambitious young adult to find him/herself grappling with whether or not what they are doing is worth it.
This is fine if that person has a plan for at least figuring out what to do next.
But rather than replace their dreams with anything, some appear to be overcome with a lack of meaning as they ask themselves if this is all even worth it.
So what can someone do?
How to remain ambitious
If you want to remain ambitious during the “Information Revolution”, I would start in two places:
Environment.
Humans have a strong tendency to copy what we see around us.
In the physical world, it is “you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”
In the digital world, it is “you think whatever is repeated by the 5 Twitter accounts you follow most closely.”
So if you want to remain ambitious, I would start there.
Physical: Surround yourself with people building cool things instead of people who criticize things all day.
Digital: Get the fuck off Twitter or unfollow people who spend their days deriding other people’s accomplishments during all their waking hours.
Build or work on things until you find something that interests you.
When I find something that I want to make or learn, I completely immerse myself in it. I come to a month later and realize that I spent the last month completely free of any existential crises.
I simply don’t have the time to ask myself questions about whether I chose the right career or not when I am having a great time writing or making something.
Through the process of making and creating, I discover my interests. And through the expression of my interests, I make my own meaning.
Listen. It is important to be ambitious.
The world needs your help.
It needs you to go solve a problem.
It doesn’t need you to just sit around complaining or going to find yourself in Tulum (See: LOVE section).
Footnote:
** The author of “Revolt of the Public” explaining the book in 10 minutes if you are interested
LAUGH: Squirrel threesome
I would imagine that one of the main reasons you open this newsletter is to watch my seamless transitions between heavy topics (like how to avoid plunging into nihilism) and lighter topics (like squirrel threesomes.)
On a different note, might start calling this newsletter “Ambition and Beastiality.”
LOVE: Why the fuck you in Tulum?
This is an absolutely fire song that I cannot get out of my head.
It hits the rare trifecta of catchy beat, hilarious lyrics, and important philosophical question being asked.
I have probably listened to this song over 100 times in the last week. But I am weird and get stuck on a single song and need to listen to it 100 times in a week and then never listen to it again for a year.
Thanks BR/TF for the find!
Closing time
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Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are strictly my own. Who else’s would they be?
AIM was the ultimate social media platform. Wanna talk to someone? First you gotta get their screen name, then you can talk to them privately. Wanna leave a public message? People will only see your away messages if they go look at it. No feed. No algorithms. Just pure weirdness and fun with friends.
Also, the song is indeed straight fuego, 3 listens already this morning and running it back again as soon as I post this. #wanderlust