3: The Spirit: Ghost (April)

Today we talked about the jellyfish model of the soul, some music/books/movies, womanhood, spiritual rituals, and more.

Transcript

Ghost Season And The Habit Pyramid

Speaker 0:00

Hello, and welcome back to the new Piniped Zodiac Horoscope Show. Um today is as I'm recording this, it's Wednesday. This will go up either tomorrow on Thursday or the next day on Friday, probably Friday. Um Friday the 10th. It is currently ghost season. Yeah, spirit ghost season. And we have a website now. Uh we have um we have a NPZ website at newpinipedzodiac.com. So, you know, we're really locking in and feeling official in the club tonight. Okay, let me read you the description for ghost. The spirit ghost is April 2nd to May 17th, and there's specific timestamps on the site. Um, you know, whatever. The ghost is one of two spirits in the NPZ. This spirit is understood to be a spirit in the metaphysical sense of the word, not the moral or mythical sense. This spirit tends towards science and towards spiritual phenomena which come from observable material phenomena. If this spirit is an arrow on the pyramid of computer language, ghost arrow is pointing up. The NPZ spirit-ghost aesthetic is bright blue-green skies, cool fluffy clouds, computers with souls, habits which become traits, earthly bodies with unearthly consciousnesses, and recursion and generation as divinity which arises from the mundane. The ghost is beyond alive. The ghost is beyond dead. The ghost is a level of consciousness. It is the secular patron saint of an immaterial place you can get to from many different material start points. So, um, you know, in the spirit of the NPZ, do some reflecting on how April has been for you so far and what you've got going on for the rest of this stretch of time. Um, and think about the hierarchy of your habits and if you are doing a good job um kind of maintaining the lower level habits that allow your higher level habits to work. Um, I got clocked bad by this. I got I got hit. I got I was doing really good. Oh fuck. Sorry, there's a spider that fell behind my stove the other day and I just saw it on my wall. I've been wondering where that fucking guy went. I'm so glad he's not in my room. Okay, um, what the fuck was I talking about? Hold on. I need to add the compressor now or I'm gonna keep talking weird. Okay, now I feel well, normal's a strong word, but oh yeah, so I was, you know, mermaid season for me, la okay. Last episode I came on here and I said mermaid season is spiritually rough, and that was true. But then things took a turn, and I got very inspired and very locked in and felt like, oh, you know, everything's going amazing, and I'm a genius, and I can see the matrix. And I felt, you know, whatever. I felt very um, I felt the spark. And for a while I was doing, I think, pretty good in general. You know, like I was making good decisions and I was keeping my environment well maintained. I was very brave and social in a way that is, you know, not always the case with me. I was I was I you know, I can't know this for sure, but I it seemed like I was more pleasant to be around. And then I and then things um became not that way, and I kind of lost my footing, and um, you know, the spiritual cycle continues. I feel like now I'm like relatively neutral, like emotionally and spiritually. But it did cause me to reflect, like, there is something very zen about the fact that you do have to fumble the bag profoundly in like a cyclical way. Like, you do just keep fucking learning the same thing again and again in a different hat. Because I fucking came up with the ghost. I came up with this model. It's my fucking favorite one. Um, it's like my favorite one on the zodiac because I think it's very helpful for me. And I like it a lot. I think it's like aesthetically pleasing to have an idea of like a hierarchy, like a Maslow's hierarchy, but instead of being something that just describes your needs, it also is something that you need to be like looking at and referring to throughout your day. Cause why whatever. Like let's talk about the ghost. Why do we fucking do this? Why do I propose this idea? Because when you get excited about something in a creative capacity, it's really easy to get caught up in the vision of what you're looking towards and kind of trying to manifest and visualize. And this can be anything. I'm being vague right now, but it could be anything. It can be um uh like an idea of how you want your room to look. You want to redecorate and you have a you want to have a system for where you put all your clothes and you imagine, wouldn't it be so nice, so cool, so hot, so fresh if I did such a thing? And what would it look like? Or it can be like, you know, in my case, perhaps I'm working on a song or something, or I have an idea for a song, and I'm like, okay, what do I want it to be like? The reason that I like the model of the ghost, the hierarchy of little mundane needs and rhythms that you must continue to meet in order to get to the higher level of decisions, is because it causes you to be a little more practical and a little more grounded. In the example of redecorating your room, the spirit angel version of that idea is like following the the whim. It that would be like you're doing something else, and you get an idea for oh, what if I redecorated my room? And you follow the feeling, and you go, Oh, I just, you know, I'm gonna map it all out and draw pictures and map out where everything's gonna go, and it's gonna be so nice. And you like allow yourself to get caught up in inspiration that you didn't know was gonna happen. But the spirit ghost, this month's sign, the spirit ghost model of how you deal with such a thing is that you already kind of have the vision fleshed out for the most part. Maybe it's not uh maybe there's room for improvement, but like you kind of know the direction you want to move in. And as soon as you have that, you need to drop low and you need to go, like, okay, how are we doing in the body? Am I experiencing animal terror right now? Am I do am I experiencing the cortisol levels of someone being hunted for sport? Am I overwhelmed in a really crazy way? Am I falling behind on like mundane day-to-day stuff? Um, and then you can go like to the next level up and like think about your environment and go like, alright, I'm gonna move things around, but before I do that, am I living in filth? Are the d are the have I done my dishes recently? Have I done my laundry? Before we revamp the whole room, you know, can we maybe do the bare minimum to create a livable habitat for the animal that I am? Which is tough. You know what I've been thinking about lately is like the idea of so I have my little hierarchies, right? I have my triangles and I have this idea of um the model of the ghost model of how you make it through your life and do tasks and do your day-to-day stuff, which is as we've been talking about, the hierarchy. Um But I've been kind of thinking of myself and like the soul or whatever as being like a jellyfish, where here's how it goes. Um, and feel free to comment like on the substat comments if this reminds you of something or if you think someone else has like already kind of drawn this picture, like put it in an interesting way, because I'm you know, uh whatever, but like so when you go about your day, you're using like verbal thought, right? You're and maybe you're not, but usually you are, I think. You kind of are like going through your life, imagining that you have like a pretty complex experience. You're like, I'm a I'm a grown-up and I know about shapes and colors, and I I understand the concept of a government, and like I know about astronomy, and you're like, you think that you kind of have some pretty nuanced concepts up there, and you have visions and desires about how you'd like to maybe change your conscious state. You know, maybe uh you feel whack and shaky and like you'd like to not feel like that later, or like maybe you have some kind of aspiration in the institutional world that you're working towards. You want a particular career or degree or something. Um, and that's like a version of trying to change your conscious state. You're like, I want to be someone who has this other identity marker and has done a particular thing or whatever. But like the trick for me that I feel is that you always want to reach down one level. You're like, you're on this high level of conscious thought, and you always want to go down like one bracket and edit the thing just beneath you. This happens a lot to me because I feel like I think about my own thoughts a lot, which is related to my like OCD life, um, and possibly related to other things, but who's to say. But like doom scrolling, going on your fucking phone is a great example. Like, frequently I'll be dicking around, going on my phone. I have things that not only should I be doing, but in fact I would rather be doing that I'm not doing because I'm I got caught on my phone and I'm looking at stupid videos and I'm like wasting time zoning out. I will think to myself, I wish I didn't choose to do this. And not in the abstract, not in like an ethical broad sense. I mean right now. I'm I wish right now I wasn't choosing to do what I'm choosing to do. I wish I had the willpower now to put my fucking phone down and do anything else. It's very like uh it's like biblical. It's like help my unbelief. It's like, what why? It's a weird, complicated thing, actually. It's like loaded emotionally. There's something really odd about the fact that you can it's not that you don't know what you want, and it's not that you don't want what you want. You wish you wanted something different, or you wish that you could have more dominion over like what you enjoy, or like what what you choose to do on like an impulsive level, you know? And that's a moment where I kind of think of the model of the ghost. You want to reach down one level and edit the thought just beneath your like high level self. On the high level, you're thinking I wanna do all these ambitious things, or I wanna be super pleasant and social, or I wanna do whatever thing, whatever, I want to achieve my goals or whatever. And like one level beneath that simmering is I wanna have fun now, and I'm stressed and sad, and I'm gonna play on my phone. And you have an idea that you should be able to just brute force decide not to have the inclination that you have that makes you dick around and be avoidant and waste your time. Because you can see that thought super clearly, because it's right next to the thought that you're thinking on purpose. It's right there. And you think you should be able to just reach down and change that one. But the jellyfish thing I've been thinking of is that actually you have to go low. The the arrow goes from the bottom of the Maslow's hierarchy type pyramid all the way to the top, right? But then from the top, it goes all the way back to the bottom. Kind of like like a loop or like those toys that you ha what are they called? The toys, the jelly, those horrible long jelly donut toy. Do you know what I'm fucking talking about? The tubes, the tubes, where you have a shape that as you roll it, the top becomes the bottom. Like you um uh what the fuck is it called? Hold on, hold on. Horrible jelly tube toy. Yeah, no, precisely, yeah. What the fuck is that? Slippery water magic snake nostalgic tube gel. Yeah, it's like that. If you imagine if you imagine that you know, things are kind of flowing in like a volcanic pattern where you when you're at the top, the thing you get to change is the bottom. You get to change your environment and you get to you get to interact with your environment through your body. But what you don't get to do is change the middle part. You don't get to drop down one level. And maybe some people do, you know. I don't know how other people's minds work or how you guys feel. And I know that there's, you know, there's like therapy modalities or whatever that would not be even like barely conceivable to me, but that other people like get a lot out of. But for me, for me, my life and what I have observed personally and you know, whatever, um, is that if you want to change the middle level of your thought, you have to start by using your brief moments of consciousness, true consciousness, to edit the lower level. So, like, you know, you're like dicking around on your phone and you're like, I wish I had it in me to put this down and go do something productive, or at least go do something that I really fucking actually like. I wish I had it in me to do something um with my whole spirit instead of just going on my phone and wasting my life for no reason. You want to go into the middle of your mind, but actually you have to go to the bottom, and you have to if you're gonna if you actually are going to change the kind of jellyfish formation of your spirit, you have to start with your body and your environment and go like, okay, well, what can I do to keep my body healthy? And not like healthy and like uh again, not like long-term goals, but just like could I do something I'd physically enjoy? It's like, could I fucking stretch? Could we start with that? Could we start with a a singular stretch? Instead of trying to put my phone down and solve a major problem in society, could I actually perhaps, you know, instead of putting my phone all the way down, could I switch to an app that I only need to listen to and then maybe do some stretches? And like when you do that, you put the bottom of your mind in a different place. And it causes the rest of your thought to um flow up in a different place. And so I kind of think of that process as like a like a jellyfish, like kind of um I'm doing like a motion with my hand, like a jellyfish motion with my hand. Like you're kind of you're planting your feet somewhere else so that your head will rise somewhere else. Do you know what I'm doing saying is this mean anything to any of you? Let me know in the comments. Okay. Anyway, that's just some shit I've been thinking about. You know? If you even care, that's just what's been on my mind, I guess. Um what else? Music Watch. What's going on in Music Watch? I haven't gotten any recommendations recently from the Cherry Queen Bee. She's been on the grind. I'll tell you, here's a here's a reward for those of you who listen to the show. Um, yeah, there is gonna be another merch drop along with the album, and it's it's gonna go hard. It's gonna be awesome. It's I mean, I think it's cool. I think they're neat. I really like this small batch merch. I would like in the future to have a little bit more dominion over the back end of it all, and I'm not sure if there's like a way to do that that's realistic and responsible for the frequency that we're doing this. It's a little weird because like I don't know how much. I'm sure there's a solution to such problems, but I'm just not sure if it's worth everybody's time to figure it out if I'm not gonna be doing that much merch. But people seem to like them, and I really like them, and I really like that we're using materials that are already out there in the earth as opposed to making new bullshit. I'm not opposed to making new bullshit every once in a while, but I really d bristle at the idea that I should be making it um frequently, because I just don't really see a benefit and it feels kind of wasteful. Um, I don't know. But right now we're using Depop and it's like it's working. It's working right now. I just in the future I'm trying to decide if I'm gonna be doing little intermittent merge drops like this um often enough that I should really lock in and come up with a more elegant solution. Um, but yeah, so no music recommendations from the Cherry Queen Bee this time. She's always fucking listening to Oasis, so I guess that's like a perma recommendation, whatever. She doesn't listen to this, but I don't know. I was posting about Pacific Purgatory again. I was posting about Wargasm because it goes hard and it's awesome. So you know, that's my follow-up recommendation. I mean, what can I say? I think it's neat. I think it's neat, I think it's cool. Um I did I did post that fucking thing on my story the other day about how furries control the GDP of this country and they and they use the word facial recognition and and they make their own like uh porn and propaganda. I said that confidently on my public account, and I said that you should be watching furry news the way that you listen to NPR. And I was only most like I'm like obviously I'm kidding, but I'm only kind of kidding. And I have a whole thing, nobody wants to hear my like my hot takes on furries, because it's not particularly interesting if you don't know anything about furries. And if you do know things about furries, then you think that I'm like actually too distant to really know what I'm talking about. And everyone who thinks either of those things is correct, just a cop to that immediately. Um, but I have long held that the reason it's so convenient to dunk on furries is not because they're doing anything that different from other weird niche communities, but because they threaten popular institutions that there's elements of the f look, there's elements of the furry economy that is like self-sustaining, and that's a threat to a lot of institutions in our modern world. And I I have like a pet conspiracy theory that I like kind of think, I don't even know where I want to fucking go with this, but I I would not be surprised if we learned, within my lifetime, I would not be surprised if we learned that there were active smear campaigns against furries being paid for by like large gatekeeping institutions that don't want people to be making and selling their own art on the scale, on the sheer magnitude that we're seeing furries do it. And look, I'm not I've been online. I've been online. I've seen a lot of furries do a lot of things that I'm like, I wish that was not the case. That's really that's really scary to behold. Um, but I've also seen a lot of non Do a lot of scary shit that I don't want to behold. And I think that when you have weirdos, like weird little freaks, doing something that happens to step on the toes of like a, you know, like a Walt Disney, for example. And then suddenly, like, all the content on your feed is like, I'm not gonna I'm cutting this part out. Whatever. What genuinely whatever. Anyway. What have I been listening to or watching? I read a book this month called Football. Football by Chuck Klosterman, which is unheard of for me, because I don't watch football. I hardly watch any sport ever. I'm like a high octane nerd with no athletic interest for the most part. But, you know, secretly I've always been kind of interested in what the fuck is going on in the football world because I care about keeping an eye on trends in society. Like I like to know I'm a big believer in um following the attention and just like being willing to accept that people are paying attention to something for a reason and not for no reason, you know? Like this is important to me in my music life. I embrace music that people think is cringe if it hits, right? Like, if I'm gonna be serious about that, I have to kind of apply that same um willingness to bite the bullet to sports. The problem is just that I don't really care about sports, so like I'm willing to acknowledge that sports are cool. I just can't get on the level. And so this book caught my attention because I was like, alright, football, for sure. Um and it's it was really, really good. It was, I really loved this book, and I I would recommend it to you guys, actually. I would recommend football by Chuck Klosterman. Um, because here's my here's what's cool about it. As someone who knows literally jack shit about football, it was approachable to me and helped me understand what about football and sports in general like touches the soul for people who really are all about it. And I felt like that was a really refreshing read. Because it's hard when you really love something and you're trying to explain what you love about it to someone who's not in that world at all. It can be really tough to give an honest account of what you love in a way that is intelligible to an outsider while also not being defensive, while also not selling your passion short. And I thought he did a really good job. I felt I think there are a lot of things about football, and just as a side note, he means football. He means American football. It's not it's not like secretly soccer. And he has a whole thing that he talks about. He he addresses head-on that it's weird that we call it football. I don't know. I thought I thought it was a really interesting read, and I thought it answered a lot of my questions about football that I wouldn't probably ask someone because I wouldn't want to come off insulting. For example, I don't understand why this is fun and why do you care? Like, I wouldn't say that to somebody because I don't want to be a dick, but he answered it, which was refreshing and cool. Um, so yeah, I don't know. I think it's really neat. And I know a lot of you guys are probably like nerds. Um, and so maybe you will like this as well. Because I feel like on the nerd jock continuum, I'm so far towards nerd that it kind of felt to me reading this book, I had the epiphany that maybe I can't jock my way into sports and I have to nerd my way into sports. Like if I'm gonna get interested in sports and enjoy them for fun, I'm gonna have to do it the way I do everything else, which is intellectually first. That's not good per se, but perhaps if I were to accept that it's true, then I could be someone who enjoys watching a fucking sports game, you know what I mean? And then I could like be normal and chill at the function. Wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't that be something to hang out with my friends who love sports and to be able to like focus on the fucking screen instead of going on my phone like an iPad baby? Wouldn't that be cool? This book I feel may help me on such a journey. Also, worth noting that this book is the second book I've encountered in the past year that uses the phrase the word epiphenomenon, and the first book was Gürtel Escherbach. So that alone should tell you that this is a particularly interesting book about football. Um anyway, so that's uh media watch, I guess. We're back again for um Pacific Purgatory, and we're yeah, football by Chuck Klosterman. Um one more thing I'll also say is that while we received no music recommendations from The Cherry Bee, uh she did like that new movie Um The Drama is that what it was called. I actually haven't seen it yet, I'm waiting to go with my friends, but um The Bee said it's good. Or that I should see it, which is actually a different thing. So maybe that's not a recommendation because sometimes she just thinks that I need to see movies, and it's it's more about me than about the movie, um and our uh creative discussions. But yeah. What else? I rewatched Melancholia recently, and I rewatched Horse Girl, some of my favorites, classics. Not a new recommendation, not even a recommendation per se, because some of you guys would hate those, but I think they're great. I also re- Oh, here's a good one. I rewatched Creep recently, which is one of my favorite horror movies too, because it's one of the only horror movies I've seen that has a male final girl. Creep is a really good horror movie because it separates sex from the horror trope, and it's really interesting because I love horror movies, so I've seen a lot of them, and I've seen how it plays out, and almost always part of the part of how they signal that the final girl is the final girl, is that they put her in some kind of um sexually violent peril. She's like uh vulnerable in a literal sense, but she's also like vulnerable and demure like as a woman. And what's cool about creep is that that's not what's happening at all. It's like and it's also not like a disaster movie, like it is the classic I guess this is a spoiler, but whatever, lock in. And it's good regardless, so whatever. But it's like a classic serial killer type movie, but then instead of having discomfort caused by a guy who is like either manipulating or transgressing against like a beautiful woman or whatever, instead of that, all the transgressions are like social, like man-to-man social. That's just fucking weird. Why does he act like that? And I just think it's really interesting and cool. It makes me feel really icked out um and nervous in a way that I thought was really poignant. Part of what works and is interesting about the serial killer trope when it comes to the classic horror movie, horror story of like this girl is getting pursued by a guy, but surprise he's a killer, is like the ambiguity between creepy guy who's not a problem and creepy guy who's a fucking problem. And playing in that gray area, I feel, is like how the horror movies of that kind work. I don't know, like imagine like a scene in a movie, and I'm just like making this shit up, but like imagine a scene in a movie where um a man is courting a woman in a bar, and she says, like, oh hey, I'm going home after this, and he says, Oh, do you live around here? Like, the reason that that would work in like a horror movie is because it's a scary question if he's evil, but if you have a crush on him and the night has been going really well otherwise, you might actually secretly want him to kind of like know if you live in the area because you'd like to see him again. And like that ambiguity and the fear of making the wrong call as the woman, I think, is like part of why those kinds of stories work. And like the horror stories like that will do a lot with that. Um, and it's important that the transgressions kind of ramp up. So, like, oh, he asked, oh, do you live around here? And you're like, okay, that's a slightly he's that's not a neutral statement. He is kind of asking me for more proximity or um, yeah, like more closeness, more intimacy. But if I'm into that, then that's a welcome transgression. That's like, oh, you know, he's crossing the boundary he's crossing is the boundary between people who don't know each other and maybe would like to, as opposed to a version of a transgressive boundary that is a boundary you don't want crossed. Like, this is a man I don't want to know where I live, and he's asking to know where I live. And like a lot of getting to know a new person is about figuring out which boundaries are good to cross and which boundaries are not good to cross. And like we're we're social animals, we're very attuned to when people willfully miss these cues. And I think we want to be polite, and maybe particularly women, although I'm not even sure that's true, but we want to be nice and give the benefit of the doubt, so we'll let it slide a few times in the name of being social and pleasant and agreeable. Someone asks a personal question and you kind of give them an easy out. Someone um says something a little like uh intimate about your appearance, and you're like, yeah, but I don't want to be a dick, and I think he means well, so I'll I'll I'll be cordial and I'll choose to take that the inoffensive way or whatever. But like at a certain point in a horror movie or in a scary situation in real life, after enough little transgressions, if they're not welcome, if they're not reciprocated, if someone is pushing your boundaries and they're not boundaries you want pushed, and you've given a lot of signals that that's the case and they've pushed like 10 of them, it there's like a thing that happens on like the 11th boundary where it's not just that they pushed your boundary one more time, it's that you realize they don't care, or that in fact they like that they are making you uncomfortable, and it retroactively makes all the other boundaries they crossed more scary and unwelcome. So, like the first 10 times this guy is like, you know, asking you a personal question or saying something um that is more intimate than your guys' relationship allows. Take the example of like a woman in a bar, in a movie, who's like maybe interested in this man, but he's being a little bit too forward, or maybe she's not interested, but she her mind could be changed if he were nice, but he's not being nice, he's being fucking weird, or whatever the vibe is, like this dynamic. Um, I feel like I've seen a lot of movies where they do a really good job highlighting the horror of the 11th transgression. There were 10 other little things that you let slide because maybe you did think he was cute, or maybe you wanted to give the benefit of the doubt, or maybe you were around your friend. There's all these reasons why it makes rational sense in the moment to choose to be forgiving. But there's a certain limit where we'll call it the 11th, the 11th transgression reveals something about the source of the transgressions. The 11th one tell teaches you that not only did this person push you and make you uncomfortable, ask you a nosy, unwelcome question, or you know, maybe make physical contact. Oh, he let his leg touch your leg or whatever little thing. Like, not only is that last thing unwelcome, and you're like, hmm, I don't care for that. I'm gonna choose not to accept this bid for getting to know me better, um, but it retroactively makes the other fucking ten things scary. Not just unwelcome, but scary because you you see now, you have information now that would have caused you to act different the other ten times. If you knew on Transgression 1 that this guy was actually enjoying making you feel um uncomfortable, if you knew that the first time, you wouldn't have given him the benefit of the doubt, and you wouldn't have chosen to be social and polite. You would have been more rigid in your kind of get the fuck away from me. So it's like creepy. It creeps you out. It it gives me the feeling of like um when you're staring at you're kind of like zoning out, looking at something and you don't really know what you're seeing, and then when your eyes focus, it's a bug, and you're like, oh my god. And it's like it's creepy not just because there's a bug, but it's creepy because there was a bug the whole time and you didn't know. And ew, you know? The feeling of retroactive anxiety and retroactive fear. Of like, not only is there something now, but there was something all along. In the past, I chose to proceed as if there wasn't a threat and I was right to be afraid, which makes you feel like you can't relax in the future because last time I relaxed, I was mistaken, and that's how anxiety works. And that's why horror movies are so fun. And that's why I love the movie Creep, because it's able to create that tension of transgression outside of a romantic, heterosexual context. It's it's all social friend transgressions, which are so creepy and so icky and so hard to nail the way that they nailed. So anyway, alright, that's the intro. Oh my god, I've been like yapping and yapping. I've been I've had a lot to say today. Sorry. Woof. Alright, on to your questions. Okay. Uh AT, uh not seal, says, Hello, Penny. I'm AT, December 29th, He Vay High Schooler. Lately, I have been having this dread of finally being an adult and being able to be my true self, being a notably different person than my parents, being queer, I don't know, I can't pinpoint it really, and not being able to relate and connect with all of the people of my past, whom I cherish or don't have a bad relationship with. But I feel like this is also a very common experience, if not universal. Is there anything that the NPC can tell me about this? Also for a music rec, Jenna Popstar Balloonist, especially uh uh especially Paris shirt. Okay. So you've been having this dread of finally being an adult, being able to be your true self. Yeah, so I feel like there's a few things going on here. Um the unseal represents like unresolvable paradoxes, unknowable truths, unprovable truths, things that you know were true that you can never prove are true. For me, I almost think of the unseal as being like a representative of the feeling of anxiety. Like really the feel- the experience, both mundane and profound, of just going like, this is uncomfortable. I can feel in my body that I don't know the answer. Which is scary. Like it's scary, it is uncomfortable. But I feel like you have a couple things going on here where you have that feeling, like you you are, it's your sign, it's this phase of life you're in, it's this experience you're having, this like all these things are kind of centered around this fundamental uncertainty. But then you also are kind of stacking more puzzles on top that are, I think, adding to the distress in a way that is not necessary. Um, you have this dread of finally being an adult and not being able to relate and connect with people of your past. Like, one response to this is that that's possible. Like, that might happen. It might be that as you grow, you know, your relationships will change and you might outgrow some of them. But that you can't do anything about that. Um, and I think a lot of our anxiety at big pivotal moments like this is the is because we think we can control more than we can and we're not focusing on the shit that we can control. And it's true that you can change your behavior to preserve relationships that you are afraid of outgrowing. But just because you change your behavior, that doesn't actually mean that you are changing the circumstance itself. Because the circumstance is that your natural growth may diverge from your existing relationships. That's the that's the unseal in this situation. That's the unbearable, unknowable truth, the thing that can't be that you can't wrap your mind around, and yet it's true. The presence of the unseal that I see here in your question is that you will change, and it's impossible to know exactly how the change that you go through will affect your existing relationships and dynamics. And that's just true. But what do you do with that, right? So now we can go to your compliment, the seal, and think about reality and good enough. Given that there is this um anxiety, this change that you're thinking about as you grow into yourself, and given that there are unknowable future paths before you, what can your compliment, the SEAL, offer to you in terms of like what you can do day to day? I can tell you a couple things that that people in your situation commonly do that the SEAL would caution us against. Um, one option you have before you is you can self-sabotage and fuck your shit up so bad that you don't grow into the person you're meant to be and you don't outgrow your friends. And if you think about that in those terms for longer than a second, it will become immediately clear that that's not a path that you should choose to take. The truth is that we don't know how our relationships will change as we change. And trying not to change doesn't work. And saying that phrase in that tone of vo like in that phrasing is a very SEAL thing to say. Cause it's it's like I can't prove what I'm saying, but I'd just- I'm just like eyeballing it based on life and experience. And I would encourage you to do the same, to just like, you know, not spiral out of control, not compare all sorts of bullshit, and not trying to find definitive proof for what you should do, but just look at your life and eyeball it and go, does do I think intuitively, as a reasonable person, that it makes sense to self-sabotage and feed into rumination and dread in a subconscious attempt to stop myself from reaching my full potential as I see it, so that I won't outgrow people who are themselves also on a growth path and moving through the spiritual realm. No one is fixed. So if you try to stop yourself from growing, to keep yourself from outgrowing your friends, don't be surprised if they grow even as you kind of try to artificially stay still. Um I mean that doesn't even make any even saying that is like so trippy and abstract. Like all of these ideas about growth and your path, these are this is all bullshit. And it's fine, it's useful bullshit. It's like bullshit that we need in order to conceptualize our lives. But these are all like stories about the future. It's not really happening. What's happening is the present. And in the present, you're a human animal and you're nervous and you really care about your relationships and you're kind of anxious about them. That's what's happening now. And that's really all you need to worry about. If you just behave responsibly towards yourself and your relationships now, eventually now will become later. So you don't granted the dread the dread may not be under your control, but I would be suspicious that I for me when I'm feeling the dread that you're describing, it's evidence that I'm trying to solve something that there's no reason to believe can or should actually be solved. And at a certain point you have to cut yourself off and say, it's possible that this is solvable, but I'm not going to continue spending my time trying to find out. It's not worth it to me. The cost is too high. I have other shit to do. I'm I'm missing my life worrying about this. Um is this a common experience? Is it universal? I think aspects of the thing you're talking about. Talking about are certainly universal. I I think that the feeling you're feeling is probably something that many people, if not everyone, have some experience with. That your specific concerns, your specific experience is entirely your own. But but yeah. It's tough. It's interesting too, because you don't really have a a question here. You just want to know what the NPC can tell you, which I think which I think is weirdly the right way to go about it, because there's not really anything to do. Because nothing's wrong. What you're describing isn't a problem, you know? It's just a thing you're going through. So there's nothing to solve. It's interesting. This real there really is no problem in this question. Which is good. I think that's a that's a good true account of what is happening, is that there isn't anything wrong. You're experiencing something uncomfortable. And yeah, I think it is probably very common, but it's still happening to you. What's happening to you is still happening, and that's scary. And then your neighbors, so you're eight, so one and seven. Um one is dog, which I like for you. Dog is all about getting in touch with your body and your social reality. Um I think it's important, especially when we're anticipating change in the future, to not um confuse our imagined ideas about the possible future of our friendships with the current experience of our friendships. Like, I think you should take take some care to not drag the future into the present or the fut the present into the future. Like be a friend and uh enjoy your friend's company now. But don't try to use the present to like make the future certain because it's not gonna work. The future isn't certain. So you can't, for example, like here's something not to do. Don't start acting uh super high pressure and hostile in your friendships to try to force your friends to understand the severity of the situation and prevent a situation in the future in which you guys grow apart. Don't try to don't sacrifice the present friendship to try to prevent something in the future that you're scared of that is ultimately not up to any individual. Um I think is a a dog-coded caution. And also dogs always, dog logic always asks you to just like literally check in with your body, um, which is a good practice in any question that contains the word dread, you know. Um I always used to say, I guess we're let's go to your angel now, because the angel is all about the out there and like the beautiful ideas of the world and poignant, poetic visions that struggle to integrate into reality. When I was a kid, I always described the dread or the void, and I would talk about these like profound experiences of like dread. And now I talk about anxiety, which is a much more clinical way to put that. And I'm not sure it's not the same experience. I'm not sure it is the same experience. Who knows what I was feeling when I was 14. But um I do think that there's I think that any experience like that, the experience of dread, you know, that thing you're going through, whatever that flavor of feeling is, like, there's a lot of ways to describe it. And you can reduce it to anxiety. You can also puff it up into a spiritual experience of dread and assign all sorts of meaning to it. And like maybe it has some meaning or there's like use in interpreting your feelings in these mystical, interesting ways, but I do think that it's important to consider that there isn't an inherent meaning to many feelings. A cautionary piece of advice from the angel here is to consider the fact that the story you're telling yourself about why you feel uncomfortable may be just one possible interpretation. And the angel does this a lot. She gets very caught up in the visions and abandons her body and pursued the story about what's going on up off the globe, and she gets very crazy, is her arc. Be cautious that that's not what you're doing. When you say that you've been having this dread of finally being an adult and being able to be your true self and not being able to relate and connect with people of your past, that may well be what's happening. But when you feel that feeling, maybe it's worth it to take a moment and consider the possibility that these are separate things. You are experiencing dread and you don't know for sure why, right? Because we don't know for sure why we feel what we feel. You can treat the dread separate, I guess is my my point. Like, um if there's nothing if there's nothing concrete to be done about the situation, you know? Does it make sense? Does uh I feel like I could have been clearer about that point, but I'm not really sure how to phrase what I want to say. But I guess my my read of the angel's advice is just yeah, to like put a little bit of distance between the story about why you feel anxious and the true fact that you are experiencing anxiety. Because sometimes the story makes you feel worse and then you've created a loop and that's no good. Yeah. And also, you know, the angel is a romantic at heart and believes that you should follow your passions and your true divine calling at all costs, which is kind of a listless and frequently unstable way to live, but is like a beautiful idea to keep in the back of your mind, and I think kind of applies to what you're saying here, that you're gonna you're gonna get this divine opportunity to be a grown-up and be your true self, and that's worth whatever it takes, I guess. You know? Like that this thing you're excited about, you might be having anxiety because it's so important, because it is close to the the the um divine. I think a thing I've been thinking about when I think about like the angel framework of the world and spirituality, and I've been like just thinking a lot about in my personal life, is that anxiety is um directly linked to passion and care, like giving a shit. Like, I mean, I noticed this for me. Like when I'm depressed, when I'm kind of like anodonic and like not locked in and don't really give a fuck about anything, I'm very low anxiety typically. Because what's there to worry about? I don't care what happens, but when I'm going through a creative phase, anxiety is sky high. And I think it's very normal as a human being to look at that and go, that's so unfair. Why can't I just be passionate and locked in and have no anxiety? And it's like, I don't know why, when I put my foot in the air, are all my toes also raised? Maybe because these things are like fucking mechanically related. You know what I mean? So, like, yeah, here's another thing I'd say about your thing. You're saying lately I've been having this dread of finally being an adult and being able to be my true self and not being able to relate and connect with all the people in my past. Another read from the angel side of the horoscope is maybe like this anxiety you're feeling is the confirmation that what you're moving towards is worthwhile and important on like a spiritual scale, you know? It doesn't mean the anxiety is more or less true or that the specific things you're worried about are more or less likely to happen, but it does mean that anxiety is not a problem to solve, it's a symptom of getting close to things that actually fucking matter to you, you know? Which takes some of the heat out of it in my experience. Because instead of being like, oh no, I'm nervous, I did something wrong, everything's gonna fall apart, you're like, oh, I'm really scared because I'm I'm doing something that is serious to me. You know? And I mean, I don't know what specifically you're doing, but growing up is serious, serious business. So um, yeah. Okay, great, next question. Okay, we've got a message from Nerve Clump from the last episode, or sorry, the first podcast episode, um, who said, Hi, I'm the Nerve Clump that was on the first podcast episode. I just wanted to make an update for you and the podcast here. Awesome, okay. First of all, thank you so much for your advice. It genuinely helps much. Awesome. I'm so glad that I'm glad that I'm not giving horrible advice, because I really am just kind of rambling sometimes. Okay. Then you said, right now I'm staying out of my girlfriend's business and looking at my relationship with Jet. My goal is just to feel pleasant in our friendship and to weed out anything unpleasant when it comes up. Most importantly, my goal is to lock the fuck in at school and keep my room clean, because your girl was too focused on moral and social mumbo jumbo bullshit to realize she was failing and living in Phil's LMAO. I feel that. Be the fuck too, dog. Um, and you said. The NPC really helped me realize how idealistic I can be. I relate to the spirit angel so much. Um, but that doesn't take away from the fact that I am a machine. I have a lot of needs that should be met. Being moral, spending time with my girlfriend, not overwhelming myself with social events, that I put together to create a desired outcome, feeling good. My problem so far has been that I focused on being moral and tried to neglect everything else. I guess just because I was scared that if I focused on anything else, I'd end up doing something horrible. Okay, we'll come back to that. In retrospective, I feel a little dumb. Like I lit a house fire, called it a toaster, and when people questioned why I didn't just build a normal toaster, said, well, what if it wasn't hot enough? Like, I don't know, bro, your house is burning down, the toast tastes like shit now, you suck. Anyways, that's it for now. I might write in again with a text that's shorter, lol. This became a real text wall. Seriously, thanks for going through that. Oh great, okay, cool. Yeah, I love the update. That's so funny. Uh yeah, your thing about and that's right, NPZ machine, nerve clump. That's right. You're the machine, the system. Um and relating to the angel, I mean, me too. I mean, I really relate to the angel. Although less so lately. I feel like I feel like my adolescence was really defined by the fr uh the thoughts and feelings that I now associate with the angel framework. Um I was very caught up. What the fuck was I gonna go back for? Oh right, yeah. You you've described kind of the machine of this situation as you've constructed it here, which I I like. And I also what you've said uh up top about your goal is to lock the fuck in at school and keep your room clean. Um I think is uh good. And I also really like here where you say you're staying out of your girlfriend's business looking at your relationship. Your goal is just to feel pleasant in the relationship and weed out anything unpleasant when it comes up. The when it comes up, I think is a good way to think about it. And um I I like the phrasing here. Um, but this thing too of uh I guess I is just because I was scared that if I focused on anything else, I'd end up doing something horrible. This is a very common refrain in OCD world, and um possibly beyond, but I wouldn't know because I live in OCD world, so I don't know what the rest of you people are fucking talking about. But um this concept of like worrying about something, and usually like particularly being good, like being morally good, being morally pure and not making any fuck-ups. When you do a thing like that, you obsess about a thing like that to a degree that is like detrimental to your well-being. And when people point that out to you, or when you figure it out and try to take a step back, the fear is if I let go, how do I know I won't do something horrible? There's two things that's interesting about that. The first thing that's interesting about that is that the horrible thing that we do often comes from the dysfunction, which comes along with being obsessive. Obsessive, that's by the time you get a diagnosis for OCD, you already, you already hit a threshold of dysfunction. You're not getting the diagnosis because you're such a good person and everybody's jealous. You're getting the diagnosis because you're acting like a disaster and you're fumbling your tasks and you're having um your vibes are bad and you're not happy. And all those things are true because you're afraid to let go of control, but in fact, you're not in control. That's what's so interesting about it, is like from a um, from like a, I don't know, like a cybernetic perspective. Like from a perspective that's like not even personally invested, but just like looking at the machinery of how this kind of dysfunction works in your life. I think it's really interesting that you, when you're in the trenches obsessing about some bullshit, you really feel like I have to do this obsessing because if I take my eye off the ball, one when I relax, everything will go fucking bad. Or I open, I open the possibility for things to become evil and it'll be my fault because I relaxed. Meanwhile, the very fact that you won't relax is itself the dysfunction. So you're protecting against it's really weird. It's really, it's really like trippy. You're you're bracing against something that you are doing. It's like you have your hands pressed against each other and you're like, if I relax, my right hand will push my left hand over. And it's like, my brother in Christ, these are both your hands. If you relax, nothing will happen. The force is coming from all directions because of you. So if you chill, the equilibrium will be maintained in a sense. You know what I mean? Which is, I mean, you know, I don't know. That's like kind of a tangent because that's related to like the concept of OCD and dysfunction. That's not really about your story, but it just made me it was interesting. It made me think of it. Because because of your phrasing, you're scared that if you focus on something else, you'll end up doing horrible. It's like, it's interesting that you always think, not you, but like one, like when you're freaking out anxiety-wise about moral scrupulosity, it's interesting how in your mind, like, you are the person who may not relax because you recognize yourself in the first half of the sentence as having agency and needing to protect. But in the second half of the sentence, when you say, when you say I can't relax because what if I do something evil, the second I, it's like, so you won't have agency then? So right now at the beginning of the sentence, I can't relax. Because at the end of the sentence, what if I do something horrible? It's almost like it's two different versions of what you think you are. Like you, in the first half of the sentence, you think that you're responsible. You're an agent. You're responsible for the situation, you're an actor, you're a stakeholder, you have a body and a mind, and you do things. And in the second half of the sentence, it's like it's you talk about yourself like you're possessed. What if suddenly I do something that I don't want to do? It's like, huh? What? What is that's such a like loaded metaphysical claim that anxiety will just drop on you out of nowhere apropos of nothing. It's so crazy. It's really interesting to think about. But not instead of cleaning your room, which is where I struggle. So, Godspeed. And thank you very much for the update. Our next question is from Kenzie, the woman, who says, Hello Penelope. I was born on August 11th, so my sign, I believe, is the woman. I have a question that to me is pretty urgent. This year I'm graduating high school and I would like to know if I should leave home right after I do. I want to be a different person when I come back. In truth, I never want to come back. If I am successful, then I will not want to go to college in the fall. My life has been mapped out for me by my family. My sister has made this life plan for me that involves law school and a whole lot of other things that I've just realized I really do not want to do. There are a lot of stories I've read in school about young men who hate their stuffy upper middle class lives and run away to find themselves, like Into the Wild, The Catch from the Rye, or Chase Motorcycle Diaries. I resonate with these kinds of stories deeply, but the genre is very male. I've always felt insecure about the idea of my own journey because I am a girl. I made myself very miserable in high school, and I never had any time for myself until this year. I applied to colleges that my mom and sister wanted me to go to, and I now have learned that I would be miserable at those schools. And the less competitive schools I applied to, I know I would hate as well because I'd feel like a failure at them. I would be a failure to my family. My family would only have me go to a competitive school, and if I don't get into one, then they'll put me in a community college so I can transfer into a competitive school. In truth, I know that I will be able to do what I want in life. My family cannot always control me. But I still feel so stuck. My senior year has been dull and boring because everything is moving at a snail's pace. I'm so restless. It feels like my body is being torn apart so my soul can crawl out. I know that what I want in life isn't at any college. The day after I graduate, I want to pack my things and get in my car so that I can leave and never come back. I want to rebuild the idea of what my life can be. What should I do? I have a plan that I'm confident in, but spiritually speaking, am I just acting like a stupid teenage girl? Kenzie. Okay. Sorry, I had to fix the microphone. Okay. Um, well, first and foremost, I think that your sign um maps on very well to this question. And uh right, so here, let's go let's go to the website, let's go to the NPZ site and read your description. Um the woman can also be called the first person or the man, as in mankind, but defaults to feminine because the NPZ uses primarily feminine symbolism. The woman is generative. She's the first computer, she's the mother and the child, the foreground and the background. She's a parsing participant and a parsed subject. Living in the wake of countless nuanced and contradictory stories, standards, and ideals, the woman is always ironic and yet always genuine. She must divine her Freudian slip. She must define her sense of self self against a tapestry of fables, some flattering, some degrading, all smaller than her reality. Each idea of the woman captures a piece of her essence, but none is capable of telling her fortune. Okay, we'll come back to that. The aesthetic is red blood, soft skin, domestic machines, hesitation, courage, imperfect fruits, bows on objects, awkward charisma, quiet moments of growth, lush green forests, lived in rooms, ambivalent passion, the finite scale of a human life, the gruesome divine, and sets of objects which are curated and arranged in such a way that just by looking at them you can feel the gentle, desperate soul of the person to whom they belong. So your question is really interesting because you are in a much more concrete sense. Um sometimes we like connect your guys' questions back to an MPZ sign, and it's like, oh, in a way, you know, if you really think about it, but your situation is different because you are actually living your life against a tapestry of stories told about you by people who are not you. That's your issue, actually. So it's really interesting that that works. Um, and it's also interesting that you feel kind of uncomfortable with the gendered aspect of it, that you feel like, oh, because I'm a girl and these stories are typically so male, what if I don't really fit the mold of the hero that I identify with? Meanwhile, the experience of worrying that you don't fit the mold that you see for yourself is what those stories are about. Like that's um it's interesting that I think all of us, no matter the circumstance or gender, like we all have moments where we're like, I don't know if I'm you know what I've been thinking about lately, the version of this has been showing up in my life is like I've been thinking to myself when I feel like, oh, I don't know if I have it in me to do the task that I'm setting out to do. The the thing I catch myself the thing I catch myself thinking a lot. Sorry, I had like too much coffee, so I'm like talking a million miles a minute, is what are the odds that I'm the one who does this? Like I'll have an idea for a cool thing I want to do or something I think is worthwhile or worth pursuing, and I'll start to plan about how I can do it, and then I'll think like it's not gonna be me, right? There's no way it's gonna be me. I mean, look at my life, look at who I am. I'll think back at all the things about me that don't fit the story of who I think is gonna be the person to do. The thing that I'm imagining. But probability has nothing to do with it. Because, first of all, the past does not necessarily determine the future. And second of all, even if the past did determine the future, you wouldn't know it. Like there's two reasons that doesn't work. The first is because it it might not even be true that the past determines the future for sure, from any perspective. But even if it did, the amount of information you would have to have about everything in the world to make a reasonable prediction for the future is like astronomical. And when we're thinking about our lives, imagining that we can do that kind of calculation, it's really crazy because we're biased, we're one person, and we don't have that data at all. So when you're sitting around going, like, I don't, what are the odds that I'm gonna be able to pull this off? It's like odds? There's no set to draw on for the thing that you're asking. We can't run any tests on that. We can't make a whole other world and run it a thousand different ways and see how this situation turns out. Each moment is emergent. Um I do think that this that whole thing that I'm like rambling about, but also your specific crossroads, these are all very within the range of your sign. Like, because I feel like reading your message, you are telling a story. You are telling a story about what you want to do and what you see yourself doing. And then you're comparing it to like other stories that feel relatable to you, and you're saying, well, you know, here are the ways that I'm different from the people in these stories, so what if it doesn't work out for me? These stories are fiction. Like they're not I mean, obviously not all of them are actually fiction, but these stories that you're reading, whether they're literally fiction, like Catch from the Rye, or if they're like based on true events, or if they're written like in the present, like everything you write down is something you write in hindsight. Even if you eve okay. Even if you were to write down everything that happened to you in a day, as it happened to you, you would still have to pick which things you wrote, what you consider having happened, and you'd have to pick how you present it. That's kind of what writing is. You're like sorting out which things are important and how you would construct the story for someone else to understand later. Which I only bring up to say, like, you're trying to use stories that other people have written, picking through their experience with the gift of hindsight to paint a picture of what happened in a way that is like compelling and rings true. And you're also telling a story about your own life and what you want that is like you also are kind of sorting things and cre like creating a narrative of what is going on, which is fine. You kind of have to do that, but it's also causing you great angst because I feel like you're reading these stories and you're also constructing this story, and then you're looking at the stories and you're saying, you know, based on these stories, what will happen to me? And that isn't an answer that the stories have. Like, none of these stories can tell you the future. Um, the story you're telling yourself about yourself cannot tell you the future. The stories that your family is telling you about yourself cannot tell you the future, and stories that other people have written about their lives cannot tell you the future. The only way to find out what will happen is to show up to each moment, and then eventually you'll be in what is now the future, right? Which isn't an answer to your question, except for how it absolutely is. Like, it's not an answer to what you should do, but to your question, are you just acting like a stupid teenage girl? Um, you're going through the human experience. And yeah, being a stupid teenage girl is one iteration of the human condition. But like, you your thing isn't stupid. That's what life is. That's what life is. What you're doing is like uh maybe like the only thing a person can do. I fear like you're kind of sorting um information and experiences and trying to make sense of what you ought to do. Seems like exactly what you're supposed to be doing. Frankly, I feel like you're nailing it. Um, but you have to remember that the it that you're nailing is in the present moment. The thing that you're doing right is that you're alive and uncertain. But it's not like there's gonna be a right answer that's revealed to you that you'll know when you do it. Because no matter what you do, if you um if you pack your things and leave, if you decide not to go to college, if you decide to go to college, like you will have apprehensions and regrets no matter what you do, forever. So I think you can free yourself from the idea that there's a right answer and you'll be punished for failing to pick it. That's not true. Your compliment is uh one, the dog. Which I like for you. I I always like dog logic, especially those of you who are good storytellers. I think dog logic is important for you to keep in mind because dog logic asks us to check in with our bodies. You're making this like whole huge constructed idea of what the future looks like for you. And there's nothing wrong with that. You are at a time in your life where that's an important, meaningful thing to do. However, it is important to remember that the future is not happening now. What is happening now is that you're a living, breathing animal and you need to keep the trains running. You need to look, you need to think about your body and how you feel in it and ask yourself the boring, mundane, basic questions. Have you stretched recently? Have you had any water? Are you eating in a normal enough way? Are you experiencing physical distress that is heightening your psychological distress that you could easily resolve if you took some time away from the future tripping and did something in reality now? Also, the dog cares about like your social. Maybe a dog suggestion for you would be framing this problem completely as like what will you do later and what does that mean about your relationships now? Like, spend a little bit of time thinking about how you actually feel towards the various people in your life right now. And like, regardless of what you choose later, are there mundane improvements that you could maybe make to your close relationships now? I think people have a sense that they need to resolve everything before they leave, and you just don't. You don't need to resolve everything before you leave. Like you don't have to decide what the rest of your life is gonna look like with regard to your relationship with your family. You don't have to decide that in the next year. You actually don't have to decide it ever. You never have to decide that. Also, my chair is squeaking so loud and it's making me evil. I'm so sorry. I have to Okay. It's gonna be fine. Um, your neighbors are four and six. Um, just seal and machine. That's really interesting for you, in my opinion, because I feel like the seal and the machine are uh not egocentric signs. Neither of them are very concerned with the ego and like the individual narrative. Because the machine, the system is all about taking the first person perspective out of the situation and looking at it as if it were just like purely mechanical. Like if you weren't emotionally invested, how could you talk about what you're going through and make your desired outcome more likely? The seal is all about like natural boundaries, good enough. And both of these signs are like unconcerned with individual narratives about the self. Oh, okay, word. Whereas your question, your problem, and your sign are all very concerned with the individual narrative and the ego and kind of the tension that you have as like a person with a first-person account of your life. It's like uncomfortable for you to have a story that you are putting forth about yourself and to have other people like contradicting it and like not listening to you. And I feel like your neighbors are maybe offering an easy out, which is you know, it doesn't it doesn't matter what anybody thinks. It doesn't matter what you think, and it doesn't matter what they think. And of course it matters, but it doesn't need to be the only thing that matters. You know what I mean? It you don't it doesn't you don't have to put so much emphasis on whether or not you or other people are right about the story about your life. It's okay to have there be uncertainty and wiggle room there. But yeah. Please send an update. I would like to know. I mean, this is very interesting. And I also The mermaid is nowhere in your chart. Isn't that fucked up? That's that's crazy. Um and there's something you could say about that being a blind spot that you have. You have no relation to this sign, and that's why you're struggling with this principle so much. Maybe that's maybe that's the play here. But I want to tap into mermaid logic for you, apropos of nothing, and just say, you have created a whole serious binary here, and I don't think you have to. You're like, I just want to flag that, that you're saying, you know, either I follow this plan they have for me and I'm miserable and I hate it, or I don't, and I go do my own thing, and I'm abandoned, but I but I followed my dreams. And it's like, let's get the mermaid perspective in here for a second. Um, be suspicious always of all or nothing binaries, black and white thinking. Like, the truth is always somewhere in between. And no matter what you pick, there will be more choices that feel that same level of anxious and urgent. So to bring this into normal language for a second, like you could take a gap year. Or something. You know, whatever your specific life is like, there's always wiggle room. There's always, and there's always surprises that no one can account for. I mean, you know, and there's a lot of possibilities. And not all of the responsibility is on your shoulders to determine what will happen in your life. In fact, very little is under our control as individuals. We must give ourselves some grace about that, because you can't, it's already so it's already tough enough without um putting all sorts of pressure on yourself to know the unknowable and do the undoable. Like, uh, you know, maybe you'll go on some trip and you'll change your mind and you'll decide, maybe I'll give college a try. Like maybe I'll give one of the colleges that I got into a try. And like you show up, what if you love it? You know? What if you actually love it? Um, or maybe, maybe you hate it, but you stick it out for a year and then you leave and you do something else, and you go, well, I was fucking right. I super didn't want to do that. That sucked. I hated that. Or maybe, you know, maybe you do a year and then you do something else and then you come back, or you go, you transfer somewhere else, or um, you know, maybe you go for six months and you make all sorts of friends, but then you guys decide to do something completely unrelated to school. And it's like, okay, did you make a terrible mistake? Did you make the wrong choice? No, you just lived your life the best you could each moment, and you discovered in real time what was gonna happen. It's okay. That's there's actually nothing else you can do except for that. I think it's good to keep your options open. This is like career advice at this point, but like, I think it's good to keep your options open. I think it's good to give a lot of things a try. And I also think it's good to like not feel pressured to call it too early. You know? And your idea of what um your idea of what you want to do and what a full life means to you changes drastically over the course of years, but even fluctuates pretty drastically like day to day. So it's okay to not know for sure what you want to do. Um in fact it would be it would be weird if you were completely sure about anything at your age. So rest assured that that's normal. Um And this thing of like you have this dream to go on some great adventure. Am I just acting like a stupid teenage girl? I do feel that there is something gendered about the pressure that you're feeling, and I am very sympathetic to it. Because I do I do kind of think that like I hesitate to even say this because I've I've never been a boy, so I don't know what they're I don't know what they're experiencing over there. But it seems to me, based on my limited experience time on this earth, it it does feel like it's harder as a girl to commit to the bit. It does feel like I am more afraid of embarrassing myself by trying something unexpected than many of my male peers. Like, I feel like guys will just try some bullshit. It's not like they're not humiliated simply by the fact that they tried some bullshit. And I kind of am. I kind of I'm like, oh, I wanna take this class or learn this skill. And immediately I begin thinking, it's so embarrassing that I wanna do what? You're like a girl who does that? That's what's that like that's like your thing. You're like a girl who takes this class. You think you're gonna be some kind of like cool type of girl who does this activity? You're not. You're not even good at it. You don't even really like it. You're only doing this so that people will see you doing it. Which is irritating because, and I've talked about this with my female friends before, we are social animals. So everything you do in the institutional world is to some degree for attention and validation because being paid attention to and validated is how we fucking apportion attention in academia. It's like, oh what, you just wrote this uh research paper because you want attention and validation? You just want people to read it, that's why you wrote it. It's like, yeah, that's how we um understand and legitimize information in this world. I don't know what to tell you, dog. Yeah. Oh, you just contributed to your field because you wanted to be a part of it. You want to be a part. Yeah! That's why you do things. But if you're a girl, that's like embarrassing. It feels embarrassing. Feels embarrassing to want to make your mark because it's like, oh, you're only doing that for attention. I you know, yeah, I'm a social animal and I want to have some say consciously in what my identity is. And yeah, I'm only gonna know when I achieve that by how other people who I respect treat me. That's what it is Uh right? Right? Going back to dog logic, like imagine translating this bullshit, this anxiety, into like dog world. Like, imagine if dogs were like, Man, I really wanna run and chase that ball. I bet it would feel so good, but I don't want the other dogs to think that I'm only doing it so that they see how fast I am. I feel like that analogy sucks ass, dude. I have to think. Hold on, let me use my whole brain. Like it doesn't work. What what works? Well, because they're pack animals. So, like Yeah, here's a good example. So, like sometimes when dogs are like meeting each other, if one of the dogs like gets too sniffy with the other, like sniffs the other one's ears, the one who's being put upon will lash out. Um but sometimes if the first dog is like the alpha or like if the first dog is like in a position of authority over the second dog, the first dog can get away with some bullshit. And the second dog might acquiesce and be play nice because he knows the first dog is larger and scarier. Or or not. We don't know for sure what they're thinking, but this is like a thing you see on TV shows about dogs, or like at the dog park sometimes. You'll see like interesting social dynamics going on between the dogs. So, like, imagine if you were a dog and a larger, scarier dog who you respected and looked up to came over and was sniffing you, and you made the decision as a dog based on your instincts or whatever, to play nice, and maybe you maybe you roll over, maybe you show your belly. Imagine being that dog and thinking in your mind, this is so humiliating that I'm acting like this. I'm only doing this so that the other dogs see me and think that I'm socially aware. Like, who even am I really? That would be like very weird. And I don't I don't know what dogs are imagining, but I really doubt they're thinking that. You know? It's like, yeah, what it means to participate in society is defined to some degree by how your community sees you. So to bring this back to your last little blurb, day after I graduate, I want to pack my things in my car so I can leave and never come back. I want to rebuild the idea of my life and be what should I do? I have a plan that I'm confident in, but spiritually, am I just acting like a stupid teenage girl? And then that goes back to your thing before of I resonate with these kinds of stories deeply, but the genre is very male. I've always felt very insecure about the idea of my own journey because I'm a girl. Yeah, like it's like, oh, you just want to follow in the footsteps of these figures that you admire. Why? Because you want to be like that? Yeah, that's why I admire those people. Because we share similar values and aspirations. I don't know. I d yeah, you know, there is something very gendered about some of the anxiety that you're describing here. And I think it I think it's good to just identify that as like a distortion that we have as women. Like as women, it's we have certain blind spots, and I think one of them is that we're, especially modern, modern women, we're very cautious about like doing things for attention. But what's that fucking quote? Hold on. What's that horrible sad quote we find? Um uh yeah, Kierkegaard, marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way. What did he say? Yeah, marry and you will regret it, don't marry, you will also regret it. Marry or don't marry it, you will regret it either way. Yeah, like do it for the vine, you will regret it, don't do it for the vine, you will regret it either way. Like, go on an adventure, self-actualize, don't self-actualize, you'll regret it either way. Uh, follow in the footsteps of this male genre that you admire or don't because you're a girl, you'll regret it either way. Like, no matter what you do, you're not gonna feel sure that it was the right thing to do. Unless you do. Sometimes you do, but that only ever happens in hindsight. Anyway, good luck. I hope interesting things happen. Um, and yeah, don't put so much pressure on yourself to make a decision about your entire college career. I mean, you know, people come to college all different ways, all different energies, all different walks of life. It's fine. It's it's fine to like not be sure what your plan is immediately. You know, you might do other shit for years and then later decide actually I'm interested after all, I'd like to lock in and try to do school. Um and you might do school and then not finish or take a break. It's fine. Not an issue. I mean it might be harder, but just because something's harder doesn't mean that it's like not worth it, you know. It's like yeah, it's hard to um do things in untraditional or an uncertain way, but it's a lot harder than that, even, to live a life you hate. So you have to you have to take each day as it comes, I think. But a lot of people will tell you what they think is difficult, and I think as a general rule, you have to find out for yourself what you think is difficult. It might be a lot easier for you to do what you want than what you think you're supposed to. So anyway, I'm going on a tangent. Okay. Next question. Sophie signed the woman says. Hi Penny, I wrote to you for the last episode asking how you found your kind of music. I had another question if that's okay. I'm not sure if you've explained this yet, but how did you create the new Piniped Zodiac system? P.S. I have Harmo C D, so hearing you talk about your experiences with OCD is pretty cool as much as it sucks. Love Sophie. Cool. Um yeah, so the new Piniped Zodiac System, how did I come up with this? I mean I wish I remembered like when exactly I came up with it, but I just kind of I wanted there to be like a a diagram or a chart or something to go along with the songs and eras and stuff of water dogs because I really like there I want there to be like a coherent logic behind my stylistic decisions. I mean really I just kind of like zoned, I was just like thinking about it. I've just been I've just been daydreaming about this concept of the NPZ for a long time and sorting things throughout my day, and after a while I was like, alright, boom, there it is. You know, I don't know, uh, it's fine. Yeah, I mean I wanted there to be eight because I wanted it to match the number of songs on the album, um, and also because I thought eight was like a really good number for this whole thing. I like that I like I like the math of it on like a kind of vibe-based intuitive level. Yeah, I don't know. I wish I had more like information for you. It just feels neat. And I also, I don't know, so oh yeah, and Fear of God is coming out on the 24th, which is gonna be cool. I'm excited about that. Um I mean my favorite song on Fear of God is symbol manipulation, the last one. That one I really stand by and like. And I wanted there to be 10 on Fear of God because it just felt like the right number for that album in this era. Um, Water Dogs was very much like a light blue. It's actually the um complement to the color papaya whip, which will become important again in the near future, I think. And then uh fog, fear of God is like a light purple, which just seemed correct. I go through life and I just kind of I get a inkling that like, hmm, this color is about to be the right color for the era. And then I just try to remember that and incorporate it into everything. And then yeah, uh harm OCD, hearing me talk about OCD as much as it sucks. Yeah, OCD is a trip. OCD is funny, like I feel like I started having symptoms that actually affected my quality of life as like a preteen, maybe, and then I got diagnosed mid-COVID. Like I got diagnosed like uh maybe not mid-but like a ways into COVID at school, which was hilarious. I mean, I don't know I don't know how many of you guys have OCD or are on like the OCD meme pages. There was a joke going around when I was first diagnosed with OCD that was like my therapist saying that I don't need to follow my compulsions and that no one's gonna get hurt. Meanwhile, the government's ever every day the government's saying if you do not wash your hands ten times, your grandma will die. And I was like, yeah, yeah, absolutely. This is this seems good. It's really crazy. It's really crazy. OCD is so funny too because it's one of those things that like whatever you're obsessing about is the worst thing in the world, and then whatever you were obsessing about two years ago is like actually could not possibly matter at all. And it takes a while of just living life to really understand that pattern in an embodied way. But when you're like young and you don't have that experience, you're like, it's really crazy how different things make me evil every year. Isn't that weird? Doesn't it seem like it would be one thing that's resolvable in some way instead of always being a new reason I'm evil? But that's not how it works. That's not how it works. Everyone's always like, I wish I had your theme. Your theme seems really manageable. My thing sucks. And it's like, my brother in Christ, it's your own mind attacking you. There's no thing you it's it arises out of other functions. There's no if it's just very I I love it. I love I love talking shit about it. I love thinking about it. I think it's so amusing because you have these experiences that you think are like actually life or death, so serious. And many of them turn out to be just like mistakes, like uh kind of meaningless loops and confusions in how your mind works. I mean, it really is crazy that you can have just random anxiety, like maybe caused by something, but maybe not. And because of the kind of mind you have, suddenly it's a whole story. What why did I do that? It's so it's really a trip. Yeah. Harm O CD is a tough one. Uh, I mean, they're all tough, but tough to talk about because people get weird about it. Like you've never had a thought before. Be serious. Anyway. Next question. Uh Salem says, Hello, Penelope. I'm Salem. Any and all pronouns, I was born on the 28th of August. I think that makes my NPC sign a machine, though I'm unsure. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Let's find out. Yep, you're right. My question is about spirituality and my sense of self. Lately, I have been trying to reintroduce myself to spirituality and religion in a way I haven't before, away from any preconstructed system or group, etc. This has been a very turbulent process, and things have been changing rapidly. My opinions, beliefs, ideas, relationships. My struggle with the fact that there may not be one true answer, or perhaps even uncertainty in general, has been nothing but an uphill battle. So true. Despite some healing experiences here and there, overall, this exploration period has been exhausting. I keep getting burnt out as I try to create my own patterns and traditions. I feel the calling towards spirituality, like I need to explore things because there is a certain state, a state of peace and existential content I will get to. Since many things in my life are kicking my ass at the moment, and I think this said state will be the flip side of the coin. The best TM way to deal with death, grief, worry, and fear I'm experiencing right now, in a way. Obviously, there are things spirituality cannot and will not fix. That's simply not how it works. It's a crutch, a side dish, a supporting role, an item rather than the whole network itself. Because of this very same reason, I also think it's not a tool I'm utilizing to its full potential. So, I'm wondering, while I do understand, whenever someone tries to learn, experience, and deal with things differently, it will inevitably be difficult. What does my NPZ sign suggest I do with the spirituality I so desperately want to explore more of? What kind of approach should I take in view of the machine? And how can I use the power of belief rather than struggle with it? Hopefully this doesn't sound like a complete word salad, sometimes I don't make sense. We'll try to verbalize my thoughts. LMAO. Send from the hot garbage pile in which I fucking sleep. Sailor. Cool. Okay. Okay, those rules. Awesome. Yeah. So first let's start with your chart. Start with your sign. What we always do with the with the system is to imagine your problem or question or whatever as if it were purely mechanical, and if as if you and your ego and your um emotions were not involved, and then think, you know, in very neutral, cool-headed terms, what can you do to make your desired outcome more likely? Your thing is tough because your thing is kind of all about your individual experience and your feelings, but I we can still, you know, give it a try and think about it or think it through. So the machine would ask you, what is your goal? And if you can clearly define your goal, then you can start to think about what actions to take to bring you closer to that goal. One way you could phrase your goal based on what you've said here is that you want to feel better. Another thing you might identify as your goal is to learn more. But then you'd need to define what you mean by that. Do you mean consume more content about spirituality? Do you mean like like read about it more? Um, like what I guess the machine would ask you, you're burning yourself out, right? You're feeling like I'm looking for something and I'm not getting what I want. Are you able to write down what you want? Because if you're not, then you don't have any milestones to measure your spiritual journey by. And that can be really disheartening and stressful. And because this is something that I kind of relate to, and it's not unrelated to my dabbling with the NPZ, um, but I'll tell you one thing that I did. I have like a little meditation thing that I came up with um a while ago. It's a little meditation routine that I'll do when I try to do it like about once a week, but I'm constantly slacking and um getting distracted. But part of it is journaling and journaling with a specific format. Like I have particular aspects of what I think my spirituality is that I choose to keep an eye on, and I make sure to check in with those particular same things each time. And I'll tell you why. It's not because I actually think that I know what the parameters of God are or whatever, like I this is just some shit I came up with. But I realized after a while of thinking of myself as like a someone who actually might care about spirituality, that like it is such an intangible thing with such intangible goals that it's really hard to have a sense of stability. Especially because, like you, I don't adhere to like a religion. I'm not going to church. I have no authority with my spirituality. There's no one. It's hard to get your footing when there isn't anyone that you are willing to answer to with regard to your spirituality. You have to make your own structure, which is stressful. But I think that picking arbitrary shit and making it a regular part of your practice is worthwhile. And it's worthwhile even if the thing you pick turns out to not be something you stand by. For example, this is not true to me, but let's just say. Let's just say that like there was a particular song that you put on every time you were doing whatever you chose to be your spiritual practice. You're like, this is it's it's Saturday, I'm gonna play this song in the background while I journal. This is this is my God song or whatever. Like, let's say you do that every week for a year, and you miss some, and sometimes you're out of town, and sometimes you're too tired, or whatever, but you more or less you do it with some regularity. At the end of the year, it's possible that you will think, this song doesn't belong in my spiritual practice at all. I mean, what the fuck am I doing? Why this? You can switch it out, it's fine. The importance of the thing is not the thing, it's the regularity, it's the structure. And you have to use things in your real world to create the structure, but the thing is not the point. The structure is the point. So, with that in mind, I would give you that advice kind of as machine logic, because I think that part of what you're asking is like mechanically, how do you do this? Burnout is a very like mechanical process, and it's like you're spinning your wheels and you're not getting anywhere. I think you need traction. Like, one way to add traction to your circumstance here is to create structure, create boundaries. And importantly, in order to have stability and structure on your spiritual journey, or your meditation journey, your mental health journey, or your whatever, whatever it is, however you want to phrase it, but you're phrasing it spiritual, and I'm inclined to agree with that. So, like, in order to have stability and structure in doing that, you have to define a structure. And then sometimes you will fail to meet it because you're human and that happens. And when you fail to meet it, if you want the structure to prevail, you need to choose to see yourself as having failed to meet your own standard. Because what you might be inclined to do, especially if you do not answer to anyone when it comes to your spirituality, um, when you have no spiritual authority that you like cower to, like, here's something that it's really easy to have happen. Um, imagine you decide on a spiritual practice, you're like, whatever, once a month I'm gonna do this activity, and that's that's me checking in with myself spiritually. Let's say you miss a month. Life gets busy, you know, or you just really don't want to, and you miss a month. When you come to terms with the fact that you missed a month, you didn't do whatever the thing is, you didn't meditate, you didn't go on your walk, you didn't go to the ocean, whatever the thing is, you didn't do it. It would be really easy to say, I didn't do it, and I don't have to do it. And I guess it doesn't matter that I didn't do it, because I don't even believe in any of this bullshit. And if I really wanted to do it, I would have done it. And it's like it's easy to like start um throwing the structure itself under the bus and go like I don't give a shit about this anyway. I mean, this isn't even real. And you're free to do that, like no one will stop you. But two things. First of all, when you do that, when you throw the structure under the bus, you get the short-term benefit of elevating your ego because you go, like, okay, I didn't fail. But what what that makes you an ego, it costs you instability because you have thrown the structure that you relied on to provide boundaries to your spiritual practice. You've thrown it under the bus, and now you don't get to have that, and that sucks. Is and it's not about like shame or like feeling bad about yourself. It's just about when your actions conflict with your values, will you acknowledge that conflict or will you change your values to match your actions? And I think when you do the latter, you become unstable and unhappy, which is no good. But here's a second thing that I'll propose to you, just because we're out in the weeds, and I think this all fits under machine logic because it's um it has to do with systems in general. So um, here's another thing though. There's a lot of things in modern society competing for your attention and competing for your impulses and wanting you to make decisions with the lizard brain that profit mysterious pools of money that we are not privy to. Like, so much of the modern world is about directing your attention without your permission. So when you when you set a standard for yourself or make a structure for yourself about whatever, your spiritual practice or your mental health journey, I'm gonna do this thing, when when you allow your short-term mood or your apathy or whatever to take you away from that, which again happens fucking all the time, no worries, happens constantly. But when you find out that you didn't act in the way that you said you were going to, and you change your standards to match your behavior, the double whammy of that is that frequently the part of the reason that you acted not the way you intended to is because of structures made by other people. So you think you're being this like punk anarchist who doesn't answer to anyone, and I just didn't feel like doing it today, so I didn't do it. And it's like, well, you didn't feel like doing it today, so you didn't do it. Fine, that could be self-actualization, maybe. But sometimes you didn't feel like doing it today, and the it that you didn't feel like doing was something you really wanted to do as your higher self, and you didn't do it today because other sinister forces took your attention away. And instead of acknowledging that conflict and allowing the conflict to be there and letting your values and your goals remain, you actually changed your values and goals to be more in line with behaviors that sinister forces are prompting you to do. You're you're um you're doom-scrolling and depressed or whatever, and it took your attention away from your ambitions. Um, and it's one thing for that to happen, but it's a s it's another thing, and I would argue much more serious to change your ambitions to match actions that you're taking because you're being like preyed on by the modern world. That's a different problem. Um, it's better to be a failure sometimes. I think it can be really good and beautiful to just be like, I didn't do the thing I wanted to do, but at least I still know what I want. You know? It's better to let yourself acknowledge that you fucked up something than to pretend like that isn't true, and in doing so give up on what you intend to do next time. God, that was a tangent. I'm sorry. Oh. Fuck every day. Every day more bullshit. Ugh, good lord. Um anyway, sorry. I really did just go on like a rant for no reason, but whatever. That's what this is. Your compliment is to the mermaid, which is my sign. Um and the mermaid always cautions us against uh uh false binaries and like feeling like you have to make an all or nothing decision, particularly if you feel like you have to make it urgently. We remember the idea of the mermaid sitting on a rock in the sun. Make make sitting in the middle a nice place to be, because you're gonna be there in some ways eternally. Um and I think that relates to your statement here that you feel like you're burning out. I mean, it's true that there is not one true answer. The mermaid would caution you against the idea that there's anything to solve. So if you're putting in more effort than you have into a problem that is unsolvable, I mean, you're never gonna know for sure. And I can tell you that for free. Like, I can tell you that easy because I have OCD and I know people with OCD, and I I am in, you know, I'm in the world of OCD, and there are people who believe in God who have OCD about God, and there are people who believe in God and have OCD about what if there isn't a God. There's also people who have OCD who don't believe in God, but have fears that what if they're wrong? Like, no matter what you decide and no matter what you believe, uncertainty and doubt and anxiety are part of being like conscious, I fear. Like, so you shouldn't burn yourself out looking for an end to that because those feelings will remain even if you're right. Like, even if you actually were to find some kind of like deep spiritual truth, you're still gonna feel anxious and uncertain sometimes. And that has nothing to do with what you're thinking about or what you're looking at. That just has to do with the fact that you're alive. And I think that you may need to I don't know if this is like helpful, this is kind of mermaid logic, uh it's supposed to be fun. Like spirituality, maybe fun isn't the right word, but it's the point of pursuing questions about the nature of things and what it means to be is to enrich your life and help you have meaning in your life. It's not to fuck up your shit and deplete your enjoyment of this one precious life. And this ties it back to the season, which is ghost season. I think that the NPC would tell you to start low. Draw a hierarchy of what it takes for you to be well and look at the bottom rung and check and see. Each time you feel like I need to find spiritual meaning, I need you to look at that hierarchy and look low and go okay well on the bottom of the hierarchy of my spiritual self-actualization I have things like food and laundry and you know taking a walk um have I are those needs met are those needs met and what can I do to work towards them and then like a rung up from that you're gonna have like social interactions like it's not that you have to have all these things perfect in order to find higher spiritual meaning that's not true but it is true that neglecting these things um takes away from your ability to like make meaning or discern meaning in like a like a values aligned way if that makes sense because it's just too fucking volatile it's just so hard it when you feel whack and shitty and like unhappy and you're haunted by a sense of urgent anxiety it's like how are you supposed to know which experiences are mystical and which ones are like actual mental illness you can't know you can't know you're busy feeling frazzed and unhappy so yeah I think the NPZ would have you look at the ghost analysis of consciousness. Yeah and then your neighbors are five the woman and seven the spirit which are interesting because those are both very narrative heavy idealistic signs which I mean it does relate to your circumstance I don't know what advice they have for you. Maybe the advice from the spirit and the woman is to take an active role in the story you're telling about yourself and to treat it like an activity and not like an obligation. Like try to take joy and pride in telling a story about the world and about yourself instead of looking at it like something you have to get sorted before you can start living. You need to switch the order on that. You need to be living first and then as you're already living and doing okay then you get to play around with symbols. You know what I mean? How can I use the power of belief rather than struggle with it. I mean I think spirituality is super interesting. I think all this stuff is interesting. Part of what's so cool about it is that it exists kind of outside of the clutches of a lot of other stuff that we have going on in our world. Like it's not determined by who you are your relationship spiritually with the world and with others and with your higher power or whatever is like not determined by other identity markers about you, which I really like. But that also is what makes it difficult to to find your footing in a spiritual sense and also makes it difficult to take insights or experiences that you have in like the spiritual world and bring them into reality. Um I'm not even sure that I think I'm really a spiritual person because all the things that I do that are spiritual you could kind of make a case are just extensions of ERP um which for those of you that don't know is exposure response prevention. It's the homework they make you do when you have OCD so that you stop being a problem. It's tough because like you could say that about anything. You could say any therapy is spiritual because the mind has to do with the spirit um the boundaries between these fields are like not as firm as people will have you believe and that's okay that's fine. It's fine to know that but it does just mean that we have to sit in the gray as they say in OCD world. This is funny too because I grew up like whatever but I grew up around a lot of like granola crunchy culture and I had an aversion to like the yoga new age vibe that I imagine is like similar to the aversion that lapsed Catholics have towards the church. Like when by the time I went to college I was like if I see anything tie-dye I'm gonna throw up like get away from me and I've been like that for a while but in the past couple years I've like actually started going to yoga classes and shit and like meditating and doing my therapy homework and like trying to lock in and I do think that there are things about these practices that are are genuinely valuable beautiful and true and do you have to do it through this particular aesthetic? No, of course not but take it where you can get it you know and one of the things I really like about yoga that I think is cute is that sometimes they'll have you do poses and they'll say like let's meet in this pose like let's meet in a downward dog. And what they mean is that everyone does that pose and then the instructor will continue the lesson. But the idea of meeting somewhere and they don't mean like a sp a they don't mean a point in space they mean a pose that you're all doing. It's it kind of makes me think you're meeting somewhere and the and the somewhere is in the spiritual world because you're all experiencing the same pose as opposed to standing in the same place. You know what I mean? I think stuff like that has been like good for me because when I do my little meditation ritual I have like particular little it sounds stupid but it really does help you to have a ritual that you choose and adhere to because over time it creates structure that is good for you. Um and helps you kind of like measure your mood and your experience across large swathes of time. And it also helps you mark when you're done like I did that and now it's over. Like for example maybe you would have a rule where you're gonna do some kind of spiritual task and you want to be sitting crisscross applesauce or something. Whatever. You're like I'm gonna do this every time. First time you do it you're like this is stupid. The second time you do it you're like okay I guess it's working the third time you do it you're like thinking about other shit you don't even care you're like this is so boring I don't want to do this. But the fourth time you do it you remember those past three times and now you have created a structure that means something and that's the magic. That's actually I think what spirituality is for is about having um conscious control over your rituals as opposed to just having rituals happen to you by way of habit which again I'm intimately familiar with through OCD world. Like in OCD world you are not picking your rituals your rituals are compulsions that happen to you by nature of your unwellness. That's not fun. Um and you feel that the rituals are made stronger each time you do them. You learn how that works in an embodied sense through OCD. It's just that you learn it through dysfunction and then it I mean for me it wasn't until I'd been doing ERP for a hot minute that I understood the concept of choosing a ritual on purpose. Like I feel like when you first start ERP you're like this well when you first start ERP you're like I'm being hunted for sport this is horrible. But then later like as it goes better you're like oh okay I don't have to do any of this shit. You know I had all these rules that I thought I had to follow and they're all bullshit. And then after that after some amount of time like eventually you start to have the idea like the concept like hold on what if instead of doing something that I feel like I have to do even though I don't fucking want to what if I picked my behavior in advance based on my values and that's a big step. That's cool and I would highly recommend you know working towards it if you have the opportunity to do so because it goes hard it goes phenomenally hard to do something on purpose for once that rules so anyway I hope this was helpful and please write back in uh yeah give me an update give us an update on your um spiritual journey um I mean I don't it's uh everything you're talking about sounds completely fair and reasonable and like you know you're going through the process but I the burnout is the thing that I would flag as an indication that there's a problem which is that you're not enjoying the process you're trying to get certainty and when it comes to spiritual stuff I think you really gotta flip that. You should be the process should itself be enriching yeah okay all right and then we also had um someone write in and share some artwork which I'll link to on the sub stack um I'll link that at the bottom here some art and we got another one but I don't think that I am meant to read this one on the show so I won't um damn what else is going on dude I'm like I'm listening to some really crazy books. I'm listening to some really crazy books and this is part of like a thing I'm trying I'm not confident that I'm smart enough to understand all the shit that I'm listening to but I've come to a realization that I'm just gonna wing it because I've spent a lot of time worrying that I'm like oh I this text is too dense for me and at this point in my life I'm like there's so few people who are interested in the kind of dense abstract nonsense that I think is neat to discuss. Like what's my concern that I'm gonna like read a book wrong? I'm gonna read it I'm gonna misunderstand the much more likely probability is that um I won't encounter anyone else who knows what the fuck I'm talking about. And that's not because I'm doing anything that crazy or I'm you know I'm oh I'm just I'm just into such niche niche kill me I'm just into such niche shit. But it's just that you know the way that the world is going and the way that content is everything is fractured and moving away from each other really quick. So it's just it's hard enough already to find other people who like what you like if you like normal shit. And I'm sitting around going like I don't want to listen to these philosophy books because like what if I embarrass myself by not immediately understanding it. It's like no one fucking cares about what you're like bold of you to assume that anyone cares about you or your ideas enough to clock you on the fact that they're wrong. So that's really freed me from the expectation that I need to know what I'm talking about every time I speak which is for better or for worse. But I'm listening to two books um I'm listening to uh In the Dust of this planet which I talked about before when we talked about the Unseal In the Dust of this planet by Eugene Thacker which I like um but I'm probably gonna have to re-listen to a good deal of um it's about like the philosophy of demons and cosmic horror and he's been talking a lot about well he's been talking about all sorts of shit but I just got to a part at the end where he's talking about some like bizarre poem and there's like tentacles involved and I'm like oh yeah what? Huh? I'm interested I think it's neat. I like I like too that it just provides like a reference point for a lot of other like a lot of monster stories um that I haven't heard about like directly before which I think is cool. And then the other thing I'm listening to is good lord I'm listening to Quantum History a new materialist philosophy by Slavoj Zizek which um I mean this is like so I I have like a couple friends who have tried to explain to me the concept before the concept of Slavoj Zizek and I my eyes always kind of glaze over I'm like huh what when when did this happen? And and they're like they've seen all these like videos that I like haven't seen um and I just I'm not like caught up on the lore surrounding this guy. I'm I'm sure it's all very interesting. I just don't know but I listened to this book on a drive I had to go on recently um or I started it and I listened through it once and now I'm re-listening to it because it's it's a lot. It's cool. It's cool and I like it I think but I am gonna have to like do some digging into what the fuck is going on in like the quantum physics world because there's references being made to experiments that I can't even fucking fathom at all. You're you are con you are confidently relaying to me things that it's like we learned this 10 years ago. I'm like who the fuck is we what are you talking about? I've never heard some of this shit before in my life and it just goes to show like the scientific advancement is so crazy lately because there are quote unquote truths about the world discovered that are not effectively disseminated in any meaningful way like people will just tell you did you know they disproved free will? No they didn't no they didn't and why are you allowed to just say that to me that's not stop that's first of all what do you mean when you speak and second of all who's they who are they do you guys aver when you go on social media and people will post like oh they made a new one and I'm like who the fuck is they one thing that I love is when people say something just dropped when they're like you know ooh new planet just dropped I think that's cute. I like that I'm really excited about the symbol manipulation music video. I think it's gonna be really fun and cool um and I'm excited because I have an idea for the ending for it and I want to splice in some artwork. You'll see it'll make sense but it's supposed to kind of feel like like the images are like straight spliced straight into the video is the idea. And I asked a few people if I could use their artwork in this video and a few people got back to me and said yes I'm very excited because I think it's really it's gonna be beautiful. It's gonna be really beautiful it's gonna feel really right with the particular images that I have now to splice into the end. They're they're good ones. Because I want it to feel frenzied and like kind of wild unbridled inspiration and like you're you're kind of like whoa you know but I I same problem I have with water dogs. I can't in good conscience make something up like if I want there to be a part of the music video that seems like it's really meaningful then I have to actually come up with some meaning to inject into it or like with the water dog's logo or not logo but the um album cover and the lore it's like if I want it to have the aesthetic of there being a story behind it I have to actually make a story behind it because I don't have it in me spiritually I don't have it in me to just say to allude to lore but then if someone really goes and looks there's nothing I can't do that. I can't do that. I can't do cosmetic meaning I always need there to actually be something that I'm willing to stand by somewhere in somewhere in there. And it doesn't have to be perfect but it's like I have to fucking try I'm not Italian brain rot. I don't have it in me to just create the illusion that there's something being said but there's nothing being said in fact I can't do that. It makes me feel frothing and hostile it doesn't feel right it feels like I'm lying it feels evil. It doesn't feel like super evil it just feels like a little bit evil and I don't wish to so I had to source some images and get some memes and now everything's gonna be okay rest assured everything's gonna be okay dude anyway alright um thank you all for your attention and for your messages and feel free to comment on any of this on the Substack and also let me look yeah so this month we started ghost season next month if I do the show early in the month like I have been and I expect I probably will it'll still be ghost season so you know do nothing with that information but I am just saying it okay bye