im not talking 2 fast ur listening too slow <3
Watching cj the x videos has done a lot for me in terms of how I think about things for sure but one of the best things I’ve applied to my life has to be his unabashed care of the most random and absurd of things. With intense genuine wholesome love.
They’re not doing the thing where they find a thing loved by many people or things that trigger the right type of nostalgia in this nostalgia obsessed generation and jump off of it.
It’s like he thinks about something so fully and entirely that they feel it inside of him and then it speaks to him in ways I wish I had the attention span to reach to. I don’t want to flesh this off by giving examples of his videos, I want to articulate the sort of impossible wonder that fills me up after every new hyper fixation that I am somehow able to convert into art.
I’ve been reading for as long as I can remember and trust me, I can remember more than I think a human should. The hunger to consume stories was more than just to blank out parts of my real life (because yes, I’m mentally ill of course that was PART of it) it also helped me do this thought bounce thing where I would just sit and let all my multi thoughts intertwine and when they did I would come with an ultimately more interesting thought.
A lot of my early dabble into writing (after I was done methodically copying and recreating the stylistic talents of all of my favourite poets of course) was to do this self-talk in my head with these people and the things I’d tell them, and it would give me a fun new thing I cared enough about to explore while writing. A lot of the times when I started, I did not know where I was going with it at all and in some (MOST!) cases you could tell when you finished reading the piece.
But these were the most fun to write. They were like a high-speed roller coaster I could not see the path of but was falling into head fast. Very less things in my life do I approach like this.
How this ties with their video though are more intricate than just getting helplessly obsessed with something enough to be able to break it down and draw parallels with other things you love. It’s like reading a book you would never recommend to anyone because overall there is nothing it is saying that you want them to know or is presenting some feeling you want them to experience. It is just drugging along but you read a paragraph that says something that makes you think of something else which is absolutely an idea you want to extend and explore.
The consumption of art, not because it is a great piece of art but just because it exists and you are curious and even at the end when you are objectively concluding it is not a great piece of art you have found yourself an idea that makes your consumption worth it.
(Side note on worth: I do not think my time has to be so absorbed in optimised consumption of GREAT books that I can’t spare time to read any and everything that sparks my interest. That would be a sad and boring way to live.)
Cj the x videos have solidified this in me. To be able to love things and to be insanely deeply into things and make art out of the parts of you that are the weirdest. That’s what I want to do. That’s what I will do.
A bunch of his videos that have moved me such:
- Skipping The First 5 Minutes of Tangled - example of a small thing that he is critically into
- 7 Deadly Art Sins - the call out of my life
(i went to grad school and all i got was this lousy understanding of systemic problems in science)
The attempted reconciliation of the art and science in me is like me trying to force two similar poles of a magnet into each other extremely aggressively and watching it bounce into me repeatedly (painfully). They refuse to go together and yet I cannot define myself with either, without the other. I am at war mentally with what matters to me, what is real. The inherent dress up played by STEM topics like men totting their selfish wants as the rational objectively accurate thing has always poked at me. Rubbed me the wrong way. I rebelled at the idea but did not have the words to actually articulate it, even to myself.
Dr. Fatima worded this in a way I feel like I always knew but did not have the facts or vocabulary to back up. The subjectivity of science in the way it is framed in the way it pretends to be meritocratic and rational and objective. This kind of humanistic lens has been missing from our scientific view for so long. Honestly, without sociology what even is the point of ‘progressive discoveries’. The reality versus the variable fixation to create an environment that is as close as we can possibility get to fully grasping the world suddenly makes no sense. Your constants are my variables your scales aren’t the thing that I wish to be measured against. Your theories work for the goal you assume is where everyone aims to land, but there are so many possibilities so many things we disregard. How can there be a fixed metric for anything that works for everyone when there is no fixed metric that works for me alone. There are patterns she uncovers and assumptions she calls out that the scientific word tries to pretend are just facts.
She also does this thing where she teaches you how after you are able to see the shaky reality, we have tethered ourselves to, the unsafe plane we are floating on and are gripped with insane fear, it is not over. There are steps and ways to make it better, not just for yourself not just for you mentally but for people and things that you care about.
She reminds you that give people the right set of variably controlled ideal world and they will always choose good and be good because the apparent evil in us is more systemic helplessness for ninety percent of the world. Her videos that speak to me :
- How Science Pretends to be Meritocratic - insane articulation
- A Practical Guide to Systemic Change - life changing advice
Together these two recommendations tie in together when you see the quick jumpled passionate way CJ the X explains the objectivity of art and the evidence to your feelings Dr. Fatima verbalised while explaining the subjectivity of science <3