It is my debt to myself to understand the terms under which I seek to establish a more livable solution than the one I have worked under as a result of setting a goal for myself in college of serving the poor without regard to my own needs. This was a difficult goal from the outset and didn't have the effect on me of transforming my day to day sense of progress. As a result I made other plans than service without reward, first in economics and then in architecture, with the outcome of mental illness, perhaps because I had this conflict deep in my mind over the issue of rewards and the scale of the undertaking. The largest scale of undertaking of any I considered was this one with no consideration for reward. In a sense, it was this fact that guided my decisions over the long term and led to homelessness, in which I was forced to make do with a future utterly without reward, so why not make something of it, thus setting me up for pursuing the service goal I visualized in college. In this way, I rallied around my ambition, whose highest expression, in my case, was off scale in the world of college at Yale. And it could be said that I rallied around my ambition from the moment I reflected for the first time on service in a college setting. But still, this was motivated by self advancement, which is what ambition is all about. When one serves, he elevates everyone, and can expect this will include himself, though he must understand that this elevation takes fundamentally different directions in the case of those served and in the case of the one who serves. For those served, there is relief. This is absolutely different from the idea of the service economy. There, one works for pay, and performs service that contributes to, ultimately, what I have heard described as "the quiet enjoyment of assets." The history of the species is basically organized around this objective, and the stories of outsize servants dot the fabric here and there, but do not define the species assets. I have come to the conclusion there must be more in it than such an eccentric role for me. I want to be able to engage in the quiet enjoyment of assets, and I want to understand how this is accomplished so that I can raise my progeny up in that understanding. However, my reality is not economically strong. I produce nothing and do nothing that draws investment. What I produce is understanding. It is of the scale of my ambition. Generally, others will see no merit in it. My work is not generative of viral growth of audience.

However, there is evidence I have aroused the interest of some with a role that implies great ambition is not foreign to them. These identities will not be turned aside by the lack of ready economies in what I produce, or so I surmise, while they will still be looking to benefit. I find this picture of them attractive. Perhaps it fits. Perhaps it doesn't fit. Either way, it is wise for me to incorporate a more understanding component of my audience than any I began with when I started this blog. I knew such a component existed, but I had only a hope of seeing it respond.

With the manifestation of this component, as it occurs in spikes of large numbers of views of the blog in very short time intervals, there came a call to be cautious. A certain critical element is to be inferred. Confidence I am on the right path made it easy to operate in the spotlight of criticism. Yet it calls for something more than what I have done in the past. I must be starkly honest about my motives. This will serve my base of action.

This honesty about my motives leads me to question why I wish to seek financial comforts after having so strongly spoken of my goal to serve and to count myself among those who certainly didn't produce economic returns in proportion to their service. I have begun to enter this area of thought above. The species is centered on assets, not outsized service, which is an afterthought. My economic desolation gave me a space to inhabit of small size, but my critical skills found use in the time left to me, and I have invested in understanding, coming up with some ideas with large implications. On the strength of these ideas I determined that tool use by humans caused them to lose body hair because it made up for a loss of tactile contact with their environment.

I seem to be in a frame of mind in which I lead myself into concepts that extend in many directions none of which has the definition required for standing on to go any further. This may be out of having no conversation in the large scale of ideas, and needing to let ideas simmer for a while before it becomes obvious what the next proposition with merit will be.

That being the case, I allow that the ideas the reader may take from all this may well be earlier, and this present bit of writing is not yet as fruitful.

Not a life to emulate

Would I recommend the sort of life I have had to today's Yale students?

There are so many reasons not to. I am poor. I am mentally ill. New Haven's last official words to me were stay away. My blog is unpopular. Most of my family has disowned me. This is a deep and dark cavern to explore in looking for signs of do not enter.

There is no "BUT". I may have a life of substance in terms of accomplishments (now the but) but they are all resting on the slimmest footing and the most vulnerable chemistry, that of DNA, with respect to permanence. I will not succumb to a tendency to poetry in the interest of selling what I have not enjoyed. My life is not one to inspire imitation or succession. It has been a tedious existence. Little romance. Day after day of hunger and cold. Refuge in the unappealing arms of Social Security Disability. By any measure it is a tragedy.

Life itself has been an irritant.

Why?

There is a possibility the reason is that as a freshman at Yale I mused about my choice of a direction in life among all those I had seen and heard about, the lives of Yale alumni, and I came to a general but murky conclusion that the best way I could use my Yale education, were I to complete it, was to seek no reward but yet work, and do this in the company of the poor of America. I had no skills for it. I had no ideas to make it concrete and actionable. I only had a desire to admit myself into company which at the time I would have blushed to think of as fellows of the same kind. And for this choice there remains no reward. That keeps me in the company. It doesn't make me happy. I have never disowned my appetite for pleasure. I have learned to live with various levels of poverty, both in terms of money and in terms of logistics. I have no ashram to offer those interested in me, whether as a place to live or as a house to provide brief respite. I have not extended anyone's spiritual empire. I have not written anything pointing the way. These disqualify me for that one office which I can otherwise claim with reason, that of successor to Moses. So perhaps I shall ultimately disengage myself from that claim, and go entirely sui generis. Great. Another vanity.

Such as it is, it is a warning to all but those who disregard them, not to follow me.