my journey to one million dollars pt. 6

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send all donations to the Make Thomas Rich foundation, PO Box 80085, 42069. This was my last unhinged rant of 2024, prepare for a new moisturized and meditative zen Thomas in 2025.

I’m not in crisis! you’re in crisis!

Deathbed — you want to go to it without regret, right? You don’t want to be sprawled in your last hospital smock, covered in bedsores, mumbling “oh man oh man I wished I had watched more episodes of the hit NBC show Elementary.” You want to be on your deathbed surrounded by the loved ones who love you, a life stuffed to the brim with satisfying experiences to re-rehearse as the death chemicals flood through your brain. The catharsis in your final moments, a feeling of satisfaction, of a job well done, affairs set in order. A life, which when completed, feels adequate.

Because the past is forever, right? It happened, you did the things you did. You saw people, you thought things, you witnessed events. Having to live in a crumbling palace of memory, that’s aging baby! The rewriting of history to suit the needs of the squalid present.

I avoid imagining the future. It’s anxiety-inducing. I imagine that this is the case for most people, because if imagining the future doesn’t fill you with dread, it’s very likely that you’re just totally fucking insane. It’s scary to age. You get weaker.

And I’m not talking some generalized anxious feeling of uncertainty here, I’m talking about the truest form of anxiety—the feeling that anything could happen.

I think this is one of the most important and powerful functions of politics. Politics, when functional, has a vision of the future, has a project in mind. There is a theory of conflict, and a theory of the self. Good politics assumes a state being worked toward, a desirable set of conditions that we can take steps to achieve. Steps that will presumably outlive us, grow and shrink to inhabit future people.

We don’t have that in America, and I’m not sure anywhere else has it either. We live in a place that doesn’t have the ability to reckon with its own past, even the recent past. Past, present, future, all sublimate into miasma; objects and scenarios that are things we momentarily respond to and then forget. The experience of living here-now is being yanked at the seams, tearing in different directions, believing that you need to form appropriate social responses to events that are categorically meaningless to your own life—in other words—anxiety. Anxiety that generates a resting anger that has nowhere to go but toward everyone in your immediate space. And if there is nobody there, it goes toward the self.

But back to deathbed regret. Soberly, the predictive regret we have has nothing to do with reflection, on goals met or unmet, relationships broken or held. The deathbed question is, ultimately, “did I live a life at all?”

And not in a facile LIVE LIKE UR DYIN country song kind-of way, but our present alienation, the way in which identity, self, understanding, compassion, anger, emotion, feeling, all of these portmanteau words have become signifiers torn away from anything they might have referred to, where the conception of having had a life at all feels like a sick joke without punchline or setup. To feel like a person, to feel solid, within a place, requires an immense act of will, so much so that the process of just being alive derives an incredible toll.

The anxiety of this spiritual emptiness and unmooring drives people to just go completely corkers. Consider the news items of the moment — mystery fake drones on the coast; some guy shooting a health insurance CEO; brutal murders in faraway lands funded by our money, somehow — how do they make you feel? What do they do to you?

They do nothing because nothing feels real. Angry about the violence? Who cares!? Happy about the violence? So what!? These are lines, points of history which are happening due to a program that was set in motion before any of us were born, and we feel completely powerless to change. The great weapon of our time is propaganda that is so powerful, so forceful, that it completely haymakers your soul from your body. You float, disembodied, on a cloud of emotions that are supposed to mean something, supposed to feel like something, but you can’t remember what. You can only remember that you were here for a while. Then, you’re not.

Having a mirage of a life is unsettling. All that said, I find the manic optimism that people often throw up to protect themselves from this unsettling-ness to be even more unsettling. It’s like there’s a room with funhouse mirrors, and somewhere in there is a person but also another funhouse inside the funhouse, and everything has gotten so impossibly distorted that you can’t tell if you’re moving or your reflection is.

I suppose it isn’t all bad. At some point, it will stop. Anyway, thanks for the therapy, 2024 reader.

today in history

The day I wrote this, Du Fu, a poet from the Tang dynasty, moved to a thatched hut in Chengdu, the capital city of the Chinese province of Sichuan. Jealous. I’d live in a thatched hut.

He’s a very famous poet, born in 712AD, and reading his poems, the sense of loss just screams at you. The ending from “A Homeless Man's Departure” is striking:

Since my village has been washed away,
near or far makes no difference.
I will forever feel pain for my long-sick mother.
I abandoned her in this valley five years ago.
She gave birth to me, yet I could not help her.
We cry sour sobs till our lives end.
In my life I have no family to say farewell to,
so how can I be called a human being?

I’m not a scientist, but I believe that language, whether written, verbal, or otherwise, constructs our ability to think and make sense of the world. Without a formal language, it seems unlikely to me that the world is more than an assemblage of sounds, colors, and flavors. Now, by this I do not mean literacy, which is not the same thing. Writing is a technology that we have adapted to, and it has corrupted the use of our language. To paraphrase Walter Ong: take a word like “nevertheless.” In an oral tradition, where language does not function in the form of a five-paragraph essay, such a word has very little meaning. It would likely just be a nonsense sound if we didn’t have a tradition of literacy. Ong writes that “The fact we do not commonly feel the influence of writing on our thoughts shows that we have interiorized the technology of writing so deeply that without tremendous effort we cannot separate it from ourselves or even recognize its presence or influence.”

Back to Du Fu. I like many of his poems. But, I have an intuition that there is something lost in the translation. I have so fully adapted to the conventions of written and spoken English that they construct my world. That seems to be the function of language, and other languages are built in a similar way. But the contexts within which they are built are so varied that I imagine much of the flavor of Fu’s text is lost. There is an arch-ness to reading about his loss in English. His poetry is austere and meaningful, but is that how it was intended?

I think about the last lines of that poem—more broadly—without anyone to say farewell to, without a language, a land, a place, an understanding of oneself and where you came from, how could you consider yourself a human being?

Material politics are important is whatimsayin.

board game corner

I haven’t gotten to engage with too much interesting board game stuff lately. I played Acquire recently, which is a Very Important Game Design, but I think at this point, mainly because of the games that have been derived from the tree.

As middle age sets in, you start thinking about determinism. Was it all preordained? Was the trajectory of my life set in motion from the beginning. When you play 6-player Acquire, it certainly feels that way.

It’s a game where you draw little plastic tiles from a bag. You have 6 of them at a time, and each tile has a coordinate grid number that corresponds with one on the board, for example, A-1. On your turn, you place a tile in the appropriate spot, starting a “hotel chain” if you make an orthogonally adjacent chain of two or more tiles that haven’t been made into a hotel chain already. You can freely add to hotel chains, and when a tile is placed connecting two of them, they merge into one big one.

Why do you care? Well, you’re buying shares in each of the hotel chains, and when they merge, you get to sell your shares in the smaller one for money, which you use to buy more shares, and so on, until you end the game and the person with the most money wins.

When you play Acquire with six, usually you have about as much control as you do over a roulette wheel. In my case, I came in second, but mainly because I was sitting to the left of the person who managed to start a game-winning merger. I got to ride his coat-tails into second place position, and once that game-winning scenario was orchestrated, the game was basically over, even though we played for another 20 minutes. Acquire belongs to a class of games that make you think that you can game probability, which you can in some instances, but I’m not sure you can in this one. It’s very difficult to have any sort of plan, impossible to predict the behaviors of other players, and ultimately, the result of the game is an average of what all the other players valued as “good”, which can sometimes be a fun exercise, but not in this instance. Also, the designer was totally nuts, as you can catch from this clip. I jest, but there’s clearly some trauma at play here.

Hope you have a great 2025, and that you’re sitting next to someone who makes a mega-hotel merger.