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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34967 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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  • The caveat is that I'm coming at it from the other direction - knowing what I now know, I lost way too much sleep for little real gain.

That could be the case, but is it that you were wrong about your past actions and the future actually balanced out or you just didn't care for the lack of whatsoever you were lamenting?

But when I fell (got metooed, although it wasn't called that back then), I fell hard.

Because of a lack of integrity?

But on the other hand, you are smarter than me

Disagree.

Note that all of our current "elites" seem to have clinical depression and imposter syndrome, if not n/bpd - none of them can live with themselves. And most of them aren't even particularly bright.

I'm not sure this statement is empirically true. There is a strong coping aspect to believing this, so I am somewhat skeptical on those grounds to begin with.

However, even though I have only gotten more pessimistic about the world over the past two years, I am nothing but optimistic about my life now.

This is good to hear. What do you think was the change the resulted in change of mindset? As in be descriptive about the change.

Then again, maybe I just didn't have what it takes to succeed at it and you'll be alright. Just whatever you do, don't forget that it's temporary.

It definitely is as per my own experience shared in another post. But the whole thing left a very strong taste in my mouth, I am not entirely sure if I will ever get rid of it, or that I should get rid of it. Knowing the bad helps you appreciate the good.

God fucking damn it I always do this, I spend so much time chopping and changing a post up that I forget the point of the post, here being what the hell integrity has to do with any of this. Sorry dude.

So basically when I was metooed my friends and family stuck by me because they knew I didn't do anything, but many acquaintances - professional and casual - dropped away. Most of them wouldn't even talk to me, but those who would explained that they wanted to believe me, but I had given them reason not to, specifically I had lied or cheated in their presence, so they didn't know if they could trust me now. It wasn't that I had lied once and was now untrustworthy of course, but I introduced a reason for them to doubt me, and given the social dynamics in place (hyper progressive at least cosmetically, and I basically represented the old guard of 'true' liberal/left libertarians and closeted conservatives while she represented the new front of identity politics and Marxism) there was limited value in believing me, so since I gave them a reason not to, they had to take it.

So after I fell I was pretty down on myself and everyone/thing else for a while. It wasn't fair that I lose everything over a lie, I never got anyone fired with my lies. Which is true, but after a while I came to discover it is also beside the point. There's no balancing out of the universe, but I deserved what I got because I made it happen. If I had maintained my integrity I wouldn't have been in a position to be metooed, there would be no angle.

I can't remember the specific moment I decided I had to change, it was never like an epiphany - "why don't you try not cheating and lying?" It was more like I knew what I was doing wrong the whole time and I just had to admit it to myself. I guess what opened my eyes was when my former boss told me that he thought it wasn't impossible I had been there. I had thought we were closer than that. So maybe I just massaged everything in my head to make it seem like integrity was the issue because I wanted integrity to be the issue.

But it was definitely embracing integrity (not just integrity of course, the conclusion I came to was basically the right is right, you fix things starting with yourself and working outwards, fixing society won't fix you (side note: although as someone raised by television I fought so hard to try and figure out a way to still call it left wing - I didn't want to be uncool) that turned me back around. There weren't YouTube tutorials or wikihows on how to rebuild your life after hitting the bottom back then (there probably are now), so I let my conscience and philosophy guide me. I started reading Scott and TLP and I focused on improving myself. I still get bitter about it sometimes, and I have black moods where I think it's the only way to get ahead, but I think you are better off with it than without it.

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