PROMISCUOUS SOURCE

May 7th, 2021

The nature of the news has changed drastically since the advent of the internet.  Formerly esteemed and reputable institutions of information have been sucked into the race-to-the-bottom that is the click-advertising business model.  This is almost old news.  In order to get as many eyeballs and clicks on ads as possible, then the news has to be eye-catching.  But, what if nothing particularly eye-catching happens on a given day, what is a large corporation with a responsibility to make income supposed to do?  This question is at the heart of the poisoning that news organizations have been self-administering.  The answer is to make everything eye-catching, and the best way to get someone’s attention is with something negative.

If asked to look at two screens, one a sea of smilie faces with one frown face, the other a sea of frown faces with one smilie face, we are much much quicker to pick out the single frown face than we are the single smilie face.  We are hardwired to have a penchant for noticing the negative.  This probably has a very understandable evolutionary origin: being able to spot the one predator in an otherwise idyllic environment is far more important than seeing the one positive thing when the situation is awful.  In this way the natural world generally selects for pessimism. And so, pessimism sells, because it’s what people pay attention to, and if people are paying attention, then they are more likely to click on that arbitrary advertisement that likely has nothing to do with the content being consumed.  The ironic thing is that clicking on an advertisement directs someone’s attention away from the original content.  One would think that if the content were so enthralling then a person wouldn’t get distracted by an advertisement, but the business model is counting on someone being distracted from their content.  Seems a bit backwards.  In the days of newspapers, it’s a bit different to run an ad.  In that context it’s really a notification or a reminder that something exists, but in the age of screens, one click and it’s like the entire newspaper disappears.

Faceless corporations aside, what is the individual wishing to be informed to do?  With this layer of poor incentive skewing information into strange pockets of rage and idealism, where does the average person look for a sound perspective on what’s going on in the world?

The answer at first seems like a lot of work: it’s to be your own journalist and triangulate what’s going on across many sources.  Of course this is what the news is supposed to be.  Individually, few of us have the time to go hunt down sources for any given event  or newsworthy item.  But we do have the tools now.  During the age of the newspaper, that was the source.  Perhaps the TV to.  But notice, even with these technologies it wasn’t uncommon to read a couple different newspapers, or check a few different news stations to see what the similarities or different takes on any given issue are.  The internet age only magnifies this capabilities.  Instead of a couple news papers or a few new stations, we can now curate tools to deliver hundreds and thousands of sources.  The key is to realize that curating this set of sources is the only thing the requires any effort.  Take for instance Twitter: some people hate it, some people love it.  The difference is feed-curation.  Those who enjoy it and find it useful and informative have gone through the trouble to tailor who they follow, seeking out individually wise voices on a variety of topics so that when an event occurs, there’s a small pantheon of trusted opinions to scroll through.  

Notice also the difference regarding incentives.  The click-advertising incentive is non-existent for this sort of pantheon of opinion.  A great deal of accounts on twitter are motivated by a sense of trust shared with their audience, and that’s it.  Perhaps there’s a product or a book or a service attached to such a person that they plug, but it’s very likely to be on brand.  Not always, but when authenticity is important for trust, it becomes a metric for filtering the sources  one pays attention to.  The advent of click-advertising took authenticity off the table for many if not all of the large new organizations.  In an age where no single source can be trusted, the key is to be a little promiscuous with one’s sources.  Promiscuous, and picky.

SONG OF THE MIND

May 6th, 2021

Shine a light through a crystal and it’ll split in a certain way.  Toss a pebble into a lake and the ripples will collide with the natural waves.  Say the right combination of words to someone and the song of the mind will change it’s beat.

Generally, though, very few words ruffle the beat of anyone’s mind.  Certainly those who are easily ‘triggered’ or ‘offended’ might seem as though they get ruffled, but that sort of reaction is almost always just part of the song - a chorus if you will.  It’s a song primed to react in a habitual way to a verse with the right sort of content, such things are ‘hooks’ in the exact same way that a pop song might be written.  And if such an idea is offensive, one might pause first to wonder: is this sort of idea a legitimate rock tossed into a placid pond, or is this just more proof in the pudding between a pair of ears comprehending these words.  If such an analogy is offensive, perhaps that’s grist for the mill that proves it.

What’s more interesting than the normal fluctuations and vicissitudes of our mind’s song is when something actually disrupts the regular flow of thought.  Most people don’t have a mental song calibrated to receive this kind of influence.  Most are hearing out the rhythm of their own melody, on the lookout only for the notes in their environment that fit into the tune.

Think of a new musician.  Getting plopped into a jazz band as a new musician would be a nervous and stressful experience for most newbies.  It requires a fair amount of experience, and most importantly, a desire and receptivity to open one’s self to a new experience that does not have a predetermined outcome.  There must be a curiosity about the unknown for the mind’s song to be disrupted by some arrant combination of words, some idea, some concept.

Otherwise, raw experience is far more effective.  Life is constantly ripe with the opportunity to dive into something completely new, and unlike the words that we can easily fail to hear, misinterpret or ignore, the experience of reality can be far less apologetic in the way it bores into our sense of being.  Any experience worth having is going to carry some sort of stress.  And even the one’s that don’t seem worth having, while also stressful, can yield fruit.  This is the difference between post-traumatic stress and the lesser known post-traumatic growth.

Regardless of whether it’s an experience, an idea or some words we read on twitter, the opportunity to be effected by such things is a matter of our current outlook: are we willing and receptive? Or are we closed for business?  Closed for change, and closed for the opportunity to experience life in a different - potentially diversified and well-rounded way.

SEABIRD

May 5th, 2021

The mind has a kind of weather.  Drizzle, shower, lightning storms and hurricanes descend upon our mental experience, often in reaction to the trials and changes of life.  For most, the experience is a one-to-one correlation with the weather: if the mental weather is bad, we aren’t well.  But there’s a further question to ask: how do we experience the weather of our own mind?  Are we that weather?  Or is it possible to define ourselves and our experience as separate from the condition of our own mind?  

Think of yourself as a ship within your own mind, and contemplate what Joseph Conrad has to say about ships:

“A ship is not a slave.  You must make her easy in a seaway, you must never forget that you owe her the fullest share of your thought, of your skill, or your self-love.  If you remember that obligation, naturally and without effort, as if it were an instinctive feeling of your inner life, she will sail, stay, run for you as long as she is able, or, like a sea-bird going to rest upon the angry waves, she will lay out the heaviest gale that ever made you doubt living long enough to see another sunrise.”

How many people treat themselves this way given the changing weather of their own mind?  How few have this gentle touch with their own sense of experience?  How many can rest themselves despite a tumult of angry emotion?

This is a skill to be developed and honed, like that of a sailor upon a boat with it’s intricate workings of lines, sheets, rope, sail and rudder.  There is a system to the mind’s maintenance just as there’s a system to a ship’s maintenance and handling in all sorts of situations.  But just as every boat is different, just as every boat has handles differently and even identically built ships have their own idiosyncrasies, every mind is different, and it’s handling is something to be learned, understood, and developed down to an art.

But, the current incarnation of culture is only slowly coming to the idea that the mind is something to learn about, and something about which we can train.  For most, experience is at the whim and will of the mind’s weather, and so many are left to be tossed and pummelled and nearly drowned in the deluge of their own thought.

PYSCHOLOGICAL STAND-OFF

May 4th, 2021

The equation for procrastination is often as follows:  there exist two things, the one you want to do, and the one you should do.  Doing what you want to do without first doing what you should do decreases the enjoyment.  Any activity is more enjoyable in the absence of some lingering stress, and those activities that are purely for enjoyment are undermined.  But instead of doing what we should do, we often go for a third option: some innocuous chore that has no pressing obligation.  Or worse yet: we do nothing, paralyzed, locked by the binary options.

It’s at this point that a large portion of the local bookstore steps in, taking the form of the ‘self-help’ section.  The very best of this entire literature boils down to: just do the thing that needs to be done.  It’s almost the correct advice.  For some it works, and for those they may shake their heads at the rest of the paralyzed bunch, not without an air of superiority.  Better advice is just a smaller version:  just start.

Just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, most goals and projects are accomplished through a kind of attrition.  We slowly wear down the to-do list of large projects.  They are never done in one giant swoop of effort.  And if they are, perhaps projects of a bit larger magnitude are in order.

DOWNSTREAM PURPOSE

May 3rd, 2021

We are good with one - to - one correlations, especially when it comes to our actions and the effects they have.  Got to work, get a pay check.  Have a drink, feel good.  Take a pill, relieve the anxiety.  We are remarkably untalented when it comes to second and third order effects of our actions and retooling what we do initially to tweak those results.

Maturity and self awareness might be as simple as realizing that there are far more things that we can do on purpose.  No one wakes up exhausted on purpose.  No one feels anxious on purpose, and no one wastes a life doing the same menial job that they hate on purpose.  These effects are all downstream, and it requires a good deal of self-understanding, planning, and even a little bit of cleverness to take action in the name of such late-order effects.

What’s first required is simply being able to see relationships among things that expand beyond initial one - to - one correlations.  For example, thinking about the potential hangover when contemplating the idea of having a drink.  For anyone that drinks quite regularly, this is even more difficult because there’s often no longer a hangover to be worried about.  At that point its a matter of understanding from an intellectual standpoint that the entire experience of life might be dampened, and that this has gone on for so long that it’s simply not possible to imagine a higher baseline.  What feels ‘normal’ can be depressingly subversive in the face of any attempt to see connections between what we do, and how we perpetuate the problems in our lives.

Drinking coffee is another example that fits into the issue of chronic exhaustion.  While it advertises and often feels like the cure to low energy, a chronic overuse of coffee will actually exasperate the problem.  Coffee and alcohol become easily and smoothly linked up.   The hangover seems easily solved by a deluge of coffee and then later in the day, the anxiety caused by chronic coffee used seems easily solved by just having a drink or two in order to unwind.

Vicious cycles chain together and multiply in effect.  Such a habit leads to a lower baseline and an obliviousness to it.  Such exhaustion and stress leave little resource left over for thinking carefully through very large and important aspects of life, like that menial job that is anything but fulfilling.  The downstream effects of our actions become particularly tricky to see and plan for.  And then with enough vicious cycles chained together, life can become a continuous trap that is constantly rolling in a worse direction.

Shaking up one’s life, the way moving, or extended travel can, is one of the easiest ways to see things differently.  When our habitual patterns are interrupted and downstream effects change accordingly, that dissonance is easier to notice, analyze and understand.  Otherwise, in order to see such puzzle pieces connected at a distance requires a good deal of intellectual imagination.  It requires ingesting certain pieces of knowledge, imaginatively understanding how they interact, and then creatively construction a hypothesis about how things would be different if certain variables were changed.  But of course, the exhausted imagination is far less equipped to handle this task in a way that has an effect that is emotionally convincing to the point where someone might actually try and change.