Cover artwork by Anton Biletskyi-Volokh, from an unpublished reusable sketchbook in progress.
A thematic selection of translated notebook fragments.
The problem with total control is the same as with a totalitarian regime: it requires endless resources. Since resources are never endless, attentive management and an adequate assessment of your resources are preferable to total control.
The stronger the pain, the more you see your impossibilities in the world rather than your possibilities.
Not living out of fear of death.
The bulkier the ego, the more it gets hurt and rubs against the outside world and other people.
The obsessive person’s puzzle: you defend yourself against anxiety with order, but order creates anxiety.
Getting wound up is a way of exhausting anxiety.
Anxiety lies at the root of conformity.
Being afraid to show yourself because ‘who would be interested?’ seems to deny that showing yourself is interesting in its own right. Being present helps neutralise shame.
People who constantly need to do something are, firstly, coping with their anxiety that way and, secondly, holding onto the nourishing idea that if they do nothing for even a little while, everything will fall apart.
Where the wound is, there is the subject.
- Food cares for you like a mother, and fat protects you like a father.
Guilt is a way of feeling your own grandeur. I could have, but chose not to.
Indifference is like a scar on a wound that healed badly.
The first step towards devaluation is complete enchantment. It is hard to take value away from something that was not valuable to begin with.
The wish to be absolutely good is fear of your own shadow and a desire to buy something with goodness: love, acceptance, safety. What matters more is being not good but adequate. Adequate and adaptive.
Sometimes exhaustion becomes a way of regulating anxiety. There is no strength left, and no strength for worry either. Anxious people sometimes wear themselves half to death this way, but exhaustion brings at least a semblance of peace.
Everyday worries are a good distraction from existential questions. While you think about deadlines and prices, questions of mortality and values can be set aside. On the other hand, how sweet it can be to shut out everyday worries behind existential questions.
A passion for novelty can help adaptation in uncertainty. But where stability and consistency matter, being hooked on novelty may prevent you from finishing things and eventually lead to maladaptation.
The hook keeping you in destructive relationships is most often fear. Where situations in a relationship trigger that adrenaline feeling of a falling lift inside, there is the hook.
Two factors shape demonstrativeness: danger and the absence or shortage of personal contact. When you are visible, you are relatively safe. A lack of personal contact leads to attempts to feed on an audience’s attention.