Blog Archive
In todays post: loneliness and human nature
Conclusion: make sure to get out in the real world, but you still don't have to play the empty status game of others
----
Every man is an island
That used to be my motto. It was supposed to be a tongue in cheek opposition to the traditional adage "no man is an island". Over the years, however, I've in an accelerating fashion come to realize I was wrong. Sure, I still value independence and responsibility, but recent events have altered my perspective on loneliness and not least twoness dramatically.
Now I realize, I am hardly anything more than my web of relationships. I may not quite subscribe to investor Josh Wolfe's assertion that every man is a status seeking primate, but I do get that humans are social animals. We can't survive alone, not more than as more or less meaningless warm bodies, but not as fully functional consciousnesses.
Sapolsky's angle is that you can control the choice of reference group, and thus escape the otherwise unwinnable status game. Peterson talks about it in terms of lobsters and serotonin - if you start backing down, "losing", you'll lose more easily in the future and keep falling lower in the ranks. I understand, that's how unthinking animals work, and that humans too mostly are unthinking animals. But, we also have the ability to create mental models of problems, break them down into manageale parts, and not least to change perspective. I don't feel the need to be better than anybody else. Or, maybe I do, but my definition of better is to not play their empty game of status and fame.
In any case, I've thought I valued loneliness and independence much more than it turns out I actually did. Reverse FOMO has governed my actions at least the last 5 years. I've avoided real life interaction just to read and write stuff to no real avail. I've been an island, more specifically Easter Island, a barren and arid island with useless remnants of greatness. No more. My focus now is on the betweenness of the world, of meaningful actual interactions with other people. My knowledge, skills, emotional capacity is useless as an independent entity, however competent or fair. Useless.
---
Zero Activity Nodes
Humans are networks of cells and microorganisms internally, and nutrition, energy and people externally. A measure of network health is the number of dead nodes, of zero activity nodes (ZANs, like the number of store visitors not buying anything, or number of Amazon retailers not selling anything at all). For the internet at large, temporarily dead nodes don't really matter; the Internet is built to cope with a lot of ZANs. But for a network of humans, of friends, family, colleagues etc, dead nodes perpetuate themself, become forgotten and unwanted. The network's health deterioates. Even worse is that the nodes themself die and turn into Easter Islands.
The hyperconnected world risk turn a frightening number of people into slaves to their network devices, adding zero value themselves to the network. They'll become lonely, miserable, useless and eventually fully dead nodes. I think part of the problem lies in the left brain hemisphere increasingly dominating society since the advent of the semiconductor. The left brain is caught in a hall of mirrors of it's own logical, hierarchical, straight-line, constructs. It's revelling in being able to optimize every aspect of its undertakings, including streamlining social interactions with endless text messages and emojis over social networks and dating platforms, with ever fewer meaningful meetings end meldings of consciousnesses.
---
The medium is the message; you'll adapt to the medium and become its appendage
The mediums we use change and transform us. Beware what you use and what you don't. While you're consuming the wonderful entertainment through your device of choice, you are morphing into an entity more or less slave to that particular mode of consumption, be it a physical book reader or mobile phone user. We think we are superior to people hundreds or thousands of years ago. However, the ancients were in no way inferior to us; in many ways they knew more, not least since they had to memorize so much more than the multiplication table. Without the multiplication table or at least knowing the basics of addition you could hardly get around in the real world. The ancients had dozens if not hundreds of similar "guides", templates and shorthands that could be productively applied to various real life situations.
Did you, e.g., know Stonehenge and thousands of other sites like it were memory palaces, hard disks if you will, where the active memory component were (often singing) humans? By associating a sequence of particular stones with certain facts, while walking around the site singing about striking, absurd and gory stories, the ancients could remember thousands of important details governing their everyday life. Did you know that myths were outrageous and colorful to make them easier to remember, not as depictions of what they actually though had happened, and that we only get the kids' version without the practical details, since the details are lost to history? First you learn the easy to remember kid's version, like that about Adam, Eve, the flood, Noah, Kain, Able, Noses etc. Then you add the details, but now the people knowing the details are dead and only the major memory palace keystones are left to us to decipher. No wonder the stories seem ridiculous, superstitious and absurd. Aborigins, e.g., could sing themselves across a thousand miles of terrain using memory palace techniques. Their brains must have been fantastic machines compared to ours. Learn more about this on the Mindscape podcast here
Let me start by saying I don't like poetry. At all. It has provided me no discernible feelings or experience whatsoever. Ever. That doesn't, however, mean I'm not open to finding value in poems sometime in the future. Call me an optimist.
Do you remember the 3d pics, stereograms, that became popular decades ago? Stare, relax, wait, and boom a 3D picture appears. Like this one:
There's no reasonable way you can puzzle the multi colored pixels together to get to the dragon. It's because the dragon simply isn't made of the parts, at least not in a way that enables you to will it into existence by putting the pieces together in a linear, left-brainish, fashion.
You just have to take in the whole dragon* in one single relaxed gaze beyond the picture. The dragon isn't in the picture, it's in another dimension. Beyond and between.
That's how poems work too. I've been told.
You can't work your way to the "meaning" of a poem from word to word, from sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph, or by analyzing the line spacing and indents, use of italics, bold or capitals and so on. Instead, you have to relax, read it all in oneperceptive go, and just feel it, feel the betweenness, the longing, the outerworldly and ambiguous beyond the language itself. Language, in McGilchrist's words, is the left brain hemisphere's way of fixing, narrowing, flattening and in a way killing the living, ever fluid, reality and chopping it down to rough-hewn concepts and categories with no real one-to-one relation to the actual world.
What's being conveyed in a poem are ineffable human experiences that are inexpressible in mere words, but possible to participatein, in a relaxed state of openness to something other, an other that per definition can't be expressed in sequential language using familiar and static concepts like words. In essence you have to become the author and imitate his or her's experience immediately prior to writing the poem to understand it.
Music works in the same way as poetry, just a little harder to reach. The notes aren't interesting in themselves; it's their relationto each other, the pauses, and the entirety of the piece. The left brain HS can't see beyond the single notes, but the right HS can make sense of the whole, of the harmonies as well as disharmonies. You rarely think about the individual notes and tones, and little focus is put on cut out passages unless in the context of the whole.
Most of us understand music, but most of us don't get poetry. Least of all I. Given how important music is to me, and how much I love to read and write, McGilchrist has given me a reason to make a new effort with poetry. Perhaps, I'll try Tao Te Ching, since I'm so attuned to the parallels with quantum mechanics and my own thinking about time, reality and consciousness, inherent in Tao and Zen philosophy.
---
On that last topic, I highly recommend Sean Carroll's updated talk with Don Hoffman about the case against reality, and the case for the inevitable, evolved perceptional distance from real reality in Don's Desktop Universe vision.
---
* actually it's a shark, not a dragon, but I wanted you to discover it for yourself
My book is almost finished. Actually it is finished, and I’m just touching it up, pruning and clarifying certain ideas. Here’s a short excerpt, just one single sentence from the book, to get a taste:
Small, consistent steps, taken with awareness, celebration, feedback, analysis and course correcting, will always get you further than occasional and mindless spurts, not to mention being more enjoyable than a single marathon for some pie in the sky moonshot you might never complete, and might not even want if you ever get there.
That’s the excerpt. Here’s the interpretation:
Today I was interviewed on the topic of saving for retirement: when to start, how much to put away, when to start reducing risk, what to forego in terms of consumption, what to plan for etc. Saving and investing money is much like investing in your own life. It comes down to getting the small things right – and the earlier the better.
But small and early, the wu wei concept, isn’t enough. What you do small and early is utterly crucial. Hence you need to pay close attention to who you are, what you truly like, and what effect your chosen small steps actually have, as opposed to what you meant them to cause. That’s what I mean by taking your steps with awareness.
Celebrate your successes. Better yet, celebrate your learning experiences, good or bad. Then reinforce your habits or course correct. Every completed small step is reason to reflect about what you did, why you did it, what effect it had. It’s an opportunity to celebrate the fact that you did something, that you had an experience, that you learned something, and that you’re still around to improve on your decision making process. Analyze what happened, and feed your conclusions back into your habits, targets and life direction.
Do it continuously. Acknowledge that the process is a success in and of itself. Sticking to a good habit is more of a success than actually reaching a long term goal. Sure, keep tweaking and updating your desired direction, and possibly ultimate endgame, with the outcome of your taken small steps. But avoid staking years of toil and effort on long term goals and potentially empty hopes of grand celebrations at the finish line. You’re most likely somebody else when you get there. In addition, with the goal behind you, you have nothing, not even a process. In effect when you reach your long term goal you have nothing to celebrate. The risk is you establish another, equally arbitrary and long term goal just to fill the void.
Striving for a million dollars or a 200 lbs bench press are such useless goals, with nothing but emptiness waiting for you. Using your body every day, or managing your savings a little better every day, are processes you can be happy about every day.
Life and finances work much the same way, and should be considered in context of each other. You can’t predict, but you can prepare. Establish good habits that resonance with your personality and every day will be reason to celebrate sticking to and improving on your habits and best practices. The inevitable setbacks will be nothing more than temporary and largely inconsequential stumbles.
You don’t need to finish the marathon under 3 hours, there’s no defeat in falling and missing the magic number. The joy lies in every step along the way. If marathon runners were only in it for winning or beating a certain time, there would be very few marathon runners around. No, it’s the small steps, the habits, the joy of the process that drive them. The same idea applies to your life and your finances.
Trying to spurt will only make you miserable. Aiming for the moon might or might not get you there; and maybe, just maybe you’ll get to celebrate once. And then what?
Becoming strong, fast, rich, accomplished or successful isn’t about reaching a final goal, it’s about the becoming in itself, i.e., enjoying and celebrating the process. If you save, invest, socialize and exercise in a way that’s sound, ever improving, and not least enjoyable – taking small steps in full awareness and with an effective feedback process – chances are you’ll appreciate your life so much more, than even if you did succeed in a one in a billion moonshot effort to become rich, famous or achieve some other form of externally validated status.
Robert Sapolsky says that your subjective status is at least as important as your objective status, and after a certain threshold level of living standards, what group you choose to compare yourself to is the main deciding factor of how good you feel about yourself. I choose to rank myself in the serenity and happiness group, and there I come out on top, which also means I actually come out on top in therms of how I feel. Win-win-win.
More excerpts are coming up. The question, however, is whether I should include these long winded clarifications in the book or not. What do you think?
|
|
|
|