THE VIRTUE OF INEFFICIENCY

January 20th, 2021

 

Ants have incredibly efficient brains.  They are tiny and dialled in with exceptional optimization for what an ant needs to do.  Any don’t spend time worrying about tomorrow, or fretting over what they should do with their day - they simply don’t have the brain space for that sort of experience.  They are, simply, too efficient for that sort of luxury, and worrying and the ability to fret over this and that is a luxury of a larger, more flexible and dynamic brain.

 

The same inefficiency that allows us to worry about something bad that might happen tomorrow is the same imagination that allows us to craft beautiful stories, songs and new theories about how tings work.  Inefficiency, or rather, a lack of hardwired specialization allows us to cognitively wander.  

 

Now certainly, some who wander get lost, and it’s possible to wander into dark territory.  The brain can get itself stuck in a vicious cycle of bad thoughts which can create terrible pain.  But it’s this freedom to wander in the first place that is the core virtue of our inefficient brains - an inefficient brain that has made tremendous progress, far beyond anything any other species has managed in billions of years.

 

A luxury to worry certainly turns the perspective on the experience of worry inside out.  The realization that the ability to worry is a luxury can also beg an important question: is the luxury well spent if it’s taking the form of worry?

 

The answer is most certainly not.  Worry and anxiety is a signal that we’ve wandered in the wrong direction and that our thoughts, our brain, and our experience of the present is better spent pursuing a different direction.  That’s all anxiety is: a signal that the present is being misspent.  Switch gears and spend that present on something worthy and difficult and chances are good the mind will allow itself to be consumed - delightfully - in the task.  And when finally the mind emerges from a period of focus it lays claim to a jewel - a sense of accomplishment with which the present becomes tinted with relief.

 

It’s hard to imagine an ant gets to have such a variety of experience.  There’s probably not enough room, nor cognitive machinery to craft this mental adventure.  It’s too efficient for such fun.  That’s perhaps the crowning realization: play is just like worry: it’s a product of our inefficiency.  But who wants play to be efficient?  Where’s the fun in that?

REWARD SWAP

January 19th, 2021

 

Does a lazy person ever think about a workaholic and wonder how that happens with perhaps a touch of envy?  It stands to reason that if work really can become an addiction, then there’s a path to adopt that hot-tempered monster as one’s own.  Our bodies and minds toil for rewards, and despite how varied the task and how different the task might seem, none of it is all that different for the brain which is operating with a few different carrot cocktails that are all composed of more or less the same neurotransmitters.  A lazy person can wonder if the rewards of life can be swapped out to provoke a better, more fulfilling behavior that may eventually lead to a better life.

 

When the lure of the video game or the Netflix show is strong, palpable and seems overwhelming, how does the dreadful promise of frustration and effort required to do something stand up as a viable option?  The rewards of course are vastly displaced given the activity.  The reward of a video game or the Netflix show is nearly immediate, whereas the reward of work well done might not even exist if the work ends up as just a few wasted hours of frustration that seem to yield no progress.

 

The rewards of better behavior are almost always minuscule or nonexistent in the beginning.  Endurance and perseverance through that initial period requires a kind of imaginative faith - a constant reminder of the workaholic and the things they’ve managed to achieve.  Hope isn’t even appropriate because there is always proof all around us of what is possible.  It often just requires staying the course and remaining consistent.

 

Slowly the cocktail whipped up by the brain begins to shift, sprinkling in more serotonin and less dopamine.  And with even a small taste of the resulting reward, it’s not too hard to keep at it, if the memory of that reward can be cherished, hyped up with a frame in the mind and even obsessed over.

 

Before long, the same machinery that produces superficial days filled with quick-fix dopamine hits has transformed into an engine of productivity, steadily carving out a path towards better and distant goals.

 

TOO VAGUE

January 18th, 2021

 

There is a manner of speech prevalent today, and likely prevalent since the invention of language that consists of incredibly persuasive rhetoric with absolutely no substance.  We listen to far more than just the words and the compilation of their aggregate meaning when someone talks.  We listen primarily to the way someone talks, far more than the woven thread of meaning that may or may not exists through their sentences.

 

Tone of voice, volume, speed of speech, and if the speaker is visible, their facial expression, the tension of their eyes, the pose and movement of their body.  All of these combine to create an experience that isn’t necessarily in line with the words being said.  And if in fact nothing of any real substance is being said, than all these other methods of conviction still function.  An audience can be won over and grant a speaker legitimacy based on metrics that have absolutely no real meaning or relation to their words.  

 

This happens because all of these attributes that frame spoken words perform a second message which is in constant dialogue with the feelings of those listening.  A powerful voice that speaks words with a sense of certainty evokes a particular feeling in an audience.  Jordan Peterson is a speaker with this sort of urgency and force, but then again, so was Hitler.  Crowds are swayed not by words but by the way such words are framed with tone and volume, physical stature and fascial expressiveness.

 

All of this framing aside, the clearest litmus test for meaningless speech is to ask if such words can be acted upon.  Do they translate to something actionable in the tangible world?  Or if the speaker relying on the nebulous quality of certain vague words so that a message can be open to a wide interpretation?  Such language is often employed to assuage many view points, concealing exactly where the divisions and disagreements might exist.  Politicians and salesman speak with such vagueness to evoke a certain feeling, because it’s a feeling that casts the vote and spends the money.   Vague speech can inspire action without explicitly stating that action.  In this way speech can comprise of absolutely nothing and it can also describe via the same relative absence of subject.

 

Such speakers can be deactivated by simply asking for clarification and more clarification until the speaker corners themselves with only an absence of real message to point at.

 

 

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: THE DESTINATION

January 17th, 2021

 

As the planet grew in the cockpit window a small light began to blink on the control panel, and then with it another light and a periodic beep.  Just behind the empty command chair a large frosty glass tube lit up blue and behind the warp of fog and ice there was clearly a human being.  The tube warmed, the ice thawing as the planet grew ever larger in the view of space.

 

The airlock of the tube hissed and swung open.  A few dreary moments passed as Lucilius opened his bleary eyes.  He coughed, and immediately held his head which ached from the long sleep.  He looked around at the cockpit, and stale memory returned.  He remembered clambering into the escape pod, seeing thousands like it scattering out into the deep night of space.  Everything had happened so quick, he didn’t know if it had been an attack or a malfunction.  

 

He got up and sat in the command chair, not even glancing at the large planet in view.  He clacked in some commands to bring up date and mission time.  A mistake to be sure, he figured looking at the time.  He reentered the commands and the same numbers popped up on the screen.  

 

His mind was blank.  He looked up at the strange planet, then around at the inside of the pod.  There was no way to verify the computer’s log, but it seemed inconceivable he’d been asleep so long, unrecovered by another ship, just… drifting.

 

Another alarm started to sound.  

 

“What?” Lucilius said out loud, looking at it in disbelief.

 

The alarm signalled signs of life on the planet ahead.  Lucilius only watched the blinking alarm aghast.  He’d been part of an enormous campaign to venture out into the galaxy in search of life, and now here he was, so many dreamless years later, all on his own before a planet that seemed to hold exactly what they’d all set out to find.

 

He initiated a descent to the planet’s surface and plunged the agile pod down into the long bands of clouds that striped the planet, creating massive rows of light that stretched enormous across the curved landscape.

 

The moment he punched through the cloud cover his stomach seized.  He could see settlements, cities patched across the vast continent.  He checked for any kind of radio signal, but all he could pick up was the usual interstellar static - the planet was quiet.  A dead civilization, he figured, his hopes sinking.

 

He angled the pod down to land just on the outskirts of one of these cities.  There seemed to be a fog or a low patchy cloud cover just above the ground, and much of it scattered as the pod fired landing boosters for a soft landing.

 

He put on a suit, double checking the atmosphere readings to make sure it was compatible, and then left the pod.  The low cloud cover, hovering waist high parted as he walked toward the city, and for hours he wandered through the alien structures.  But none of them seemed to have entrances, nor did they seem to exhibit any kind of life or operation.  Clearly they were constructed from some sort of metal or alloy, but he seemed he was in a ghost town.  

 

What was strangest to Lucilius was that there was no sign of alarm, nothing in disarray, no remains of anything, skeletal or otherwise to find.

 

After some time his oxygen was getting low and he headed back to his pod.  He walked through the low cloud cover, pondering the alien structures, wondering what might be his next move in this strange place, during this inconceivable time.  He stepped up into the pod and as he turned to check the door as it swung shut he saw something curious.  He slapped a button next to the door to arrest it’s movement.  A small piece of the low cloud cover had separated from the rest and drifted toward Lucilius’ pod.  

 

He wouldn’t have thought much about the strange fog but there was something about it that seemed deliberate, and the gentle speed of the cloud was too much for a windless landscape.  Lucilius quickly swapped out his suit’s tank and then got back out.  

 

The little cloud was still there, separate from the rest of the fog bank, as though waiting for him.  Lucilius hunkered down in front of the little cloud, and after a moment reached out to it, but it quickly receded out of reach, startling Lucilius.  But after maintaining a safe distance for a couple of seconds the cloud began to approach again, slower.

 

Lucilius reached out and slowly the cloud gently brushed up against his gloved and unfeeling hand.  Then another cloud broke off from the cloud bank and approached Lucilius.  The first pulled back and the two seemed to hover near, as two might hang back to talk.  Quickly little bits of cloud began separating from the main bank and glided up toward the pod, as though looking at it from every angle, and then the first cloud approached Lucilius and then very quickly covered him completely, swirling around before pulling back again.  The curious clouds around the pod also pulled back and together they all became a solid fog bank again, and then, the white clouds turned green, first lightly and then dark, like a kind of terrible bio weapon, but the cloud bank stayed as it was.  Then, something else seemed to be changing. 

 

Lucilius looked around, unsure of what he seemed to be sensing, and then he caught it.  Light was beginning to reflect brightly off the city structures.  It brought Lucilius’ gaze up where he saw an unfathomably sized band of cloud shifting to bathe the entire area in direct light.  The green cloud bank before him lit up.

 

And for a minute, nothing happened.  Lucilius was beginning to wonder if there was an effect of the hibernation that was messing with his mind when the green fog bank began to change shape.  All around him it started to rise, like a solid wall of green.  His nerves rose to an edge as he watched the continuous wall around him begin to narrow and close above him.

 

For a moment he was in complete darkness.  Then his wrist control beeped and lit up.  He looked to find nominal atmosphere readings.  The bright glow of the solitary little screen was then joined as the cloud all around him began to glow lightly.

 

 The cavity created by the cloud encompassed also the pod, so he signalled the ship to double check the atmospheric readings.  

 

Apparently, it was safe.

 

 

It probably wasn’t a wise idea, but Lucilius’ day had been so odd and disorienting so far that it didn’t feel like much of a risk.  He took off his helmet.

 

And he could breath, there in the strangely lit huddle of cloud.  From the wall of glowing green a small cloud parted, and the luminous shape floated toward him.

 

Lucilius removed his glove and reached out to the little cloud.  And when they touched, Lucilius heard in his own head

 

Hello.

 

Lucilius pulled back, but reached out again to touch the cloud.

 

Hi there.

 

Lucilius squinted, and wondered… “is that me, or did this cloud just say something?”

 

That was me, the cloud.  Or rather, us.

 

“Us?” Lucilius said out loud.

 

One cloud, different clouds... both make sense to us.

 

“So, you’re alive?”

Oh yes, certainly.

 

“And how do you know my language?”

 

We don’t.  Thought doesn’t really have much of a language.  Your words are a result of a conversion.  We can sense what happens before the conversion.

 

“So you’re a collective mind?”

Sometimes.

 

“Did you create the cities?”

Sort of.  Our ancestors did, so yes.

 

“Your ancestors?”

The cloud laughed.  Yes, long time ago.  It’s been quite a while since I thought about their construction.  Long before the great schism.  

 

“What’s the schism?”  Lucilius asked.

 

The cloud sighed.  Well, before we evolved into this form we had physical bodies and we were developing technology just as every other evolving creature does.  And there came a time to make a decision and that’s when we split into two groups.

 

“What happened to the other group?”

They left.

 

“Left?  Where’d they go?

 

They went where all advanced civilizations go.

 

“What do you mean?”

Have you noticed how quiet the cosmos are?

 

“Yes, certainly, that’s actually why I’m here, I was sent as part of mission to find life on other planets.”

 

The little cloud jiggled as it laughed, and the green and glowing walls seemed to animate with a kind of communal laughter.

 

Pretty odd to have all these quarks playing around and so little life, wouldn’t you say?

“Of course,” Lucilius said, “it’s the ultimate paradox.”

 

Not so much, the little cloud said.  There have been plenty of civilizations to rise among the cosmos.

 

“And do they fall?  Collapse?  Is there some sort of bottleneck, or a filter that prevents so many from enduring?”

There are certainly plenty of mistakes to be made along the way, but no, not really.  Each civilization eventually makes the necessary discovery.

 

“And what discovery is that?”

They discover where everyone has gone.

 

“All civilizations end up going to the same place?”

Yes

 

“And why aren’t you with them?”

 

Because of the schism.  We decided to stay.

 

Lucilius looked around at the glowing wall of cloud all around him.  “And what do you do?”

We are air farmers.

 

“Air farmers?”

Yes, we shape the clouds, control the sunlight, and we feed off of a simple chemical reaction that we host.  Our talents are also what allow us to create your air.

 

“And you just stayed?”

Yes, it’s what we wanted.

“Could you still go if you wanted?”

The cloud was quiet for a moment, as if thinking.

 

Yes, I suppose we could.  It’s unlikely the machines don’t still work.

 

“Could I go?”

The cloud was quiet a moment longer.

 

Well yes, if you’d like.

 

Lucilius paused to think, but the cloud continued on.

 

It might be a good idea considering how long you’ve been separated from your people.  

 

Lucilius gave a surprised and suspicious look at the cloud.

 

Apologies, we do have access to most recent thoughts that you’ve had, and it seems you have been adrift for quite a long time.  It’s quite likely that your species made the discovery long ago and moved on.  There’s a chance your species might have had a similar schism, but there’s no way to tell.  It depends on a lot of things, mainly the state of your home planet and how much of a toll it took for your technological evolution.  And of course there are many ways that technological species find their way to less… lively destinations.

 

Lucilius knew the cloud was talking about self-annihilation.  He honestly had no idea which way the human species might have gone, and given how long Lucilius had been asleep, he figured the cloud was probably right: There was either no one, or maybe some still squabbling, or some or all of them had made it to this strange destination the cloud spoke of.

 

You’re right, the cloud said, if you go back, you may find a more enlightened evolution of your own kind that is content like we are, to farm and live, or you might find no one, and you might not have any way of communicating with those that are still there, even if you do go back.

 

“Are you trying to convince me one way or another?”

 

No, not at all.  You are free to do whatever you like.  We are happy to help a lost traveller.

 

Lucilius spent a few more hours chatting with the cloud, mulling over his options.  It was clear that the universe was positively brimming with life - according to this cloud, but any life that began to make technological progress discovered the destination by default, and this discovery fundamentally changes the priorities of any civilization that comes across it.  He was still suspicious of it all.

 

It’s a bit like any realization, the cloud said.

 

“What do you mean?”

 

Imagine a wonderful experience, perhaps a taste, or something special your species does.  How much success do you have trying to explain that experience to someone who has never had it?

 

Lucilius thought for a moment.  Taste made sense. It was impossible to describe the taste of chocolate to someone who’d never had it.  But Lucilius started thinking of others, precious experiences that could only really be experienced, they couldn’t be understood otherwise.  Suddenly he remembered being a child, a boy, asking an older kid what it was like to kiss a girl.  But all he got was a genuine smile and shake of the head.  “You’ll find out.”  Could it really be that?  Could it really be that the cosmos seemed so empty simply because there was a secret that everyone else knew, some place -some destination where all these civilizations go?

 

“So you don’t even know what this destination is all about, do you?”

 

The cloud was quiet for a moment.

 

You are correct, we don’t.

 

“And you’re not curious about it?”

We used to have some curiosity among us, before we evolved to this form, and some left for the destination over the years, but it’s been quite a long time since some of the cloud left for the destination.

 

Lucilius stayed a few more days.  Each time after waking the cloud would rise and create for him his own little bubble of atmosphere, and he spent the time talking to the cloud, learning about their history, their species before the schism, and their millions of years farming the air.  He even questioned their plans for the future and the collapse of their star in several billion years and the end of their ability to farm the air, but they responded by saying only that there was more than enough time to think about it.  The destination was, always on offer.

 

“I’ve made my decision,” Lucilius finally said.  “I’d like to go.”

 

The luminous bubble of cloud moved with him, guiding him as he walked, and he saw bits of the alien city enter the bubble’s cloud as they moved until the wall of cloud before him swept away to reveal a doorway.

 

Lucilius walked toward it and it opened, revealing a blinding white light.  He squinted, shading his eyes against the onslaught of the sight, but he couldn’t see anything in the brilliant white.  

 

Lucilius reached out to the little cloud next to him.  

 

“Thank you,” Lucilius said.

 

The little cloud floated with him to the threshold.

 

Safe travels, the cloud said before Lucilius walked in.

THE ANTI-ROUTINE

January 16th, 2021

 

The end of an unproductive day can drag right past a decent bedtime for no obvious nor good reason.  The rebellious mind keeps scrolling or whiling away time with more unproductive pomp.  We add to a bad day by indulging in the opportunity to make it worse, and inevitably tomorrow is already at a deficient with a poor foundation of sleep.

 

Most of us have been there.  It’s too late to actually start anything of substance.  The day is already a throw-away.  So why can it be so difficult to actually throw the day away and get on with sleep and welcome the fresh slate of tomorrow?

 

An unproductive day is an insult to personal agency.  It’s an affront to our ability to seize control of our life and make something of it.  More than anything, it’s evidence that we don’t have control.  And it’s this helpless and even desperate feeling that we rebel against by trying to stretch the day out longer.  With so little will power, the power to further ruin the day becomes the only way we can express our sense of agency.  When we’d be better served to just call it a day and try and forget it and move on, we finally persevere, but only to our detriment.  This is a sort of anti-routine, and the procrastination it represents only fortifies how powerful a routine can be.

 

Pushing through the routine of work, even when it yields nothing but frustration, new problems and further blocks to imagined progress, we can, at the end of the day still rest with the notion that we gave it a shot.  Beyond this, there’s the realization that all those new problems, frustrations and blocks would have still been waiting there tomorrow if they hadn’t been discovered today.  The flimsy logic of procrastination indulges in the idea that something might be better handled at a later time when conditions are better.  Not only is this circular logic by way of being a self-fulfilling prophecy, but it creates a fantasy of progress, making it out to be smoother and easier than it actually will be, if only we just time it right and have all the predatory details in order.  Fact is, unfortunately, the problems of progress only get kicked down the road of finite time, leaving less of it available to use in order to solve those problems.

 

Procrastination, inaction, or progress and action - both sides of this divide snowball.  They gain momentum through the day, and by the end of it, one barrels onward, cutting into sleep to ruin tomorrow, while the other enables it’s own end with a decisive call to actually end the day.  Routine perpetuates further routine, whereas the missed opportunity to use that routine  breeds a rebellion to keep that routine at bay even longer.