Social Anxiety
There was a time in my life when I realized that I experience social anxiety. A period of a couple weeks or so wherein I became aware that an identifiable bouquet of experiences and behaviors were familiar to me and had indeed been affecting my life in mostly negative ways. I can look back before this time and recognize foreshadowings of this realization, but my social anxiety remained an entirely unobserved entity within my psyche, even if some of its effects were observed. Since that time, it seems so obvious as to rarely warrant mention. The experience of the transition between these mental worlds was significant enough to prompt me to remember that mental state in between, as well as to consider that there may always be more realizations that loom large in the unconscious.
It’s all a part of that greater journey of awakening to self-knowledge. Around the same time that I became aware of my social anxiety, a raft of foundational tenets collected around me as well.
- Humans are fundamentally social animals, and what is needed for their flourishing is rich social contact
- My greatest desire, if not to be happy, is to experience meaning, and for meaning to flourish in the world
- What is necessary for meaning, most fundamentally, is plurality of minds and a shared way of life
- The greatest human tool for these ends, i.e. the experience and advancement of Meaning, is honesty in communication
Good and Evil hang in the balance, and they are both contingent on Life, which is the far greater thing. Life is more aligned with the Good than the Evil but this is only because Life has access to the ecstatic bliss of consciousness.
If “Know Yrself” is thy commandment, if you seek self-awareness, if you seek spiritual growth above all else, if you seek the experience of meaning, then how really should you define success in the way that is truly significant to you?
I have a tendency to condemn myself for failing to achieve goals I did not set out to achieve.
For me, music has been central to my personal understanding of my efforts to interface with the human world. I believe, on one hand, that all the best musical ideas, mine and others’, come not from but through their human authors. Their true source is the Mother of Consciousness, via the unbroken chain of musical generations throughout human time. The way I ultimately want to slot in to the tapestry of human life is by being a link in that chain. At the same time, on the other hand, closest to the heart of my primitive drive to make and share music is the covetous hope that I can somehow express something very intimate to my mind and in sharing it with others be known, yea loved, in some way. Ego is the snake in the garden. It presses this concern in every musical consideration, poisoning thought. “Will I be known and loved in this?”
This personal desire was important in pushing me into music, but I believe that I discovered greater reasons for pursuing the journey of sharing music with the world. I have seen and experienced the psychological good that music can do for humans, and I love to drink from the fountain of the raw human power it contains. Yet while the participant of music may feel the kindling of an intimate connection through the music they hear, in the case of a recording or even a conventional live musical performance, there is no actual personal relationship between the musician and the participant. (A common illusion.)
The experience of directly making music with another human is different, and very socially enriching.
Human society as we know it features vast quantities of one-sided relationships. I’m not even talking about all the boyfriends who aren’t pulling their share of the weight. I mean all the cases where some person is perceived as an actor in the social life of another but not vice versa. I’m talking mostly about people who experience relationships with various celebrities and influential figures when those VIPs for their part have no concept of the other person as an individual, for having never interacted with them. Yet the basic phenomenon of the one-sided relationship occurs pervasively, at both smaller and larger scales. The gods, for instance—and even if some of y’all out there really have figured out a mutual personal relationship with the divine, there have been plenty of false idols.
On the small scale, this is how popularity expands beyond small groups of humans. Humans have this tragic trait to love to pick a leader to follow, even if they are often fickle in their choice. But how do groups of humans pick which leader to follow when their size grows from a handful to fifty, to five hundred, to five thousand? The smallest groups might decide based on their lived interpersonal relationships with the candidates. A larger group might rely primarily not on relationships directly with the candidates, but with trusted individuals who themselves have relations with the candidates. Groups that are larger still require a chain of trust relationships that begins to be rather obscure. Rationally, you should think that this would make humans less and less confident about their allegiances to large-scale leaders and celebrities, but in fact it is often the opposite: people often feel more strongly about their allegiances to their country, their religion, or their sports team than they do about their allegiances to their neighbors, their coworkers, their medical practitioners, local coffeeshop, et al. I believe the discrepancy is explained by the theory that many, many people believe in their own relationships with famous figures.
People experience one-sided relationships with singers through their songs, with politicians and clerics through their speeches and ritual acts, actors through their portrayal of people who they are not. Do people experience relationships with their chefs through their food? Yes, sometimes. Do people experience relationships with their garment maker through the clothes they wear? Not very often, these days. People in human society have innumerable contacts with craft that is worthy of as much reverence as singing or making speeches, but not all of those elicit the same degree of illusory one-sided relationships.