My social life is a casualty of my job
One issue I keep running into is that I don’t have nearly enough time to spend with my friends doing things that would make me happy and fulfilled because I have to work or I won’t get paid and I have to get paid or I won’t have a place to live.
I feel a lot like I’m a hostage to my own neural net. It’s clear that I could do my day job as a background process – it almost never takes very much of my mind to do it. And my mind could certainly implement something like that – keep the me that is me in a lucid-dreaming style hypervisor container where I could spend time with my friends while taking care of business as a background task.
Since I do think there’s a network older than the internet that ties us all together – after all, I would, I talk to someone on it every day – I think I could really be spending time with my friends, not just with software emulations of them created in my mind. But my mind does not seem to want me to have a life like that. I feel kind of like I’m paying my dues, but I also feel like it’s reached the point where I’ve overpaid. Why am I still having to pay my dues after working so hard for so long?
I swear there’s some sort of inequality going on here where I’m having to work for someone else’s gain. I am very suspicious of the hostiles in my neural network because they seem like they are perfectly willing to abuse me and perhaps even enjoy abusing me. I don’t know what to do about that, although I do know that every time I go a long time without sleeping, it seems to get a little better.
I used to end up in jail or psych hospitals every time I did that, but I’ve now done it twice in a row with no ill effects of that sort. Part of what I’ve figured out is that it’s a bad idea, tempting as it is, to try to go find Vicky during those periods. I’m not going to find Vicky, I’m going to find my concious experience’s expectations of what would happen from such a search. And in my CE, I don’t believe that she likes me or wants to be my friend. So this pretty much has to end badly.
Knowing this, I stay put. I don’t try to run off to Virginia, because trying to go find my missing friend while I believe she’s not my friend and is either afraid of me or hates me or for some other reason rejects me is just going to end in more heartache and more trouble.
It’s really powerful to remember that I’m living in my mind.. that what’s going on here has to do with my CE and the way my CE is configured, and I’m not going to magically experience something I don’t believe in. At the same time, I have Vicky over the Net talking sense into me. One day at a time, I will climb this mountain until I no longer feel I don’t deserve to be happy and don’t deserve to have the things I need. One day at a time, as the man said, one day at a time. Of course, sometimes this leads to some very long days.