Critique of "Otaku and Instrumental Reason"

Several days ago I wrote a long blog post attempting to process some feelings of inadequacy I was having. I reflected on the hobbies I had throughout my life, and the frequently problematic circumstances surrounding my interests and desires. After spending a few days mulling over the ideas and re-reading what I wrote, I am now prepared to revisit the ideas in a more coherent way. While originally I planned on editing the post to present the argument more clearly, it quickly became apparent that this would not be a very worthwhile endeavor. So instead, I decided to write up what I think went wrong and why. Despite the critical approach of this post, I want to be clear that I'm extremely glad I went through the process of writing the original piece and learned a lot in the process.

My main takeaway upon revisiting "Otaku and Instrumental Reason" was that basically all the primary points I was trying to make don't hold up, or at least would require fundamental restructuring in order to be defendable. As was evident to even myself by the end of the post, the claim that I had never been an otaku about anything was just flatly incorrect. But further than that, I think pretty clearly my definition of otaku was spurious and obfuscatory. I was not very clear at describing what I was getting at to begin with and then proceeded as if I could use the term as some conceptual scaffolding to make sense of my hobbies. Some concepts will inevitably end up without clarity as they are being worked out, or will be so novel as to not be easily renderable in existing modes of thought in language [1]. This was not the case with my orienting concept of otaku. It was pretty clearly just a confused object to point at and pretend I was deficient in. The feeling of deficiency came first, and after I created a theoretical construction and asserted its absence in an attempt to justify the feeling. Rather than try to arrive at a proper definition of otaku then, it will be more useful to tackle the feeling of deficiency head on. This deficiency will vary relative to a specific area of interest I have.

For example, in philosophy I constantly feel as if I am not nearly well-read enough. I'm aware that this is not some unique problem I have, and is fairly common. There's just so much history to cover and because of the nature of the discipline every interpretation is contentious, so you have to be very careful with where you get your information from and how you go about assessing it. But often in order to do that it involves some level of knowledge about the intellectual affinities the author has, and sometimes this can feel like an impenetrable loop. It is very reminiscent of feelings of anxiety, where I spend all this time worrying and I struggle to even get my foot out the door. After crashing my way through several important philosophers though it becomes pretty clear that just getting familiarized, even if it's messy, is usually a fine enough starting place. Having some vague awareness ahead of time like "Hegel is not just 'thesis-antithesis-synthesis'" is good to start with, but you're going to remain perpetually confused if you don't just get started and fix your understanding as you go. I also am increasingly sensitive to the fact that other people do not feel nearly the same level of intellectual anxiety about erroneous interpretation, and have no qualms about speaking confidently in an area they know very little about. Of course I'm aware that this is a common human tendency, but it is nonetheless surprising to see otherwise thoughtful people fall into the same traps. I need to find a better balance between intellectual humility and neurotically avoiding communicating about a topic. Screwing up is an important part of the learning process! But anyway I think one of the primary causes of this is just that the university I attend is extremely analytical in orientation and does not include very much continental philosophy, and that the general environment in philosophy spaces is like that in person and online. Self research is really cool but also really difficult to contextualize properly and to find space for in addition to normal studying obligations. Additionally, my approach to self-research tends to be very focused on diving deep into one philosopher at a time and really getting into their head so I don't misinterpret them. This can be nice and feels effective and careful, but is also rather slow and I don't get a ton of breadth. This lack of breadth is one of the largest sources for feeling deficient I believe, as I will sometimes feel embarrassed when I'm unfamiliar with references people make to people I haven't read.

Another area I feel a lot of deficiency in is around computers. Growing up I didn't really use computers a ton, certainly not in any sort of complex ways. I played console games for the Wii in elementary school. In middle school I played Minecraft on the family laptop, and the most intensive tech thing I did on that computer was acquire a lot of viruses attempting to get mods to work lol. In high school I got a pre-build PC and an iPhone. I played Overwatch and some Steam games, chatted with people on Discord, and used Chrome to browse YouTube, and that's about it. I would experiment with emulating here and there, but that was pretty sparse. I got slightly more tech literate as time went on, but it was still very surface level. Only in the last year or so have I even touched the command line and started to get interested in tech, mostly through Linux and FOSS stuff. I daily drive Manjaro on my laptop and dual-boot Manjaro on my PC, though I basically never leave Windows. That being said, I now use Chocolatey for my programs and consistently use a lot of simple command line applications to do stuff like scrape songs/videos or edit/ocr/convert/combine files. Additionally I now actually torrent things (how the fuck did I survive before?), use a privacy hardened fork of Firefox, and am generally more competent at navigating around programs. Plus I suppose I learned some basic HTML and CSS to make this website. Still, compared to the people I admire I have virtually no skills or knowledge. Linux constantly confuses me; which to be fair, running into issues where things break is kind of the classic Linux thing. But still people actually have a general understanding of what types of things can cause things to go wrong, whereas I feel like I just try 12 things on StackOverflow until something works. I'm probably being a bit too pessimistic here, but I think the main emotion I have is just a lot of embarrassment when I'm around tech people because I would like to be more capable.

Lastly, I feel deficient in actual otaku things. Anime, manga, and visual novels tend to be the only type of fiction I really enjoy, and I spend a fair amount of time consuming them. But I have basically no background knowledge in the history of Japan, and also don't know directors or studios or anything like that. In some ways that can be pretty cool because it is interesting to have less pre-established expectations and associations going into an experience to just see where it takes me, but it can also be a little odd to not be able to communicate or properly contextualize something I spend a fair amount of time on. This seems like another problem with me not associating myself with communities very much, as I imagine I would pick up a lot of things just overhearing others talk about the subject.

However, in addition to these more specific applied cases of deficiency, there is also a broader feeling that I am unskilled or unknowledgeable in general. This is what I speak of when I say I am suspicious that the feelings I am having have a productivist stench to them. My personal hobbies and area of academic interest are not regarded very highly in terms of contributing to monetary success, and so when thinking about my future after college there can be some anxiety and discomfort about that fact. This feeling was best exemplified when I went through that minor breakdown and heavily looked into signing up for a coding bootcamp and adding a computer science major, lol.

I think not obscuring the fact that this feeling of deficiency is just that makes for a much more coherent reading on the struggles I'm having. Part of the remedy will be addressing the feelings themselves, and another part will be changing my actions. For sure, part of the remedy will be changing my actions given this awareness, like potentially looking into anime directors as I come across new shows and trying to make connections to other things I know. However, another possibly more important part of the remedy will be addressing the feelings themselves. It is understandable that I don't know everything there is to know about the history of philosophy, and in many ways a good thing that I take my time with authors to really try and figure them out. It is understandable that I'm not incredibly literate in technology given the relatively short period of time I have dedicated to trying to learn it and given that the people I am comparing myself to pursue the subject as their primary interest or area of study. These acknowledgements need not imply complacency nor seeking to eradicate the feeling of deficiency entirely. I can allow myself to feel, while not endorsing an overly critical attitude towards myself and my abilities.

I think that's just about all I have to say on the otaku aspect of the essay. In terms of the other elements: I think my historical account of different hobbies was mostly fine if very clearly jumbled; there were a few things I would add and take away if I was re-writing and would obviously try to present things in a more organized fashion, but overall it wasn't terrible. In terms of the arguments I made around instrumental reason and the structure of my desires I think there are a lot more issues. My interpretation was exaggerated and frequently not very nuanced, which is fine when getting the ideas out but does not make for a very cogent argument. Furthermore I think right now I sort of just lack the conceptual tools to properly analyze that. I would like to read more philosophy of psychology stuff and revisit it. I do think that I am onto something though and am pointing at something important, even if it won't be clear for a bit. The history is very messy and I need to be more careful about what threads I pull on and how I weave them together to try to tell an informative story. I also think I would benefit from explicitly framing it as one strand of my personal development rather than the sloppy presenting style I fell into of frequently implying that the instrumental reason of others was the exclusive motivational model I had, which is obviously rather absurd.

None of this critique is to say that what I did in that post was useless. Far from it! I learned a lot and it helped me gather a lot of my ideas in an interesting way. Being messy and wrong was an essential step to coming to the understanding I do now. None of it was individually ground-breaking, but putting things together some new meaning arose, even if it was rather confused the first go around.

1/15/2023 Edit:

Recently I've been looking into psychoanalysis (I really should have done this sooner; a lot of interesting stuff). Through this process I have come to realize how theoretically impoverished my previous self-reflections were, even given the opporutunity to critique myself like in this piece. I now see my initial draft as more or less an outpouring of manifest content, and this post as a cognitive behavioral style rationalization. Because of the etiolated tools I had at the time of writing, all I could really think about were causal explanations to the following question: How did it come to be that I had no in-depth knowledge in interesting areas? The draft was more self flaggelating and the critique was more compassionate in tone, but they shared the same basic (and flawed) framework.

As a quick gloss of how I currently interpret these posts, I basically feel that I was writing from a place of constructive envy [2] that somehow got turned against myself. I had various people in my life where I appreciated their skills, character traits, knowledge, etc. and wanted to be more like them. The key point is that I saw this as an aspirational goal for self-improvement and not that I wanted to remove it from them in any way; hence *constructive* envy. A more adequate treatment would have focused on the specific relationships and their significance to me, as well as engaging with a pattern of idealization I seem to have for people I deem significant in my life.

However, I don't think I'm personally capable of self-analyzing to that extent right now, and I also don't know how comfortable I would be sharing that publically in any case. I still don't know how comfortable I am keeping these pair of posts up to be honest. I don't think I would have written them otherwise, so in some sense I'm glad I did it, but since they are written I could probably take them down if I felt uncomfortable. Not like anyone is going to read them anyway. And honestly if someone has, they've earned access to that information because the writing isn't pretty lol.

Anyways, I will continue to learn, and hopefully the new conceptual tools I acquire will provide more enlightened orientation for self reflection and analysis of the world I inhabit. This will be the last edit I make to this post, otherwise every month I'll just keep revisiting to tell myself how much of an idiot I was. Seriously, how do writers stop themselves from perpetual editing? I suppose actually revising in the first place, huh. But there's no way I'm gonna do that.

2/2/2023 Edit:

I know I said I wouldn't edit again but I was catching up on Parz/artificialnightsky lore and they mentioned similar feelings to the original purpose of the article so I thought I'd include them here:

Mediocrity syndrome - 世界の敵

HEAD EMPTY NO LECTURE NO LOVE LEFT - 世界の敵

In some ways its comforting to know that other people also struggle with duration of lurking before posting too. In any case their explanation might capture something mine didn't, and the medium of expression might add some meaning or significance. It's also a relevant historical inclusion to capture where my headspace is at and what resonates with me at this time.

2/9/2023 Edit:

Okay nvm I feel extremely validated and related to and not alone. It's okay, I'm okay.

The unwatchable 12 hour podcast - U0YKNAHT0N