HEART OF LUXURY

February 12th, 2020

For all it’s conspicuousness, it’s gaudy signaling, the core of luxury - the real reason why any given person should be driven to chase it - is invisible.

The word Luxury has bit of a bumpy history, but if you go back far enough, it originates from Latin, and refers simply to excess.  This excess has a negative association and that negative association only grew through the centuries until it morphed into the current usage which appears to be more in line with the original Latin root – still somewhat negative despite the fact that everyone is gunning for it.  Those who can afford luxuries do so with an excess of money.  And often, the obvious luxuries are conspicuous displays of this excess:  unnecessarily expensive cars that do nothing more than get a person from point A to point B in much the same way a dirt cheap car does, expensive clothes that cover and warm the body little better than what the salvation army has on offer, food delicately prepared that offers nutrition little better than what someone can prepare on their own for far less.  All of these forms of luxury are merely a way of signaling to others the excesses that an individual can command.

These conspicuous symbols of luxury are superficial.  The signaling nature of luxury, and particularly its advertising often drives people to undermine their own wealth just to be able to display a wealth that they no longer have because of their drive to upstage or equal the visible value of someone else.

All of this misses the point of luxury, and the unique opportunity it can afford.

The core function of luxury is actually convenience.  Top brands are often obsessed with figuring out ways to save their top spenders a little time.

Instead of “that’ll be $782.” it’s “I’ll just put that on your account.”

Every transaction that occurs in the market is a function of convenience.  For example, it would be inconvenient to an insurmountable degree to build your own laptop from scratch.  Luckily there are many thousands of groups of people that have been conveniently organized in a way to accomplish this work, and we pay for that convenience.  There is little difference between the laptop and a cup of coffee that a barista prepares for you.  Even if you are at home and that barista is you, chances are high that someone else is largely responsible for how those beans came to be in your possession, and you paid for the convenience of finding them a couple blocks away at the grocery store.

Think for a moment about the amount of time you would need to construct a laptop from scratch.  Not just buying the components and putting them together, but mining the materials and developing the processes to form them into the right shape, and discovering or developing the laws of computation and how exactly you accomplish this with your mined and shaped materials.  How long would you need to accomplish this as a single individual?

A thousand years?

Ten thousand years?

The cup of coffee is similar.  If you were totally without coffee, how long would it take you to make a cup of coffee happen if you were alone on the planet?  Depending on where you are located, you might have to travel and very long way in order to find a coffee plantation or a naturally occurring plant that yields our beloved black bean. 

How long would you need?  A few days?  A few weeks or months?

It would certainly take you far less time than constructing a computer from scratch, but then again, a cup of coffee is far cheaper than a laptop. 

Framing it this way, it seems like a miracle that powerful laptops are as affordable as they are.  Making a few hundred or even a thousand cups of coffee from scratch to equal the cost of a laptop would take an amount of time that does not even begin to register on the time scale of creating a laptop from scratch.  Either our coffee is far overpriced, or the relatively low price of a laptop is nothing short of a genuine miracle.

The excess that exists at the heart of luxury is time, hence it’s connection to convenience.

The adage Time is Money, also comes to mind to cinch the laces of this connection a little tighter.

An excess of money ultimately affords us free time, which can be spent in the productive pursuit of curiosity, but the benefit of this is counter-intuitive, and many would rather spend this extra money, not on free time, but on symbols to broadcast to others.  And yet, our greatest achievements as a species often come from the mind unencumbered by nothing other than coming up with a way to creatively fill free time. 

Two wildly different examples help illustrate this.  The popular writer Neil Gaiman has often said that the way he comes up with stories is to simply make himself very bored.  At a certain point, his mind starts to build it’s own entertainment and he starts writing it down.  Another immensely powerful example that elicits this point about free time is Newton.  It was during his isolation created by the Plague that he developed Calculus.

When sloth and idleness were deemed vices, it was a time of far less knowledge and information.  But in the modern world, with so much information dammed up at the thresholds of our senses, the vices invert:

The most valuable way to spent time, is to allocate it as free time.

BRANCHES & NETS

February 11th, 2020

There’s no consensus on what consciousness is, nor how to define it.  The only irrefutable and accurate thing we seem to be able to say is that:

something is going on.

If creatures or things other than humans are conscious, then it’s certainly possible to say that there is a range of results when it comes to diversity of action.

Whales dive, eat, mate, and repeat.  But they also sing songs of apparent complexity and variety.

Bees pollinate flowers, build hives, and produce offspring and honey.  But they’re clearly capable of navigating a large, complicated, and varied environment in many different ways as a team.

Leaving the entire morass of discussion revolving around intelligence aside,

We can identify limits of consciousness.  For example, we have no reason to believe that whales contemplate the rotation of black holes.  Nor do we have any reason to believe that bees might be capable of studying giant squid.

Humans, on the other hand can do all of these things, and much much more.  Our consciousness seems equipped with a certain plasticity that has little equal in the rest of the animal world.

For other species, it seems as though knowledge, know how, and diversity of capability grows like a tree.  Through evolution each generation of a species contributes to the shape of the next generation, adding and probably forgetting ways of doing things.

But the knowledge and know-how of humans seems to operate with a different framework.  What we pass on is not necessarily cumulative, and not bound to vertical movement.  For example, few people know how to hunt and gather like our ancestors before the rise of civilization.  None of this is shared vertically or rather hardcoded into who we are, but despite this, any individual has the ability to learn through our network or knowledge.  We seem to have taken the tree of knowledge and ability upon which all other animals seem to operate, and gone lateral.  We replaced the tree with a net.  One that is functionally impossible for one human to hold all at once, but a net nonetheless which we can travel across.  A musician can drop his instrument and start learning how to woodwork, or dance, or code tomorrow.  A singing whale on the other hand seems bound quite strictly by what it’s parents were capable of.  Edge cases in animals seem to be just that: edge cases.  Whereas with humans, all of us are edge cases.

Our abilities and knowledge are no doubt a result of memes, our ability to create them, and spread them.  Individual words are perhaps the most enduring examples.  They are constantly used, shuffled, shifting and on the whole as a system or language, they are fairly resilient through time. 

Our variety of consciousness, unlike the majority of animals seems capable of hosting this vast network of memetic knowledge.

Narrowing in on this difference, we might define our consciousness as marked by an ability to draw new connections and associations between parts of greater and greater disparity. 

We seem to have the ability to take two things that appear to have no relevance to one another and let them mingle in the fictional space of our mind in ways that often reveals surprising and potentially hidden connections.

We do this both as a group and we do it on an individual level. 

Each individual net of knowledge and know how adds to the groups net.

The question boils down to:

How big is your net?

THE CONVERGENCE OF THOUGHT & EMOTION

February 10th, 2020

Hard truths are difficult because our emotions are not aligned with what we know.

We experience this strange internal resistance: we know what the better food option is.  We know we shouldn’t text that toxic person.  We know we should buckle down and get to work on that important project.

But when push comes to shove, there’s a snap decision moment when we our thoughts and emotions on the subject sail past one another like ships in the night and we say screw it!

Derek Sivers put it quite well once when he said that “If more information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.”

He makes an excellent point with humor.  We have more information at our finger tips than ever before.  The methods for how to accomplish many extraordinary things has been teased apart and detailed ad nauseum for those willing to look for it.  We know what works, whether that be to gain wealth, or to have a healthy, fit body.

We can go so far as to say that we know how to be happy.  Even the knowledge and the techniques for that are ancient, and yet so few systematically go after these goals..

The question is why?  Why would someone not strive to make their life better, especially when such great heights are clearly achievable?

Even if these methods are obvious in terms of information, this rarely means that the same things are obvious from an emotional standpoint.

If something is ‘logically obvious’ but radically different from our previous behavior then emotions are almost certainly not going to be aligned with what is logically obvious here.

Emotion is the basis for our action, not logic, and certainly not information.

For the most part, modern culture, especially in the west is a mess when it comes to any kind of alignment or regulation of emotions.  It’s starting to creep in for the individual level, as with the resurgence of interest in the stoics and meditation, but still for many, these options are not obvious.

More importantly though, is: what exactly is emotion?  And why is it so different from thoughts which is the realm of all the good ideas that might change our life for the better?

In short: emotion is what moves us.

Think for a moment about attention and distraction.  Think about the instances when you have a hard time focusing.  Why?

So many things are fighting for your attention.  In this sense, there are many emotions occurring.  Each distracting is eliciting an emotion and pushing you in a certain direction. 

Many large emotions are conglomerates of many aspects of one’s state.  Think of how someone can become irritable because of an uncomfortable plane seat.  The reason is physical but manifests in this somewhat unrelated behavior of being grumpy.

Emotional regulation is a lot like sifting and listening: you sift out the unnecessary emotions that aren’t of any immediate help or use.  Sure one can be generally depressed about one’s station in life, which can be a very useful signal, but it almost never guides one well in the moment.

Noting that emotion – which drives a person to do dumb things in the short term but as a useful long term signal – and then sifting it out, allows a person to listen to what else is going on in consciousness.

Get good enough at quickly sifting and listening and we begin to start finding gold, regarding smaller, quieter emotions that give a person a tiny push to do something useful in the moment.  These are often totally crowded out.

Sift, note, and listen long enough, practice deeply enough, and we begin to realize that everything is an emotional composite.  Individual words may even be said to be emotional in that they move our mind to a certain object of imagination.  And in that vein, even what is logically obvious but initially counter intuitive begins to resolve as a subtle and unexpected combination and path of emotion where our mind is taken on an unexpected journey of attention.

What is ‘obvious’ to most people are the big loud, dumb emotions that aren’t useful in the short term if we act on them, and which will have negative consequences in the long term. 

Good ideas are not that obvious, somewhat by default.  They are quieter, and their emotional power is of a subtler degree.  One that we have to train in order to be properly moved by.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: DRIFTWOOD & TALLOW

February 9th, 2020

When Lucilius was young he took work aboard a ship.  It was a grunt position, being the ships’ boy, and being the youngest he was tasked with every manner of tedium and grime, leaving him little chance to learn the true ways of the ship, gazing up every day at the taut sails, seeing the men haul their lines and mend their ways.

One evening, exhausted, he sat with the cook in the galley, his only kind shipmate at the time, and watched the cook go about his business of food.  The ship had already had it’s fill and most were grogged down for the night, and Lucilius, eating last, savored the food only by being too tired to rush it into his ravenous body.

The cook removed the lid from a pot and with a ladle, skimmed off some tallow.  The cook blew on it and tasted it, smiling and then extended the spoon to Lucilius who sipped off the rest.  The hot fat was delicious to the two.

“Good stuff,” the cook grumbled through his crooked smile.  And then, “Well,” he said, looking at the boy Lucilius, feeling the nudge for a lick of conversation.

“When ya gonna be more than just boy?”

Lucilius looked at the ancient man.  He shrugged his shoulders.  “I just do what they tell me,” he said.

The old cook gave him a dissatisfied look.  He turned back to his pot and skimmed off a little more tallow, lifting it and then poured it back in slowly.

“Know why tallow floats to the top?”

The boy Lucilius shook his head. 

“Cause it’s so good. Yeh, ye need water like what’s b’low, but a man’ll go far longer on tallow then’e will on just water.”

The old cook looked seriously at Lucilius.  “I seen it ma’self.  Man’ll just shrivel up.  Don’ matter how much water he got.  But tallow does far more for ya.  S’why it rises for us.”

The boy Lucilius struggled, listening to the old cook, trying to understand what he was saying about the hot fat.

“Be like tallow boy, an y’ll rise.”

For the next week, Lucilius pondered the cook’s words as he went about his work, and one evening after stand-down, Lucilius was tasked by the bo’sun to recoil lines along the rails.  He was left alone as the crew went about their frivolity down below.  He’d yet to deal with lines and no one had taken the time to show him, nor had he paid much attention when the older sailors had been at the work.

He unhitched the coil and let it fall to the deck, and then he began to unhitch the line from it’s cleat, unaware of how much weight it was holding.  He came to the last turn and the line began to pull, and it sucked Lucilius straight into the rail, pinning him as he winced in pain at a trapped hand, keeping the line from feeding more, but totally unable to move.  He gasped heavily for breath, looking skyward, trying to figure what heavy piece in the rigging might fall because of him.

Then with a quickness that Lucilius could not fathom, a strong hand threaded round and clapped hold of the loose line behind his hand, and another holding high above teased the angle, till Lucilius’ hand was free.  He fell back to the deck gasping.  

The captain stood tall above him, and with dizzying speed, the man had the line held fast again.  Then he turned to Lucilius with a flat smile.  He grabbed Lucilius’ pained hand and examined it.  Then looked Lucilius in the eyes.

“Let me show you.”  And with that the captain lead him through the maneuvers of the line held fast, explaining how and why it was cleated.  What is was connected to, and then he coiled the tailing line, perfectly, and hitched it, then stayed with Lucilius as he went through the same maneuvers, and made him do it over and over until the boy Lucilius had it right.

“Good,” the captain said, and then he turned to leave.

“Thank you Captain.” Lucilius was barely able to say.

The captain stopped, turned and looked at him.  The captain motioned with a gesture to the whole ship.

“All this,” he said, shaking his head,  “without us, it’s just fancy driftwood.”

The next morning Lucilius arose before all others who were not on watch and he went to the galley to prep the cook’s work.  Then he went to the forepeak, and helped organize the bo’sun’s keep, and he started on the crew’s chores early, polishing the ships metals before getting to his own work, and he kept at the extra work, day after day, rising early and turning in late.

SUPER SOAKER

February 8th, 2020

The speed of progress while working on a project is surprisingly and perhaps even depressingly variable.  Hours can dawdle by with a mere pittance of work done, but see the clock, realize there’s only twenty minutes left and suddenly things get kicked into a gear nearing warp speed.

The day or two before a vacation are always incredibly productive compared to any old normal Thursday or Friday on the calendar.

There seems to be a sort of pressure that we can apply to our ability to get work done.  As time falls away and looming obligations suddenly stand poised to topple upon our present moment, we hustle.  But when time is but a rolling grassland of open opportunity, we dilly dally.

Walking away from a particularly hectic and productive bout of work, it’s frustrating to wonder why that kind of productivity can’t always be called up.

Perhaps it can?  But how?

How do we build some sort of time pressure for our work?  We try to covet those large swathes of time in order to really go deep on the project, but it backfires as we relax in stead of settling in.

Is it possible to chunk that large swath of time in order to apply pressure in small sprints?  Like pumping a super soaker, creating a pressure to move forward?

It certainly is.

When Tinkered Thinking started there was a twenty minute allowance of time for each episode.  This was simply to ensure that something would get on the page, but more than that it also ensured that something somewhat cohesive was left on the page when finished.

Repeating a timer of 20 or 30 minutes can be surprisingly effective.  The alarm goes off and we realize we’ve gone down a rabbit hole with little promise of accomplishing anything.  Instead of spending an hour or two down such a path, the alarm jolts us from the reverie of exploration.  We can pivot far more easily and charge the pressure again, and with a different target, fire.