Journey to Nothing

[LastThursday]

@Myioko absolutely! And why don't more folks wear sky blue dresses with yellow boots eh?

--

Some of the things which make life joyful are the small activities you love to do. Here's a few mine:

At university there was an overgrown grassy area round the back of the halls of residence. On clear nights I used to go and lay there and be subsumed by the tall grass, then I would stare up and look at the stars and planets. After a while I would see shooting stars. Once my eyes adjusted even more, I could watch the pinpricks of light of satellites zooming about in straight lines all over the sky. It was magical.

I really love restaurants and cafe culture. I really enjoy eating novel food, especially sea food of all types. Ideally eating outside in the sunshine on a warm day chatting with friends and watching the world do its thing. On holiday it's even better, there's no rush and everyone is relaxed. Even just sitting by myself outside having a strong coffee is wonderful, and if someone strikes up conversation it's even better. If it was warm enough - it never is here, I would sit outside every morning at the local cafe and have coffee for breakfast (my DNA is continental!).

Night clubs. I just enjoy having my senses assaulted. The loud bass vibrating in my chest, the crowds of people dressed up to impress, dancing like an idiot, chatting to beautiful strangers, the dim ethereal lighting, smoke, the dreamlike state of being slightly drunk. It's like a mini-world unto itself.

There's something about looking at art. The idea that a painting you're staring at was executed by someone uber-famous like Picasso or Michelangelo, and it was done decades or even hundreds of years ago. Some art is so well executed that it makes you wonder how it could have even been done. I absolutely love renaissance art for its realism. I like Warhol's art and own a Marylin print. But art isn't just painting, modern art installations can be clever or confounding. Canova's sculptures are breathtaking and sensual. I also enjoy Pre-Raphaelite art, for all those posed, long haired women in flowing dresses, and just their emotive composition. There's nothing more pleasurable than riffling through an art gallery or exhibition. I often wish I had talent enough myself to be a proper artist.

What can I say about music? I just about love all forms and styles of music. There's just something transcendental about it. I even occasionally like metal or guitar heavy rock music (which is normally so vanilla). There's strong cultural connections too with music, and just getting a different cultural vibe can knock me out of myself. I think that's the point, it occupies my mind and transports me somewhere else. I'm more into the texture of music than it's lyrics though - most lyrics are mumbled anyway! A good syncopated rhythm, chilled voice, modulation, some amount of repetition. For me it's all about the "feel" of the music rather than the technical mastery. Music combined with artistic video is great, but a good song should be able to stand up by itself. I listen to music every single day it's so joyful.

Exploration. There's something entrancing about discovering new places. My favourite way of discovery is just to walk, I just enjoy the simplicity and pace of it - everything new can be taken in and appreciated properly. It's always cool to go down that street or path you've been past hundreds of times, but never thought of walking down. Last week I discovered the entire length of Shaftsbury Avenue in London. I had never mentally joined up the two ends, even though I have frequented both Piccadilly and China Town many many times. There's a joy in things clicking together and places being joined up together.

People. Man this is a huge subject in itself. But I love people. For sure they can make your life hell, but I find people to be magical. There isn't a day that goes by when I don't have to interact with a person and there's constant pleasure and surprise. People can be so ordinary and yet so amazing at the same time. Some people are even beautiful in the conventional sense, and if it was socially acceptable I would just sit and stare like looking at fine art (the crossover is interesting eh?), but I'll take just a glance instead. But the real beauty of people is that they show you that there's a million different ways to be and if I wanted to I too could be like you. Some of my most joyful moments have been with other people in many different ways.

 

[LastThursday]

Just kept pressing F5 until the forum worked. When it did, I didn't know what to write. My finger hurt. What craving have I burnt through, the forum. Yeah right...

[LastThursday]

The decline of everything.

Whenever I go around different towns for whatever reasons, I notice a lot of boarded up places where shops used to be. They generally fall into several types of ex-establishments: shops, pubs, post offices and bank branches. Certainly where I live it seems like once a shop or chain goes under nobody else takes up the empty space. It gives high streets a kind of run down quality which is unattractive and probably goes some way to putting people off from going there in the first place - it's a downward spiral - it's also economics. It can be easy to be doom and gloom about it if you care about it to any degree (I mostly don't).

What's mostly killed off the high street as far as I can see is the internet. That's because of several reasons but the main one being that's it's far cheaper for a business to run a website than it is to run a physical space populated with employees. This is what's happened to banking, physical branches just don't make sense economically when most money transactions are virtual. For any banking services that require a human, then you either chat online or on the phone. Bank branches were also not a social hub, but just a means to an end. The same can't be said for pubs and post offices.

It's the same story with pubs, for areas with less footfall, it seems like once a pub closes it stays boarded up indefinitely. I find it hard to understand why pubs are closing at such a rate, but really it must just be changing cultural standards. The pub historically is a social hub, and a place for entertainment. But I think the nature of that entertainment has changed and there are different ways to be social nowadays, either online or through different activities. I think also the way people drink here has changed with supermarket alcohol being relatively cheap, and so people drink at each other's homes before going out (not to pub though!); preloading I think the youth call it.

Post offices are an odd case. In major towns it's more like a place to get stuff done, but in rural areas it's a social hub often incorporating a shop. There's a lot of lamentation in the media about the demise of post offices especially in rural areas. But they're fighting an impossible battle, it's super easy to exchange messages nowadays, who needs to write letters, there's a million better ways of doing that. Even with the other mainstay of post offices sending and receiving parcels, there are other competing services. I would say it's days are numbered, society has moved on.

I would say that the biggest problem is not that these kind of places are closing down, but purely lack of imagination. If your social hub in the village was either the pub or post office, then it would seem grim for you, but in reality all it needs is some imagination and initiative for getting people together regularly. It requires a certain amount of cohesiveness in the first place, in that you have a desire to get together with your neighbours. In bigger towns this doesn't happen anyway, and people get by in other ways.

Similarly for unused ex-shop space in town centres, what's lacking is imagination. Instead landlords are simply holding out for the high rents they've been used to, after all an empty property whilst not bringing in cash, also is very cheap to maintain - to a degree they can afford to just sit on it and wait, most landlords own several properties in any case. Local councils and government should be encouraged to buy out these spaces and do something with them. Even converting usage to flats to live in, or offices would be preferable. Why shouldn't people live in town centres again?

I'm not so pesimistic about all this. It's the growing pains of rapidly changing culture and economics. A new normal is being established which may or may not be "better" than the old normal. What really matters is that the new normal is given enough space to unfold at its own pace, because really at the heart of it is people, and they can be surprisingly resistant to change. But I suspect technology won't be so accommodating and change will continue to disrupt our lives in difficult ways, but there will also be amazing opportunities to build a better society.

[LastThursday]

More random ramblings.

I was thinking about some comments made about Leo's latest video on how to get laid. I haven't seen the video, I don't feel invested enough to watch it at the moment (which is no particular comment on its subject). Maybe I find people's reaction to it more interesting than actually watching it? Anyway, the primary thought I had was that there is a certain ickiness around these sorts of subjects. Why's that?

Some of that ickiness I think revolves around the idea of "gaming" people. This is the sort of thing at the heart of capitalism, the idea that it's perfectly ok to use any technique at your disposal in order to sell things to people, or more subtly to get what you want from people. For capitalism the currency is money, for getting laid the currency is sex. There is definitely a quagmire to navigate here, because it's not so clear cut that all forms of manipulation are asymmetrical or necessarily bad per se. What is probably bad is the attitude of active manipulation, and having that attitude permeate society.

What's the difference between active and passive manipulation? That's tricky to define. We all need to survive and have our needs met. Largely, having our needs met involve other people at all levels. In turn those other people also need to survive. It works like a balance sheet, having your needs catered to by others goes in the plus column, having to use your resources to help others goes in the minus column. Naturally the exception is where mutual helping helps both sides survive: this results in trade and capitalism eventually. So passive manipulation is at baseline to do with surviving and having your needs met, asking for food and shelter is passive. Active manipulation on the other hand is where you consciously use all the techniques at your disposal to corral people into doing what you want: gaming them.

By gaming people you are using an understanding of psychology and human behaviour to manipulate them in an ways that they're not aware of. That there is exactly where the problem lies with gaming. It's that lack of consent and awareness from the person being gamed. Surely that's ok though? If someone is stupid enough to fall for your tricks that's their fault? No. There is a big difference between being open about your intentions: hey I'm selling you this product because it may help you and it will help me also, and, I'm going to trick you into thinking you need this product, even though I know you probably don't. It's not possible for people to be so switched on at all times that they know they're being manipulated and somehow just laugh it off as harmless. 

And so it is with gaming your way into having sex with a stranger. Is it being done with clear intention in a mutually beneficial environment? Should you feel good about winning at sex by gaming people? Probably not. Saying that I'm not completely naive, to a degree biology dictates that men "prove" themselves to women, and women get to do the choosing. But that is passive manipulation: ultimately survival. In other words e.g., men and women openly flirt with each other and the intention is obvious (flirting is of course passive manipulation and dependent on orientation too). With flirting the manipulation is in both directions for mutual benefit.

I think the correct way out of this mindset of gaming others, is to reflect it back on yourself, game yourself. In a way gaming yourself stops being gaming and turns into self-development:  you can't pull the wool over your own eyes (mostly). Learn to game yourself for your own benefit, and then let that be a springboard for getting what you want through more natural means. From having read comments on the forum, I think that's ultimately what Leo is pointing out in his video: work on yourself, game yourself not others.

--

For something completely different, I stumbled across this artist

I suspect I'm completely the wrong demographic, but I really like her voice, and the blatantly Scouse (Liverpool) accent, it's refreshing to hear. And another for good luck:

 

Edited November 9, 2021 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

I'm on a roll. I just had the strangest thought about what I'm doing in this journal. It's completely like I'm casting a shadow. You can see me but only by the shadow I'm casting into this journal. You then reconstruct me from my ramblings. It's like I'm giving you the mould of me and you're pouring your interpretation into it. But isn't this exactly what we do IRL? You can never know "me" only what I present to you. Is that sad? Nah. It's glorious, because I have infinite depth and have an infinite number of facets to show you.

Edited November 9, 2021 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

Yup I'm practising procrastination today. A bit soundbighty but it resonates with me:

 

[LastThursday]

I've always had a healthy relationship towards sleep (and food). With sleep I pay attention to my body, and if I don't it punishes me. I've never been able to function properly on too little sleep. By function I mean able to go to work and think about complex things, and that's been the number one driver for me getting enough sleep in my adult years. Sitting at a computer yawning for over eight hours and not being able to concentrate is literal torture.

Unfortunately, the world of work and presenteeism has never meshed too well with my sleep tendencies. I'm an owl not a lark, I've always found it a drag to get up in the morning and it was especially acute in my late teens and early twenties. I was known for my epic sleeps at university often sleeping for twelve hours (especially after a night of drinking and clubbing). I always shrugged my shoulders and just told everyone I needed the sleep, I was unapologetic. I definitely know if I've woken up too early as I feel like I've been drugged. Left to my own devices I will just come out of sleep feeling refreshed and not like a zombie.

My sleep pattern nowadays is definitely shorter, 8.5 hours seems just about right. But I'm usually under this in the week at around eight hours. I force myself to go to bed at midnight most nights - although that can slip sometimes. My waking up is slightly erratic and it can vary by up to an hour, even with an alarm! I don't see a pattern to this yo-yoing at all, but I definitely notice as winter draws in I get up later. This morning was a case in point as I was still struggling to wake up at 9am when I should have started work (at home). This definitely has to a be a morning light level kind of thing. And I still, even now, on occasion sleep ten hours or so especially on weekends. 

I've found myself napping more as I've got older, a stereotype that I never thought I would take on when I was younger. I think this is less to do with being older and more to do with being able to go to sleep more efficiently. I've always struggled to actually get to sleep, my mind was always hyperactive (can't you tell?) most of my life and being an owl, especially at nights. But around 15 years ago I took the bull by the horns and trained myself to be able to go to sleep better, mostly by distracting my racing thoughts with hypnosis of sorts, and it worked eventually (I'm sure I've written about it previously). Nowadays my mind is a lot calmer and less anxious, and I find I can switch off and sleep when I need to - it's a relief. I'm not sure what caused the hyperactivity in the first place, but it could have been a combination of genetics, possible ADHD, caffeine consumption, or any number of other things. But I will say cutting out caffeine, and wearing blue light blocking glasses in the evening have helped me tremendously.

I notice that there's definitely a slight stigma against getting proper sleep. Some people just require more sleep biologically than others, regardless of whether they're owls or larks. Society wants you to burn the candle at both ends, by getting into work on time, but also by indulging in leisure late into the night, and sleep mostly gives way to this sort of stupidity, as if sleep were optional. There's periodic wails from the media of an epidemic of lack of sleep, but I'm not so sure about it. The fact is most of us can function just ok on slightly less sleep than we should be getting, and unless you're a parent you catch up on the weekend in any case.

There's a definite strong link between not getting proper sleep and some forms of bad mental health. Some go so far as to say that some mental health problems are actually sleep disorders in disguise. My suspicion is that it goes both ways and possibly training people to get proper sleep may go some way to improving their lives. Sleep! It's the best.

[LastThursday]

I've never really had much of a sense of shame or regret for my actions. I think it comes from not having engaged with myself much emotionally in the past, it just never really made much sense to me. I've taken a more utilitarian view of my mistakes: I made them, I apologised where I needed to, I put things right where I could, and then I moved on. This feels like enough for me. The idea of ongoing self-flagellation or deep shame for my actions never fully connected.

Is this a failing of mine? I don't know. I do know that I'm not a psychopath and completely lacking in empathy. In fact my empathy muscle has got stronger over the years both in terms of feeling other's plight and also expressing empathy, it comes more naturally nowadays. I think when I was younger I was far more dismissive of people's emotions and what I saw as emotional hangups. I just couldn't understand why holding a grudge or unresolved emotion for any length of time was actually productive in any sense. On the whole I took people at face value and expected the same from others, most people seemed to understand I was this way, but I also put many people's noses out of joint - some people really didn't click with me at all. Again, I just didn't care if someone didn't like me, it made no difference to me.

This kind of binary hot/cold response from people dogged me most of my life. Particularly in a work setting I didn't suffer fools or pander to people's emotional reactions, this even got me effectively fired from one job, because the big cheese just didn't click with me in any way, I just wasn't interested in playing to his tune. To layer on top of that, I had a certain amount of social anxiety which made me socially awkward at times. If I connected with someone, then I could be fluid and relaxed with them, but a lot of the time there was awkwardness on my part and I was always very aware of it. The awkwardness in my case was a symptom of hyper-awareness, I would pick up on someone's body language or tone and I wouldn't know what to do with it, and then that would make me behave awkwardly. This ongoing social awkwardness eventually came to head, I simply got fed up with it. I regularly wondered if I was autistic (I still do sometimes) and that I would never be comfortable socially which depressed me. The equation was simple: lack of empathy plus social awkwardness equals autism (although I have other tell-tale traits). In the end I broke down, I simply had to change myself or off myself, I couldn't continue the way I had.

What I've learned is that I can be more empathetic if not more emotional with it. The realisation is that empathy is not emotion, it's just that most people connect the two as some sort of natural law. Empathy is really understanding, and understanding comes either from your own experience or by having enough interest to learn what's going on with the other person. Paradoxically having had a kind of breakdown, I'm a lot more empathetic towards people and particularly with bad mental health, I now have a deep understanding of how helpless and confusing it can be. I also know that it's possible to navigate through it and come out of the other side. Also, I have learned to connect with my emotions more deeply and listen to what they have to say.

I'm a lot less socially awkward than I was. I was always and still am interested in people; I've learned to tone down my hyper-awareness in social situations and just "go with the flow" and "be present", it's the moments when I'm not in flow that I become awkward and it still happens sometimes. I think that hyper-awareness of body language came from being very visual with my mum, as she was congenitally deaf and I had to have a highly refined feel for eye contact and facial expression. I eventually realised that I did have social nous and I wasn't autistic, or if I was it was possible to overcome it, largely, in my case. I still struggle with some social aspects, but I'm more rounded now: I opened the door to my prison.

There are still things in my past which I feel regret or cringe about, I know I behaved in a hurtful unempathetic manner at times. I suppose this is me confessing to strangers, but that's fine, it's only ever our own conscience we have to make peace with. Some damage can't be undone not really, the past is immutable, I can only try and be a more loving person now.

[LastThursday]

Mixing relationships and physics.

When a new person enters our spacetime there is a kind of gravitational pull. The pull can be weak and far away or strong and close. This is not necessarily sexual but just a kind of resonance between people. You both begin to enter into a kind of gravitational embrace circling each other for a while. The revolutions can be slow and weakly felt; that acquaintance you see every six months, other times it's a wild merry-go-round exciting or nauseating. Everyone is affected by each other's gravity, spacetime is warped, we inevitably warp and change each other. But gravity can be unstable and chaotic, it's equations tell us that much, and our closest planets get flung out far into the void. We feel the loss and readjust our web of gravity, but their perturbations have already changed us and we are imprinted with them and them us - no one is ever truly lost or completely forgotten.

Edited November 12, 2021 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

I have a soft spot for street art, especially graffiti. It can be clever and ephemeral. Why should art just be confined to galleries and stately homes? Where I used to live in Brighton seems to be a kind of epicentre for it, or at least it's well tolerated there. Anyway, here's a scenic walkthrough of some of the stuff I've taken pictures of over time.

Brighton:

John Peel (Brighton)

I think the kissing policemen is a Banksy and had to be protected from vandalism:

A recurring character:

Pisa or Florence (can't remember which):

 

Vienna:

This one had a mirror in it!

 

New Zealand:

 

London:

 

Belgium:

 

Devon:

 

Spain:

Someone felt the need to show their undying love, it's sweet:

 

Some picture keep duplicating don't know why...

Edited November 14, 2021 by LastThursday
Duplicates

[LastThursday]

Where do people go when they die? Is this question even a question? Going somewhere implies a destination that isn't here, where could that be? I'll dig into a bit more. We can start with the division between being alive and not being alive.

If you zoom right out and take the Earth a whole, it's clear that what it means to be alive is highly concentrated there. When you look elsewhere at other planets or whatnot there's no signs of life whatsoever. It looks like life if synonymous with planet Earth. It's clear that living beings are constituted from the Earth, they constantly take in food to fight entropy (destruction) and excrete waste. So a living being is a complex physical/chemical process in segue with the environment of Earth. Earth itself has many processes in feedback loops such as the water cycle and carbon cycle and thermohaline circulation. So Earth itself is a complex set of processes and could be said to be living. Even if Earth itself is not living, it's clear that the dividing line between a living being and the Earth is hard to pin down because the Earth evolves living beings and living beings modify the Earth, living/non-living are in complex feedback loops with each other. At one extreme you can take the system as a whole and say Earth is a living organism, and "life" is a strict subset of that one organism.

When a person dies, the delicate cascade of chemical feedback loops is interrupted and shuts down. That is physical death. The answer to where does a person go is: nowhere, they are chemically disassembled and reconstituted elsewhere into other life or back into the organism of the Earth.

Earth is not the centre of the universe, instead it circles the Sun, because the Sun is more massive. But it is at the centre of life, it is more full of life than anywhere else. My gut intuition tells me that the Earth is the only living being in the universe (at the moment).

What about a person's consciousness and other non-physical attributes? If we presuppose that a person has a consciousness (they could be a p-zombie), then we have to ask the question about whether their consciousness is separable from their body. Because if their consciousness is separable it could be that it doesn't need a body to continue existing. This would seem unanswerable, because how do we check for a disembodied consciousness? How do we interact with a pure non-physical thing, how does it interact with us?

It seems like there's a symmetry here. Being alive seems inseparable from the Earth and being conscious seems inseparable from being alive. I don't think that's a coincidence at all. If the Earth is a giant organism, then it could be said to have one consciousness - its own. As disambiguated individuals we are like the limbs of the organism of Earth, and we share in its consciousness. I'd go one step up and make the three the same: Earth/Consciousness/Life is one thing, the same thing. I suspect there isn't a hierarchy of containment, Earth, Consciousness and Life are on an equal footing and interchangeable.

Looking at our deaths as indvididuals is asking the wrong the question, only Earth/Consciousness/Life carries on.

Edited November 16, 2021 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

must work must work must work must work must work must work must work must work must work must work must work

I was talking to my nephew on the weekend at his sister's 18 birthday party. We started chatting about the difficulty of learning different languages, he said he was picking up Russian and he went through the Cyrillic alphabet with me. He's got a knack for it, he's only 15. I told him I'd learnt the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets at some point way back, but had forgotten. Then he went on to showing me his Rubik cube selection, and all these different algorithms he'd learnt, I showed him a few I'd learnt too - he proceeded to solve a 5x5x5 monster in about ten minutes. Then he started to talk about his love of coffee and all his specialist filter equipment and machinery he'd bought. I told him that I'd watched a James Hoffmann (coffee expert) video just the other day on YouTube. At that point I was wondering if he was my clone. I have high hopes for him (lol).

must work must work must work must work must work must work must work must work must work must work must work

I've been designing a new programming language, it's been on and off the last few years. I kind of work like that, a project lays dormant for a year and then I get the itch again to start tinkering. The programming language is to compile down to 8-bit machine language, so I can write a new retro game for original 80's equipment. I have a BBC Micro in my cupboard which sometimes sees the light of day, but mostly I use an emulator since it's easier than spending twenty minutes setting up my old micro. I started to write an adventure game, you know Go North, Take Lamp type of game in 6502 assembler. More accurately I wrote an engine that would take the game description, possible moves etc and then that would create the assembler code.

The thing that makes me drop a project are when I hit a wall of some description. This happens often in programming. In this particular case I had immense problems with needing to use recursion (searching rooms for objects, where objects could be inside other objects), I thought I would just let it stew and get back to it. It's been two years. In the interim I thought I would create a new programming language so I could actually crack the recursion problem and program the adventure game in that new programming language instead. I'm nearly there. Except. I'm stumped at implementing recursive functions, as I have to do variable address allocation and follow the function call-chain around, but my compiler hangs and runs out of stack space because it follows the recursive function calls around and around forever. I'm sure there's a link with spirituality here... Anyway, it's all very niche and esoteric stuff, my own private land of fun to play in.

must work must work must work must work must work must work must work must work must work must work must work

As the year winds down and so does Covid restrictions, I feel like I should be getting out more. I've had something on nearly every weekend for the last few months. But I think what I'm lacking is exploring new things. I want to get to see some live bands, I'm happy to go solo, but I'm notoriously bad at remembering to look stuff up and booking it. I also want to learn to fly, I must just, book it - a friend of mine is also interested in this. I definitely want to get some art galleries and museums in - in my defence I did go to the Royal Academy the other week, so big tick. Some theatre might be good too, several friends may be interested in that. And I need to decide what to do for Christmas, I've already got two different sets of friends invite me over, must choose, or contact my Dad and see him in Dublin instead. He's as bad as me about Christmas however, so it won't be very Christmassy, but it will definitely cheer him up to see me. I want to travel, I want sunshine and warmth, I fell in love with Italy and may go again. I also have an invite from my sister to see her in the states. I also feel like it would be fun to take my nephew out and indulge his nerdy love of coffee in some way, maybe there's some sort of coffee exhibition probably in London? Who knows!

must work must work must work must work must work must work must work must work must work must work must work

I know I know I'm starting work now, it's 11:13. Music to work to:

must work must work must work must work must work must work must work must work must work must work must work

Ok, I'm super distracted this morning, still haven't started work.

I've also been playing chess nearly every day, thanks to Chess.com. My blitz rating has seen a steady linear increase over the last few months since I started. Very frustratingly I wiped out my hike of a hundred rating by consecutively losing about ten games. I realise this is all part and parcel of mastery, one step forward two steps back. It's all about calibration, whenever you're learning something new, new knowledge and techniques need time to bed in. Whilst that bedding in is happening everything suffers: the rating goes down. But once that's happened everything accelerates, I suspect my rating will rebound. Of course with chess actual stufy of techniques (opening, middle and end game), gives you great advantage, at the moment I'm just plucking the low lying fruit of learning through repetition and just playing the game.

My rating in the slower games (30 minutes instead of blitz 5 minutes), is about 200 higher because I can take my time and think about things and not make idiotic moves. But mastery requires both, quick thinking and slow thinking. That's the point of all mastery, you cover all the angles in depth.

Ok, I'm working now 11:28.

must work must work must work must work must work must work must work must work must work must work must work

Edited November 17, 2021 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

Are you a secretly a perfectionist? No matter how wise and together you are, there will always be situations that turn you into an idiot. That's the joy of living. You secretly long for everything to fall perfectly into the scheme inside your head. That intricately and well rehearsed world you thought of yesterday crumbles away today; you're just playing a game of controlling the world through thought. It makes you anxious, neurotic. There's a better way and that's to give up control.

Giving up control doesn't mean giving up everything and being bullied by stark reality. It just means giving up on your pefectionism. Idealism is perfectionsim, ideology is perfectionism, optimism is perfectionsism, pessimism is perfectionism, bigotry is perfectionism, narcissism is perfectionism. Instead you want to sway with the wind, bend your branches a bit, lose a few leaves. Non-perfectionism means being nimble and changing yourself as the reality in front of you changes. It means being present. It means mastering yourself, not only because mastery requires you to think on your feet, but also being prepared for any eventuality: this is the art of being alive. Out of non-perfectionism you can ever grow and stretch yourself, be shaped and moulded by the intelligence of nature around you; freeing yourself from the prison of your perfect world and stepping out into the awe and beauty of a seemingly imperfect reality.

 

Edited November 18, 2021 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

One of things I aim for in this journal is openness.

There's definitely a fine line to be walked here. I don't mean in terms of not airing my dirty laundry - although some things are too dirty to air - I mean not falling into the "look at me" trap. I'm effectively anonymous here, which makes being open easier (saying that, anyone with two brain cells to rub together and enough motivation could work out who I am, but I'm probably half a world away from you physically). Maybe trap is too strong a word here.

There's a lot of unconcious types of "look at me" type behaviour. Some categories might be: "look at me", peacocking, virtue signalling, being brash and intrusive, faux humility, drama, having something to prove, sageness, stroky beard wise mage behaviour, pure narcissism, put everyone down troll (i.e. "you're all idiots I know best"). The essence of all these types of behaviour is to get attention in some way, and by extension to receive the love of people (on here mostly from familiar strangers).

But what else are we all doing by publicly journalling, other than just getting attention for our woes and ideas? Isn't that the whole point?

To counterbalance the unconcious or sometimes conscious attention grabbing, the other thing I try and aim for is just being spontaneous and coming from a place of genuine exploration. This aspect is more introspective but also sharing oriented. I want to share myself for the sheer love of doing it. I want my love to go outward without expectation of response or attention grabbing. Everything else that hangs off that is a bonus. When people respond to something I write that resonates with them, I get a nice fuzzy feeling (probably oxytocin ha!). I post to try and explore and work through my problems, and to help others do the same even obliquely, and sometimes I just post spontaneous shit, because I'm a human with spontaneous wit - and I hope that someone sometimes clicks with my own particular brand of quirkiness.

What am I trying to say? Dunno. Be the light, warmth and love, don't be a black hole sucking everything in.

 

 

[LastThursday]

What, female composers? You betcha:

 

[LastThursday]

I thought I would try and explore the strange relationship I have between "winning" and "self-worth".  In this context I would take winning to be any situation where I am in/directly competing with someone and there's a clear criterion for winning. This can be absolutely anything, from having a bigger house, to a better paid job, to actually playing a game. 

It would seem that the link between winning and self-worth to be completely natural. By self-worth I don't mean physical assets, but the feeling I have about where I stand in some hierarchy in relation to others. This has been so unconsciously ingrained that my knee jerk reaction to not winning is a mixture of humiliation, deflation, frustration and other negative stuff. I'm not even particularly competitive, I have friends who are much more competitively minded either covertly or overtly. 

When things bubble up into consciousness sometimes it's in the most absurd way. I played a game of chess with a close friend of mine. I'd never played him and he hadn't played for about thirty years. I've been playing a lot recently, but before that I hadn't played for nearly as long.  He had me running around the whole game and I ended up conceding. I felt immensely frustrated at myself for losing and losing badly. For some reason it triggered some deep seated emotions within me. I've been trying to unpick exactly why I reacted as I did, because I suspect it's an integral (negative) part of my make up.

First things first. I know it's only a game and it's irrelevant, that's why it's absurd. My emotional reaction was absurd.  So really it has nothing to do with the game itself. I'm struggling even now to articulate what is driving my frustration. 

I think before I even played my friend, I'd set up an expectation that I ought to win. I think for me a lot of my frustrations in life boil down to not being able to meet my own expectations. But it's not just purely expectation, it's also something to do with effort. I often have a sense of needing to put in a disproportionate amount of effort to achieve my expectations. That is, disproportionate to what other people seem to put in. It's a form of envy I suspect. There's a sense of needing to be at the same level (I'm not sure in what sense though) as my peer group. I'm not sure, there's a Pandora's box full of shadowy-work stuff here.

It doesn't make much sense logically. I am definitely very good at certain things, way outside what my peers are capable of. My chess friend is also a programmer, and I know for certain that if we were playing a game involving programming, I would outclass him. He's also very numerate, and in certain ways I would beat him there too. But the similarities between us are what brought us together into the same peer group in the first place. So if it is all envy then I'm envious because of our similarities! Madness I tell you.

I don't think it's all envy albeit that's part of my frustration. In some other areas I'm poorer at. In (high) school I was never picked for a team in P.E. classes, I was nearly always last. On the whole my coordination skills were underdeveloped at that age. So what? I'm good at some things and bad at others, me and the rest of humanity. But there was a lasting impact from those classes. It's something to do with visibility. I felt visibly humiliated time and time again by not being picked. In other words, I wasn't allowed to hide from my inadequacies it was always on public display. But neither was my lack of skill ever addressed, so I never had the chance to redeem myself with my peers. The only redemption I ever got was to be a very good sprinter, and the reason was we were all on a level playing field - I didn't need to be chosen first.

I think for me the humiliation goes back further, were I would often wet myself in classes (I was five or so) because I was too afraid of the teachers to ask them for the toilets. Again, the root cause of the humiliation was never addressed (my fear), instead the onus was put on me to somehow get over my fear - what else could my parents do eh? That sort of thing can leave a lasting impression for a five year old and perhaps it has. Saying that I've worked through most of that pain already, but something lingers (no it's not warm and wet lol).

I think all the things I have been good at have always been low visibility. I've always had a knack for S.T.E.M.-like subjects, I have an engineering degree, I work with computers, I'm good with figures, good with words. On the whole nobody ever gets judged by how good you are at calculus, you get judged by how many cars you have on the gravel drive. It's purely visibility. Maybe this is the nub of it, I've never really proven myself in areas with high visibility: physical wealth, social prowess, drive and determination, physicality - the stuff that people seem to openly care about.

Being male also factors into this frustration. Men implicitly operate competitively. Within a peer group there's constant one-upmanship, you get acceptance if you can prove yourself. Normally this is masked by lightheartedness and jokes, which stops any aggression or escalation. However, I have never bought into this way of behaving, it always seemed transparently fake to me. To a degree it's lessened by having established long term peer groups myself, but there's still an undercurrent of it when dealing with any men such as in the work place. But I'm not completely immune. I still have an innate drive to win and come out on top. I see the game for what it is, but I can't help playing it, mostly to my dissatisfaction. Winning is linked to my self-worth and place in the pecking order. 

Strangely, I know and behave like an alpha male would. I am alpha de facto, but not in visible things that people actually care about; I play it down as much as possible. This is the problem, people (men and women) want to treat me as beta, but as soon as they get to know me they realise it's not so easy. My greatest asset has always been my intelligence, and on most counts I win hands down. I say this not to re-affirm myself, but I've come to realise that of the less visible markers of "winning" intelligence is right up there. People never grade you on intelligence, but just how adept you are socially for example, or how expensive your clothes are. In fact, often intelligence is seen as a bad thing to have - what worse thing to your dominance is there than someone who could undermine you in areas you're weak in? Intelligent people show up less intelligent people and they don't like it.

So with age I've come to an uneasy truce. I have the confidence to calibrate my own self-worth and not be bothered by external factors, but I'm still bothered by concerns about hierarchy and social standing relative to my peers. And I realise I'm both choosing my peers and the expectations I'm trying to live up to. It's a game I'm ultimately playing with myself, and getting frustrated at. The whole undercurrent of feeling I have is of never being quite good enough, despite putting in immense efforts in my life. Most of my peers have higher paid jobs, bigger houses (I rent), families, wives and husbands etc. 

What next? I simply need to drop this silly game of who's better. It's not serving me now and has never really served me well emotionally. Let other people get on with what they're good at and what they aspire to and what they think is important, and I'll try and do the same without envy, or frustration. I need to judge myself by my own yardstick and set up my own well thought out expectations for what I want in future. If other people become part of my plan, then great, if not, so be it.

Edited November 22, 2021 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

I do like a bit of art history. I went to a Gauguin exhibition a few years ago, so it's good to get some background on the guy:

 

[LastThursday]

Two thoughts are swimming around this morning, which label themselves as: Parts Integration and Flogging a Dead Horse.

Flogging a Dead Horse

Too many times in my life I've buried my head in the sand because it's easier to keep the status quo. I'm a path of least resistance kind of guy, life is hard enough without conciously choosing to make it harder - well that's my sentiment whether it's right or wrong. Inevitably though, sticking with the status quo can make me unhappy to the point where I can't stand whatever situation I'm in any more. I then know in my gut that change (and possible upheaval) is coming and there's no putting it off any more. For me this has mostly been in the realm of relationships and work.

I've been getting ever more irritable about my whole situation recently. I've been especially irritable about work. Since the pandemic I've been working from home. It has its pros and cons. One big pro is that I can be a lot more relaxed about how I work, I'm no longer chained to a desk in an artificially lit room. I used to refer to my workplace as The Cave. The big con is that my levels of motivation to actually do work have plummeted. But, it seems to have largely gone unnoticed (!).

I've become very irritable about work in general to the point where I've "complained" to my manager. He (obviously) has to react to this in some way. In doing this I've started something which I really shouldn't have. The reaction has been one of tightening down on how I work: it has been suggested that I allocate time to different types of tasks each day. This goes completely against the big pro of working from home - in other words they are impinging on my freedom. Instead, what needs to happen is that the erratic nature of my client's requests need to become less erratic - they need to sort themselves out, it's a case of too many chiefs.

It's all about how everyone perceives my role within the company and the history behind it. Before I joined, my role was actually within my client's company, i.e. I would have been directly employed by my client, it's just that my predecessor was physically at a different site (the company I actually work for now).  This set up was all about convenience. What happened when I joined was that I was no longer employed by the client, but by the company I'm in. As a consequence I get treated as if  I'm their employee by my client. This creates a very different dynamic from simply being an outsourcing company who do work for you. I push back very hard on this point. I'm simply not my client's lacky, it's not what I'm employed to do. Neither am I a project manager or a data analyst, but my client simply expects this from me and when I push back they get annoyed. They don't pay me enough to be all these things at once.

The bottom line is, it's time to go. My patience with age is actually getting worse. However, my irritability has nothing really to do with work, but with my life in general. I know getting a new job is not going to solve my irritability (that's why I've hung on). The only way to solve that is to STOP FLOGGING THE DEAD HORSE THAT IS MY LIFE. Until I solve my life set up I'm going to feel both frustrated and irritable. Change and upheaval is both inevitable and necessary it's just a matter of when and how.

Parts Integration

One of the most of enlightening things I learnt when I did my NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming) courses, was that we are made up of parts. We all go around pretending that we're whole and undivided and a single entity. We're not. We are different people on different days and different situations. Sometimes those parts conflict with each other: e.g. you want two different things at once. NLP has techniques for integrating parts, or in other words recognising that disparate parts often ultimately want the same thing but in different ways.

The idea here is that if all the different parts that make you up are in harmony and working towards the same purpose, then you will be a more effective human being. I resonate strongly with this idea. A lot of my paralysis is due to having conflicting interests and desires. I suspect that if everything was more aligned then I would be motivated to change my life for the better.

A lot of what I go over in this journal is about forensically looking at those parts to see if I can glean anything new. One of the problems with the model is that it's not clear what a "part" is exactly. I think instead it should be taken for what it is, a convenient label for identifiying different ill-defined aspects of yourself.

As you go through life, you pick up knowledge, understanding, experience rather like a snowball growing larger. All these things "stick" to you mostly unconciously or without filtering. So there isn't really a centre to your being, we are just collages of stuff. Because that process is kind of random, most of it doesn't hang together too well. What happens in day to day life, is that "parts" come to fore and temporarily take over your being: your emotions, thinking and behaviour. One impulsive part makes you make a rash decision, one more risk averse part makes you cringe at that decision later. We're constantly tossed and turned by these parts at their whim. We are blind to our own nature.

What can be done to improve this situation? What NLP suggests is getting part A and part B together and asking each "What is your higher intention?" For example part A is impulsive, so it's higher intention might be "freedom". At that point to keep pushing, "What is the higher intention of freedom?", it might be "to feel joy" and so on. You do the same process with part B, which might be the risk averse part; it's higher intention might be "protection" and so on. The idea here is to come to a point with both parts where they agree: normally at something like "to feel loved". At that point you carry out the integration process and actually physically meld the two parts together (using anchoring). The two parts stop being two parts and become one part.

Using the above process you can see that if you do it for enough parts, then slowly slowy you become more integrated and whole, each part works in harmony with other parts, because they all recognise that highest intention.

For me personally, one part would be "stick with the status quo" and another would be "take a risk with a new job" or "get a girlfriend". Can this NLP process be done on yourself? Yes (and I should do it), but it's nowhere near as effective as when someone else does it to you.

[LastThursday]

I can't let myself off the hook. I need to keep questioning and introspecting until I get so damn bored with it that I have to take action. 

Over time I've managed to install within myself a dynamic that actually paralyses me, it stops me from developing myself and stops me from getting the best out of life. Somehow I need to break up that dynamic and install a different one in its place. I know this is is going to be incredibly hard to solve, because it's all bound up in my identity and history. 

One way to start is to treat the whole dynamic thing as a system. A system with interacting parts behaving as a whole (see my previous post).  It's worth noting that the system as it is works, it does actually hang together. I know it works because the system has been in place for decades and I've managed to survive comfortably off it. In all fairness I could survive off this dynamic indefinitely, or at least until retirement. But there are factors outside this system impinging on it.

When you start talking about systems then everything becomes a system. The paralysis dynamic (PD) I have is a system inside a larger system. That larger system includes elements which interfere with the working of the PD. That is to say that even though the PD has served me well in terms of survival and comfort, there is more to life than pure survival. The larger system includes desires physical and emotional and unexplored experiences. One large component is the need for expansion. The PD is about hunkering down and protection from the big-bad world, but expansion is its opposite: it's about exposure and risk and novelty.

On the whole then the even larger dynamic is that of the PD on one side of the see-saw being overweight and not giving a chance to Expansion on the other side. But because Expansion is not actual or very lightweight, it only sits in this space of possibility, which makes it nebulous and ill-defined. Nevertheless the need for expansion is there and is getting stronger. It's getting stronger as I get more confident and sure of myself, and it's becoming a petulant teenager.

Could it be that that is enough? That this need to expand my horizons will eventually become overwhelming, it will put on weight and tip the balance towards itself? Is it enough to suck it and see? One pressing aspect against this is time: how long do I have till old age? How many years of vitality do I have left that I can squander in waiting for expansion to assert itself? Surely when my vitality dwindles then needing to hunker down and survive will become overwhelming? Isn't that all old people seem to do? (A paragraph of questions!)

I think that question around vitality is driving my neurosis about paralysis. It's making the problem pop out in sharp relief. I'm fit, healthy and mentally in my prime right now. I need to act now and I need to keep acting until I can't any more. Or at least that's the neurotic urgency I feel.

It terms of history my life has been a trajectory towards ever more comfort and stasis. My teenage years so unsettled me that all I wanted was to escape it and to have some sense of stability, emotional and otherwise. At the time escape was expansion. I've been hugely successful in that sense: I do have a sense of pride in myself and my achievements; whatever I turn my hand to I make a success of. So my paralysis is part of that success, it seems churlish just to throw it away, and replace it with god knows what. Why replace certainty with uncertainty?

To be continued ...

 

Edited November 25, 2021 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

@LastThursday Shorts (I should start a YouTube channel):

I'm bored to death of programming for a living. But if I do anything else now, it will take me years to ramp up both in experience and pay. Do I stick to what I know or take the plunge? How do I choose what to plunge into, I have so many interests and things I could potentially do. I know that concentrating on just one thing for a living is going to bore me to death in the long run, I need variety. Maybe I could take Leo's approach and have a theme around which I tie all my other interests together. But how do I tie together: computing, music, mathematics, art, sociology, engineering, languages, history, writing etc. etc.? How the hell do I make a living out of all that? Yes yes a YouTube channel, get with the times Guillermo.

Edited November 30, 2021 by LastThursday