SIGN & SIGNAL

May 16th, 2019

Is a signal a part of the sign? or is the sign the signal? 

What exactly is the best way of thinking about these two similar words – so similar in fact that one contains the other with a simple addition of a couple letters.

Signs can be good or bad, in that each is a valid indication of whether or not we are going in the right direction.  Both are equally valid and ideally – in a world where we don’t take things personally – equally informative with regards to what our next move should be.

A good and bad signal, on the other hand is a totally different issue.  A good signal means that we are receiving information.  This information can be good or bad, but it is information nonetheless, whereas a bad signal is not bad information, it’s simply the absence of a connection – an absence of our access to information altogether.

A bad sign is far better than a bad signal, because a bad signal means we are essentially flying blind, whereas a bad sign can be used to figure out where to go next.

A sign is an instance of the signal. 

Good signs, bad signs, as long as we are actually getting signs, it means we still have a signal.   Finding that signal in the first place is the often difficult part.  Often we fly around blind for a while before we actually find a useful sign that indicates a signal has a possibility of being established.

And when that one sign comes along, it’s often akin to waving around the old school T.V. antennae and momentarily getting a flash of the show we seek to watch but then failing to replicate the exact positions of the antennae.  But with one small sign, our determination often has much greater longevity because now we know something might actually be there to find.  We need only continue our search and zero in when more signs start to pop up.

Often however, the efforts behind that first initial phase of flying blind in search of some signal go cold before we ever actually hit upon any one single meaningful sign.

One aspect of learning is to simply get some sort of meaningful feedback from reality.  Nothing is more demoralizing to the spirit than to make an effort only to see nothing perceptible respond. 

A person who understands how to maximize their efforts to learn looks for the quickest way to get any kind of result whatsoever.  This result is a validation of personal agency, and beyond actually having a full command of the subject, the adept and conscious learner knows this perceptible result is mainly achieved in order to stoke the emotional fuel behind the efforts to learn something new.  Remember, a bad sign is better than no signal at all.  This is why an obsession with planning things and more particularly the notion that we can some how perfectly plan the future is such a mistake.  When we finally do take action in line with such plans, it is almost never going to establish a connection to the signal we need in order to make progress. 

In the beginning, the name of the game is simply to keep going and not quit.  Once we get far enough along to actually have something to work with, or rather… once we get far enough along to actually have a signal established, than the name of the game changes to fine-tuning and further exploration. 

But that first stage is all about establishing a signal - looking for meaningful signs and seeing if they correlate to the same useful signal that we can then use to evolve our strategy, iterate our plans and take quicker tighter actions in order to move faster towards a future we can sculpt with the design of our dreams.

This episode references Episode 387: Plans and Progress, and Episode 285: Plan on No Plans

TWO KINDS OF HURT

May 15th, 2019

It hurts. 

This is a fairly bland statement.  It carries no detail, utilizes none of the intricacies of language that can illuminate nuance.  While some generalizations are harmless in their lack of specificity, the lack of real communication in a statement like it Hurts can cause actual problems simply because the word ‘hurt’ in this case has more than one meaning.

Is the pain an indication of an injury that is developing or is the pain just pain that we complain about?

The difference couldn’t be more important.  It’s a type of mental skill that requires training to reliably tell the difference between the two.  Knowing this difference inevitably requires experiencing both types of pain.  However, if we’ve gone long enough without experiencing the type of pain that indicates that real damage is about to happen, or is currently happening, than the difference fades without memory and any pain potentially becomes a cause for crying out even if it’s indicating nothing serious. 

Not only is it a mental skill to be sensitive to the differences between these two types of pain, but it’s a further mental skill to appropriately down-regulate how important the non-consequential pain is.

Or put another way: no one whines when they are under immediate threat of injury.  We send out true signals of alarm based on a survival instinct.

Recognizing that we whine or have the urge to do so is the first step in gaining the mental skill of not letting such petty pain get in the way of our progress. 

Many people get stuck in a vicious cycle of complaint that is predicated –presumably- on the pleasurable feedback that sympathy from others creates.  However, in order to illicit the same amount of sympathy on the second time round, the cause for sympathy has to be greater, and so our complaints grow more hyperbolic and our pain is described as more intense.

It’s a tenant and practice within stoicism to recognize this tendency within the mind and process it more productively.

At the end of the day, one type of pain that we describe as ‘hurt’ is an important signal that should direct us to change course immediately so as to avoid real damage, and the other type of pain that we describe as ‘hurt’ is most likely a sign that we should continue and push through in order to gain the fruits available beyond such trials.

Exercise is perhaps the best example to elucidate the difference between these two types of hurt.  With proper form and weight that is manageable for our physique we should only encounter the type of pain that is worth pushing through.  If however we have poor form or attempt weight that is far beyond our ability, the type of pain we experience can be very serious and should be avoided at all costs.  We need only push a limb in a direction it is not built to go – like an arm being pushed up behind the back – to get a relatively harmless taste of what that serious pain feels like.

Learning this difference in a physical way extends to the nonphysical endeavors that we undertake.  Without physical damage to the body, there is nothing that the mind cannot push through for future benefit.  If it feels as though that is not the case, than we have ourselves fooled, and we are mistaking one type of harmless hurt for the other more serious type of hurt.  Few things are more confusing or limiting than mixing up these two types of hurt.  Mistaking one for the other – in either direction – both carry serious deleterious effects.

Mistaking pain we can actually push through for pain that causes damage ensures that we never Level-up and the chance that our life gets better is left to the whims of fate.  This is a hugely limiting mistake, but one that can be corrected.

Mistaking hurt that indicates real damage for hurt that we can push through – on the other hand – is the worse mistake because we are casually open to irrevocable damage.

Like any and all mental skills, knowing the difference between these two types of pain and knowing how to communicate that difference to ourselves in order to push through the superficial pain and pivot before the serious pain inflicts it’s whole result – knowing these differences requires practice.

This episode references Episode 379: Mental Skills, Episode 72: Persevere vs. Pivot, and Episode 42: Level-Up

BLINDERS

May 14th, 2019

We give horses a special headgear that narrows their sight and prevents them from knowing what’s next to them and behind them.  The reason being is that horses would freak out otherwise when a car came up to pass them.  Blinders shut off all this information.

Ignorance may not be bliss, but ignorance certainly creates a worthy sense of calm.

It’s a literal example of what our mindset often accomplishes for our view of the world. 

We need only remember a time when reality gave us a cold hard slap in the face to realize that this is always the case to some degree.

A wake-up call from reality is like tearing the blinders off of our mindset.  The change is jarring, much like if we tore the blinders off of a horse while it was in city traffic.

The point isn’t to remind one’s self of times when reality unceremoniously humbled our understandings, but to keep in mind that we probably always wear some kind of blinder and that the future holds every possibility that such a blinder might get ripped off.

Sticking to plans that should be abandoned is the easiest example of seeing this work to our detriment.  When we are so set on an idea and can so clearly see it flourishing in the world that we cease to see the plain facts that it’s not working out, we have a kind of blinder affixed to our mindset.  As we save the horse from it’s own fear, we try to keep our own fear at bay by ignoring important feedback.  But unlike the horse which generally remains safer with such blinders, we only dig our own hole a little deeper.  The sunk-cost fallacy is most likely a contributing factor to these blinders, but in many cases it may simply be a love affair with our own conception of the world.  Such conceptions, if not reliable maps of the real world, belong in the world of fiction.  Otherwise, our only love affair should be with the feedback that we can receive on a day to day basis.

If we become enamored of the process, than the destination ceases to be so much of a concern, and furthermore, when we’ve achieved that destination and have a mind for some new endeavor, our love of the process transfers effortlessly.

The first step that we must take to get closer to the process is to search out any spots in our mindset where we may have attached blinders and rip them off.  Only then can we take in the valuable feedback that the process is readily able to give.

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.