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.

PERMISSION FORGIVEN

April 27th, 2021

If they don’t say you can’t, you can, and you probably should.  But a little ignorance can be a great benefit in this area.  So many people fail to try new things because of the limiting sense that permission is required.  In nearly all such circumstances, the better strategy is just to ‘go for it’ and ask for forgiveness if things don’t turn out as smooth as hoped.  

The thing is, often times it’s nearly impossible to find the person or entity required to ask for permission.  On the other hand if something truly is against the rules, the one to ask for forgiveness will come find you.  Then again, if something truly is against the rules, it’s likely not something that requires much thinking.  We all have a communal sense for right and wrong.  Just ponder the fact that laws are not taught in schools.  From a logical standpoint this makes no sense whatsoever.  Wouldn’t the education of national laws be a high priority?  And yet it’s not, because culture teaches us these laws by virtue of osmosis.  What comes with this strange transmission is a feeling, a sense for the goodness or wrongness of a given idea or thing.  

If that space feels iffy given a particular idea, then chances are it’s doable, even if asking for forgiveness is something that comes about as a result. 

The lesson is to trust this hazy, ambiguous space, to trust that even if forgiveness is required that it’s worth a shot, because if it’s not obviously bad then there’s something to learn, something to discover.  And while curiosity may have killed the cat, perhaps there’s a reason we ascribe nine lives to the feline.