Cypher said “I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.”
Can we have happier lives living in simpler times, perhaps seeking simplicity more than we seek truth of personal evolution? How does the illusion of happiness compare to real happiness and can we really tell the difference?
The Discomfort of Growth
I like to train my mind to learn new things but the more I learn, the more I know I can yet learn and evolve. This is coupled with the fact that the higher my own personal standards get, the harder they are to achieve. This is a lot of work. People can lean into being happy without continually stretching themselves, and it’s quite possible that this results in a more peaceful and happy life.
I can train myself to overcome a natural emotional response. I can train myself to counteract both nature and nurture, to break my programming… if you will. For important things like overcoming racism or sexism, these are easily worthy pursuits. For things like rewiring yourself away from monogamy, or training yourself to like something that doesn’t come naturally, what do you gain as you embrace that battle, and at what cost? I mean, congrats… you are an evolving human and you have probably walked through the mental equivalent of broken glass while twisting your soul into knots to have gotten there. You could have just been watching TV, having sex, eating ice cream, and doing the normal things that society teaches us. You might not be challenging yourself much but instead living a life that is easy, one that doesn’t stretch you, one that doesn’t challenge you.. but one that is sincerely happy, and peaceful on the soul.
The pursuit of growth is a slippery slope, a pursuit not easily abandoned. It comes at great cost. Personally, I want to know what I am capable of and this doesn’t really have an off-switch. I want to know if I can make my emotions align with potentially-worthy thoughts that may run counter to what I already know or have personalized. In this way, polyamory has been a one-way ticket for me. Once my brain latched onto it, and once I started to make any progress at all, I haven’t been able or willing to let go of it, or to go back to what I used to know. It’s taken time to get here, and it’s taken time to get healthy in it.
The Taste of Progress, and the Shaping Of It
When I understand the landscape of something, I can do well. That’s the neurospicy, neurodivergent me. I might find that my place in poly involves having just one partner, while continuing to have the freedom to do whatever I want with anybody anywhere anytime, but without really exercising that, even as my partner is very successful at being polyamorous. Maybe I’ll share some experiences with my partner together with others or have some dates of my own. Perhaps the polyamory pieces fit together differently for me. Maybe the evolution of my growth leaves me in a place where I can celebrate my favorite human together with the life that she is building, walking beside her, while for myself choosing or accepting a more peaceful life, one with less dating-frustration and less dating-reward.
Everything is made up. If I choose a type of life that works for me, it can be anything I want. Some of the intellectual pursuits I am undertaking don’t need any justification or consideration, they are simply worthy or necessary. Others might be happening simply because I’m curious about undertaking them. I want to know my limits and test them. I want to know what makes me tick, and when I find out what makes me tick, I want to continue to explore that even further. I am a moving target, an evolving meat popsicle of emotions and thought.
Keep Moving, Keep Learning
I have long claimed that to be stagnant is to die. When I stop moving or stop growing, I stop living. I can pause, I can take moments, but I need to move and I need to grow. I am a self-experiment, tinkering with my own machine. I am the artist of my own creation, refining, adjusting, discovering. Who am I? My only answer is “the me of the now”.
The me of the now is not anyone I have previously been, while being a step towards the next person I will become. It can be exciting to be malleable. It can be frustrating to want to integrate change and get struggle with it. There can be a peace in simply being, without having a specific growth intention, and yet that same moment can be hell when growth feels so fundamental to who I am.
I want to have personality, passions, characteristics that make me “me”, but very little in my life is concrete. Everything is subject to examination and change. Does this make me flexible or does it make me human tofu, my own flavor existing only via the flavors that surround me? I’m not scared of transformation. I’m not scared of burning everything about myself down and rebuilding. That process can suck, but I’ve done it before. I’ll probably do it again.
Sometimes it seems nice to consider a simple life, a peaceful life, a happy one. But once the evolution starts, once I seek to know who I am and who I can be, anything short of complete examination and experimentation not only seems empty and dry, it seems disingenuous and impossible.