FRIEGHT TRAIN

May 13th, 2019

Time past functions like weight on a train.  Two trains can be going the exact same speed but contain within that speed drastically different forces.  For example, if one train only has one cart and the other train has five hundred carts, the one with more weight will take far longer to slow down even though both trains are going the same speed.  This is inertia.

Our personalities, via the experiences we’ve had, the behaviors and emotions they’ve evoked and the thoughts that have perpetuated through time function like weight with regards to who we are.  The more we have behind us, the more likely that past is going to be the determining factor in where we are headed next, even if we are trying to look in new directions.

This is referred to in a smaller way as force of habit. 

But nearly anything that we experience or do with repetition can qualify as a habit.  We may in fact simply be a bundle of good and bad habits, the sum total of which may seem to spit out occasional new directions as the differing forces of all habits give way to each other by slowing down or speeding up.

Self-control and will power and self-discipline.  All of these are tossed about in culture as though they were as concrete, definitive and reliable as the sunrise.  These concepts mostly function as hazy conceptual pools that gurus and coaches use to divide people between those who think they have it and those who do not.  This creates a gradient differential, that can create income by making people think they are passing from one side to the other.  Most of this is well intentioned and many of the tactics may indeed work which is good for all involved.

However, it is a mistake to think that we can will ourselves to magically wake up tomorrow as the person we would like to be. 

There is generally too much inertia from the past pushing us from behind.

This is the opposite of what we say about kids, who we describe as impressionable.

Kids are like that train with only one cart in tow.  Easy to slow down, easy to change directions.

Getting older is like adding carts, and going in a new directions requires taking all that inertia into consideration.

It’s for this reason that we also prescribe one another to forget the past, or don’t let it control your future.  The inertia battling such advice is gaining strength everyday.

It is possible to cut some of that inertia, but this requires a special pause and a mindful step away from the emotional resonance of memory.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: A DAY'S WORK - PART II

May 12th, 2019

Lucilius woke with a jolt as the Ipad buzzed in his lap.  He had been dreaming about his old experiments with entropy and now this mundane apocalypse was yanking him back into his bland and grueling day.  He picked up the Ipad.  A program running in background had signaled the alert.  Lucilius had programmed it to scan occasionally for old SpaceX  internet satellites.  There were still a few in low orbit, fewer as time went on but every once in a while Lucilius was able to hack into one if it got close enough. 

His program had queried the satellite for any movement in the area and it had managed to ping an old NORAD satellite that was still operating some public channels.  The program expanded a map of the area and indicated movement in the far east.

Lucilius stood up and angled the telescope at the horizon.  He knobbed the viewfinder into focus and paused.  A thin dark line split the horizon.  He looked up from the telescope a moment and scanned the land with naked eyes before drawing the viewfinder into sharper focus.  It looked like trees in the offing, beyond the sandy dunes.  How, he wondered, but remembering the program alert he scanned the whole horizon.  The dark green edge came to an end where it seemed the sands took over.

He looked again with naked eyes, but couldn’t figure out what movement the program was registering.  Whatever it was, it was beyond the horizon he could make out.

He sat back in his beach chair and had the program query the satellite for any remaining internet ports.  Servers had eventually been migrated to unmanned space stations and so the occasional connection yielded most if not all of the old internet to anyone who could make a request, but none of the stations were responding. 

He swiped screens and opened his audiobooks.  Putting on headphones, he clicked a Douglas Adams title and leaned back into the chair, waiting for a sensible laugh to rise in him.

The day was aging and he gazed up at the sky.  A drone angled into the periphery of his view.  He watched the aerial bot zig and pause and then zip to a new point in the planting matrix, black dots falling at each pause.

Lucilius had spent those final months researching tropical trees, ordering seeds from suppliers while outfitting a caravan to head north.  Many had headed south to bigger cities when it seemed fractures were beginning to lace through society’s systems.   Lucilius had known then that the time while money still meant something was coming to an end.  He maxed out every credit card he could get his hands on in order to afford the equipment and then, before the fire storms he had set off to go north.  The firestorms caught up with him as he’d driven, and Lucilius could still remember driving through corridors lined with fire for days, the sky black with smoke, the filters of the car keeping him safe. 

While gazing high at the sky, Lucilius realized he had never queried what had happened during those last months when the world seemed to burn down.  Surely news outlets had gone down with the ship of society, reporting till the equipment itself could no longer function.   Lucilius chuckled at the single-mindedness of it all, quaintly captured by a news reporter continuing to report while doom surrounded the scene.

At what point do you give up on the inane habits of your own species and cut out on your own?

Lucilius breathed deep and sighed, opening his eyes again.  But this time his periphery caught something new.  In the deep red sky, there were as tint of darkness.  Lucilius lifted his face and far out on the horizon there was smoke rising.  The light of fire twinkled on the horizon and Lucilius sat up to the telescope and scanned the land up to the horizon.  Something moved as his view zipped to that dark green band that was now alight.  He moved the telescope back, down towards the dune plains where the view grew blurry with dust.  Vehicles were spreading out, kicking up sand, heading westward.

“Shit,” Lucilius whispered to himself.  There were dozens, maybe even hundreds of the vehicles fleeing from the burning land.  Lucilius switched to the scope on the Barrett rifle and focused one of the distant vehicles into sight.  It was miles away.

He sat back and paused for a moment.  Then he picked up the rifle and walked it over to the buggy and secured it onto a swivel he had in front of the steering wheel.  He packed up the telescope, initiated a callback for the drones and the Atlas bot and initialized the solar panels to repack.

He had planted fruiting trees throughout all the valleys from that eastern edge back to the place he’d made into a home.  Those valleys had grown rich with soil, with fruit that had grown abundant and catalyzed the ground with rotting. There were only a few birds in all the forest he had grown, but no other animals.  And these people coming across the dunes would find it all.  The fruit and the trails.  They would shoot the few birds from their trees and eat their eggs.

Nearly a hundred vehicles, he’d seen.  Lucilius had no way of knowing who they were or what they were like, whether they were one of the old warring urban tribes or someone else. 

He thought for a hard moment as he got into the buggy and powered it up.   It had been years since Lucilius had come across a stranger, and now all these people where headed his way.  The soil was thick and rich and full of water around his home where he’d build it.  It would make it through a burn, he thought, looking around at the young dry trees that stuck up along the top of the ridge from the western slopes. 

Lucilius turned to the filing cabinet and opened the bottom drawer.  Secured within were rows of different grenades.  He removed two fire-starters and looked left and right from the trail down into the woods.

There’d be less of a chance they find the trail if this whole place were burning, Lucilius thought.  He looked out at all the young trees, his chest caving with an ache, wondering what kindness might exist in the people who were coming his way.  And yet, who might be following them despite their kindness, their humanity?  It was safer to burn his work, he knew and make the strangers turn, maybe starve back in the direction they were coming.  He looked at the grenades, putting one down, he pulled the pin on the other and cocked his arm ready to throw it into the new growth on the ridge. 

In that moment he paused, just to think it all through one more time.

LIMITS OF EMPATHY

May 11th, 2019

No one can see the world like you do.

If a person could do so – to see the world exactly as you do, they would have had to be born in the exact same circumstance that you were, with the same parents and the same genetic coding and then go on to experience everything that you have.  This is, however, impossible, because that position in the universe is already taken.

The same goes for every single other person on the planet.  There is a finite limit to the empathy we can generate because our ability to see the world through someone else’s eyes ultimately hits this impenetrable barrier of non-experience.

We can try to imagine walking in someone else’s shoes, as the phrase goes, and we may even be able to walk that mile in their shoes, but we cannot do so as that person.  During the experience of that mile, no matter how grueling or enjoyable, each person will notice different things based on the sum influence of previous experience.

Recognizing this unbridgeable gulf is a first step to figuring out how to be more human.  Empathy is often touted as some sort of secret sauce with regards to showing one’s humanity, but it’s understanding the limits of this empathy and furthermore, acting accordingly.

The unbridgeable gap of non-experience, if considered seriously can illicit a sense of awe:  that other person you are interacting with is, in some sense living in a unique iteration of this universe.  Whatever information and experience we can toss over this gap through dialogue is somewhat transcendental, but from physical standpoint.

Recognizing the limits of empathy gives rise to the conclusion that another’s perspective is always valid from their point of view – no matter how flawed and dangerous that perspective.  Whereas we might normally see someone as stubborn, if we refresh our vision of such a person with the realization that there was no possible way they could have come to any other point of view, then our efforts to bluntly contradict such a perspective should look humorous if not idiotic.

A generous frame of mind for conversation is the only way of adequately addressing the limits of empathy.

The two single most pertinent signs of generosity within conversation is giving a companion in dialogue the time and the space to explain themselves to their own satisfaction and to then continue the conversation on the terms laid out by that person.

Many conversations take the appearance of two people simply trying to explain themselves.  But conversation breaks down in this way.  Effective conversation is only when one person is actively trying to explore the other person’s perspective through listening and questions regarding what the person says.  These two roles may flip-flop, but the second both people try to inhabit the roll of explaining their perspective, conversation unravels.

Such a case is the most accessible way to experience the limits of empathy.

QUESTION ABOUT THE QUESTION

May 10th, 2019

A surprisingly difficult question to answer is: what is a question?

We encounter them everyday, we form and use them everyday, but when asked to define ‘question’, most people are apt to pause.  For those who do not have a ready definition, the mind seems to break due to a kind of infinite loop.  What is a question? is… itself a question… which is a question about a question which ultimately references all questions, and hence the recursiveness that ensues which can turn this ponderance into a bit of a Zen Koan.

Other questions are fairly easy in comparison.  For example: what is a cat?  Anyone can answer this in countless and easily recognizable ways.  So here we have an initial way of differentiating at least two types of questions:  those to which the answer is readily available, and those questions that make us feel stumped. 

The first point to make is that questions to which we have ready answers are no longer really questions for us.  A child might ask: what is a particle accelerator? and for the child this is a genuine question.  But for anyone who knows what a particle accelerator is, this is merely a request to copy and paste some information.

Note for a quick moment the wording:  A child’s question to which we have the answer is to the person with the answer: a request.

The main root of both of these words is the key to answering that pesky query: what is a question?  The answer lies in lopping off the last three letters of the word question, in order to get the word quest.

Quest, is quaintly defined as a long or arduous search for something. 

Pause for a moment to think about whether this really applies to the child asking about the particle accelerator.  Pause further to reflect on whether or not this definition accurately describes most of the questions we use during the day:

did you take out the trash? 

what time is the meeting?

who is going to be at the party tonight?

These are more requests for information than they are long and arduous searches for something.  Naturally such a reliance on the root quest somewhat betrays the modern definition of the word question.  It is a tenet of this framework, however, that the current modern definitions of words are experiments in variation, like someone trying a new profession to see how they like it.  Words are constantly shifting, morphing and touching new semantic territory, but the history of a word often points to the reason for it’s existence, and this teleological core often casts the modern definition in a fuller context.  The difference is like that of a general who can see the whole battlefield as opposed to the sniper who is so concentrated, she fails to notice the enemy sneaking up from behind.  Narrow definitions that fail to pay tribute to the context created by that word’s history can fail us in the way the sniper is defeated.

To elucidate this point further, we can simply ask a question:

Which kind of question is generally more valuable?

The question to which someone else has a definitive and verifiable answer?

or

The question which no one knows the answer to, but which can be definitively figured out?

A couple real-world examples help clarify this juxtaposition:  Compare these two questions:

Did you take out the trash?

and

Will this business idea make money?

These comparisons seek merely to underscore the difference between a valuable question and a question which is merely a request for information.  While much of the modern world could benefit from increasing the efficiency of such request-questions (an effort to which Google has spearheaded with unparalleled success) it’s the answerable questions that we haven’t figured out that are of greatest potential value.

At this point, we arrive at a working definition of the word ‘question’ and an answer to the pesky query.

 A question can be defined as:

An open-ended concept that creates momentum.

This fits both the unanswered question which requires some sort of long or arduous quest to figure out and the request-question, to which we have the momentum to go find someone with the answer.

Making that definition deeply intuitive can solve motivation problems, free up stagnate progress on a project, and even build bridges between enemies – if only we extrapolate wisely on the open-ended concepts we create and the direction of momentum which they generate.  The next question of greatest utility that can propel us in a useful direction is simply:

Are you asking yourself the right questions?

BASKETS OF FIRE

May 9th, 2019

To have many irons in the fire is to have a lot on the go, projects, jobs, endeavors, explorations, hobbies, interests.

This last one: interests, might seem like the core of such a drive, and certainly it is the most fluid, efficient and natural drive behind such eclectic efforts. Such diversity is often based in a natural curiosity which can be one of the most powerful tools we can foster within ourselves.

This is a virtuous framework because it sets itself up in a way that naturally safeguards against risk and maximizes potential payoff.

To illustrate this aspect of curiosity and having multiple irons in the fire, we can juxtapose it with a similar idiom that functionally seems to say the same thing but actually conveys the exact opposite meaning. We’ve all heard it:

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Why is it good to have more than one iron in the fire, and why don’t we say don’t put all your irons in one fire?

Because the risk of the basket does not carry over to the creative powers of the forge.

We don’t put all our eggs in one basket because if the basket is accidentally dropped, then many, if not all of our eggs will probably break.

Put another way, we might say: don’t put all your hope into this one endeavor, because… frankly, it might not work, and then all that hope will have functioned like expectation, now dashed to pieces, leaving only a mess of disappointment. It can take a while to bounce back from such an event, and this might just be from an emotional standpoint and says nothing of the financial and reputational fallout that might coincide with such unfortunate results. Many people fail to take into account the unknown forces that create unforeseeable randomness which can affect results in ways beyond our control, and such stiff perspectives can quickly place the blame on an individual who has honestly tried their best as opposed to greater influences of chaos that such stiff perspectives unwisely choose to ignore.

The forge for our irons, on the other hand carries no risk of ruining our projects. Metaphorically. this is where projects grow, where we build, where we experiment, iterate and ultimately produce results. As anyone who has tried their hand at multiple projects - even projects as humble as knitting or simple woodwork – such individuals know how everything comes with a learning curve, even those things we have some experience with. The craftsman or artisan puts no huge and final hope in any one project, but uses projects as a way to get better. The attainment and continued exercise of a skill is ultimately driven by the mind’s desire to increase personal agency, to change reality to be as close to the wonders we dream up.

This iterative practice is the symmetrical antithesis of being too emotionally tied to one single plan. Each iteration in the practice of some given skill, each project is a small plan, one through which we learn from the results and from which we form new plans based on the discoveries of such experimentation.

The blacksmith with several irons in the fire is running multiple experiments at once: keeping this iron in a little longer to see what effect it has, taking another one out sooner to observe that effect, having all of them run at slightly different temperatures to again note the difference of results. If one turns out particularly good, it’s a pleasant surprise, but it’s also knowledgably founded on the experience of what happened with all the other slightly different iterations.

The equivalent mistake of having all eggs in one basket for the blacksmith would be to have only one iron in the fire and to expect it to turn out perfectly.

Concurrently, the equivalent for carrying eggs would be to have a basket for each egg given to different people and thereby raising the chance that someone will make it to the destination without dropping their basket.