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The SymposiumMay 3, 20259 min read

Being treated as a wannabe rapper

Retrospecting the founders journey

Read the original on Substack

What does the founder and a budding “wannabe” rapper have in common you might ask? Everything, nearly everything.

Each time you present yourself into the world you’re relegated to having justify what it is you’re doing and why exactly it is that you’re doing what you’re doing. Unlike the rest of society that can identify with a predefined career category such as doctor, lawyer, real estate agent, cashier etc. without any question ensue, you’re left having to explain your wherewithal for doing something beyond rhyme or reason without expectation to yield return.

Every time this self-justification ritual begins, it’s as if a part of your soul escapes your body each time this seemingly vampiric exchange commences. You summon the utmost uppity and vigor in your apologia, only to be downtrodden by a long face of doubt as the listener’s eyes begin rolling back behind their skull begging to exit this dance before you’ve even had the chance to finish your plea. After many repetitions of this exact ritual, you start to notice that you’ve become pariah, an untouchable, for you get rendered into obsolescence for having nothing in hand to show, neither bushel of crop nor carcass of meat for all your toil.

It is in these moments you’re reminded why you must never leave the cave where the imagined is inseparable from the apparent. For without a goblet of fire in hand to pronounce, you become draped in shame having nothing to show for all your toil. In this cave enlightenment is found only through mania, when the most fleeting of intuitions transmutes into the most decisive of convictions. It is where the illusory and incomprehensible unite as one to illume the world afar and outside the cave. The longer you stay in the cave, the more disconnected you become from the reality of the external world. People become irritable to you because you demand people to see what you see, feel what you feel but in dialogue its as if their inert ghouls with not a modicum of humanity to show, thus sending you into further retreat of the world outside upon each interaction.1

The deeper into this cave you descend, the less people there are in the world for you to relate with, but deep enough into the cave and you become entirely blind to all other stimuli except for the shadows being cast by your mind. When you’ve entered this abyss, there’s no reason for anyone to check in on you. It is at these depths that you’ve broken away from all prior assumptions and dogmas of the world, becoming that of whom can generate from nothing at all.

However, some friends of old might come check in regardless, but since they don’t have a cave of their own to enter and escape from, they will not understand the angst. Since they inquire, you sincerely want to update them giving them answers such as “I think I’m about one month away from launching”, but exactly in that moment the zeitgeist of the unknown unknown comes to haunt you thus rendering you six months later into the future without a goblet of fire in hand, once again commencing the humiliation ritual of self-justification.

It’s in these moments you realize you’ve taken on more than you can chew, as you begin losing familiarity and proportion of your own form and begin taking on the shape of the thing that you’ve been chewing on. When inventors speak of “madness” overcoming them, they’re speaking to exactly this phenomenon where their image and association of self fades into the background in service of the great deed before them that they’ve surrendered themselves to. It’s a delirium that’s one part liberating and suffocating, where you can’t fathom the thought of anything else in your life existing.2

This is where the animus of generation-defining conviction gets formed, one that singularly propagates itself towards a single trajectory, autonomically repudiating all threats perceived or otherwise which may be impeding its line of sight. Consciously, this manifests as dimension altering fixation, dilating all other disparate nodes of your life into fading apparitions that may only ever twinkle over your inner narrator ever so timidly at the come of night. It is here you find the days skipping past you in hours, the weeks running past you in days, and the months jumping past you in weeks, indicating the subconscious has united with your conscious in a self-induced trance, thus at once crystallizing the conglomeracy of your many persons into the unity of a singular indivisible personhood.3

In the midst of all this trial and tribulation, one is left to wonder whether the onslaught of resistance is a form of penitence or the forbearer of destiny. What you realize is that a man’s value isn’t made manifest at the zenith of his existence, but rather in the abyss of his trough as the void fuels man of his life force, if he chooses to embrace its armageddon. In this solitude induced by abject mania, your isolation and rejection will send you to places that others couldn’t consider existing as you’ll birth a great many visions and manifest what you once assumed as seemingly impossible, thus only through irreducible failure do you discover the love of life and what truly ought to be your cause in this life.4

In this dance with the ineffable one comes into contact with a type of pain that simply cannot be reconciled by materialism, a revulsion transcending sustenance, mimetics, and all other permutations of physical well-being felt almost as an ill against fate. This undue disgust is what the archetype of the visionary and artist feels when they’re unable to birth their conception into the world, one that seemingly feels as if the vision preceded their own existence. Thus, if there truly is a supernatural order in the world, the hardship faced manifesting said vision into being feels like a wrong being committed against that order.5

As the visionary sublimes into the imperative of his absolute, you become like a stone mason cutting rock with bare hands. It’s painful, it’s tiring, and after doing it long enough you start to feel more like Sisyphus rather than a magician bringing life into the stone upon a single touch. However, after the spoils of toil the rock finally begins to transmute into your image, even if just a faint image. It is then the universe awards you with the metal rod to finally get serious work done, but like all things difficult, the universe needs to slap you with some irony first as when you needed the aid most, you were given nothing.6

After spending long enough in the destitute of your isolation to birth what you willed from nothing into being, you come to realize there will always exist a cohort of people that’ll dislike you irrespective of what you say, do, or act. Until you don’t learn to ignore these voices of doubt, rejection, and skepticism, greatness will never be in your midst.7

To the mind, the meandering voices from afar are no different from the nebulous voices within, the utmost discipline and jurisprudence is necessitated to rise above the cacophony of chaos as it attempts to distract, dilute, and tempt you out of your convictions. Thus the fleeting voices of hesitancy and doubt from within must be stomped upon indubitably, otherwise you’ll be impaled of your own cowardice, squandering into obsolescence as you’re left floating into the ether of space as fate chooses to make of you as it wills.8

If you’re doing something noteworthy, there will be many bystanders along your journey who will come whisper in your ear a simpler path to a good and happy life awaits if you can only temper your expectations down to reasonable proportion.

As well intentioned as these voices may appear to be, deep down these people are bothered by the might of your ambitions and simply can’t fathom how someone can concentrate their life force into a singular point without expectation of victory or return.

They’re bothered you possess the wherewithal to believe in something without any apparent rhyme or reason. Your actions and energy reflects back into them something ugly about their soul that they simply cannot comprehend existence past the immediacy of quid pro quo.9

It’s not you against the world, but rather it is you against malfeasance, it is you against skepticism, it is you against derision, and ultimately it is you against the force that denies life itself. Your role as the founder and, by extension artist, visionary, and all other generatives is to fulfill the archetypical role of keeping alive the premise of story.

Before success truly has the opportunity to peek over the horizon of your soul, you must first excise all demons of self-doubt within, brainwashing oneself into believing you’re going to make it and that everything is going to be alright.10

If you truly want to see change manifest into the world, you must be willing to shamelessly chant for your own victory and cause.

Any indecision or strife upon your own convictions and your outward expressions will be rendered externally as hesitancy and ultimately weakness that no silver tongued prose can ever feign off.

Until you’ve not strangled the nascent voice of the inner critic, it’ll continue to suffocate all your prognostications of what instead ought to be into the world.11

When you’ve toiled in the tumult of your madness for too long, you immediately assume what could be glimmers of light awaiting for you at the end of the tunnel are no more than illusory mirages.

After prolonged exposure to consecutive failure, you begin to develop such a strong bias against positive outcomes that not even immediate success can illuminate your blindness.

It is this same headspace where decades of meaning can be experienced in a fraction of the measured time, as the intensity of your rage liberates you in your madness from all semblances of objectivity and duty.

However, to return to reality after this prolonged escape, you must learn to trust in yourself once more, recognizing the creations made from your mind and body were not fantasy, but rather manifest whole into reality.

When you entered the cave it was pitch black and nauseating, as it’s foul stared back into you, but yet you chose willingly to take a leap of faith believing that you could do and become.

Now that the light has begun to shimmer across your face, you must learn to believe in yourself and not just objective reality, for until that’s happened, the journey cannot be completed nor the cave exited, thus denying yourself the opportunity to slay mightier dragons and scale greater peaks.12

Believe in yourself, believe in your cause, and believe in your doings as the light will shine upon you even in the tumult of your madness. The time to generate is now.

If you liked my work feel free to give me a follow on Twitter/X and check out my other Substack Generative Forms for more philosophy-specific content.

Footnotes

Footnotes

  1. Cave of the imagined and the apparent https://x.com/remusrisnov/status/1849719444517552517 ↩

  2. Taking on the shape of what you’ve been chewing https://x.com/remusrisnov/status/1855808241609175216 ↩

  3. Generation defining animus https://x.com/remusrisnov/status/1773613419998171481 ↩

  4. Man’s value is found at the trough of the abyss https://x.com/remusrisnov/status/1761946032467071117 ↩

  5. Pain that cannot be reconciled with via materialism https://x.com/remusrisnov/status/1819266488605536622 ↩

  6. Founder is like a stone mason https://x.com/remusrisnov/status/1826881175497179561 ↩

  7. People that will always dislike you https://x.com/remusrisnov/status/1857301476873490715 ↩

  8. Meandering from afar are no different to the nebulous voices within https://x.com/remusrisnov/status/1825053463191130148 ↩

  9. Doing something noteworthy https://x.com/remusrisnov/status/1867823660922548649 ↩

  10. Before success has the opportunity to peak over the horizon of your soul https://x.com/remusrisnov/status/1840578788641358144 ↩

  11. Chant for your own victory https://x.com/remusrisnov/status/1891728566531825865 ↩

  12. Toiled in the tumult of your madness https://x.com/remusrisnov/status/1858059955812565154 ↩