Curt Doolittle

Form: Diary

  • MORE ON AUTISM, ASPIE-NESS AND LIFE You know, I had a very troubled childhood an

    MORE ON AUTISM, ASPIE-NESS AND LIFE

    You know, I had a very troubled childhood and it gave me my desire for success – financial and environmental independence so that I would be free of the terrible decisions of others. I have sort of two subconscious drivers from that childhood: I have to protect everyone, and I have to have enough money to be safe – and safe from ‘ordinary people’.

    Back in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s being an Aspie was not a very easy thing. Everyone is ‘harshing’ on your happiness all the time – telling you that you will be happier if you do what other people do. Except all that stuff seems really stupid and boring and i’d really rather either read science fiction or an encyclopedia or try to figure out how to arrange my room differently. OK? It’s just really bizarre.

    I actually went through childhood thinking that the world was full of idiots and crazy people – like zombies – but that they were in charge so I needed to get along with them and help them. I was never non-conformist. I mean, these poor fools are trying to run the world right? OMG. I dont’ want to make it even worse! If I help them a little bit they don’t annoy me too much and I can read science fiction and try to draw the internal wood structures of these victorian houses by imagining what’s behind the clapboards.

    Really. I swear to god. That is how I thought.

    WOMEN

    Women can make it worse. They are really awesome creatures. They are like the best-est most wonderfuly-good-smelling, soft, yummy things in the world PLUS they can explain emotions and stuff like that to you and it makes the world a LOT less exasperating. And you just have to be nice to them, listen to them, do stuff for them and give them your money. And it’s like magic. They make you part of the real world.

    And because they’re really good smelling, and soft and fascinating and helpful and stuff, they make you connect with the world. You don’t sort of fall into your head for three weeks at a time and then come up for air without any knowledge of time passing.

    But, the problem is, that they want you to feel all this stuff. And you say “Well, you know, it’s not like I don’t want to. It’s that I don’t and I can’t feel what you feel. I mean, if someone is color blind, you don’t criticize them because they can’t tell the difference between red and green. But it’s not OK, and you can somehow criticize me if I can’t tell the difference between bored and angry facial expressions.”

    Now if you TELL me how you feel I can understand that. But I can’t SEE it unless you tell me. ‘It all looks the same to me. I rely on body language because that seems to work. But I have to concentrate to use it. And if I am thinking about something terribly fascinating like how they manufactured the parts to this chair here, or how the water vapor accumulates over this geography, I won’t notice your body language. Really. Its not that interesting. I’m sorry. It’s not.

    Other Aspies and ASD’s are really interesting because they talk about interesting stuff. They are fun to be around. It is the only time we feel really normal. ‘Cause other people think like us. Really smart normals tend to think a lot like us too. But they have all these verbal ticks and status cues that are really annoyingly confusing.

    SERIOUSNESS

    So I did my duty. I got educated. I got married. I got wealthy. I ran companies. I built companies. I got cancer a couple of times. I got very sick a couple more times.

    And you know, I sort of had this incredible epiphany that none of it really mattered. I mean, It’s great to prove that you CAN do something. You should experience all the life that you can while we have it. But that doesn’t mean you want to do a lot of it.

    Now, for me, business is trivially easy. Seriously. I can develop strategy on just about any business there is, because I’m fascinated with economics and collecting information about any given business. I never, ever get tired of it. And it’s so freaking obvious that I can’t understand why people do it WRONG so often. (They should read Karl Popper and Austrian economics.)

    So I have had my fancy cars, and my two houses and my corporations and my travel-lifestyle, and I wasn’t happy at all. Because I’d have do force myself to adjust all the time. It was really interesting. Really. Fun. And really no one can ever say to me that I can’t do anything. ‘Cause I can do it repeatedly even if I haven’t got a cent to start with.

    THE WHY

    But I realize that the only reason I do this stuff is so that I can have a woman, and afford to have a woman, and have her explain the world and insulate me from the world. But that it’s circular. It’s working for having a woman that is actually making me unhappy. If I have to do this to have a woman, then I either need a different one, or not to have one at all.

    Instead, if I loved my Aspiness, rather than fought for normalness, I would be a lot happier. I would work and write on a problem that requires a whole lot of thinking. I would work at the part of work I like rather than the part I had to in order to maintain my control over a whole lot of people. I wouldn’t be sick all the time. I wouldn’t be stressed all the time. And I might live a bit longer too.

    The problem then, either doing without a woman by learning to connect with the world on your own. Or finding a woman who isn’t wrapped up in all this materialism stuff that they find so absurdly fascinating. Someone who doesn’t want you to feel differently than you feel. Or feel what you can’t.

    I set out to do both.

    VICTORY

    I am really good at connecting with the world. I can work a room like nobody’s business. I just had to live in a place with high population density so that I’m around people I can readily interact with all the time. So I do.

    I try to avoid television and computer games and to work instead. And only use entertainment when I cannot do anything else. Not as a form of medication.

    I am perfectly fine on my own now. Although I have trouble training women still. For some reason they keep chasing me. I tell them its a bad idea, but they keep at it. 🙂

    So, now I have my political and economic philosophy to obsess over, I have a small company that doesn’t have any debt, I produce something I believe in, and I work with really smart nerdy folk who understand and appreciate me. I try to have as few possessions as I can. And that last bit is really important to me. I try not to change contexts too much. Travel is something I reserve for necessity. I live in what is for me the best place on earth.

    I love my inner Aspie and I dont fight it. I feed it. I care for it. And I am happy.

    Cash is freedom. Possessions are a prison. Marry your work. Love everyone you can as much as possible. That’s bad for a consumption economy but it’s really good for us.

    And I suspect that it is something more men should think about. Because Atusim is just MALENESS exaggerated a LOT.

    It’s just sad that it took me more than half my life to figure it out.

    Cheers

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-01 16:11:00 UTC

  • SUPERMODEL FACTORY? I do not know what is going on today. But I’m sitting at thi

    SUPERMODEL FACTORY?

    I do not know what is going on today. But I’m sitting at this cafe, working on the problem of platonism in mathematics (and logic) and it’s like Podil has been invaded by an army of models or something.

    Very strange. I mean. It’s nice and all. But. It’s just like, that movie The Truman Show, where the protagonist (Jim Carrey) doesn’t realize he’s in a movie.

    I keep looking for cameras….

    lol

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-01 06:17:00 UTC

  • You know, some of us spend all this time tilting at windmills. You can’t even te

    You know, some of us spend all this time tilting at windmills. You can’t even tell who is a crank or genius until well after he’s dead. WTH is the point? Really. 🙂

    I read up on a few ancestors who were fire breathing Puritans. If you met my Grandfather, you’d think no time had passed since the English civil war. Maybe since the middle ages. Except he knew physics and chemistry. But the personality was the same.

    I sit here obsessed with morality and ethics for no reason of my own choosing other than some strange mechanism drives me to.

    And you wonder how much of life is in our genes? I don’t.

    I don’t think I’m much different from that man 400 years ago. And I kind of doubt that he was much different from the man 400 years before him. Or the one two hundred years before him. A thousand years of genes doing the same thing. And if we met we’d recognize the same traits in one another.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-11 10:44:00 UTC

  • How does cancer change you? In many ways, for the good. Although, not everyone a

    How does cancer change you?

    In many ways, for the good. Although, not everyone around you might agree. It takes a while, and we all feel it differently, but something we all share is an increased appreciation for every day. And, frustratingly for others, a little more intolerance for wasting time on things we don’t want to.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-06 18:16:00 UTC

  • Personal. Other immune system sufferers are the only ones who can probably appre

    Personal.

    Other immune system sufferers are the only ones who can probably appreciate this feeling.

    One or two days a year my immune system gives me a rest and I can reach deep sleep and feel relaxed physically and mentally.

    Today is one of those days.

    I wonder if this is what normal people feel like.

    Thank you god.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-29 06:11:00 UTC

  • Vivid memory. On the farm. Late afternoon. July. In a field. Behind a tractor. Q

    Vivid memory. On the farm. Late afternoon. July. In a field. Behind a tractor. Quiet. Crackling and ping of cooling engine parts. Standing on the soil. Wearing converse sneakers. Worn at the tip. Looking down into the irrigation ditch. It’s deep. I couldn’t get out if I fell in. At the bottom. Water. Clay. In mixes of grey, blue, purple, red, pink, brown. Look like they’re floating plastic bags. The smell of fresh earth, the rubber of the tires and some older man’s aftershave. The sun behind a man in overalls. The man to my left speaking. He speaks with empathy and understanding. But just sounds out of place. He makes me feel awkward. I bend and squeeze a lump of clay. It squeezes like plastic. Lines of blue-grey within red-brown. I throw it in the water to distract myself.

    Smells create the most amazing moments of recall.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-26 12:40:00 UTC

  • Oct 07, 2012After two days in a skeevy apartment, I move into the Impressa hotel

    Oct 07, 2012After two days in a skeevy apartment, I move into the Impressa hotel.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-21 17:07:00 UTC

  • Oct 05, 2012Fifth of October, arrive from Munich via Poland. Met at the airport

    Oct 05, 2012Fifth of October, arrive from Munich via Poland. Met at the airport by my friend Roman Saskiw. Place: Kyiv, Ukraine (50.45, 30.5233)Address: Kyiv, Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-21 17:03:00 UTC

  • PERSONAL: MSG AND SULFITES (restaurant food as date rape drug?) I’ve been so car

    PERSONAL: MSG AND SULFITES

    (restaurant food as date rape drug?)

    I’ve been so careful that I haven’t run into any food problems here in Ukraine for months. But today, I’m not sure what was in the food, but it’s bad, and I’m effectively intoxicated without any of the good things that go with the experience that accompanies alcohol.

    Dose up on antihistamines is all I have figured out that I can do.

    Sigh.

    Need to ban sulfites, MSG and derivatives.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-10 11:44:00 UTC

  • What Was Your First Epiphany?

    GREAT QUESTION.  HERE ARE A FEW OF LIFE’S REVELATIONS

    At the age of 6 when in one day I thought reading was an impossibly complicated idea, and then three days later, after just tortuously tryig to read books, because I was embarassed that a girl in my class could, that almost like a light switch, I started being able to read.  Doing hard stuff is hard. You just have to suffer a bit for the reward.  Best lesson in life.

    At age 7 when I understood that foreign languages weren’t ciphers (codes) but completely different words with completely different meanings, sometimes with completely different characters with completely different sounds. And thinking I was a completely hopeless idiot for thinking that they were systems of codes. 

    At the age of  9 when I understood that most adults really have no idea what’s going on, or what they’re doing, but they’re responsible for us, and we know even less than they do, so we children have to help them be successful, otherwise the whole world will fall apart into chaos.

    At the age of 12 when I understood that it was now possible to possess an original thought, and that I must remember to treat children of that age with patient respect.

    At the age of 14 when I understood that induction didn’t exist, and couldn’t exist, and I couldn’t for the life of me understand who could think so.

    At the age of 15 when I understood that mythical religion was actually a valuable thing given that you can’t explain anything very complicated to almost anyone – but religion is really easy to understand. It’s good enough for government work so to speak.

    At the age of 16 when I realized girls don’t think ANYTHING like us guys, and that it’s a hopeless, unbridgeable difference that you just have to deal with.

    At the age of 17 when I realized that despite wanting a career in science, that we don’t really understand that much more about the universe than did newton, and that experimentation was really expensive, and that I had better ways to spend my life than trying to solve that problem by spending most of my time trying to raise money for experiments that had very little chance of success. I’m not that patient.

    At the age of 19 when I realized that there is nothing in a university education that you can’t get out of books on your own, and that all universities do is sort people. They don’t really teach you anything. So allow them to sort you, and then just read what you want and need to.

    At the age of 22 when I realized that people aren’t bad to each other on purpose: they are actually clueless, and worse, there isn’t any way for the clueless to determine the difference between those who are slightly less clueless and someone who actually understands something that you should listen to.

    At the age of 24 when I realized that each of us has particular talents, and can’t all work the same way. So I let other people worry about details and I work on really big problems further out in time that they can’t work on. Cooperation is also a division of labor in time with people who cant understand each other’s jobs.

    At the age of 25 when I realized that it doesn’t matter how smart I am, if the guy I”m competing with has twenty years of experience.  It’s not brains. It’s just knowledge. And knowledge is much faster than reason.

    At the age of 26 when my health failed, that I was indeed mortal – very.

    At the age of 29 when I realized that entrepreneurship is largely a willingness to endure deprivation, pain and hardship more than other people are willing to, and its not so much about being all that smart and creative. It’s just hard work to do hard things, and that’s more than most people are willing to do.

    At the age of 30 when I realized that success and money aren’t really very useful if people are afraid of you, don’t like  you or don’t trust you. Money doesn’t keep you company and doesn’t get you access to people you want to keep you company. Ruthlessness is overrated. It’s much more profitable to have people love you.

    At age 31 when I realized that people will love you if you try to help them. So I started trying to help every single person I talked to in some way no matter how small. It is much better than spending most of your life trying to convince people to do something differently.  And they love you for it.

    At the age of 32 when I realized that reason, logic, fact and science are pretty unnatural to man, and that western civilization developed them for totally accidental reasons.  They just happen to work pretty good, and so we keep them.  But no one actually WANTS facts. They’re almost always unpleasant.

    At the age of 35 when I understood that there are maybe 1500 total ‘ideas’ in the human conceptual lexicon, but that each one of them is subject to errors in relation to every other. So the minds and libraries of the world are pretty much full of errors, with the few things that aren’t errors pretty hard to find among them.  Humans are smarter than everything else, but we’re actually pretty dumb. It takes a whole lot of us a long time to figure out even the simplest thing.

    At the age of 40 when I realized that I had made a my only really regretful mistake by not studying philosophy and going into it as a profession because I didn’t know how to earn a living at it. (You don’t. Philosophy is an avocation, not a vocation. It just happens to make you pretty successful no matter what you do.)

    At the age of 50 when I realized that after many years of hard work, I had solved a significant problem in the history of thought, but it was entirely due to all the people smarter than I am who came before me, and my achievement was just luck, timing and spending more time on it than anyone else. It was humbling.

    At 53, after two bouts of cancer, three related illnesses from a compromised immune system, divorce and a down economy, that I might actually want to slow down, and get my writing done before I run out of options on the durability of my northern european genes.

    Just a few of them. There are plenty of others. There will be plenty more I assume.

    https://www.quora.com/What-was-your-first-epiphany