The right to having void time? (voluntary emptying)

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I'm in sort of an odd place where it seems like a lot of the major thread in my life are coming to a close.

My metaphysical search to understand the universe - I can think of a handful of people who've gotten about as close as can reasonably be gotten at this point, in which case I've read them and understand their ideas relatively well.

Political and sociological sense-makers - I know who they are, I wish them the best of luck, I realize I'm in a world where barely anyone really cares. Any success they're going to have will be luck meeting their capacity to create a path of least resistance that broader society can follow in a disengaged manner.

What's troubling me right now is that adulthood feels every bit like the 'conform for conformity's sake' vice grip that I was in since high school. For example the only way you have a right to had the social right-away to have a divergent interest in school was if you were almost semi-pro and going toward pro at it, at which case you were an authority and people would leave you alone. Sort of like if you have or have had a lot of interesting ideas you're really only allowed to think in novel ways (or be forgiven for it) if you're a Phd, a professor, etc. in the particular subject that you like to think about.

A lot of the areas where I had a lot of complexity in my thinking - I feel like those interests are going stale, not that I didn't pick interests in areas that didn't just mean a lot to me but mean a lot in general, I just feel like I've run them out and I feel too tired of repeat content to keep reading more books and finding more filler. I'm also realizing, no matter how convenient it would be for me to all of a sudden not have the autistic draw backs in my body language - I have them, they aren't going away, and my life is likely going to plod along as it has right through the end (live with my parents until they pass, inherit the house, either sell and move or keep it for some time, can't really envision out past that) and in a lot of way that closes any sort of future me doing anything wildly interesting with that knowledge in a public setting.

What I hate then is the pressure that states that I should be watching all of the popular TV shows, on top of the sports teams, on top of the latest gadgets, be cycling through buying x, y, and z... what scares me more about this is when it almost seems like required self-defense. One side of growing up and heading toward and through 40 is that you're almost required to become a closet psychopath to be seen as 'adult' enough to be alive (outside of that is a sort of innocence held in the same view as profound weakness, immaturity, mental retardation, etc.) and so building these huge veneers of either authentic or fake interest in popular topics is a sign that you're 'with it' and not easily mugged or are the kind of person who'd have a lot of social resources to protect you.

Is life really all about staying alive by fending off predation and coming up with all sorts of fakery and artifice to show that you aren't a mark or a victim waiting to happen? If so there's something *profoundly* wrong, ie. that there's no such thing as freedom other than in the kind of exile where you can go complete 'gray man' or 'gray woman' and not attract any attention from anyone nor have to socialize much. What's really disgusting - those demands aren't progress, they're a person deforming themselves to survive game-theoretically deformed people - which really saps the joy out of living and feels like you're genuinely wronging yourself.

Right now I'd really like to just stop - everything aside from work. Everything that I don't literally have to do in order to pay my bills or help take care of the house.

I'd like to take a step back, do f-all nothing, for a good long while, and see what emerges naturally.

There's another thing that disgusts me, it's the sense of mandatory busy-bodiedness. I have a crate of acrylic and water-color paints for example that are sitting by the foot of my bed. I used them for a specific purpose but I'm shelving that purpose and now I have a big crate of painting tools that I may or may not have a future use for. While I feel like, at the time, I had a good reason to be doing it I also can't help but think of just how busy people are running at self-actualization through trying to pick up new interests, drop the ones they're tired of, and filling their houses up with various supplies - and you expand this playing out, almost to the head-count, of large parts of the western world, it's a LOT of really senseless waste of the sort that only a capitalism-gone-mad would celebrate. And yet... not constantly 'running' at something is somehow a sign that you've gone weak or that you aren't actively trying to run at alpha anymore, which is the same thing said different ways? Going back a couple paragraphs to the kinds of games we play to survive other people... hate it.


So I'm getting to a place where:
- My big multi-decade interests are declining sharply.
- I'm realizing that as an adult - no one really cares what anyone has to say, so 'being the person with ideas' is a dead end.

I'd love to have the right to just drop off the map, come home and zone out, and hope that I can do that for several months, even close to a year without missing critical social armaments, going back out, and just barely missing destruction at the hands of others because I was too 'out of sync' with all of the signals of being in style or acting precisely how a 41.8 yr old or 42.4 yr old is supposed to demographically act, which increasingly just looks like a Darwinian arms race that'll never stop mutating for as long as we're alive.


Not exactly sure why I'm sharing this other than that - for me at least - it feels profoundly strange to even consider that I have any right to just stop. It feels like it would be the wisest thing to do right now but can I get away with it!?

I do wonder if that question or that place might resonate with some other people here, ie. the question of does one have a right to just stop, feel the environment, feel what it's like to be them without doing anything, and let life self-assemble on the other side of that.

.... YES! What a brilliant post, ts.

I stopped my life in 2014 and never went back. I have no agenda, no goals, no obligations, and no worries. I pay the bills and keep a roof attached to the walls. The rest is unstructured, guided by how I feel each day. You most certainly have a right to do this, morally and for your own mental health. I hope you'll find it as helpful as I have.

I see these patterns to life as well and they are crazy in that people follow them and they don't see where they are going or where it will lead.
I see the patterns of how vunerable groups are being used as tools to bring about a world communistic dictatorship and how in every country that used to be free is suddenly thought of as bad, and that little by little they are labelled things... Hurtful things... And then half the world seems to go to war with them in the form of the UN and they replace their government with what they call "Democracy" but which in reality is a mix between democracy and communism which is steered not by their own newly formed government, but steered from an outside small group of elect people...
I see how the WHO says one thing and does another...
I see how the media brainwashes the people. How they work under the control of the small group of people who steer the governments of countries...
I see how gullable the people are and vunerable. I see how they are not thinking for themselves as they can't see beyond the brainwashing they have been given.
I am puzzled how I can see this and how obvious it is to me, and yet the majority of people even on this site can't see it? I ask why am I different? Why do I see these patterns in life? Of life? How can other people not have the ability to reverse and step out of the busyness around them and see these patterns? How can other people not have the ability to bend their mind and see things from another angle?
I actually marvel at some people I know who can only see what they are told to see and will accept this brainwashing regardless of what is said!

My Mum and I saw through the early brainwashing experiments being used on the public here in Britain, where certain products were being pushed which were obviously no good, and yet we watched these products being shown even on the news as a good thing, and then famous celebrities had them and were shown either using them or wearing them as the case may be... And within no time the products were seen everywhere and then as we predicted, within a short time people very quickly saw their flaws and the products died a death just like we predicted they would... But we saw behind this how our very government were experimenting providing money to set up these products so that companies could produce them and how they had the news media involved... And how it was not about the products themselves... It was about experimenting. And these experiments were done in the early 1990's...
And we have seen how things have progressed since then!
We see the patterns of covid. I see patterns... How lifes natural patterns are and how mans manipulated patterns stand out at angles and point away from the ones who made them so all one has to do is "Walk" backwards up the flow of these patterns to see where they began...

It puzzled me how people can't see them but it disturbs me how some can see them but deny they exist? Now that really is brainwashing!! ! How a person can be so gullable to being brainwashed?

I know how people are brainwashed. I have spent over half my live trying to fit into these brainwashed patterns by pretending that I could not see these patterns. By masking! I broke away from this in my mid 30's because it was doing me harm trying to be like others just to fit in.

How can others not see these patterns? How can others "Go with the flow" without looking to see the dangers of the sea that the rivers flow is flowing into? How come I am the only one who is walking along the bank and tracing upstream to see where these patterns are coming from?
I see patterns?..

That's definitely a possibility if it just hangs as a new mode. I think I'd still want to keep on my radar anything that I can gainfully be doing that surfaces as a purpose-enabling tool. I suppose in the long run staying in this mode is a bit like a practiced / organic Daoism.

I did forget to mention - I'd still probably do martial arts once a week, just not much of anything else.


I might agree a lot on the political observations but I'd personally frame a few things slightly different:

There probably are plenty of people who came to their own conclusions than we did and came to different conclusions. I think the way to spot them might be that we can agree with them on the problems (sometimes they see them with incredible clarity), just not always the solutions. That and one finds they're people you can talk to, disagree with, and still have a productive conversation.

What I think more people are up to is licking their finger, sticking it in the air, and seeing which way the social winds blow - or alternately contemplating their tribe, finding their tribe believes x, and becoming the most ardent believer in x they can possibly be because it's how they 'get things' from their tribe. A lot of them don't really seem to have strong principals one way or another other than recognizing power and recognizing where and how to get food, money, mating partners, and how to not go to jail (and that last part even holds when speaking truth or questioning ethnic groups being carted off on trains as enemies of the state takes people there). Their concerns are much more pragmatic and immediate to them than aiming for anything as large as base-level truths about things like the consequences of the politics of the times, and of course any kind of metaphysics is way out past that.

It is, of course, your right to do as you please....most definitely. As long as you don't have other mouths to feed.

But I don't feel that people simply don't care I feel like they care----but they either don't want to show it because it exposes vulnerability, or it exposes them to attack from one or more fronts.

Just like people care when they informally ask "howya doin'?. It's not that they don't care, it's that they might not care enough

My emphasis is more on the Nature around me, even amid the urbanity of New York City, than on the psychology of people. Nature usually gives me more than than any one person, or any collective of persons.

Thinking a bit more, if I want more autonomy in the future the 'going gray' bit is probably going to be important.


This is probably why I got so interested in big picture issues - 'humans' are a wall. It's not that I can't read them, it's a bit like the social game theory of getting deeply involved in any meaningful way is almost exclusively for people who match frequency. Then - even if you started out ahead in life and you find yourself alienated from society you miss critical milestones because you didn't stay in constant traction with the organic social system the way other people did.

I remember somewhere in my mid 20's friends dragged me out to an 80's night at a local club, and while I can go out to clubs and have a good time I found myself unable to engage with the people or music much, noticed that as usual the dancefloor had furious social activity, everyone saw very little other than narrow agendas, and I was sitting there almost like a statue (probably looked scary) and thinking 'I see a ceiling, I see four walls, I see a nice sound system, I see nice decorations, and the rest of is useless to me'. It's a bit like when I was in summer day camp and we went to the local swimming spot, all of these kids (my age) were dunking, splashing, going under water and coming up to spit water on each other, it felt even at that age to me a lot like the way the opening trailer park scene in Idiocracy looked - ie. furious meaningless activity.

When it's like that I suppose you're sort of forced to engage with big picture topics, with nature, with minerals, with laws of mathematics, physics, etc., it's something that holds still and doesn't care where it is in the human hierarchy of social status unless you're talking about specific scientists or public figures.

Often, when I look into things, apart from those that directly pull the governments strings who know how to use governments for their own gain, I feel that the governemts themselves actually do not know what they are doing and seem to be living for the moment just like most of society seems to be.

One does see long term vision on occasions, but such leaders are never popular and society elects someone who pleases the people instead and the countries tend to go downhill.

Often we do not know what is good for us and like good for us food... We would rather eat the candies and ice creams but the long term result of "I told you so" is one society does not want to hear.

The direction the tapestry of patterns head towards is like this. If they point towards disaster they just don't want to know as society loves living in the now and they hate being shown the directions that will keep them safe.

Global warming is such a web of deceit and lies that I am honestly surprized how people can't see through the various policies that governments have set up. If one looks at the policies and the outcomes of those policies, it is pretty obvious that global warming does not exist, as if it was real and it was serious, then the policies would be very different indeed. The policies only profit the rich at the expense of their competition, which is not what global warming should be all about. T is a way of taxing the poor and giving to the rich because the rich "Claim" to have the new enviromentally friendly solutions which produce a far larger carbon footpring in their manufacture then several of the traditional ways that they are said to replace.

Have you notice... Those of you who live in the UK... How we went from leaded petrol to "Unleaded" (Not actually unleaded. It has less lead) where the replacement chemicals are worse for you then lead was... And then they said diesels were less polluting so the majority of people went for diesels... And then they said that diesels were more polluting so they are trying to force everyone to change to electric... (And each version in the long term if one takes the real figures of the harmful pollution in building the things and the efficiency lost in the refueling compared to the output is taken into consideration, electric vehicles which are the new "Green" vehicles are actually 10 or more times more polluting overall then the old leaded petrol engined vehicles duting their entire lifetimes).
But going back to why they keep changing the goalposts, and they also do this with house regulations, is for this reason. Every time there is a major change, there is a major need to manufacture the new and the old gets scrapped so raw materials become available at rock bottom prices... So the manufacturing costs are much lower and the profits buch higher then ever before.
So why is this done? Every time a major change like this takes place through governmental policy it boosts a failing economy. This is why it is done and why governments work together to keep changing the goalposts. It is to keep the worlds economies afloat so the large multinational industries don't collapse. It has nothing to do with the enviroment.
Incidently, going back to the pre Trump days, the USA did an enviromental study into all the industries and transport to see which was the most polluting. This was a detailed study. If one put all of the USA's vehicles and measured their pollution they came to around 4% of the entire yearly pollution coming out of the USA, and peoples homes came to far less then a percent. The third largest polluter was the manufacturing of vehicles and other products.
Second on the list was the combined petro chemical industry. Firsr which dwarfed all the other poluters out there and it was massively out in front and it was the White House.
While I don't know why they were the most polluting at that time, there was much criticism as it was classed as pollution tax exempt. The worlds highest polluter.

Another problem, aside from short-termism, is complete incapacity to consider problems at scale or at least be able to knock exponents off of things to get some intuitive grasp on what differences are. We see really big numbers or really long time scales and nothing connects.


It almost doesn't matter, short of draconian carbon policies, when we're chewing up the biological substrate so fast that we need similar solutions to those problems. I am really glad that things like vertical farming are taking off and that we're getting into ideas as novel even as setting up grow factories, for carbon recapture, that sequester it by growing hemp and then processing it for graphene or industrial diamonds. I am at least starting to wonder if we're getting closer to, perhaps not having anything like a complete closed-loop economy but having a much larger percentage of our goods be in a closed loop. There are also some other really neat things like the Ambri calcium-antimony grid batteries that seem like they're perfect for smoothing out inconsistencies in power grids or alternations of alternative energy sources. Someone else had the idea of raising prices slightly on raw materials for plastics to raise the value of and encourage recycling. A lot of small tweaks and efficiency-doublings of these kinds of technology could go a long ways - we just have to stay sane long enough and stop pulling the rug out from younger generations.