Is it even possible to make it when you are from a middle-class-schmuck-parents-weed-smoking-siblings-total-degenerate-"friends"-third-world-tier-education-upbringing background?
Are there any big names in the cannon who were not richfags, who didnt fit in the "high-society"?
What even is to "make it"? What is it behind all the books you read? What has been the magnet behind all literature, all the western cannon? What made Homer write the Odyssey in between all the chaos he lived?
I always see you guys having serious discussions about Plato, Deleuze... whatever, you name it. What made you guys get so much into something that is literally nothing after you look beyond the paper? Somedays I can't even get myself to read a page, I just stare at the window with nothing but slow-motion thoughts in my mind.
Fuck, Veeky Forums
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99% of philosophy is wankery, the chinese guys figured it out. Make a life for yourself outside your mind
Whats a good life to live?
Being an aspiring writer isn't 'making it.' It is, in fact, the opposite.
Most of the core userbase of Veeky Forums is like 'The Dilettante' from Thomas Mann's 1897 short story. Read it if you want to see the definitive Veeky Forums lifestyle in action.
The meme trilogy, the "Veeky Forums aesthetic" and the idea of 'starting from the beginning' are parts of a dilettante notion that attempts to encapsulate an art form through one's immersion in it, and one's knowledge of its extremes.
Surely if you can complete the best, greatest, and most difficult additions to the literary canon, you must at that point have become cultured! Once you have read and understood all, you must have at that point qualified for yourself an audience!
No, read for your own enjoyment only.
Engage with other people who have interesting ideas. Produce if you must, but not for the sake of producing, do it for the sake of the stories that have come out of your experience naturally.
A disdain for the mainstream can become a disdain for humanity at large. Don't fall prey to it or you isolate yourself even from those you imagine to be like you.
Go outside
get married, have about 5 kids, try to help people who seem reliable, build a business to leave to your most competent child.
the usual stuff that's worked for over 4000 years.
see one day you'll be about 70 years old, and you'll have this sudden rush of realisation. that you were only here for others, and the only others than matter are the ones closest to you by blood.
homer wrote nothing down you fucking retard, writing had not been invented and he was blind, it was an oral culture he just traveled around greece singing songs for money. plato's writings survive as fragments and it was almost certainly multiple authors, all making fun of each other because they were old and rich.
you have low test, probably from a sedentary lifestyle and poor dietary choices. your 'feelings' are not your own, they are a biproduct of your working and home environment, your genetics, the weather, pollution, having a loyal companion animal like a pet dog, seeing people smile and having a good time and then joining it.
it's all whole giant jumbled mess, stop pretending like you're in control of anything and just do what is required of you, lazy fucking piece of shit. walk up to your mom or dad and say:
"hey, help me, what should i do?"
and then do what they say.
>reads marcus aurelius once and only once
>tfw they say do what you want
>taking advice from a sperglord who left his empire to ruinous children who then went on to ruin it
>Is it even possible to make it when you are from a middle-class-schmuck-parents-weed-smoking-siblings-total-degenerate-"friends"-third-world-tier-education-upbringing background?
Sure thing, kid. You're just kind of pissed at your environment right now, your parents might be weighting on you or whatever. But this will pass, your "upbringing background" will one day be just that, a background. In the foreground you have everything you do with your life.
>Are there any big names in the cannon who were not richfags, who didnt fit in the "high-society"?
Here I'd like to say something of your post in general, about other writers and such. Tip from someone who has done that far too much: don't look for validation in the past. Don't think that finding a counterpart to your situation in the "list of epic people of the world" that you imagine will make it any easier or any harder for you. Don't think "wow, Mozart was 8 when he composed this" and yadda yadda or perhaps look for similarities between you and others and think "hey, that writer's parents had the same profession as mine!". You'll soon find this means nothing. Your life will not repeat that of anyone, not the geniuses, not the ordinary (both imaginary categories, btw).
What even is to "make it"? What is it behind all the books you read?
To "make it" doesn't mean shit. Forget about it, we are all constantly making it. There is no end, there is no concluding satisfaction to life. Win a nobel prize if you want, what will you be doing 5 years after that? Other projects, other things, other problems, other joys. I repeat that there is no end. To think there is an end makes you frustrated for all the time you don't touch this imaginary place. Even worse, it makes you think you are "truly making it" if you do something you think you were supposed to be doing. And that will wear out and you'll think "not even after that I could make it..." and your frustration will grow.
What is "behind" this and that. As if there was a secret dimension to things that you don't have access to right now and that would explain why you are (according to you) not making it as of this moment. There is no "behind things" either, which can be rather painful and dissapointing if you really understand this, but something that eventually allows you to accept things as they are and move with more liberty in this world. Values and meanings are tools we use to do things, they are necessary up to a point, but they are imaginary, which means they are never definitive and never meaningful if there is no one to think of it in those terms. To fight for a country, or for "art's sake", for God, for entertainment, etc, all of those are excuses people to get by with what they do. What is the true reason then? There is none, that's my point, all is excuses.
This is not a bad thing. I understand it may sound as a terrible thing, because the thing we want the most is "the reason", "the meaning" of it. Something for you to hold on and say to yourself you have things straighten out and now you can plan your life accordingly and thus you'd make it(it's the same quest for an "end" to your search). But it is not a bad thing that there is nothing. Our times, in which unusual encounters happen (you and me online for one), seems to liquify any value and take us to that point of feeling at loss with the world. You are not alone in your frustration, user. Conservatives and reactionaries will teach you to hold onto certain values or rescue dead ones, other people who seem to be welcoming the future are actually inventing new values that one day will grow old as well. Both seem to be doing pretty well gaining followers.
But if you let go of this necessity to fit in the world of "doers" and those who "make it", you'll find there are other ways to experience life other than furstration and success, both momentary things. You'll see it is not bad that there are no definite answers. While there are things that can help you along the way, like an anchored boat can help you cross a river, after you reach the shore, don't get too attached to the boat, you leave it and you move on.
What are some non-imaginary categories?
>No, read for your own enjoyment only.
This thread is turning out pretty good
>reads Nietzsche once
Good catch, user. There are no non-imaginary categories, but I said it that way to bring that aspect forward.
Thanks for making me think
What are some books that explore in depth the themes of the last 2/3 of your post?
>hey, help me, what should i do?
>dunno son, follow your dream, we'll always be supportive
>tfw no dreams
wat now?
...
Blame your grandparents for raising such ineffectual cucks
I can't recommend you books that are very direct about it because that's just how I phrase it, I wasn't thinking of anything in particular if not my own thoughts on similar experiences. Like some other user noticed, Nietzsche comes to mind. But many have said similar things in different ways and to different effects. Alan Watt's "Book on the taboo against knowing who you are" also comes to mind and his way of thinking in general, taken in his own way from eastern philosophy. Watch his video "work as play", perhaps.
But I think most of that has to do with my contact with psychoanalysis, because it acknowledges that we are constantly producing meaning to sustain ourselves (though it is put in other more complex and fitting terms). We seek to correspond with the world in someway to create this link, this certainty. Like when people ask of God "what do you want from me?" or when parents divorce and you are left thinking "okay, so why did you make me?", or you see in tradition a way for you to fit in, maybe enter the literary canon, or create the next great technology and be remembered for it. Or maybe it is smaller, like gaining a recognition for best dentist in your town at a private party, or even smaller like just getting the dopest of drugs and sharing it with friends for a nice weekend. But it is always big to the one who is experiencing it. It is the symbolic aspect of what we do and that insert us in something bigger than ourselves. It's not something you can get rid of, you can't just shake this off and live without it. But you can learn to not be completely taken over by it, specially when life does not correspond to the ideal we have of it, or when people (our parents, our background, our school) are not how we wished they were to us. There are ways in which you are able to negotiate these differences with the world. I learned and will continue to learn this from going to a psychoanalyst for several years and looking at my own "anchors", my values, my ways to produce meaning, things that both guided me and hindered my motion simultaneously.
I enjoyed this post
Oh my god youre right.
the good will in these posts is making me feel all warm desu
I read poetry, and I have not met many people who enjoy poetry. Maybe just my best friend from college. And of course my lit professors. I think that between us, people who enjoy poetry never ask it to be anything other than it is--we never ask it to provide meaning for us, or to validate our experiences. Poetry always returns to the plain sense of things, as Stevens calls it, beyond which there can be no more imagination. Yes, there is nothing beyond the paper, but there needn't be anything. Poetry is self-sustaining, self-sufficient. At times I have caught myself thinking, "This is completely unsatisfying and self-referential and a facade for nothing at all." But after a while, after I had studied great poets other than Stevens, and read more contemporary stuff as well, I realize he was right in a way. Poetry, art, enriches life without taking anything away. It creates no blank spots, no absences of its own, even when it asks you to question it, those questions are themselves full of intention and meaning. In this way poetry self-proliferates.
I should also say that I write poetry and expect that to be what defines my life in this society, if our lives are indeed defined by what we produce. So maybe reading is fulfilling to me in a different way than for a pure reader. I don't know, I don't think there are pure readers. Even Harold Bloom who claims to have never written a line of verse allows poetry to creep, mystically, into his criticism. Read a lot. Partake of art. If you don't enjoy it that's fine, but if you do, it may change your modes of thinking.
Was homeless from the age of 14 to 19 and have loads of life experience to augment my literary works
Stay mad middle-classkeks and richfags
I'm not mad. That sounds rough. Make some quality lit out of it.
This thread is nauseatingly bad. Reported.
I was only projecting
Looking back, I realize that despite the benefits of having more grit in my oyster so to speak, and being able to handle and cope a lot more than my peers because of my past, I still would trade it to have had a loving family in my formulative years as a kid
I remember when I was 16 I had a short relationship with a girl I really enjoyed. She was smart, attractive, charismatic. She came from a wealthy background and was very privileged. She could go home to her cool lawyer dad who played the electric guitar and her mom who taught English at the local community college. I had nothing. She would often joke about me being homeless with no family and because of how stoic I was I pretended that it didn’t hurt me. She was my window into a normal life. When she broke things off and fucked some random dude I wasn’t upset because it ended with her. I was upset that the window into that stable existence closed, and, drugged out of my mind laying in a friends bathtub, I realized that she would never understand the pain I felt. Not because she was a bad person or anything, but because all experience is an arch wherethro gleams the untraveled world.
Sorry for the blogpost
its okay dumb frogposter. all of us were underagefags at some point. fuck a bitch.
what are some books about these chinese dudes?
is that a stock photo? lmao
just bee yourself
let me give you the big enchilada
youtube.com
how do i into taoist magic to banish spooky ghosts from my home?
You can make it. Don’t make excuses.
Look at Raymond Carver. I came from a similar situation and that’s who my inspiration is. Dude had an alcoholic sawmill worker for a dad and his mom was a waitress. Married at 19 and had 2 kids within two years. He was working as a janitor and doing other menial jobs to support his family, then enrolled in some college courses (not at an Ivy League school or academically superior institution) and just kept trying and trying. Outside of lit (who shits on literally everyone) he’s considered one of the best short story writers in contemporary American literature.
You can make it if you try really hard. Don’t let your upbringing be your excuse.
This sounds like something Nick Land would agree with