losing the narrative

many people believe that spongebob’s darkest episode is squidville. it’s the episode where squidward gets tired of living next to spongebob and moves to a town full of octopi who share his hobbies, only to become bored and depressed

in some ways it reminds me of sf - specifically the tech communities there, not the entire city - relatively homogeneous groups of people who do similar work and often have similar hobbies. last year one of my friends (somewhat unfairly) described his roommates as “they come home from work and spend time with their partners, and then they do one of their hobbies like guitar or mixing drinks or climbing, and they have too many hobbies so they’re not particularly good at any one of them”

that last bit about having too many hobbies to be good at any of them stings because it’s a pretty accurate description of the last few years of my life. someone once told me that if i didn’t do a good job on anything it would probably be because i tried to do many unrelated things at once, and i think that’s a fair assessment. what i need right now is focus, direction, a stronger sense of narrative

and i thought i’d figured all of this out over the past year, but i’m beginning to realize it was largely just a lie i wanted to believe. i was wrong about a great many things about myself, things that i’m not comfortable writing about yet though i’m sure the time for that will come. for now i’ll just say this: in chapter 12 of the bhagavad gita, arjuna asks how to become closer to god, and the response he receives is “For those whose minds are attached to the unmanifest, the path of realization is full of tribulations. Worship of the unmanifest is exceedingly difficult for embodied beings. But those who dedicate all their actions to me, regarding me as the supreme goal… I swiftly deliver them from the ocean of birth and death.” in other words, it is much more difficult to approach god through an abstract form of worship than by going through your everyday life and dedicating all your actions to him. and similarly i think self-discovery is very difficult through thought and meditation because you encounter many falsehoods that are hard to distinguish from truth, and it is much better to do through everyday action

on a more concrete level - i think at some point i got confused about the difference between myself and the people around me. i thought that by surrounding myself with people i liked and respected i was becoming someone i would like and respect. and this is true to an extent, but there is a difference between choosing the people around you and choosing something for yourself, and i have not really made any good personal decisions yet