Undead: My Story, a New Type, and a Complete Directory
Updated: Oct 23
For more articles on the Undead Metaphor:
Article Synopsis by Mr. John Igwe and Co.
The article "Undead: My Story, a New Type, and a Complete Directory" is an introspective exploration of personal transformation through the lens of the undead metaphor.
It blends existential themes with the concept of societal disillusionment, offering a creative and powerful way to explore complex ideas about self-realization, alienation, and societal critique.
The article's strengths include its unique metaphor, raw authenticity, philosophical depth, rhetorical power, and emotional transition from video game addiction to philosophical enlightenment.
In conclusion, the article is a passionate, thought-provoking, and imaginative exploration of personal and societal disillusionment.
Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live. -- Norman Cousins
Anger and embarrassment are often neighbors. -- Amy Poehler
Awkward Introduction
(Note: This was originally written in 2018, and by "Rubinshteinic/Rubinshteinian" I refer to a type of undead I made, and not to Rubinshteinic Individualism, nor to Political Rubinshteinism).
It can be argued that everyone has a background story that made them the person they are today. Hereby the story that made me a partially ascetic, partially solitary, philosopher and "undead". Metaphorically, of course....
Onwards with the show!
The Exposure to Awkwardness
I am my own type of undead, a hybrid of a lich and a revenant, a Rubinshteinian, a product of intellect combined with asceticism, or simply a lich revenant. Let me tell you my story, traveler.
There once was a child who spent his entire childhood playing video games. Whether the sky was sunny and bright or cloudy and windy, that child kept playing video games day and night after school and after homework. He was offered other opportunities to spend his childhood, but no, video games were just too addicting and fulfilling. This was until he was exposed to the Philosophical Realm of the universe by a dear person.
When philosophy took hold of his mind and he invested himself in it for long periods of time, the child lost his innocence and began to think about how much he had wasted his entire childhood playing video games, instead of doing other things that were considered more worthwhile and productive.
He realized that he had missed out on so much by spending all of his time playing video games. He had never learned how to interact with the world in a meaningful way. He was ashamed of himself for wasting so much time, and he vowed to make up for it.
As he entered his teenage years, the boy was offered many other things, but they no longer mattered to him. Philosophy has replaced video games. Philosophy helped him realize how awkward reality really is. How you all treat your own perception, whether unique or shared, like its external reality. Like, reality is clear to you just because you feel it is clear.
Like, your own lack of critical thinking makes you right the greater you lack critical thinking. Like, your expertise, and not just your critical thinking, makes you competent and makes you deserving of being in authority. Like, your own lack of ability to look both ways, makes your own way far more right than any of the ways you don't bother looking at. Like, applying the strawman's fallacy to things you don't bother researching and learning further, makes you more knowledgeable.
It's silly and observing this all my life made me feel dead inside more and more. Dead inside and full of rage I utilize for productivity. Rage, as I realize more and more how intellectually incompetent most people are. Rage, because I have a strange desire to rectify the world, which is also done by making people not this logically incompetent.
Logical incompetence, because I see this stupid, stupid illogical behavior that are often agreed as logical because others also lack critical thinking. To deter oneself from their own incompetence, they apply whataboutism, to make themselves sound logical, despite using a fallacy yet again.
This utter liking of the very things that shoot themselves in the foot, like electing people who don't care about the people they elect; like marrying a person they choose to betray; like living somewhere expansive, despite being able to move to a cheaper residence, and then complaining about how expensive their rent is, without understanding how prestige bias affects finances!! That people adore singers because feeling good is "necessarily" good, but rectifying the very planet we all share, is hard;
That hard, is "necessarily" not good because it doesn't feel good to be concerned! Because we "need" to smile instead! And escape negativity, that escaping our problems is good because alcohol and other nonsense feels good!
That me, the person who thinks and is concerned about this world, is a narcissist because I don't care about collective hedonism, but about this world!
Beyond doing what was necessary to grant time for self-actualization, isn't everything else that is unnecessary but has the potential for fun like a "video game"? Isn't society a stimulation programmed by perception-limiting norms, just as a video game is a stimulation programmed by its developers? Isn't much of society a fabrication, as if we are trapped in a virtual reality?
When I control the character in a video game. I am not really that character, in their "video game"; it is simply a puppet created by people I don't really know or care about in my own, uncanny, detached, moral experience.
They give me a role in their mental dimension, and think their perception of me is the real me. All of us do it, yet to fully understand someone you need to learn that person first. Learning is hard when you are bored, and hard is harder when you refuse to see difficulty as a challenge that grows you as a person yourself.
The same goes for the "character" in society -- they are merely a product of norms which are external to you and which do not care about you personally. Beyond the veil of herd mentality, why would you want to partake in society voluntarily if not for its necessities?
Rather, they care mostly, if not only, about the "character" you are controlling, the one that many are convinced is themselves because that's how the norms have made them think... That we do not exist beyond society to at least some degree.
The social ego is just a creation of norms and traditions that don't care about you and don't care if you care about them, just like the developers of a video game! And, once you fail too much following it, you will be discarded as if all your positive qualities don't matter in the slightest.
Because behaving is there to cater to the wants and needs of the overly sensitive. Wanting people to be more accepting of each other, and more honest about what they prefer denying, is somehow egocentric. Such people, who confine themselves to their matrix of pain they don't even want to feel, those who refuse to understand, and prefer to judge as a way to protect themselves from the reality beyond their perception.
This is a very alienating insight, solved only by the ability to actually work to become a more logical being. This is why I conclude with much eccentricity that video games and life in the external world are fake realities; masks that we put on ourselves or that are put on us by others that teach us these masks are our true faces.
It is a force of habit that we keep regulating the same conventional methods that hinder us from understanding beyond fabrications of our own making.
We may gain pleasure and entertainment from playing a character in a video game, like playing a role in society, but ultimately all of this fun, drama, and entertainment is derived from faking, from delusion, from acting.
We just learn to believe that we are the role we play in society, just like we refer to the actions of our video game characters to ourselves. Shoot him! Shoot that! And slowly we even think we are competent enough to be one-man-armies in our desire for joy and hubris. In our desire to grow, in our inability to grow beyond these labels and beyond ourselves in virtuality.
This is what led me to ponder during my first years as a self-made philosopher: Is there anything more to life than the “video game” that is society and societal life? I honestly resorted to nihilism as a result of my former helplessness.
Coping With Increased Awkwardness
I realized, however, that there was hope for me. There is a life of relative solitude, fortified from the fakeness and absurdity of the theater we call “real life.” To protect my mind from being so angry and humiliated by my own high expectations towards this world, I prefer to calm my mind and just analyze and solve such problems philosophically.
It is a life with plenty of free time that one can domesticate to live a life of fulfillment, self-actualization, and independent thought. It is a perfect life for an ex-gamer who wishes to explore the world after years of wanting to discover it, less and less, as my feelings of being dead-inside only increase in an overwhelming rate. Overwhelming rate until my mind disconnected from reality as a form to protect myself from this frustration. Frustration I now use far more productively. To help others.
Transmuting my anger into high-quality, free philosophical articles is, really, all I want to do for the rest of my life. Otherwise, I would be consumed by my own rage.
Deviating Orthodoxy For Mental Survival
And this is why, traveler, I see no need to follow the typical life trajectory of an average person. For a Rubinshteinian undead, however, it is that you are born, you work and study at the same time, and then you die! You work/study to rectify the world, and that's the only reason you return to the world as this type of human undead, consumed by the depravities of humanity. Consumed, and unwilling to be silent about it. Far, far more willing to help. Yet, this help is done in solitude...
The more unique you are, the greater the path to authenticity lies within a more extensive and voluntary solitude. The world is designed for simpletons that render geniuses, the disabled, incompetent ones. Sometimes, as the arrogant villains as well.
This realization kills you and resurrects you from the death in the depths of existential despair. From being broken, to becoming stronger from within. Strong. Moral. Aggressive. Asocial. An anti-villain.
Conclusions
That's a Rubinshteinian for you, traveler—a hybrid of a lich. An intellectual so far from being a faker, he can be compared to an undead; A revenant—one that abstains from the full life, but remains among the living nonetheless, through the labor of an iron way of life.
I am one such iron, and I shall grant this new type of undead to the world for all to use both as a lifestyle and as a source of knowledge and insight. I am a Rubinshteinian who offers his philosophical articles to the world he hates, to better foster a world he and many others can love.
None could now go and tell me that I am a waste of space when I am using my solitude to contribute to the people around the world in my own individual way—the way of the ascetic philosopher, the Rubinshteinian! An underground thinker and teacher that cares not for the academy.
Should you wish for insight, just let me know. Otherwise, I see little reason to talk to most of you. Enjoy my care for you, and respect my desire for distance!
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