Lots of great stuff in here, Christopher. Congrats on being cloned by the scammers. That means you're good and widely read and worth their time to impersonate you. I've reported the scammer who has replied to several of your responders.

Have you read "Demian" by Hermann Hesse? Here are a couple of quotes:

“We, with the mark, might justly be considered strange, even crazy and dangerous, by the rest of the world. We were awakened, or at least awakening; our efforts were directed toward ever more complete awareness, while others always longed to merge their opinions, ideals, and duties, their lives and their happiness, more and more closely with those of the herd. That was a striving too — there was strength in that effort, and even a kind of greatness. But we, with the sign, felt that we embodied nature’s will for the new, the individual, and the future, while the others’ lives showed only a will to persist in the old. They loved humanity as much as we did, but for them it was something already finished, to be preserved and protected, while for us it lay in a distant future we were all moving toward, whose image was still unknown, and whose laws had never been written.”

The mark he speaks of is his interpretation of the mark of Cain. I happen to display mine on my middle finger. I wonder if you also have the mark.

Here's another quote from the novel:

“For awakened human beings, there was no obligation — none, none, none at all — except this: to search for yourself, become sure of yourself, feel your way forward along your own path, wherever it led — This realization upset me deeply, and that was what I gained from the whole experience. I had often toyed with ideas and images of my future, dreaming up roles to play as a writer, for example, or prophet, or painter, or whatever it was. All that meant nothing. I was not put on earth to write, or preach, or paint — and nor was anyone else. These things were only secondary. Every person’s true calling was only to arrive at himself. He might end up a poet or a madman, a prophet or a criminal — that was no concern of his; in the end it was meaningless. His concern was to find his own fate, not a random one, and to live it out, full and complete. Everything else was a half-measure, escapism, fleeing back into the ideal of the masses — conformity and fear of what was inside yourself.”

I recently read it for the second time. In the margin next to that quote I wrote, "BEING v DOING," which was my reference back to this Neale Donald Walsch quote:

“If you think your life is about DOINGNESS, you do not understand what you are about. Your soul doesn’t care what you do for a living — and when your life is over, neither will you. Your soul cares only about what you’re BEING while you’re doing whatever you’re doing. It is a state of BEINGNESS the soul is after, not a state of doingness.”

All that and more is in the companion essay portion of my https://medium.com/channspirations/reflections-on-purpose-and-life-0d1156df70ce, which starts out with three short poems. Here's one of them:

"to live

that’s my purpose

nothing more, nothing less

witness and experience all

that’s soul’s"

Cheers and best wishes, Christopher, contrarians come in all forms. The label is limiting and often defines us in the eyes of others.