My Struggles As They Relate to You

Caw caw, bish

• Raven Nevermore

I’m shitting hard again, back up the dump truck
You underneath, then tough luck

• Lloyd Banks

I’m from where they call you a rat if you snitching

• Young Thug

Struggle as process, process as pragmatism, pragmatism as struggle.

The recipe: I think of a topic. The topic gets summarized with a title. The title acts as a starting point to describe the topic.

Days after coming up with the title I found myself lying down on a massage table. As the massage therapist was working on my knots, I started thinking about the topic again: How can I get people to give a shit about my struggles?

The theme being philosophy, the question is multifaceted.

Sure, I can use psychology to win friends and be influential. At what cost? At the cost of letting passive implications go unvoiced. Use people’s name in front of them. They’ll think you’re soft on them and that you somehow respect them. But if they come looking for help, how soft will you then be?

From another perspective, people are predisposed to give a shit about stuff their paid to do. This massage therapist wouldn’t be using their allotted existential energy focused on my back muscles if there was no money involved.

From a more autonomous perspective, I can get people to give a shit about my struggles if I reach a social agreement with them that I will give a shit about their struggle.

From a universal perspective, we can define what are human struggles and reach answers about giving a shit that apply to everyone. “That person is someone’s mother. I will give a shit about her struggle because I would want someone to care about my mother if roles were reversed and my mother needed help.” Even if my mother may never need help or even if I had no mother, I could still believe that because the relevant point is that there is a struggle going on and my existence is based on how I relate my existential expulsion within the struggle of struggle.

The universality of struggle (contrasted with the individuation of struggle) can be seen at every facet of understanding. To understand is a struggle itself, but to understand is to struggle with something beyond understanding.

Paradoxically, re-read everything thus far and you can see the beyondness of understanding against the tension of understanding. You have your own approach by which you come to understanding/struggle with this text. The question of how I can get people to give a shit about my struggles can be understood in “various” ways but only once contrasted with our individual struggle with understanding.

Again, even as I try to gain sympathy from you, the reader, you have to remember that by my understanding of struggle, it includes thinking about this bullshit while getting my body rubbed. Beyond understanding the struggle of understanding, there’s the struggle of what is understood.

Can you ignore what is understood? Can you ignore struggle? Can struggle be trivial?

Again, before the beyondness of struggle, struggle is understood as a universal truth. The universe is one, inter-connected struggle. The understanding process is a struggle that understands a struggle. The digestion of this struggle is done by further understanding, which results in “further” understanding.

Where we stand under is defined by the struggles we wish to define us.