My Actifit Report Card: February 21 2022
Felt absolutely miserable today because I had a mix of headache and stomach complaints. Nothing too serious with the stomach (I suspect I ate some spicy stuff I shouldn’t have because I was feeling better and now I’m paying the price for that), but the headache was quite aggressive. I suspect it’s a consequence of sleeping poorly for multiple nights in a row and just not having the sleep, so I’m going to go to bed earlier than usual.
I finished the Meditations today, though again I was probably going through them at too much of a break-neck pace to really call myself familiar with them. I don’t know if I was just in a bad mood yesterday (possible) or otherwise negatively dispossessed, because I feel guilty about throwing so much disrespect on it.
I still disagree with Marcus Aurelius on a lot of stuff, of course. There is a degree to which the sheer difference between Roman conceptions of reality and our own makes it hard to fully appreciate where he was getting his stuff, but the later sections appealed to me more.
It’s weird, because I can’t help but draw connections between the Meditations and Stirner. Those are perhaps entirely antithetical, since Stirner is the origin of the term “egoist” (at least from what I’ve heard) and Aurelius consistently exhorts his audience to participate in social life.
But I do not think that there is such a contradiction in this as may be seen on its surface.
After all, one of the things that people misunderstand about Stirner is that he may insist on right being that which an individual possesses, but that is not necessarily to say that right is all which a person desires to possess. Further, when Stirner talks about capacity as the means to right, he is not necessarily talking in a strictly tangible sense.
It is not the sinews and the tendons which Stirner bases his statement of rights on, but the mind and the spirit. Much like the stoic, it is contrary to the goal of the egoist to be possessed by outside forces, but instead a harmony with the inner nature is the ultimate ideal.
The stoic sees restraint as the path to getting what is right, and the egoist views a development toward power as the path to getting what is right. There need be no contradiction in this except as it is understood.
Of course, my interpretation of Stirner probably disagrees with a lot of peoples’ interpretations of Stirner. My counter to this would be to point out that I am the world’s highest authority on Stirner in that I apply his work in accordance with his own principles.
I will interpret it and make it as I will. I could make a robust case, I believe, for why I do so, but I do not need to justify myself in my interpretation of the egoist philosophy. To do otherwise would be to participate in a negation of myself, an admission of a guilt I do not bear.
But enough philosophy for the evening.
Work on my side game is going along smoothly. My goal is to have it done by the end of the week so that I can get back to working more on Kenoma and Cybrine Dreams, both of which haven’t had much progress because of a mix of my low output over the last few days and my other projects.
One of those projects is a little scrap of fiction that might turn into something or might just be a stand-alone little experiment to get my creative writing back in gear. I’m still trying to get Aspects of Sand published over on @kwilleywrites, so I need to start working on more pieces of that before too long. The last one I posted was so long that it actually gave me grief in Wordpress due to not wanting to load the full length of the text. Not sure what the solution to that is in the future other than keeping my chapters shorter, but 1000 words is about when the problems start and anything past 1500 becomes basically unusable in the web editor. Might try a different browser to see if that helps.
I also discovered that apparently I don’t learn from my mistakes and I saved the piece I was writing about Horizon Zero Dawn to Dropbox, which lost a chunk of it when my computer restarted itself last night. That’s fine, because I still have to do some editing and reinventing that section will probably do it good.
Also, I still have the vast majority of the text, because I’d just written a couple small sections between when it uploaded to Dropbox and when it reset, but it’s frustrating in part because I should have seen it coming.
I’ve decided to just upload the whole thing as one very long piece instead of doing a bunch of shorter fragmented posts. If people don’t want to get through it all at once, they can take a break.
All I have to do is re-implement those small sections, edit, add screenshots, and post. That shouldn’t take long and I expect to have it done tomorrow.
This report was published via Actifit app (Android | iOS). Check out the original version here on actifit.io
