yeah im in the cliche USian internet socialist demographic, young-to-middle millennial w/ a college education on a downwardly mobile middle class trajectory. honestly a fluke of history and luck (stumbling on the right educational resources at the right time) and i guess having a monomaniacal neurodivergent brain that i've learned all the shit i have. and then similar stumblings of luck/chance (or fate (which is still out of my control) or maybe those are the same thing and language trips us up) that got me to finally touch grass and do shit irl. and even then i'm still pretty new to that and who knows where the stream of life takes us next.

idk the point im trying to make is it's humbling in an important way to realize how little of our beliefs is out of some essential idealized puritan virtue (which is the kindling for misanthropy and for feelings of superiority, which are often the same thing) and how much of it is luck. and also how we're weirdos/outliers for diving deep into this shit and the norm (which is in many ways rational at least from a survival/self interest POV) is to be disaffected by politics and to kind of passively absorb a disparate incoherent mishmash of a lot of the default ideological conditioning.

but then also stumbling through that gauntlet of luck and chance is in certain ways a gift and a responsibility, a mixed bag kind of gift that feels really heavy at times, but one that once attained gives us a duty to try and (in what ways we are able, even if they are small and limited by our circumstances) bring that knowledge and guidance to the rest of the people in our class who are struggling in the darkness. and i don't mean that in a messianic or individualist way, but by joining the collective and the struggle in what ways we are able, doing our small part to build real tools of collective learning informed by our knowledge and also always having a curiosity to learn more.

and honestly while being a marxist can feel like cursed knowledge at times (something something university degree in truth, 0.00 percent of communism something something all he's done is made himself very sad, etc) i can't say i envy the people i know who are still stuck in the morass of liberalism, either tacitly or explicitly. trying to fit a framework of "this is fundamentally just, if flawed" over all the this-is-fine of our conditions would drive me much more insane than what i have now. i'll take an accurate model of the grim reality over a poisoned and poisoning delusion.