Don vs Kore

So the other day I learnt the hard way that I misjudged women.

I was at the grocery store, buying pears. I love pears so I'm packing mad loud. As I walk out however, I realise that the lady at the cashier billed me for PEAS instead of pears. 

Pears are around 1.50/kg, peas are 10 dollars per kg. So I'm literally paying 10x! There's no way I'm paying 10x for my pears. I took it back, and I showed a man in another register.

"I think you billed me for peas"

"...Ah we did bill you for peas. Gimme a sec I'l fix it"

Whew, close one. I almost hadn't caught that - but thankfully this very nice man will fix it for me and let me go happily on my way.

He took the bill to his friend, and they went back to the machine. No way! Both these nice men are working hard to make my day!

Now outside, I get the urge to just recheck the bill.

Huh, I only saved like 2 dollars. That really wasn't worth the time. Now I feel bad about going back and wasting 3 people's time.

Still walking, I take a closer look at the bill.

Wait a second, they charged me for the most expensive pears in the store! Instead of paying 10x for peas I ended up paying 9x for fancy pears. The second time on purpose! Baffled, I sprinted back to the store. I see the same guy through the front door, locking up for the night.

Waving, "Hey man are you sure these are the Bartlet pears we talked about? The bill doesn't look right"

"Yeah man pears, they're pears! Look, can you come back tomorrow? Were closing right now."

I want to upload a YouTube video, circa 2010. I find my camera, and press the record button. I think of a video idea. I do the video, and stop the record button. I think of a great joke to add to the video. I press the record button again.

But now I'm older and I need to find a motivation and I need to build a story. But most of all, I need to wait. A lot of the job is just waiting. Wait 14 months, till the iron is hot.

You might not have heard about Don and Kore, but you most probably have seen them. They're me. If I was in Tom and Jerry they would be sitting on opposite shoulders.

Don wears Rick Owens shoes. He doesn't care about anybody else. Not in the sense that he spits his gum on the pavement but in the sense that he doesn't feel much attachment to the people close to him. Around strangers, he likes to find ways to feel like the biggest in the room. When he looks around, he likes to set his gaze below eye level.

What do you want? To be better then everybody else. When you lose a game of DOTA, you immediately check an enemy profile for their in game hours. They cant possibly be better than you and be lesser experienced. Seeing a bus go by - customarily full of people sitting on their phone, It feels good to be the one on his feet, out in the cold.

I love how crazy it is that we sit in this box. It moves even before we command it to. We have no idea what the box is, or how it is connected to the body.

How do you rank cultures? Could "older is better" be the answer to cultural relativism? If people followed an ethical concept for longer, the ethical concept must at least be more compatible with humans. On a world scale, the Olympics might be one of the oldest concepts. Sports.

Contrary to my hopes, I am not the only person outside. In fact, people are playing basketball in the rain.

When you have your head down, grinding, hustling, you don't lift your head to look up.
When you don't look up, you forget how beautiful trees really are.
But what about when you die? What was it all for? What's it all worth? What did you do with it?
You weren't doing anything with your life before you existed, so why the thoughts now?
Why not just be like you always were, like you always will be - nothingness?
But think about the times we live in. We have all these things - phones, cars, football stadiums. We wouldn't have these.
Sometimes, when you look at people, you can see it. You can why they work and you can see how tired they are from just sacrificing so many things for it. It really is beautiful.
It's why I'm here.
But only I have the luxury of saying this. My fellow third worlders can't relate.
They would say it's ridiculous. I like to believe that they would.
I love to say, "You know I would rather be you. My life is bad." But its not. I have the best life and I love it unapologetically.
Do I want to help them? Sure if they're my friends but no I don't want to do anything
I look at those people in the buses, and contemplate how close I was to being in the same seat - cluelessly contemplating. But they really aren't right.
I one of them last year in my room but now I'm free to walk the world
I am weird, I'm a psychopath. I'm crazy. I'm not just a dude, I'm not average.

One year later, and I still have no cash and no women. I'm slightly higher MMR.
The real world is weird. You gotta know the right people, fill up the right forms, submit applications, reach deadlines, I hate it. In Dota, you just got to be the best. That's the beauty of it.

I really hate making this but future me will hate it more so it's worth
- April 2022

Core believes in good and bad, and is of the opinion that being good is good. He is a traditionalist. Some ideas he finds good: responsibility, self sufficiency and independence. He wants to be in a place where he is able to help the people that he wants to help. However, Core hasn't been a lifestyle for long. He has mostly just been the reference material for "the good life".

Therapy took me to Core in February 2023.
It feels good to walk around. To smile at the people you cross. To listen to music. But its a different kind of good.

3 minutes to the bus, tap your card, stand for 17 minutes. Press the button, thank the driver, walk towards EDC.
Or stop in the middle. Tell them you like their watch.

But something is missing. I'm missing the other kind of good. The order 2 large pizzas at once kind of good.

Core kind of good doesn't lend itself to unhinged rants on google notes.

14 months. It is futile to discuss ideas and to choose between them.

Every idea is born equal. Every idea is born as lights in a brain. At this point, ideas are neither good nor bad. The first human to "discover" murder could think it good or bad. One opinion could be that murder is bad - because a human must have the right to life. Another opinion could be that murder is good, as long as the victim is of different nationality. A third opinion could be that murder is good - because humans are a cancer to the earth.

So we deliberate and debate right? We try to find the "right" idea - through reason, through the scientific method, etc. In vain.

However the idea of murder sounds to me, an analysis of each opinion does not affect the probability of me adopting it. The "pros and cons analysis" of every opinion surrounding an idea will always be judged through my lenses. My lenses which have been biased by DNA, and my 22 years alive. In a macro sense, I didn't have control over either, i was born to the parents I was born to, in the place I was born. In a micro (quantum) sense, If particles are fundamentally determined, your life was set in stone long before you were born. If they are fundamentally random, your brain is simply a rationalization of random noise, as seen in Generative Adversarial Networks. Neither allows for the ideal - objectively analyzing an idea before adopting it.

Ideas are adopted by someone: in childhood because of the people surrounding them; in their adulthood because of the people they admire; and in life through the events the universe randomly (or free will?) chooses for them to experience. Because of our DNA and past, every idea has a certain "compatibility score" with every human. If an idea is compatible with enough humans, they are adopted as "common sense". Some popular ideas are logic, and rationality.

When studying for Indian law school, I was incredibly surprised to see how much of "the law" is codified to depend mostly on judges' common sense.

As much as people like certain ideas (like statistics), they can never be used to make objective comparisons in the universal domain. There is no "good life" to live, or "good world" to live in. While I spend a lot of time deliberating between ideas, spacetime is too vast to properly consider both ideas. The "analysis" I conduct is closer to a compatibility check.

An argument can be made for natural science. That irrespective of compatibility, different humans will come to the same scientific conclusions because of the nature of physical reality. However, strictly natural ideas (like g=9.8m/s^2) do not come under the umbrella of "ideas" because it is born out of nature, not out of a brain. The word "science" as we use it today, pairs observations made using the scientific method with conclusions derived using popular ideas. Gravity, meters, seconds, acceleration, and down are all ideas. You don't need firsthand experience in science to know that observations don't lead directly to conclusions without ideas.

Ideas are used to understand these natural concepts, The Golden Record is a great attempt at conveying ideas using natural concepts.

I chanced upon this realization early in life, but it was too big an idea to immediately integrate into daily life. Maybe I became more open-minded, but I continued to never fully enjoy the life I was living - still embroiled in a search for the "correct" ideas. Living life like it was still the flop. Calculating the various possible hands I could have.