ENJOYING MISERY

May 12th, 2021

There are endless dimensions to the human experience, and each comes with it’s own set of conscious variables: how we perceive, appreciate, resist or welcome what is happening.  It’s easy to appreciate a beautiful sunny day when well rested  and with little stress plaguing the mind.  But what about the miserable day, is it impossible to appreciate by definition, or is there a pocket of perspective we can sneak into that can grant a grateful smile upon even our own misery?

A completely happy go-lucky life would be no life at all.  Some common sense logic might parrot the axiom that the sweet is never as sweet without the bitter, but what about appreciating the bitter for what it is, independent of what sweet might have been or might still be?

The darker depths of life are still an experience, one that when placed next to the possibility of having no experience at all may be infinitely sweet.  There are of course miseries that make no experience sound like a reprieve to be dangerously lusted after.  Such desires forsake all possibility of a different and better future, one that might reframe and recast the light on such experiences within memory and find immense gratitude for such dark experiences.

True heartbreak, whether it be over a lover gone or a family member lost is simply proof that the love was a real and genuine experience - it can be an debilitating proof of past authenticity.

It’s a strange hypocrisy that we can enjoy an intense and sad drama at the movies, but fail to translate that same kind of appreciation to the dark vagaries of our own life.

With absolutely all experience, the key is whether or not we embrace it or not.  Absolutely everything, be it happiness, or exquisite physical pain is brought into perspective with an ability to embrace what is happening.  Once that commitment occurs, there’s a certain facility that becomes available regarding how we can hold that experience in our sphere of consciousness.  An embrace enables an ability to hold, and by embracing experience we can learn to hold any experience at just the right angle so that no matter how dark it gets, we can still get it to gleam.

USEFUL FRIPPERY

May 11th, 2021

By definition, frippery, or decoration is not useful, at least not directly.  But a thoughtful bit of frippery can be very effective.  Frippery is defined as specifically showy or unnecessary decoration.  The negative connotation is a bit ironic: isn’t all decoration by definition showy and unnecessary?  Unless perhaps there is a difference between first order effects and second and third order effects.

Switching gears for a moment, think about the fact that many languages apply a gender to nouns.  The gender often doesn’t even make sense when there is an opportunity to categorize things as male or female or neuter.  So what’s the reason?  In information theory, the reason why there isn this arbitrary identifier to nouns is to help with transfer fidelity.  For instance let’s say you didn’t hear the noun clearly when someone was speaking, but you did hear the article correctly which usually conveys the gender.  That gendered article would help you figure out exactly which word was being said.  Here’s an example.  In French the word for sea, or ocean and the word for mayor are homophones.  They sound identical.  But the word for ocean is feminine and the word for mayor is masculine.  Granted, in this case the context would likely be more powerful for determining exactly which noun was intended, but the gendered article which is often seen as a useless pain by students everywhere does carry some informational power.

To return to the more traditional form of frippery, which is often in the visual sense, the utility isn’t direct, but indirect: it often allows a viewer to understand a great deal about the attention paid to detail.  Arbitrary detail is still detail which requires some thought and effort, and this is what it conveys: the level of thought and effort that a creator was willing and able to put in.  Such frippery indicates: if someone was willing to pay attention to these useless details, then it’s likely they also pay attention to the useful and very important details.

This natural and intuitive logic can be inverted to subversive use.  A product or service can seem legitimate because someone has done a good job with the tasteful frippery that accompanies serious endeavours that care about communicating these sorts of things and still all the while, that product or service could be a scam.  This results in an interesting phenomenon that is painfully obvious on a platform like Instagram: people are faking lives far beyond their actual means to try and bootstrap their way into that sort of life via the leverage that comes with a large audience, which is more easily procured by broadcasting a lavish lifestyle.  It’s ‘fake it till you make it’ in the most superficial way imaginable. 

This brings up the issue of priorities.  While trying to build something, what should be the priority?  Details in the way something looks?  Or details in the way something works?  One is clearly more important.  If something doesn’t work than it’s literally useless, but that doesn’t make this a binary choice of importance.  Making something that works perfectly but doesn’t look like it works is a recipe for crickets, meaning, if the project doesn’t effectively signal to a potential audience what it does and how well it does it, then that audience may end up being no audience at all.

MAGIC COMBO

May 10th, 2021

Would you rather be a master of one thing, or really very good at two things?  The traditional answer to this is the axiom: Jack of all trades, master of none.  The judgement is clear, no one wants to be just a ‘Jack’ and a master is far more esteemed.  But this is a bruised spot on the fruit of common sense - it just doesn’t hold true.  What the Jack of all trades can do which is totally unavailable to the master is combine disciplines.

Being an excellent coder likely just means a person is highly employable.  But being an excellent coder and also being good at something else, say painting and drawing, means that a person can cross-pollinate these skills and create for themselves a dirt cheap online store that looks fantastic and works with a droppshipping company that does canvas prints so there’s virtually no overhead.  Such a thing would also be totally automated meaning the artist can now spend more time painting and drawing instead of working as a coder for some company they don’t actually care about.

This example is an individual capitalizing off of the synergy created between a combination of skills.  Imagine now if a third skill was present.  Say for instance this coder also has an unusual amount of knowledge and know-how regarding an industry that has been untouched by digitization.  Gardening for example.  Our hypothetical coder/artist/gardener could build a gardening app, and this build would be driven by the fact that our individual knows what a gardener wants or needs, and this person would also be their own graphic designer.  Everything can be done “in house” literally.  

The fact is, mastery is not as important as it once was.  We think of celebrated composers or mathematicians as having some kind of magical focus that enabled them to become successful, and that’s where our imagination about what’s possible stops.  Frankly, being a master composer in today’s day and age certainly wouldn’t elevate a person the way it would have two hundred years ago.  But a composer who could reinvent musical notation by building a digital app which simplified the entire world of music and made it more accessible to people who haven’t learned musical notation?  Now that could go somewhere, because everyone yearns to be musical in some degree at least: it’s our original language and socialization - who wouldn’t want to express themselves in such a new and primordial way?

The hard part to striking a spark of synergy is in the ability to strip away narratives.  Often our skills are siloed in a narrative about who we are while using that skill, and as a result we are blind to it’s potential use in a totally different area of our own life.  Our thoughts fail to cross-pollenate because the narratives that generate them are incompatible.  But if a person can ease up on their own sense of identity and relax the grip of that narrative, ideas start leaking out and mixing with new areas, and this is where synergy can occur.  Magic is no longer cloistered in the determined drive to master one thing, it’s now in the soup, like a witch’s cauldron that requires just the right amount of different things in order to work.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: LITTLE LIE

May 9th, 2021

When Lucilius was a young boy, someone lied to him.  Luckily, the lie worked.  Being a young boy he was full of naiveté and optimism, the perfect combination in order to be gullible.  The lie wasn’t on purpose, of course, as Is the case with most lies.  It was more incidental, a passing thought really, something mostly to entertain the liar than anything having to do with deception.

Lucilius merely asked, as all young children do, what happens when you die?  Where do you go?

“You start over,” was the answer.

“Start over? What do you mean?  Like, you have a new life?”

“No, it’s the same one?”

“Like you start in the same place but you can do things differently?”

“No, it’s the same exact life.”

The boy Lucilius took a moment to contemplate this strange turn of events before asking further.

“So it’s like a loop that just goes over and over?”

“That’s right, which means you better make it a good one, a really good one, full of fun and adventure and excitement and deep experiences. Drink it up now,  otherwise you’ll spend the rest of eternity being thirsty.”

This instantly filled the young Lucilius with a very useful anxiety.  There was so much to do, some many places to go, so many people to meet.  He worried he wouldn’t be able to fit it all in.

It was years later before an older Lucilius realized that he was still operating with that same underlying idea that he would have to live this life over and over, even though he’d long come to his own conclusions about the nature or likelihood of knowing anything about experience after death.  The lie had made it’s mark, but Lucilius was glad for it, his life was indeed full, brimming, and there was still so much more left to explore.

CUSTOM EFFORT

May 8th, 2021

Sometimes the perfect fit doesn’t exist.  But we can spend an extraordinary time looking and waiting for it to turn up.  In a decent handful of these cases, it actually makes a lot more sense to figure out how to make it on your own.  Obviously this doesn’t work for everything: a new set of teeth, for example should best be left to a dentist.  But the perfect backpack? Or the perfect desk?  Or the perfect app?  

There are an unusual number of benefits when out comes to trying to figure out how to make something specifically for yourself.  The most obvious one is that if you succeed, you get exactly what you wanted.  The second is the skills learned along the way to make it happen.  And a sly third benefit is that you understand the real weaknesses of the final product.  By stitching together a custom leather backpack, one develops an intimate understanding about it’s construction that’s simply impossible with something purchased.  If the custom object breaks, not only are the reasons almost instantly understood, but the potential ways to fix it also pop up.  This is almost never the case with something store-bought, in which case we usually just throw it out and buy a new one and hope for the best.

However, it’s so much easier to be lazy.  At least it seems that way, but it’s worthy to wonder about two different lives that a person can live.  One where they have exactly what they have always needed, along with the added pride of achievement due to the fact that they’ve made the darn thing themselves, or another life, where a person is just constantly on the lookout for that one special thing they have in mind, nagged by the need, the idea for days, weeks, months, and even years.  Suddenly a little effort and learning doesn’t seem like such a tall task compared to the long subtle torture of waiting for what you want.