To tell you about my proclamation of 2024, first I must tell you about my proclamation of 2023.

Luckily, this is very simple.

“We are free from the perfidious ghosts and misconceptions of our pasts.”

( You can also read it (viz.: my previous post on the subject) here: wyattscarpenter.github.io/blog/my_proclamation_of_2023.txt )

What does this mean? Well, around the new year of 2022→2023, I decided to make a new year's resolution. I'm very powerful (spiritually) so my new years' resolutions affect everyone, and become proclamations. And what I had noticed, around that time, was that I was acting irrationally as though I had to continue behaviors that had sprung from misconceptions in my past. You don't. You don't have to do this. Somebody yelling at you makes you upset because as a child you had no power to stand up to such a thing? You don't have to act the same way. Storing a lot of useless materials around because as a younger person you thought they might be useful someday? Turns out they weren't; you don't have to continue doing that. Used to hold a misconception about social practice or scenario X, perhaps wordlessly, that means you acted incorrectly with respect to X? No need to continue doing that. Feel a secret shame about something you did years ago? You are now free. Generally stuck in some kind of subtle thought-loop like the shame thing but different? It's ok; now you aren't. (In particular: feel the need to continue thinking about something because past-you thought it might be important? Feel free to abandon the hunches of past-you.) Started a path of action that now seems bad? No need to continue. Misevaluated your priorities at a certain point? You have now realized you misevaluated.

Here's something I said to a friend of mine 5 months later:

> Childhood trauma isn't real; it can't hurt you.
> Oh, maybe you didn't hear: when we rung in 2023, I declared that this year we were free from all the perfidious ghosts, fears, and stupidities of the past. We're free!
> I have cancelled the very idea of hangups.

To which he commented:

> Finally I can take all this sand out of my pockets

I drew a great comfort and correction from my proclamation of 2023. It is very good and correct. It addresses certain common weaknesses — in myself, and possibly also in the human animal.

There is an open question, however: what is the past? In the context of this proclamation, what is specified?

Eventually, months after the initial proclamation, I addended:

"My proclamation of 2023 renews every day, by the way."

Eventually, 2024 happened, and this led into my proclamation of 2024:

“We are free even from the perfidious ghosts and misconceptions of our presents.”

With this proclamation, you achieve true radical freedom. Doing something wrong? Feel free to stop. Could be doing something better? Feel free to do so. Guilty about something from earlier in the day? That's never helped me. I release you from it. You are the master of your own destiny.

"You are the master of your own destiny" — I keep telling people this, and they never believe me.

Here's a little something I wrote about it at the time, being very calm and happy, an incredible lightness, that I didn't owe anything to anyone:

> My proclamation of 2024: “We are free of the ghosts of the present, also”.
> This occurred to me in 2024, when I had just finished being the best man at a wedding, and also doing other things, which entailed taking on too many things I needed to do. Afterwards, I completely lost the sense that I owed to myself doing the past tasks I thought I might like to do (although I kept them around just as ideas about what to do next); and I lost the sense that I should care (give a shit) about what other people think about me (if they should keep weird little grudges against me, see also, they also insane (I haven’t interacted with them, let alone wronged them, in years)) (although, keep in mind I still do want to be moral. For intrinsic (I suppose) reasons).

In particular, I often find that, say, take for example applying for jobs: I used to not like applying for jobs. Still don't. But I used to let this stop me.

In a scenario like that, a man can get to thinking "guess I just don't apply to jobs. Guess it's impossible. Guess that's a special kind of task I just don't do, reserved only for different types of soul than I".

And, it's useful to know your limits like that. For example, I don't make a lot of plans that involve applying for jobs, because I know I won't get around to those.

But also, you can't let this become an actual limitation to you. A meta-limitation. If the situation comes where you should be applying to jobs, it is fully within your power to say "I understand applying for jobs now. It's just a time-intensive, boring task that I dislike, nothing more. My soul is not on the line, in any way, this way or that. I simply choose to do it now that I have realized this." And that's what you do when you're freed by my proclamations.

Appendices:

=== Interlude: sand in pockets ===

Why did my friend say "Finally I can take all this sand out of my pockets"? Well, it's fitting as a suitable metaphor. And it's funny as an image. However, in addition to that, months later he said to me, in a humorous comment, a statement that implies I had told him as a child that he needed to put sand in his pockets or he'd float up to the moon, and his mother was then mad he had dirtied his new outfit. This never happened, because I didn't know him as a child (we weren't even children at the same time, come to think of it). So maybe it's some kind of common joke or meme or anecdote in his part of the world (which is also America, but whatever neighborhood he grew up in, I guess).

=== Interlude: becoming willpilled ===

I felt some kind of way. When I was 25, turning 26, in 2023, I began to have what I described as "spooky mind powers" or "spooky cognitive power". Perhaps these spooky brain powers were from turning 25, as everyone says your brain matures at that time (I don't believe this... whatever it means...) or maybe just securing employment after spending an indeterminate amount of time merely drifting around walking incredible distances and watching the turning of the seasons after getting my master's degree in computer science in order to recover from about 20 years of an education system which while not brutal was still like unto a prison for my will. Or perhaps it was for no reason at all. But, by whatever cause, everything was suddenly very clear to me. I understood how to do things, and did them. This is when I started poasting (as my friends call pontificating about something) about the "will pill", which was "taking" (realizing) the "pill" (revelation) that you should simply impose your will on the world, skillfully. At this time I also found the proclamation of 2023 very useful; not only in a palliative sense, but in an active sense, as I actively abandoned the misconceptions of my past with great rapidity to rebuild my life from the ground up. Simply using my spooky mental powers — powers that were like unto lightning which they made my will, arcing from cause to effect (or, perhaps in reverse, due to the necessity of planning in the conception) in a straight line (therefore, in fact, unlike lightning, but quite as quick!), powers that were like unto that which a crazy person considers themself to have, thus their obsession with moving furniture; except when I move furniture, and when I think, it ACTUALLY WORKS.

(Incidentally: I've realized the phrase "spooky mind powers" occurred to me because of the delightful turn of phrase "creepy oracular powers" Scott Alexander once used to describe the skills of Greg Cochran https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/14/a-failure-but-not-of-prediction/ . My powers were not actually oracular, nor epidemiological, in nature.)

I sort of lost these, however.

=== Interlude: becoming depressed ===

Towards the end of 2023, a friend, call him A, came to live with me. This was fine and good. It was supposed to be merely for a short time. However, he failed to get a job that paid him almost anything (note his failure to apply the willpill here, I guess), and even though I had a good job they were a bit tardy in paying me; so, the planned move to a suitable two-person apartment was delayed for these reasons. Eventually, the arrangement collapsed (tho not in a negative way): we had a multi-hour discussion about what kind of apartment we should move into, and where, and eventually reasoned that he should move to Brazil to stay with his family, which he had always intended to do at some point; and I should go live with a friend of mine, call him A′, until that second friend's wedding, as that second friend had offered to me as a living situation to pay back a favor to me and also because it seemed like a fun time. And so we did.

I told you that story to tell you this one:

I arrived at the apartment of A′ and, as I say, it seemed like a fun and cool time to live there with him for a couple months (to both of us). I was living in his living room, sure, on an air mattress (and, later, a sleeper couch), sure; but I'd been in college, I'd lived in worse. Unfortunately, over the months that ensued, my idiosyncratic sleep schedule and his busy work/chore/planning-for-wedding schedule conspired against us meaning that we only got to hang out for real a couple of times a month, despite living in the same apartment. Let me be clear that when we did hang out it was fun, and also ambiently seeing each other around was fun, and also I did some things on my own that were fun (although I very rarely saw other people when doing my other activities). And so, unnoticingly, like the apocryphal boiled frog, I slipped into a deep isolation-caused depression, a foul mood which rarely left me completely. I only noticed this had been the case when the actual wedding occurred and, talking to several of my friend who were there whom I hadn't seen in months, thought "oh my god. I haven't felt like this in months. It's like I've come back from the dead." So yeah even though it seemed like a good idea at the time, and I'm definitely still grateful to A′ for his friendship and generosity and hospitality and (as all roommates must have some of) tolerance of my peculiarities (as we forgive the peculiarities of our roommates in turn; as in the lord's prayer), it was a bad idea and in retrospect I shouldn't have done it.

I eventually returned to my original living situation, from the beginning of this section (shortly before A came to live with me (in fact, A tried to come back to live with me again, but his plans were sadly, shall we say, upended)), and eventually felt much better.

Why did I tell you that story? Well, it explains, to some extent, why I don't feel like I have spooky mind power anymore. Perhaps I will recover again. I have already felt my powers (in a general sense) growing, again, to be sure. Or perhaps I will just continue my life in a humdrum manner.

> CIA Superior: What did we learn, Palmer?
> CIA Officer: I don't know, sir.
> CIA Superior: I don't ███████ know either. I guess we learned not to do it again.
> CIA Officer: Yes, sir.
> CIA Superior: I'm ██████ if I know what we did.
> CIA Officer: Yes, sir, it's, uh, hard to say
> CIA Superior: Jesus ███████ Christ.
—𝐵𝑢𝑟𝑛 𝐴𝑓𝑡𝑒𝑟 𝑅𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔