Lost in Translation

The soundtrack to Lost in Translation is done by the band Air and is quite good, but watching it tonight, it occurred to me that thematically - not just aesthetics but the suggestions presented in the constant companionship of the incomprehensible city that surrounds them - the band M83 might make for a tighter fit. There is a strange presence in each of... is it possible - oblivion? Air is appropriately surreal but inappropriately reassuring - or am I wrong? Perhaps Air isn't reassuring us at all. Perhaps they are merely working at the same punctuated speed as our higher cognition - requiring events, lapses, days to wear through generic boredom into something conclusive.

A couple years ago, I had a very positive initial reaction to the film sub-genre uselessly known as "Mumblecore", when I saw both Mutual Appreciation and even better, Quiet City. The latter made practical use of the space between characters as well as the characters themselves - what went unsaid and undone and unseen are all in our minds when a movie has the patience to let our minds wander - carefully, purposefully. But Lost in Translation (and Coppola's earlier "The Virgin Suicides") does this even better. The strange alien city is constantly speaking underneath Bob and Charlotte; after a time, it is there even during relatively grounded scenes like those that take place in the hotel bar.

I have liked this movie more after each viewing, as my attention gradually shifts from the largest moments to the smallest. My favorite moments tonight are the flower arranging, the first night in the club with Charlie Brown, the shots of Charlotte sitting on the windowsill looking down at the city that she doesn't understand; as her marriage, as her life.

The Best Laid Plans Do Not Suffice?

I am happy to say that as of today, when I look back at the last eighteen months, things have gone well:

1) I finished my degree. I succeeded under conditions I would have scoffed at attempting not long ago. I achieved a GPA (3.5) that was an ambitious target just two years ago (my final two years brought it up significantly).
2) I was hired back at my old job in a limited capacity. I proved myself and was hired back full time. Not only have I grown far beyond my old capabilities, but I am learning faster, "learning to learn" faster, making better use of my time, making wiser, more holistic decisions, utilizing knowledge and ideas from a variety of fields, and executing on my own goals more consistently than ever before.
3) I am extraordinarily close to being free of the need for my AD/HD medication. This means I am near the end of a 10-year long journey to become behavioral medication free without repercussions for my mental state. I am close enough today to free of it that I consider myself "there" already. I can again see the medicine as a worst-case safety net, rather than a constant crutch.
4) Although it is a simplification, I have made one big investment in each of the last two years that I feel was a real home run. I have refined my methodology considerably in the last two years and have concrete ideas that I am highly confident in to continue moving in that direction. Less is more and I am striving for significantly less.

Still, all the machinations of a society cannot - within themselves - produce contentment. Indeed, I am NOT content, and maybe no closer. Perhaps what I have done so far is the easy part. Witness what is to come:

1) Eliminate the need for stimulants and mental hyperactivity in order to navigate weekdays. Utilize some combination of exercise, meditation, and other mental conditioning to replace hyperactivity with true clarity and balance.
2) Balance societal attentions (job, money management) with personal interests. Find the right books and read them. Spend time specifically with music. Find a satisfying and natural way back into making music.
3) Work because it is a satisfying challenge. Become sufficiently financially independent to spend time unemployed, traveling. Extinguish the wealth accumulation compulsion and make decisions that affect finances holistically. Acknowledge my inherent expectations for my own life, rather than falling into a fate one day at a time.
4) Fully acknowledge and internalize my obligations to my partner. Make decisions together for a future we will share.

The Search for Meaning, part two

"Isn’t that what being young is about, believing secretly that you would be the one person in the history of man that would live forever?"
- David Aames, Vanilla Sky

Boy, does that quote hit the nail on the head for me. I really believed that - quite exactly - when I was young, but it was more than that, too. I imagined the graduation speeches, and television interviews, and one-off dinners with prominent people that I would give; a gift of my extended wisdom, the sightlines of my brain that stretched farther than others for reasons that today I can only describe as "heroic". (Thanks go to Jung, who correctly saw that Superman is not arbitrary.)

It is sad to look back and see that such boundless dreams have been extinguished by nothing more than the passage of time, but such is life. The ultimate mystery is alive in the universe; what complaint regarding our existence can be brought forward that is not a misunderstanding? Indeed, I am fascinated by Leibniz' posit that we live in the best of all possible worlds, although my view of a "God" does not require that it be so. On the other hand, I am philosophically unsophisticated; perhaps a few years of concentrated reading on the subject would bring around one or another of my supporting positions.

What more is there to say? The thoughts of youth trail off now, although I try to hold on. We are what we used to be for only so long, and I - perhaps in contradiction - try each day to fall asleep a little wiser than I was when I woke up, even as I try to hold on to what I was. Which do I want more? I push on bravely because the past will fade regardless. I don't ultimately want complicated things; only to be happy.

The Search for Meaning, part one

I learned in business school that execution matters more than ideas in delivering value to the customer. I suppose that execution is similarly relevant in the search for meaning in the world. It has done me little good to sit on the couch and read amazing books, gaining knowledge and yet failing to process it into action. My world - hidden away in my mind - rhymes but it lacks rhythm.

I experienced a troubling period of boredom late in my stay in Finland, after many of my friends had left and all the "easy" things around to do had been done. I often went ice skating alone, or walked to the coffee shop and read. This was at the tail end of a particularly active period of time in my life - both Finland and before - but also foreshadowed a particularly frustrating period of inactivity over the six months following my return home.

I have continually attempted to deconstruct myself over the last several years, to attempt to understand what I am doing wrong and fix it. More than any external changes in our lives, internal ones require bravery. By the fall of 2008, I had already long wanted to make myself more a person of action. But despite my readiness, it was the external world that shoved me into action - I had merely to not resist. The period of time proved nothing of my ability to coerce activity from the world.

I didn't mind - indeed I basked in it - but I should have seen the recoil coming. I returned to what the persistent parts of my personality required me to return to - a frustrated introvert. The summer and fall of 2009 were painfully inert for me, as I waited in expectation of further opportunity to step up and shake my hand.

Failure: it has been said that the world looks like a nail to the man with the hammer. Perhaps I was guilty of seeing the world through one lens. I tried to fix the situation with medicine combined with thought, but I mistakenly believed that thought was the hammer and all change looked like a nail. Our minds are not so robust, but they can do an exceptional job of appearing to be to us.

Failure #2: we are all creatures of habit, but the variety of habits from one of us to the next is enormous. As much as true self-awareness cannot exist without honesty, we can be blindsided. I have crossed the boundary of the popular definition of "alcoholic" and returned, but my addiction was never physiological. My psychological addictions, numerous and robust, have required hosts of otherwise irrelevant habits. The search for meaning - marked by uncertainty, doubt, and fleeting solace - leads those of us compelled by its promise to places outside our discretion. I can not explain where the existential comfort comes from when I sit with my close friends at the bar, but I do not complain. I am happy there and with them, and if it is indeed a delusion that there is some grand reason for me to feel that way, then long live the delusion.

The Closest I Will Get To A New Year's Resolution

I have always believed in the adage that the best solution is usually simple, but this is a difficult thing to remember in regard to ourselves. Many of us who analyze ourselves do so out of habit, and thus do so restlessly, ceaselessly, confabulating problems and confabulating solutions and playing a game akin to "throw every idea against the wall to see what sticks". At times I have been stuck too much in a process of analyzing my every changing habit to try to understand its genesis and ultimate destination, but this is a losing battle. We ruin ourselves when we try to wire ourselves for self-improvement but do so in a way that does not respect the rule that the best solution is usually simple. Unfortunately, all this time my unstated creed seems to have been "urgency", rather than "simplicity".

What do I want to accomplish? I want to see the arc of my life in a lucid way, come to terms with it, and proceed by my own design, with the knowledge it affords me (or offends me) with. And, perhaps now I am at a stage where I can see that - through no particular virtue of my own, but rather as a simple arrival at a clearing in the fog that occurs throughout life if we maintain sufficient honesty and patience.

Ten years ago, my life shifted from an external struggle with the world to one resolutely internal, and I have little reason to believe that it will ever shift back again. By the scale of the internal, I am sobered to look back and assess how far I have come in that time. So little has passed before me. I feel that if I have proven anything, it has been that one human has so little chance to change the world. We are at the mercy of the tides.

McCarthy wrote, "In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments." How true this has been for me. In many stages of my life, I have guarded my precious sentiments dearly, wanting to believe they are eternal. In every case the turning of the world has slowly washed them clean from me. What did a notion like "true love" ever do to me, in the end? Nearly kill me? For what? To believe that I belonged to something? Or to believe that something belonged to me? In the end, it simply engendered new sentiments. My life today is in the notable decline of the echo boom of sentiment from this one initial folly that has reverberated through my emotional life, from then until now. More conclusively, curing me of my sentiments has meant curing me of my personality, a shameful outcome in a world that I once believed I was destined to make a difference in.

What remains for me here? Can I be surprised again? Can I find anything to sustain myself above the sadness that returns so consistently?

I have asked these questions before, certain that the answers were bleak, and yet, in time I was proven so very, very wrong. I hope that it is true again. I want to believe that this place, so defined in my mind by the actions of an inscrutable past, also precedes greater joy to come. I wish for myself that I may outrun the gravity of apathy into a future filled with meaning.

The Mistake of Dualism

Of all the illusions that the mind bestows on us, one of the most invisible is the illusion that consciousness is a robust and ubiquitous presence in ourselves. We build ideas of the mind's working but we do so by mapping lessons we learn elsewhere in the world to it. To quote Cormac McCarthy:

"The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part"

The mind is chimeric in our visible universes and we are not equipped to understand it; we are equipped to understand where to find berries and how to associate sets of stimuli.

One of the recent illuminations that introspection has given me is to be skeptical of dualist concepts - that is, pairs of concepts, working differently but both explaining one thing, that we believe represent that thing correctly. For its part, dualism is a bad word in consciousness studies, and perhaps for good reason when you pull it apart in concept. Quite simply, dualism is the acceptance that no practical model exists for a phenomenon, so the next best thing is to have two that both do part of the job.

I had just woken today when I caught myself thinking that the man of id, confronted by dreams and instincts, is separate from the man of ego, reasoning what these things must mean and how to deal with them. But, in truth they are and can only be one man. The man of ego does not exist separate from the man of id; he is and has always been a product of their interaction, and vice versa. Instincts and logic are imperfect anchors; often so imperfect as to be inoperable. They do not have the luxury of existing in a vacuum; rather, they are always and everywhere set upon by external forces that they themselves affected but can never decidedly control.

Ultimately, dualism is a mental weakness. Dualities like this exist in our mind because of two facts:

1) We believe our minds police and enforce their own logical rigor; and

2) The mind does nothing of the sort

Such a combination is commonly known as a "cognitive bias". We may like to believe that we are more mentally resilient than we are, because our analysis of our resilience is a gestalt response, which itself is subject to all sorts of memory survivorship and other biases. Humans consistently overestimate their mental resilience in comparison to empirical testing.

A strange question to end with: would life be better or worse without cognitive biases? For my part, I'm not sure it would be possible to enjoy it at all.