Alone, and Building Anyway

Resetting an entire ideology from scratch is a paradox in more ways than one. Consider how anyone actually approaches the complex problem of survival — the inherent loops we run into, the limited number of options a whole species really has available to it. Weigh that against the paradox of the philosophy we string together, one assumption at a time, always trying to justify our own process to ourselves. Look at it from the angle of wanting to manipulate the outcome, and the whole exercise starts to look almost comic in its self-regard.

Here is the part worth actually keeping: being an active observer of your own situation does not give you the right to blurt out every conclusion the moment it arrives. Having the advantage of seeing a picture with its layers and its hidden meanings does not entitle you to wreck the journey for someone else walking a similar path with similar hopes. Your read of a situation is unique to you, in that fleeting moment, and placing your assumptions onto someone else's choices is the same arrogance as calling odds on a roulette wheel and then acting like you'd predicted the outcome instead of gotten lucky.

For most of this journey, I tried to build something that would be acceptable not just to me but to a wide audience — and the more I studied what other people found attractive, the more I realised their reasons were eerily similar to my own starting motive: to please others. That's the loop. You end up feeding exactly the system you set out to challenge. The other option is to go looking for a genuine outlier, an anomaly, the humblest possible exception you can honestly stand behind as an answer. We all have answers. We just don't want to stand by them, because it's uncomfortable to notice how close together all our answers actually sit.

This is, in the end, the closest thing to a working definition of building something alone: my theory is unique to me, my way is my own, and I will walk it without expecting company or forgiveness for getting it wrong. There will be collateral damage in expecting anyone else to follow the same path with the same tolerance for how malleable the idea has to stay along the way — that's not a flaw to fix, it's simply not possible, and pretending otherwise is the real myth. Every theory has to test its own assumption honestly, and stays a slave to that assumption until it does. That, not the theory itself, is the only thing that should ever decide your next move.