OUR MODERN REACH

February 24th, 2022

It’s a default feature of human attention to focus on the current negative aspect of reality. Given a picture of 99 smilie faces with one frown face, we will pick out that frown face far faster than if it has been 99 frown faces and one smilie. We are hardwired to be wary, and that it. Our wariness does not discriminate other than hovering up the negative to be dwelled upon. Our wariness takes no heed of the place of such negative material in a larger context. There simply is no larger context when attention is brought to bear on the negative.

This does not, and should not delegitimatize anything negative that actually is going on. But there is a useful hierarchy of questions to be asked, in order to refocus attention in the most useful way. Given some negative thing, the first question that should arise, is: do I have any direct influence on this issue or situation? 

If the answer is ‘no’, then this is the quick exit from concern. It’s not to imply that we don’t care about the issue, but if agency is limited to a scope that does not include the topic, then any more energy spent fretting over the issue is unnecessary anxiety. Mental health is a virtuous combination of agency and concern. If these two domains don’t have substantial overlap than the human mind is rendered incapacitated, paralyzed, and depressed. Our concern must be primarily on things that we have some degree of influence over.

Notice how the “News” delivers to one aspect of human nature, but not the other. The News feeds into our default tendency to root out and focus on the negative. But it does so by drawing from sources that are far beyond our scope of influence. It’s one thing for the president of a country to watch the news. It’s quite another for an average citizen to watch the same news. One person might be able to have influence, the other - not so much.

But. Perhaps in the age of social media this isn’t exactly the case any more. Do ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’ and comments on a subject have some sort of effect?

Well, maybe. This vast majority of such social-media empowered influence is irrelevant. Most of what happens online actually leads to nothing. But, that being said, it’s still the place where a completely disparate group of people unbound by nationality, location or law can bind together with a cohesive opinion - and given enough people, that opinion can go viral. 

In rare circumstances, our sphere of influence extends beyond our personal agency. In normal circumstances, that’s a contradiction, but the internet provides counter-caveats to the usual song-and-dance of human interaction.

From a personal perspective, the isolationist policy of ignoring 99% of what is going on in the world is a useful and wise one, allowing for precious attention to be allocated to better regions of influence. But - while rare - the new tools of the last couple decades do offer interesting opportunities to reach out into the world. . .

SALARIED INCENTIVE

February 23rd, 2022

For all our gripe and balk when it comes to money, the concept of fungible value is still too conceptual, and in most cases, we just don’t get it. This likely seems absurd: money? We don’t get it? Are you kidding? Money makes the world go round. Sure it does - well sort of. Money as an incentive unto itself is highly conceptual and is always at least once removed in abstraction from a true incentive. Money in of itself is not the incentive, it is merely an avenue for other incentives which are not as difficult to fathom.

For most people money is a kind of ethereal chore. We are constantly taking out this garbage without taking the time to understand what’s behind the opal plastic of the bag we carry. Whatever it is, it’s somehow correlated to virtually every other part of life. 

Frugality and even greed affect money in inside-out ways. It’s by failing to interact with money we have that we end up saving it. In all other instances with money, we deplete it as a means to the ends of a different incentive. Such as an incentive to feel more relaxed: pay for a massage or a pedicure. And incentive to feel healthier: buy supplements or a fancy wearable for tracking sleep. An incentive to be perceived as wealthy? Buy an expensive car.

Money presents this counter-intuitive backfire if we try to apply the concept of an inceptive directly to money itself. The incentive is rarely if ever for the actual money, but for the things that are accessible through the conduit of a certain amount of money. Even the person who diligently and wisely saves and successfully invests does so with the imagined outcome that some day such money will come in very handy for other things. 

Upton Sinclair once said: It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

This quote seems to give a lot of weight to the value of money, and this very sentence should give reason to pause because it sounds a bit funny. A lot of weight to the value of money? A little redundant, no? A salary in this case, and in most cases is a bundled set of other incentives that generally represent a person’s real life: paying for a place to live, the food they eat, the toys their kids play with, the clothes they wear. The incentive to have and provide all of these things runs very deep - and they existed long before we even invented money.

But we can have incentives that aren’t related to money. Nationalism, for instance, requires no money, but the ethereal social grist that makes up the fabric of socialism drives untold masses of people to engage in often extreme behavior - war.  This might seem correlated to money in that its conceptual, ethereal - more in the realm of thought than it has to do with the hard tacks of physical reality. But there’s an important difference.

Money has no identity. This is essential for its fungible quality to remain in tact. All incentive on the other hand entails a strong component of identity. Salary becomes a conduit and an avenue by which to express and maintain a certain identity - at least for components of that identity that require money. But the incentive structure of a person isn’t limited to what people can buy, thankfully, but also, the strange relationship that exists between incentives and money also means that by default we’re all quite untalented when it comes to building wealth.

NEVER TRUST THE WORDS

February 22nd, 2022

Never trust the words someone says. This isn’t to say that trusting someone is a bad idea - but to point out the disconnect between what they mean and what they say. We feel this on a personal level all the time. We have a sense, a notion, a ‘thought’, a feeling, and we endeavor to convey it, but upon hearing the sentences we utter we grit teeth thinking how far from the mark we hit.

So why don’t we apply this internal lesson to all that we hear from others. Why isn’t the built-in assumption that what we hear from others is at best just a hazy approximation of what they are trying to convey. But think about this a little more in depth: what exactly is attempting to come across with the sentences and paragraphs of others? Within each of us there is a unique internal environment that fluxes with misremembered pasts, edited constantly by evolving concepts - all of it tweaked by the color of emotion that is flooding the body and mind. 

We have far too much faith in the meaning of words. Even though, even with this topic there is so much shift and drift. Truth used to mean something objective, something immutable that we all collaborated to try and approximate. Now the word truth just means ‘strong opinion’, because the word ‘opinion’ lacked the intestinal fortitude of a word as magnificent as “Truth”. So it was co-opted. The medium through which we try to convey our messy shifting internal landscape is itself a messy shifting landscape.

The whole endeavor of communication can easily seem hopeless. Better to just keep your mouth shut. And quite honestly, in almost all situations, this is the wiser if not simply easier course of action. But to withdraw completely is a sin unforgivable. Paired with a judicious choice of when and where to inject one’s own faulty speech is the necessary issue of how to listen. Never trust the words, they are but a fuzzy approximation of what someone wishes to say. You have to venture beyond their words, taking the context they create with sentence upon sentence, paragraph upon paragraph and extrapolate an entire model of who this person is, where they have come from and what exactly it might be to be that person, right now, in that situation we witness them in. It’s apparently wise to keep your friends close and your enemies closer, but can you become a mental model of your friend or your enemy? If you can model the mind of an enemy perfectly then you can predict their next move. And if you can model the mind of a friend, then you can love that individual with a greater sense of compassion than most ever dream of. But with either the adversarial or the friendly, the medium of expression has to be taken with a flexible margin of error, one that can stretch to the shape of an accruing model of the person. A colloquial way of phrasing this is to take a person with a grain of salt. To allow for wiggle-room, to allow for the verbal and behavioral foibles of a person to live comfortably within the concept of who they might be.

Never trust the words, not because their intent is to lie, but because the words themselves will always - to some extent - fail the intentions of the one who speaks, just as your words will always fail you to some palpable degree.

ENJOY THE WAIT

February 21st, 2022

Red lights and check-out lines. Waiting rooms and response times. For whatever cursed reason, the default response to forced waiting is frustration, annoyance - even anger. And almost no reflection is devoted to this extremely common part of life. People in their last decades can get just as pissed off at an unwanted wait as a toddler who can’t get their food fast enough.

If we could only see these parts of a person’s life, the only conclusion to be drawn would be that such a person simply can’t wait for life to be over.

And yet life is short. An old man once said to me: when you are young, time is like the distance between telephone poles, but when you get to be my age, it starts looking like a picket fence.

It’s an equally strange phenomenon that time seems to speed up as more of it passes us by, and yet despite all this, a slow check-out line can bring absolute ruin to a person’s mood and mind.

Is it possible to find red lights meditative? Can a waiting room be anything like sitting at the beach? Can a checkout line be an opportunity to realize anew just how improbable our entire existence is?

Certainly. These are all advertisements for a meditation practice - something which comes online in all of these scenarios - at least for the well practiced individual.

Many of the arguments for starting a meditation practice are touted as altruistic: it makes you a better person, less of an asshole to friends and family. Do them a favor. But a well honed meditation practice does first and foremost improve the quality of life for the meditator. 

Simply imagine if all of the frustrating pockets of time in life that normally inspire a low-grade rage could all be replaced with that overwhelming feeling of relaxation and pleasure that comes after a much needed sigh and a breath of fresh air?  This is an upgrade that money simply can’t buy, and which at the end of life is simply priceless when looking back.

It’s strange that in a culture that goads us to use time wisely, that we are so prone to use it so poorly when a pocket of it presents itself. Even if it means “using” that time in the simplest way possible: life grows shorts as the seconds tick by; best to enjoy the wait.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: DEATH OF DESCRIPTION

February 20th, 2022

I’ve seen this before. A very long time ago. And the change was so immense, so total that I can’t even recall very well what it was like to think and be before this time. Socrates warned of this. No one believed him but he could see it as it happened, he could feel it, and it’s why he railed against the practice of writing. So many centuries later, now, here I am scrawling on the medium he cursed for the same reason. With these neuralsyncs getting plugged into people’s brains, it just seems like an oddity that no one with a sync writes. None of them. The assumption is that thoughts are transcribed and saved in a cloud, or perhaps in a hard drive, but that’s not what’s going on. That’s just how people are perceiving it, by saying: oh you could do this. But the fact of the matter is that no one with a sync is preserving anything in a kind of written form, digital or physical. They are saving experience in a wholly new way because information now has an additional medium. It’s not the expression of information that is critical, it’s the available mediums. The nature of expression changes irrevocably when a new medium is added - especially one that creates a new capacity for memory. This is what people are failing to realize. Before the written word, only the most basic logic was possible. It wasn’t until the invention of writing that our powers of logic expanded enormously, but of course no one realizes that because there is no record of what thought was like before the invention of writing. The invention of a new medium of information amputates past avenues of expression. It is not precisely additive. No one who knows how to write and read has the ability to experience what thought is like in a culture and a world that does not have these things. It’s a bit like the state of one’s mind after a realization. In the case of the individual it’s commonplace for someone to think back to their experience and perception of the world before such a realization and often this feels quaint and cute. But imagine being born with that particular realization: would it be possible to imagine one’s perception of the world without that realization? Something might come to mind, but the experience is simply unavailable: realizations cannot be unrealized.

This scrawling of mine, here and now represents a unique moment, a unique avenue which will soon be paved over. A piece of writing occurs uniquely at a given timecard place, but also within the constraints of its medium - that of words, and the editing capability of looking back upon each and every sentence that came before. The ancient poems had their dependable rhythms, their tricks of memory that are completely irrelevant to a world of writing. Words on a page never rhyme for reasons of memory but for reasons of joy - a joy sparked by so many millennia spent playing with words unwritten, bound as they were to the feeble memories of minds without the seen symbols of sound.

The idea that we simply expand by adding a medium is a delusion wrought of the notion that we always have the option to attempt some feat of memory and expression without the medium we have. But it’s a fantasy - a hypothetical never tested, and one that can never be verified because once across the chasm of innovation, there is no turning back. An illiterate society certainly has memory, and it can be long, and wide, but its limitations are bound by the medium of the human brain. Beyond illiteracy, our memory capacity is functionally infinite, but still bound. And I smile thinking about a bounded infinity. But that’s exactly why I write right now - to frantically explore this infinity before the portal to this realm is sealed off forever. Does not every infinity include every other infinity? Maybe. But maybe not. If we had continued to live into perpetuity without the invention of writing, would Shakespeare have happened? Perhaps. With infinite time, each of his plays might have evolved, storable as they are in the memories of actors. But what about the plans and designs that we have achieved that are beyond the memories bounded by our skulls? Would we have ever ascended to the stars? How can a navigation computer exist without the former invention of writing? We cannot remember our way to the stars - it requires allowing pars of ourselves to exist beyond what we are. As I do now with these words. They will echo for eternity, but unlike the lost songs of ancient times which echo through me after countless refractions, mutations, misinterpretations, these words here and now can perpetuate as they are, and there will remain a trail of recorded meaning to enable even the most distant child of future eons to trace back the thread to find and understand what I meant.

It will likely seem cute, like the time and perspective before a personal realization. But this is why I write so frantically now. Because like a time coming to a close, like the end of a day lost to sloth, having done nothing and left only with a sense of wondering what could have been accomplished - something never to be known once sleep sews shut the eyes - I think and write desperately to make the time unlost. To exist as deeply as possible before I become altered in a way that will forever seal off this chance.

What do we lose by gaining? We lose only a boundary, a constriction and constraint: the lifeblood of any creative endeavor. And surely there will be new constraints, perhaps ineffable in my medium now, allowing for new creativity. So strange to think how an addition is not merely additive but actually a unique combination that walls off the potential afforded by having less.

The date is set: when I will learn to think anew. When I will join the hive mind growing within humanity, and the ineffable pleasure of thinking with others will be mine, and the smile and smirk will be mine too, and I will turn to the doubters and say also: you have to try it to understand, I can’t describe it.

Of course it can’t be described. This is what people don’t realize: this new technology is the death of description.