Having read through some of your other posts last night, I thought I'd expand on my previous comment;
Obviously you come from a much more socially dense life than I did and I'd probably be in a somewhat similar situation, if I'd been raised as you were. As it was, I grew up on a farm on the East coast, raising race horses and dairy cattle, so I've spent more of my life around animals than people. Which required me to adjust my emotions. I was 5th of 6 kids and not obessively ambitious to compete in this business, so the result was to simply sit back and try to see the bigger picture.
As I see it, you have too many social constructs and requirements crammed into your life, with little more than drugs and psychiatrists to sort them out. So my advice is to try to pull all those various layers apart and see if there are other ways to arrange them.
For one thing, you lived in a California culture that evolved over the last century as a sort of idealized focus for popular culture the world around. Consequently there wasn't much to compare and contrast it with. Say Europeans have other countries to deal with and have their problems pointed out on a regular basis, creating more nuance. Say between French, Germans and English. Americans often then were the outcasts and hustlers from the old world, all thrown together in this one. I'm not much of a movie buff, but Bill Murray's speech to the caddys in Caddyshack comes to mind.
So the "California dream" was a sort of culmination of this race for attention and money as replacement for a complex culture that takes centuries to really develop depth and texture. Say a jelly donut versus fruits and vegetables.
Such as our presumption we can force democracy on Middle Eastern cultures that know all we really want are their resources.
Having the choice of going out and being a hustler, or simply working with the animals and land I was raised on, I chose the latter, so here are a few of the insights I've come across, comparing people to nature;
For one thing, as these mobile organisms, necessitating a sequential process of perception and a narrative based culture, we assume time to be the point of the present moving past to future, but it is change turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Given narrative is the basis and guiding principle of culture, this might seem like a fairly basic insight and I find the younger people are, the more open they are to it, but it really can be a bit of a neutron bomb to various religious, political and philosophic assumptions.
For one thing, a collective narrative is what binds a culture together, making it a social organism and hive mind. All the clocks are in tune and harmony and anyone disrupting the symphony is silenced.
Yet the organism exists in the ecosystem. The node in the network. Narratives compete, occasionally cooperate, but mostly just find their own space and time. Filling out the niches in the ecosystem.
One of the primary devices of the narrative social organism is the monotheistic god.
The essential fallacy of monotheism is that a spiritual absolute would necessarily be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The fact we are aware, than the details of which we are aware.
Yet that top down authority figure is necessary to focus the community. The Ancients were not ignorant of monotheism, but since there was no distinction between culture and civics, it was equated with authoritarian systems. As in one god, one ruler.
While pantheism was the original multiculturalism, as tribal societies evolved into city states and had to encompass diverse beliefs. Many voices, power centers, many gods. Democracy and republicanism evolved in pantheistic cultures, that transitioned to monotheism, as they became more centralized and authoritarian. When Western culture went back to more populist forms of government, it required a separation of church and state, culture and civics.
Yet while this anthropomorphic concept of god has faded, the premise of assuming one's ideals to be absolute continues in most of the ideologies, movements and many of the political theories that have sought to replace monarchy and monotheism. From the Terrors of the French Revolution, to the Soviet system, to even the current cancel culture, where no one is allowed to debate.
Consider the issue of sexuality; The problem with the progressive stance that people should be able to express themselves and do whatever they wish, is that sex is a fairly primal desire, emotion, impulse, etc and when you start to stir the pot that deeply, it isn't just physical attraction that rises to the surface. That's why we wear clothes, even when it's warm. It keeps the primal in check. So it might be ok if others do as they wish, but when it gets taken to extremes and everyone is supposed to get on board, that creates serious blowback. It is simply one of many situations where we assume our ideals and aspirations to be elemental and universal, rather than unique expressions of our own time and place.
Going back to the issue of time, energy is "conserved," because it is what is present. Its dynamic creates time, as it constantly changes form. So the energy goes from one situation to the next, past to future, as these patterns, forms, information come and go, future to past.
Think of a wave. The energy drives it, while the fluctuations rise and fall.
In a factory, the product goes start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product. As lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.
Now consciousness goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts go future to past. Yet it is the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, while the central nervous system sorts through and further distills the information precipitating out.
Suggesting the mind is more lens and filter for this flame within, than its source.
As these complex organisms, our minds have evolved myriad filters, lenses, shutter speeds, apertures through which our consciousness shines. It is in pulling apart these often diverse and conflicting models is what I see you might work on.
As I said, people are easy, in the sense that as a person, you are fundamentally programed to connect with other people. Especially since they tend to be the more attractive and useful connections. Though in your case, this might not always be the case, so the question is how to deprogram that focus on others, the nodes and see the big picture, the networks.
As I've argued, the nodes are forms, like a wave, building, cresting and receding, as living organisms. Though what you connect with is the energy they express in the moment. Like a magnet, sometimes attracts, sometimes repells and often a complex combination of the two.
Yet look at the world around you. The streets you drive down, the buildings you exist around. Not to mention other living things, flora and fauna. All pushing and pulling you in different ways.
The reality is that conscious perception is a form of dream state, where our minds constantly create images out of the information coming into our senses. The only difference with actual dreaming is that it has to constantly reset to new information.
It isn't so much the function of the consciousness to make decisions, as it is to imagine possibilities.
When you drive down the road, you find your impulses tend to react faster than your consciousness can decide. In fact the consciousness is otherwise engaged with imagining possible consequences of other eventualities, say someone serves in front of you and you imagine the crash, then the aggravation kicks in and you start cursing people texting and driving, meanwhile the guilt factor points out you were doing the same thing five minutes ago, as the rationalization feedback argues you are obviously a better driver, since you hadn't swerved. So it's no wonder the rest of your body doesn't count on the conscious, executive function to make the immediate important decisions.
So its role is in the planning and learning, so future decisions are better informed and organized.
Yet given our cultural preference for linear goal oriented results, we ignore the actual processes and assume more is better, rather than balance is necessary to sustain the process in the long run.
For instance, rich and wealthy people can better control their situations, so they don't necessarily have to reset to new information, but can ignore it, until it gets too big to ignore. As in, "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
This can also apply to any number of groups, from mathematicians, to war strategists, caught up in professional feedback loops that can avoid having to acknowledge outside factors.
If life was a race to the finish, they would win, but it only really exists as this present, physical state, in which every action creates an equal and opposite reaction. So sometimes it does work better to see oneself in the larger network and play on through it.
The bull is power. The matador is art. If you have to cheat, you don't get the larger game.
This might seem a bit long winded, as a reply, but these are ideas I'm shuffling around in my head and it works to sort them out, by imagining a particular audience. So thank you for presenting an interesting series of essays.
