i am a hack

i am a hack

These days I have an increasing suspicion that I am not an interesting person. There are musical and creative ideas in my head which are interesting, but they do not make me an interesting person. Sometimes I do interesting things and I pursue interesting things, as well as read and watch tasteful stuff, but it's just what I do. As a whole person I'm not quite sure. They are just parts of my thoughts, and I've come to see that a person is the sum of their parts. Each significant part of them may be interesting in different ways, but when a person is examined, they are taken by their whole — a gestalt principle which I think holds relatively true. Just because a person does interesting things, they are not interesting. An interesting person does things. Interesting clothes doesn't make someone interesting. The man makes the suit.

I feel an overwhelming sense of inadequacy when I observe people who might be as a whole more interesting than me. I characterize it as a twenty-something middle class college students primary fear: going through half your life, and in the middle of it realizing that you are not only normal, but have spent you youth fostering lameness, realizing now that time spent cannot be bought back. And to see other people doing it better than you is the source of that inferiority complex. Imagine the turmoil when comparing yourself to false projections of perfect people.

Maybe that's why I do "bad things". I see myself falling into this deliberate delusion — for example drugs, as basic as they are, at least give me the impression that I can fit into the cool crowd if I want to. Obviously, it's counterintuitive and demeaning for my self. Or maybe it's that sense of loss of self that I'm interested in. If I am uninteresting, then maybe being less of myself would be better.

I've always hated being sensitive. Over the course of the past several years, I've developed a certain immunity to it though. I hate the feeling of overthinking things which do not hold any value, exerting empty and overly emotionally charged opinions and vibes upon unsuspecting peers and then dealing with the consequences after having escaped that emotional state. Because of this primal distaste to my instinctual self, I've forcibly turned myself away from maintaining too close of ties in which my pride is on the line.

It's funny: I am as a whole an arrogant and condescending person, but I can't help shake the idea that it may stem from an inferiority complex that deeply fears not being interesting. My self indulgence not only makes me cocky, but also fearful that the things I've invested into myself are just shams — who knows? they might be.

I am not a loser, there is brilliance within me — I tell myself this all the time probably. After a while I've come to believe it, but without products of myself externalized, the words sometimes seem like my fraud brain concocted them to fuel my fantasies of living whatever life I want to live, being happy at the cost of everything else. Thus, thoughts of delusion creep into my head ironically admist a front of unfaltering confidence and straightforward ambition.

I hate resumes. I look at mine and it tells me nothing of who I am. Although it is accurate in that I didn't do much professionally, I hate it because I don't want to judge myself on what I did. I always judged and saw myself in the potential I thought I had, it was the only real way I've kept myself afloat for so many years, but I've come to see that that idea is bullshit. Who I am is accurately depicted in what I do — isn't this obvious? Who I am is not what I think I'll do. But I reject it anyway and understand myself through who I want to be or the feats I will probably do in the future, because "it's my insides that counts". That phrase is sardonic because on one hand I believe it, yet on the other hand, I know it's total shit, but what else can I do?

I like to think that if anything, at least I'm original. At least I'm not a parrot. But even that is such a low standard. And in fact, I am a parrot in a sense. Everything I am is a consequence of people I've met, movies I've watched, books I've read — a fairly healthy product of collisions and distillation.

As a result of wanting to be totally interesting to everybody, I've created a part of myself that reacts and moves based on what I think other people will find interesting. Or more often than not I find people that I think are interesting and mimic them: watching their interviews, reading the same books that they read, using similar lingo, watching the same movies that they like, quoting them or instilling their habits into my daily life, in anticipation that through such mimicry I will become interesting as well. I started rolling cigarettes because I saw Johnny Depp do it in an interview. But now he quit because cigarettes are bad. But one thing I have noticed is that this philosophy does not really work in real life. I am a hack. People are usually interesting only because they are true to themselves. And through mimicry it's only natural that what manifests is not true. All the while knowing and understanding this, I find it often so difficult to understand my true self that I fall prey to just copying other people.

These days I make music that has a wild sense of melancholy within it. I find parts of myself scattered within my work and it's cathartic because from an outside perspective I can look into parts of me which I regurgitated out.

Is my confidence baseless? Where is it coming from? I think to myself very often in a super narcissistic Way "I am totally awesome and brilliant ", but then realize "so what? what's come of it?". What great deed have I done to facilitate this sort of thinking. On one hand do I have to validate my confidence? On the other hand, I'm just a cocky prick. The line is too thin and I cross it every day.

Is being true to yourself doing everything that you want to do? Not being afraid of the consequences if no one likes or accepts you besides yourself? What a shitty life it would be if that comes true. But more often than not I think people like people true to themselves so I think I'll be alright. I'm such a piece of shit for no good reason so much of the time. I've literally done nothing meaningful or good for the world.

Narcissistic, self indulgent, sensitive asshole with an inferiority complex that fears being uninteresting. What a hack. Those words together shouldn't even make sense to describe a person.

When I finally do some good or make something awesome, then what happens? I wait in anticipate of that day so I can finally tell everyone that I shit on them and ITS TRUE. But if I do that, I would be the same hack as before, just with money and people looking at me. It's like I have this image of myself doing awesome things as a goal just so I can validate who I am and be comfortable with myself. Fuckin hell.

"I just want to be true". Yes, but how? Then what? Will I be happy? Sometimes I think those thoughts but they get me nowhere — so I just focus on what's in front of me, hoping that what amounts might give me some answers.