REPRESENTING THE FUTURE

February 12th, 2021

It’s impossible to be sure if a memory is true.  How would you ever know?  All you have to rely on for a representation of the past is, your memory.  And yet despite plenty of instances that prove the perennial fallibility of memory, we often swear by it.  The statistical likelihood of veracity is certainly not being taken into account when we do things, though, we swear by things more often on the basis of emotional conviction, not facts.

Some dreams can be so realistic they spur the dreamer once awake to ask those who were present in the dream if what passed was real.  All of us have suffered this glitch of memory, though once past childhood we are duped less often, though still duped - just not by dreams.

Presenting the past again, or representing it, is the real business of memory, but it is always done so in the context of a new situation - the present.  The past becomes recast, tinted, and often skewed through the lens of intervening time.

This does not just happen on an individual basis but also a cultural one.  Histories get rewritten, sometimes as we discover more about the past, but just as likely because we simply have different opinions about what happened.  Films get colorized, and memories take cue from fantasy.

Now we try to filter the present, altering reality, representing what is already in front of us.  But of course, we’ve been doing this since we first applied paint to our own faces.  

Strangely, what we often have a hard time representing is an idea of the future.  It remains a dull haze, an average crash of our common efforts and distractions.  Even delusions of grandeur remain so, always unrealized.  The disservice we do to the past is best applied to the future.  Tomorrow will always turn out to be a dull recast of today, unless of course we can imagine something radically different.

THE CONTEXT OF METAPHOR

February 11th, 2021

Analogies and metaphors aren’t perfect, and that’s by default.  There’s criticism lobbed at these cognitive tools for this lack of fidelity.  The argument follows that if a metaphor is needed than is the original core point all that clear in the first place?  Why can’t it translate?

Increasingly context is becoming more and more atomized.  Individually and as a culture our focus is becoming more narrow.  The result is that what comes into focus gets pulled out of context.  Such is one of the dangerous underpinnings of cancel culture.  The warriors of such a movement, while likely well intentioned and often bringing up fair points, are still all too willing to be very sloppy with the context, cherry picking details to collage a particular picture that best serves the movement.  Orwell is most certainly rolling in his grave, perhaps with laughter.  This sort of context-cut-and-paste was formerly only the sin of powerful tyrannical governments.  But now the diseased treatment of context has spread like a plague through culture and publications  that were once held in high regard as the clearest and most honest word have, within the last decade morphed into massive opinion pieces, tailored to grab attention instead of offer the truth.  

It’s an unfortunate monster of a game where short rounds might be won by those who play, but it’s a game of war that has an aim to consume every player regardless of who seems to be winning.

And along with this storm, the old tools of analogy and metaphor have been swept up.  Once the jewel of poetry and the indispensable tool of explanation and education, metaphor is now trusted less, which perhaps makes sense considering the assault on context.

A metaphor functions like a bridge between contexts.  Analogies too, straddle the border between contexts, and this is exactly why they are useful.  As tools they expand context so that one context can be understood in terms of another, and by doing so, those two separate contexts join, like bubbles merging to grow larger.  While the current trend is to narrow in until we’ve atomized every last bit of life so that we can no longer identify the meaningful connections between the pieces we’ve ripped apart, metaphor offers a chance to backtrack the dangerous path, like an anchored point of yesterday to which we still grip the rope.

The context of metaphor itself, is a lack of understanding.  When the point has failed to get across, and mere vapid description falls short, we take a step back and try to see what might exist in the context of those we seek to reach that might function as an isomorphism - as a way to translate the information of our point into the terms of another’s perspective.  And from such a zoomed out position, we inhabit the larger context and seek shared images and relationships that mirror what we know narrowly.

It’s a strange tension that we maintain, between zooming in to the specifics to gain deep understanding, but also to step to understand how the minuscule context of a detail fits into the grand scheme of things.  Without a well-oiled zoom that enables both pictures, we are easily lost, but most definitely lost if we are stuck zoomed in on details that are bereft of context, by default.  It’s the difference between trying to navigate one’s way through the city by looking at a square inch of ground at a time, and taking the elevator up to the observation deck in order to get a better view of the lay of the land.

RITUAL INCENTIVE

February 10th, 2021

A habit stack is a group of ritual behaviors that support one another by being tied together.  We all have habit stacks. Nearly everyone has a ‘morning ritual’ which is a habit stack, and it usually comprises of brushing teeth, shower, all manner of bathroom activity, getting dressed, and of course the coffee.  It’s a curiosity of the improving mind to wonder if more habit stacks can’t be engineered to be as productive and compressed as that morning routine.

The workout is often another routine, a habit stack that becomes an automation after enough time.

But perhaps most important for creating new stacks of productivity is that we often unconsciously pair these routines with a ritual incentive.  In the morning it’s that hot coffee for many people.  After the workout, it’s a good meal.

The ritual incentive is a great tool to incorporate when trying to pick up a new habit, especially one that inspires a grudging groan when the time comes.  An important caveat is to make sure the incentive doesn’t undo the good work of the habit.  Eating a tub of ice cream after a good workout is counter-productive in all sorts of very human ways.  That being said, if there’s an incentive that’s inline with the underlying goals of the habit it’s accompanied with, than all the better.

We tend to think that we should be able to get ourselves going with all stick, but some carrot after the ordeal can go a long way.  And it’s amazing how effective a small the incentive can be, be it a cup of coffee as reward for meditating in the morning, or that hot shower, or even something as simple as listening to a favourite song.  The reward itself becomes charged more than usual with the sense of accomplishment that lingers after a habit completed.  The two become mutually reinforcing.

ERROR OF MYOPIA

February 9th, 2021

The tendency to delay the start of some new endeavour is often attributed to the need to plan more.  Often the issue can be the start itself.  How can something be started if the start itself is shrouded in a fog of unknown. It seems sensible that one should at least see the next step before trying to take it, and it seems further sensible that if just one step can be planned and executed, the plan for a next step can wait for the new perspective afforded by the first.  Entirely sensible, but unfortunately, it’s not always practical.

Sometimes, the most practical step boils down to that nerve-wracking buddhist aphorism: jump and the net will appear.  Sometimes the very next step is invisible, and we must blunder forward on just the scent of a dream that may await somewhere in the fog.

It’s likely that even the first step is a misstep, but if we as humans are good at anything, it’s the quick recovery.  Failure in this sense gives us something immediate and concrete to work with, like a baseball flying toward our face: it’s the sort of problem we actually are good at.

So in this sense, making a mistake can actually be a great way of getting started.  A mistake gives back information, and whispers an instant lay of the land.  Or at the very least, we quickly understand what not to do, which can just as likely provoke a better idea about how to get started.

Of course, it’s vital that such a first misstep not be an irrevocable mistake of huge consequence.   It’s better to fall while walking instead of wiping out while sprinting.

The error of myopia in this case is to believe that we will somehow figure out how to see farther into the unknown, instead of working forward with that myopia regardless.  Sometimes, the only way to see farther ahead is to more forward and get farther ahead.

THE WORST STORY

February 8th, 2021

It’s always a bit of a buzzkill when someone is asked about their vacation and the next ten minutes are filled with the excruciating minutea of some travel detail that didn’t go according to plan.  This happens with astonishing regularity, and as disappointing as it is, it’s entirely understandable, because, the worst story you can tell is a happy one.

It takes only the most cursory tour of film, literature  and all manner of storytelling to realize that a good story depends on a juicy conflict.  Otherwise, the underdog has nothing to rise up against, the hero has no adventure, and nothing is at stake because nothing threatens.  

This is, unfortunately, a somewhat modern mutation of story.  Before the rise of marketing and advertising, the blissful and happy experiences of life were replete within poetry and they certainly made their appearances in story.  But the business of sales and the propagandistic adverts to drive such sales appropriated happiness en masse.  That appropriation has occurred again, with FOMO as epitomized with Instagram.  Happiness, still infused with the poison of advertising now goads us to chase it as it seems to appear in the lives of others, who we follow.

There is little to no cultural instruction about how to simply rest, exist and be a peace with that circumstance.  Certainly there powerful tools that are assembling.  The spread of meditation practice within the west is certainly encouraging, and Tinkered Thinking will soon release a meditation app.  But for the most part, Western culture seems to have been geared towards too much of an atomized utility to see the diffuse benefits of something like meditation.

In light of our bad cultural habits, this does not mean they can’t change.  Though we seem hardwired to think that a story must have some miserable kernel of conflict at it’s core, we can rather wonder if it’s possible to instead speak a bit lyrically about something that was particularly wonderful.  Can you describe that exquisite shade of blue without sounding trite?  Can you convey the awe you felt?  The taste and the feel of air?

There are so many details on offer to talk about that we pass up by default in order to pollute someone else’s curiosity with a description of the tired, overworked, and incidentally rude ticket agent who couldn’t accommodate the redirect when plans didn’t work out.