Tinkered Thinking

Some Tinkered Thinking episodes aren’t all that great. This episode might be one of them. So it may be best just to skip it. And worse yet, it might be part of a string of mediocre, lukewarm episodes that work more as sleep aides as opposed to revving up the brain in the morning - which was the original hope for Tinkered Thinking: snackable, thought provoking episodes that can be consumed over a cup of morning coffee. (As an aside, there is at least one person who has admitted to consuming this content in just that sort of way, which means the whole platform is a total success and can now be retired with infinite satisfaction.)

Alas, the words keep rolling, regardless of how good or bad.

A string of off days, or bad writing happens. As with any skill or practice, we hit plateaus. It’s quite easy and natural to get stressed about such plateaus.

Have I lost my touch?

Am I no good anymore?

Will my spark return?

These all seem like legitimate questions, but frankly they’re just awful. Notice what they have in common: they all have some sort of personal pronoun. The focus is inward, and attention is splattered against the flimsy mask of identity. By asking such questions we get overly concerned with something that has very little if anything to do with our inspiration: who and what we think we are.

Let’s flip the whole issue inside out and make the same point from the other side of the fence: When you are in a flow state, when inspiration is firing on all cylinders, when time is flying by and you aren’t the least bit distracted but at the same time things feel a bit dreamy….. where is one’s sense of identity in that circumstance?

It’s of no concern. These flow states are often described as losing one’s self. Like watching a good movie, or spending time with someone who electrifies the moment, or reading an excellent book. We lose ourselves. So what exactly is the thing being lost during these moments?

The thing being lost is the very same thing referred to by those overly self-conscious questions: when we relinquish our attachment to identity, the door opens to inspiration.

That issue about identity and worrying about whether you’ve lost your touch is a bit like being obsessed with the chicken-and-egg question when really you should be making an omelette.

When inspiration ‘strikes’ we don’t suffer the loss of our identity,

So that being the case:

are you willing to sacrifice your identity in order to welcome inspiration?

WHY THINK ABOUT WHY?

August 11th, 2020

Questions take a few basic forms. These forms are the journalists’ mantra: the who, what, when, where, why and how?

Each word heralds a different cognitive realm regarding how we make sense of the world. The form of each family of questions are vastly different. For example the question that begins with the word “who” is really a subdomain of the form of “what”. To demonstrate we can ask: What caused the accident? The answer can be, that guy over there, which also answers the who. But this can’t work in reverse. If you ask What caused the accident? And the answer we get is, the foundation gave out, well then this answers the what, but we’re still left in the dark regarding who might be involved or at fault. This is because who refers only to people, whereas the word what can refer to everything and anything, including people. Obviously.

Evidently, the word what automatically refers to a larger pool of answers than who, and this is by default. Regardless, both questions seek to pin down nouns for the most part. They refer to actual things.

The question about when does mush the same thing. We define time fairly rigidly and with great precision, and we synchronize this precision across the globe. The possible answer for when something occurs is inherently narrow. Whatever it is, it can either be pinpointed to an exact moment, or the beginning and the end can be, thereby defining in time quite narrowly when something happened.

How something happens begins to broach a much larger range of territory. Suddenly we are launched into the realm of constructing a mechanical narrative. The task is one that casts us in the position of a Sherlock Holmes. Suddenly we are gathering all the pieces that we can ascertain by asking what happened, and reanimate these pieces in reverse, and engineer the history from a backwards perspective. I hold the last domino, now which of these other dominos was the one that hit it? And so forth and so on we track a string of interlocking events and pieces until we arrive at the start just before everything happened. With the introduction of how we have moved far from present reality which neatly contained the what and the where, and the who. With the introduction of when, we are flung into an imaginary territory to track exactly how things happened.

But after the entire cognitive exercise of assembling the moving puzzle through time is finished, we are left with a final imaginative trial: why?

Why is simultaneously the most useful and most difficult question to answer. It’s no wonder that children zero-in on the utility of why so quickly. If an adult can actually answer their question about why, then their curiosity gets the most bang for its buck. If we get a solid answer to the question of why then it leapfrogs the need to sift through the who, what, where, when, how. The answer to why inherently involves and subsumes all of these. No correct answer to why is going to leave out the important aspects that one needs to discover slowly by asking who, what, where, when, how. At the same time, the answer to why may dispense with needless details contained in the answers to those questions.

The problem with why however, is that it can be difficult to know where and when to stop when you’re digging for the answer. The question of why someone did something can quickly branch into details of genetics and environment, which ultimately requires examining parental genetics and the legacy of environment through time. By asking why over and over, the bounds of when are breached and the reasons for anything occurring at all begin to ramify backward into the past until we start skimming along the domino of reasons citing, because this person’s grandparents originally met in this town, which was settled ten years prior, because these people moved into this part of the continent, because of European exploration, because of civilizational density, because of agriculture because of evolution of man, because of the evolution of mammals, because of the evolution of eukaryote cell, because the formation of the earth, because of a yellow dwarf we call the sun because of coalescing gasses and galactic formation… all the way back until we can say: why did it happen? Well because there was a big bang, apparently.

When a child asks over and over why something happened, each response an attempt to get at a deeper reason, the final reason at the bottom of this recursive hole really is something like: the big bang. But then the proper answer to any question about why something happened is a careful and ridiculously complicated narrative that starts with the big bang and ends with the results in real time that are being questioned. And even then, if a parent or a teacher attempts the tour-de-force task of threading that string of narrative, a child, or anyone can turn around again and ask: why did the big bang happen? At which point everyone should be forgiven for throwing up their hands and saying, I don’t know.

The whole point of wandering around in the ramifications of the question why is to highlight the enormous difference in the size of answers that different questions hint at. Questions like what, and when are quite easy, and they are easy because they are specific. We are tasked less because the steps required to get to the answer are few. We can unknowingly wade into mental quicksand if we ask why something happened in a way that isn’t tightly bound.

An example is: why are things so unfair?

This is simply an impossible question to answer effectively. Any answer we do come up with also isn’t going to be all that helpful. But compare that use of the word why to this one:

Why wasn’t I able to hit my usual amount of reps during that exercise at the gym this morning?

This use of the word why is far more bounded. We can track back pretty quickly, analyzing how we can end up with low energy, examining the previous 24 hours and then identifying a really bad night of sleep as the cause, which perhaps was in turn caused by a huge meal and perhaps a few too many drinks.

While Why has the potential for having the largest, most complex and most difficult answer to pin down, the scope and complexity of this answer can be hugely narrowed by the way we cage and frame the question that uses the word why.

Interestingly, why can also self-destruct in a very helpful way.

For example, when you realize that you’ve been stuck trying to answer a bad question, you might wonder:

Why aren’t I asking myself a better question?

The answer to this question ceases to matter the moment the question is asked -it self destructs- because by that point, you’re already fishing around for a better question, one that doesn’t keep your head in the past, but one that might actually help you move forward.

A NOTE ON AUDIENCE

August 10th, 2020

Whether you are starting a business and looking for customers or if you simply want people to read your writing, or laugh at your jokes, or if you’ve spiralled into the morass of being an influencer, each one of these situations seeks an audience. An audience of any legitimate size becomes one that is larger than the person on stage or behind the keyboard can get to know. This heavily skewed ratio may in fact be the definition of audience: a bunch of people paying attention to one, or a few.

So how does that one in the spotlight, or those few with the audience filter their audience?

It’s much like anything else: you get what you ask for. Garbage in? Garbage out.

Or in this case, if you put out garbage, it’s probably going to attract a garbage audience. If your comedy is rooted in the expense of a scapegoat, then should you be surprised if the audience you attract makes a scapegoat of you?

If an individual’s platform is rooted in strong statements and attacking opposing views tooth and nail, is the audience for such content going to be open and curious? Skeptical and inviting of new ideas?

…probably not.

Of course this applies aptly to Tinkered Thinking, and the audience that has formed around this content wasn’t planned at all, but given rise to these thoughts. The people who engage with Tinkered Thinking are a constant reflection of this content. They ask questions, they wonder, the pause before deciding.

Clearly biased opinion here, but, they are simply excellent.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: QUESTION IN CRISIS

August 9th, 2020

This parable is dedicated to Bruno who reached out on Twitter. You can connect with Bruno on Twitter with the handle @olivedrivin

Lucilius was paralyzed. His body was technically fine, he’d sustained no injury, no crippling virus nor bacteria had wiggled its way into his blood. No, this was a disease of a far deeper kind that imprisoned Lucilius. He now spent his days wrapped in terror, purely unable to wrench himself from the infinite swirl within which he was bound. His mind coursed through the same flow of thought, each time leading to nowhere new, but back to the beginning of the confusion that only perpetuated itself, over and over. He’d distanced himself from friends and had begun to recede from the whole world, now unable - totally at a loss for how he was supposed to interact with people and their huge noisy apparatus of life. No matter what he tried, no matter what angle of the issue he took, he couldn't find the bug that had wheedled its way into the waves of his mind.

The alarm sounded, and momentarily he was pulled from his dark reverie. He’d forgotten his appointment, and now knowing he had to get up and get going and go out into that obnoxious clanking world, he cursed his luck. But he’d already rescheduled several times. He pulled back the covers, and it was another 10 minutes before he was able to swing his legs down and sit on the edge of the bed.

Several slow hours later, he sat in the waiting room, his face shielded from that awful gaze of others with wide sunglasses. It was just his luck that he’d forgotten his headphones and couldn’t make for himself that artificial cocoon that claps off all the rest of the world: their jabber, their pestering sounds, the construction, the vacuums and weed-whackers. How was it that he could belong to this ridiculous species that had no respect for the domain of sound? Couldn’t we all just be quiet for one minute?

Of course not, he thought. There was no way to get along, not like this, not when such sadness can be invisible in front of everyone, no matter how flagrant, how genuine, no matter how loud these unending thoughts screamed into the echoing walls of his skull.

A finely dressed, clean cut man sitting next to Lucilius noticed the tear run itself out, streaking Lucilius’ face just a short distance below his sunglasses. The man notice Lucilius did not wipe it away, and surmised correctly that the young boy was worried that the movement of his hand to his face in such a way would draw more attention than the actual tear had. Few, if any had noticed that diamond turn on his face, and chances were, Lucilius figured in the choking smoke of his mind that no one had.

The man sitting next to Lucilius looked around at everyone else in the waiting room and realized that everyone had headphones on. He and this boy next to him might as well be alone, he figured. The workers at the desks they waited for were far enough off to be out of earshot. The man decided, what the hell..

Keeping his eyes to the perusal of his newspaper, the man said “I also shed a tear when I can’t stand how beautiful the moment is.”

Lucilius nearly choked on the single disgusted sneer that masqueraded angrily as the false start of a laugh.

The man smiled widely. “So interesting how anything can be funny with the right perspective. Even the suffering of others can be funny if you’ve grown bitter enough.”

The expression on Lucilius’ face grew quiet, suddenly aware and nervous of a proximity he hadn’t really considered.

“I remember once,” the man said, “I was stuck. Just stuck in life. Couldn’t figure out how to get out of some sort of mental morass that I seemed to be stuck in.”

The man let his words linger a few moments in the air, hoping to draw in the interest of this troubled young man next to him.

“Couldn’t remember really how I got there either. It was strange. I could remember being happy, but it was as though that were all in the past, and happiness had become a memory that can’t be visited, like someone whose died, who you can’t see or talk to anymore. There was something sick about the situation, as though happiness were haunting me.”

In his periphery, by the sliver afforded behind his own sunglasses, the man could see Lucilius’ head unconsciously turned a little, certain tensions now present in his posture. The man knew he had Lucilius’ attention. But he remained quiet a few moments, turning the page of his newspaper, scanning the head lines, picking out a line here and there, sampling the articles with a rapid set of hops, testing for tone and rhythm, quickly gathering whether they warranted a full read.

“What’d you do?” Lucilius asked.

“Oh,” said the man, “didn’t realize you were listening. Sometimes I just sort of talk to myself, or kind of imagine conversations with people. Sometimes those wires get crossed, and I just start talking to people. Always figured keeping company is like painting a portrait: the cheapest model is always yourself. Maybe that sounds a bit kooky.” The man smiled, purposely forgetting the question Lucilius had asked, wanting to test this boy’s attention and interest. The short silence stretched out fast, and with it, spinning attention to a point until the machinery of the moment clicked into place.

“So?” Lucilius asked again.

“Oh.” The man smiled and chuckled. “Sorry, I go off on tangents. What were we talking about?”

“You said you were haunted by happiness.” Lucilius looked at the man fully, his clean cut appearance, the health and vibrancy that seemed to radiate from him. “certainly.. seems like maybe things are different now.”

The man lowered the newspaper into a folded heap. “Yea, they are.”

“So what happened?”

“Well,” the man said. “I realized I was trying to answer a bad question.”

“What do you mean?”

“See, now that right there is a good question. Do you know why?”

Lucilius shook his head.

“Because it has an answer, a definitive one that can be figured out. By asking it, you prompt me to explain what I mean, and regardless of how good the answer is, whether you like it or not, whether it’s convincing or not, it’s still a definitive answer. And from there we can move on to another question. But a bad question doesn’t lend itself to that sort of answer, and that’s why you can get stuck. When you try to answer a bad question, there’s nothing to really grab on to, there’s nothing to really tell you if you’re on the right track, if your answer is helpful or productive. The question doesn’t resolve, it just quietly remains, like that cruel memory of happiness, it offers you no help nor response. And most importantly, a bad question prevents you from moving on to a better question.”

The man feigned a need to take out a notebook and reference something, as though a pressing thought had just jumped to mind. He fished a pen from his pocket, unscrewed the cap and jotted something down in the notebook. But it was all an act to give this young man next to him a moment of time, to take in what he’d said, to give his perspective a moment to breathe, to digest.

“What was the question you were struck on?” Lucilius asked.

The man looked up, squinting. “Oh, I don’t remember anymore. It was one of these awfully dumb questions that people get hung up on: what’s the meaning of life? or… Who am I? Something like that. They’re all the same, they’re just quagmires for your mind.”

“How do you get out of that question?”

“Oh simple, you leave it to itself and get busy answering a better question.”

“Like what?” Lucilius asked.

The buzzer in the waiting room rang and the man looked at his ticket number. It matched the one flashing on the buzzer screen. He had to go.

“Like, what can I do with the rest of today that might set up tomorrow to be better?”

Lucilius contemplated it. “I need to remember that one,” he muttered.

The man ripped out a page from his notebook and handed the sheet to Lucilius along with his pen.

“Here, write it down, look at it in the mornings and see what happens.”

The man paused, watching Lucilius write the question, then he got up to go to his appointment.

“You pen!” Lucilius called as the man walked away. He turned.

“Keep it. Writing is another good way to fumigate thoughts when the mind gets a bit too stagnant,” he said, smiling as he tapped his head. “Plus, he said, it’s always good to carry a pen, you never know who you’ll come across that might need it more than you.”

The man turned and left Lucilius on his own, wondering how many times that pen had moved between his own hands.

ATTENTIONAL CURATION

August 8th, 2020

It’s one skill to curate your own attention when left to your own devices. It’s a subskill to analyze how other things curate your attention for you, and we already do it to a large degree, but placing it in strictly attentional language can yield a helpful nuance for moving forward.

How is that we already analyze how other things curate our attention?

How was the movie?

How good was the book?

Should I get into that show?

How’d the date go?

When you have an amazing conversation with someone, what exactly is happening in terms of the flow and shape of our attention. Does our attention wander during a great conversation, or does it feel naturally bound up in the moment? And while bound up in the moment, what is happening to that attention? How might we describe the changing shape of our attention as it’s influenced by each nuance of what’s going on? The words and concepts flying back and forth? The tone, rhythm and cadence of voice, the setting, and even the time in relation to all other recent things that have been happening.

Obviously we can say that something very good and worthwhile is happening with our attention during such a fruitful and juicy conversation.

Now reflect on the same sorts of questions during some kind of awkward encounter. In such a circumstance attention seems unable to wander off into better territory. We’re somehow masochistically bound to endure whatever misalignment is clearly present in the situation. And when we finally emerge, released from the tendrils of situation we shiver and try to shake the memory from our current attention.

Highlighting these sorts of situations in terms of attention is simply to give context to a new sort of question that can be used to filter our interaction with different parts of the world:

How did that curate my attention?

For example, we can apply this question to a social media platform like, say, Instagram. Many will be acquainted with the undeniable power that Instagram has to hold your attention. So when we ask: What sort of job did Instagram do to curate my attention?

In some sense it did an amazing job. It held your attention as though that attention were locked within an invisible vault. At the same time, the question opens up the situation up to a more nuanced answer. My attention was held, but were good things happening to my attention while it was so tightly bound up?

This subquestion gets at the real value of examining different things in terms of our curated attention. Many, would have some negative answers to this subquestion. And so the original question How did this curate my attention? Allows us to separate out important distinctions in our experience. It becomes much easier and quicker to identify things that are wastes of time. But beyond this, we start to develop the ability to peek inside the ‘why’ of such experiences.

Why did this grab my attention so well even though I didn’t really enjoy or value any of it?

This becomes a portal of introspection, and it can quickly branch off into a productive exercise that helps a person identify all sorts of inequities in their daily life. Beyond this, it also enables a person to start thinking and developing a mental alarm system for avoiding harmful things that can function like traps for our attention.

From a higher level, it shows just how powerful the concept of a question is when it comes to the direction and curation of our attention. Be sure, questions are not immune to becoming harmful traps for our attention. Any existential crisis is most likely borne of being unable to answer a bad question when it’s accompanied with an inability to move on to a better question.

(As a side note, Episode 843 entitled “The First MetaQuestion” explores this sort of issue involving bad questions more fully)

It’s only natural that this episode now commit to it’s own message and ask you:

How well did this episode of Tinkered Thinking curate your attention?

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PLATEAU

August 12th, 2020