LastThursday

I was thinking about the question asked here by @soos_mite_ah My answer was basically to go actualise yourself. Whilst out on my daily walk, it occurred to me that this was not a particularly obvious answer. One thing that's not obvious is why self-actualisation is needed at all in the first place and why it would give you a fulfilling life. The second thing that struck me was that it's really not at all obvious how to even start the process. So I thought why isn't there some sort of school for self-actualising? My idea is that it would teach you the basics, enough to get the ball rolling. It would be say a residential eight week set of courses. That amount of time seems long enough to get some grounding but not so long that's it's not feasible. The residential aspect would allow you to be fully immersed and focussed on learning. It seems to me that some people find it very difficult (me included) to be self-driven and need a different way to do it. I think the set of courses should interlock with each other and be taught maybe in rotation, rather than exclusively in week chunks say. Since it's only eight weeks and supposed to be basic, then the number of subjects covered should be minimal but provide high long term value. I don't have a real feel for what subjects would be covered, but some that come to mind are: Interpersonal relationships, sexual relationships, self-confidence Meditation and introspection, journaling techniques, listening skills, conversational skills Outdoor activities, walking in and appreciating nature, survival techniques, cooking and nutrition Some form of physical sport/group game playing Dance, light martial arts, making music, singing, making art, story telling Techniques for emotional mastery Techniques for mastery in general, with perhaps some area to start hands-on mastery in the eight weeks Techniques for running your mind Some basic finance, planning and life strategy. Life purpose techniques. Open and/or closed therapy sessions, where problems can be aired and worked through I'm sure there is a much better set of subjects that would mesh well together though. I would feel inclined to try and keep the male and female ratio 50/50 and to encourage all age ranges, but it could be impractical to enforce that. Some inspirational guest speakers peppered in would also be a great boost. What I see with a lot of courses is that they're too short, too narrow in focus, and are easily forgotten after the fact. There needs to be enough synergy that the learning sticks permanently, and allows you to start the self-actualisation process in earnest. Honestly, a school like this I think would be devoured by most of the people on the forums here. I certainly would go for it. So if I were to set something like this up, there would be a long hard slog. Some immediate cons I can think of: Cost, I can't imagine this would cost any less than about $8000 (£6000). This is difficult, because the people that need actualisation most are exactly the people with little money. Location, initially there can only be one location for residence, so it would need to be somewhere most folks can get to. For me personally, setting something like this up would be terrifying, but boy it would certainly give me a purpose in life.

One thing that my recurring quest to give up smoking taught me was that it was possible to do. The other thing is, is that I never really gave up. I was thinking really about shadow work here. One particular shadow I had was smoking. For a long while I was addicted, and for long periods I simply gave into it and gave up worrying about the consequences. Morbidly, when I got depressed, I actually wanted the smoking to kill me and I wilfully smoked as much as I could. I originally took up smoking because I thought it had some coolness factor and to fit in with my peers. Smoking is interesting to me. My Mum smoked probably once a day for many years when I was young, my Dad never did. Whilst I never tried it in my teenaged years full well knowing it was bad for me, I let loose at universtity. I think my Mum smoking kind of normalised it for me, and so when I took up smoking it wasn't really such a big deal. The interesting aspect to it, was that I felt I needed to do it to impress others; and therein lies my shadow. As time went on, smoking became associated with that period of my life and all the good times I'd had - eventually it became a sort of nostalgia or remnant of the life I'd lead. What made it difficult to even contemplate stopping was my long time girlfriend also smoked, but I always smoked more than her. Later I became more and more aware what an expensive and useless activity smoking was, and I became determined to quit. Absurdly, I would stop for very long periods, say six months or a year and then start up again. Cravings are interesting to observe. Like any other type of shadow the impulsion or appearance of a thought or emotion comes out of the blue. Many things to do with the body are this way, there's a staccato quality to these things. When trying to give up, cravings would suddenly come on and crescendo, and then slowly taper off. But actually really thinking about it, there was nothing smooth about the craving "curve", it was more like the craving was made up of repeatedly hitting me in ever increasing frequency and intensity until it decreased again. I think this stacatto thing applies to other types of shadow or trauma. The memory of past abuse suddenly hits us from nowhere, and it keeps hitting us in waves until it decides to go away again. Then there is a period of quiet normality. That period in between bouts or cravings, is as if the trauma or shadow doesn't exist at all. That's a key thing to take in. What happened when giving up smoking, was that the cravings became more and more spread out, until they eventually never came back. And so it is with shadow work, any work you do aims to reduce the frequency of these "shadow attacks". The take away is that the shadow is never cast constantly. If you are depressed you are not constantly depressed. If you are traumatised you are not constantly traumatised. If you are a smoker, you are not constantly craving. No. A better model would be to say that you are a smoker only when you have cravings, you are depressed only when you have a bout of depression, you are traumatised only when the trauma periodically reasserts itself. How else is it that one can have "good days" and "bad days"? This gives hope that we can leave trauma and depression and smoking behind: mostly because we are already doing this. All that really happens is that the frequency reduces with successul shadow work. So I never really gave up smoking, I just haven't smoked in five years. I never really gave up being depressed, I just haven't been depressed in over ten years. And so it goes. Don't get me wrong here, I'm not advocating that it is simple to give up on things that torment us, it really isn't. So I'm not saying just reframing or recontextualising your smoking habit is actually going to work - most probably it's not. You actually have to do work, you have to learn to control your impulses to smoke, you have to learn not to engage too strongly with the emotions of trauma. This learning is really really hard and slippery to master. That is the nature of shadow work.

I'd say recognising our immense potential and then using that potential. Most of us are like Ferraris being used to just go to the grocery store, and then being parked back in the garage for another week. Put a different way living a full life is self-actualisation. How do you know that we're living a full life? It's incremental. As we actualise more and more we lead fuller lives. Living a full life is about everything: good relationships, material wealth, experiences, spirituality, nature, life purpose, direction, joy, fun, work, everything. It's the entire human condition. In terms of milestones we could do worse than follow the Stages of Ego Development model by Cook-Greuter and pin ourselves against that as we progress. But I'd say the very basics of actualisation should be learning: Good impulse control Good decision making Mood control The ability to introspect and step outside ourselves

Good post @aurum. It seems that in relationships it's not so much the level of needs that need to be met on either side, but if each partner is able or willing to service (for want of a better word) their loved one's needs. There's kind of a three-way neediness going on. There are your own needs and whether they're serviced by your partner, there is your partner's needs and if you are able to service them, and then there is underlying (perhaps social) expectation that your partner service certain needs that you could well meet yourself. So there are needs you can't meet by yourself, and needs you can but don't. As another layer there are other needs coming out of expectation, which are at a higher level: for example the need for a partner to be a high flyer or socially capable or have X quality. Most of my relationships I would say have failed because the neediness of expectations haven't been met in the long run (from both sides). I'm not sure if commitment is neediness, although it can come out of neediness, because you may have needs that can't be met without being committed to someone. I think most needs are recurring and so being committed helps with that. It's a reassurance that my needs will continue to be satisfied and that you just won't run off whenever you feel unwilling to meet my needs for whatever reason. Whether a relationship is fundamentally coming out of neediness, that seems a bit more fuzzy. I think at a higher level people are drawn towards unity and completion, so there's a spiritual aspect to being in a relationship - although that way of thinking about a relationship could be too difficult to align with for most - there's a sense that two people become one entity or system, with it's own emergent needs.

I'm going back to the question of what to do with my life. These are the emotions/questions I have right now with regards to this: People are not attracted to drifters and dreamers, people are attracted to go getters. I think I'm really talking sexual relationships here. Most of the women I find attractive have exactly the qualities I want to have in myself. But that puts me in a bind, as I myself don't have those qualities. Put it this way, if you had a choice of a man that was sure what he wanted and how he wanted it, compared to a bloke that was unsure and really didn't seem to care either way, which would you go for? I mean some women would find the latter attractive, but they'd be in a minority. Appearing unsure, breeds insecurity, which is unattractive. There is a sense in which there are only two paths to be taken. Either you take the path of purpose and constantly move towards something, or you take the path of acceptance and just be in the moment. It feels to me as though both paths are equally valid, but it is made out (by society) that unless you're constantly heading somewhere you are not worth or valued as much. Whereas the point above is more geared to reproduction and biology (a go-getting man is more valuable for raising healthy kids), this second point is more about the way society is structured in the West. The setup appears to be that we're in constant competition with each other, and that is what gives dynamism to society: and if you opt out of that you're shunned, or thought of as weird at least; you are less valuable. But I do lead my life very much in the moment, and accept the good and the bad. I should leave something for posterity. So when the day comes for me to die, then I have a legacy that I'm proud of; I can point to something and tell everyone who wants to listen, "I did that, I changed the world for the better". I feel very ambivalent about that. I have a certain pride in myself and my achievements that I'd like to boast about to others - although I'm happy with the lesser pride of not boasting. Given where I came from and my family circumstances, I have achieved greatness already, despite absolutely nobody (I care about) openly acknowledging that. So if I'm on my deathbed and boasting about my legacy, will anyone actually say the words "you did good" and mean it? I mean why bother trying to have a legacy? The more "pragmatic" or even "mean spirited" part of my just doesn't give a fuck: I die, end of, what's this legacy nonsense? It's possible that I'm actually just kidding myself, and I'm very much an "external" person. What I mean by this is that all my motivation comes from other people. It's like the introvert saying I'm party animal, when everyone else clearly sees through the delusion. The delusion in my case is that I can be self-driven. I suffered greatly when I drifted away from my core group of friends - albeit the drift was in a sense natural, they changed, I changed. But being more isolated has been a double-edged sword. I have grown immensely in terms of my self-development from it, but on the flip-side it has done nothing for my sense of worth, optimism and motivation. The issue is is that I identify so strongly with being self-sufficient and self-driven, that openly and consistently admitting (to myself) that I need other people to thrive feels wrong. But hey, I'm doing it here, now. Planning. Like it or not stuff needs planning, I mean big stuff. I may not care about a legacy, but I need to care about survival. When I'm actually an old geezer and I need to stop working (dear God can I stop working tomorrow please?), how will I take care of myself? The older I get the more into sharp relief this problem becomes. I don't believe my pension as it is will support me very well in old age. Nobody is going to take care of me, I just don't have that sort of family. I don't have my own family, no spouse or kids to lean on. To a degree I think that there is some selfishness in parents, were there's an unspoken expectation that their children will be their saviour when it's needed. I have saved my parents many many times. Largely, I have shied away from having kids purely to not expose them to my selfishness, why should I have children just so that I can lean on them when times get tough? It's unlikely that I'm going to get some sort of windfall. My father has a property that will be split three ways that I will inherit - that's it. That share would probably keep me going for about four years perhaps without working. Family. It's not rocket science, there are pregnant women everywhere I look, everyone's at it. Why should I be so special as to not have a family? I seem to salve myself with the thought that I just haven't been lucky yet. But if I examine myself frankly, I don't see much excitement in it. It's twenty years of slog and grind and an endless money pit. If I have a long term partner the likelihood is high that we'll have kids. I badly want the company and intimacy of having a girlfriend, and I know that it would be better overall for my mental health and wellbeing, it's just a normal human need. But people are fucking complicated, and I just don't want complication at the moment. Damn it, I need a simple girlfriend with simple needs, with a bit of a spark for life. It's just a shame that I'm so fucking complicated. Anyway, back to family. I do feel an underlying need to have a family, and just be "normal" and fit in with everyone else. I do feel acutely that I'm wasting my talents and abilities. More than any of the above this is what is driving me insane at the moment. It's like I simply want to shake my world upside down and go do and be someone completely different. Unfortunately, either through choice or luck, I'm typecast as the current version of me. It's like I'm stuck in a spider's web of geography, friends, family, work, age, social norms. More prudently I'm stuck in a spider's web of my own thoughts and insecurities and ignorance. For example I'm insanely good at programming computers, so I'm typecast as a programmer, that's where the money to live comes from. Yet, I feel as though after nearly forty years of doing it, I've exhausted it. I just want to stop thinking that way. What other talents do I have? I'm musical, and if I were to plough time into it, I could be a very good pianist. Is that the sort of life I want, is it acceptable for a man my age to start a career in this now? I'm very good at maths, I have the sort of logical mind to be a very good mathematician. But, how many well off mathematician friends do you have? I have a very strong physics and engineering background. But more than anything nowadays, I find myself being interested in people. I feel this strong compulsion to understand people, connect with people and have a group to belong to. It's partially why I'm writing here. I feel as though I have a pretty good understanding of what makes people tick - to that end I could do coaching or perhaps even be a therapist. Maybe that will fulfill me more going forward? But more than anything I have a deep need for expressing myself in whatever ways present themselves, and I find the arts very attractive - I wouldn't be a Picasso or Tolstoy or Beethoven, but I could make a good go of it. I do see the balance shifting in myself to a more people and arts centric way of doing things - more right brained. If so, how do I even tackle the transition, when will the threshold be reached were I just say "goodbye programming, hello self-expression"? How the hell will I live that way? That is all.

The thing is you can't have your cake and eat it. What is a billion years? It's something in the past and therefore in our imaginations. The past leaves clues and scraps of information about itself in the present, and we conjure up the rest of the story. For example we see the Colosseum in Rome and read about it in Latin and we imagine gladiators and make films about it.

It's true!! Ok, not strictly. The past is not what you think, it exists but it is completly concertinaed into the now (there's no time), only our imaginations reinflate it.

Sponsorship deals skew truth in science educational YouTube videos:

From the worst of times springs hope. The winter was one of despair and darkness, and incredulity. It was my belief then that age should have bestowed wisdom upon me, but no, I was still in an age of foolishness. And yet now it seems the best of times and a season of light has shone from within; as I have moved from a city of devilry to one of saintliness. A tale indeed if I were to tell it.

What is going on???

How mind bogglingly complex existence is, it's so absurd it makes me laugh sometimes. The other is people, I'm in constant awe and amazement at what people are capable of creating and the sheer diversity of mastery; and how "ordinary" people are constantly doing extraordinary things without giving it a second thought.

One more for luck

Quirky but I like it

Yes yes yes! From a purely practical point of view learning to play an instrument engages all the major senses. You need vision to read music, hearing to hear the music - obviously - and touch to coordinate the hands or breathing. If you play with other people then it's also a social activity. So it can sharpen up your senses with practice. Never mind brain training apps, all you need is to learn an instrument. My own theory is that because the language areas of the brain are very closely linked to the motor areas (hand movement), playing an instrument can also improve your speaking ability, because there's crossover. But also the listening skills needed to play music transfer over to talking and conversational skills too. From a more aesthetic point of view, just learning to playing music you love, is very rewarding. That is the main reason I would have for learning an instrument. But some people like to entertain other people, so that could be a good motivation too. Find a piece of music that excites you and learn it on your keyboard, that should be enough to get you hooked. Not everyone is musical though, I would say if you don't have that much enthusiasm for practice then give up on it and do something else instead.

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More navel gazing. I started to look at Leo's motivational speech video. The irony being that I haven't been motivated to watch it all. When I looked at the title for the video, I thought to myself "this isn't for me", I just don't need a talking head telling me stuff I already know but in a serious tone. But I started to watch nevertheless. That sensation I had beforehand was correct, I continued to have it whilst watching it and had to endure the dissonance of enjoying being tortured by the truth of it. In the end I gave up early on the video. I don't need a motivational speech. But I do need to solve the problem of motivation. It's a deep deep problem for me. It's a problem because I know at my core that I'm not being true to my ......... , I don't have a word for it. Ok let's try. I'm not being true to my abilities, intelligence, self-expression, showing love, showing empathy, being successful materially, being successful in relationships, feeling joy, and all round having a beautiful life. All that presupposes that I'm entitled to those things, but if I'm not then what am I doing here? It is torturing me; causing me suffering. I'm good at rationalisation and analysis, but I find it impossible to unpick why I lack motivation, it has nothing to do with logic. My intuition tells me that it's partly learned behaviour, but also partly response from trauma, and also partly lack of suitable role models or basic learning early on, but also temperament from genetics. The biggest thing that ground on me from the video, is that I don't need to be scolded into action. That's a good bit of learning. I need to stop poking myself about my lack of motivation, because it's actually counterproductive. Instead, I need to understand and be extremely honest about what does motivate and excite me. I literally need to sit down and work it all out, and build a coherent vision. If I don't do that, I will piss my life away and continue torturing myself. When I hear about other people wanting to do things, like go travel, or quit their mind numbing job, or get out of their abusive relationship, or write a book or anything, I feel like grabbing hold of them and saying "stop thinking about it and just fucking go do it now not tomorrow". I see so much potential in other people, and they're not using it to have a great life for themselves. But in reality I'm just shouting at myself. However, I don't actually know what to do. I have absolutely no idea which way to go. I just know that continuing to drift is not for me, I've had enough of it; it feels like I've held my breath underwater for too long and I'm gasping for air. --- Part deux I think I'm feeling off today because I have a sore throat coming on (for the first time in years). It's miserably grey and wet outside, and it's cold. I could switch on the heating, but working and living at home means that I would have the heating on 15 hours a day which is silly expensive - I have better things to spend my money on - a cup of tea and a fleece is cheaper. What I need to do is go outside and get some vague form of daylight and body movement and that'll improve things. Then I actually need to engage with the work tasks that are hanging over me and stop them being a weight around my neck. I learned that exercise and being outside were important for improving mood when I was depressed, also seeing and being with people too - but not gloomy people! And also, having a project or something going on is helpful. I just about have the wherewithal to recognise when I'm getting mopey, and not to slip too far down into it. But also just to indulge in the "my world is falling apart" narrative just once in a while and not fight it too much - it gets it out of my system.

This is correct. As soon as we open our mouths, we are telling a story, not truth. The only solution is to experience things for ourselves and be satisfied with that. Words can only push us to investigate for ourselves, they can't be taken literally.

Quick immediate thoughts: 1. Was the teacher given enough warning or training to handle this sort of situation? For example when you learn to drive you're told to keep to the speed limit or expect consequences. 2. Was the teacher suitably screened before entering the job? 3. It's possible your teacher had poor impulse control or lacked good judgement in certain areas. 4. Or maybe just a case of the right person in the wrong job. We all make mistakes some worse than others, it's our ability to recover that's important, that's where the learning happens. We certainly live in a more litigious age. I see this mostly as a consequence of society slowly moving into stage Green, and it's mostly correct: everyone deserves equality of opportunity and if a teacher wants to spoil that for a particular child, then they should be suitably punished. But when stage Orange sentiments get involved litigiousness is seen as an opportunity for a bunch of legal people to make yet more money and it can be applied too liberally. This can give the impression of not being given any slack to make mistakes, and fragility. The antidote is not to worry about it and allow yourself to make mistakes, just don't wilfully do wrong.

LastThursday Soap Episode 2 Turns out that friend couldn't make the cinema this week. So we're hoping for next week, that is if Bond is still showing then. And so it is, organising people and why I don't like it. I haven't been out for my daily walk, maybe I should turn it into a quaint ritual (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beating_the_bounds)? I'll still be getting my dose of daylight though, since I'm driving for my weekend break in a couple of hours. It turns out there's a jacuzzi on the premises, happy days. I'm tempted to buy champagne and sup it in my swimmers to celebrate not being at home or just to celebrate being in a jacuzzi in Autumn. I actually can't wait to switch off from normal life for bit. I investigated the picture Vanity by Cowper shown in my previous post (thanks to @Myioko), and it turns out I can see it in the flesh at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, for free no less. London is amazing if you like art, I've seen so many famous art works there. So I'll line it up for a few weekend's time and possibly invite my arty friend A. along. It's funny, A's husband P. is very into photography and yet being dragged around an art gallery is his idea of hell - each to their own! (The P. and A. stand for their names, not their interests). At least it's not my friend R. who I was with at a Picasso exhibition in Nice, and he just thought it was crap and could do it just as well himself - heathen. I wonder if P. could stand a photography exhibition or if his head would explode? I think I might post about art I own at some point and go through why I have each piece. Could be mildly interesting. Other than that, whilst I've been working today, it's just been lots of little insubstantial tasks. Frustratingly, I've made no progress on the bigger chunks of work. I so so want to quit working altogether, it's just boring mind numbing grind, and I wasn't born for this. I need to engage my beauty and wonder and awe senses more and not be used as some cog in a money making machine. But humans like to treat each other inhumanely, such is the world. I need to find a way out of the grind (although I've journaled about that conundrum extensively here). So I ought to end with a cliffhanger. Will LastThursday finish coding up his last report of the week, before his friends arrive for holiday? Find out in next week's instalment...

@Myioko I think we're a society of lurkers here in the journaling section. I really appreciate the artistry and art in your journal. I think I should get over my Brit introverted reservedness and be openly grateful about people and their journals. Anyway, I was especially struck by: I can't recommend NZ highly enough, the inhabitants are truly blessed. My only recommendation is to do what I did: buy a flight, book a hostel and go experience it yourself, their Spring is best. I went around in a big green bus, it was great fun. When I go walking I don't mind treading the same routes over and over, I enjoy seeing the slow changes of the seasons and different lights and weathers. The familiarity makes me feel like I belong to a place. Saying that I do go for longer hikes in the countryside for some novelty, the UK has a zillion rights of way through the countryside which is good for exploration. Since I like to try and be as present as possible I don't listen to music at all when outside, I find music takes me away from that, but that's just me. But I do love music for its own sakes. I like the idea of retraining ourselves to appreciate old things in a novel way. I would read the Art of Travel by Alain de Botton, there's a section in there that talks about this very thing, he frames it something like going on holiday inside your home or something like that. One way to definitely do it is to become an artist - painter, photographer, it doesn't matter - and spend time staring at things and really appreciating them from fresh. The only danger is not getting lost in the technicality of being an artist. I find that actually touching things helps, touch railings and plants and brickwork, smell them too. There's definitely a balance to be had when dealing with time. It's ok to just be in time and let it pass, there's a joy in just being and letting things happen - as you say thoughts of "wasting time" is itself a waste of time. Many times I've felt like I fell asleep in my twenties and suddenly woke up in my late forties - even writing it down feels odd, my thirties were a social blur. It's like I've had layers of years painted to the outside of me, but that fresh faced twenty year old is just beneath. I wouldn't undo or re-live anything though (edit: except my first kiss), it was what it was. My only advice, is to grab life by the shirt tails and really live it, especially when you're young.

I think I'll ramble today. It's kind of interesting sometimes just to be nosey about other people's lives and what they get up to. I guess that's why some of us watch TV soaps (I do not). I'm fighting with the cognitive dissonance of having to do work, I have a shed load to do, but my brain is just going "nope". I just cannot quite bring myself to concentrate. Programming takes immense concentration - although it varies by task - usually I can get myself in the zone, but if anything's slightly off then it becomes nearly impossible. I do feel a bit of tiredness and I haven't been for a walk, enticingly the sun has just started shining, so I may just fuck it and go out. The problem is this particular task has been outstanding for months, and there is a lull in the influx of my workload, so now is prime to to knock this particular task on the head. If I worked for myself it would possibly be easier, my off days I would just switch off and vegetate or do something not-left-brained. I sort of like the spacey feeling of being a bit tired, it's like being in a dream. I notice this especially on walks. I have pretty much exhausted all the walking routes around my local area, and as things go I do have my favourites which I patrol often. So I can compare and contrast the days and how I feel each time. Sometimes I'm very "present" I feel connected to my senses and focused in a certain way. Other times I'm in my head with a kind of stream of consciousness thing going on, my thoughts are fleeting and incoherent (no I'm not psychotic) and I feel disconnected from the world around me - at times like these my walks seem to pass very quickly. I often try and force connection with my senses, by paying attention to what's going on around me, and it can work after some time, other times no chance. I do like using walking to ground me, as I'm very prone to being in my head. Yet other times, I'm completely in thought and rational analysis, which can be useful for problem solving. Also what's not helping is that I'm having the outside of my building painted. Scaffolding is up and I have to put up with the oddity of painters passing by my windows (I'm on the second floor). They're also painting my windows, so they keep fucking around with opening them, scraping them and so on. It's also cold outside in Blighty, so it's fucking annoying to have windows open. Apparently so my landlady tells me, they were meant to paint in Spring, but Covid or whatever. Why the fuck they have to do it in Autumn instead and not wait until next Spring I just don't understand. Yeah I know, let it go, let it wash over you, don't be too attached, it's just an illusion anyway, yeah yeah. The smell of paint fumes isn't that pleasant either. So I'm listening to more Dub Techno which I use as an aide to work, it's a device for shutting up my chattering mind (it's not working today though). But I appreciate the repetitive and ever changing soundscape of it. This one at the moment: I'll go into what music I like and why some time on here. But I will say I like rythmic music. I've never been one to go against my natural impulses and inclinations, rather, I like to explore them. But this can get in the way of things I have to do, there's a lot of that being a grown up and all, it's all so tedious. One of the biggest problems I find is that time passes so god damned quickly. I've wasted a morning already doing basically nothing. It feels like I've blinked and three hours have passed. I suspect that this is only going to accelerate as I get even older. I think what happens is that consciousness goes ever meta and novelty decreases over time. We need that novelty and consequent emotional stimulation to anchor us in time, without it, time collapses back into what it actually is: a singularity. I'm not talking black holes, I'm talking about the real nature of what's happening, anyway. Later on this evening, I'm going to see the new Bond movie with a couple of friends. I've known both about twenty years (used to work with them originally). But one of them is recently divorced and going through the e/motions of that. I don't really keep contact with that guy, we never completely clicked as people, but my other friend acts as a linchpin between us. I understand that role well. I think some of us act as a bridge between disparate sets of friends and family. I kind of have three groups of disparate friends which I go between. I would say on the whole they're probably incompatible with each other (and also geographically), and I'm a different person to each group, which is fine, we all modulate ourselves to the people we're with: we unwittingly play a familiar character to smooth over social interaction. As for Bond, it's a bit of fun and I've seen all the other ones, so I may as well. I'm going to stay off the beers I think, although the novelty of taking a beer into a cinema never wears off. This coming weeked I'm travelling to Norfolk for a weekend staycation with friends. It's a two or three hour drive depending, probably the latter as I'm travelling Friday rush hour, because it's unlikely my friend can organise his life to leave any earlier (wife + kid = time vortex). I've nominated myself to drive, because I enjoy it and I find being driven around less exciting. It also gives my friend a break from being "Dad" for a bit. There's a petrol crisis at the moment around London and South East where I am, and it's been hard to find Unleaded or Diesel, luckily I don't need to commute in the car! I better get that tank filled before Friday. This trip was organised by my friend. I never organise things. Mostly it's because I'm single and it's easier for me to go along with others' family plans than the other way around. I'm more flexible and spontaneous and I usually say "yes" to most things, I don't mind it, I'm very good at saying "no" if I don't want to do something. Plus, I dislike organising and administrating things, especially people, it's all so tedious. If others want/enjoy doing it, let them! Ok WALK! Back later. ---

What war? It's more like lack of social skills, lack of empathy, lack of emotional intelligence, projection and self-righteousness. But none of us are immune, if you've mastered relationships you won't be on this dating forum. In any case, people come and go on here, the nature of the forum will drift over time.

There are other senses, sound, taste, touch, smell. There are things that you are barely aware of, maybe traffic outside the room, maybe an aircraft flying in the sky, the moon, the smell of your neighbour's cooking, the rumble of your neighbour's washing machine spin cycle. Where's the boundary of your direct experience?

Apathy.

There's two approaches which I use: Structured approach Unstructured approach With the structured approach, I use it for work that doesn't excite me very much. Mainly I use the Pomodoro method, with a pattern like: 30,5,30,10,30,5,30,20,30,5... all in minutes of work/break. This works for me because paid work is mostly boring and I'm very easily distracted by more exciting things. With the unstructured approach, I use it for work that does excite me. I start and then keep on going until something happens, nature calls or I get hungry or I feel brain fog coming on. My breaks will be longer to go and service my bodily needs. I may go for a walk or have a nap. After feeling refreshed I'm back to it. I tend to work in much longer periods, maybe 90 minutes or two hours between breaks. I find naturally that working longer than about two hours my brain starts to switch off. So this is a more natural approach to work.