Today something happened in our world that may easily appear trivial. On one level, I would quite like to ignore it; to go to work tomorrow and think about all the things coming next around the bend. I rather expect most would; perhaps the outwardly cruel among us who did not ignore it would choose instead to laugh about it, and the inwardly cruel - at one time or another almost all of us - might divide it away from themselves into that mental compartment where the entirety of the rest of the world is kept, and tended to with a different standard than we hold for ourselves.
Our cat, Rocky, was neutered today, a few days short of our estimate of his first birthday. If I have been thinking about it a lot - and had, indeed, thought about it a great deal in the months leading up to now - it is not because I need to, but because I have grown obsessed with certain principles. I am not a perfect person but there are principles I know to be true, principles that are incontrovertible to me, and a person is only self-actualized when they find themselves acting, unquestioning, upon the application of their own principles. Ethics is in doing always and everywhere what you are certain to be right.
He didn't deserve to get neutered, for he has only acted always and purely like a cat since the day we brought him home. He has been - I hope beyond hope - happy, and comfortable, and fulfilled of his needs. The toys we buy for him often have a wheel of "pet's needs" on the back, with pie slices for emotional and physical and health needs of all kinds. I did not see the need to procreate listed on a pie slice. But that is what a cat is built to do before everything else. Is it possible for a cat to be happy who cannot fulfill that need?
I suppose there is a lot that goes into answering that question, and I do not dismiss it, but I digress regardless, because I do not know how to answer it. We give him a lot - attention, consideration, and care. He is a member of our family. It hurts us when he is hurt, such as today, when he was so scared, and later, when he was withdrawn. The nature of cat contradicts the nature of a domestic home and a family around the edges, at such times as when he claws and bites me as I reach out of bed in the night, when he often hurts me.
And I suppose neutering is a compromise, an opportunity cost. We, the epitome of evolution, who created the wheel and God and the Quad Stacker, can be so brilliant as to assess overall emotional fulfillment with a formula of clinical and precise logic. The opportunity is that we will be happier, and he will be calmer, and we will need spray him in the face with water less often, and we will need clean off urine-soaked items less often, and our family will feel like a family practicing the human social theory of mutual respect.
Besides, it becomes academic without any good alternatives. I would always be too afraid - of myself, more than anything - to release him into the wild, although I have wandered through those thoughts in my mind more than once, wandering whether his fulfillment years from now, a life of uncertainty and fears and fleeting comforts and so many moments where he can be what he truly is, would have outweighed the happiness we feel with him by our side and equipped with all the measures of our safety, insulated in our world, and of course, his happiness, too, which we hope he feels here with us.
We love him, and he will have a good home, but it is simply and practically impossible to improve upon something's inherent nature, and he is deserving of that, and I wish it could have been his.
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Monday, July 9, 2012
To Learn
It occurs to me now, eons too late, having read a thousand tired internet blog posts, that affectations are a waste of time to both reader and writer when the writer's purpose is not aesthetic. This tired nature is contagious to us; affectations are memes.
When one is writing with aesthetic intentions, affectations can be used in creative ways, most, exactly once, and with limited replay value. If there is a literary equivalent to picking up pennies in front of a steamroller, this is it. Sooner or later, your reader is flattened into a disinterested pancake, complete with googled eyeballs.
If there is a lesson, it may be that the purposes of writing are better facilitated by eliminating - always and everywhere - the use of affectations. Try to write only the truth, and eliminate everything, everything, everything else.
Can a meme be the truth? Yes, in its own, localized place, it is as real as anything else. A meme is the active, infected mind that conceives it, and likewise the vulnerable mind that receives it, and the medium traveled, and the past and future. But it is not the feelings it simulates.
It took me a terribly long time, too, to realize that great writing evokes feeling precisely by avoiding memes. Perhaps that told me the true nature of memes - that they are all that we already know. Nothing more, nothing less. Writing that evades memes teaches us - neurologically, it teaches us - and at that level, to teach and to change cannot be divorced. They are the same mechanism.
If I have spent my life until now tilting towards information and objectivity, then I wish to spend the rest of it tilting towards art and aesthetics and subjective truth. I have never believed that a person is too old to change, so long as they carry with them an awareness, a paranoia - or better yet, a superstition - that their own vibrant and changing consciousness will some day wither away.
When one is writing with aesthetic intentions, affectations can be used in creative ways, most, exactly once, and with limited replay value. If there is a literary equivalent to picking up pennies in front of a steamroller, this is it. Sooner or later, your reader is flattened into a disinterested pancake, complete with googled eyeballs.
If there is a lesson, it may be that the purposes of writing are better facilitated by eliminating - always and everywhere - the use of affectations. Try to write only the truth, and eliminate everything, everything, everything else.
Can a meme be the truth? Yes, in its own, localized place, it is as real as anything else. A meme is the active, infected mind that conceives it, and likewise the vulnerable mind that receives it, and the medium traveled, and the past and future. But it is not the feelings it simulates.
It took me a terribly long time, too, to realize that great writing evokes feeling precisely by avoiding memes. Perhaps that told me the true nature of memes - that they are all that we already know. Nothing more, nothing less. Writing that evades memes teaches us - neurologically, it teaches us - and at that level, to teach and to change cannot be divorced. They are the same mechanism.
If I have spent my life until now tilting towards information and objectivity, then I wish to spend the rest of it tilting towards art and aesthetics and subjective truth. I have never believed that a person is too old to change, so long as they carry with them an awareness, a paranoia - or better yet, a superstition - that their own vibrant and changing consciousness will some day wither away.
Sunday, July 1, 2012
Melody and Moonrise Kingdom
The other night, I felt compelled to watch the 1971 British movie, "Melody", after hearing Wes Anderson reference it in an interview regarding Moonrise Kingdom, and before I went to see just that movie today. I'm glad I watched it first. This is one of those times when you can comprehend and appreciate how an artist has "played jazz", as they say, with an existing work, both thematically as well as in the details.
Melody is fascinating all by itself. It is very unique - an oddity, though I am unable to identify how much of that is due to the age and mediocre production values of the movie. The movie creates a world filled with cultural degeneration permeating everyone and everything. The children in school smoke, drink, more often than not act like wild animals (these could be the cast of Animal House some years earlier); the parents are vain or caddy, all colossally flawed human beings; the teachers are caricatures; the two principal kids can only be products of their environment - Daniel lights his father's newspaper on fire and attacks his best friend, though it is clear he is a victim of upbringing and environment, and that underneath this he is mostly predisposed to kindness. In any case, if the movie allows a miracle, it is that any sanity is possible in such a world. In this case, Melody and Daniel have survived parents and teachers and all the rugrat peers they are constantly surrounded by to become [mostly] sane human beings against the odds.
Despite the notes of satire in the portrayal of the teachers, when order finally breaks down into anarchy, it mostly feels like it had been inevitable. Though Ornshaw's tumult with Daniel follows a wonderful arc, they are sanity among insanity (Ornshaw more sane even than the others), and the force and momentum of the larger groups (the students, the teachers and parents) never cease pushing forward the events of the story.
The resolution of Melody and Daniel's impasse is a formalist choice of theme over the constraints of reality, no matter how chaotic the reality of the movie is portrayed to be. It is the only possible way to play out the romantic and redemptive trajectories of the story. Where else can two 10-year olds in love go but aimlessly into the wildness? That their final mode of transportation is both self-powered and absurd is perhaps a more careful choice than it may initially seem. And, with that, they pass into that transcendent movie-magic space composed of equal parts bliss and oblivion.
By my judgment, Wes Anderson has borrowed many of the right details from Melody, both central - the familial alienation felt by the leads, the delay in showing them together, the 180-degree change of heart among the peers - and smaller - the boy unabashedly enjoying painting nude models, their absurd home lives. Further, the strongest characteristics of Melody that he did not borrow are the ones that contradict his storytelling "toolkit" - the open-book ending, the overwhelming sense of ambiguity, of looking for sense among nonsense. It is also worth noting that the order of inspiration is evident (even if the 40-year gap in release dates wouldn't make it obvious) and I do not believe that a read in reverse would produce similar insights.
Fortunately, Anderson is strong enough with his own tools that a different, also outstanding movie results. The style is its own thing and yet enhances the movie - frames packed with details, the wonderful idiosyncrasy and juxtaposition (the kid on the trampoline when Uncle Ben makes Sam and Suzy talk over the idea of marriage). The music is much more varied than in Melody, though it may be surprising to find the strongest irony in the soundtrack to Melody ("Teach Your Children Well" playing as a kid's homemade pipe bomb destroys a convertible and the kids relentlessly attack the adults). Wes Anderson's music choices are not dissimilar to Tarantino in artistic intent - to embellish a scene, to add a brushstroke to scenes that, when successful, gives them a transcendent quality. The introduction to Moonrise Kingdom, especially, is as integral and interesting and fun as I can remember a movie intro being.
I think it was the best decision of my week to watch these essentially back to back.
Melody is fascinating all by itself. It is very unique - an oddity, though I am unable to identify how much of that is due to the age and mediocre production values of the movie. The movie creates a world filled with cultural degeneration permeating everyone and everything. The children in school smoke, drink, more often than not act like wild animals (these could be the cast of Animal House some years earlier); the parents are vain or caddy, all colossally flawed human beings; the teachers are caricatures; the two principal kids can only be products of their environment - Daniel lights his father's newspaper on fire and attacks his best friend, though it is clear he is a victim of upbringing and environment, and that underneath this he is mostly predisposed to kindness. In any case, if the movie allows a miracle, it is that any sanity is possible in such a world. In this case, Melody and Daniel have survived parents and teachers and all the rugrat peers they are constantly surrounded by to become [mostly] sane human beings against the odds.
Despite the notes of satire in the portrayal of the teachers, when order finally breaks down into anarchy, it mostly feels like it had been inevitable. Though Ornshaw's tumult with Daniel follows a wonderful arc, they are sanity among insanity (Ornshaw more sane even than the others), and the force and momentum of the larger groups (the students, the teachers and parents) never cease pushing forward the events of the story.
The resolution of Melody and Daniel's impasse is a formalist choice of theme over the constraints of reality, no matter how chaotic the reality of the movie is portrayed to be. It is the only possible way to play out the romantic and redemptive trajectories of the story. Where else can two 10-year olds in love go but aimlessly into the wildness? That their final mode of transportation is both self-powered and absurd is perhaps a more careful choice than it may initially seem. And, with that, they pass into that transcendent movie-magic space composed of equal parts bliss and oblivion.
By my judgment, Wes Anderson has borrowed many of the right details from Melody, both central - the familial alienation felt by the leads, the delay in showing them together, the 180-degree change of heart among the peers - and smaller - the boy unabashedly enjoying painting nude models, their absurd home lives. Further, the strongest characteristics of Melody that he did not borrow are the ones that contradict his storytelling "toolkit" - the open-book ending, the overwhelming sense of ambiguity, of looking for sense among nonsense. It is also worth noting that the order of inspiration is evident (even if the 40-year gap in release dates wouldn't make it obvious) and I do not believe that a read in reverse would produce similar insights.
Fortunately, Anderson is strong enough with his own tools that a different, also outstanding movie results. The style is its own thing and yet enhances the movie - frames packed with details, the wonderful idiosyncrasy and juxtaposition (the kid on the trampoline when Uncle Ben makes Sam and Suzy talk over the idea of marriage). The music is much more varied than in Melody, though it may be surprising to find the strongest irony in the soundtrack to Melody ("Teach Your Children Well" playing as a kid's homemade pipe bomb destroys a convertible and the kids relentlessly attack the adults). Wes Anderson's music choices are not dissimilar to Tarantino in artistic intent - to embellish a scene, to add a brushstroke to scenes that, when successful, gives them a transcendent quality. The introduction to Moonrise Kingdom, especially, is as integral and interesting and fun as I can remember a movie intro being.
I think it was the best decision of my week to watch these essentially back to back.
Sunday, June 24, 2012
Natural Phenomena
When I was quite young (too young, in any case), I read a paperback book that was a compendium of UFO and alien abduction stories. In the past fifty years, several abduction cases have flirted with something like widespread notoriety, some with particular, memorable details (especially the Travis Walton account, complete with witnesses who passed lie detector tests, though he himself could not), but of course the most interesting characteristic of abduction reports are how similar they are in outline and how short a list of characteristics provides sufficiently wide definition to cover the vast majority of the reported phenomena. Of course, whereas this degree of commonality amongst a wide variety of people may have provided fodder for the casual speculator, believing it proves that some common phenomena is responsible, most speculation does not take the time to assess the full range of candidate criteria that qualify as "common phenomena".
Having been exposed to these stories at an early age, I was terrified, but it would be more relevant to say I was riveted (terror typically pushes you away). My senses were activated like I had been plugged in to an outlet. It was certainly one of the most aesthetic experiences of my life.
There was, I recognize now, a primal activation - deeper than most - associated with the experience. I suspect that the cultural stereotype of an alien is a shared image - a symbol - that emanates from the [Jungian] collective unconscious. It is too powerful, too keen in its activation of our programming to be otherwise. There are no precedents for something like the alternative explanation, that they are part of material reality and that our minds merely react to their presence as an imposter for which we feel some particular fear (or the other typical reactions, which I will discuss below). If that were true, we would be just as likely to regard these events with equanimity, which rarely seems to be the case.
An archetype, or symbol, or any psychic construct (which is really just patterns; a set of predispositions, if you will) is an emergent phenomenon of the layers below it. We can say that symbols emerge from our anatomical brain and neurochemistry and the stimuli which itself is predisposed to take certain forms, and we can say that archetypes emerge from symbols, but these are all just words. The true predisposed reality that gets labeled randomness by those incapable of observing in adequate detail is fully emergent on that level. (Keep in mind, an archetype is not made untrue because a contradictory example is found, any more than a sunny day disproves the existence of thunderstorms. An archetype is only a predisposition, and in that, combined with the subjective nature of psychology, in its vast intricacy, it would be difficult to empirically falsify, though it could be "proven" into probabilistic boundaries.)
To me, it seems clear that the alien symbol is born of the primal fear of the predator, especially the predator whose presence is feared or can perhaps be "felt" (sensed semi- or un-consciously) in the dark. It should not be surprising that such a fear - which human brains have been able to detect for eons back through mammalian progenitor species (and through simpler chemical/reflexive channels well before) - should manifest itself into distorted, unpredictable results in the present day, when we have evolved consciousness and the ego and developed myriad modern technologies that distance us from our primitive environment and thus the stimuli we are built for.
Interestingly enough, there is more than fear involved with both the archetypal alien encounter as well as the simpler UFO sighting. The UFO phenomenon seems to be at least as intertwined with awe as it is with fear in the social context. Jung suggested the metallic flying circle was part of the motif of wholeness (shared with many religious symbols), that modern life is apt to displace from our psychic wholeness. Others have posited that specific social contexts can explain specific waves of UFO sightings (see http://parasociology.blogspot.com/2009/09/carl-jung-ufos-and-his-method.html, for instance). Indeed, I buy these suggestions as a broad concept - that social anxieties must manifest themselves not only through the "shallow" feedback loop of sociological action but the deeper feedback loop of the psyches of the individuals comprising the society. Of course, these are abstractions, in reality not disconnected, but that is quite the point. Sociology is not broadly interested in the workings of Jung's archetypes because they fall outside its common mandate. Some limited claims can undoubtedly be made in reverse, of course, of psychology.
Beyond fear and awe, and strangely enough at first glance, many reports of alien encounters contain a message of peace, brotherhood, understanding, unity from these visitors. Of course, they would. The modern world fills us with spiritual and existential dread, as well as feelings of anxiety, powerlessness, and isolation. The modern unconsciousness always desires balance, and in seeking to offset these feelings, the mental construct of alien beings - regardless of how abstract and conflicted - often provides a vessel that these feelings can empty into.
Who knows how long humans - and perhaps our progenitors - have believed in supernatural beings? And, certainly, psychic urges and predispositions are the true and common bedrock of all of these things and the beings themselves merely what has emerged in time. I do not believe that lesser mammals have known the concepts of gods or demons, fairies or witches or aliens. But I believe they must contain the same underlying psychic urges (to varying degree and effect) that produce those particular aberrations in modern man. It is certainly true that all of these beings act as conduits for the desires of the humans who have "seen" them, in whatever age they have existed.
The symbol of the alien is unique from some of these in that it is a prevalent phenomenon not only in a scientific age, but a stage of that age where the majority of the observed world has ceased to be a mystery. Science, in its prevalence, has triumphed perceptually. And yet the idea of aliens can persist because we can believe easily enough that it is in no contradiction to science - that it lives in one of the remaining corners that science has not conquered.
Of course, that is all just part of the bigger myth that the modern era can augment the human experience, while leaving behind some degree of our "primitivism", as if the rational and instinctual sides of our being were designed to be remodeled and realigned however we see fit. For the matter of the previous point regarding science, most of us do not even know where science holds claim and where it does not or can not for practical or other reasons. In our omissions, we have made two mistakes. One is to broadly assume that our shared heritage - expressed in our instinctual self - serves our rational self in any way. The second is to believe our limited command over the rational self can carry over in any way to the instinctual self.
But in the end, it is no mystery to say that we cannot escape our own nature nor the pieces of it; they are all just natural phenomena.
Having been exposed to these stories at an early age, I was terrified, but it would be more relevant to say I was riveted (terror typically pushes you away). My senses were activated like I had been plugged in to an outlet. It was certainly one of the most aesthetic experiences of my life.
There was, I recognize now, a primal activation - deeper than most - associated with the experience. I suspect that the cultural stereotype of an alien is a shared image - a symbol - that emanates from the [Jungian] collective unconscious. It is too powerful, too keen in its activation of our programming to be otherwise. There are no precedents for something like the alternative explanation, that they are part of material reality and that our minds merely react to their presence as an imposter for which we feel some particular fear (or the other typical reactions, which I will discuss below). If that were true, we would be just as likely to regard these events with equanimity, which rarely seems to be the case.
An archetype, or symbol, or any psychic construct (which is really just patterns; a set of predispositions, if you will) is an emergent phenomenon of the layers below it. We can say that symbols emerge from our anatomical brain and neurochemistry and the stimuli which itself is predisposed to take certain forms, and we can say that archetypes emerge from symbols, but these are all just words. The true predisposed reality that gets labeled randomness by those incapable of observing in adequate detail is fully emergent on that level. (Keep in mind, an archetype is not made untrue because a contradictory example is found, any more than a sunny day disproves the existence of thunderstorms. An archetype is only a predisposition, and in that, combined with the subjective nature of psychology, in its vast intricacy, it would be difficult to empirically falsify, though it could be "proven" into probabilistic boundaries.)
To me, it seems clear that the alien symbol is born of the primal fear of the predator, especially the predator whose presence is feared or can perhaps be "felt" (sensed semi- or un-consciously) in the dark. It should not be surprising that such a fear - which human brains have been able to detect for eons back through mammalian progenitor species (and through simpler chemical/reflexive channels well before) - should manifest itself into distorted, unpredictable results in the present day, when we have evolved consciousness and the ego and developed myriad modern technologies that distance us from our primitive environment and thus the stimuli we are built for.
Interestingly enough, there is more than fear involved with both the archetypal alien encounter as well as the simpler UFO sighting. The UFO phenomenon seems to be at least as intertwined with awe as it is with fear in the social context. Jung suggested the metallic flying circle was part of the motif of wholeness (shared with many religious symbols), that modern life is apt to displace from our psychic wholeness. Others have posited that specific social contexts can explain specific waves of UFO sightings (see http://parasociology.blogspot.com/2009/09/carl-jung-ufos-and-his-method.html, for instance). Indeed, I buy these suggestions as a broad concept - that social anxieties must manifest themselves not only through the "shallow" feedback loop of sociological action but the deeper feedback loop of the psyches of the individuals comprising the society. Of course, these are abstractions, in reality not disconnected, but that is quite the point. Sociology is not broadly interested in the workings of Jung's archetypes because they fall outside its common mandate. Some limited claims can undoubtedly be made in reverse, of course, of psychology.
Beyond fear and awe, and strangely enough at first glance, many reports of alien encounters contain a message of peace, brotherhood, understanding, unity from these visitors. Of course, they would. The modern world fills us with spiritual and existential dread, as well as feelings of anxiety, powerlessness, and isolation. The modern unconsciousness always desires balance, and in seeking to offset these feelings, the mental construct of alien beings - regardless of how abstract and conflicted - often provides a vessel that these feelings can empty into.
Who knows how long humans - and perhaps our progenitors - have believed in supernatural beings? And, certainly, psychic urges and predispositions are the true and common bedrock of all of these things and the beings themselves merely what has emerged in time. I do not believe that lesser mammals have known the concepts of gods or demons, fairies or witches or aliens. But I believe they must contain the same underlying psychic urges (to varying degree and effect) that produce those particular aberrations in modern man. It is certainly true that all of these beings act as conduits for the desires of the humans who have "seen" them, in whatever age they have existed.
The symbol of the alien is unique from some of these in that it is a prevalent phenomenon not only in a scientific age, but a stage of that age where the majority of the observed world has ceased to be a mystery. Science, in its prevalence, has triumphed perceptually. And yet the idea of aliens can persist because we can believe easily enough that it is in no contradiction to science - that it lives in one of the remaining corners that science has not conquered.
Of course, that is all just part of the bigger myth that the modern era can augment the human experience, while leaving behind some degree of our "primitivism", as if the rational and instinctual sides of our being were designed to be remodeled and realigned however we see fit. For the matter of the previous point regarding science, most of us do not even know where science holds claim and where it does not or can not for practical or other reasons. In our omissions, we have made two mistakes. One is to broadly assume that our shared heritage - expressed in our instinctual self - serves our rational self in any way. The second is to believe our limited command over the rational self can carry over in any way to the instinctual self.
But in the end, it is no mystery to say that we cannot escape our own nature nor the pieces of it; they are all just natural phenomena.
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
On Nature
There is a periodic observation that I hear among the realms of mathematics or philosophy, that randomness is no more random than order; that order is no more ordered than randomness, because no randomness is random. An order suggests an organizing principle, and any we utilize are arbitrary. I suppose you could say this is the "base case" of subjectivity just after it has splintered away from universality. We will always see things in our own context. That is an inescapable effect of having private histories.
It is not impossible to imagine a world where our private histories make all attempts at communication useless. It is not impossible, I would argue, because we are often closer to this than we think. And while it makes me fearful that I might hurt someone I love, I am thankful that mystery persists in both our thoughts and words. The alternative creates a logical cascade that turns the world into something fundamentally different than we have, and indeed, the idea of a world without subjectivity may be at least a canard as at most an impossibility, but I digress.
I have learned to think and talk in what is commonly known as a "systems" perspective due to my daily use of such a model at work. And thankfully, it has not fully invaded my mind and daily patterns of thought. It is a deterministic nightmare, devoid of any humanity, any spirit. It is the existence only of rules; of rules until flexibility does not exist, and the name of this state is "optimization". If ever were one single idea meta-Orwellian, this would be it. Followed to its extreme, it is the trap that exposes the deterministic world, where human actions are so optimized to make any choice obsolete. Whatever the world may really be, my heart's desire resides in a land polar opposite.
I look for the world that is mystical; a cipher, a contradiction in terms.
I like best what Borges said about the world, because it speaks to my heart, and yet my mind can find no way to criticize:
We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false."
- Avatars of the Tortoise
It is not impossible to imagine a world where our private histories make all attempts at communication useless. It is not impossible, I would argue, because we are often closer to this than we think. And while it makes me fearful that I might hurt someone I love, I am thankful that mystery persists in both our thoughts and words. The alternative creates a logical cascade that turns the world into something fundamentally different than we have, and indeed, the idea of a world without subjectivity may be at least a canard as at most an impossibility, but I digress.
I have learned to think and talk in what is commonly known as a "systems" perspective due to my daily use of such a model at work. And thankfully, it has not fully invaded my mind and daily patterns of thought. It is a deterministic nightmare, devoid of any humanity, any spirit. It is the existence only of rules; of rules until flexibility does not exist, and the name of this state is "optimization". If ever were one single idea meta-Orwellian, this would be it. Followed to its extreme, it is the trap that exposes the deterministic world, where human actions are so optimized to make any choice obsolete. Whatever the world may really be, my heart's desire resides in a land polar opposite.
I look for the world that is mystical; a cipher, a contradiction in terms.
I like best what Borges said about the world, because it speaks to my heart, and yet my mind can find no way to criticize:
We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false."
- Avatars of the Tortoise
What is Responsibility Doing to My Personality?
What is responsibility doing to my personality? Particularly, I wonder what is different about me now because of having the job I've had for the last few years. First, let's acknowledge some truths:
1) Behavioral changes cannot be isolated to one part of our personalities. That's not how human brains work in and of themselves, and it's definitely no way to think about what happens when our own changed behavior starts reflecting back different stimuli from the outside world.
2) Wilde's "creeping common sense" from my previous post - if it is a real thing - must be able to be accelerated or decelerated. I have my suspicions which one of these two are more likely applicable in regard to getting better at a job requiring dynamic responsibilities and decision-making skills.
3) The world - as it really is - is far more unknowable than we are inclined to believe. Building thematically on ideas propounded by Nassim Taleb, Daniel Kahnemann pointed out recently as a simple thought exercise that there was a one-in-eight chance that we could have had a 20th Century without Hitler, Stalin, and Mao (each could have been born female). How many similar men did we avoid because they were born female? Three? Zero? Ten? I guess a statistician would say the most likely answer is three, but that doesn't make it right.
The more difficult question is whether any given behavioral change is something I should want. Especially as someone who has more money than a desire to spend it. If I do not want these changes, then my already high opportunity cost to go to work skyrockets. After all, you can't put a price on your [mental - or spiritual] health.
Perhaps a way to more accurately see the problem the way I do is to view rationality and aesthetics as opposing forces. But, is that true? Richard Feynmann said that, as a scientist, he saw more beauty in a flower because he understood the intricacies of its design. Although I find his argument fascinating, it leaves me confused. Learning - whether it is something like "education", or what happens when we intuitively grasp an idea - has always sucked my sentiment out of things where it used to exist. But does it add more to my future than it subtracts from my past? I have always been sentimental - if it were possible, leave it to me to overvalue the past at the cost of the future.
On the other hand, we have Vonnegut, whom I believe is on the side of Feynmann when he says (I paraphrase, for lack of access to the relevant book):
"How can you tell a good painting when you see one? Easy - just look at a million, and then you'll know!"
- Bluebeard
Next time, perhaps I can deconstruct this entire post in the context of, "Am I actually getting more responsible?", and while we're at it, "Do I really have a personality worth concerning myself about?"
1) Behavioral changes cannot be isolated to one part of our personalities. That's not how human brains work in and of themselves, and it's definitely no way to think about what happens when our own changed behavior starts reflecting back different stimuli from the outside world.
2) Wilde's "creeping common sense" from my previous post - if it is a real thing - must be able to be accelerated or decelerated. I have my suspicions which one of these two are more likely applicable in regard to getting better at a job requiring dynamic responsibilities and decision-making skills.
3) The world - as it really is - is far more unknowable than we are inclined to believe. Building thematically on ideas propounded by Nassim Taleb, Daniel Kahnemann pointed out recently as a simple thought exercise that there was a one-in-eight chance that we could have had a 20th Century without Hitler, Stalin, and Mao (each could have been born female). How many similar men did we avoid because they were born female? Three? Zero? Ten? I guess a statistician would say the most likely answer is three, but that doesn't make it right.
The more difficult question is whether any given behavioral change is something I should want. Especially as someone who has more money than a desire to spend it. If I do not want these changes, then my already high opportunity cost to go to work skyrockets. After all, you can't put a price on your [mental - or spiritual] health.
Perhaps a way to more accurately see the problem the way I do is to view rationality and aesthetics as opposing forces. But, is that true? Richard Feynmann said that, as a scientist, he saw more beauty in a flower because he understood the intricacies of its design. Although I find his argument fascinating, it leaves me confused. Learning - whether it is something like "education", or what happens when we intuitively grasp an idea - has always sucked my sentiment out of things where it used to exist. But does it add more to my future than it subtracts from my past? I have always been sentimental - if it were possible, leave it to me to overvalue the past at the cost of the future.
On the other hand, we have Vonnegut, whom I believe is on the side of Feynmann when he says (I paraphrase, for lack of access to the relevant book):
"How can you tell a good painting when you see one? Easy - just look at a million, and then you'll know!"
- Bluebeard
Next time, perhaps I can deconstruct this entire post in the context of, "Am I actually getting more responsible?", and while we're at it, "Do I really have a personality worth concerning myself about?"
Sunday, December 18, 2011
On Wisdom and Joy
"Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
I've quoted that before, but I was reckless, for now is a more apt occasion. What is the place of wisdom in a life we must try our best to enjoy? Tonight, I got two clues.
First, I went to a party where I said everything I had to say to anyone there. It was not much. It could almost have been nothing. Is this an emanation of wisdom? Am I so sated with knowledge so as not to need any more? Obviously I say this tongue-in-cheek, but even so, what sort of way is that to be happy? I can sit and look in the mirror and confirm that "success" (in whatever asinine form this is supposed to be) has visited me. I am certifiably knowledgeable enough to be bored by some people into having very little to say, through no fault of their own, or mine (as far as I can tell).
The second thing I saw tonight was the new profile timeline feature on Facebook. Even as a product guy (by employment), I don't really care about the details of the "feature" in any conceptual sense, although it was fun enough to play around with. But I got hopelessly caught up in scanning back through old posts and events from my past. The thing that really struck me is how people's use of Facebook has changed. Especially the tone and quality of their posts.
By definition, I generalize here, but people's tone today, on average, is more refined. Fine. But the sad part is what that turns out to mean about quality. Facebook is not a book. It is not articles or ad copy or an email or a phone call. It is truly unique. And it turns out that the Facebook medium - through brevity - calls for earnestness, for no facade. That is its strength and its opportunity and the truest measure of "quality" in this medium. But time is carrying it away. As people refine their skill for creating posts, they are concealing the earnestness. They... it... is becoming something else. We end up with a marketing tool instead of an urgent communications tool. It is because people are infected by a sort of creeping common sense that steers them inexplicably away from being forthright, exposed, and earnest and towards being measured and calculated, and it is everything that kills me about interacting with certain people.
I guess what I truly miss is my friends and the things they would post on my wall. And ironically, out here in the real world, I miss the days when I had things to say to them, too.
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
I've quoted that before, but I was reckless, for now is a more apt occasion. What is the place of wisdom in a life we must try our best to enjoy? Tonight, I got two clues.
First, I went to a party where I said everything I had to say to anyone there. It was not much. It could almost have been nothing. Is this an emanation of wisdom? Am I so sated with knowledge so as not to need any more? Obviously I say this tongue-in-cheek, but even so, what sort of way is that to be happy? I can sit and look in the mirror and confirm that "success" (in whatever asinine form this is supposed to be) has visited me. I am certifiably knowledgeable enough to be bored by some people into having very little to say, through no fault of their own, or mine (as far as I can tell).
The second thing I saw tonight was the new profile timeline feature on Facebook. Even as a product guy (by employment), I don't really care about the details of the "feature" in any conceptual sense, although it was fun enough to play around with. But I got hopelessly caught up in scanning back through old posts and events from my past. The thing that really struck me is how people's use of Facebook has changed. Especially the tone and quality of their posts.
By definition, I generalize here, but people's tone today, on average, is more refined. Fine. But the sad part is what that turns out to mean about quality. Facebook is not a book. It is not articles or ad copy or an email or a phone call. It is truly unique. And it turns out that the Facebook medium - through brevity - calls for earnestness, for no facade. That is its strength and its opportunity and the truest measure of "quality" in this medium. But time is carrying it away. As people refine their skill for creating posts, they are concealing the earnestness. They... it... is becoming something else. We end up with a marketing tool instead of an urgent communications tool. It is because people are infected by a sort of creeping common sense that steers them inexplicably away from being forthright, exposed, and earnest and towards being measured and calculated, and it is everything that kills me about interacting with certain people.
I guess what I truly miss is my friends and the things they would post on my wall. And ironically, out here in the real world, I miss the days when I had things to say to them, too.
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