Today, We Have a Choice: Love or Hate

We've reached an inflection point in history today.

I’m heartbroken. More and more violence, and it’s going to continue unless we stop it.

I’ve been studying the nature of change over the last five years, because I realized I was being changed against my will. I started out writing about my own personal transformation, and a month into chasing the incentives, I wrote about giving my dad a choice between Trump and his grandkids.

To me, Trump was a symbol of hate. I didn’t want to have my kids raised around hate, so if he had a Trump sign in his yard, he must be full of hate, right? I spouted off online, experienced a wave of hate as a backlash, and my brain exploded. I’ve never been the focus of hate before. As my work was elevated to the global (or at least national) consciousness, albeit briefly, I realized something: everyone put their own stories on top of my words and shared them on behalf of their side in the war.

But on the internet, time is weird. This was a momentary fight I had with my dad, and we made up within days, because I know my dad. He knows me. We share a context, a history, even if we don’t see the world the same way.

And the funny thing is that we agree on the problems! We simply don’t agree on the solutions, because solutions are a lot harder than problems. But I received hate mail two weeks after I wrote the blog post, and about 10 days after I took the post down because I realized it didn’t reflect the person I wanted to be.

I touched something I wasn’t ready to touch, and I got burnt. I reached into the dimension of art, and got to experience the power of a god, just long enough to do something stupid.

I had no idea, I had crazy thoughts in my head about Twitter being a quantum computer, but that wasn’t it at all. It’s art that exists in the quantum realm, not information. Art exists at the moment of creation and destruction, the intersection of love and hate.

I created art when I conflated the feelings I had around my position in the world, the uncertainty I had during the global pandemic, a difficult marriage, an unknown future, and all sorts of shit. I knew I was broken and all I wanted to do was fix myself, and I projected that out into the world. I hated all sorts of things about myself, and I made it my mission to fix the world, because the world was so incredibly broken, I was seeing it everywhere! I could be the one to solve things! I had the answers!

Then I realized that everyone else in history has as well. It’s all well and good to know things have to change, but how do we know WHAT needs to change?

After today, I have the answer. I want to turn HATE into LOVE.

Hate is simply a desire for change. It’s a feeling that something is wrong, and must be fixed. Unfortunately, technology gives us an easy way to throw that hate against others, instead of focusing it where it can actually do good: internal change.

After scrolling Twitter today, I was a bit of an asshole toward my wife, and I didn’t understand why until I started writing. I was feeling triggered because I saw a future in which I was the person committing that act. There exists a series of choices I could have gone down, because I saw the change pattern that social media leaves on us. I felt that pattern personally, I know how it feels to be pulled in the direction of hate. I remember angrily pounding out the strokes on the keyboard, unburdening my soul into the world.

I smashed that submit button and I went out on social media, spreading my insecurity everywhere like digital herpes.

The internet rubbed some cream on me and I went away, resigned to the shadows of social media for the next half decade, where I tried to convince myself of my importance. I had all the answers! Why couldn’t anyone see them?

And then I decided to investigate the game theory of straddling the line between genius and insanity, and I realized the answer was there in front of me the whole time.

I was trying to solve a problem that was solved in the 1400s. There’s a pattern we can use to generate geniuses, because it ensures that each generation surpasses the last. It keeps getting captured and freed, breaking apart only to come back together again.

There’s way too much I need to learn still.

I think the first thing I need to do is apprentice in a master’s shop.

I need to feel the patterns that exist inside of the artist’s workshop. All the human problems have been solved, but not by tech, by art. Once I understand art, I believe I’ll have the tools I need in order to share my vision with the world.

If your workshop has a Lorenzo de Medici and wants a wandering master to visit for a bit and exchange techniques while learning your processes, please reach out. I’m in the process of collecting apprentices and learning about patronage. The one thing I can guarantee is that you will be transformed by my visit, and I’ll be transformed as well.

That’s the magic that happens in the bottega. It’s only in the bottega that we can perform the alchemy necessary to transform hate into love.

And as the first sacrifice, I make an offering of all hate I have in my heart, and I sacrifice it to the memory of Charlie Kirk, a man with whom I agreed on very little. In this way, I turn hate into love.

I vow to use my art to ensure your death is transformed into love, not more hate.

And I call on the other artists of the world to help me spread love as well. Offer your hate up to the world, and let’s launch a transformation of meaning that brings magic back into the world.

We all need to work together to stop the hate.

This might be the last chance to stop the path we are currently on.