Assorted Notes

WEDNESDAY, 4 JULY 2012

I previously thought that to say, “I’m a lawyer” should not be seen as a statement of identity. It is just how you make money. I figured if you wanted to mention your job, it would be more correct to say, “I make money as a lawyer,” than to say “I am a lawyer.”

Then, over the next few years, it became increasingly clear to me that how you make money is a fairly important part of your identity – sounds reasonable enough, but it is still the kind of discovery that I had to make on my own, at my own time. You can thus not say, “I am X” and “I make money with Y” and expect the one to have nothing to do with the other. “I’m a lawyer” is not a statement that represents a person’s entire identity, but it is certainly an important aspect of who that person is.

The other great discovery was to be expected. If you do not know who you are as a money-maker, you will find it a challenge to make money.

Also good to take into consideration the opposite: If you have gone through the process of sorting out, discovering, and choosing how you want to make money – and then in a way or ways that suit your personality and talents, you will most likely find yourself placing fewer obstacles subconsciously in your own path.

* * *

What to do then with what Karl Marx wrote, that in a more ideal world it would be possible to do one thing today and another tomorrow – to plant vegetables in the morning, catch fish in the afternoon, take care of your cows in the evening, and after dinner make a speech about a political treatise you have read, without ever becoming a vegetable farmer, a fisherman, a cattle farmer or a politician?

Perhaps Marx assumed that one would not need to make money in an ideal world. Yet someone would still have had to hunt or plant vegetables. Someone would still have had to fish. Livestock and other animals would still have had to be fed. And someone would have had the ability to form an opinion and criticise the opinion of others. So, in Marx’s ideal world, if you had been competent in any or all of these areas, you would have done these things, with no focus on occupational identity. Remove money from the story, and expect things to look different.

MONDAY, 9 JULY 2012

I believe in myself – or, I certainly have what can be described as positive self-esteem (rather important seeing that without positive self-esteem you are 98 metres behind the other athletes in a 100-metre race). I also know that this is to a large extent a performance, but that it is important because the performance has practical value. In truth, there is much more uncertainty. It must be so if you want to be honest.

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TUESDAY, 29 MAY 2012

14:22

I am currently going through my notebooks from the years 2005 to 2011.

Two remarks:

1. Every now and then I took a few minutes from my very busy schedule of almost full-time failure to produce notes of highly usable quality.

2. If I had done a personal writing project after 2004 but failed to include an honest assessment of my many failures between 2006 and 2011, the project would have ended in weak, half-hearted attempts. Because of my experiences over the past few years, my manic working style and the less than positive results, I am likely to produce another personal project. And the notes that I have dutifully made will, as always, be indispensable.

One more remark: I have to stop nurturing the false and inaccurate notion that the period 2006 to 2011 in my life was one big nightmare full of failures. A writer needs a life to produce material. For a better one, I could not have asked.

19:22

By the time I was closing up tonight, two thoughts were rolling around in my head.

Thought one: the material from 2005 is a different story, but the notes from January 2006 to this year are starting to look like a big, new project – a “second” Personal Agenda, as it were. The “first” Personal Agenda dealt with my struggle for identity, place in the world, purpose of existence, meaning of life, why I continued living knowing that I could give up, and what to do when you have discovered and worked out all these things. The “second” Personal Agenda would deal with a struggle that is familiar to most adults – the struggle to make money. It may sound trite, but I reckon a brief narrative of my dozen efforts to make money and my perseverance after repeated failures might just be worth reading.

Thought two: It seems that I have quite a lot of work to do. With the skills I have developed, and lessons learned about marketing and publishing your own literature, my literary projects could possibly be considered as more than just personal work – it may actually be time to look at it as a source of income.

It is as if I have come full circle. At the beginning of January 2006, I was very serious about publishing my writing. Then I discovered that I could make money from home, on my computer connected to the internet. For the next more than five years, I moved away from my writing, in an effort to make more money. The plan was, first financial independence (“Everything seems so possible!”), then I can pay other people to proofread and translate my material. Five, six years later, I am back at the beginning: Similar financial situation, and me deciding I cannot wait any longer to publish what I have written.

So, money or no money, I am working on my writing again. If my books eventually make money, pay the rent, buy food and other groceries, and make it possible for me to take my wife out for a nice meal and a movie, and maybe even to afford a weekend in the mountains, I would reckon that I didn’t do too badly. I would certainly not have been able to conjure up a better story.

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MONDAY, 14 MAY 2012

Earlier tonight I wondered how it would be if everyone thought out loud about the big questions: Who am I? Where do I come from? What happens when I die? How did the earth and everything come about?

After thinking that I had answers to most of these questions up to a point in my early twenties, I realised that religion is like having access to a search engine loaded with a particular ideological database. You type in a question, and within seconds you have an answer.

Each religion, of course, has its own database with different answers. There are similarities between the databases of all mainstream Christian denominations, and some more obscure sects have databases with completely different answers.

The point is, it’s fantastic! Can you imagine it? You type a question – and boom! – there’s your answer! Another question … another answer.

The problem kicks in when the search engine breaks down, when it becomes increasingly clear that the database is corrupted, or that the answers are not credible.

This is when the real work begins: to build a database from the ground up.

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TUESDAY, 1 MAY 2012

I just read through the 2004 piece, “I own seven pairs of underwear …”. Again I found the idea intriguing: What would happen if someone – maybe in his teens (younger is too early, later may be too late) – should say: “I see what’s going on here. And I’m not going to play along.”

This person then denies his given name, and refuses to accept any other name. He refuses to answer questions about where he comes from. He does not profess any faith. He expresses no ambitions or dreams. He owns nothing; not even the clothes that cover his body (he would have walked around buck-naked, but he got tired of being arrested). He never utters any words, seeing that almost anything he might say would identify him as part of a particular language community.

Is it unavoidable that he will be locked away and be certified as mentally disturbed?

How would his life unfold in the decades after his revolutionary decision?

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FRIDAY, 27 APRIL 2012

I do not call myself an atheist, for the simple reason that the onus will be on me to define what I do not believe in.

If I were to call myself an atheist, I would be arguing that I do not believe in something, that I reject the existence of all gods, including “God”. The question is then: What exactly do I reject? What exactly do I not believe in?

Seeing that I will have to rely on other people’s descriptions of their gods, other people’s definitions of “God”, I would only be able to say that I do not believe in one specific person’s god.

Will that make me an atheist? Then a Christian is an atheist from the perspective of the Hindu or Muslim! Then one Christian can even call another Christian whose concept of God differs slightly from his own an atheist!

Fact of the matter is, people only think everyone in their group believes in the same god because they recite the same confessions. But if one person refers to God as “my dear heavenly Daddy”, I can almost guarantee you that their god is not really, deep in their subconscious, the same as the god many of their fellow believers profess to believe in.

So if I say I am an atheist, in whose god do I not believe? Whose god do I reject?

* * *

What is the alternative, if I have to categorise myself for the sake of identification?

According to Wikipedia, agnosticism is the view that the truth of certain claims is unknown or by nature impossible to prove. These claims include metaphysical claims relating to theology, the afterlife or existence of gods, spirits, or even ultimate reality.

This, by definition, does not mean I do not believe in gods, spirits or a specific ultimate reality. It does mean that I do not believe I nor anyone else can prove the definitive truth of these statements.

Of course, many Hindus believe this to be nonsense: they can point to the personal experiences of millions of people that prove to them that Krishna really exists. Same with followers of any other religious tradition. The ability of any person with a firm intention and an established interest in a particular view to find evidence for something that they believe can never be underestimated.

As for my own position, I can say without thinking twice that I find value in doubt. I find value in asking questions. I consider it worthwhile to wonder rather than to claim that I know, and to declare the discussion over when I’ve said my piece. Lastly, I place too much value on intelligent discourse between reasonable people to reject outright what anyone says.

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