Journey to Nothing

[Raphael]

On 10/25/2021 at 3:05 PM, LastThursday said:

• 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.
• 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.
• 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. [...] 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. [...] How do I even tackle the transition, when will the threshold be reached were I just say "goodbye programming, hello self-expression"?

I'm 24 and I'm currently blown away with how well I resonate with what you wrote here. Your thoughts are helping me to self-reflect.

I'm currently taking actions to move out of the tech world and get into something more authentic.

[LastThursday]

@Raphael thanks, that means a lot.  It's great that you're following your instincts and intuition at 24. By the time you reach 48, you'll be smashing it ? What are you looking to do?

[Raphael]

54 minutes ago, LastThursday said:

@Raphael thanks, that means a lot.  It's great that you're following your instincts and intuition at 24. By the time you reach 48, you'll be smashing it ? What are you looking to do?

I'm currently getting back into solidifying my core after being a bit lost most of this year, so I'm focusing on basic things: self-esteem, confidence, money, healing, relationships.

What I want after having a solid foundation is to get a lot of knowledge and experience on how the world works and interconnects by studying many different fields like: politics, history, geography, ecology, ecosystems, psychology, philosophy, spirituality, etc. I want to help solve world problems and raise human development.

I also currently resonate with your need of wanting to be more artistic. Maybe it's a phase, I'm not sure. I'm thinking through a lot of things.

Edited October 26, 2021 by Raphael

[soos_mite_ah]

5 hours ago, LastThursday said:

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:

I feel like instead of a school, while it isn't completely off the table, we need to deal with a lot of issues at the root systemically so that the problem doesn't arise in the first place. I'm talking access to mental health care, classes for parenting, dealing with things like educational, medical, and wealth inequality, and over all helping people better their quality of life so that they have the time and the means to help themselves in a way that they feel is necessary rather than a predetermined curriculum. 

[LastThursday]

@soos_mite_ah totally. Everyone should have access to a better quality life, the systemic problems you mention are not about learning per se and more to do with the organisation and priorities of society. Systemic problems are in the realm of politics and activism I'd say. I suppose my idea was less lofty and more aimed at those already on the self-help treadmill, and is more about "filling in" some of the areas which are sorely lacking in conventional school education, which is geared towards the world of employment and not about actualising yourself and being a fully rounded human being. Really my idea was a counter to Leo's "you must do it all yourself" mantra, some of us would benefit from a more "we can do it together" approach; we can pretend we don't need people to actualise but it's not true, we're heavily dependent on people and we may as well acknowledge it.

[LastThursday]

17 hours ago, Raphael said:

I also currently resonate with your need of wanting to be more artistic.

For me it's all about balance and being a more complete person. I'm very analytical, rational heavy, it's my default mode, but this has a warping effect on my psyche and view of the world. I see myself getting tired of this way of being, and I just need to open up to other ways of being, and art is one such avenue.

Edited October 27, 2021 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

I have a romantic notion of being a hero. I'm not sure if it's a male desire rooted in biology or if it's just me. Certainly there's a lot of it about in the cinema, mostly of the superhero variety, so it might not be just me - it's not something us men talk about openly. It's all about facing adversity and stepping up and taking decisive action. It's about being a leader and a protector. For me anyway the romantic notion is about being tested and coming out on top.

I'm sure this is why many men volunteer for the armed forces. It's not so much the hero's journey - although that's part of it - but just being a "hero". In a sense men want to be looked up to and adored for being strong men, or actualised men. There is an underlying archetype here which the movies and the media unconsciously adhere to because it makes for a gripping story. Why's it gripping? Because being a hero and leading your tribe out of adversity is good for survival.

I think probably for most men being a hero is the antithesis of what it means to be a highly consciousness man - all that physicality, simple decisiveness and grim determination lacks nuance. And yet those who have been in the armed forces stand out because they exude the essense of manliness: discipline, courage and strength make the man.

And so I got my dream of being in adversity via the pandemic. What did I do? I just went along with the masses, the vector of adversity was too abstract to stand up to or rally against. This is reality; war for example can produce heroes, but most of it is a terrifying, uncertain grind against an abstract enemy hiding and punishing you from behind their machinery and increasingly from an air conditioned room several thousand miles away. So if not war, where else can we be heroes? Maybe in the peacetime efforts of politics or leading in business. Many men throws themselves at this from a sense of needing to express themselves as men and as heroes.

I still want to be thrown into difficult circumstances and be tested and show my mettle, but reality may just slap me in the face and show me how unheroic I really am. Maybe my other less heroic qualities are more important?

Edited October 27, 2021 by LastThursday

[Raphael]

3 hours ago, LastThursday said:

For me it's all about balance and being a more complete person. I'm very analytical, rational heavy, it's my default mode, but this has a warping effect on my psyche and view of the world. I see myself getting tired of this way of being, and I just need to open up to other ways of being, and art is one such avenue.

Yeah, I experienced that too. I have been doing web development regularly for at least 5 years now and I'm a bit bored with it. I have difficulties finding my balance because one aspect of my personality is also very artistic and chaotic: sometimes I'm too much analytical, sometimes I'm too much artistic.

3 hours ago, LastThursday said:

Really my idea was a counter to Leo's "you must do it all yourself" mantra, some of us would benefit from a more "we can do it together" approach; we can pretend we don't need people to actualise but it's not true, we're heavily dependent on people and we may as well acknowledge it.

 

2 hours ago, LastThursday said:

I still want to be thrown into difficult circumstances and be tested and show my mettle, but reality may just slap me in the face and show me how unheroic I really am. Maybe my other less heroic qualities are more important?

I'm again blown away with how much I resonate with this. I fall into this trap of being too much independent and wanting to do everything by myself in the past and I threw myself into situations that were too difficult for me to handle only to prove myself to the world. It was caused mostly by bad conditioning and a few experiences where I found myself being the responsible person where others wouldn't care. Leo's views also had an influence on me and contributed to that years ago.

Edited October 27, 2021 by Raphael

[soos_mite_ah]

7 hours ago, LastThursday said:

Really my idea was a counter to Leo's "you must do it all yourself" mantra, some of us would benefit from a more "we can do it together" approach; we can pretend we don't need people to actualise but it's not true, we're heavily dependent on people and we may as well acknowledge it.

I agree with this 100%. 

I also was watching a video a few days ago on how a lot of people have both an internal and external locus of control but they tend to prefer or default to one of them. The internal locus of control is about looking at what you can do in a situation and taking charge to change. The external locus of control is about seeing how your environment and people around you affect your circumstance so you aren't blaming yourself for anything. And whichever one you tend to default to, usually in a therapeutic setting, resorting to the other form of control is usually helpful in resolving neurosis

There are people who tend to default to the external locus of control and who tend to blame everyone but themselves and fall into victim mentality. For them, usually the individualistic, take responsibility for your actions and see how you contribute to a situation is incredibly helpful in mitigating their biases. But a lot of people, including myself, have an internal locus of control so that same method will probably cause me to double down on my personal biases and beat myself up for things that don't even make sense. That's why for me, it's been incredibly helpful in my self improvement journey to look at systemic issues that are contributing to my problems and be gentle with myself because not everything is my fault rather than telling myself that I need to spring into action because I'm not doing enough. 

I also feel that if you belong to  marginalized community, you're more likely to default to an internal locus of control because externally and systemically, there isn't much that's helping you so you need to help yourself. On top of that if you belong to a marginalized community, you have also been constantly told by the people in power to take responsibility, help yourself, and don't question systems (because if you do, the people who have power will risk losing that power and god forbid they would be pressurized to take responsibility and make a better situation). Meanwhile, people who have more power in society are more likely to resort to an external locus of control because their environment works for them and it's in their best interest to not take responsibility as it might cause them to reconsider their power. 

[LastThursday]

@soos_mite_ah the locus of control idea is interesting, as you say it's an attachment style or bias, but ultimately it's still you making the judgement. You may blame external circumstances when things go wrong, but it's still you doing the blaming for example. Tangentially, I see it's like difference between the active and passive voice in grammar, the difference between @soos_mite_ah gave @LastThursday the cheese, and @LastThursday received the cheese from @soos_mite_ah. There's always a balance to be struck between the two polarities I reckon, that's the place to be. But sometimes it's both, it seems you affect and control your environment, but it affects and controls you in return, maybe both happen at the same time. Really you are part of the continuum with your environment, you are your environment. Anyway, that's just my musings.

I believe with some marginalised communities they band together tightly because that way they can control some of the externalities, say culture and ways of living or religion. So it gives space for those that have an external locus of control to exercise that bias. Of course that banding together can be seen as a threat to or unwillingness to assimilate with mainstream society, as if mainstream society were a static uniform thing. So as a group a marginalised community is often left to fend for itself by the powerful, and as a whole must have an internal locus of control, and maybe you feel that or embody that more keenly than most as a member of a marginalised community? 

I certainly have an internal locus of control myself (largely) and I think it has come from exactly what you talk about, having been marginalised when I was younger, in my case by having a foot in two identities and cultures: Spanish and British, and having to help myself and prove myself to others that I belong. Saying that my sister has a very external locus of control, so I'm not sure it holds 100%! Anyway.

[LastThursday]

22 hours ago, Raphael said:

I have difficulties finding my balance because one aspect of my personality is also very artistic and chaotic: sometimes I'm too much analytical, sometimes I'm too much artistic.

Some art can be analytical. Take Bach for example, his music is very technical and mathematical to a degree, yet it's still high art. You can have your cake and eat it.

22 hours ago, Raphael said:

I fall into this trap of being too much independent

Personally I don't think you can be too independent. The reality is that even very independent people are dependent, they just refuse to acknowledge it (i.e. who feeds you and puts a roof over your head?). You can however enter into things that are overwhelming (mostly down to inexperience) and no amount of independence will help with that, so at that point you should definitely acknowledge that you are dependent and get help. A lot of frustration, depression and anxiety, is caused by not getting help from others when it's needed - and getting help should be more normalised.

[Raphael]

@LastThursday @soos_mite_ah

I had similar thoughts ~2 months ago about taking responsibility vs. recognizing systemic issues. The conclusion that I came with is that there is no difference between blaming ourselves and blaming the environment: we are the environment, the environment is us, the environment creates us, we create our environment.

Thinking that way remove the blame and we don't entirely feel like being the victim of the environment or the victim of ourselves (in a sense), but we recognize what is happening and what needs to be changed and therefore feel more peaceful. However, by doing this it's possible to fall into the trap of not making enough distinctions which create some blur.

My conclusion was that there is nothing to blame, but making distinctions and balancing between an internal/external locus is necessary to solve issues.

Edited October 28, 2021 by Raphael

[LastThursday]

On being nerdy.

I introduced my friends to the card game Big Two. I played it extensively in my university years, which is now forever ago. Somehow I always manage to just about remember the rules of play and explain it to others. I'm not going to explain it here though. It was taught to me by my two flatmates with a Hong Kong extraction who both studied psychology and despite cultural similarities couldn't have been more different from each other: one a short cigarette smoking leather jacket wearing graphic novel loving dude, the other a tall buffed clean living classical music lover who turned out to be gay in the end. We made an odd trio, I not having any of their affectations. Except the leather jacket. And smoking. And classical music... hang on a minute. Anyway.

So my two current friends who I showed the game to recently on holiday, have also become hooked on it. What makes it so appealing is the good mix of luck and strategy needed to get your cards out. Obviously, I like to win. All three of us are programmers (technically developers, but I always think that the average bod would take that to mean real estate), so I took it upon myself to work out the probabilities of getting or being beaten by the various poker hands involved.

The rank of poker hands is purely determined by their probability, where less probable hands have a higher rank, simple. So I wrote a quick bit of code to deal a million rounds, and simply count the probabilities involved. Strangely, or perhaps not so, one of the other friends decided to do the same. We used slightly different techniques to scan for the poker hands, but came up with the same answers. It turns out that being dealt flushes is more common than straights, which is flipped from their ranks: so always play a flush if you can. That is what I love about programming in general, you can answer real world problems (!) with it with relative ease. In no other discipline can you do this. In fact all the other disciplines rely on computers to do the answering, such as medicine, logistics, mailing your pay cheque, or DNA analysis of murderers. It is so diffused into modern life, that it's nearly invisible and definitely taken for granted.

I think I'm a nerd just simply out of intense curiosity about everything. If something hooks my imagination enough, I go down the rabbit hole of exploration around that topic - maybe it's a slightly autistic trait I have, and I'm only saying that because sometimes I just cannot let go of a thing until I know the answers or the background, although I do like to work things out for myself if I can. I find a lot of people around me just don't have that intensity of wanting to know, they seem to be able to live just as well without it.

Obviously at (high) school this nerdy intensity wasn't well received and I was an easy target. Certainly when I was growing up being smart was seen as easy target for derision and bullying, mostly by less smart idiots. The irony was never lost on me, school supposedly being a place of learning, not a camp for breeding psychopaths. But as soon as I went into the world of work, the tables were turned, I suspect I've been one of the more succesful ones, my suspicion being backed up by having all those ex-school people on my Facebook. God I hope nobody ever reads this from Facebook - actually I have more chance of being struck by a meteorite than that happening.

Nerdiness should be applauded and encouraged in all realms, especially at school. Although, I have seen the shift in the past few decades and probably due to the internet there's a kind of cool nerdiness culture nowadays. Some of us are even reasonably good socially. Cool. There's another thought to explore: what does it mean to be cool?

 

Edited October 29, 2021 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

Annoying in many ways but informative and well read. Always separate content from delivery, must, not, judge. I'm sure I'm just as annoying as hell myself at times. Anyway, hetero:

 

[LastThursday]

In the short drive back from the cinema (Bond was fun), something come together that had been sitting around aimlessly in the background of my thoughts for a while. That was the idea that there are five perspectives to my thoughts/being. I wanted to be neat and have four cardinal directions, but five doesn't fit this nice scheme (but maybe it does). Anyway here they are:

Introspective

This is the sensation that I'm me experiencing this internal world that is off limits to others and to the world. It seems like my thoughts and ideas are private and unless I make them public they stay that way. It seems like there's a whole internal (private) world that I inhabit and I'm both its master and its slave. This is the world I go to to ruminate and instrospect, and is the container for the ego and sense of a self doing stuff. Behind it all there's a sense of observation and ownership.

Extrospective

It's possible to flip out of the introspective direction and be in the world instead. You are party to everything that's going on around you and you belong to it. This is where your physical body is and all it's pains and disease and pleasures. In this perspective people are important and the laws of physics hold, the law of money and survival also impose themselves. When in a flow state, there's little introspective or self-awareness and it's all focused out there and externally. At moments of high emotion or drama, the blood pumps and the adrenaline runs, you are there and very present. This is where you are in moments of bliss and having fun at a party or doing your favourite activity.

Retrospective

This is the strong sense that you have a history. This is the world of memory and relationships and knowledge accumulated over years. Here is were yesterday happened and what you had for breakfast. Here is where you know how old you are and from where you can see the story arc of your life. You can corroborate your stories and flashbacks with others and build a sense of continuity and knowledge that you were born. Your body feels like it has taken on the pleasures and traumas of the past and that these things define who you are now - maybe it's even the perspective of identity itself. To delete or deny or rewrite the personal past feels wrong and against natural law, because without it how can you be you?

Futurospective

From here is the place of potential and hope. This is where self-improvement and goals and all that doing lives. It's the source of fantasy and what ifs and new ways of being and behaving; dreams. If retrospective tells you why you are you, then futurospective lets you expand outwards to be anyone you want to be. It's also the perspective of fear and anxiety, having that certainty that bad things will happen and that that inevitable day will come whether you like it or not. It is where your own death resides. But if things are bad now, the future always holds hope that the badness will be washed away to be replaced by goodness. It's the place where families are planned, new friends made, and that you will become what you've always wanted to be.

Now-spective

From this perspective you are content to sit and be one with all the other perspectives. It is the centre of the maelstrom of being alive itself. It's possible to live from this perspective constantly. It is a place of refuge from the other perspectives: the past cannot reach you any more, the future has yet to affect you, and both the internal and external worlds are one and the same. It's both a prison you cannot escape from (except to go into other perspectives), and yet is everything and delightful, if space is given over to this perspective. It is both the container and canvas for the other perspectives, and the place to realise the other perspectives are just tall tales. From here being a child feels like just now, and being old and grey haired will be just soon. Nothing happens here, time stands still, and you are everything at once, everytime at once. There is nothing to observe except observation itself. This is a place of rest.

[LastThursday]

It occurred to me that I missed out the major reason for my previous post. It's that you are only ever in one of those perspectives at any one time. If you're thinking about the past, you're not thinking about the future. If you're lost in introspection you're not paying attention to what's happening externally. Each perspective is a silo and you flit between each one quickly and many many times a day. The only meta-perspective is what I called the now-spective, but even that is its own kind of silo. This happens because your mental bandwidth is limited, you can only pay attention to a very limited set of things at any one time.

One important aspect of the different perspectives is that you "act as if" when operating from the perspective. For example when you're in Retrospective you re-live those old memories as if they were happening now. Say your boss or parent scolded you yesterday for doing something stupid, and you're still angry about it, in this case you're in Retrospective acting as if it were happening right now. If you suddenly switch to Extrospective because someone knocks on your door, then that anger will be temporarily dropped, and now you're acting in response to your external environment.

The meta-point about all this, is that you can aim to have a default perspective to fall back on. I would say the now-spective should be the most prevalent and natural perspective to be in. So when you find yourself ruminating negatively about past events, you can bring yourself back into the now to immediately drop the rumination. It's the same about any of the other perspectives. You want the now-spective to be the attractor or centre of balance for all perspectives. This is because the now-spective is the most anchored in direct experience, but also because you are a detached observer and able to stop "acting as if" and not got sidetracked by acting: you can be in your natural state.

The other thing to know is that all this "acting as if" is the source of your problems. The anxiety or trauma you experience is only ever engaged when you're working from one the perspectives. Whenever you stop the acting, the anxiety disappears (e.g.). This may seem trite or disingenuous to those suffering mental health problems, but really in these cases the sufferer is repeatedly engaging their depression throughout the day. It is just the frequency with which the sufferer engages which causes problems with being able to function normally. It would seem that to learn to change perspectives more freely would help the sufferer. This is in stark contrast to the "work through problems" model of your therapist. All that "working through problems" aims to do is to recontextualise your suffering so it becomes less intense - but it it a slow, random and laborious process - switching perspectives and pulling yourself back into the now-spective is a quick and accurate process. There's nothing to work through but unlearning the habit of engaging with (mental) suffering.

 

Edited November 2, 2021 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

What is our relationship to animals? My thoughts about this are not fully formed or coherent, but I'll give it a shot. 

My first instinct is to go back into evolution. We humans are in a dynamical relationship with the environment and that includes animals. To live side-by-side with animals we have to understand them. So probably for most of our pre-history we were hunter-gatherers roaming around in small bands. We would have had to either kill animals for food or be killed by them or otherwise animals were neutral towards us; we were up close to animals on a constant basis. 

There are two levels of understanding of an animal, extrinsic and intrinsic. What we would have lacked in bare strength (we are puny apes), we more than made up for in intelligence. We used that intelligence to build up knowledge of how animals behaved and moved, which gave us an advantage - this is extrinsic knowledge, which would have been taught through observation and oration. But also over millions of years evolution would have given us inbuilt knowledge of certain animals; intrinsic knowledge. 

The intrinsic knowledge of animals is actually part of our human make-up. We are universally scared of spiders and snakes, we are paranoid about being watched and predated on (by lions e.g.). But above the level of instinct, there's strong identification with mostly large animals. We use animals on flags and emblems, are fascinated by cat videos, have the strength of a lion and on and on. Whenever we want to be more than human, we take on the persona of animals: wolves, birds (especially birds of prey), large cats, horses, oxen, snakes (Medusa). We easily can imagine being mythical hybrids of human and animal, either in appearance or supernatural ability. This sort of thing abounds in mythical stories and ancient cultures, for example ancient Egyptian mashups of dogs and humans turned into gods, or Greek centaurs. Mythical creatures are also made of parts of different animals, unicorns and griffins and are imbued with supernatural power and horses that can fly (Pegasus).  What would any mythical story be without animals?

Sometimes animals are given human abilities, and can talk and reason like us, children are delighted by such things and embrace them as nearly a natural and self-evident occurrence. Apes could even talk and take over the world. Really, we anthropomorphise animals all the time, give them personalities and think they're cute and cuddly, friendly or scary. But the converse is also true, we are also animalised by them (can't think of another word for it), we have snakes and spiders and lions inside us - we are partly those things. We understand that we are ourselves animals at a deep level and not separate from them and we are shaped by them.

[LastThursday]

How to break up poetically:

Think you've had my number? Dial me again, see. Tap tap tap.
I'm unapologetic even as the colour runs from my lips.
My love fades from red to black and all you do is stare back.
Those lips you once kissed are now whispering dismissal. Go.
Take your mindless stare elsewhere, do I care? No.
I'm unapologetic even as the colour runs from my lips.

[LastThursday]

My lord I love this

 

 

[Myioko]

@LastThursday

I really like that song!

It's a really interesting mix of styles, something I haven't heard before. Also now I think that more music videos should have a dancer like that to go along with vocals and instruments.