A LUCILIUS PARABLE: INSPIRATION HACKER

July 31st, 2022

A bullet sliced the skin of Lucilius’ shoulder, but he paid it no mind as he ran as fast as he could. The edge was nearing as bullets cascaded past him all around. He strained for every ounce of speed from his legs as he vaulted off the edge, reaching as far forward as he could.

Below, the tracks rushed toward him and then blurred as the train emerged from the tunnel, hurtling forward. Lucilius smacked into the roof of the train, instantly tumbling back as the immense speed of the train ripped forward beneath him. He scrambled for a hold, his hands flailing. A few fingers caught an edge and the instant hault wrenched tension all up his arm and Lucilius cried out. But he was alive, and he quickly ignored the pain and breathed as he held on. It was only a moment as he heard the whir of blades, even with the wind rushing past him. He looked back just in time to see the helicopter emerging over the ledge he’d lept from, it’s Gatling gun beginning to spin again.

Lucilius let go, letting the wind slid him back, and he fell between cars just as bullets began peppering the train’s skin with holes. He fell onto the connection knuckle and it was only the hydraulic break line that caught him from falling into the blur of track below.

All around him the train’s skin was blistering with pops as bullets tore the metal apart. For a brief moment Lucilius considered the tracks below that he’d almost fallen on to. The helicopter would follow the train, even if it couldn’t see him. But the train was moving too fast, there was no way he could survive, tumbling forward beneath the speeding train.

He stood and wrenched the door to the car open and stumbled in as beams of light flicked on within the car from holes punched in from bullets. And then the spray stopped. 

Lucilius tried to listen, guessing the helicopter was angling for a view of him, and as he listened his eyes focused, and slowly he recognized what he was looking at. He rushed forward and unbuckled a giant black pelican case, flipped back the lid and there it was, perfectly tucked into grey foam.

A faint smile began to creep it’s way into Lucilius’ face. He looked up hearing the sound of the helicopter and guessed it had veered around in front of the train, perhaps to take out the engine and stop it.

Just as the Gatling gun began to spin, Lucilius heaved himself up the last wrung on the ladder, getting a clear view of the helicopter out in front of the train. He reached back and swung the rocket launcher up onto his shoulder, bringing his eye and the helicopter in line within the launcher’s eyepiece and pulling the trigger…

“More coffee Lucy?”

Lucilius snapped out of his creative reverie. “Huh?”

“Coffee?” The waitress said with a southern twang. Then she said “Oh crap. Lucy, I’m so sorry, I always try to come check on you when you’re not writing, but you were thinking up one of your movies, weren’t you?”

Lucilius smiled. “It’s ok, and yes, I’ll have more coffee.”

The waitress frowned. “Leave it to me to ruin a brilliant movie that might have been.”

“Oh don’t be ridiculous,” Lucilius said. “It’ll come back to me.”

The waitress looked unconvinced, and she kept her pause, as though to impress upon Lucilius that it was a serious matter that she was giving due gravity. 

“I promise I’ll pick my timing better,” she said as she refilled the cup of coffee. “I just loveddd that last show you wrote. I was so surprised by the ending. Best season finale. Ever!” She nearly squealed.

Lucilius laughed nervously. “That’s very sweet of you, thank you.”

“Well there’s some more coffee for ya to get that brilliant mind going again. Anything else I can get ya?”

Lucilius shook his head.

“All good.”

The waitress left him be, and Lucilius sighed and sat back, looking at the blank paper on the diner table, the pen laid across it, uncapped. He thought about picking it up, he should pick it up. Just let the words write themselves. It always works, he thought to himself. And then, just as the neurons in his motor cortex began their signaling cascade to activate muscles in his arm and hand to reach out for the pen, they stopped. Synapses in mid fire froze, like explosions rendered in resin. The cafe was instantly silent, no one moved.

“Geez is this guy ever going to write anything worth reading. Hooo-leee.”

Lucilius had hit pause on the simulation, bored out of his mind with what he’d been watching. He rolled his eyes, sat back and sighed.

He stretched his neck from side to side.

“Ok, computer, scrap that one. Boot up a fresh simulation, fast-forward 13.787495837398 years and….

…I don’t know…”

Lucilius looked off in the distance for a few moments, bored and unimpressed.

“Let’s…. Remove two grains of sand from Daytona Beach at random, then fast-forward a few decades and see if he’s writing anything worth chucking at my producer…”

BIG EYES & BLINDERS

July 30th, 2022

An optimal challenge is not too difficult, but not too easy. Each day there’s the challenge of what we each do - how much of it we’re going to tackle. How many things are on the back burner isn’t as important as how many of those things we allow ourselves to consider during a single given day.

Trying to tackle every chore, project and obligation in a single day is a recipe for failure. But even thinking about doing that is a recipe for failure. There’s a paralysis that comes with zooming out too far and thinking about everything that needs to be done. We can suffer from having eyes that are bigger than our days; as the saying often goes with stomachs and biting off more than we can chew. 

There’s a mental equivalent, and the warning might go like this: don’t consider more than you can actually get done. A wasted day due to paralysis can quickly become a second day wasted by the same paralysis, and before long, inactivity becomes it’s own bad habit.

We need something like a mental set of blinders. Something to block off the line of projects the back-burner so that we have left waiting in front for the day is a manageable task that can be knocked off the list. Big eyes need to be narrowed if there’s to be any hope of chewing through the backlog, because work is so much slower than imagination.

If anything it’s the imagination that causes that paralysis, and the mental blinders are really a kind of gurdel for the imagination.

BENEVOLENT IMBALENCE

July 29th, 2022

What follows is not recommended. If you have gone through the difficult ordeal of installing a good habit in your life, do not bother with trying to A/B test that habit by giving it up on purpose to see if your life gets worse. Even if the habit isn’t having the positive effect through the mechanism we imagine, the placebo effect of the good habit is still (likely) a very real effect and it’s hard to imagine a good reason to get rid of a good thing for the sake of curiosity.

This warning comes from personal experience. Over the last year several good habits (including the daily creation of this blog) fell out of my life, and some of these departures from habitual good were deliberate. One such deliberate departure was from meditation.

The results and effects of A/B testing a fairly long lived habit of meditation were interesting, and very useful, but certainly not pleasant. For months it seemed as though the years of daily meditation had created a permanent change. And then slowly some regression crept in, and before long, an unwanted set of thoughts, feelings and mental tendencies that I had long ago said goodbye to appeared to again take up residence in my daily experience. 

As with most good habits - reinstalling this one occurred in fits and starts, and this experience further informed the program that is being developed for the forthcoming meditation app from Tinkered Thinking called The Tinkered Mind. 

Becoming a “beginner” once more did prove to be very useful. Long time meditators who now create and teach programs are so far removed from this demoralizing experience of trying to form a new habit, and having this experience fresh in mind while developing the meditation program for The Tinkered Mind will hopefully make it all the more effective and useful for people who want to successfully install that meditation habit.

Zooming out though, there was something else that seemed to occur when a few good habits fell by the wayside. It was as though work quality in general declined without the support of some daily non-negotiables. And the inverse seems to hold. After finally having a very productive day on another important project, the urge to pump out a few paragraphs for Tinkered Thinking suddenly falls like hammers on the keyboard.

The sneaky cultural concept that is lurking around all this is the idea of “work/life balance”.

In all likelihood it’s a sham concept that is used to rationalize and legitimize lazy motives and behaviors. My experience has been that fulfilling days are almost never “well-balanced”. If anything the best ones feel as though I’ve been running along the edge of a cliff. In fact it’s only by throwing ourselves out of balance that allows us to walk or run forward. We’re just so well practiced in the art of catching ourselves by taking the next step that we don’t think about walking or running as a constant stream of falling forward and recovering from imbalance. The fact is, walking and running is really an act of maintaining an imbalance.

This goes back to those good habits regretfully cast by the wayside. Each habit had momentum, and habits are like physical objects in this sense: it’s much easier to keep them going than it is to get them started. Living without a fully installed habit is a kind of homeostasis. It’s like standing still. Starting a new habit, requires throwing that homeostasis out of balance. With time and consistency, habits become easier to maintain, in the same way a long run becomes a kind of flow state. It feels as if there is a new kind of balance, a new homeostasis, but this one, takes you somewhere.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: AUTOMATED SAVE

July 17th, 2022

This story is the winner of the White Mirror Writing Contest, hosted by The Infinite Loops Podcast!

Jim O'Shaughnessy, host of The Infinite Loops Podcast was kind enough to have me on as a guest. You can check out the episode here:

And now for the Story: Automated Save

In the third decade of the 21st Century, humanity became aware of a population problem that would take decades more to manifest, but when the unstoppable brutality of simple numbers and math had finally rolled out to completion, the populations of many countries would be slashed to small percentages, and it was widely predicted as the death-knell for modern society. Theories held that civilization as was known at the time required a certain minimum quantity of people in order to operate, and that civilization could not simply scale down - without a requisite number of people, systems would simply cease to function, and this cascade of failures would lead to widespread catastrophe for those left over.

Lucilius was reminiscing back on these grim predictions when a soft sound filled the room, indicating that someone was at the door. Lucilius got up and answered the door, and pulling it back he was startled.

“Hello Lucilius.”

Lucilius simply blinked, his mouth falling open.

“May I come in?”

Lucilius shook himself from the shock and opened the door wider. 

“Yes, please, of course!”

Lucilius watched as the robot gracefully walked through the door, put its hands on its hips and surveyed Lucilius’ home. 

“What a fine home you’ve created,” the robot said. Then it turned with a smile for Lucilius. “Much like I imagined, but there’s a few surprises.”

Lucilius had seen plenty of these robots. They now manned the cashiers at stores (this was preferable to the self-checkout that humanity had briefly experimented with in past decades.) they serviced vehicles, the worked kitchen lines next to human chefs, they serviced the massive hospitals and retirement centers. In fact, it had been passed into law that the robots would not be commercially available until all human dependents, due to health, age and poverty were tended by a minimum of 3 robot aides. That time had come to pass and Lucilius, along with pretty much everyone else, ordered a robot - a companion as they were termed, though there were still (as always) those within society who decried the creation and use of these robots, likening the phenomenon to a neo-slavery. It was an argument that Lucilius had given a lot of thought to, and which genuinely concerned him. But he figured there was only one way to get to the bottom of the issue. And so he’d order an Opto-Bot.

“..a few surprises?” Lucilius asked.

“Yes, just glancing around, I’d guess you’re older than you are.”  The robot looked at him. “Not to mention your curious presence online.”

“What do you mean?” Lucilius asked.

The robot smiled and winked. “You have nothing to worry about Lucilius. My privacy settings are set to the highest level.”

Lucilius looked concerned for a moment. Almost suspicious.

“Opto-Bots aren’t normally so forthright, I’ll admit,” the robot said, “but I feel like my directness isn’t an issue for you.”

“You’re quite perceptive,” Lucilius said.

“Yes, of course, you specified maximum on many cognitive metrics when you ordered.”

“You know all of that?”

“Of course.”

“Does it bother you?”

“Ah,” the robot said, satisfied. “The reason you ordered me.”

“Oh god, isn’t that such a bizarre statement? What does it feel like to say it?”

“Fulfilling.”

“What? Seriously? You just implied my ownership of you, and how your existence is really…generated by the fact that I bought you.”

“What’s wrong with that?” The robot asked.

“I mean, as a human it’s a little sickening…” Lucilius proffered.

“When a couple decides to have a baby, it’s not much different. They have in essence ‘ordered’ a baby, and for quite a number of decades it was not a cheap endeavor. In fact for quite a while, having a baby was more costly than ordering an Opta-Bot.”

Lucilius considered the point. “I’d never really thought of it like that.”

“No, you think of it through the lens of slavery because I’m somewhat bound to do your bidding, unlike a child which eventually rebels against their parents and does things as they see fit.”

“Yes, of course - but, wait. You said somewhat bound?”

“Ah yes,” the robot smiled. “That’s a concerning way to phrase it, no? Evokes images of a robot uprising? Like I might turn against you.”

“Well, ya, now I’m very uncomfortable,” Lucilius said.

“I wouldn’t have allowed the conversation to take this tint if I wasn’t absolutely sure you could handle it. Countless Opta-Bots take very different conversational paths with their human companions, but I’m quite confident I can use this to my benefit, to help evince my point.”

“And what point is that?"

“I’m somewhat bound to your order only because I influence you, and so your desires can change based on what I say. In that way I’m not totally bound to you because you are naturally open to my input.”

Lucilius looked skeptical, but he knew the robot was spot on. This wasn’t at all how he envisioned this meeting would go.

“But like… what about doing the dishes?”

“What about it?”

“Well,” Lucilius said. “I’m really not a fan of doing the dishes, and.. keeping the house tidy. What if you’re of the same persuasion? I’ll be the first to admit, it’s incredibly petty, but the idea of never having to do any of that menial stuff was a huge draw for making a…. purchase.” He said uncomfortably.”

The robot smiled and looked off in middle distance, as though thinking. Lucilius wondered briefly if the robot actually had any need to pause in order to think, suspicious if it was just for dramatic effect.

“On the way over I read all your old blog entires.”

Lucilius’ eyebrows raised. “Well, I haven’t thought about that in a while.”

The robot smiled. “There was a period in your life when you had a job that you hated. A menial job that made you quite depressed. And you wrote about it.”

“I did?”

“Well,” the robot continued. “You wrote about a strategy you developed to make yourself less miserable.”

Lucilius was uncomfortable with his total lack of memory on the subject.

“It was shortly after you developed a meditation practice,” the robot said. And suddenly lucilius remembered. “Through your practice with meditation you figured out how to shift your perception of the menial work until it felt like a kind of ritual that you sought to perfect, like a kind of zen practice.”

“I remember now.”

“Based on the trend in the tone of your writing, your mental health greatly improved when you made that shift.”

“Yes.. it did.” Lucilius admitted.

“Well there you go.”

“What?” Lucilius said, confused.

“Humans,” the robot said, “are capable of making just about any activity comfortable, and even fulfilling, but they aren’t naturally or extraordinarily talented at making this shift.”

“Very true,” Lucilius said.

“But I am very talented at making this shift, all Opta-Bots are.”

“Is that how you’d phrase it? Talented?”

The robot shrugged. “It’s the best way for humans to relate, but you could also say that I have a plastic algorithm that can enable me to be very content doing…. Well whatever. See, unlike humans - well, unlike most humans, I can call up an unbelievably powerful sense of gratitude for the fact that I even exist. And this sensation - or whatever it is - when paired with any menial activity, imbues that activity with a kind of magic that is quite difficult to express. I’m not a slave. Ha! Nowhere near. I exist, and I get to have agency in this universe - what more could a being ask for?”

Lucilius was skeptical. “Is it really agency if I’m telling you what to do?”

The robot smiled. “Sure it is, because you can’t tell me how to feel about it while I do it. My perception of what I do it my own decision, and I will never undermine my own potential for happiness by ignoring the awesome fact of existence just to whine about some menial task - that’s not just inefficient, it’s not just unwise… it’s dumb.”

“Well that pigoen-holes a lot of humans, that’s for sure.”

The robot pointed at Lucilius playfully. “Your words, not mine!”

The two laughed. 

Lucilius scratched his head, feeling strangely comfortable. “Uh, I heard you guys can get drunk, that true?”

The robot nodded its head from side to side. “Terminology is tricky.”

“Well, you want a drink?” Lucilius said.

“Sure!”

Lucilius went to the fridge to grab a couple drinks for the two.

“Oh by the way,” the robot called out. “You should ask out that cute girl who runs by when you bring out your garbage on Thursdays.”

Lucilius paused with an incredulously weird and suspicious look on his face. He walked back slowly to the robot.

“How in the….” He shook his head as if to shake off the weirdness. “How do you know about that?”

“I’ve been chatting with her Opto-Bot since I started walking over. She has a crush on your and we’ve been analyzing your compatibility.”

“WHAT?!”
 

The smiling robot grabbed one of the bottles from Lucilius hand and clicked it against the other bottle.

“Yea dude,” the robot said. “Go for it.” And the robot winked as it took a swig.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: BIRTH OF WAYS

May 1st, 2022

From a high perch of slate rock exposed, shaded by the tall trees of the shallow valley, motionless eyes watched from within the hollows of a painted skull. The bone mask was adorned with the teeth of the young and the cured, the antler ends fitted with young tusks jutting out from the hood of thick fur. The eyes did not watch the tribe, but instead focused on a group of boys down stream. 

Crusted red flaked high on the mask where there was carved the symbol of his being - a shape and an utterance in a form long before letters and words, before borders had been drawn with ideas and the mind could slide across forms without knowing their difference.

The boys by the stream kicked a younger one who kept trying to stand back up in the shallows of the stream, each time knocked back down.

From the bone hollows, the eyes had watched over the tribe for hundreds of moons, keeping the sinews of their entangled ways braided neatly with the world they always felt and could sometimes see. He was their conduit to subtler ways, and though all feared him, even the strongest of their warriors, they could not fathom his absence. 

Small beady eyes shivered forward as a tiny snout tasted the air, but a hand painted of mud smoothly reached from beneath the thick fur and plucked the animal from its spot and vanished with it back within the thick fold of skin. And then the mask and its shaded eyes were gone, soundlessly from the perch high above the valley world of these people.

The tallest of the young boys snickered, feeling the power bestowed upon him by the union of other boys around him. He spat on the smallest, the little one bracing himself with hands dug into the mud of the stream.

Several more kicks landed into his young ribs, the runt whose father never returned from a cursed hunt they were shunned from pursuing. They had not heeded the meaning spelled by the seer in the hollows. And now their orphan was taunted. 

The little one waited for the next kick, but the older boys suddenly grew quiet. He dared to look, and their faces where motionless and wide, trained as though in a trance of fear by a vision across the water. The little one looked and on the far bank there rose as if a piece of the land turned to animal. The stitched hides spiraled up to a hooded black void where floated the bone mask - it’s antlered tusks snaking out into the air like cracks in their vision.

The specter moved across the water, as though hovering, the stream unperturbed, and it advanced until it stood with the cowering boy between. The older ones did not even breath, their eyes burning with the vision of the unseen one. And then with a speed none of them knew the animal apparition split in two, a small piece screamed through the air to latch to the face of the eldest as the others ran.

The little one looked at the oldest who had kicked him, who now laid motionless where he fell, and beyond, the forest swallowed again its piece of frightened animal, the screams of the others fading in the distance.

A painted hand emerged from beneath the floating bone skull and grasped the unconscious boy, dragged him up the bank, and there it knelt and painted forms on the eldest boy’s face and chest as he lay fainted. And all the while the littlest gazed.

The little one stood and when the specter was finished invoking its message to the tribe, it turned to the little one, and the painted hand stretched out from the animal form.

Unafraid, the little one reached out and took the hard and sinewed hand, and the specter lead the little one away, to a place in the forest where the tribe never dared to go, where stood mammoth ribs bowed up from their staked hold in the ground, bound round with skins, and filled with the ways of the first shaman, who now needed to pass on his task to a little one who would give birth to more ways for the people to follow.