ANGLES

January 4th, 2021

Maintain a discipline of writing everyday about a new topic and the question inevitably occurs: how do you think of so many new ideas?  In a world now now augmented by the digital one, content is king, as they say.  So how is new content created, found, invented?  How does one generate new content?

The answer is that new content is actually very rare, and almost never occurs.  So how is content still king?  The answer to that requires refining the claim.  It’s not content that is king, but something about that content.

As many authors have pointed out and which has been discussed in previous episodes, most content is a kind of remix, a sort of sampled collage of prior content.  This might sound like just a flimsy disguise for stealing or plagiarism, and perhaps it is, but such a brand would miss the point: something new is occurring, its just not content.

A visual demonstration helps.  Imagine a coffee mug, of if there’s one near by, then take a moment to look at it.  Imagine a photograph of what you see.  Now spin the mug 180 degrees and take another snapshot.  Is it going to be the same image?  No, of course not.  Now spin the mug 1 degree and take a photo.  Is it the same?  It’s certainly very similar, but technically, no, it’s a different photo.  Now spin it half a degree back, and repeat.  Oh and now add a filter, or instead make a painting of it, or reverse the colours, or invert it, or flip it upside down or simply look at it while something incredibly impactful in other areas of life settles into your mind.

The content is always the same, what makes it different and fresh is a change in perspective.

And perspective is just an angle, it’s a filter.  Much of what our brain is doing as we experience reality is just filtering things out so that we can actually make sense of some of it. Content is effective when it enables our perspective to expand beyond it’s own current limitations, when we see the same world anew, from a new angle.

Content in the digital world is all about the angle we take.  And everyone has a unique perspective by default!  It’s quite literally not possible for someone else to have the same exact take on the world as another because we can’t inhabit the same exact physical circumstance nor even the same circumstantial perspective - we all, together, have different angles on what’s going on.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: DEALER'S CHOICE

January 3rd, 2021

The bar was loud, filled with Lucilius’ colleagues.  The company they worked for had just been acquired which foretold great things for all their wealth and prospects.  There were drinks all around and with them Lucilius basked in the glow.  The bartender noticed Lucilius’ glass nearly empty and wiping her hands clean she bounced her chin up to get his attention.

“What would you like next?”

Lucilius gazed at the near empty glass with a warm smile.

“What do you recommend?” he asked.

Her eyes flitted to a high corner of thought, but before she could answer, Lucilius corrected himself.  “You know what, I trust you, dealer’s choice.  Give me whatever you’d have and make two.”

The bartender smiled and got to work.  Lucilius listened to the ecstatic banter of his colleagues as they boasted and bragged about their future plans.  The bartender pulled a thin stream of cold and coloured spirit from glass to rising tin.  But just as she was finishing the drink a quiet quickly spread throughout the crowd of colleagues.  They were now looking at their phones in groups, breaking off to check their own phone and Lucilius glanced at the screen studied by the colleague next to him.

The bartender wore a worried look as she put the two drinks in front of Lucilius.  She leaned in closer to Lucilius, knowing him well enough as a regular.  

“Everything alright?” She asked, nearly whispering.

Lucilius smiled.  “Unexpected surprise,” Lucilius whispered back, as he lifted his glass and gently slid the second drink toward the bartender, nodding toward it at the same time for her to take it.  She smiled, rolling her eyes, and lifted the glass.  

“What happened?”

With his glass raised, and still smiling, he whispered again “We all just lost our jobs.”

The bartender’s face flushed as she froze.  Lucilius clinked his glass against her stationary one and said,

“Cheers.”

He took a sip and so did the stunned bartender, her eyes darting around at all these spiffy, suited people.

“You too?” She asked.  Lucilius nodded, looking at the drink in his hand with a delighted and puzzled look.  He took another sip.

“How can you still be smiling?”  

Lucilius looked at her strangely, as though the answer were obvious.  “Well, I’m celebrating, of course.”

“Not anymore..” The bartender offered.

“Sure I am, how could I not with such a beautiful and balanced drink in my hand?”

SUBTLE LANGUAGES OF VISION

January 2nd, 2021

The golden arches of the burger franchise McDonald’s is the most recognizable symbol in the world.  We compute the meaning of those arches on sight far faster than we do the word “McDonald’s”, and this is true of all symbols which also have a name spelled out with letters.  We might recognize the golden arches faster than Nike’s swoosh, but we register that swoosh far faster than the name “McDonalds” when it’s spelled out as a word.

This is a lost utility reminiscent of hieroglyphics that has returned in a primitive way with brand symbols and emoticons.  The use of symbol, shape, and color creates a shortcut within thought.  That is, of course if the association is already present.  Drawing a random, never-before-seen symbol is as useless as looking at a single letter in a foreign alphabet, but unlike most letters in alphabets, the symbol can take on a complex meaning.

Now while the golden arches don’t implicitly convey anything that might possibly lead someone to think the name “McDonalds” without prior association, we do operate with a subtle language of vision when it comes to shape and color. 

One example regarding color is how fast we can find and match it.  Given two instances of color within a sea of colors, the human mind can pick out the two with astonishing speed.  The same cannot be done with two instances of the same word.  This fact of the brain is something we have done little to utilize.  Now before the digital era, this lack of capitalization is understandable: producing color in the physical world is expensive and laborious.  But in the digital world, a color is just a tiny snippet of code which can be reproduced infinitely. 

And so it goes to wonder what subtle use of color we have failed to tap into given all the flashy apps out there.  Color seems to be used in only the most superficial way, as a means to just get some attention, as opposed to being a conduit for attention to be guided along intuitive paths.

The cluttered complexity of letters and words may also ignore something intrinsic about the use of shape that we aren’t using.  As with those golden arches, or that swoosh, it’s not the color of the symbols that is conveying the information, it’s the shape.  How much information are we inefficiently parroting with words that could be fast tracked with a wider more thoughtful array of symbol?  The explosion of emoticons perhaps hints at the huge potential here.  They are presented with no description, and yet they are used with little to no confusion.  Perhaps we should take the smilie face a little more seriously and learn from it’s lesson in order to expand the way we communicate with one another.

MEMORY & CHOICE

January 1st, 2021

You are only who you repeatedly remember yourself to be;  or, who you choose to be otherwise.  

We remember the past in a warped way.  There are strange and very unsettling opportunities when the brow furrows at ironclad evidence that the past unrolled in a very different way than we seem to remember. We bend and dress the past, and from that dolled-up amalgam, we have a story about who we think ourselves to be.  This can be a severely painful story, or it can be a glossy version sugared over.  The later is bound to benefit from humility, but the former gains to benefit from a rebellion: against the past, against one’s own conception of self.  

This is a very difficult feat to pull off, and unlike the flashy examples of movies and video games, it does not happen all at once.  Overnight changes occur only when great force is available, like with a military coup.  And even that sort of force takes quite a great deal of time and effort to amass.  No, rebellion on a personal level is pure subterfuge best carried out with a methodical strategy.  One of the worst aspects of the mind, is also one of the easiest to take advantage of: It’s a terrible master but an excellent servant.  If that servant can be put to work on a slow rebellion, the master can be gently overwhelmed by a changing mental circumstance, given enough time and consistent effort.

Take for example this very short list of excellent activities to help change one’s life: love thyself, meditate, exercise.

Now in that order, it’s a very difficult list to pull off.  It would certainly be nice to feel more compassionate for one’s self, but how is that trick pulled off?  If the list is reversed and priority repined in that order, it creates a long term subterfuge with greater self-compassion as the inevitable goal.  Viewed on timelines, self-compassion is the longest to work towards.  Exercise, on the other hand is something we can experience subjective benefits from almost immediately.  Meditation on the other hand takes a bit more time: a minimum of three to four months.  The larger point is that one can enable and lead to the other.  A good workout session can supercharge one’s mentality - but only for a short time, but long enough to take advantage of the change, and perhaps get that meditation session in before the boons of acetylene and all other endorphins wear off.  If that dual-enabling pattern is followed for enough days in a row, eventually, the benefits of meditation begin to come online, and these persist with far more reliability and endurance than the short positive kick delivered from exercise.  Then, with enough peace in the mind, and time to explore that peace, self-compassion arises as a natural result.

Each part of the process piggy backs upon the prior in order to feed the overall system in a way that eventually has the most impact possible.  Exercise can function as the thin edge of the wedge for this sort of process, but it need not be the only entrance to the avenue.

Regardless of what hopscotch levers are pulled to make long term change happen, the result occurs slowly because the passing of time slowly allows us to remembered a new person, one that we have chosen to try and become.  The past can be an excruciating weight to bear, but we always have the tool of the present on hand, a tool which can be used to slowly steamroll the power of the past, now a palimpsest, written anew with the memory of a different person.

STICKY MIND

December 31st, 2020

As people age, they tend to be more reticent to the adoption of new ideas and beliefs that might displace the ones they already have.  The mind has a fickle stickiness with respect to new ideas.  While young the mind is sticky for anything and everything: as children we don’t know how the world works so almost anything can stick to the young mind.

Meanwhile, the quality of stickiness of the mind in later years seems generally coalesced in power upon the ideas and beliefs already there.  The overall stickiness factor seems equal, just distributed differently over time.  A person in their seventies is far less likely to give up their model airplane hobby whereas a nine year old is switching hobbies with every turn of the head.  Age seems to concentrate the adherence of the mind to what it’s already familiar with.

This general trend of stickiness to concentrate over time is largely responsible for institutional rigidity.  An excellent example is the study of psychedelic compounds.  For decades this area of inquiry has been a taboo topic, one sloughed toward the law and hushed for fear of punitive association.  But why?  It goes to reason that anything that presents even the potential of danger should be highly researched and studied so that we understand exactly what the risks are, and furthermore, what hidden benefits might also lie in such areas.  We follow this logic when it comes to other dangers, whether they be on the level of enemy countries or sports teams - we study to minimize risk and search for leverage.  And yet, the mental model that’s been applied to psychedelics has been one of denial and ignorance.  It’s required the aging out of an entire generation for the topic to finally come back on the table of serious inquiry as spear headed by John Hopkins’ Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research.

Younger minds come in that still retain a diversified stickiness and replace the entrenched stickiness of older minds that have yielded the power to steer institutional agenda.  That diversified stickiness allows for shifts in institutional agenda before things solidify again and the need for another generational rotation is required.

This concentration of stickiness in the mind is important in order to get anything done.  It’s similar to attention and focus.  If a mind has maximally diversified stickiness then it gets easily distracted, like children, and it’s absolutely necessarily to drill down into a topic for an undistracted amount of time in order to make progress on it.  But, if the tendency to drill down on a useless topic or to drill down on a good topic in a useless way becomes the norm, then again the generational rotation is required to refresh perspective.

These are, of course, generalities, and when we drill down into specifics, there are crucial exceptions.  The shift around psychedelics is an example ripe with appropriate coincidence.  The shift was super charged, and perhaps initiated when the New York Times bestselling author Michael Pollan -who is most closely associated with writing about food- released a book all about psychedelic compounds.  At the time of publication Pollan was in the ballpark of traditional retirement age - not exactly the sort of person with such esteem you’d expect to drop a serious discussion of such a taboo topic. 

The topic of psychedelics is particularly pertinent to this discussion because of the effect psychedelics have regarding the mind’s stickiness.  If we were to attempt to translate the concept of stickiness into the world of neuroscience, one possible candidate for real analogy is something called the Default Mode Network.  This is a large scale brain network composed of a number of brain regions and is generally associated with an idea of self, narrative, memory and ideas for the future.  From a crude bird’s eye view it might be summarized as the story we continually tell ourselves about who we think we are.  Psychedelics in general, but particularly with psilocybin reduce activation of the Default Mode Network, and studies published in Nature earlier this year conclude an increase in emotion and brain plasticity.  To be sure, these topics are only crudely understood.  Hence the need for further study, and though the term here employed, the so called stickiness factor grossly simplifies much human experience contained in these topics it’s usefulness is in the potential to describe the utility of such compounds and topics that were previously considered dangerous.  These compounds, which have been used since before recorded history, alter the stickiness factor of a person’s mind, greatly during the time of use and with a subtle lasting effect that an individual can capitalize on in beneficial ways.  Again, this is a gross simplification of a topic that lacks specificity.

The trick we as a species doen’t seem to have figured out yet is how to have a conscious control over the concentration or diversification of our mind’s stickiness.  The process of siloing the power of the mind’s stickiness into perennial topics is, from a very real angle, a bit of an imprisonment.  We are left constantly yearning for a greater, deeper experience - the one that we seemed to be immersed in as children, but we fall for false advertisements of peak experiences that turn out to be counter-productive and lacking all fulfillment: the sugary ones in our diet and the vicarious ones on the screen.  The greater, deeper experience isn’t something that happens to us necessarily.  Probably the better way to capture this is to phrase the greater and deeper experience as simply a perspective we can arrive at, achieve and inhabit.  The treasure of childhood lost is a perspective that has been narrowed and boxed out by what we’ve repeatedly added to that perspective.  In a very real way, our sticky mind grows stuck to a certain idea of the world, shackled and then eventually oblivious to the potential experience and benefit of new perspective.  For the most part, the crucial ingredient of experience that most often gets boxed out with a mind growing stuck is a deep sense of the moment.  We live in our head, concentrating on ideas we have of the world, blinded from what is actually happening, and so the present has for many the dull veneer of something laboriously remembered the day after as opposed to the fresh vibrancy that is always available now.