Tuesday, 11 March 2025

Post No. 3,054 - The duty to do and appreciate enjoyable things (if one can)

One of the problems I have to still overcome is of wanting to do too much - to be busy or feel usefully occupied. 

In part, that is due to being raised in a household where both my parents had been raised with a combination of the stereotypical “protestant work ethic” and also experienced considerable hardship during the Great Depression - and many such survivors are afraid to not be busy or productive as those experiences have given them a fear of losing work or otherwise not having food, shelter, and the absolutely vital survival attribute in such desperate circumstances of having the support of one’s family/peers. Those characteristics were strengthened by living through World War (part) Two, which was followed by a desire to rebuild what had been destroyed - which required work, aka “being busy”. 

On top of that, my autism results in me taking exhortations to give 100% much more literally than others - meaning I would work to the point of a deep exhaustion from which the effects of masking, which were always manifest when I was at home, would hinder recovery. (I’ve given links below to a bunch of shorts from a channel that is very good at explaining this.)

And, to complete the trifecta, I worked in a profession which was cursed with people with self sacrificing (to the extent of being anti-family and even anti-life, in effect) and abusive personalities of the type Musk wants, expects and amathiacally “thinks” is - or should be - commonplace ... and quite a few unscrupulous and flawed characters took advantage of my characteristics to get work done the way they wanted at the expense of my well being and sanity. 

In response to all that, I developed skills such as meditation and what this blog covers, but the one characteristic that I have struggled with is the simple pleasure of just existing (as the footer puts it, “we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing”), which can actually be a powerful counter to the Musks and other such of this world, and taking that further to allow myself to have time to do things I enjoy doing - things that give me pleasure, such as listening to music, going bush, sketching, etc. 

Some pleasurable things are beyond me now for various reasons - so I won't have another pet (the physical demands of pet care are beyond me now) or go sailing again (owing to the transphobic hate in sport), for instance, but the others remain. 

(There can also be valid reasons for not being able to experience joy at a moment or period in time, such as the loss of loved ones or other suffering - as well expressed in the Hallowe'en tweet described in this article. There are also dangers such as spiritual bypassing, denialism, not attending to shadow work, etc to avoid.) 

On the other hand, my recovery from work has reached a stage where I can start thinking about going out and about and meeting people IRL, for instance (socialising, in a word - a bit).  

The move to write this came when I had started a music playlist, and found myself sitting and thinking “OK, so what should I do while the music is on?”, which was a d'oh! moment.

Now, the world is not in a good place, and there is a valid need for people to be activists working for change - and I have friends in hard situations, but, as a number of activists have written about, you cannot keep giving endlessly in activism without rest, rejuvenation, or renewal - and doing something you enjoy will increase your BPM energies, and, if you allow that joy and happiness - aka BPM energies - to flow out into the world, it will be a direct counter to nonBPM energies. 

And thus I enjoyed my music playlist - without guilt. 


Links

and also


There is one other matter I wish to cover, which is that the current US president may have a reading problem. 

I came across a YouTube video on this which, although it covered the key points relating to that person well enough, did so in a snarky way that effectively attacked others with similar disabilities and thus I will not use it. 

However, there are other articles online which address this, including The Times of Israel (2016) and We Got This Covered (2024), but the one I want to particularly refer you, Dear Reader, to, is: 

“Why [the current US president] Can’t Learn: An Educated Guess by a Veteran Teacher”   https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/09/17/why-[the-current-US-president]-cant-learn-educated-guess-veteran-teacher   “Dyslexia may explain a lot about the twisted behaviour of the president”      

This article includes the following: 

“I think he began faking when he was six or seven and couldn’t keep up with the other children his age who had learned their letters and were starting to read sentences and little stories. He wanted to be "great" so he made things up.   ...   Dyslexia is not predictive of a particular fate but combines with elements in each person’s personality. One person might become an excellent forest guide who knows all the birds, small creatures, and trees intimately and doesn’t need to rely on reading. By contrast, another might undertake a strenuous course of tutoring to maintain grade level in school, be open about his or her [or their] reading problem, ask for extra time in exams, and eventually graduate from college with a stellar record. A third might inherit a lot of money, then create and monitor a foundation to help people with various disabilities. A fourth, discouraged, might drop out of school and settle for doing odd jobs in the neighbourhood.   And a fifth might fake and falsify his way to fame and power and enjoy lording it over so-called “smart” people and thwarting their hopes. I am suggesting that [the current US president]’s lifelong experience with dyslexia, instead of increasing his capacity for compassion, has instead combined with problematic elements in his personality, including a penchant for revenge that was apparent even when he was a young adult.”  

I know or have known a total of at least four other people (plus a few acquaintances and work colleagues) with dyslexia, and many of them have actually been wonderful, caring and/or genuinely talented (in a particular area) people, so blaming the current US president’s behaviour on dyslexia is flawed - other factors, especially his abusive father, are far more likely to have been significant - although the abuse of other children would not have helped either, and is a good example of why bullying by children must be actively stopped (and doing so should also be used to teach children to be upstanders, not bystanders). 

This double point about 

(a) not using a disability to “explain” (“excuse”) problematic behaviour, and 

(b) not tarring all people who have a particular disability with the same brush, 

is important, and applies elsewhere - including the supposedly autistic Musk, and a stack of others I know or have known. 

And with [the current US president], while dyslexia might partly explain the possible confusion or misreading that changed transgenic mice to transgender mice, it does NOT excuse the hate.



Possible flaws 

Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider: 

  • there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan  Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”;  
  • I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.

 

If you appreciated this post, please consider promoting it - there are some links below, and there’s also other options. 

Note that I am cutting back on aspects of my posts - see here. 

(Gnwmythr is pronounced new-MYTH-ear)  

Remember: we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing, to mind our Mӕgan, and to acknowledge that all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering” (just as binary gendered [men’s and women’s] sporting teams are either both given the gender descriptor, or neither).

#PsychicABetterWorld   and   may all that I do be of value and actively BPM used for and by the nonphysical  BPM  

Copyright © Kayleen White 2007-2025     NO AI   I do not consent to any machine learning aka Artificial Intelligence (AI), generative AI, large language model, machine learning, chatbot, or other automated analysis, generative process, or replication program to reproduce, mimic, remix, summarise, or otherwise  replicate any part of this post or other posts on this blog via any means. Typo’s may be inserrted deliberately to demonstrate this is not an AI product.     Otherwise, fair and reasonable use is accepted under Creative Commons 4.0 on an Attribution-ShareAlike basis https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/  




 

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