Jeremy Miranda (American, b. 1980, Newport, RI, USA, based Dover, NH, USA) - 1: Kitchen Pt 2, 2022 2: April Fire Sketch, 2022 3: Neighbors 4 4: End of Day Studio Interior, 2022 5: Living Room, 2022 6: Turpentine, 2016 7: Spring Interior with Sink, 2022 8: Side Yard, 2021, Paintings: Acrylic on Panel
Anonymous asked:
what is there for someone who feels they failed to become a human being, who no longer feels capable of wanting anything or building any kind of life for themselves?
intactics answered:
hmm pretty vague ask. well, you were born a human being, but the thing you’re talking about is what I call “personhood”. you may be clinically depressed and your brain may need some assistance getting out of the hole it’s in right now. the rest is the fundamental problem facing every human being who has ever been born: figuring out how to go on living in the world and finding a reason to do so. you are not alone in feeling yourself at a loss before the magnitude of this problem. it has perplexed and bedeviled humanity for millenia. first I think you should have a nice cup of chamomile tea with honey. then I think you should go on some random quests. ever thought glassblowing would be cool? go find a studio to take classes at. pottery? same. organic farming? WWOOFing. living at sea? merchant marines. there’s loads of shit you can waste time doing here on our little planet so dabble in whatever tickles your fancy while you have the opportunity.
right now you sound like you’re in your mid twenties and everything has Gone Wrong. flunked out of school, got left at the altar, got fired, got told you’re unfit for the life you dreamed of having, found out on your own that you suck at things, whatever. it’s probably wiped out your sense of self because you attached all your selfhood to what you can accomplish, not who you are, and now that the accomplishments aren’t happening the “you” has become ambiguous. the easiest trick to being a person at this stage is to embrace the failures as lovingly as the wins.
in case your problems exist on a more wretched scale, however, in my biased opinion there is nothing technically wrong with giving up on “personhood” and deciding instead to become an automaton that performs personhood well. define your “self” in simple and easy ways for a simple and easy DIY sense of self. pick your own placebo. provided that your identity of choice is stable and consistent, you’ll be better off functioning with the dummy as your template self than trying to organize all your heuristics contextually for every decision and then attempting to deduce the self out of the decisions ex post facto. way more efficient. only issue is correcting the dummy to accord with emergent selfhood later on instead of allowing dissonance between them
