Damn, it feels good to have JT on mic again! This episode covers "Adepthood: Praxis and Theory for Integrating, Transcending and Unbridling from Determinism Effectively" (AKA, The APTITUDE PROJECT - not just the deepstate that creates sick abbreviations!)
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Intro!
As a kid, my family moved every year or two. As an adult, the longer I stay in one rental unit, the more suffocated I feel.
Struck with wanderlust, I sometimes fantasize with Zillow. Like a change of pace is just what I need.
I’m suddenly thinking, though, why move to
The country (where I’ll have more space, free time and self-determination, but bumpkins, bugs and snakes will scare me)
Or the city (where I’ll have more community and culture, but be overstimulated by filth and dangerous strangers)
Or the suburbs (where I’ll be mostly safe and comfortable, but also deeply isolated and lonely)…
I say “suddenly,” but it’s really a five-day gauntlet-style anniversary in Vegas that helped me realize these inevitable imperfections. Sin City has janitors roaming public sidewalks, mopping puke. It’s never darker than an overcast morning, even at midnight. There is nudity, glitz and a din of dings in the same register as cooing babies.
In short, it’s so clean, and well lit, and engineered, it feels safe.
In Vegas, you can rest assured everyone loves your money too much to let you encounter anything too unpleasant—even so much as a grumpy cashier. What happens there, stays there; you’re safe to be disinhibited… but at what cost?
Control.
Control is both the method and the effect of eliminating the perception of danger.
Vegas is a monument to control: an oasis with thirty-story fountain displays in the middle of a desert. That nebula of lights in the wilderness burns away every twitch-inducing shadow, but the path it illuminates leads to totalizing safety. Safety from even yourself.
The architecture of Vegas booms at you: “Heed not your interoception! Denude yourself of agency and open up to paternalistic nudges!”
Vegas exists at the end of the spectrum, but fear is available everywhere, should I reach for it. But that experience of the pole taught me the project of control that promises safety necessitates, finally, control of your own body by someone else.
I can stay and fear isolation in the suburbs, or move and endure overstimulation in the city, or move farther and worry about the hills having eyes. Or I can simply be here now, as Ram Das says, and follow the upsurges of wanderlust toward their root: toward karmic baggage this incarnation is meant to burn off.
Why do I feel the need to move constantly? What does that sense of strangulation tell me about who I am? About what I’m here to learn? What is it pointing to about how I can grow to be a better person, partner, dad, and artist?