A LUCILIUS PARABLE: SHADOW RUNNING

December 29th, 2019

Lucilius leaned out the window into the hot stinging air, looking back at the brown storm as it pulsed with flashes of lightning, rising higher and higher into the stratosphere beyond his black paneled trailer that bumped along.  He pressed the pedal more, hearing the electric whine as he turned back and studied the land ahead, the dry and arid ground crumbling and lifting to dust beneath the wheels of his steel truck.  A tiny red light he’d mounted to the top of the busted flat monitor in the center of the dashboard began to blink.  Lucilius stared at it.

“Fuck,” he muttered.

It was the only indication he had of a low battery, the other systems, the autopilot, the navigation, those had all gone offline long before the monitor stopped working.  He’d wired up the tiny red light crudely as a last resort.  He looked back through the cab window into the pickup’s vault to see that the plug from the trailer had come lose.

Quickly he took a length of wood from a slot he’d duct taped to the back of the driver’s seat and wedged the pedal down.  He clipped safety lines to the steering wheel, fitted his goggles over his eyes and then began to climb out of the window of the speeding truck, grabbing crude handles he’d wielded to the angular steel skin of the truck.  The speeding air cuffed his exposed wrists, ankles, and his neck with a hot sting.  He maneuvered over the gear boxes bolted into the truck’s vault as the rig bumped up and down over the sandy land.  The trailer in tow was a black capsule covered in mismatched solar panels.  The storm had not yet blotted out the sun and he was still ahead of it.  He grabbed the rattling plug and pushed it back into the outlet, linking the truck’s battery with the array of panels on the trailer.  If he couldn’t stay ahead of the storm his speed would die and he’d be buried in minutes.  He trained his goggles on the rising tumult of sand, toggling buttons on the side for a distance reading.  It was still gaining.

Lucilius opened a gear box and pulled out a nearly exhausted roll of duct tape and wrapped the plug to keep it from coming loose again.  Then he began the climb back to the driver’s window, clutching the welded handles as the truck sped along, jolting over the land.

The red light was still blinking when he looked back to see the far panels on his trailer begin to blur in the wall of sand as it began to overtake him.

*           *           *

Days later Lucilius saw a bright reflection in the distance.  It took hardly an hour before the glare of light began to resolve and he could see a huge array of solar panels clustered in the shape of a dome.  The array was haphazard, composed of all sorts of different panels.  Thousands, that had been mounted to a rudimentary scaffolding. There on the outskirts he could see children peering out from between the panels. 

He rolled up and parked his rig next to the black dome, the kids venturing out to look at his truck and trailer.  Lucilius got out and the kids silently stared at him, whispering to one another, a few of them running back into the dome.   Before he could follow the kids into the dome two men emerged to size up Lucilius.  One of them indicated the two pistols he had mounted to the side of his thigh. 

“Can’t bring that in here.”

Lucilius could tell what sort of people these were just by the children.  He unclipped his rig belt with the two pistols and his knives.

“Here ya go,” he said as he handed them the mess of leather and tools and walked past them into the dome.

Inside was an entire community of people.  The scaffolding had been reinforced with cement pillars, and quickly Lucilius found himself being ferried to one of the hovels by the children.  Adults emerged from their shanties and eyed him before resting easy at the sight of the two men who’d taken his weapons following him.

As was customary among the peaceful, Lucilius and the leader of this group shared a meal, eating algae cakes that had been harvested on the coast.

And then they spoke.

“Lot of people you have here, this kind of exposure can be pretty dangerous.”

“We have agreements among the local wartribes.”

“That couldn’t have been easy.”

The man sighed.  “No, it wasn’t.”

“I’ve had a few run-ins.  Still lucky, I guess.  What’d you offer them.”

“Different for each tribe.”

“Explain.”

“I’ve promised the most powerful local chief that his tribe can come with us, and that’s done a lot to ensure our safety from the others.”

“Go with you where?”

“There’s a tanker on the coast that they are helping us guard and ready.  We plan to sail south.”

Lucilius was confused.  “You are going to sail a tanker?  With all these people and a war clan?”

“Yes, once we have enough oil.”

“Oil?”  Lucilius asked, looking at the man as though he were deranged.

The leader smiled and motioned Lucilius to stand with him.  He opened a window in his shanty that looked down a rough corridor to the center of the dome.  There, the old dipping neck of an oil well churned, nodding it’s rusty head to the ground and then back up high into the space within the dome. 

“You’re using solar to power an oil well?”

The leader smiled.  “Yes.  Once we have enough, we’ll sail from this awful place and find a better one.”

For the briefest moment, Lucilius regretted that he never wore any rings.  He launched that back of his hand and knocked the leader of these people off his feet, and walked out.

“Morons,” he muttered to himself.

DESIGN THE PROBLEM

December 28th, 2019

We can boil down the human life to an endless series of problem solving.  Every issue that arises, either at work or in relationships is a little puzzle and problem that needs solving.  We seem hardwired to do this even when we think we hate it.

Many problems we try to solve don’t even warrant the effort and would resolve without our efforts.

Picking which problem to work on is a skill that has very little active teaching behind it.

Indeed this is the initial problem to solve:  where should I direct my time and energy?

Freedom of choice is not limited to the choices on hand.

The most underrated gift of the modern age is that we can invent our own work. 

At first pass this might sound like creating problems for the sake of solving them, but it’s best to relax the definition of what problem means in this sense.

Tinkered Thinking didn’t exist a couple years ago, but now, everyday, the problem arises: what to write about?

This is an invented problem that yields something that wouldn’t exist otherwise.

The problem becomes a means to an end, but in the process it has also become an end unto itself.

Given just a little available free time, we are all free to invent a juicy and productive problem for our minds to chew on.

It’s something that’s best discovered as opposed to decided.

It begins by asking:

what if I did….?

PROPORTIONAL MANIPULATION

December 27th, 2019

Losing a sense of proportion makes navigating incredibly difficult.  To get a sense of this, just think about the person who draws a map of your town or city.  Imagine if that person had drawn the map in accordance to their experience of the place.  Their own home would probably be quite big, and the route between that home and where that person works would be prominent and detailed, and perhaps a few hangouts and houses of friends would also be large, but what about all the places our cartographer hadn’t been?  These might only get the most cursory treatment, if any at all.  Now how useful would this map be for a tourist?

It’d be terrible, and potentially even useless.

The structure of the brain demonstrates a similar distortion with the somatosensory cortex and the motor cortex.  These are the parts of our brain that register sensations, physical orientation and movement.  In the fields of study that involve these brain regions a distorted homunculus is used to illustrate the proportional attention our own brain pays the body.

These homunculi look like action figures whose bodies are tiny, but equipped with gargantuan hands, huge heads and budging mouths, lips and tongues.

The motor cortex in particular devotes an absolutely enormous amount of real estate to the hands.  And this makes sense if you consider how drastically humans have altered the natural environment, and you realize that this has been accomplished almost exclusively through our use of our invaluable little platoon of fingers and opposable thumbs.  More brain space is devoted to a single hand than the rest of the body below the neck and wrists.  This distortion is useful since it’s far more important to have an accurate idea of what’s going on with your hands than it is say, a random patch of skin on the side of your thigh.

We all have an intuitive sense of this – just think of all the movies where a character takes a moment to realize they have a wound in their midsection or leg, as opposed to the instances when you get a tiny paper cut on the tip of your finger. 

The sliced finger registers a lot more pain because in some sense it’s a more important part of the body from a utility standpoint.  We don’t use a random patch of skin on the side of our thigh all the much when it comes to getting a sense of the physical world around us.  Our hands, however, are vital.

We experience a similar and far less valuable distortion.  Given all the topics that we think about, or might think about, each one registers some sort of emotion.  Some emotions are fairly insignificant, and then there’s other topics that trigger an immense emotional balloon that can expand to overwhelm our sense of reality. 

Most modern experiences of fear fall into this second category.  We feel enormous amounts of fear that eventually prove to be fairly useless.  Often we look back and think

“why was I so scared?  It didn’t matter anyway..”

This is an emotional distortion, and it’s part of an emotional system that’s most likely outdated and ill-fitted to it’s modern context.  While fear may have been very useful 100,000 years ago, it functions now, primarily as a maladaptation that hampers creativity and potential.

Things like jealousy and anger, which are perhaps a subset of fear probably also qualify as a maladaptation in today’s world.  The behavior that we partake in when anger or jealous almost never registers a positive change in our life, while in past millennia, these probably had important, if not vital roles in survival.  Regardless of the details of the past, it’s easy to see the relative uselessness of such emotions today.

Our emotional homunculi is an awkward creature in a society full of creature comforts.

But luckily, unlike our somatosensory cortex or a our motor cortex, the emotional distortions and proportions upon which most of our behaviors springs can be drastically edited.

The mere awareness of an emotion is enough to get a handle on its out grown proportion.  With a mindfulness practice, our perspective gains an ability to toggle the size of the context.

When something triggers an emotion to suddenly spike out of proportion with the situation, our perspective can “zoom-out” in a sense, counteracting the distorting view of reality created by a lens of emotion.

OUR OWN PLACE

December 26th, 2019

It’s no secret that most meetings are considered useless by the people attending those meetings.  And yet it seems to be the default tool of productivity for many corporations.  If it’s not actually effective as a productivity tool though, what exactly is going on?

If we think of the only real other group setting, that of a social group gathering, we might wonder in a similar way.  Socializing is, apparently to initiate, nurture and grow our relationships.  The group setting might be great for meeting and beginning relationships, but how effective is the group setting when it comes to the aim of deepening a relationship? 

Group settings often require a common point of distraction, like a sports game, or a board game, or a contentious topic to banter and argue about.  The sort of fulfilling conversations that deepen relationships don’t really happen in group settings.  They happen with fewer people around, in private.

The group setting is primarily – it seems – a tactic to feel less alone.  While groups can be incredibly effective and productive, the vast majority of meetings and social gatherings only seem to be undertaken in order to immerse everyone in the feeling that there are people around.

As the numbers around us dwindle, things get more specific and interesting.  The sort of depth that can occur between two or three friends is simply impossible in a larger group where different dynamics come into play.

There’s something somewhat desperate about the vast desire to socialize, and it may simply be that we see others yearning for the same thing, but more likely this has to do with an inability to direct solitude in a fulfilling manner rather than any real tangible or psychological benefit that comes from the company of a group.

Similar to the reason people prop up in order to sidestep an honest consideration of practicing meditation, the avoidance of solitude is often rooted in a fear of what someone might find when left alone with themselves. 

Undistracted by a movie, or a book, or any of the usual delights, what is left for a person?

It’s worth noting that our worst punishment short of death is solitary confinement.  We’ve somehow trained each other to think that being alone is something terrible, and we are so convinced of this that it’s leveraged as a kind of torture.

But is this realistic?  Is it that unbearable to spend time with one’s own thoughts?

Without training, perhaps.

Without a real understanding of the benefits, probably.

With a fear of solitude running wild, then certainly,

as Milton once wrote:

“The mind is it’s own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

Simply put, we are capable of torturing ourselves, using nothing but our own mind.  This everything tool can of course be inverted and we can bask in a personal paradise if we so aim.

Given this, it’s interesting to wonder if the common wisdom about socializing and company and spending time in groups really holds any real water in the weight of its argument.

Is it possible that we actively hold one another back from our own personal paradise?

Certainly.

Can it pay off big time to go against the crowd? 

Certainly.

Might this issue of solitude packaged as loneliness might be one of the areas where the wisdom of the masses has it exactly wrong?

Well, it’s certainly hard to figure that out with so many people around.

DRAFT ZERO

December 25th, 2019

This episode is dedicated to Aliyah Shaeffer, you can connect with her on Twitter @AliyahShaeffer

Speech and writing are not the same thing.  Though each can be superficially converted into the other by transcription or reading, the act of writing and the act of simply talking produce different outcomes.

We need only think of the difference of reading a speech vs. talking about a subject impromptu.  Or we might compare the first draft of a piece of writing with the final draft.

But even this last comparison isn’t necessarily a fair one.  Any first draft isn’t even that, once actually written.  Draft zero occurs in the mind, and currently we cannot capture thoughts as fast as we have them.  With the act of writing, sentences can easily change in the mind as they are slowly brought out onto the page.  Our mind runs over the tail end of the sentence in several different ways as the actual writing pulls it out of the ether of consciousness and nails it down in some tangible way.  Or of course, there are the false starts which are unavoidable in speech and talk but merely warrant a rapid fire punch of the delete key.  Even with this first draft, we are already editing, albeit on the fly.

What speech and writing do have in common is that we don’t exactly have an idea what words will tumble out of our mouth or onto the page.  It’s a bit like going to a movie.  We might have seen the trailer and have a vague, somewhat emotional feel for what is going to happen, but the details from moment to moment, from word to word, are a surprise. 

For example with this episode, the topic has been on tumble-dry in the brain for a couple days, and the conclusion which these words are leading up to was certainly the only concrete aspect of consideration up until the actual act of writing.  The concept of a  Draft Zero emerged somewhat on it’s own, and it seems to have a nice ring to it, indicating that private ethereal realm where our thoughts compose themselves.

The crowning feature of writing addresses our terrible biological memory.  Just think for a moment of the times during conversation when the topic has veered off on a tangent and neither person can remember exactly what they were talking about a minute or two earlier.  Or even more insidious is the gaslighter in an argument who uses the poor human memory against their opponent by misremembering an earlier point in a way that benefits their own aims. 

Very few, if any of us can remember a conversation word for word for any meaningful length of time.  Speech disappears almost as fast as we produce it, creating only faint ripples in the mind.  We remember tiny blips of conversations, general gist’s, and maybe a quote here and there.  We’re probably even subject to the peak-end rule, which dictates that our memory of anything is primarily determined by how it ended and the few peak-emotional moments during the course of the event.

But

Writing affords us a perfect memory, and the reflective benefit of such tractable fidelity of thought cannot be understated.  We can experience a piece of writing over and over with no lapse of memory as we might when we try to think of a conversation we had a week ago.

More importantly is the fact that such writing can be our own thoughts.  We all have a somewhat strange tendency to think that we have solid identities that persist through time, and these identities are composed of values which embody prescriptions of action based on what we think of the world.  This might be true for some people, but it is more likely to be true for those who have devoted time and energy to the study of their own thoughts.

To put it mildly, most people don’t even know their own thoughts.  They just experience them as they happen.

But those who write not only discover what they really think about things, but the ability to reread what one has written allows a person to disagree with their own position with a level of resolution that simply doesn’t exist given our feeble working memory.

Tinkered Thinking, for example, has had almost no planning for it’s 600+ episodes.  Only mere keywords to provoke exploration have served as the basis and seed for these episodes.  What has emerged in the process, such as the developing Rivalnym framework, the analysis of Money, the increasing focus and analysis of Questions, and more – all of these were surprises until they were written down.

Writing is ultimately much like any endeavor: you won’t know what you’ll find until you get going.

Tinkered Thinking began with a simple question:  is it possible to write about the same general topic everyday for 20 minutes?  The original goal was just a year, but after 600 days, a light obligation has turned into a valuable necessity, one that provides a tiny sense of accomplishment, no matter how failed or wasted the rest of the day seems.  The simple exercise has opened up realms of conceptual imagination that before only felt as though they might be there.  The writing actively maps these imaginary areas, making them real, if only by virtue of being black marks on a page.

People certainly sell themselves short on what they think they can do.

The writing version of this would be that people underestimate their own capacity for thoughtfulness and imagination, whether that be fictional novels or novel ideas, so much more exists within a single perspective than even that perspective can realize without actively turning inward and bringing out that inner world: 

With writing, we map ourselves onto the real world.

Our thoughts then become a piece of reality that we can work with, and change, and by so doing, we change ourselves.