The 99/1 Principle

I just got hooked on the blog Exuberant Animal, and spent about an hour compulsively reading posts, because I couldn't stop. That blog is the blog I wanted to write, but I wasn't good enough. It's the blog that my hypothetical self-who-has-her-shit-together would write.

And now I'm simultaneously incredibly inspired and incredibly frustrated.




A year ago, I would have taken all those posts, and designed some kind of daily journal exercise or "mindful living" exercises where I tried to "do health as a verb" or something. Maybe I would have tried meditating again - despite ample evidence from repeated experiments that I'm just totally incapable of meditation (on the rare occasions when I don't fall asleep, I end up spending the whole time beating myself up for my inability to be peaceful and zen and shit. It's just not productive.)

Maybe some of that would have even stuck. Probably it wouldn't have, but it might have clicked somehow.

But it still wouldn't ultimately help me deal with the issues that Exuberant Animal is talking about - the same issues that the MovNat folks call "zoo human syndrome." Because whatever I decided to inflict on myself in the name of "mindfulness" would be just that: self-inflicted. It would be me, talking to myself. Me, trying to reach enlightenment by myself. Me, trying to change my own behavior.

And that just doesn't help me, because I don't need any more self-directed programs or habits or initiatives. I don't need to spend any more time navel-gazing or thinking about my ~~feelings. I'm trying to make up for a total lack of community and connection and social engagement all by myself, and no matter what I do all by myself, it isn't going to work.

99% of my crazy is the direct result of one simple fact: I have no form of meaningful engagement with a society that I care about. That's a human need so basic that you arguably aren't even human if it isn't filled. I can keep tweaking and changing everything else to address the last 1%, but it's still not going to make a meaningful difference in my overall health.

Unfortunately, I can't fix that problem, because (A) I do not want to be part of the society that I live in, and (B) even if I did want to, I don't know how, and (C) even if could be part of that society, it still wouldn't help because that society doesn't provide the kind of meaningful engagement that my humanity needs to express itself.

So now I'm stuck reading blog posts, and wishing I had a tribe. A tribe of Churchill-reading Sci-Fi nerds who farmed with their own hands and created beautiful, useful things and had never heard of fucking Oreos.