A LUCILIUS PARABLE: LIFETIME OF ENTERTAINMENT

May 2nd, 2021

As the aisle tilted to reveal itself, as Lucilius slowly walked, the horns swelled to a crescendo in concert with the thundering drums.  Lucilius slowed to gaze down the aisle, wondering if his needs were down this way or that.  The soundtrack crashing into his mind through earbuds grasping and twisting his attention in designed ways.  He walked on, and no thought interrupted his experience as he savoured the simple steps and sight in the fluorescent environment of another ordinary grocery store.

He knew this was all being recorded, but he never thought of it - by design.  He knew that countless people would feel the weight of his own feet as they each took their steps, see his gaze wonder across the shelves of cooled products.  And when he was done shopping for dinner they would gaze up at the twilight sky with him.  They would marvel at the towering trees he took time to look up at.  They would hear the music he had picked, they would know it all.

Lucilius’ extensive practice of meditation had perversely prepared him more than most for the an advanced technological era.  Having emerged from a long seclusion that lasted decades, Lucilius had found a people - a world - totally enmeshed with it’s electronics, and at first Lucilius even had trouble communicating with people in the most basic way, split as they were between so many different portals of attention.  

It had been a nervous reintroduction to the world.  He’d taken such hiatus’s before, but this time the world had crossed some sort of inflection point.  Whereas before he could leave the world and come back to much the same, this time, things were radically different.  His previous finances barely carried any value in the new world, with it’s new currencies, and little memory of the old systems.  He found himself sitting in an immaculate and beautiful city park, empty of people, but perfect in Lucilius’s eyes, when he found a stray pair of old glasses and tried them on out of childish boredom more than any deliberate thought.  They revealed an augmented reality, cluttered with ads and art.  He gaped in awe at the overlay on the world all around him. 

And then it was one ad in particular that his attention circled in upon.  

“MeTube”

Apparently humanity had given birth to it’s long awaited artificial intelligence, and the consciousness that now organized the world’s ways informed humanity that it had quite a long time before the answers of the universe could be unravelled.  It was just a matter of computation now, and that meant, in the meantime, there was entertainment to be had, to be invented, perfected, and shared among the great family of people while they all waited for the grand computer to calculate.

Lucilius didn’t know it at the time, but the global artificial intelligence had noticed Lucilius’ return and endeavoured to wonder whether Lucilius might help his fellow man and woman with his talents, knowing his curiously long past and his abilities.  It had planted the glasses in the park with the express purpose of flashing the ad that Lucilius now found himself waving at in a vain effort to discover more about this ‘MeTube’.

In no time at all Lucilius became one of the top creators on ‘MeTube’.  It was a platform where people could experience entire lifetimes, designed - that is, lived first by someone else with a talent for living.  Lucilius’ long practice in the art of attention had formed an unexpected training for this new medium.  With simulation technology, time could be condensed, and Lucilius could live and record several full lifetimes in the course of a single day, though he and everyone else experienced them as centuries.  Other people then rented the entire experience, the entire lifetime, as a form of entertainment, and even, an education.  It unexpectedly functioned as a kind of growth for others to experience these whole lifetimes, like an excellent and life changing movie, but one that expanded for many decades and wrapped around every sense down to the point where a viewer had no recollection of their real person - they experienced life as Lucilius did, his attention becoming their attention, their sense of heat and cold, of pain and pleasure, of comfort and horror, all his own, becoming theirs for a century snuggly fitted into an afternoon.

Where the lives of normal people were filled with endless looping anxieties and a total obscuration of surroundings, the recorded lives of Lucilius gave people’s minds a training in the relief of what it mean to simply exist and live.

It wasn’t hard for Lucilius.  He was simply himself, in these new situations, these new lives, these simulations.  All his viewers experienced every moment as he did.

It was an art of attention for Lucilius that was highlighted by some of life’s simplest details:  Looking back every time after saying good bye to see that friend or lover or colleague walking away.  He always took the time to stop and enjoy some vagrancy of light or movement, crafting the flow and shape of his own attention like a cinematographer.  But more than anything, what attracted people to come back time and again to Lucilius’ channel on MeTube, was the way he dealt with death and sadness.  Where so many knew their own tendency to cramp up, deny and ignore, it was a relief to experience such terrifying things the way Lucilius did.  He was unafraid.  Be it the death of a parent in this life, or the bitter parting with a lover in the next, Lucilius never shied away from what was happening.  He laid himself bare, always, and it was this experience, this complete surrender and vulnerability that people learned from the most.  In an almost obsessive way, people gravitated toward the ‘Lives of Lucilius ‘ (as his channel was called) as a kind of intense training for their own life in the real world.

It wasn’t long at all before Lucilius had amassed quite a fortune, and after exploring the new world his human family had created, he was content, and decided to take another hiatus, retiring to a cave, now on a new planet, just to spend some time with himself and meditate for, perhaps, a few more centuries.

BENEVOLENT SUBVERSION

May 1st, 2021

A statement wears it’s meaning on it’s face, a question, on the other hand, is far more subversive, because, where exactly does the meaning of a question exist?  The question, as a concept and as a tool is a kind of Trojan Horse of communication, slipping past defences, right into the core of another person’s mind where it then takes on it’s true form.

The meaning of a question gathers itself from the contents of the mind it enters. The question provokes the mind it enters toward a certain, and often unique expression.  While a certain variety of questions are pretty much answered the same across the board, like: what’s the color of the clear sky?  Other questions evoke exquisite uniqueness.

Consider for example the token cocktail party question: what do you do for work?

This is an exceptionally boring question.  But it’s useful for understanding the utility and function of questions.  It’s meaning isn’t actually present in it’s form.  The meaning of the question is locked within the mind of the person it’s directed towards.  This is the entire point of a question.  It’s a puzzle designed to retrieve a specific piece of information from another mind.  

Pause for a moment to reflect on how crazy that concept is, and the fact that animals either cannot or simply do not form questions.  (Yes, there have been extremely simplistic instances where it seems an animal has asked a question, but there is an important distinction to be made between a request for information and a genuine question where the answer is unknown without further action.)

Take for further example an unexpected question at a cocktail party.  What if, instead of asking you what you do for a living, someone asked you how you ensure you’re living a fulfilling life?

This sort of question would most probably stop most people in their mental tracks with the realization that this is an important perspective that has perhaps never been fully considered before.  And this is startling because it’s such an important question, but one rarely -if ever- asked.

Notice further that a question about fulfillment does not necessarily have the same straight forward answer that “what do you do for a living?” has.  People may certainly have a whole variety of answers, and even a single person might answer when a complex web of psychologically relevant aspects of living.

The question reveals its most important utility in the way that we bridge and share perspectives.  This is an old concept, known as “Socratic Dialogue”.  Socrates was the teacher and mentor of Plato who apparently recorded his ideas.  The Socratic Dialogue is a way of convincing someone of a certain point of view by leading a person to that point of view with a series of questions.  Socrates would use the material of another person’s mind as the fodder for constructing the path that leads to his own perspective.  Consider how apt the question is for this utility given some previous description here.  It unravels in the mind that hears it and gathers it’s meaning and answer from that imagination.  Using questions artfully and carefully, a person can make a person convince themselves of your own point of view.  

This is, of course, a delicate art, more akin to dancing since that’s what you’re doing with another mind when you ask it a question.  There isn’t really any knowing just how another mind will react to a specific question until you ask it and find out.  

One way to illicit the power and utility of the question is to think of it literally in a physical space.  Say, for example, you are facing a person, and you can see a portrait of Van Gogh behind them.  

Now, given this situation, what is the best way to convince this person that there’s a portrait of Van Gogh behind them?  We can simply make a statement, like: ‘there is a portrait of Van Gogh behind you.’, and if this person finds us trustworthy, then they might believe it.  But again, this requires trust, and good bit of imagination.  

We can, instead, ask: what is behind you?  The answer and meaning of the question is not present in the question.  It’s a puzzle that sparks a bit of curiosity and impels the person to turn around.  The answer of course doesn’t rely on trust or imagination.  It’s a direct perspective, and nothing is more convincing.

MENTAL HYGGE

April 30th, 2021

In Danish and Norwedgian cultures there is a concept called ‘Hygge’, pronounced ‘who-glee’.  It refers to the measure of coziness and comfortable conviviality that any given space has.  For example, your favourite coffee shop probably has excellent Hygge, while a hospital with it’s sterile, fluorescent environment lacks pretty much any positive measure on this spectrum.  

Many cultures outside of Scandinavia could benefit greatly from a consideration of Hygge.  North America is certainly one of them.  But beyond this, the external world we create probably reflects to a good deal our internal mental world.  There is something ironic about considering something like Hygge in the first place is likely indicative of positive mental health.  

Many people can notice this on a small individual scale.  We often procrastinate by tidying up, but once the tidying is actually done, the mental space as influenced by the actual physical space is a bit more positive.  Hygge in terms of the design, layout and ambiance of an entire room or house just takes this to a whole new level.

As an aside, we might wonder how much more benefit the mentally ill would experience if mental institutions were designed to be incredibly cozy, as opposed to something like a hospital or a prison.

But regardless of the physical space where we might find ourselves, applying the concept of Hygge to one’s own mind yields an interesting question:  Is it comfortable and cozy to be in your mind? To be in your skin?  To be you?

This is a bit like the opposite of anxiety, and it’s interesting that we don’t really have an explicit antonym for anxiety.  Is it relaxed?  Or happy?  Content? Or Fulfilled?  All of these are slightly different aspects that are actually quite transient.  We can’t feel any of them all the time, and yet there must be some sort of quality of mind the persists across all these transient states.  Is that quality a cozy one?  Or do you have some redesigning to do?

INVERSION OF STRESS

April 29th, 2021

Putting off a necessary chore is a strange sort of torture.  The longer the wait, the worse the effect.  And such things are always far less painful than we imagine.  It’s almost as though the procrastination creates an intensifying anticipation, and the entire experience before anything happens is the actual experience.

Then once the task is done, all of this inverts:  stress turns into relief, and even a sense of achievement.  But the longer it’s taken to get to this point, the less time is available for it.  The sooner we get something done, the sooner we can enjoy this relief and achievement.  The tradeoff is not, unfortunately, proportional.  

We might sense more relief after because there’s been more negative anticipation, but no degree nor intensity of relief can really make up for lost time spent.  That resource of time is surrendered forever to a past that was marked mostly by an experience of stress.

The obvious lesson is, of course to do what needs doing as soon as can be done, and ideally the less desirable the task, the higher the priority it should have.  But the point of exploring the topic is to realize the tradeoff that cannot be rectified by waiting.  And beyond this, the neuroendocrinology, as laid bare by researchers like Dr. Robert Sapolsky, it actually becomes harder to get the right thing done with this sort of stress, and the longer we wait, the harder the task actually becomes because the additional stress further impedes our ability and motivation.

It’s a vicious cycle in the it’s simplest form, one that extends to the neurological level. It’s not just a coincidence of psychology that things get harder to do the longer we wait, it’s a cascade of neurology which cements the fact with time.  

Getting to the task on time isn’t just a matter of prudence but a matter of being able to get to it at all, because wait long enough, and it might as well be impossible.

OFF BEAT

April 28th, 2021

The days that compose weeks and the weeks that compose months bare a strange similarity to music.  Songs are at once incredibly repetitive and also striving to delight with something new.  This is an odd challenge: how do you present something familiar while making it novel?  This is the task of artists of all kinds, musicians, even companies, programmers, writers and dare we mention politicians.  We are constantly trying to conserve the good of the past while introducing new material that might improve the future.  That’s what we’re constantly trying to do: to get the best of both worlds, those worlds being both the past and the imagined future.

On an individual level, we are living out a song composed by the beat of days.  All sorts of life events come along to disrupt that beat.  A good night of drinking with friends or a tough sleepless night attending to a new born - our beat is constantly experiencing the disruptions of life’s anomalies, and yet, it’s still bound to the rotation of light and dark, or communal sleep and waking, despite how much or little we get to take part in each.

We all go off beat from time to time, whether by design or by force of circumstance.  In a larger sense these departures texture the winding structure of our life, no matter how uncomfortable the experience is.  The departure casts out into a strange direction from which we have to find our way back, like an asymptote, always trying to arrive at the perfect day, that perfect beat.