This weekend has been pretty blah.

For one thing, I have been sleeping a lot. And not the good kind of sleep, the kind that leaves you feeling refreshed and restored.

No, it’s all been that shitty sleep that sometimes seems like it does more harm than good. It certainly doesn’t make me feel rested. Instead, I ended up locked in this cycle of napping where I sleep, get up for a little while, then go back to sleep because the sleep I am getting isn’t doing me any good and I am still very tired.

At this very moment, even though I just got out of bed, I wish I could go back to bed and sleep for another eight hours.

The whole thing leaves me feeling lost and disoriented and somewhat pissed off at the bullshit life puts me through.

Oh well. All I can do is keep trudging onward until I get to the next good bit. In the meantime, do what I can to take care of myself.

I’ve been slacking off on that like hell lately. Eating the wrong things, forgetting to take my insulin, not keeping to my routine. Stuff I know leads to an unhappier me but like an idiot I keep on doing it anyhow.

I am pretty sure that, on a subconscious level, I am punishing myself. Or at the very least, taking out my extremely impotent rage on myself. I can feel the rage of it in my mind. I am a person who wages war against himself on a daily basis.

The good news is, I usually win. Which means I lose. Le sigh.

Gah, the words, they do not come easy today. I’m too tired, despite the caffeine in my system from the Diet Coke I had with my lunch. Normally, I am brimming with words and it’s no big deal to write some of them down. It’s far from effortless, but at least the words are there, waiting to be pressed onto the page.

But right now, I feel like I am out of words. And yet, I have 647 of them to go.

I wish I had a pocket dimension just for napping. A place outside of time so that I can sleep for as long as I want there and when I am done, only a couple of seconds has passed. ^[1] It would be very comfortable, with gravity set to 0.25 G – enough so that I am not in freefall and dealing with all the zero gee complications, but I am still much lighter than usual and my body gets a rest from supporting my enormous weight for a while. It would be dimly lit or possibly even pitch black – it would depend on how I react to total darkness. And it would, of course, be just the right temperature for sleep. Dunno what that is. Whatever temperature would keep me cool without making me feel cold. A temperature so perfect that I wouldn’t need a blanket.

And while I am dreaming big about sleep, there’s the issue of what I am sleeping on.The truth is, I have no idea. I don’t know what my ideal sleeping surface would be. Maybe it would be nothing more fanciful than a high end bed with perpetually clean and fresh linens and sophisticated springs that spread my reduced weight evenly, with no pressure points. Maybe it would be some kind of energy field that does the same thing. Maybe it would be the back of some benevolent creature who loves me and will protect me as I sleep. A creature that vibrates at just the right frequencies to vibro-massage all the tension out of my body so I can truly relax.

Of course, while in realtime only a few seconds have passed in real time, in my own subjective time all that perfect sleep has taken the same amount of time as if I had slept in real time, so I would age the same amount.

Fine by me. I just want to know what it is like to have slept well. I am not sure I have ever had truly good sleep. All that varies is the level of crappiness. I am pretty sure that if I ever well and truly caught up on sleep, I would be a much happier and more focused person.

One problem with my nap dimension : a place where I am very comfortable and there is no time pressure forcing me to do things might end up being where I spend all of my subjective time. The contrast between life in my little sleep bubble and life outside it would be quite stark and I might end up spending weeks or even years in there.

And then, when I finally forced myself to go back to real time, it would be as if I had aged however many years in a few seconds. And that would suck (not to mention tip off the rest of the world that something weird is going on) and so I would have still more reason to stay in my cozy hidey-hole.

So it would have to be boring. No way to use a computer or a tablet or a TV. Too dark to read. Only big enough for me, so there would be no way to bring someone to talk to.

That way, the lack of stimulation which aids sleep would also be the incentive to get the fuck out of there once I am rested up.

Real time might be a harsher place that my little dimension, but boredom is a powerful motivator for a high IQ dude like me.

And speaking of stimulation, I’mma go play Witcher 3 now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Felicity, please skip this one, as I am going to discuss what we were arguing over Friday night and I don’t want it to turn into a whole thing all over again.

In fact, I am kind of ashamed of how long I did argue about it with you. Anyhow.

The basic idea, and the crux of disagreement involves a very specific and tricky piece of moral reasoning. The issue in question is whether or not the right person with the right motive and the right intentions deserves to succeed at what they attempt even if they are using the wrong method.

Felicity says yes, and I say no. Sort of. It’s complicated.

To my feverishly pragmatic mind, I can’t imagine caring one way or another about it. To me, the person using the wrong method does not deserve success in their attempt. I don’t think meaning well matters when it comes to successfully getting something done. The world works a certain way, and your method either works according to those existing facts or it doesn’t. Period.

In fact, it would be unfair, in my books, to hand success to someone who means well but did not take pragmatic concerns into account. It would be like giving a kid an A on a test that all the other students studied really hard for just because the kid meant well.

In short, to me, success going to the person with the right method is perfectly fair, down to the mathematical level.

Otherwise, I would have to find it somehow unjust that a nice person with a good heart and pure intentions is not succeeding at giving money to a homeless person because their method for doing so is to staple their dick to the wall.

But that’s where things get tricky, because I am not at all sure whether it’s that I don’t think a good person failing due to a bad method is unfair, or that I simply do not care. By that I mean, to me, it may or may not be fair or unfair, but the bottom line is that I don’t consider the question to be worth pursuing. If it’s unfair, it’s a form of unfairness so abstract and obscure as to be worse than useless as a factor in moral reasoning.

And I am too dedicated to the humanist endeavour to waste time on petty academic distinctions when there is so much that needs to be done to help humanity live healthy, strong, and free lives where everyone’s concerns are taken into account and we all strive to make life saner, smarter, softer, fairer, and happier for all of humanity.

That is my cause and my morality. In the service of this cause, I consider it to be my duty to avoid anything that will distract or sidetrack me away from the mission into irrelevancies. The project, as it were, is far too important to me to risk losing sight of the goal because I wasted my time on earth on meaningless bullshit.

In fact, I think a lot of the problems of the world are either caused or allowed to thrive precisely because people with the best of intentions and hearts as pure and strong as a mountain stream nevertheless refuse to do the absolute basic first step in solving a problem : knowing and accepting the truth of how things are right now.

That does not mean accepting that you cannot change things. This isn’t that old “that’s just the way it is” bullshit. Bruce Hornsby and the Range put that crap to bed in the 80’s.

No, all I am saying is that if you don’t know where you are, you can’t ever get where you want to go. So the first duty of anyone who is true to their ideals, no matter what those ideals are, is to take as clear and unfiltered look at reality they can.

Once you have as clear a picture of how things stand as possible, taking how you want them to be out of the equation, you can then move on to thinking of how you want them to be and what steps are needed in order to move things closer to how you feel they should be.

But in this step, too, you must remove all irrelevancies from your thinking and focus on results. To my mind, if you do not do this, you are not truly dedicated to your ideal because you are putting your own personal issues ahead of them. All that matters is making the world a better place, and that means results. Not rhetoric, not bullshit theories that sound grand but mean nothing, not sitting around morally masturbating one another about what great people we are, not preening oneself for maximum social dominance amongst our more-PC-than-thou peer group, not being more concerned with being seen to be middle class than to help those you say you are trying to help, not patronizing attempts to help people that treat them like idiots and assume they should be grateful for the help their are getting from people who are quite obviously superior to them and who should be heaper with praise for even being willing to go near them… none of that crap.

You do whatever to truly believe has the best odds of succeeding based on an objective, cautious, thorough analysis of the situation as it is right now.

Everything else is petty stupid bullshit and a betrayal of what you claim to believe.

So I have no problem saying I do not care who “deserves” to succeed. It is utterly irrelevant and can only distract from the aims of our ideals. I would never say intentions don’t count for anything – an impractical person with good intentions is still a good person.

But I don’t feel bad for those who do not succeed when they are using the wrong method. I’m sorry they are going to feel bad about it, but that will give them the incentive to learn, adapt, and try again until they get it right.

To me, that is perfectly fair. And I know that makes me seem cold and inhuman to some. But it is the only moral path as I see it. And the only way to stay focused on the end goal.

A happier, healthier, more actualized life for human beings.

That’s worth whatever sacrifice I need to make in order to get there.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.