Chapter Two: Patrick on Praktic

On how I live my life (or, at least, how I try): a pragmatics of immanence

by Patrick Simpson ([word count])

It’s difficult describing it. For a long time, I was obsessed with the question: what should I be doing with my life? I took a fairly moralistic approach to this question.

Broadly speaking, my life philosophy is concerned with the question: “What does it mean to live a worthwhile human life?”, with a specific emphasis on “attention” as a term. I’d like to analyze how my ideas around this have developed in a genealogical sense, starting from as early as middle and high school, when I first actualizing myself and my identity in the world. I watched a great deal of YouTube and also had a Tumblr phase, both of which I think impacted my early identity formation, especially in regard to my current politics. My years-long vlogbrothers fandom had a huge effect on me: this is where I got the moral imperative to pay attention. John Green would emphasize that the “truth resists simplicity,” and that it is only through the miraculous, almost religious act of truly paying attention to another person---especially, as Green would frame it, paying attention to another’s pain. Green’s writing about how we regard sickness in The Fault in Our Stars, but mainly in his vlogbrothers videos, in which he could be more explicit about his values than in a work of fiction---Green himself influenced by Susan Sontag and Elaine Scarry on the subject---had a huge influence on my early ethical and even political thinking.

I didn’t realize---or, more precisely and accurately, I did very much realize, but did not have the means of articulating the realization or understanding the full implications of it---that I was, in a word, “different” from my peers. I now understand myself through the broad critical lens of neurodivergency, but I’m also not too concerned about the words we use here---I’m much more interested in what we’re doing together (i.e., as independent human subjects), from a purely pragmatic standpoint.

The thing with “sick” people---patients with terminal cancer diagnoses, for example, as in The Fault in Our Stars, or in the comparison I’m drawing here, people who could be diagnosed with psychiatric disorders---is that they’re not actually “different.” Frankly, all of us inhabit sick and constantly decaying and dying bodies (“of course, all life is a process of breaking down,” as Fitzgerald puts it in the opening lines of “The Crack-Up”)---which is not to dismiss the material realities of living with the health conditions that we do. Cancer treatment is difficult for anyone to endure and this can and should be acknowledged---but it doesn’t make cancer patients any fundamentally different in kind from those of us living on the other side of normality. Neurodivergency, likewise, is a material reality with material implications, but it’s not a fundamentally different experience of life. Cancer patients and neurodivergent subjects are both “disabled”, if one is using the “social model” of disability and not the “pathology model” [IIRC those terms correctly: need to research this area more], but this is only to say that they are both populations who are systematically marginalized, in politics and otherwise: they’re still also just people, people who just want to live their lives.

As a young child, like most other white Americans in middle-class suburbia of my generation, I was placed inside of large institutions---public school, namely---that I could never fully comprehend at that age. As a child, you do what you are told, and you do it because you are powerless. We don’t talk about this very often---it’s so baked into not just American culture, but many cultures historically and around the globe---that children are ultimately only expected to obey the dictates of their parents and the family social unit as a whole. It’s not just the expectation though---as the individual subjects and beings that they are, children understand, at least on an unconscious, unarticulated level, that they want things that are different than what their parents want for them or can provide to them. This is simply a fact of existing as a living animal: You Are Alone. But it’s a particularly scary reality for children growing up in the confines of the standard American social unit of the suburban family.

First, you can’t really leave. In my childhood, I needed a parent or other adult to drive me if I wanted to go essentially anywhere that wasn’t just riding my bike around my neighborhood and other mostly identical suburban subdivisions nearby. Historically, this is a very new experience for human children---at what point in human history has the physical movement of children been so restricted, and when not outright restricted, when has it ever been surveilled and policed to the extent it is now?

There’s suburbia itself, and then there’s the institution of public schools. Something strange happened with me inside of this institution: I believed in it. I believed in it for ultimately selfish reasons, of course: I wanted to feel good about myself, and that desire simply took the form of me performing a role of not just “good student,” but essentially what I saw as the model of good liberal citizenship. There’s a few reasons for this. I was an only child; I was neurodivergent (specifically, as a child, I had patterns of obsessive thinking and an overall inward tendency that, had it manifested itself more materially---which material manifestation was exactly what I myself was so deeply unconsciously repressing, ultimately---could have been diagnosed with any number of psychiatric labels, namely OCD or high-functioning autism). I felt largely alienated from my peers at school and didn’t have any peers to turn to in my home life: I only had my parents. There were some neighborhood kids I made friends with, many of whom later came out as queer (I would also consider myself queer, but it’s not as important to my identity as I materially live it, at least at the moment). Beginning around the second half of middle school and taking full effect in high school, all of my childhood friendships faded away: friends moved (and I knew, even then, that when the friends moved to a new neighborhood, it was all over). I had maybe one actual person I could call a friend in high school, and we were only friends because we were both alienated and had no one else: specifically, he was a Korean immigrant obsessed with becoming a filmmaker and probably also felt alienated in high school. Of course, none of this was explicit in our friendship.

As a child, I’m not undiscerning. Like most children, and as a great deal of adults prefer to ignore, I understood subtleties of social power and how to get what I wanted. What I wanted was ultimately what we all want, being the animals that we are: simply to do what we want on our own terms. I could pull out my philosophical reasoning here---Hegel’s “life-and-death struggle,” for example, which for me, is an essential argument or framework for understanding the inherent opposition between independent subjective wills---but that would be getting ahead of myself. David Foster Wallace describes it best in “Good Old Neon.”

I wanted, on a more concrete level, all of the things children normally want. I wanted social connection, free time, candy, video games. More than anything, I wanted to be liked: by my parents, peers, authority figures like teachers. I happened to be very good at the things they wanted me to do in school: I did well on standardized tests, and I essentially never had to study to get a good grade. So this became my fixation. It feels good to be praised by older authority figures as a child: I adopted my “good kid” persona fully. What happened is that I quickly realized---because, again, I’m not undiscerning as a child---that there is no inherent value to being a “good student.” Rather than simply say, “school sucks”---the surface-level attitude and coping mechanism a lot of children develop in response to the ultimately traumatic institutional environment of most schools---I made the idea of what it meant to be “good” bigger and bigger and bigger: I kept recognizing how the straight-A version of me on my transcripts was not the “real” me because I knew that I wasn’t learning anything in school (because I wasn’t: for example, I understood at a very early age the horror of math education in public schools and how it kills curiosity and genuine learning: I watched Vi Hart’s “doodling in math class” videos on YouTube and through them discovered the beauty and intrigue of math, and read an essay by her mathematician father colloquially known as “Lockhart’s Lament”, about the pitiable state of math education in American public schools). The drug that kept me going was feeling like I was performing my role well, but what that role was kept becoming bigger and bigger in scope the more and more that I guilted myself over what were ultimately the failures of the institutions I was trapped within and powerless against.

So what ended up happening is that, on the surface, I was mostly just very quiet. I was largely anonymous in high school: I might have been bullied a little in a smaller school, but nobody was even really paying attention to me in my high school class of around 1200 (I think something around that amount: at least over 1000). I kept getting good grades, kept feeling fairly okay about myself because of that, but also kept descending into deeper and deeper cycles of procrastination and burnout. I wanted very much to feel like a “good one” and kept setting more and more unrealistic expectations for myself: because I knew that the on-paper grades never mattered (and they truly don’t, simply in the sense that they tell you extremely little if not nothing or less than nothing about any person’s learning or personal development: they’re just a very blunt and reductive form of externally-applied measurement: grades are only hoops to jump through from the perspective of the powerless student within the institution), I kept setting ideals for myself no person could reach: that I wouldn’t just be a good student “on paper” but a good student in practice, and not just that, a good person, in practice. I police myself to the extreme in order to hold onto this image of myself.

I said earlier that it was ultimately a selfish impulse underlying this: on a certain level, I just wanted to be liked (“… admired, approved of, applauded. You get the idea…” --- “Good Old Neon”). Still, what ended up strangely happening is that I came to some very deep ethical and even latent-ly political ideas very early in my life, and more than that, earnestly attempted to actualize them. I opened this essay speaking a little about the importance of vlogbrothers in my early development: the first inklings of these larger philosophical ideas are inspired by them, as well as others I’m following on the internet around middle school. I become very concerned with the question of existential solipsism in middle school when I watch a Vsauce video about how we can’t ever “know” for certain whether someone else’s experience of the color “red” is the same experience as someone else’s color of “red”: we don’t have any “objective” way of talking about the “qualia” of experience like this, as it’s sometimes termed. Even though I am in many ways a discerning child, I am also often socially slow (hence, why I said earlier I tend to think of myself as neurodivergent now): to put it bluntly, I fail to pick up on how to play the “game” of social relations and don’t have a lot of friends growing up. This, coupled with the larger cultural reality of isolation and lack of freedom for children in suburbia (discussed earlier), means that I not only seek refuge in my status as “good student”/”smart kid”, but increasingly find relief on the internet.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but in the same way many of my childhood friends later came out as queer, many of the people I followed online were people I was ultimately attracted to because of their conspicuous difference (i.e., social difference). Vi Hart and John Green are the two big names for me here. I become obsessed with vlogbrothers mostly because they make me feel a little less alienated: specifically, John Green makes me feel okay and acceptable to be socially clumsy and awkward and overly earnest. Vi Hart shows me that you can just be a person who, for example, wears socks as sleeves (both for comfort and for style). In other words, witnessing her be as much herself publicly online---seeing her, in her videos, be openly curious, messy, deeply interested in esoteric subjects, esoteric thoughts and ideas more generally (about, for example, the rich intersections between mathematical and musical beauty), and more than anything, entirely unconcerned with the judgments of others---was pivotal for me. Specifically, Vi Hart’s early masterpiece “Twelve Tones” becomes almost a Bible for me. It introduces me to so many subjects that later become central to my life: the two I’m thinking of here are experimental music, specifically in the classical avant-garde (I later fall in hard with Schoenberg, John Cage, and many others); and Jorge Luis Borges, and specifically his story and concept of “The Library of Babel”. Really, it’s Vi Hart’s overall vision of creativity that influences me so deeply: a vision of creativity as simple and yet also mysterious pragmatism, a pragmatism entirely unconcerned with “originality” and only interested in new experiences. “New shapes, new shapes, new shapes!”

Inherited from these online presences, my early values are mainly centered around learning and paying attention to others as fundamental to a well-lived life, with a focus on art. (I also inherit a great deal of the moralistic flavor of the pop feminist and “social justice warrior”-dominated cultural atmosphere of Tumblr in the early 2010s, something which is also worth exploring in more depth).

Later, I go through a number of life-altering traumatic events, largely because of all of the dominoes set up by my, in the end, ultimately still “happy” but very repressed childhood. The things that I wanted were so huge and abstract and obsessively moralistic in tone: to learn, to live a worthwhile human life, which means paying attention to and taking care of the others around you. These are good values to have, but they weren’t values I actually felt a great deal of the time as a child: I always framed them as “shoulds”. The only things I ever actually truly wanted---like, where I could feel the wanting in my gut, like how the Underground Man relates to his wildly oscillating animalistic “wantings” in Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translation of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground---were things like: my routine of watching YouTube videos to relax at the end of the day; a footlong tuna sandwich from Subway on the way home from cross country practice (which I only signed up for so that my parents and everyone would leave me alone about needing to have a sport: cross country worked because I didn’t really ever need to interact or talk with any of my peers); breaks from school, especially summer and winter breaks… the other things I “wanted,” like good grades and the more general appearance of “good liberal citizen,” as I earlier described it, were not true desires, not true wantings: they were ultimately coming from a place of very deeply repressed fear.

Repression is strange. It is both entirely “on the surface” and yet can only really be encountered as “repression” after a great deal of “internal work,” this “internal work” being, at its simplest level, an opening to parts of yourself you normally push out of daily conscious awareness. I sort of had to repress many of my sincere desires because I was in an institutional environment in which those desires could not ever be actualized, in a very material sense: there were no material forms for actualizing it, no truly open channels. “We don’t repeat because we repress; we repress because we repeat…” ---Freud; in a very material sense, I had to keep going to school and had to keep performing well, because that was the nature of the situation I was in. Why do we not ever acknowledge how terrifying this would be for any person just entering the world?---to give them the overwhelming certainty that if they don’t get the good grades now, they won’t go to a good college, and if you don’t go to a good college, you won’t get a good job, and if you don’t… I saw my future stretching out ahead of me like this: an endless series of hoops to jump through with… what? at the end of the track? I have a very distinct memory of being very anxious about the fact that the Spanish classes I was taking in middle school would go onto my “official” high school transcript, and it was because I was thinking of my life in this way, even then. The logic was: “oh no, I really can’t fuck up this class. Because if I fuck this up, that goes on my transcript, and my transcript is what goes on my college applications…” and then I might catastrophize a little further from there, but with the essential logic being sound in nature: I had a recognition that there was a huge gap between the “on paper” version of me and the “real” me, and if I didn’t keep being the extremely high-achieving person I was “on paper,” then it would all fall apart. The mistake I made was guilting myself over the fact that the “on paper” version was not “really” me: I took it, again, as my own failure rather than the failure of the institution (“I’m lazy,” “I always procrastinate,” “I need to get better at ‘time management,’” etc… these were the weapons I used against myself). Here is the thing: I was right about all of the institutional failures I was seeing, but was in a position in which I was in fact powerless (i.e., to actually do anything substantive to resolve or at least mitigate those failures): I was right that I wasn’t learning nearly as much as I could, that a great deal of time was being wasted inside of this building which was built, ostensibly, for the express purpose of helping children learn, but which was, in fact, not just failing in that purpose, but in many ways actually actively hindering learning.

Noam Chomsky’s views on education are relevant here: in a talk he gave on the Bush-era program “No Child Left Behind”, he describes two general approaches to education. The first is one in which you treat the child’s mind like an empty vessel, with the teacher’s goal being to fill the vessel. I would compare this to the concept of “banking education” in Pedagogy of the Oppressed: in this approach to education (which is the overwhelmingly dominant approach to education in the US), the teacher essentially performs the same function as a Catholic priest relating the Gospel (only available in Latin, which only the priests are allowed and trained to read) to their lowly parishioners. In other words, this is essentially an authoritarian model for education, in the end. The much better approach---really, the only approach that results in true learning, in the sense of, for example, John Dewey’s definition of knowledge essentially being about one’s capabilities, one’s agency and effectiveness in the world (see “The Individual and the World”---I think this is the title for the essay I’m thinking of? from his works on “democracy and education”)---is what Chomsky suggests as the second model, which is like “laying out a breadcrumb trail” for the children to follow (that might not be the exact metaphor he uses, but that’s the gist: a trail, a guide, instead of a vessel). Chomsky doesn’t say this, but the reason this second model actually works (as opposed to the empty regurgitation encouraged by the former approach: as a sidenote, I often specifically guilted myself for preferring, in some ways, the ease and comfort of regurgitation to get good grades: I would actually become afraid (or at least, nervous and on-guard) during, for example, the “Socratic seminars” my humanities classes started sometimes doing in middle school and high school: when I look back now, I realize that these seminars were perhaps the closest the institution of my public school got to truly encouraging independent and substantively collaborative learning, but of course, existing within the institution, they were still subject to a great deal of limitations: what made me nervous, namely, was the awareness that I would get a bad grade if I didn’t force myself to say something at some point, which, as everyone who has ever been in a seminar with required participation knows, often results in useless, performative comments that don’t move the discussion forward at all and are clearly intended just to fulfill the requirement).

In the repressed way I was living my life growing up, I would never jump through the “final hoop”, as it were: there would be no end to it. So I repressed my desires, which were always, in the end, political in nature, just as much as they were also personal problems of mine. I’m older now and I have a better understanding of what I want, and it’s essentially the same as what I wanted as a child, but now with a great deal more philosophical weight and nuance, which I’ve inherited from, first, my early online influences (Vi Hart, vlogbrothers, Vsauce, etc… weird coincidence with the “v” thing, which only directly has to do with “video” in the case of “vlogbrothers” (“Vi Hart” is just Vi Hart’s name, and “Vsauce” was something generated by a random phrase generator and is basically meaningless)), and later from philosophers and political thinkers (professors very much included) I encountered in college, all of whom added substance and nuance to the already fairly weirdly deep ethical and philosophical ponderings I was engaging in as a precocious, “in-bent” child (to use an apt phrase from the final lines of “Good Old Neon”). I was deeply influenced by my reading of Virginia Woolf---first, To the Lighthouse, and then Mrs. Dalloway in a class I later took on Woolf, and A Room of One’s Own from yet another class---as well as by my reading of David Foster Wallace, which began with a failed attempt to read Infinite Jest in the summer before college (as I’m remembering it now, I think I was even thinking of this summer project as a kind of preparation for the heavy reading I knew to expect in college: again, I was never doing what I simply wanted to do and always had to come up with some kind of larger moral justification in order to allow myself any fun or pleasure: of course I didn’t finish IJ that summer: why would I have, if the whole time I was just thinking of it as yet another homework assignment?).

We’re nearly caught up with the present day now. Another important early online influence for me I’ve failed to mention so far is Mike Rugnetta and the PBS Idea Channel, essentially a pop critical theory and humanities edutainment channel. Rugnetta introduces me to a book that will become of central importance to my thinking as it stands now:

Oh, and I also kind of become a Buddhist at some point (not really, but I’m deeply influenced by Buddhism and especially Madhyamaka and Zen variants, as I get more deep into the subject thanks to a couple classes I take with Prof. Tom Yarnall at Columbia).

Much more to say. I want to stop for today. I’ll end it here by saying that the common through-line, as I see it, always comes back to paying attention as a primary ethical value: I hold this value strongly from essentially late middle and early high school all the way until today. “Attention is the beginning of devotion,” as Mary Oliver says (a sentiment I first picked up from, again, John Green videos: he also likes and quotes Oliver): I have always been interested in devoting myself entirely to the world. I wanted to live well---and when we really talk about “living well,” don’t we really mean giving yourself up to something larger than yourself? This is why I fall in love with David Foster Wallace early as well: it seems like everyone pays lip service to these huge things, but if you truly look around and pay attention, none of it is actually happening: nobody is learning anything; human progress is not happening (just look at climate change); everyone is working all the time, but for what?

I caused myself a great deal of trauma ultimately because I very much clung on to the earnest hope that good could still come of this overall societal situation in which I was born into, and that I would be able to joyfully build a place for myself within it. I still very much believe I can joyfully build a place for myself in this world: it’s what I’m doing every day, on a purely immanent, pragmatic level (or at least, this is what I try to do, and how I phrase it to myself). (Now we’re getting into the actual philosophy… Spinoza, Deleuze, etc.). My ultimate mistake was believing in the delusions of liberal civility. Liberals want to believe that things don’t need to fundamentally change---namely, the cultural practices and values that they hold don’t need to fundamentally change---in order for progress to be made (for example, in regard to climate change, or the overall project of reducing human suffering and increasing human flourishing---this is another, broadly utilitarianist-flavored ethical imperative I inherit from vlogbrothers, which they phrase in a cutesy, early internet “nerdy” way: “decreasing worldsuck”). I grew up with liberal parents in a “nice” suburban town with “good schools” (they were “good” only because they had a lot of funding and the nice middle-class (mostly white) families sent their kids there and the standardized test scores were “good”: not because, you know, actual learning is happening in any substantive way that anyone actually cares about). I had the awareness that I “should” be happy, but I wasn’t a very happy child. By this point, I’m actually glad to have gone through the traumatic experiences that I did---if I hadn’t gone through them, I might have simply continued being the very quiet, very repressed person that I was.

So much more, and I’m not putting it as well as I can. To be revisited later.

(realized later: this could be turned into the second chapter of Pure Texture. Needs a great deal more specificity and precision and detail and much better prose. I would want to to be something that you can get lost inside of, and that makes the people who might need it a little less lonely (as DFW and others did for me (Kafka, Woolf, and so on...)). But this is exactly the kind of writing I wanted to be doing for the second chapter, and this could be tied in with material I’ve already written: namely, the script I was initially writing for my “Big Thing”, where I opened with the line that was something like: “there’s a troubling gap between how you feel on the inside versus how other people see you on the outside.”)

Next chapter.