A LUCILIUS PARABLE: SUGGESTION

December 13th, 2020

The inveterate little printer began it’s loud and unashamed process.  A few seconds of clanking buzz and jerky motors produced a small slip of paper.  Lucilius tore it from it’s thread of umbilical  left by the incomplete sever from the rest of the paper roll hidden within the guts of the obnoxious little machine.  He glanced at the order printed on the slip of paper and got to work.  As he was straining the last drops of mixed drink into chilled coupes his eyes caught familiar shape and movement at the door.  A regular had walked in, and by the quick look of it, the guy wasn’t in his usual jovial mood.

Lucilius glanced at the clock as his hands went about their automatic work of resetting his tools.  It was a little early.  Something must be up.

Without taking the break to go greet the friend, Lucilius instantly set about making a drink.  He used bourbon with an amaro he had imported in special.  He added just the smallest dash of some bitter branca and then set about the long twisted spoon spinning the liquids with two big blocks of ice.  He pulled a chilled glass from the freezer, set the strain to the beaker and then pulled a long silent string of stretched liquid as he poured the drink.  He shaved skin from an orange and then pinched the oils from it above the drink.

Taking up the glass with another filled with water he walked the length of the near empty afternoon bar and set it down before the regular.

“Godbless you my good man,” the regular said as he quickly lifted the drink and took a needed sip.

“In a bit early today,” Lucilius pointed out, testing for the day’s story.

“Ehh,” the man grunted.  “The Miss and I are having a bit of a tiff.”

“Dare I ask?”

“Same as always.  It’s pretty much the only thing we fight about.”  The man’s face curled between sadden hurt and mild disgust.  He dazed at a middle space of memory for a moment and Lucilius grew sensitive to whether the man needed an ear to listen or just time to think.

“Smoking,” the man said looking up at Lucilius, shaking his head.  “She smokes, and it drives me crazy.  It’s so bad for you, and we constantly go through this routine of gum and brushing teeth because I think it tastes disgusting.  And she even agrees that it would be better if she stopped!”  The man’s face was tense with raised eyebrows in disbelief at the irony he described.  “I tell her to stop, but it just makes things worse…”

Lucilius nodded.  “Ya know, I’d make a suggestion, but I’ve found that people don’t ever really take suggestions.”

“Isn’t that the truth!”

Lucilius smiled flatly.  “I dated a girl once who smoked.  It was nothing short of a miracle when she stopped.”

The man’s face brightened.  “What happened? How’d she quit?”

Lucilius shrugged.  “Well, I was very much in the same position you are, but I knew it was useless to simply tell her to stop - I mean that never works, ever.  And if anything it makes things worse just by making the situation more stressful, which is exactly when someone grabs for a pack.”

“So what did you do?”

Lucilius smiled.  “I spent a few months making her a beautiful cigarette case.”

“What?” The man snapped, affronted by the absurdity of the answer.

“It really was beautiful,” Lucilius said, reflecting on the memory. “I used walnut wood, and I routed 6 slots for cigarettes and a long one for an antique cigarette holder, and then another spot for an antique lighter that I got for her.  Even got her name engraved on it.”

The man’s interest intensified with his disbelief. “How did that solve the issue?”

“And then,” Lucilius said, getting excited now by the old intricacy of the idea, “I created this huge scavenger hunt across the city.  Like she had to dig up a lockbox on the beach and inside was a little music player with one song which lead her to the bar where we had a first date - you know, it was ‘our song’, and then something there lead her somewhere else, and eventually after working through all the clues, she found the gift behind some books on a shelf in the public library.”

Lucilius’ audience was now impressed as much as he was completely at a loss for how the story might end.  Lucilius let the premise linger as his smile curled more, looking for the next set of words.

“It had a card with it, and in it I wrote that there was just one rule regarding the gift.”

The man gestured frantically for Lucilius to continue.

“Only cigarettes she rolls herself, nothing store bought.”

“Huh,” the man said. “That worked?”

Lucilius gently shook his head.  “It’s really easy to smoke half a dozen cigarettes when they’re already rolled and just sitting there in the pack.  It’s a pain in the ass to roll them all individually.”

Lucilius paused for effect.  “Within three months she wasn’t smoking anymore and that beautiful walnut case finally began to do what it was made for.”

The man chuckled a bit.  “What’s that?”

Lucilius smiled.

“Collect dust.”

THE ART OF SUGGESTION

December 12th, 2020

The only suggestions worth describing are the suggestions that someone has asked for.  In other words: advice.  All other suggestions are a waste of breath - but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make suggestions - that is, literally build structures that create a particular suggestion.

This is the art of influence, or manipulation.  That last word might seem like a bit of a bad word, but realize how little difference exists between manipulation and influence?  They are rivalnyms, which is to say they have the same functional definition, but one is regarded as positive and desired and the other is negative and seen as harmful.

The word influence carries a bit more of a suggestive air and therefore leaves the agency squarely in the control of the person being ‘influenced’.  Manipulation, on the other hand evokes more a sense of control, as though it’s an attempt to explicitly control someone to a specific end with no choice on their part.  However, if the person has agreed ahead of time in order to achieve a certain end, is it still manipulation?

Take for instance the agreement a person has with a physical trainer.  Someone looking to get fit and healthy turns over all of the decision making to the physical trainer, and then the physical trainer decides how that person should physically and literally manipulate their body to achieve a particular result.  In such a situation, neither influence nor manipulation seem to fit right.  Influence is too wishy washy and manipulate too deceptive.  But functionally speaking they are appropriate.  The physical trainer makes “suggestions” about what to do with the expectation that such suggestions will be followed.  In such circumstance, however, there is a clear and obvious agreement regarding agency, action and decision making.  The nature of suggestion can straddle that uncomfortable divide that we sense with influence and manipulation, and this is easily elicited with language: we can hope to be a good influence by making a wise suggestion, but someone can also try to be manipulative by wearing suggestive clothing - but even that can go both ways…

Someone is fairly likely to wear suggestive clothing on a date they are looking forward to in order to suggest the potential incentive of pleasure and intimacy. This may not be conscious or designed, but it is a rather unwise ignorance of human nature to believe that it won’t function in this way.  As further example, wearing a hazmat suit to a date obviously suggests something quite different.  

Point is everything probably suggests something, but those suggestions that are linked up with a clear and present incentive are going to have the greater practical effect.  Notice how this applies to the suggestions we actually give others.  Is there ever much incentive baked into our use of language?  We might try to bargain, as with “make your bed and you can have some ice cream” but then again, the incentive is very clear and practically available in such bargaining.  

Giving someone the suggestion to develop a practice of meditation in order to begin the long-term process of developing emotional regulation in order to deal with issues of anxiety…. While an excellent idea in theory, is actually a very poor suggestion: the incentive is distant and completely impalpable.

This gives rise to an important and unfortunate aspect of incentive: short-term return is far more attractive than long term gain.  We have a great difficulty thinking long-term, especially if it’s coupled with a short-term version.  But the better results are almost always locked behind long term incentives.  That ice cream in exchange for making one’s bed is far less valuable than the exquisite good of being able to properly regulate one’s emotions.  But one is far closer, so close you can even taste it. 

But change the incentive to meditate, and things can change.  For example: I’ll give you a dollar everyday that you meditate.  Suddenly the incentive is closer, more palatable: but notice, the point of meditation is not money.  It’s simply another incentive that’s been arbitrarily linked up to it.  This is often the game we have to play.  In order to reach for long term incentives we need to invent additional short term incentives that have a suggestive effect and thereby keep the process rolling consistently.

The art of suggestion isn’t so much one of influence, manipulation, but one of structure and incentive.  Proper suggestion requires that those who receive the suggestion always feel a sense of agency, of control over their own destiny.  The best suggestions are never explicit, but ones that naturally arise in the other person’s mind as a result of incentive structures that have been created around that person.  This may sound manipulative - it is: but it can also be an effective way of being a good influence.

THE CHEMISTRY OF PERSPECTIVE

December 11th, 2020

The greatest barrier to understanding between people is buried within the chemistry of perspective.  Handing a 3 year old a weighty tome with fine print that describes the fragility and  varied hormetic responses capable by different structures of society and biology is.. pointless.  The perspective a 3 year old is of a composition that is totally unfit for dense reading replete with vocabulary and concepts that are worlds apart from the one being explored by a 3 year old mind.  We recognize this difference easily enough, even if we do it with an incorrect air of superiority regarding what someone is or isn’t ready for.

Something related is occurring when we give a mind-blowing book to a friend and their overall reaction is casual and fairly unimpressed.  In such circumstances chemistry forms a good analogy.  Some compounds, when mixed, will create a reaction.  Sometimes that reaction can be fairly spectacular, as when some Francium is dropped in water.  The reaction is a legitimate explosion.  Switch the Francium for oil, and there’s no reaction whatsoever.  In fact, the two have a kind of anti-reaction and refuse to even mix.

Some books, ideas, films, even people can feel as though they’re made of Francium when they are dropped into the pool of one’s mind.  Others are like oil.

But the crucial difference between the chemistry of perspective and actual chemistry, is that our mind changes over time.  What once inspired pure obstinance in our mind can one day be welcomed in.  Perspective is like a chemical that can change it’s own composition and by doing so create beneficial reactions with new things that once had no effect.

Often none of this nuance is on the table when people are trying to communicate with one another.  Most communication and attempts at persuasion resemble a crude, brutal and ultimately ineffective kind of palimpsest.  We try simply to overwrite someone else’s thoughts and opinion with our own by talking louder, by repeating ourselves.  Such misdirected attempts often just create frustration and anger.

One way to realize the utter futility of such attempts is to recognize that there’s no concrete body of text or belief that exists inside of someone somewhere where we might erase and rewrite.  A person’s beliefs, their words and their actions are an emergent property of a complex process of perspective as it functions through time.  This isn’t to say that perspective can’t be influenced, but only to point out that like chemistry, the agent of change requires a certain composition that will be in sync with the chemistry of that perspective.  

This is why it can be so powerful within the realm of persuasion to first ask questions: doing so can reveal the chemistry of another’s perspective and provide clues for what sort of message or information it will react best with.  Without knowing the details of another’s perspective, our message has little better chance than the deluded alchemists of old who thought they could figure out how to create gold by mixing together different chemicals and metals.

VOCATIONAL REFUGEE

December 10th, 2020

This episode is dedicated to the person behind the Twitter handle @nutzeeer

It seems likely that anyone who makes a living as a truck driver is going to wake up soon and find that the majority of their professional function has been outsourced to a robotic truck that doesn’t need to sleep, never looses focus, doesn’t need to eat, and requires no human.  This sort of thing was very rare in the past and with the induction of the industrial revolution a couple hundred years ago, this phenomenon is becoming more frequent.  With the accelerating evolution of technology in nearly every facet of life there is a real probability that this situation may become a kind of norm across the board.  The dominate perspective around this either lapses into full-fledged denial, rebutted by comments like “not in my lifetime!”  or it’s met with a sober fear.  But both may be over reactions.

As humans, we seem particularly talented at failing to realize how quickly things have changed and failing to see how quickly things might continue to change.  It was but a few short years ago no one had a cellphone, let alone a supercomputer which connects a person to a global web replete with knowledge, communication and other resources.  The new normal becomes business as usual exceptionally quick, and soon enough we are smirking with the thought of incompetence when the wifi craps out while sitting in a metal tube that is safely hurtling through the stratosphere at several hundred miles per hour.  It perhaps does well to remember that Wilbur Wright, one half of the brother team that first achieved flight, said that man would not fly for at least fifty years - and that he said this just two years before he and his brother figured it out.

In an age of accelerating technology, more and more people are going to be obligated with the humbling task of eating their own words after saying “Not in my life time!”

But returning to that truck driver, what is a person supposed to do?  When your main set of skills suddenly becomes irrelevant because there is a much cheaper non-human way to get the work done, the situation creates a kind of Vocational Refugee.  The year 2020 has given many a taste of this sort of situation by dint of governmental lockdowns.  Many people have suffered due to the financial dead end created by an inability to generate an income coupled with the sheer need to live.  Some governments had the resources and the organizational power to fill in this missing piece of the puzzle, effectively putting a kind of ‘pause’ on the lives of many workers.

How was the time for such people spent?  Did such people recognize the fragility of their profession and get busy carving out a new career in a more robust field that can stand the shock of something like a pandemic?  Certainly some did.  But most?  Very hard to say, but likely.. not.

One reason for this is the retirement paradox.  Many people, after retiring from a long career spanning many decades simply stop doing… anything.  Having been somewhat forced to do tasks under the guidance of a boss for so many years, it’s clear that something lively deep within the human spirit gets beaten down to the point where a retired person just doesn’t want to do anything they don’t want to do, and having been completely starved of the time required to discover what they might actually enjoy putting some effort into, there is only a void that is filled, most often with TV and food.  Mindless consumption becomes the Modus Operandi of the mind that has forgotten how to motivate itself.

To juxtapose, notice how very wealthy, older people who have created their own companies don’t really ever seem to retire.  Jeff Bezos could retire with enough money to float him for several hundred lifetimes of the most opulent expenditure.  And yet he keeps going to work.

Why?

The answer is painfully obvious, but not one that many people juxtapose with themselves in a tight enough way to really resonate.  He does it because he wants to.  So why don’t more retired people want to do things?  Particularly difficult things?  It goes back to that double-edged human talent of adjusting to a new normal: if you’ve spent years and decades following the dictates of others, your ability to generate dictates for yourself has likely lost it’s voice from disuse.  One of the principles of Tinkered Thinking applies here: 

Use it to boost it or lose it.

Things are either pushed forward to improve, or they degenerate on their own.  This applies to things as elemental as drive, creativity and personal fulfilment.

Using and boosting any of these characteristics requires time and energy, and for many working people all that time and energy is devoted to the fulfillment of a job as dictated by someone else, and so when a big fat chunk of time suddenly comes along, many people just don’t know what to do with it, and their natural energy suddenly has no direction.  More importantly such people have little ability to direct their own energy because that task has been handled by the routine of a job.   Aimless energy turns into an anxiety that is often quelled in a retired way: with mindless consumption.  

Directing one’s own energy is a skill that requires exercise like a muscle.  And without regular exercise, it’s nothing short of a painful shock to suddenly try and use it after long disuse - as with any muscle.

That pernicious human ability to quickly adjust turns out to be a virtue in this situation.  Soon enough the pain and shock subsides with continued exercise and with practice, it doesn’t become too difficult to direct one’s own energy and find a more fulfilling way of living.  But that’s easier written in a sentence than actually done - many people don’t achieve it, even when handed the opportunity.

One might imagine a sort of restart-center - a place or a program that would enable someone to subsist, that is the basic necessities are taken care of: food and shelter, and this persists for as long as it takes for someone to get back on their feet with a new purpose, mission and career.  It’s a nice thought, but such a thing probably doesn’t exist because there’s no clear nor guaranteed return on investment, and because it’s never been tried before.

There are, however, programs and economic structures emerging that tap into this idea.  An ISA is an Income Sharing Agreement, which means, instead of going into debt to pay for a program, a person will dedicate a percentage of their future income to the program that is enabling them with the skills to get that job in the first place.  The growing coding school called Lambda School functions with this sort of set up, and the results so far have been spectacular from the looks of it.  People who were formally making sandwiches or even homeless are now buying homes with the salaries they have earned after going through Lambda School.  Notice, how the incentives are aligned correctly in this situation.  Teachers are motivated to create very capable students because if they don’t, then the school doesn’t make any money.  

Notice how this sort of incentive structure has always been absent from something that might look like a ‘restart center’.  Are there any homeless shelters that have the agreement option that they will provide food and shelter in exchange for a percentage of income after a person has learned a new skill and gotten back on their feet?  If so, I’d love to know about such a homeless shelter.  

Frankly, before recent times, there wasn’t much incentive to experiment with such structures.  Most people stuck with a profession for decades on end.  Those who lost their jobs were just deemed unlucky, like the Ludites. But as this situation becomes more frequent and widespread - exacerbated particularly by the student loan crises, civilization will be pressed to explore new structures to enable its continuation.  

This is a key point.  Ask yourself: what’s the point of civilization?  There might be some future evolved answer, but for the most part, civilization is an experimental survival technique.  We found out we were far more capable as a larger group than as a smaller group or on our own.  If the structure of civilization suddenly betrays this core function -it doesn’t lead to the crumbling of society or the apocalypse as many think but to an evolution of civilization.

A total melt down is certainly possible.  It’s happened to many pockets of civilization throughout the millennia, but the root cause of our anxiety today may also function as a protective solution to the problem it seems to cause.  That being, technology.  We are more connected than ever before and on many metrics, society is improving rapidly, as hard as that might be to believe given the flashy and shocking bad news that spreads so quickly and easily on the news and within social media platforms.    One good example is how acutely aware we are of impending climate change problems.  Former incarnations of human civilization would have had no warning on such a topic.  Asteroid impacts are another - former civilizations would be caught totally off guard, but present civilization actively tracks the position and velocity of nearly every large object in the solar system.  Reflect for a moment on how utterly incredible that fact is.  We achieve this task to such a degree of resolution that we’re quite sure a rather large object is going to impact Earth in 48 years.  Is it something to worry about?  Only if you don’t know about it.  Which is a very inconvenient catch-22 of which we are on the right side of.  48 years is far more time than we need to figure out how to nudge that existential disaster off course.

Zooming out on the topic of civilization and zooming back in reveals one important trend: we are adaptive, and crucially, we are becoming more adaptive as times necessitate. 

Yes, adaptation is painful, but luckily, we are quite capable in this area.  For some, such adaptation might be a low probability outcome, especially if those muscles of adaptation and self-determination haven’t really been exercised for decades.  But low-likelihood is infinitely more likely than impossible.  If incentives and pressures are of proper structure and intensity, chances are just about everyone can change.

One final facet of this topic is absolutely fundamental: stress.  Losing a job with nothing new on offer is extremely stressful.  When necessities like food and shelter are under threat as a result, the human brain has a very high likelihood of entering a vicious downward spiral of chronic stress.  The most important fact about chronic stress is that brain function is severely impacted in the overwhelming majority of people.  Put simply: the poorer a person is, the less likely a person will get out of poverty because the stress of poverty makes it far more difficult to think properly and make good long term decisions.  This is a neurological fact: chronic stress makes you stupid.  Or rather, it makes MOST people stupider than they actually are.  This sly process is conveniently absent from discussion of poverty, debt (which is one of the largest causes of chronic stress), welfare programs and differentiations between classes of people.  No discussion of this topic is even remotely informed without a thorough understanding of the neuroendocrinology involved.  These neurological processes and effects were first and foremost laid bare in Dr. Robert Sapolsky’s book “Why Zebra’s Don’t Get Ulcers”. Which is essential reading on the topic.

The conclusion to be drawn from such research provides a deep logic for why new incentive structures like Income Sharing Agreements as offered by Lambda School are experiencing such incredible success.  Rumour has it that Lambda School has grand future ambitions to expand into many different fields of study and skill, effectively creating a kind of restart structure for those who find themselves to be vocational refugees.

RIVALNYM: HUMILITY

December 9th, 2020

If you are unfamiliar with the concept of a Rivalnym, it is something developed by Tinkered Thinking to address a certain class of words and concepts that fall in a strange place between Synonyms and Antonyms.  A rivalnym is a word, or rather, a pair of words that are somewhat synonymous in literal meaning, but opposite in terms of the emotional valence we ascribe to the thing being described.

A pair of words that makes a good example is Nervous and Excited

One is generally positive, that is, excited, and nervous is generally more negatively valence, and yet, what registers our excitement?  Our nerves.  And when we are nervous, is it not because our nerves are in an excited state?

So given this sly structure that seems to exist between antonyms and synonyms, how can this pair of words be understood:

Humility

&

Humiliating

The enormous similarity between these words simply can’t be ignored.  They both derive from the same root word:  Humility, humiliating and humble all come from the Late Latin humiliate from humilis, meaning “lowly,” literally “on the ground,” from humus meaning “earth,” which originates from a Proto-Indo European root also meaning “earth”.  

On is perhaps rightfully reminded of the image of a religious adherent on their knees, perhaps bowing low to the ground.  Such an act is literally humble because of an actual proximity to the earth.

So how is it that two words like humble and humiliating -while having sprung from the same mother origin- be so different in their meaning?  If both humility and humiliation result in some sort of lowly position, perhaps quite literally to the ground, or figuratively in terms of emotional experience, why is one generally regarded as positive and the other negative?  These two words fit the structure of Rivalnyms perfectly because of this subtle yet extreme difference.

The other verb in this family of earth-sprung words, humbling, helps parse the difference.  For example: is it humiliating to be humbled?  Hard to say.  Perhaps in some cases, but certainly not in all situations.  

What causes a person to reflect on an experience and say ‘That was humbling’, rather than ‘That was humiliating’ has to do with the interplay of perspective between the person who is the subject of the verb and exactly what is administering that verb.

For example, it can be quite humbling when a project that has taken a lot of work fails to achieve it’s planned end.  But what exactly is the cause of this failure?  Quite hard to say.  The best answer in many cases is simply that the nature of reality was the cause.  

The switch to humiliation really hinges on the perspective and involvement of others.  If someone is trying to humiliate someone else, then this intention goes a long way in terms of defining the situation.  But notice the difference between a bitter lover posting revealing photos of a painter in an attempt to humiliate versus a chess player who crushes their opponent without gloating nor indicating any kind of pleasure other than the opportunity to simply play a round of the game.  One situation is humiliating, while the other most likely evokes humility in the checkmated player.

One important relationship to highlight between these words is that it’s generally very difficult to humiliate someone who has a lot of humility.

Humility functions like a shield that has nothing to protect.  The attack often backfires, having nothing else to hit, making the attacker look like a misdirected fool.

Interpreting the situation with a literal definition of the words: it’s impossible to bring someone lower when they’re already on the ground.

Of course it’s possible to humiliate someone who is on the ground, but thinking this is an false mix of both literal and figurative.  The figurative equivalent would be that despite all efforts of humiliating someone who is on the ground, if that person has sufficient humility, then the attack has no effect on their state of mind and feeling.

As with most Rivalnyms, the divide and connection here has to do with perspective.  Just as we can anxiously or eagerly await a date who is on their way, we can interpret the events that come our way as humbling or humiliating.  In both circumstances the anxiety that tips our consciousness into the negative has to do with the perspective of others that we imagine.  

This is at the core of the ubiquitous advice to ‘not care what anyone else thinks’.  The reason is because if you care too much about the perspectives of others, then your interpretation of events is more likely to lapse into the negative, into an anxiousness and a sense of humiliation and particularly: embarrassment.  We might wonder if the word ‘embarrassment’ is part of a Rivalnym pair?  What’s the positive form of embarrassment?

Probably just an ability to laugh at yourself.

An examination of rivalnyms help illuminate some of the subtle structures that exist within language.  They represent principally unconscious choices in perspective, often grouped around a sense of pessimism or optimism. Our perspective on the world determines how we describe that world, but the opposite might hold true: if we change the way we describe the world, we might be able to shift our perspective of it.