I wonder if it is ever legal to exclude some group of people based on a generalized trait; short people from a basketball team comes to mind, although in that case there's the example of Muggsy Bogues -- "Despite his height, Bogues managed to block 39 shots throughout his NBA span including one on Patrick Ewing." So yes -- it's very unlikely that a short person will succeed at basketball, but it's not impossible, and implementing a policy of "we will never allow short people to even try out for the NBA" keeps out qualified short players, few in number though they may be. And that's why stereotyping is wrong.
However, it can be an effective shortut when you don't have time to carefully evaluate everyone individually. A discussion on stereotyping gets philosophical quickly: isn't every assessment we make based on stereotyping of some kind? To evaluate anything means to compare it to some template.
I'm really far too sleepy to be blogging -- I went to bed at 6am and slept only til 10am or so. I'm just waiting for it to be late enough so I can get a good night's sleep tonight. I'm not going to edit very carefully, and see what happens -- my guess is nothing.
This blog isn't getting many readers. I've publicised it on SDF a few times, and on Facebook now twice. Whenever I do things like this I get symptoms of the weird approach-avoidance dance that I tend to do about web publicity, and have done for the past 10 years. I used to be more shameless about self promotion, back when I first started doing web stuff in 2001, but I came to realize a few things: 1. It can appear narcissistic and to reflect bad character, 2. No one really cares, and 3. The work itself is not all that impressive.
The "because" of 2 and 3 has to do with the nature of the PC/internet environment: this is a place where the average person checks Facebook, does email, and visits 10 websites in a minute with click-click-click. Penis enlargment spam really defines the ethos of the internet, to me: this is the place of penis enlargement spam. How can I possibly expect anything I put on it to be taken seriously, especially by those people with families, jobs, car payments, and etc, who are not as culturally acclimated to the internet? I can't. So, I don't. I take what I can get. If I want a better audience, I'd have to move into the exhibition culture scene: galleries and artist run centres and all that stuff. And I'm not sure that 1. My work is good enough for that, and 2. That I can stand those people for any length of time. The biggest advantage of the internet is that you can hide from humans.
I ate 1800 calories of chili last night at 3am, so today I'm paying the price: a bowl of cereal and two tiny tuna half-sandwiches are all I'm allowed to eat. I've eaten them already, and it's only 4:41pm. Suffering. This tends to happen when I make chili, because it's just too goddamn good not to devour all at once. It was worth it. This time, as an experiment, I used fresh tomatoes that I hand-crushed instead of the usual canned ones. I'm not sure it made a huge different in taste, but it was fun in a hippie-dippie sort of way.
Tomorrow I'm going to make the most delicious thing that has ever been constructed: cut-up bits of apple in vanilla Greek-style yogurt with honey drizzled on top. It's going to be an event. So, it's 6:17pm now and my hunger issues aren't really bothering me much. I think my tendency is to want to eat in the morning and mid-day, but not so much as it gets later in the day.
I need to find some way of making my webcomic better. I don't really know how to be funny in that way. I find myself falling into the same trap that it's so easy to fall into with visual art: if you can't execute a cohesive idea, then just slap something together and say that the randomness and shoddiness of it is part of the project. Like yesterday's webcomic: I didn't know what to put in the last panel, so I filled it with a huge question mark, and people might have suspected it was just because I was lazy, but many people probably thought I was being artsy (I still need to define that word properly -- basically I mean "visually acculturated to the academic/exhibition art world"). I think that sort of thing goes on a lot in art: what looks like part of a planned project happens more because of laziness, or some slightly more charitable pseudosynonym like "spontaneity." That happened to me a few times while I was making my math drawings in grad school: I'd be filling in a huge area, and then just give up, and make the empty space into something else because I didn't feel like wiggling a marker back and forth for 30 minutes.
I think this can actually produce better work sometimes; for instance, in that case I was bored with creating a huge uniform area, and so instead made the huge area into something different and more interesting. Even though I was motivated by a sort of laziness or at least the deisre to avoid tedium, the result was perhaps eliminating some of the tedium that would have translated its way into the viewer's brain. I've said it before and I'll say it again: art, at least in academia and exhibition culture, has been corrupted by postmodern nihilism more than just about any other discipline. As a result, it's become practically impossible to judge a work of art to be better or worse than the next. So, this tends to breed lazier, sloppier art, because hey -- why not spend less time on it if it's all the same "quality"?
God I'm tired. I'm going to upload this and get it over with.
I read things like this and I think to myself "I can't do any of that." I think it's better just to be yourself and do what you want to do, and if no one likes you for yourself then no one likes you, and you just go and be a monk. That's what might happen to me. "I HAVE TO GET A GIRLFRIEND" desperation can only lead down a bad path, in my mind. My natural state is to sit in my apartment playing on the internet and occasionally go to Wendy's or the grocery store, and if Princess Charming comes along during the course of those activities then that's great. But I'm not going to force myself into a lifestyle I'm not comfortable with for the sake of desperately trying to find a partner. That seems wrong, and yet so many people are into that idea. Dating sites like Okcupid are putrescent pits of desperation, where a few ugly woman and thousands of weak men go to beg for scraps.
I'm glad I have this blog. If it weren't for it, I'd have a lot less to do. IZ MAH ONLY FRAND :'(
It's funny: when I look at my computer monitors, most of the content is just text; text in my diet spreadsheet, writing in a web page, text in my text editor I use for writing my blog, numbers in a calculator, an IM buddy list, a terminal program, some chat windows, and lists of files in an FTP program and in my OS window manager. In a sense the graphical element of a GUI is not needed -- users only need some way to drag windows around, unless they're doing actual work with images and video (looking at or making moving or static pictures). Images, sound and text: I guess that's the essence of digital content. Sort of funny that I spend so much time on the computer, and yet I have such reading problems, when being on the computer is an exercise in continuous reading. I have problems with staying interested and focused on books and longer texts, but I do well with "soundbyte-ish" nature of chatrooms and most web pages, and I can write; creatively generating text does something different to my brain than just taking it in through my eyes. But I want reading to be easy for me, like it is for many people, and it's not. Not fair.
I'm listening to music on my iPod, through its miniscule internal speakers. It's kind of fun -- the music is more in the background and not so overwhelming, and mixes in with outside noises in an interesting way. I slept for four hours between 2pm and 6pm, and now I'm going to be up all night. Still haven't eaten dinner. Was going to go to Wendy's. Maybe I'll just make eggs instead, but it's good to get out of the house. The only places I ever go are to Wendy's and to the grocery store. I kind of wish some people in school took more interest in me personally, but I'm really wasn't very friendly or appealing. And in the back of my head is this notion that my obesity had a lot to do with it; people really don't like fat people much, no matter how much they squish their fat little cheeks up into their eyes with a smile.
I'm starting to get annoyed. Why can't I have things in my life that I really like, like a woman or a job? Why does life have to be, at best, this grey, neutral, cold purgatory, where nothing is really very awful, but nothing is particularly exciting or joyful either? If I didn't know that life could potential be experienced as pleasant and great, then I might not take issue with it. And not just any old woman and any old job -- a lot of people are unhappy with their partner and/or career, and it serves to make them less happy rather than happier. The continuum goes: good woman/job, nothing at all, bad woman/job, listed from "heaven" to "hell."
I tried googling "how to find your passion," even though putting natural language elements like "how to" and "how do i" at the front of Google querries tends to yield Yahoo Answers or Wikianswers folksy self help stuff ("LOL just be urself lol"). I guess that's what I'm looking for, but I don't know. Anyway, I'm looking at this article, in which the first suggestion is something I've heard before: do what you love to do already. For some people, this works out well, but for me, it amounts to media creation (writing, music, visual art) and eating food (to a lesser degree, cooking and eating food). Maybe I need two jobs: some kind of writer, and chef.
But you don't see listings for "writer" very often. The listings on monster.com for "writer" are all technical writer, proposal writer, or web content writer -- not exactly fascinating, inspiring stuff. I guess this is an age-old problem, but I'll restate it anyway: it's hard to make money making things that you want to make. This sounds bad -- like some kind of disguised form of bragging -- but I sort of wish I weren't a creative person, and got satisfaction out of only doing someone else's projects, in the execution itself. I guess I do enjoy the pure craft of writing and the pure craft of art to a degree, but they feel somewhat empty without that creative will to make something. Maybe it's a form of ego: "THIS IS MINE!!! I MADE THIS!!!"
People do what comes naturally. This is such an important concept, and one that I think is largely lost on the Judeo-Christian, Western mind. Paraphrasing, people do those things that their particular neurochemical configuration makes easy and "natural" for them -- for the most part, people don't do things that are hard for them. Instead, they do what they know and use their talents. For some people, their talents happen to correspond to areas in life that have been socioeconomically elevated above others in a sort of cultural caste system, like high paying STEM jobs. Others of us aren't so lucky.
Generally, it's notable the way people will frame their own actions with morality ad hoc -- "because I did it, it was the right thing to do." You see this manifest as "the arrogance of success" a lot: someone who was able to get a job, a house, marriage, family, SUV, whatever -- an upper middle class portfolio of stuff -- assumes a sort of all-encompasing egocentric smug wisdom about life, as if whatever caused him or her to acquire this portfolio also gives them abilities in other areas of life.
For one thing, it doesn't. But more centrally, aquiring the upper middle class portfolio of stuff (or whatever) is more a matter of circumstances falling into place and of a person acting according to his or her own proclivities than it is some will-based struggle to create events. People, especially in America, are absolutely addicted to the idea that their own successes are the result of their own hard work, or perseverence, or any qualities that can somehow be described as self-generated. The notion that we make our own luck is essential to the American and Western mindset. But it is a total lie; free will is an illusion. Even if the deciding factor in some success was the particular configuration of someone's brain and mind, then how is this any different from being born into riches as a determinant of success? They are both cosmic events that "we" have no control over. However, the illusion of control is so crucial to Western/American mental health that we cling to it.
A brief example: personal finance. The people who make a stink about it being a necessary and moral thing to do tend to be the same peope who get a kick out of it, and for whom it corresponds to their natural abilities. I don't trust self report and I can't read people's minds, but I still conclude that people mostly don't do things they don't want to do, that that interpretation of "discipline" is not pervasive. People are go-with-the-flow slugs.
I trimmed my eyebrows today for no real reason. I think I did it a little too short, because they don't look dark enough. If I wear my glasses all the time no one can tell. Lately, I've been wearing my glasses more and more. I sort of wanted to get new frames, but mostly decided against it because of the cost ($200-$500). I like to think that I'm not quite that vain. But, yesterday, after the movie, I went to an eye care place and did some window shopping. After trying on several square-ish black-framed artsy-hipster eyeglasses, I realized that my current, very conservative, gold-rimmed pair actually looks better.
God my sciatica is killing me. It's flaring up because of the bike ride to the movie theater yesterday. To be honest, it wasn't really "yesterday" -- it was more like a few hours ago. It's 12:18am and I haven't yet been to bed, but I posted today's entry already and am getting a jumpstart on tomorrow's, which is actually today's, depening on your point of view. And, I did work on this entry above at a later time. I should write one of those temporal paradox Star Trek episodes. That's sort of the problem with a blog: it's often journal-like, as in "this is happening now" then "that is happening now," the second thing being implied to have happened after the first thing. I broke that linearity.
I've encountered this phenomenon a few times. Before this article put my feelings into more concise terms, my take on it was always "Just because you're a better debater than me doesn't make you right." Actually, that comes close to being a cogent summary of the articlie.
Rhetoric is perhaps inherently dishonest. I'd like to stick to numbers and code and crap like that, except I can't really do it very well. So, the only choice I have is to be as honest as I can in my writing. Poo-poo.
Some people are qualified to do a given job, but lack on-paper qualifications (usually a degree), which keeps them from being hired. I guess this is the fault of "zero tolerance"-type policies applied to hiring practices: "we will tolerate no one without a degree -- that's an absolute requirement, regardless of whether or not they can actually do the job, because making this determination in a more reliable way is not cost and time-effective."
These sorts of all-or-nothing rules speed things up when you're choosing from hundreds (or thousands?) of resumes, but, just like racial stereotyping, it means that you might overlook the best person for the job just because he doesn't happen to have the right piece of paper, which is often more an inidcation of socioeconomic "class" than intelligence or competence. I think, I hope, that employers are starting to realize this, even though it doesn't really mean good things for me if they are. In a sense, qualifications are sort of un-American -- the USA is supposed to be a kind of classless meritocracy, at least in theory (in practice this is far from the case, but the ideals are there for people to think about).
I'm going to a movie today: The Descendants. It starts in an hour, and I should leave my house in about 15 minutes if I want to be early enough to stay stress-free. It's a hard life I live -- can you imagine how early I am to airports?
In a sense all women are prostitues and all men are johns; it's the nature of the economics of romance: women have the power to withhold sex if they don't get what they want, and men offer goods (money, conversation, entertainment) so they can get laid. And, of course, we can trump this whole base psychobiological process with our cerebrums, but that doesn't mean the root-level behavior is not imprinted into older parts of our brain.
I'm back from the movie now. It was ok -- kinda boring. Also, there was construction going on in another theater, so I heard sawing and hammering and dragging things up wooden stairs the whole time. Plus, people were crinkling their candy wrappers loudly, and the George Clooney matinée drew an elderly crowd, who made a lot of throat noises. Oh, and there was one woman a few rows in front of me who kept playing with her bright glowing cell phone. So, overall, I was distracted with my own annoyance and misanthropic thoughts. Considering all of that, the movie wasn't bad. Still a little on the boring side, though.
A manager gave me a free pass after I complained about the construction noises, using my news anchorman voice, politley, and articulately. So, two movies for the price of one! Yay.
After that I walked around the mall for an hour or so. I find crowds are much more tolerable with headphones on.
I had so little to eat today -- just a bowl of cereal in the morning and some spaghetti in the afternoon. Then I slept from 5pm - 11pm, and have been up since then. Now, at 4:47am, I'm not especially hungry. Is it possible that I'm losing interest in eating food when I'm not hungry? That would be wonderful.
I wouldn't call the mainstream media "liberal." However, I would say that they are shills for the Democratic Party, having taken sides in American political dualism. Check out this article, about Sarah Palin. Specifically, the last paragraph (and even more specifically, the two sentences I've boldfaced):
Earlier this month, Palin said that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel should be fired for an incident in which he referred to a group of liberals as "F-ing retarded." However, when conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh repeatedly used the word "retard" in a pejorative manner on his radio show, Palin chided the incident but on "Fox News Sunday" this week dismissed it as satire. She also refrained from asking her ally Texas Gov. Rick Perry to fire his top campaign consultant for demeaning use of the word.
Why do ABC and the upstanding force for truth that is Stephanie Condon (no, I do not tend to think highly of journalists) feel the need to point out that Palin's condemnation of Emanuel's statement amounts to hypocrisy, because Palin hasn't criticized similar statements made by those of her political stripe? Doesn't making a peripheral point out of Palin being overly-partisan seem in iteslf to be overly-partisan, and more like editorializing than news?
And you know what the worst thing is? That some people will think I'm shilling for the Republicans for pointing this out! Many Americans -- Republican and Democrat alike -- are simply incapable of breaking out of a primitive, dualistic model of politics, where you become a knee-jerk naysayer to whatever the other party says or does. It's a tremendously stupid way to go about it.
I don't think I can be friends with the upper middle class, with a few exceptions. For the most part, I get the sense that my old friends, who are mostly in the doctor/lawyer/etc crowd with houses and children, look down on me, or at least pity me, which is mostly the same thing. I don't really want to be in relationships like that.
That's actually one thing I really like about artists in spite of all their other flaws: they're not part of the whole status/money hierarchical game. This is not to say that they're not pricks in their own right, but only that they determine pecking order outside of conventional metrics of social status. It tends to make them more accepting, at least of people like me (if only I weren't fat). I don't feel accepted anywhere, although some places are better than others.
There's this weird dichotomy of wanting to be different and unique vs. Wanting to fit in and have friends. People vary on where they stand on this. Mostly, I think, I want to fit in and have friends. Even the people for whom "being different" is an ethos tend to "be different" in similar ways, and hang around together, creating a subculture out of some perception of resistance to the mainstream.
Being genuinely different is lonely -- even people who yearn to be unique and original and interesting would not really want the fate of being genuinely different, because that implies a lack of acceptance. No matter how many nose rings you wear, you're still a human being, and human beings are social animals. It's as simple as that. To be "different" in a strong sense means that you're insane, criminal, or derelict. Sometimes I think I might be genuinely "different," even though people seem to understand me and are able to communicate with me, or at least they smile and nod when I open my mouth and make noises. I need some more real life (non-internet) friends. It's hard to find good people, though, not to mention that I'm not Mr. Popular.
But anyone who writes online and proclaims, "I don't care if anyone reads me," is a liar. - Susannah Breslin for Forbes.com
"If you didn't care if anyone read you, you wouldn't write online. In fact, you wouldn't write at all," Breslin continues. I don't know that this assertion is as absolutely true as Breslin's language logically implies. Authors write not only for an audience but for themselves; I do it because it helps me think and it feels good. I like that people want to make some kind of contact with me and listen to my ideas, and I'm not sure I would write if I were the only person left in the world, but it's not smart to totally discount, in an absolutist way, the importance of writing for the individual apart from any kind of discourse, even if that writing is in a public forum (and not for "Dear Diary").
Breslin makes a point -- her third point in fact -- that you have to be "a controversialist" in order to generate interest, and I do think that's sort of true. I see this mostly as a consequence of internet simple-mindedness and the soundbyte mentality that has taken over textual media; people like to digest easily-digested things. And this does not refer just to using small words or short sentences -- it means simple, direct, unambiguous facts or ideas. Using thundering logical absolutism like Susannah Breslin is a good way to get a following. Just use Twitter to post controversial, simple, made-up facts all day, and people will eat them up.
I don't like journalists much, although this might be some kind of projection and self-loathing on my part because I am, I suppose, a blogger (I am 100% certain that "real" journalists sneer at bloggers, which might be the source of some of my loathing). Mostly I see journalists as narcissists -- in the same category as artists or composers: people who make something, and think they're better than others because of this; that this creative act and product gives them some claim to a high social status. "LOOK AT MY PRODUCT" comes from the same place, emotionally, as "LOOK AT ME"; imagine artists, journalists, and composers taking a big dump in the toilet and pointing it out to all their friends -- this is the essence of their mindset and what they're doing.
I would put social climbing and wanting/striving to be better than others at the very top of my list of most detested human behaviors. This is problematic, because it's practically universal, although some people -- some rare people -- try to curtail this behavior in themselves.
Humans are fundamentally hierarchical. They're driven by desires for social status, for rank, to determine who is better within some given group, according to some metric.
I rarely shower in the winter; maybe once a week, if that, unless I'm meeting someone or have a doctor's appointment. I just don't see the need, especially with a shaved head. In the summer, I tend to shower at least once a day, if not more -- this past summer I was taking a freezing cold shower every two or three hours; my ears started to get fungal infections, I think. This may be an indication that I need to move to a cooler climate or invest in an air conditioner. We'll see what happens next spring.
I am most certainly a winter person, which is not to say that I don't have a body temperature of around 99 degrees to maintain just like everyone else, or that I don't get cold sometimes (I did just the other day). But I tolerate cold far better than most people, and heat far worse.
So, I turn 37 in a few days -- kind of a weird age. I don't notice most ages, but when I considered it this past year 37 felt important to me, and really felt old -- genuinely close to 40, I think. Moving out of the midrange and into the endzone is the significance of "7" in a base-10 number system. I'm not a "normal" 37 year old: I didn't follow the college/career/mortage/marriage track like most people my age and (I suppose) socioeconomic location. Most of my old friends did that, with some partial and notable exceptions.
Also, I'm never quite sure whom I should consider a "friend." I guess everyone has that definitional issue. You could say, at the moment, that I don't have any friends, because I go for weeks at a time without meeting up with anyone or seeing anyone except cashiers at the grocery store or fast food restaurants; they're my only "real" contact. I mean "real" in the sense of non-internet.
The internet is the main locus of my social activity, and maybe this is ok. I certainly do better over the internet than I do in real life, although some internet friends I've met have become "in real life" friends. I tend to blame monogamy for this issue: people partner up and focus on feeding their children, and having the kind of hippy free love fest that better describes the relationships of their childhood and early adulthood is no longer viable in the face of the demands of existence as a reproducing entity. Or maybe it's just me, and no one likes me because I'm ugly and mean and stupid.
There are degrees of monogamy. On one extreme you have conservative or fundamentalist Islam, where the wife is hermetically sealed into a burqa and essentially isn't allowed to interact with other men. Then on the other end you have some hippy orgy scenario where everyone is freely having sex with everyone else and there's no jealousy. I guess Western marriage falls somewhere in the middle -- there, most husbands don't ferociously demand that their wives refrain from spending any time with or talking to other men at all, although I think some do, and more-than-some secretly wish their wives wouldn't although those men know that this is not a properly enlightened moral stance to assume; I've heard "I don't want to tell her whom she cannot be friends with," even though it's an easy path from "friends" to "friends who touch each other affectionately on the shoulder" to "friends who have sex." Men and women are sexually attracted to each other, and "friendships" tend to move in that direction. It all comes down to reproductive fitness and passing your genes along while preventing the genes of others from being passed along -- "this uterus isn't big enough for the two of us." Evolutionary cockblocking. Is someone really going to make the argument that humans aren't the basest of primates?
As I mentioned way up top, I slept from 5pm to 11pm, which means my sleep schedule is going to be badly screwed up for the next few days. I'm wide awake now, at 2:32am, and I predict I won't feel sleepy until next mid-day. Or, I might stay awake until a proper bedtime tomorrow -- perhaps an early one at 9 or 10pm. We'll see. It's mostly ok that I have an irregular sleep schedule, because I'm not really doing anything of an obligatory or scheduled nature (in other words, I'm unemployed). But this can't go on forever, and eventually I will have to start looking for a job in a more serious way, although I don't know exactly what that would entail that I'm not doing now. I have some ideas, though. Or, maybe I'll just walk the earth, like Cain in "Kung Fu."
From this article:
9. Aging can be reversed. We all grow old, part of the general trend toward growing disorder. But it's only the universe as a whole that must increase in entropy, not every individual piece of it. (Otherwise it would be impossible to build a refrigerator.) Reversing the arrow of time for living organisms is a technological challenge, not a physical impossibility. And we're making progress on a few fronts: stem cells, yeast, and even (with caveats) mice and human muscle tissue. As one biologist told me: "You and I won't live forever. But as for our grandkids, I'm not placing any bets."
This is related to Aubrey DeGray's SENS project, which seems to have calmed down from the minor publicity storm it enjoyed a few years ago. Essentially, DeGray sees human aging as a curable condition, that amounts to solving some relatively small number of issues (like cells building up toxins, I think -- I'm remembering without re-reading anything, not even the link I provided).
Anyway, I guess I'd like to live a long time; I admit it. I might get tired of it 500 years in, but then the question is: would I have the courage or ability to end my own life when I found it necessary? For a long time I considered 250 years to be an ideal human lifespan; it just seemed not too long, not too short.
Anyway, I want to spend most of my time today making comics, and not writing blognonsense, so I will bid you a textual adieu.
Ha, I fell asleep and it's now 11:41pm on the 29th; I just uploaded. Talk about blogging under the wire.
In this entry, I re-consider religion.
The concept of an afterlife -- that "everything's gonna be all right," as Bob Marley says -- is comforting. I think we should ask the question, "what's going on in the brain when this thought moves through it?", rather than state something like "that thought isn't true or correct, and so I reject it utterly." The idea of heaven has such profound value in its power to foster mental health, improve outlook, and just make people happy, that it would be a mistake to discard it because it's not true (i.e., does not correspond to some physical reality). Rather, we should be looking for a way to get that comfort without committing cognitive errors; for a way to "go to heaven" emotionally and psychologically without accepting the nonsensical idea of an afterlife intellectualy.
The new focus of my discourse is "heaven."
The idea of heaven eliminates pervasive fear -- the fear of death, perhaps, which gets generalized into a fear of everything (especially the unknown). I suppose you could say that I had a spiritual experience in bed the other night when I came to this realization: that the thought of heaven is profoundly comforting and instills a peace like no other thought I can imagine. I was able to simulate this feeling by convincing myself on some emotional level that I "believed in heaven" -- that I was somehow assured of immortality and salvation from death, although it's not something I believe to be true. Funnily, it happened while I was watching "Star Trek: The Next Generation," although I don't remember which episode.
If you can somehow convince yourself that there's no reason to be afraid because everything will ultimately be all right, then there's no need for the belief in a "heaven," or a paradise-like eternal afterlife. In the Bronze Age mind, the idea of heaven served as an antidote to fear -- it was designed to provide comfort in the reassurance that nothing bad will happen. Human physiology has fear built into it, and it's up to a given human to find some antidote so he can get by in modern/contemporary life without his 75 or so years of consciousness being entirely unpleasant.
In religious traditions, this antidote comes in the form of some literal interpretation of eternal life: that when you die, you won't really die. This is taken by the modern, scientific mind to be primitive and ridiculous, I think with good reason; the monotheistic Abrahamic god isn't less fantastic than faries or dragons, or for that matter the gods on Mount Olympus. However, I don't think it's necessary to believe things that aren't true in order to get the psychological benefits of a belief in heaven; I just haven't precisely worked out the "how" yet. "God" and "heaven" can exist in the mind without challenging empirical truth, although that might be the first step down a dangerous slippery slope ("I'm a heart surgeon in my mind, so I'm going to go ahead and operate on you"). But, I think that some things -- specifically "a belief in God (or maybe even Heaven)" can exist in the mind without upsetting a logical, empirical, perceptual approach to reality.
At the essence of "the comfort of heaven" is the notion that there's nothing to be afraid of, and no reason to be afraid of death. The discourse of human civilization has been struggling with how to deal with fear for at least as long as literate civilization has existed. Fear served a good purpose (triggering the fight-or-flight response when confronted with danger), but I am not convinced we need fear in the everyday run of contemporary civilization and society.
Perhaps a soldier needs fear in battle to better ensure his survival, but do we need it when all it seems to do is prevent us from fulfilling our potential while navigating the labyrinth of text that society has become? We have mechanisms built into our minds and endocrine systems for dealing with real trouble and real danger, but once real trouble and real danger are gone the mechanisms remain, and demand to be applied to something -- asking women out on dates, applying for jobs, and asking people for what we need in life. Fear is crippling and mostly useless, for the civilized human; at the very least, its costs far outweigh its benefits. If fear can't be surgically removed it has to be dealt with in some way.
How? The answer I arrived at the other night was: belief in an afterlife. However, that begs the question "is it possible to be dedicated to truth and still not be afraid?" There must be a way to get that comfort of heaven without believing in "heaven" per se. I can now better understand the appeal of religion: even if it's obviously not true, it's too emotionally comforting and satisfying to reject. The religious person will tell himself anything to keep that idea of salvation, because the feeling associated with it is such a comfort that it takes precedence over everything else -- even truth or the value of preserving it. The emotional rewards associated with religion are so potent that people jump through every manner of twisted intellectual hoop to believe it -- ask a young earth creationist what he thinks about radiocarbon dating some time.
There should be a way to "have your cake and eat it too;" to get the emotional effects of belief in eternal love/salvation/life/etc, without surrendering to insanity. And this is not just wishful thinking -- my famously razor intuition (i.e., making stuff up) tells me the same comfort one gets from believing in heaven can be acquired via non-crazy methods.
I think the key is realizing that there's no reason to be afraid of death, even though death is inevitable and no one actually "goes to heaven." Maybe that's the purpose heaven and religion served in the Bronze Age: death is so horrible and so frightening that in order for a society to be productive, to function, and not to sit on the floor rocking back and forth while sucking its thumb all day, that society needs the falsehood of God and heaven. But now, in contemporary times, we need to get the emotional results of a belief in an afterlife -- specifically, comfort and the negation of fear (especially the fear of death) -- without contradicting a scientific world view, and perhaps more importantly without contradicting repeatable, falsifiable observation and measurement.
The next task is to think "how do we do this? How do we negate the effects of fear, defeating it finally and utterly?" Fear is much like the Devil in Christian scripture -- as Christ ultimately defeated the Devil with substitutionary atonement, thereby ensuring human salvation from death, the contemporary spiritual task is to defeat fear, once and for all, while preserving dedication to verifiable, physical truth and reality.
The future is techno-neurological augmentation. Intel inside™
People really don't like me very much, or at least it's very easy for them to simply not care about me and ignore me, especially as I get older and they get older and partner up with each other. This is partly an element of a cultural movement, to which I alluded yesterday: people are now more inwardly-focused and have less time to put into outside entities; even the phone call is dying as it's replaced with email, voicemail, and texting. But I think this lack of care and lack of attention that seems to infect the aging is not just a sociological change, but is to some degree a result of accumulated experience and neurological changes -- less and less is interesting, and the aged person approaches life with a tunnel vision that gets narrower and narrower with time.
This helps explain why time passes so slowly when you're young, and so quickly when you're older: the amount of filtering that goes on in the brain increases, limiting the residua of experience. When you're 3 years old, everything is new -- you notice every detail, and every sensory experience and thought becomes part of your growing brain; passing minutes feel longer as everything is absorbed and considered and felt. When your brain stops growing and changing as much, the inflow of information is curtailed -- this is a mutually causative process.
There's a reason it's harder to make friends as you get older: people, with their hardened brains no longer as open to new experience, are preoccupied with their families, careers, and mortgages. Who has time for "friends"? There are strong disadvantages to not following the proscribed life path for a human; you get left alone, basically...abandoned. It's weird to see everyone around me do the things one is supposed to do, right on queue: they all go to college from age 18-22, get a career, get married, and then have 2 kids at around 29-35. The degree to which humans are behaviourally identical is actually pretty bizarre.
I'm fat, but that's not the immediate cause of my lack of social success. The immediate cause is that I come across to other people as disinterested, rude, narcissistic, uncaring, and hostile. However, the cause of this is my own feelings of inadequacy, and in turn the cause of that is my fatness. I think, at least, in part. At any rate, I'm certain that losing weight would improve the way I am able to relate to other humans; people don't like someone who hates himself, and a lot of times they just don't like fat people because they take up too much space on airplanes.
Here's a great big "fuck you" to postmodernism and Protestantism: those ideologies that say beauty is bad, and that wealth is bad. They're destructive. Live long, and prosper.
So, people are getting more disconnected, but at the same time they're able to get more information about each other. Now that so many of our conversations are matters of record (texting, voicemail, email, facebook, blogging, etc) it has become easier, among other things, to catch cheating partners. The best thing to do, if your goal were privacy and the avoidance of social risk, would be to avoid email, blogging, facebook, texting -- all of that -- unless it was done in a very controlled way. I know people who use email that way, who recognize it as a potentially dangerous thing, and only send very stiff, formal, procedural emails with a "Thanks" at the bottom, every time. Internet communication, for them, is not the place for honest communication, for real communication, for communication with emotional content. That's ok.
These people are just a lot less open and honest than I am, and a lot sneakier. These are the people who get hired: the liars, who fit in well with the ongoing lie that is employment culture. But what kind of world do we live in when we can't be honest? Do you really want to live there? For some of us, the internet is all we have, because no one wants to spend real time with us (and we don't particularly want to spend time with others). So, being honest on the internet is the only way we're going to have any genuine interaction. Blah blah.
I've been making this awesome species of tuna sandwich lately. I posted the recipe on a bbs, and I'll repost it here with some modifications and optimization:
TACKER: mjt (barnacle) SUBJECT: best tuna sandwich DATE: 18-Nov-11 16:16:12 HOST: sdf i just made this, and it's so good I have to share. 1 can EXPENSIVE AWESOME SOLID WHITE TUNA 2 heaping spoonfulls of mayonnaise enough cream cheese to generously cover 2 pieces of bread 2 pieces of bread, toasted pinch of curry powder pinch of cayenne pepper dollop of honey (!!!!!!!!!!) 1. Extremely thoroughly chop and mix tuna, mayo, spices, and honey. 2. Toast bread. 3. Spread cream cheese on bread. 4. Scoop tuna-mix on top of the two slices of bread. It's important that this "sandwich" be OPEN FACED, to keep the bread-to-tunagoop ratio low. In fact I think many or most sandwiches should be open faced. It's the way of the future. 5. Eat. the honey adds a lot -- you don't need much. Just a few mL. SWEET HOT CHEESY FISH
I've been eating this pretty consistently since November 18th and I'm starting to get a little tired of it. And, I still have two cans of tuna left. Time to switch to spaghetti for a while. 1000 calories for half a box + sauce + cheese; a reasonable brunch. Tomorrow, though -- today, I only have 400 calories left to spend, and I think I will spend them on a large bowl of cereal around 8pm.
Most people don't do shit. They never struggle to overcome anything, and never face any adversity. They just waddle and meander through life, acting on instinct and getting by on bravado and style. Here is the phrase to remember:
Everyone has a nature, and a set of circumstances that influence them. They act according to this, and not out of some indepenent free agent of will. If you're successful in life it's because you had the tools to be successful, and were directed along that path. Free will is the biggest lie there is.