A lot to unpack, but inspired by my listening to punk music. Here is allllll of it. No intros.

Adult student reduces everything to luck. Business owners? Got lucky. High earning employees? Got lucky.

Is this factual? Nope.

Why does he say it?

If everything is about luck anyway, he doesn’t have to commit to any struggle. He can coast through life. Luck will decide the outcome anyway. He is embracing comfort and making excuses for not embracing discomfort.

Other adult students gets visibily excited over discovering that during the Yugoslav wars western foreigners PAID to travel to Yugoslavia for the chance to shoot down random people. He ranks these people as way worse than soldiers who kill innocents, because at least soldiers have the excuse they are comitting atrocities out of a drive to protect their own country.

What do I strongly suspect is really going on? He supports Israel, he knows Israeli soldiers have been behaving like vicious child murderers. He thinks he’s found something even worse than this. This keeps his world view correct. He can keep supporting Israel. At least Israeli soldiers are not paying for a killer holiday. If you would dig a bit deeper though you would soon have to conclude that there is hardly any moral difference between a western rich guy paying to fly to the Sarajevo region and pick of Bosnian civilians and some guy in New York happily flying to Israel to go and shoot teenagers in the testicles as they are lining up to receive some food. But to even bring this up would be some uncomfortable he would never accept his explanation. People expend the most energy to protect their own image of being the right one, the good one, the rational one, the smart one, the one above things, the untouchable one, the unaffected one, the morally clean one. Real discomfort must be avoided at all times. I dislike this, because I believe confronting myself with my illusions will open up some magical good life. If I sit in enough discomfort it will pay off. So maybe that is my illusion, that if I aggressively and consistenly attack all my own comfortable illusions I will finally rise up as some kind of God. Am obsessed with this. That’s why I can’t attack other people’s illusions without immediately scanning for my own illusions.

Moving on.

There are two types of adult learners of languages. Those who accept that it will take friction, discomfort to master a language and those who think there is some method, some teacher, some app, some trick which will eliminate friction, discomfort, time demands and the humiliation of initially not being good at something. I could say a lot about this, but where it gets rather unpleasant for me is that I can’t outright tell the wannabe learners that they aren’t actually ready to learn a new language. It would be very bad for business.

What I also want to share is:

I HATE METHOD FETISHISM!!!!!!!!!!!!

I HATE IT, HATE IT, HATE IT.

I do NOT want to listen to people comparing apps, asking AI to come up with lists they won’t study, grammar explanations they won’t sit with and absorb, bascially anything that tries to fucking bypass the only things that teach you a new language:

exposure to the language, the pain of struggling to use it badly at first plus boring repetition.

Sit with a novel you barely understand and sweat.

Watch a movie you don’t understand TWENTY FUCKING TIMES till you do understand the movies.

Get your stomach in a twist trying to produce a half correct sentence to someone who – with respect – is able to correct you or nudge you to more correct use.

Add some friction to your every day life by changing the language of all your devices in the language you want to learn.

EMBRACE FRICTION INSTEAD OF LOOKING FOR CLEVER WAY TO EDIT FRICTION OUT.

THAT IS ALL.

This is why I don’t take guitar lessons. I know full well I don’t want to suffer through the pain of becoming any good at guitar playing. Even though I do love the idea of being a guitar player. But I know I don’t want to pay the PAIN PRICE and I know there is no app, no method, no teacher who can eliminate the PAIN PRICE.

Last but not least, I often have to interact with a woman who is acutely allergic to who I really am.

What makes it worse is that this woman is extremely polite and respectful and will not even admit that she is in fact allergic to my intensity, even my hand gestures. This woman should avoid Italian people at all costs, because the least bit of intensity she reads as aggression, a threat, too much, unnecessary.

Because I can’t avoid interacting with this woman, unless I want to see my income take a nose dive, the effect is that over time I slip into thinking that my intensity is indeed WRONG.

Am being politely, respectfully, sweetly, guided to being a shadow of myself to not upset others who prefer having days that to me look like reducing life to a walk in the park on a pleasant summer’s day while I want my days to look like summer storms alternated by sultry heat.

Conclusion:

I spend my life in the wrong rooms.

I find solace in discomfort, they organize around comfort.

I feel huge value in brutally analyzing myself, they scramble to keep their pleasant self-image intact and unassailable.

I feel alive when am jumping to punk music till my lungs feel like they’re about to collapse at 5 am in the morning after running outside to do pull-ups at the local playground. They find getting up at 8.30 criminally early.

I can complain about all this shit or systematically find rooms where my intensity is welcome and if I can´’t find them, I will have to build them myself.

Because by always keeping myself small, hiding my energy, not telling people what my days really look like (they think am bragging or it angers or depresses them because it confronts them with how they only act when they are forced to act, unless pleasure is involved) I simply start to RESENT myself.