35. Lift Me Up Adultfood

While everyone is sure we live on planet Earth, I'm low-key horror-struck that we live on a crude pastiche cake of omniscience, composed of multiple inordinate layers of different creams of dubious origins, chaotic chocolate shavings throw-ins, suspicious unpeeled candied fruits, covered with fluorescent icing and various questionable nut crumbles, with insalubrious marzipan flowers and marshmallows on the top. 

This queasily overwhelming sucralosity of our static reality amazes a capricious gourmet like me with its absurdity and raw complexity.

We just happen to be crawling like microscopic beings on the surface of this facsimile cake, nipping off as much information about the world as we can digest. Ultimately, we become passive and apathetic from consuming this processed joy of cognition, yet remain absorbed by consumerism because this high-fructose imitation has low nutritional value and can’t satisfy us. Rather sooner than later, our serotonin receptors turn off.

Let's stop rootling around for a moment. Instead of getting lost in the glaze of superficiality, through which not even the healthiest individual can emerge without great damage to psychological health, we can prepare something more digestible.

Knowledge determines the quality and duration of our lives; therefore, it should be a beneficial resource that helps us increase our adequacy. Many find inadequacy amusing; I see it as a decay. For instance, suddenly dipping someone’s face in cake has never made me laugh; on the contrary, I feel despondent, watching them smear the milestone with cake muck.

When our reaction to what happens is too violent, too passive, or too cheerful, our environment quickly descends into inadequacy. The hackneyed all-time cliché that one person’s fortune is inevitably built on another’s misfortune corrupted our consciousness beyond repair. This cliché forces us to view any situation only from the perspective of the perpetrator or the victim without always considering the appropriate context, and at the same time, it tricks us into justifying every imbalance as an excuse for our misfortunes or inappropriate behavior towards others: “C’est la Vie!”

It sounds even more nauseating when it comes from the lips of highly educated people. If we acquire degrees merely as intellectual adornment and a symbol of social status, we bring no real benefit to ourselves or to those who depend on us. Our collective life incurs more operational costs than it provides livelihoods, and ultimately, we lose on all fronts. 

“That’s life” is no longer a valid interpretation of facts.

To figure out well-functioning processes, it is necessary to unravel the tangle of sequences by straining the brain’s convolutions. But there is the hitch! We are too spiritually malnourished and not ready for that activity.

Antecedent knowledge is the only tool for assessing the true value of social innovations, changes, and theories. By “antecedent knowledge,” I mean a comprehension of the mechanisms of true human nature, not prehistoric junk that, while interesting, is no use to modern human life. Dinosaurs turned into chickens fed on human table crumbs. The chicken grew too fat and lazy to fly. Wonderful! A chicken never wonders where the crumbs come from. It doesn’t care if the bread was taken from someone starving – the chicken pecks without question. We all love chickens, for goodness’ sake, but our bond is purely alimentary. We want to enjoy our dessert in the company of witty storytellers with whom we can both laugh heartily and learn. But what do we laugh at? Is the absurd behavior that is ridiculed really so alien to us?

Nuanced Tiramisù can be an acceptable replacement for the pastiche cake. Adult food. Mmm, yummy!

Our tiramisù can turn out perfect right away, if we, as chefs, make sure we aren’t using a low-quality sponge cake instead of real ladyfingers. Let’s uphold structural integrity without overemphasizing our status. When a Chef adds an I and becomes Chief, the temptation to start improvising with ingredients to stand out as a brand becomes enticing. That's a monodrama developed at one’s own risk. Try it at home first 🤣

I suggest we pour ourselves some bitter espresso to begin with: difficulties arise from a weak understanding of what is happening in general and a complete lack of understanding of how to get out of the current situation and recover quickly. The sooner we get acquainted with our inner Is, the more aware we become of what’s happening around us, so we bounce back from a negative situation faster.

Some people say to themselves, "Enough! Too much self-knowledge is bad for our health! Let them decide what's good for us and let us live jauntily like squirrels.” That's when they resort to belittling without even realizing it, and start loading a ballast of external pressure on their backs that will bury them as joyous individuals. It feels unexpectedly heavy because, unlike squirrels, people are usually seen as machines and commodities by those they submit to. All it takes to force the “self-proclaimed squirrels” to perform the required tasks is a whip or a carrot, one at a time. In this scheme, the carrots run out sooner than the whips deteriorate. The “squirrel's” life suddenly becomes a burden that requires remarkable bounce-backability to regain undeniable self-confidence. But they don't know how to achieve it: they have dismissed every attempt at self-analysis that can lead them to enlightenment. Gradually, they start to have too much frosting and feel nauseous. “Hell, what's happening to me? Am I okay?” The nocebo effect kicks in, activating the evil twins lurking in their bodies, and nothing good will come from this combination. I pity them, my fellow earthborns, and I pity me as we all human beings laugh and cry in the same sound but for different reasons.

The birth of a living being is a miracle worthy of admiration; that’s why dignity is inherent in human nature, regardless of one’s physical or mental state - I am a Miracle that shouldn’t be trivialized.

Everyone wants to live a beautiful story, but not everyone realizes they are part of someone else’s story and doesn't care to make it beautiful.

If we have to earn the respect of a particular group of individuals, we learn what it takes to get it. Sometimes, we decide, or, most likely, they convince us, that we're already adults, so that we abandon our pursuit of nobility. Because, why? We can't wish for what we already have. And then it all begins – the faustain bargains: “Shall we add instant decaf instead of espresso? Okay! The whipped vegetable fat looks as fluffy as mascarpone! Yes, it does! Artificial rum smells just like Marsala. Of course! No one will notice the difference. We can cover this whole mess with chocolate-flavored sawdust instead of cocoa, and we’ll be just fine! They don’t really look that closely. And, BTW, I'll accept that diagnosis, or whatever you propose, because I have nothing better to offer myself. I know everything and nothing will help me, and that's the point of life, and, honestly, it's not that great anyway.”

Sellouts are where the pastiche cake takes its origins, I suppose.

Unlike something tiny, big, adult things excite our imagination. They are more prominent, and we can discuss them with whoever we meet. We are, too, all grown-up individuals who long to be grand. Everyone wants to be significant. Yet, sometimes, our accomplishments fail to inspire eloquence, and that’s something to reflect on.

The belittling of our worth by a biologically identical individual is outrageous! Yet such an episode could indicate that we’re stuck in a sweetly adhesive marshmallow of illusions, ignorant of the details of the ongoing process. Our insatiable childish curiosity has been quenched, lulled by the constant supply of sugary self-approval. If we are true adults, we’d be happy to be children again to learn everything anew and grow a bit differently.

The reality is that nobody belittles a wiseman. How much would you want to ridicule someone whose intellect you admire? 

Criticism only hurts when the arrow hits the target: we thought we were geniuses, but they proved us wrong. Self-esteem is our most exquisitely fragrant mascarpone cream. In our case, it doesn’t come from cows but from completing the tasks we set for ourselves. They might criticize us because, in their minds, they see in us greater individuals than we actually are. We didn’t explain that we were exceeding our limits: conveying that antecedent knowledge earlier could have lowered their expectations. Well, at least our lack of effort caught their attention, and we can fix ourselves. That's a win because not everyone cares about us. Mostly, people care about what we can do for them, and that’s our income potential. The secret is that we can do only as much for others as for ourselves. Competence-based self-esteem ultimately commands the respect of others.

There is nothing regressive about becoming children again if we do it consciously, without imitating only the tantrums that accompany psychological stress, but by cultivating a spirit of curiosity about how the milieu works. Children are our teachers of resilience. They are our saviors, and have much to learn to pull humanity out of the deep trenches of superficiality we have inherited as a generational debt: the fruit of a second-hand education based on hearsay from previous malnourished generations.

We can’t place all that burden on our children's shoulders: our resilience should be an even greater intellectual effort, as we must purge the hearsay from the messy cake of our ancestors and start laying QA-approved ladyfingers of patience and understanding.

Marsala wine can offer us some temporary comfort with the bitter hearsay foundation. Though in our time, it has become more obvious that comfort is the hard bone of contention, a persistent point of conflict. Apparently, comfort isn’t the luxury we think it is – it's a shaky concept, especially if we don't have a clear idea of what our personal comfort might be. We look at others and mentally wear their comfort like a borrowed suit: “Oh, yes, I could be happy with that success, that status, and boons.” Envy arises in our little hearts, igniting an internal war that consumes us from within and blinds us to the point where we can no longer see the path to our opportunities and resources. Let’s be realistic: in our imagination, we can feel comfy in the driver’s seat of a luxury car, but if we don’t know how to drive it, our comfort won’t last long. Either we get tired of sitting there motionless, or we get into an accident very soon.

Stoicism can be a good practice for overcoming self-sabotage: thriving in unenviable discomfort, Stoics are never prone to envy. To enjoy the fruits of their own adequacy is the highest reward they dream of. The possible rub here is the poor diet, which leads to individual dysfunction: it’s impossible to whip mascarpone from skim milk. 

Everything we do is either to change our lifestyle or to prevent changes, and essentially, we are the guests at our own table. If our dinner seems too modest compared to the feast at the next table, we should seriously consider how to secure a more nutritious breakfast. 

Let’s not move to resentment over the unequal distribution of boons, but to strategy.

In my opinion, the panacea for the unequal distribution of boons isn’t a handout; it lies in a more equitable distribution of opportunities, ensuring everyone equal access to existing prospects and the ability to engage in all the necessary procedures to achieve the objectives of a personal well-being project.

An ideal environment offers numerous ways for people to be useful within it. The truth is that we are the environment – thanks to our passive will to admire only the man-made stars, we create a non-conductive, abyssal, and interstellar society that mimics the cold vacuum of space!

Perhaps this is why our life feels like a chronic illness with a fatal outcome: we are either sick, tired, stressed out, or depressed consecutively or simultaneously. It’s all because our operating costs maintain a vacuum rather than an atmosphere of uniform possibilities. Let's refocus on ourselves and reflect on how to feel better.

Feeling like we're winning is important, but how do we get this feeling when we are overwhelmed by the set of depressive circumstances created by people we should call brothers? 

Filling the void with fertile air takes time. We must cultivate spiritual strength to counteract the void by visualizing the long-term benefits for our well-being. Long-termism can be a useful philosophical framework for staying true to our commitments to ourselves. 

The clockwork begins when we get busy, drafting the map of our prosperity, redrawing it as the terrain shifts towards our monumental tomorrow. There are always hidden paths leading to the same temple, just as there are closed-off passageways that force us to give up.

Like attracts like, and that’s why we should define our desires clearly. Observing my thoughts, I discover that my desires are often ephemeral – I feel I know better what I don’t want than what I do want. I suspect that uncertainty expands my horizons and further deepens the void. 

Perhaps the universe is unsure of me for this very reason: I lack the gravity of the North Star, since my potential is dispersed in the void. I need to see the haven of my hope, so I take time to properly define the bitterness of what I reject and find the opposite word to clarify what I truly desire.

Only when our common well-being is built on our self-constructiveness can we synchronize our collective selves.

I'd top my tiramisù with a cocoa stencil portrait of King Louis XIV, signed with his most famous maxim, "The state is me!" Let historians judge his governance. As for me, one thing is sure: the Sun King knew how to dominate those around him with the art of subtle manipulation, all for the sake of his splendid mirror image of the State. There is a grain of wisdom in his river of thought: when we are rulers of ourselves and our power is centralized, we don’t need the parliament of the backseat drivers. We can surpass Louis’s ambitions and declare, "I am the world!" This leads us to the realization that everything and everyone around us is our reflection. Not by manipulation but by supportive communion can we recreate our world in our image and likeness. But before we can see what our true image and likeness are, how do we recreate anything similar? The North Star of the well-being of the Human Race is the worthiest haven of hope we can fancy. And as we age, understanding human nature helps us recognize that we are all one, there is no other. Everything that happens around is a part of me - this is the mindset that will help us rise to the next level.