Around 2,700 years ago a Greek poet named Hesiod once said "observe due measure; moderation is best in all things" which would later be shortened through history quite simply as "all things in moderation" as advice for life. There comes a point when these little pieces of sage wisdom often discounted and discarded as cliché eventually appear to us. In moments of great epiphany we come to the realisation of truths we already knew but never fully accepted. This for me is one.
There are a lot of things in life which I have little self control over when it comes to my indulgences but one in particular is my love of music. This is not something in and of itself that can cause any harm to me from overindulgence - unless you count excessive headphone use and the concern for my future hearing. Nevertheless there are downsides to my love of something that gives me great joy and pleasure.
The first is what I refer to a musical exhaustion. This happens when you find a track that instantly resonates with you, so much so that it becomes an obsession. You play it in excess, and in the extreme you play it on repeat and it becomes the only song you listen to, which leads to the inevitable exhaustion of the enjoyment you get from it. You then let go of the music and move on.
For me part of the reason I do this is because it represents something new that is a novelty to me and I want to get as much from it as I can, and part of it is simply to increase the play count - which I know I can do through other means without actually listening to it but there's no fun in that. The reason I do this is because I have playlists that are based on how many times I have played tracks and those tend to be my go-to playlists whenever I want something to listen to and don't particularly feel like shuffling through countless tracks.
The second is a phenomenon known as an Earworm, which is basically when you get a melody, or lyrics, or both stuck in your head to the point where you imagine it and you can't really think of anything else. Even when you try to, when you have a moment of rest or silence the Earworm wriggles again and the music plays.
Both of these are pretty harmless, and Music whilst described as a drug by some, is certainly something that is very safe to indulge in, even in excess. Other indulgences not so much, in fact whenever an indulgence can actually cause us harm or have very noticeable negative affects on us we tend to refer to them as a vice. Things like actual drugs, alcohol, gambling etc are all things that spring to mind, and incidentally those tend to be the first things we think of giving up whenever we try to change our lives. Moderation is something that is a lot harder to achieve. Cold turkey with anything is rather simple to achieve, you just have to cut off the supply of whatever you want to give up and then buckle your seat belt and prepare for the rough ride of withdrawal that inevitably ensues. Moderation on the other hand requires discipline, control, and the willpower to say no when you have the opportunity.
The idea of all things in moderation is one that appeals to me very much, but I've never been able to figure out how to do that with any degree of success, unfortunately.
Superstition
Superstition is a strange and unusual thing. To quote Lydia from Beetlejuice, I myself, am strange and unusual. I've always had a fascination with superstitions, in particular those relating to numbers. Whilst I have never delved that deep into Numerology, one thing I have learned is that you can see patterns in anything if you look hard enough, nothing ever appears truly random to us even when we know it is. Perhaps it is that insistence that nothing truly happens by chance that drives us to believe that superstitions might actually be real.
You are just as likely to win the lottery with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, as you are with any other 6 numbers chosen at random, yet our brains refuse to accept this and insist the likelihood that such an event would occur is much less likely than any other 6 random numbers. The truth is that what we are weighing up in that moment is actually selective evidence. When we consider the two scenarios playing out, unconsciously we bundle every other number combination as one, and single this combination out on its own. In that scenario, our 6 sequential numbers versus all other combinations it is true that the likelihood it would occur is far less - because we have not compared it against any single permutation but every permutation at all. To simplify the conjecture would be to say you are more likely to lose than you are to win. That at least we can accept.
The same is true of superstitions, you're just as likely to have no negative outcome as a result of whatever ominous occurrence you take, as you are to have positive outcomes. For example if you take the adage that breaking a mirror causes seven years bad luck, you are just as likely to have seven good years, seven bad, or seven neutral, after the fact. Dismissing cognitive bias which could cause us to fixate on one outcome, in a purely objective analysis of the outcome the act in itself won't influence your life. Yet these superstitions remain prevalent.
Some superstitions can be traced back to events that became associated with them. Incidents happening on dates with specific numbers such as the great fire of London in 1666 reinforce the belief that certain numbers - in this case three sixes whenever they appear together, can lead to negative events. The question is whether the number caused those events, or if those events happening on that date caused the number to become ominous - if the great fire had happened in 1888 would we consider three eights to be a bad omen?
Some superstitions can be traced back to some grain of truth long forgotten. For example if you take the seven years bad luck for breaking a mirror, some historians have argued this emerged as a result of mercury poisoning. Mercury is particularly toxic to humans and if small amounts of it enter the bloodstream it can take a long time for it slowly kill the person that has been contaminated by it. Mirrors in the 1400s were made using glass and Mercury - the former is prone to shattering into shards when broken which can easily cut anyone attempting to clean it up, those cuts can be large or tiny and barely noticeable. Some have posited then that those who broke mirrors made of mercury and subsequently became poisoned by the mercury, suffered a long period of slow decline in health. It's easy to see from here where the superstition that breaking a mirror causes bad luck can emerge - the irony is that superstition is actually true and represents not something supernatural at play but rather something that can be explained quite concisely through understanding of medical and chemical sciences.
That last point is what brings me back to the fascination I have with superstition, if some can be found to be based in truth, then perhaps there is also truth behind the others that all have perfectly reasonable explanations we just have not gained a complete understanding thereof.
You are just as likely to win the lottery with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, as you are with any other 6 numbers chosen at random, yet our brains refuse to accept this and insist the likelihood that such an event would occur is much less likely than any other 6 random numbers. The truth is that what we are weighing up in that moment is actually selective evidence. When we consider the two scenarios playing out, unconsciously we bundle every other number combination as one, and single this combination out on its own. In that scenario, our 6 sequential numbers versus all other combinations it is true that the likelihood it would occur is far less - because we have not compared it against any single permutation but every permutation at all. To simplify the conjecture would be to say you are more likely to lose than you are to win. That at least we can accept.
The same is true of superstitions, you're just as likely to have no negative outcome as a result of whatever ominous occurrence you take, as you are to have positive outcomes. For example if you take the adage that breaking a mirror causes seven years bad luck, you are just as likely to have seven good years, seven bad, or seven neutral, after the fact. Dismissing cognitive bias which could cause us to fixate on one outcome, in a purely objective analysis of the outcome the act in itself won't influence your life. Yet these superstitions remain prevalent.
Some superstitions can be traced back to events that became associated with them. Incidents happening on dates with specific numbers such as the great fire of London in 1666 reinforce the belief that certain numbers - in this case three sixes whenever they appear together, can lead to negative events. The question is whether the number caused those events, or if those events happening on that date caused the number to become ominous - if the great fire had happened in 1888 would we consider three eights to be a bad omen?
Some superstitions can be traced back to some grain of truth long forgotten. For example if you take the seven years bad luck for breaking a mirror, some historians have argued this emerged as a result of mercury poisoning. Mercury is particularly toxic to humans and if small amounts of it enter the bloodstream it can take a long time for it slowly kill the person that has been contaminated by it. Mirrors in the 1400s were made using glass and Mercury - the former is prone to shattering into shards when broken which can easily cut anyone attempting to clean it up, those cuts can be large or tiny and barely noticeable. Some have posited then that those who broke mirrors made of mercury and subsequently became poisoned by the mercury, suffered a long period of slow decline in health. It's easy to see from here where the superstition that breaking a mirror causes bad luck can emerge - the irony is that superstition is actually true and represents not something supernatural at play but rather something that can be explained quite concisely through understanding of medical and chemical sciences.
That last point is what brings me back to the fascination I have with superstition, if some can be found to be based in truth, then perhaps there is also truth behind the others that all have perfectly reasonable explanations we just have not gained a complete understanding thereof.
Merry Christmas!
My favourite Christmas song isn't really a Christmas song but I think I can get away with including it here. The song is called 'What If' and was recorded as part of the soundtrack to 'Christmas Carol: The Movie' the 2001 live action/animation adaptation of the Dickensian classic, starring Kate Winslet who performs the track. The track resonates with me on many levels, a story that many can relate to, of a love for someone that goes awry leading to the two of you parting ways, and in years to come you look back on that time and wonder what might have been, what if...
I like to think that everything in life happens for a reason, sometimes that reason is known to us, others it is not. Sometimes we eventually find out why and sometimes we never do. I like to think that everything worked out the way it was meant to work out. I know that plays with the ideas of fate and destiny and opens up a huge debate about free will but let's leave that for now, it's too heavy to get into. The point I was making is that when I look back on the "one that got away" or, ones, as there are a few guys I think could fit that moniker, I like to think it didn't work out because it wasn't meant to work out. You can write that off as sentimentality and wishful thinking, you can even put it down to a desire to shirk responsibility but in my defence I don't think any of those relationships could have been saved by anything they or I could have done.
Nevertheless there's always the thought of "What If" and the curiosity of what life might have been like if it had worked out. I don't know the answer to that question and like the lyrics to the song say, "I guess we'll never know" - still the curiosity remains. There are many things in life we can never know, it doesn't stop us dreaming about them or wondering.
On the flip side there are many things that have happened in my life since, which I don't think would have happened had things worked out. I guess if you weren't the sort to accept the sentimentality of reminiscing about the past and what might of been, it would be better to look at your present and your future and make the conscious decision that you want to do something or make something happen now in your life you can categorically say would never have happened had things worked out, because you are making that decision exactly because they didn't, and make it big enough and meaningful enough to say to yourself it was justified for things to have never worked out, for this to have happened instead.
What you choose to do is up to you, but if you think about those who go on to have lives of happiness in absence of the path they could have taken, those who have no regrets are often those who think that the path they took worked out better in the end - so why not try and make this path as best you can?
There's a quote I love, the precise wording I can't recall but it goes along these lines:
That's a bit melancholy I know but it wouldn't be Christmas if there wasn't some reflection and some contemplation of life. Every year at this time I like to celebrate togetherness and be thankful for what I do have, however great or small that may seem. The religious nature of Christmas I have to say has faded for me over the years. I've redefined the holiday choosing what it means to me and celebrating that instead. To that end, Merry Christmas!
I like to think that everything in life happens for a reason, sometimes that reason is known to us, others it is not. Sometimes we eventually find out why and sometimes we never do. I like to think that everything worked out the way it was meant to work out. I know that plays with the ideas of fate and destiny and opens up a huge debate about free will but let's leave that for now, it's too heavy to get into. The point I was making is that when I look back on the "one that got away" or, ones, as there are a few guys I think could fit that moniker, I like to think it didn't work out because it wasn't meant to work out. You can write that off as sentimentality and wishful thinking, you can even put it down to a desire to shirk responsibility but in my defence I don't think any of those relationships could have been saved by anything they or I could have done.
Nevertheless there's always the thought of "What If" and the curiosity of what life might have been like if it had worked out. I don't know the answer to that question and like the lyrics to the song say, "I guess we'll never know" - still the curiosity remains. There are many things in life we can never know, it doesn't stop us dreaming about them or wondering.
On the flip side there are many things that have happened in my life since, which I don't think would have happened had things worked out. I guess if you weren't the sort to accept the sentimentality of reminiscing about the past and what might of been, it would be better to look at your present and your future and make the conscious decision that you want to do something or make something happen now in your life you can categorically say would never have happened had things worked out, because you are making that decision exactly because they didn't, and make it big enough and meaningful enough to say to yourself it was justified for things to have never worked out, for this to have happened instead.
What you choose to do is up to you, but if you think about those who go on to have lives of happiness in absence of the path they could have taken, those who have no regrets are often those who think that the path they took worked out better in the end - so why not try and make this path as best you can?
There's a quote I love, the precise wording I can't recall but it goes along these lines:
The past is written and cannot be changed, the future is tomorrow and still to come, today is a gift, that's why it's called the present.Today is a day associated with giving and receiving gifts, so why not give yourself a gift by making a change in your life that will make it better, no matter how big or how small, not just today but every day hereafter, try to do something that makes your life better in some small way and maybe in the end the sum total of all those gifts will amount to something that makes everything in your past feel like it was worth it.
That's a bit melancholy I know but it wouldn't be Christmas if there wasn't some reflection and some contemplation of life. Every year at this time I like to celebrate togetherness and be thankful for what I do have, however great or small that may seem. The religious nature of Christmas I have to say has faded for me over the years. I've redefined the holiday choosing what it means to me and celebrating that instead. To that end, Merry Christmas!
The Pursuit of Perfection
There is a temptation in life to imagine perfection. We think about actions that we can take and we think about the subsequent outcomes and we picture in our minds what the perfect outcome would be. For example we can try to bake a cake, and we can picture it in our mind as to what it will look like. We then go through the process of mixing the batter and then baking it and eventually we get the output of our work in the form of a cake and it is an inevitability that we will compare it to what we pictured in our minds.
Perfection is a useful concept when it comes to aspiration and ambition but it is an impractical concept when it comes to evaluating the final result. This is because in almost every single thing we do in life, despite how hard we try, we will never achieve perfection for the simple reason that perfection is to be without flaws, and humanity is flawed, ergo perfection is to be without humanity. There is a reason we use machines and computerized production processes whenever we need precision. There is a reason we don't rely on humans any longer for mass produced products - they can't create uniformity the way computers and machines can. No matter how great the artist is, they will never paint two pictures that are completely identical, there will be flaws between the two, granted with the level of skill they possess, the apparent flaws will decline to the point where you have to look very closely to actually spot the difference.
If you take dating and the pursuit of someone to spend your life with, there is a temptation here too which encourages us to define the perfect person. We picture them in our minds and we add detail in excess until the image we create is as full and complex as we can make it. As before however this can be useful for defining aspiration or ambition but it serves no real purpose in reality when evaluating the final result - in this case the people we actually end up dating. The image of perfection you created in your mind is one that can never truly be achieved, you can come close depending on how detailed you made the depiction but no-one you ever meet in life will ever be the person you depicted in your mind because that person only exists within your mind.
Despite on some level the fact that everyone knows this is the case, we still try to pursue perfection and we still work not only towards our own vision and interpretation of what that is but also towards a collective vision. We as a society collectively define what we believe perfection to be, however this depiction is often fluid. When you look back throughout history and compare past and present you can see quite quickly how style and trends evolved and how the definition of perfection changed. The definition in itself isn't even one that can be considered to be universal, as the more you travel and the more you experience of other cultures the more you begin to see that perfection is subjective and that ultimately it is a matter of opinion, not something objective that can be considered an empirical fact.
Perfection is a nice idea, but when you pursue it, remember it is never achievable in itself, it should only determine direction, not a destination, this and that ultimately the real question is not whether or not something is perfect, but rather, whether or not you can accept the imperfections.
Perfection is a useful concept when it comes to aspiration and ambition but it is an impractical concept when it comes to evaluating the final result. This is because in almost every single thing we do in life, despite how hard we try, we will never achieve perfection for the simple reason that perfection is to be without flaws, and humanity is flawed, ergo perfection is to be without humanity. There is a reason we use machines and computerized production processes whenever we need precision. There is a reason we don't rely on humans any longer for mass produced products - they can't create uniformity the way computers and machines can. No matter how great the artist is, they will never paint two pictures that are completely identical, there will be flaws between the two, granted with the level of skill they possess, the apparent flaws will decline to the point where you have to look very closely to actually spot the difference.
If you take dating and the pursuit of someone to spend your life with, there is a temptation here too which encourages us to define the perfect person. We picture them in our minds and we add detail in excess until the image we create is as full and complex as we can make it. As before however this can be useful for defining aspiration or ambition but it serves no real purpose in reality when evaluating the final result - in this case the people we actually end up dating. The image of perfection you created in your mind is one that can never truly be achieved, you can come close depending on how detailed you made the depiction but no-one you ever meet in life will ever be the person you depicted in your mind because that person only exists within your mind.
Despite on some level the fact that everyone knows this is the case, we still try to pursue perfection and we still work not only towards our own vision and interpretation of what that is but also towards a collective vision. We as a society collectively define what we believe perfection to be, however this depiction is often fluid. When you look back throughout history and compare past and present you can see quite quickly how style and trends evolved and how the definition of perfection changed. The definition in itself isn't even one that can be considered to be universal, as the more you travel and the more you experience of other cultures the more you begin to see that perfection is subjective and that ultimately it is a matter of opinion, not something objective that can be considered an empirical fact.
Perfection is a nice idea, but when you pursue it, remember it is never achievable in itself, it should only determine direction, not a destination, this and that ultimately the real question is not whether or not something is perfect, but rather, whether or not you can accept the imperfections.
A Year to Remember
Every year for most of us we mark the day we were born with a celebration we call a birthday. That day represents a day of remembrance, yet the act itself that we remember often has little or no focus for the day itself. You commemorate your birth and celebrate growing one day older, but it is you yourself that is the subject of the day, not the woman who gave birth to you, nor the act of giving birth. Both of these are usually overlooked entirely, to the point where those that actually draw attention to it are accused of trying to make the day all about them or all about someone else as opposed to the person whose birthday they are celebrating.
Anniversaries in this way are somewhat peculiar to me, and it is not limited to birthdays but extends beyond them. Births, Marriages, Deaths, Moments of Achievement, Moments of Loss, Days of Remembrance, among others; in almost all of these cases the events that actually occurred are rarely the focus of the anniversary. Wedding Anniversaries celebrate how many years people have been married but the Wedding day itself often has little to no mention at all in the events of the day. Deaths too remember the losses we have had, the people who are gone and are no longer with us to see who and what we have become. We count how many years it has been and we think about how much we miss them, but we rarely focus on their actual death, how they died, perhaps this is the one example here where that's maybe not a bad thing as it would be painful to relive it. But for other days that represent moments of our past that we were proud of, the actual achievement is rarely the focus of the celebration but rather the time that has passed and what you have done since or what it enabled you to do.
It becomes quite apparent when you stop and deconstruct these days of celebration and memorial that they are all in essence dedicated to time itself, not the original events. When we celebrate a birthday we celebrate the number of years, how much time has passed. We celebrate time itself. Humanity is perhaps unique in this regard as we appear to be the only species that actually observes time directly. Others are aware of it passing and carry out routines based upon it such as migration, hibernation, and day and night cycling, but to our knowledge we are the only species that actually understands time - although that understanding in and of itself is rather limited.
The year is almost over, in a few days time we will increment a number by 1 and mark that event with celebrations that will span the globe. For one day more than any other humanity will come together to celebrate time and its passing. With our fascination and our fixation upon time, one has to wonder why it more than any other element of life has become so important to us as a species.
Anniversaries in this way are somewhat peculiar to me, and it is not limited to birthdays but extends beyond them. Births, Marriages, Deaths, Moments of Achievement, Moments of Loss, Days of Remembrance, among others; in almost all of these cases the events that actually occurred are rarely the focus of the anniversary. Wedding Anniversaries celebrate how many years people have been married but the Wedding day itself often has little to no mention at all in the events of the day. Deaths too remember the losses we have had, the people who are gone and are no longer with us to see who and what we have become. We count how many years it has been and we think about how much we miss them, but we rarely focus on their actual death, how they died, perhaps this is the one example here where that's maybe not a bad thing as it would be painful to relive it. But for other days that represent moments of our past that we were proud of, the actual achievement is rarely the focus of the celebration but rather the time that has passed and what you have done since or what it enabled you to do.
It becomes quite apparent when you stop and deconstruct these days of celebration and memorial that they are all in essence dedicated to time itself, not the original events. When we celebrate a birthday we celebrate the number of years, how much time has passed. We celebrate time itself. Humanity is perhaps unique in this regard as we appear to be the only species that actually observes time directly. Others are aware of it passing and carry out routines based upon it such as migration, hibernation, and day and night cycling, but to our knowledge we are the only species that actually understands time - although that understanding in and of itself is rather limited.
The year is almost over, in a few days time we will increment a number by 1 and mark that event with celebrations that will span the globe. For one day more than any other humanity will come together to celebrate time and its passing. With our fascination and our fixation upon time, one has to wonder why it more than any other element of life has become so important to us as a species.
Defining Intelligence
There are many things I can do which impress people, some of these talents are abilities that people believe you need heightened levels of intelligence to be able to achieve. That sounds arrogant to state, but the reason I have worded it this way is because I intend the statement to be contentious. I take issue with the implication that knowledge and intelligence are equal. I fervently oppose this sentiment because many of the things I can do that people find impressive or a sign of intelligence are not abilities that I would consider unique to myself, they're not even abilities I would consider a sign of intelligence.
For example, I can solve a Rubik's cube which impresses some people. The first thing I usually say to people is that they could learn how to do it too if they took the time and effort. The reason I take issue with seeing this as a sign of intelligence is that the method of solving a Rubik's cube is essentially an algorithm - a series of instructions or steps that you follow in order to complete a task. Anyone who takes the time to learn the steps to solving the cube will be able to do it. You can even create a computer program that takes the state of a cube as an input, performs the algorithm on that input and produces a solved cube as an output. Does that mean it is intelligent? Well clearly the answer is no, it's just doing what you programmed it to do. The same is true of any human solving the cube. The true mark of intelligence is whether or not the person or the machine solving it figured out how to do it on their own or whether they were told how to do it.
That distinction is something that isn't easy to make when it comes to humans. At least with machines you can examine the code of their program for signs that it was written by a human. However with humans who can solve the cube, determining whether they figured it out themselves is a bit more complex. You could pose questions about the underlying mathematics, but that assumes the person figured it out via a mathematical approach. They may have discovered how to solve it without an understanding of the underlying mathematics. You could ask questions about the mechanisms of the puzzle and its behaviour but again that assumes they studied these to determine how to solve it. To draw a parallel this is like Maths class in school when you were asked to show your working out when solving equations - you might actually know the answer and how to do it, just have an inability to put that down on paper or explain it. Therein lies the limitation of intelligence, that understanding of our own understanding often limits exterior examination.
You can use rote learning - the repetition of information until it is recalled effortlessly, but just because a pupil can recite their 12 times tables to heart doesn't mean they actually know how to multiply two numbers together. The depth of their understanding is exposed when you ask them to do it with new inputs they have not seen before. Asking a pupil to perform multiplication of 13 times tables for example will demonstrate whether they actually know how to multiply two numbers together. In our Rubik's cube example this can be demonstrated with the Rubik's cube variants. The traditional cube is 3x3x3 but there are other variants, 2x2x2, 4x4x4, 5x5x5 and above. Give them a cube of a size they have not used before and if they truly understand the underlying mathematics or principles at work in the design of the puzzle then they will be able to solve it.
For the record I can solve the 2x2x2 and 3x3x3 variants, I can't reliably solve the 4x4x4 and above I can only get so far. Therein lies the limit of my understanding of the puzzle. The thing is, there are algorithms to solve the larger cubes, which I have read and used with success but I have never practised to the point where I can commit them to memory. I choose not to for the simple reason that I don't want to learn how to do it in this way as there's no understanding of how and why what you are doing works. I've mentioned abstraction before in previous posts on this blog, the idea that you don't need to know how something works you need only know how to use it, I don't like this approach when learning. For the longest time in Maths class when learning about square roots I wanted to know how the square root was actually calculated, this wasn't covered until many years into my education, when I finally learned it's simply achieved through trial and improvement using various algorithms designed to speed up the process, I felt somewhat cheated. If I had simply been told there was no other way than to use repetition to find it, I wouldn't have placed such value on knowing how to do it by hand.
Therein lies the crux of the distinction between intelligence and knowledge - not what you know but what you do not. To put it more bluntly, intelligence is the approach to finding information you don't know and the extent of the structure of that approach. Something that relies on pure random attempts - a random number generator - isn't intelligent, but something that takes a methodical approach to finding that number is more intelligent. Those last two words are quite important to reinforce "more intelligent" i.e. intelligence is not absolute, it is not a state of true or false, but rather it is a scale. Not surprisingly there exist many systems of quantifying where you are on that scale and attempts to measure it for example the Intelligence Quotient - IQ - method of grading intelligence.
Knowing a lot does not make you intelligent, how you use what you already know and how you try to find out that which you don't is what makes you intelligent.
For example, I can solve a Rubik's cube which impresses some people. The first thing I usually say to people is that they could learn how to do it too if they took the time and effort. The reason I take issue with seeing this as a sign of intelligence is that the method of solving a Rubik's cube is essentially an algorithm - a series of instructions or steps that you follow in order to complete a task. Anyone who takes the time to learn the steps to solving the cube will be able to do it. You can even create a computer program that takes the state of a cube as an input, performs the algorithm on that input and produces a solved cube as an output. Does that mean it is intelligent? Well clearly the answer is no, it's just doing what you programmed it to do. The same is true of any human solving the cube. The true mark of intelligence is whether or not the person or the machine solving it figured out how to do it on their own or whether they were told how to do it.
That distinction is something that isn't easy to make when it comes to humans. At least with machines you can examine the code of their program for signs that it was written by a human. However with humans who can solve the cube, determining whether they figured it out themselves is a bit more complex. You could pose questions about the underlying mathematics, but that assumes the person figured it out via a mathematical approach. They may have discovered how to solve it without an understanding of the underlying mathematics. You could ask questions about the mechanisms of the puzzle and its behaviour but again that assumes they studied these to determine how to solve it. To draw a parallel this is like Maths class in school when you were asked to show your working out when solving equations - you might actually know the answer and how to do it, just have an inability to put that down on paper or explain it. Therein lies the limitation of intelligence, that understanding of our own understanding often limits exterior examination.
You can use rote learning - the repetition of information until it is recalled effortlessly, but just because a pupil can recite their 12 times tables to heart doesn't mean they actually know how to multiply two numbers together. The depth of their understanding is exposed when you ask them to do it with new inputs they have not seen before. Asking a pupil to perform multiplication of 13 times tables for example will demonstrate whether they actually know how to multiply two numbers together. In our Rubik's cube example this can be demonstrated with the Rubik's cube variants. The traditional cube is 3x3x3 but there are other variants, 2x2x2, 4x4x4, 5x5x5 and above. Give them a cube of a size they have not used before and if they truly understand the underlying mathematics or principles at work in the design of the puzzle then they will be able to solve it.
For the record I can solve the 2x2x2 and 3x3x3 variants, I can't reliably solve the 4x4x4 and above I can only get so far. Therein lies the limit of my understanding of the puzzle. The thing is, there are algorithms to solve the larger cubes, which I have read and used with success but I have never practised to the point where I can commit them to memory. I choose not to for the simple reason that I don't want to learn how to do it in this way as there's no understanding of how and why what you are doing works. I've mentioned abstraction before in previous posts on this blog, the idea that you don't need to know how something works you need only know how to use it, I don't like this approach when learning. For the longest time in Maths class when learning about square roots I wanted to know how the square root was actually calculated, this wasn't covered until many years into my education, when I finally learned it's simply achieved through trial and improvement using various algorithms designed to speed up the process, I felt somewhat cheated. If I had simply been told there was no other way than to use repetition to find it, I wouldn't have placed such value on knowing how to do it by hand.
Therein lies the crux of the distinction between intelligence and knowledge - not what you know but what you do not. To put it more bluntly, intelligence is the approach to finding information you don't know and the extent of the structure of that approach. Something that relies on pure random attempts - a random number generator - isn't intelligent, but something that takes a methodical approach to finding that number is more intelligent. Those last two words are quite important to reinforce "more intelligent" i.e. intelligence is not absolute, it is not a state of true or false, but rather it is a scale. Not surprisingly there exist many systems of quantifying where you are on that scale and attempts to measure it for example the Intelligence Quotient - IQ - method of grading intelligence.
Knowing a lot does not make you intelligent, how you use what you already know and how you try to find out that which you don't is what makes you intelligent.
Distractions
Procrastination is when you have something you want to do, or something you need to do, but you keep putting it off by doing other things. Sometimes you do this consciously and at other times this is just the by-product of a lack of focus or the lack of desirability or determination to achieve the goal you set out to achieve in the first place. Whilst there are many ways to overcome this, what I find most interesting about the whole concept of Procrastination is the fact that it only seems to happen when you don't want it to.
There are times in life when we experience things we really don't like, and in those moments either after the event or even before it in anticipation, we can fixate on it and build it up in our minds to be much more than it is. In those moments the thing we would like more than anything is a distraction, yet as easy as it can be to get distracted when we do need to do something, it can be equally as hard to find distraction when we don't.
Trying not to think about something, ironically, seems to make us think about it even more. The harder you try, the more you will inevitably dwell on the thing you were trying desperately not to think about, but why is this the case? You could posit that it's a case of desirability in that you will find distractions more easily if the thing you are distracted from is something undesirable, yet that doesn't seem to be the case, anxiety overrides desire and we dwell on things we really shouldn't even more so when it is something we know we should not, and have no desire whatsoever to experience - like if you have a fear of the dentist, you know your health is important but the fear overrides the rationality and you avoid it at all costs, and yet the reason you need to go in the first place dwells in your mind.
You could then perhaps argue that the opposite is true, that the more desirable an experience would be, the less likely you are to be distracted from it, but again, that doesn't seem to be true. There are a great many things in life we want, but we are unwilling to pursue, and many more we know how to get, yet we don't put any effort into getting them, regardless of how big the reward waiting for us on the other side may be. We fixate on the short term, and the fact we have to change our direction or alter course limits us from even trying in the first place - we'd rather stay the course we are already on because it is less effort, even if we know it's headed for a cliff edge we won't do anything until it is impending and we have no other choice - but even then some of us who are defeatist will reach the cliff edge and think, "well I'm here now, may as well jump" - I know that's rather melancholy but it's somewhat true, sometimes the path backwards can seem even more effort and we just can't muster up the courage to pursue it.
There are times in life when we experience things we really don't like, and in those moments either after the event or even before it in anticipation, we can fixate on it and build it up in our minds to be much more than it is. In those moments the thing we would like more than anything is a distraction, yet as easy as it can be to get distracted when we do need to do something, it can be equally as hard to find distraction when we don't.
Trying not to think about something, ironically, seems to make us think about it even more. The harder you try, the more you will inevitably dwell on the thing you were trying desperately not to think about, but why is this the case? You could posit that it's a case of desirability in that you will find distractions more easily if the thing you are distracted from is something undesirable, yet that doesn't seem to be the case, anxiety overrides desire and we dwell on things we really shouldn't even more so when it is something we know we should not, and have no desire whatsoever to experience - like if you have a fear of the dentist, you know your health is important but the fear overrides the rationality and you avoid it at all costs, and yet the reason you need to go in the first place dwells in your mind.
You could then perhaps argue that the opposite is true, that the more desirable an experience would be, the less likely you are to be distracted from it, but again, that doesn't seem to be true. There are a great many things in life we want, but we are unwilling to pursue, and many more we know how to get, yet we don't put any effort into getting them, regardless of how big the reward waiting for us on the other side may be. We fixate on the short term, and the fact we have to change our direction or alter course limits us from even trying in the first place - we'd rather stay the course we are already on because it is less effort, even if we know it's headed for a cliff edge we won't do anything until it is impending and we have no other choice - but even then some of us who are defeatist will reach the cliff edge and think, "well I'm here now, may as well jump" - I know that's rather melancholy but it's somewhat true, sometimes the path backwards can seem even more effort and we just can't muster up the courage to pursue it.
Data Mining
In computing, data is quite literally anything you can record. I don't necessarily mean in terms of sound and video, although that can be included. In computer science the act of recording data is known as logging and you might be surprised how much actually occurs if you've never studied the field - even if you have studied it you might still be surprised at how much data is logged without you knowing.
Information as opposed to data, is more developed and more concrete. If data is anything that can be recorded, then information is data with context or meaning. What you can extract from data, the conclusions you can draw, that is known as information. We live in a society where almost everything we do generates data, and almost all of that data can be used to generate information. Whilst the world has become increasingly aware of this fact, and whilst data collection and processing has become more prominent in our mindset and part of the Zeitgeist, it is perhaps a misdirection or misconception that data should be the key focus of our concern - in reality it is the information that is extracted from that data that is the real concern.
How old you are, in and of itself has little consequence when someone else knows that fact. Your age represents nothing more than a data point, something that can be charted or stated as an attribute. The risk to you personally, posed by someone else holding this data is negligible. The risk comes when this data is used to generate information. When your other data is added to create context, then information emerges. When people know what you have bought and sold combined with your age they are able to extract information. Conclusions can be drawn that someone your age might be interested in a given product. A profile is created, and I don't mean a profile like those on social media networks, although the concept is similar. A profile in the context of data extraction is used to create templates. Templates can be referenced later to give an accurate prediction of how someone might behave.
When you start collecting data from many different people you begin to harvest it, this process can be explicit, by asking individuals for their data or it can be implicit, by accessing the data they have already given you authority to access - whether they are fully aware of that or not. You can also access data in other ways, either by stealth through the use of tracking, without the subject of the data being aware of it, or through unlawful means such as hacking.
When you have amassed a large enough collection of data you can pool it together into a data set and then dig down through it to see what you can find. The process of digging through data sets is known as data mining, and like real world mining, the ultimate goal is to find clusters - groups of data accumulated together. In traditional mining those clusters would be ores in veins that indicate more of the resource you are after is nearby. In data mining, those clusters let you see where your data comes together. Where that data converges can lead to multiple data subjects all conforming to the same profile you have created. The larger these clusters become the greater the convergence of the data you collected.
When you see all the purchases made, and the ages of the people who made those purchases, you can see where correlations occur, you can see where specific audiences emerge. Audiences, like those who watch a TV show or a Theatre production, are people who have an interest in the same thing. Through data mining you can tap into audiences and identify those who are part of them, and crucially, reach those whose data you have not collected. Therein lies the ultimate goal of data mining - growth. All data mining at it's core, the same as traditional mining, is done in the pursuit of accumulating more of the resource you wish to mine. Data mining seeks to find more data, to extract more information, and to use that information to pursue growth, reaching more people to become subjects, to increase the size of the data set, and improve the accuracy of the predictability through the profiles you create.
How then do you overcome this system? If you do not want to be part of this system, or if you want to attack it, and protest against it, how do you overcome it? The answer is rather simple. Disinformation - false information. The integrity of these systems in their entirety relies on the accuracy of the information provided. So the first line of defence against these systems is to use inaccurate information wherever it is legal and prudent to do so. Those who are more militant in their objection would likely resort to providing disinformation even when it is not legal to do so. I don't approve of that personally however I would ask you to consider who it is and is not legal to lie to if you wanted to pursue that path. There is a fine line between giving false information, and committing fraud. The latter occurs when you give disinformation to a legal entity such as a bank or public body you are legally bound to tell the truth to for the purpose of the services they provide. As for social networks etc most of their terms and conditions are not enforceable by law as their stipulations are primarily aimed at consent which you can revoke at any time. Further to that as most of these rely on contract law, one of the first things you will learn about contracts if you ever study them academically or professionally, is that contracts need to be witnessed, and they need to be signed by the party to the contract - those terms of service etc are never witnessed, and as for being party to the contract, if the identity used to sign the contract is not your real identity, the contract is not valid even if it is witnessed.
For legal reasons I must disclaim I am not a lawyer and I cannot offer you legal advice. I have studied several areas of law and the information provided here is given based on my experience, it is based on opinion and I would ask you to seek legal advice before acting upon it.
Disclaimers aside, the desire to prevent profiling is legitimate. The services we use have become increasingly invasive and require us to give over more and more information as payment. They may be free in the monetary sense but they certainly do cost us all to use. I would urge anyone with concerns to think about the information they give freely to companies online, use software like AdBlock Plus to block advertising, enable Do Not Track features of your browsers, and switch off third party cookies - most websites don't need them except for tracking. Going further you could use a privacy conscious browser such as Brave to increase privacy and security. Websites can still track you even if cookies are disabled by using supercookies - these are server-side cookies that use browser fingerprinting inserted into HTTP headers to track you. Browsers such as Brave offer the option to block this behaviour and prevent websites from tracking you in this way.
Delete any old or outdated information on social networks. If you have facebook perform an audit of your account by looking through your 'Likes' and deciding what's still relevant, if you have Twitter you can do the same, or consider using a service like tweetdelete.net to delete any tweets older than a specific time frame e.g. a month. You probably have thousands of tweets on your profile, the bulk of those will no longer be relevant, and 99.9999% of the people who follow you or will follow you will never see or read those tweets, the only people they are benefiting are those who scrape data from your public profile to build up a profile on you.
Delete your old accounts on websites you no longer use - this is perhaps the most pertinent, you can use justdelete.me to find the 'delete account' page for most popular websites and instructions for many others. You can use namechk.com to find which websites a username is in use on - handy for finding old sites you forgot you once used.
Information as opposed to data, is more developed and more concrete. If data is anything that can be recorded, then information is data with context or meaning. What you can extract from data, the conclusions you can draw, that is known as information. We live in a society where almost everything we do generates data, and almost all of that data can be used to generate information. Whilst the world has become increasingly aware of this fact, and whilst data collection and processing has become more prominent in our mindset and part of the Zeitgeist, it is perhaps a misdirection or misconception that data should be the key focus of our concern - in reality it is the information that is extracted from that data that is the real concern.
How old you are, in and of itself has little consequence when someone else knows that fact. Your age represents nothing more than a data point, something that can be charted or stated as an attribute. The risk to you personally, posed by someone else holding this data is negligible. The risk comes when this data is used to generate information. When your other data is added to create context, then information emerges. When people know what you have bought and sold combined with your age they are able to extract information. Conclusions can be drawn that someone your age might be interested in a given product. A profile is created, and I don't mean a profile like those on social media networks, although the concept is similar. A profile in the context of data extraction is used to create templates. Templates can be referenced later to give an accurate prediction of how someone might behave.
When you start collecting data from many different people you begin to harvest it, this process can be explicit, by asking individuals for their data or it can be implicit, by accessing the data they have already given you authority to access - whether they are fully aware of that or not. You can also access data in other ways, either by stealth through the use of tracking, without the subject of the data being aware of it, or through unlawful means such as hacking.
When you have amassed a large enough collection of data you can pool it together into a data set and then dig down through it to see what you can find. The process of digging through data sets is known as data mining, and like real world mining, the ultimate goal is to find clusters - groups of data accumulated together. In traditional mining those clusters would be ores in veins that indicate more of the resource you are after is nearby. In data mining, those clusters let you see where your data comes together. Where that data converges can lead to multiple data subjects all conforming to the same profile you have created. The larger these clusters become the greater the convergence of the data you collected.
When you see all the purchases made, and the ages of the people who made those purchases, you can see where correlations occur, you can see where specific audiences emerge. Audiences, like those who watch a TV show or a Theatre production, are people who have an interest in the same thing. Through data mining you can tap into audiences and identify those who are part of them, and crucially, reach those whose data you have not collected. Therein lies the ultimate goal of data mining - growth. All data mining at it's core, the same as traditional mining, is done in the pursuit of accumulating more of the resource you wish to mine. Data mining seeks to find more data, to extract more information, and to use that information to pursue growth, reaching more people to become subjects, to increase the size of the data set, and improve the accuracy of the predictability through the profiles you create.
How then do you overcome this system? If you do not want to be part of this system, or if you want to attack it, and protest against it, how do you overcome it? The answer is rather simple. Disinformation - false information. The integrity of these systems in their entirety relies on the accuracy of the information provided. So the first line of defence against these systems is to use inaccurate information wherever it is legal and prudent to do so. Those who are more militant in their objection would likely resort to providing disinformation even when it is not legal to do so. I don't approve of that personally however I would ask you to consider who it is and is not legal to lie to if you wanted to pursue that path. There is a fine line between giving false information, and committing fraud. The latter occurs when you give disinformation to a legal entity such as a bank or public body you are legally bound to tell the truth to for the purpose of the services they provide. As for social networks etc most of their terms and conditions are not enforceable by law as their stipulations are primarily aimed at consent which you can revoke at any time. Further to that as most of these rely on contract law, one of the first things you will learn about contracts if you ever study them academically or professionally, is that contracts need to be witnessed, and they need to be signed by the party to the contract - those terms of service etc are never witnessed, and as for being party to the contract, if the identity used to sign the contract is not your real identity, the contract is not valid even if it is witnessed.
For legal reasons I must disclaim I am not a lawyer and I cannot offer you legal advice. I have studied several areas of law and the information provided here is given based on my experience, it is based on opinion and I would ask you to seek legal advice before acting upon it.
Disclaimers aside, the desire to prevent profiling is legitimate. The services we use have become increasingly invasive and require us to give over more and more information as payment. They may be free in the monetary sense but they certainly do cost us all to use. I would urge anyone with concerns to think about the information they give freely to companies online, use software like AdBlock Plus to block advertising, enable Do Not Track features of your browsers, and switch off third party cookies - most websites don't need them except for tracking. Going further you could use a privacy conscious browser such as Brave to increase privacy and security. Websites can still track you even if cookies are disabled by using supercookies - these are server-side cookies that use browser fingerprinting inserted into HTTP headers to track you. Browsers such as Brave offer the option to block this behaviour and prevent websites from tracking you in this way.
Delete any old or outdated information on social networks. If you have facebook perform an audit of your account by looking through your 'Likes' and deciding what's still relevant, if you have Twitter you can do the same, or consider using a service like tweetdelete.net to delete any tweets older than a specific time frame e.g. a month. You probably have thousands of tweets on your profile, the bulk of those will no longer be relevant, and 99.9999% of the people who follow you or will follow you will never see or read those tweets, the only people they are benefiting are those who scrape data from your public profile to build up a profile on you.
Delete your old accounts on websites you no longer use - this is perhaps the most pertinent, you can use justdelete.me to find the 'delete account' page for most popular websites and instructions for many others. You can use namechk.com to find which websites a username is in use on - handy for finding old sites you forgot you once used.
Introvert vs Extrovert
I consider myself to be an introverted person as opposed to an extrovert, but I have come to question whether that system of classification is actually valid in terms of absolutes. What that actually means is surprisingly hard to define. There are numerous attempts to categorise personalities and fit people into boxes where they sit neatly in order. These attempts usually involve a survey or a quiz of some sort where the answers you give then indicate your classification. The trouble is, there doesn't seem to be a consensus on how to actually define each term. Most people can agree on some general characteristics but most of those are subjective. For example characterising introverts as quiet and extroverts as loud is somewhat problematic when you ask people to define what actually constitutes either of those things. Most of these characteristics end up being relative and consequently your perception of what constitutes either shifts based on where you fall on those scales - like someone from a cold country considering 20 degrees Celsius [68 Fahrenheit] to be a hot summer's day and someone from a warm country considering that a cold winter's day.
Instead I feel the definition and distinction between the two in practice doesn't come down to what other people outline but rather which you identify with yourself. Whilst some consider introverts to be anti-social and extroverts to be social, one could argue this is a stereotype, that introverts are concerned with the depth of the connection in social settings whereas extroverts are concerned more with the experience and the nature of the gathering. To give an example, an introvert would not necessarily be fazed by a room full of people if they knew them all well and they were there for some common goal. I consider myself an introvert, I have no desire to be in a room full of people I don't know and probably have nothing in common with, however I have no problems with gatherings for specific purposes, classes in college and University never fazed me, the latter of which had over 200 people in them as a matter of routine. I didn't feel uneasy in those situations because I knew everyone was there for the same reason and that I had a common ground with everyone - the subject matter - which I could fall back on.
There's a quickness to associate shyness with introversion but in my experience many people who others label as introverted due to shyness at first meeting, turn out to be anything but shy when they are comfortable with the people they are around. This goes to extremes where I would say many of these people turn out to be some of the most extroverted personalities in my perception.
For me introversion is perhaps better defined by the level of thought someone puts into their actions before taking them, and the extent to which they look inward and examine those actions after they have taken them. I wouldn't define it as something absolute and would go so far to say that introversion and extroversion are in essence emotions or moods and that your personality is not fixed as one or the other but in reality is a neutral ground between the two. I would propose that you are capable of both and you likely exhibit both in equal proportion. Whilst you might assert the contrary at first in immediate retort, I would ask that you refrain from retort and actually look at your life as a whole rather than focusing on the parts that conform to the personality type you feel the most affinity with. Ask yourself what and where do you conform to the opposite. Ask yourself what conditions need to be met for you to behave in that way and ask whether those are conditions you can consciously control. If the answer to that second question is that they are not under your control then simply ask if your personality type is actually a response to your environment not an exhibition of your true "default" behaviour. If you were put in the opposing environment that encourages the opposing personality type, would it flourish?
Instead I feel the definition and distinction between the two in practice doesn't come down to what other people outline but rather which you identify with yourself. Whilst some consider introverts to be anti-social and extroverts to be social, one could argue this is a stereotype, that introverts are concerned with the depth of the connection in social settings whereas extroverts are concerned more with the experience and the nature of the gathering. To give an example, an introvert would not necessarily be fazed by a room full of people if they knew them all well and they were there for some common goal. I consider myself an introvert, I have no desire to be in a room full of people I don't know and probably have nothing in common with, however I have no problems with gatherings for specific purposes, classes in college and University never fazed me, the latter of which had over 200 people in them as a matter of routine. I didn't feel uneasy in those situations because I knew everyone was there for the same reason and that I had a common ground with everyone - the subject matter - which I could fall back on.
There's a quickness to associate shyness with introversion but in my experience many people who others label as introverted due to shyness at first meeting, turn out to be anything but shy when they are comfortable with the people they are around. This goes to extremes where I would say many of these people turn out to be some of the most extroverted personalities in my perception.
For me introversion is perhaps better defined by the level of thought someone puts into their actions before taking them, and the extent to which they look inward and examine those actions after they have taken them. I wouldn't define it as something absolute and would go so far to say that introversion and extroversion are in essence emotions or moods and that your personality is not fixed as one or the other but in reality is a neutral ground between the two. I would propose that you are capable of both and you likely exhibit both in equal proportion. Whilst you might assert the contrary at first in immediate retort, I would ask that you refrain from retort and actually look at your life as a whole rather than focusing on the parts that conform to the personality type you feel the most affinity with. Ask yourself what and where do you conform to the opposite. Ask yourself what conditions need to be met for you to behave in that way and ask whether those are conditions you can consciously control. If the answer to that second question is that they are not under your control then simply ask if your personality type is actually a response to your environment not an exhibition of your true "default" behaviour. If you were put in the opposing environment that encourages the opposing personality type, would it flourish?
The Second Time Around
For the two years I spent in College, there were a few subjects which I just did not grasp, no matter how my lecturers tried to explain the subject matter, it just wouldn't sink in. When it came to University there were only a few modules that touched on the same subjects, one of which I passed the coursework for 100% and failed the exam. I was given a compensated pass in that module as it was foundation year and it didn't contribute towards the degree as a whole. For the three years I spent in University I still never fully grasped the subject matter and to this day I still can't get my head around it.
This wasn't the case for everything however, in University I also struggled with a few other subjects, which years later when I returned to them through self-study, everything clicked. The time away from the subject and the eventual return under less pressure with less constraints combined to create a new mentality and a new drive that allowed me to progress.
This second time around mentality is something that I try to keep with me in life. There are experiences I have had when younger which never appealed to me at the time. I try not to let that be a deciding factor in whether or not I would try again, for the simple reason that for other things like the subjects from University, the second time around was very different from the first. Whatever the experience however meaningful or seemingly trivial, I like to revisit when years have passed just to see if anything has changed. I have wrote before about the taste of olives as a metaphor for this, olives being something I thought disgusting as a child and you could not pay me to eat them and yet now my opinion is very different. I fry some food in olive oil, I eat chocolate olives - a type of praline coated in chocolate that uses olive oil in the mixing process and are glazed to look like olives - and I like olives on my pizza where the flavour compliments the other toppings.
Some things however it feels, like those subjects from college, that no matter what you do it just won't work out. One of the hardest things in life can often be the easiest, and that is the notion of giving up. To walk away and admit defeat and stop trying. I find it fascinating that this can be the hardest and the easiest depending entirely on what our desire and what our motivations were for trying in the first place.
This wasn't the case for everything however, in University I also struggled with a few other subjects, which years later when I returned to them through self-study, everything clicked. The time away from the subject and the eventual return under less pressure with less constraints combined to create a new mentality and a new drive that allowed me to progress.
This second time around mentality is something that I try to keep with me in life. There are experiences I have had when younger which never appealed to me at the time. I try not to let that be a deciding factor in whether or not I would try again, for the simple reason that for other things like the subjects from University, the second time around was very different from the first. Whatever the experience however meaningful or seemingly trivial, I like to revisit when years have passed just to see if anything has changed. I have wrote before about the taste of olives as a metaphor for this, olives being something I thought disgusting as a child and you could not pay me to eat them and yet now my opinion is very different. I fry some food in olive oil, I eat chocolate olives - a type of praline coated in chocolate that uses olive oil in the mixing process and are glazed to look like olives - and I like olives on my pizza where the flavour compliments the other toppings.
Some things however it feels, like those subjects from college, that no matter what you do it just won't work out. One of the hardest things in life can often be the easiest, and that is the notion of giving up. To walk away and admit defeat and stop trying. I find it fascinating that this can be the hardest and the easiest depending entirely on what our desire and what our motivations were for trying in the first place.
Practice
To a writer there is nothing more terrifying and exciting than a blank page. There is infinite potential for creativity, and there is an unending reminder of failure if you can't fill that space. Finding things that inspire you to write can be difficult, inspiration can be elusive especially when you aren't feeling that great mentally. Although having said that, some of the greatest writers throughout history have been incredibly depressed in their personal lives or suffered from terrible afflictions that make them feel abject misery.
For me personally, creativity has always been a reservoir rather than a well, not something I have to dig down into but something that is held back by a wall constantly that only needs to be cracked before it floods out. To make my creativity flow, often all it takes is to start writing about anything at all. If I hate it when I write then I usually realise what would make me happier, I pursue that to see how far it will take me. The more I write, the easier it becomes.
The greatest advice I was ever given as a writer was from my English teacher when I was 14 years old, she said if you want to be a writer you have to write and never stop. You have to come back constantly and keep going, keep writing, even if you think what you write is utter tripe, the act itself gets the part of the brain involved warmed up and it gets things moving. The longer you go without writing, the harder it will be to return. In many ways this is the same advice a personal trainer will give you when you pursue fitness, the longer you go without visiting the gym, the harder it will be to return to it. To get the best result you have to do it often and maintain it. The muscles in your body perform better when they are maintained. This is the same idea for writing, to consider your mind a muscle and your talent to be something that you have to train and maintain if you want it to grow.
I write poems, and short stories, and blog posts, and I write much more than this. I write technical documents, user guides, reports, and reference manuals. I write as much as I can, and whenever I want to learn about something new, the best way for me to commit what I have learned is to take it and write with the knowledge I gain. If you want to learn how to do something to the best of your ability and cement your understanding then imagine having to explain what you are learning to someone else - that brings up a depth of reasoning that goes much deeper than your own when you are receptive of information.
Whilst I share much of what I write, here on this blog, there is a wealth of other work I create that isn't shared here, primarily because it isn't relevant, or because it touches on themes that aren't the subject of this blog. The poetry I write doesn't really fit here, and it doesn't fit on my other blogs either at the moment. The short stories I write are published through Amazon, and most of the technical documents I write are either commissions or they are manuals I have written for my own reference - with the exception of the text books which I have published through Amazon via Kindle and just in time printing. I'm not a fan of traditional publishing as it often results in wastage when you print a lot of books that don't sell, whereas just in time printing only creates physical copies when they are requested.
Whatever your interest, whatever your hobby, if you want to master it then the old adage is true - practice makes perfect - or at least it will take you one step closer to it. There's even a theory which is often quoted, to become a master at anything requires 10,000 hours of practice. You can breathe a sigh of relief in knowing this has been debunked, practice alone won't lead to mastery no matter how much you do it. To master any skill you need to increase your understanding of it and find ways to improve it.
For me personally, creativity has always been a reservoir rather than a well, not something I have to dig down into but something that is held back by a wall constantly that only needs to be cracked before it floods out. To make my creativity flow, often all it takes is to start writing about anything at all. If I hate it when I write then I usually realise what would make me happier, I pursue that to see how far it will take me. The more I write, the easier it becomes.
The greatest advice I was ever given as a writer was from my English teacher when I was 14 years old, she said if you want to be a writer you have to write and never stop. You have to come back constantly and keep going, keep writing, even if you think what you write is utter tripe, the act itself gets the part of the brain involved warmed up and it gets things moving. The longer you go without writing, the harder it will be to return. In many ways this is the same advice a personal trainer will give you when you pursue fitness, the longer you go without visiting the gym, the harder it will be to return to it. To get the best result you have to do it often and maintain it. The muscles in your body perform better when they are maintained. This is the same idea for writing, to consider your mind a muscle and your talent to be something that you have to train and maintain if you want it to grow.
I write poems, and short stories, and blog posts, and I write much more than this. I write technical documents, user guides, reports, and reference manuals. I write as much as I can, and whenever I want to learn about something new, the best way for me to commit what I have learned is to take it and write with the knowledge I gain. If you want to learn how to do something to the best of your ability and cement your understanding then imagine having to explain what you are learning to someone else - that brings up a depth of reasoning that goes much deeper than your own when you are receptive of information.
Whilst I share much of what I write, here on this blog, there is a wealth of other work I create that isn't shared here, primarily because it isn't relevant, or because it touches on themes that aren't the subject of this blog. The poetry I write doesn't really fit here, and it doesn't fit on my other blogs either at the moment. The short stories I write are published through Amazon, and most of the technical documents I write are either commissions or they are manuals I have written for my own reference - with the exception of the text books which I have published through Amazon via Kindle and just in time printing. I'm not a fan of traditional publishing as it often results in wastage when you print a lot of books that don't sell, whereas just in time printing only creates physical copies when they are requested.
Whatever your interest, whatever your hobby, if you want to master it then the old adage is true - practice makes perfect - or at least it will take you one step closer to it. There's even a theory which is often quoted, to become a master at anything requires 10,000 hours of practice. You can breathe a sigh of relief in knowing this has been debunked, practice alone won't lead to mastery no matter how much you do it. To master any skill you need to increase your understanding of it and find ways to improve it.
Addicted to Nostalgia
There are a lot of things in life you can be addicted to, some are more destructive than others. The National Health Service [NHS] in the UK defines addiction as "not having control over doing, taking or using something to the point where it could be harmful to you" - obvious examples aside, this definition throws open the possibility of addiction to all manner of things.
I guess really the crux of the NHS definition and its limitation isn't really what it can apply to, but rather that caveat "where it could be harmful to you" and the definition of harm therein. It's easy to limit harm only to physical harm, but in doing so you would completely exclude many addictions where the negative affects are not physical but mental. You can even go so far as to say that any negative impact on your life or limitation of your ability to live your life could be construed as harm.
I find it interesting to contemplate what that could be applied to and how far you can take it. There are various media sensations where tabloids and magazines and their ilk often speak of addictions to things you wouldn't conventionally view as bad. Rather than take that idea and apply it to something that would be controversial as many do, I'd rather apply it to something you might not have thought about.
If wishes, hopes, and dreams, can all be considered desires for the future or desires for how the present could be changed, then you could view nostalgia as the desire for the past - although you do have to draw a distinction between the past as it was and the past as we remember it because the two don't always align. In that vein I would say that while depression can lead one to feel a mental and physical exhaustion and the desire not to leave bed, almost to the point where addiction to sleep and dreaming can develop, I would go so far as to say fixation on nostalgia itself can become an addiction in and of itself.
If you define side affects of a behaviour as being harmful if they impede your ability to live in the present and look to the future then you could say if your fixation on the past whether it be as it was or as you remember it, could be harmful if it stops you from living life in the moment. If you miss out on experiences today because you long for yesterday so much, and deny yourself a future because you indulge in your desire to look back too much, is it fair to say you are addicted?
The reason I ask this question and pose this idea is because I am becoming increasingly aware of the negative impact on our society as a whole of a widespread populism that is defined by the desire to go back. Across the western world, both sides of the Atlantic, populism has been feeding the idea that things were better in the past and that the world would be a better place if we went back to the way things were. The trouble with this whole idea is that it is empirically flawed. The economic models of the past wouldn't work with our current society, they didn't scale in the first place that was why they were replaced to begin with. Progress was never something that was forced upon society as a whole, whilst undoubtedly along the way there were always those that opposed and objected and resisted change every step of the way the fact remains society as a whole moved in the direction it did because it was what people wanted.
I'm not convinced that many people actually want to go back to the past as it was, instead I think many people have romanticized it, particularly those who either did not experience it to begin with or weren't fully aware of it at the time to be able to judge it fairly. When you ask people why they think the world was better back then, they pick out things they liked and completely forget about everything they didn't, many right up to the point where you can ask pointed questions about the negatives that they can't answer because they either didn't recall them or never experienced it themselves.
In the UK for example many people reminisce about the 90s and the 80s as decades of greatness which many would want to return to and relive. The same people however can't justify that longing when asked about the negative events of those periods. When you ask if people would like to rebuild the Berlin wall, the vast majority would say no. When you ask if they want widespread unemployment and inflation that is spiralling out of control, they also say no. When you ask if people want authoritarian governments with leaders that were akin to dictators who made decisions that even now decades later still impact upon the lives of people who lived through them, again people say no. You get right down to it and see that really all people want is to experience the fashions again, the food they ate, the TV shows they watched, and the Music they listened to in an effort to indulge their nostalgia. They don't actually want to live like they once did. The World Wide Web was invented in the early 90s, but didn't become widespread to the extent it is now until the 00s, yet ask those so eager to return to the 80s if they would give up their smart phones, their tablets, and the ubiquity of the Internet to do it and you will see the reluctance begin to assert itself. It becomes quite clear it's not the past as it was, but the past as they have idealized it that they want to return to - a world that never actually existed in the first place.
Have we as a society become addicted to nostalgia? Is the depth and breadth of the political and social turmoil we live through today in reality a symptom of widespread addiction? If so, how can you tackle that addiction? Perhaps we need a radical solution to the problem; if one of the most effective ways to treat addiction is to go cold turkey, maybe it is time we started to seal away our past as a society in archives. Stop repeating old television shows, stop selling old music, preserve it only in archives that can only be accessed for research and posterity. Restrict publications and TV shows about past events to those of a verifiable nature. Encourage society to move forward and stop remaking and remixing old content and instead create completely new content. I'm not talking about rewriting or erasing history like that of Nineteen Eighty Four. All I am doing is highlighting the fact that we as a society have been around for thousands of years yet it is only a few decades of the late 20th century that we fixate on, and one of the reasons for that is because so much information and content created during that time is so readily available to us. We don't focus on the Roman Empire, or Medieval Europe to the extent we do with the late 20th century.
In the movie the Matrix when the first Matrix proved to be a disaster the machines had to rebuild and redesign it, in doing so they modelled it on the world as it was in the late 20th and early 21st century. If we aren't careful then our obsession with that time period might become a self-fulfilling prophecy. With the rise of VR and our pursuit of evermore immersive experiences it's not hard to see how a Matrix like simulation would become something people actually want to create and experience and it's not hard to see that time period becoming the one most people want to relive. If we ever make that a reality and go back to lie in the poppy fields, what would that spell for the future of our species?
I guess really the crux of the NHS definition and its limitation isn't really what it can apply to, but rather that caveat "where it could be harmful to you" and the definition of harm therein. It's easy to limit harm only to physical harm, but in doing so you would completely exclude many addictions where the negative affects are not physical but mental. You can even go so far as to say that any negative impact on your life or limitation of your ability to live your life could be construed as harm.
I find it interesting to contemplate what that could be applied to and how far you can take it. There are various media sensations where tabloids and magazines and their ilk often speak of addictions to things you wouldn't conventionally view as bad. Rather than take that idea and apply it to something that would be controversial as many do, I'd rather apply it to something you might not have thought about.
If wishes, hopes, and dreams, can all be considered desires for the future or desires for how the present could be changed, then you could view nostalgia as the desire for the past - although you do have to draw a distinction between the past as it was and the past as we remember it because the two don't always align. In that vein I would say that while depression can lead one to feel a mental and physical exhaustion and the desire not to leave bed, almost to the point where addiction to sleep and dreaming can develop, I would go so far as to say fixation on nostalgia itself can become an addiction in and of itself.
If you define side affects of a behaviour as being harmful if they impede your ability to live in the present and look to the future then you could say if your fixation on the past whether it be as it was or as you remember it, could be harmful if it stops you from living life in the moment. If you miss out on experiences today because you long for yesterday so much, and deny yourself a future because you indulge in your desire to look back too much, is it fair to say you are addicted?
The reason I ask this question and pose this idea is because I am becoming increasingly aware of the negative impact on our society as a whole of a widespread populism that is defined by the desire to go back. Across the western world, both sides of the Atlantic, populism has been feeding the idea that things were better in the past and that the world would be a better place if we went back to the way things were. The trouble with this whole idea is that it is empirically flawed. The economic models of the past wouldn't work with our current society, they didn't scale in the first place that was why they were replaced to begin with. Progress was never something that was forced upon society as a whole, whilst undoubtedly along the way there were always those that opposed and objected and resisted change every step of the way the fact remains society as a whole moved in the direction it did because it was what people wanted.
I'm not convinced that many people actually want to go back to the past as it was, instead I think many people have romanticized it, particularly those who either did not experience it to begin with or weren't fully aware of it at the time to be able to judge it fairly. When you ask people why they think the world was better back then, they pick out things they liked and completely forget about everything they didn't, many right up to the point where you can ask pointed questions about the negatives that they can't answer because they either didn't recall them or never experienced it themselves.
In the UK for example many people reminisce about the 90s and the 80s as decades of greatness which many would want to return to and relive. The same people however can't justify that longing when asked about the negative events of those periods. When you ask if people would like to rebuild the Berlin wall, the vast majority would say no. When you ask if they want widespread unemployment and inflation that is spiralling out of control, they also say no. When you ask if people want authoritarian governments with leaders that were akin to dictators who made decisions that even now decades later still impact upon the lives of people who lived through them, again people say no. You get right down to it and see that really all people want is to experience the fashions again, the food they ate, the TV shows they watched, and the Music they listened to in an effort to indulge their nostalgia. They don't actually want to live like they once did. The World Wide Web was invented in the early 90s, but didn't become widespread to the extent it is now until the 00s, yet ask those so eager to return to the 80s if they would give up their smart phones, their tablets, and the ubiquity of the Internet to do it and you will see the reluctance begin to assert itself. It becomes quite clear it's not the past as it was, but the past as they have idealized it that they want to return to - a world that never actually existed in the first place.
Have we as a society become addicted to nostalgia? Is the depth and breadth of the political and social turmoil we live through today in reality a symptom of widespread addiction? If so, how can you tackle that addiction? Perhaps we need a radical solution to the problem; if one of the most effective ways to treat addiction is to go cold turkey, maybe it is time we started to seal away our past as a society in archives. Stop repeating old television shows, stop selling old music, preserve it only in archives that can only be accessed for research and posterity. Restrict publications and TV shows about past events to those of a verifiable nature. Encourage society to move forward and stop remaking and remixing old content and instead create completely new content. I'm not talking about rewriting or erasing history like that of Nineteen Eighty Four. All I am doing is highlighting the fact that we as a society have been around for thousands of years yet it is only a few decades of the late 20th century that we fixate on, and one of the reasons for that is because so much information and content created during that time is so readily available to us. We don't focus on the Roman Empire, or Medieval Europe to the extent we do with the late 20th century.
In the movie the Matrix when the first Matrix proved to be a disaster the machines had to rebuild and redesign it, in doing so they modelled it on the world as it was in the late 20th and early 21st century. If we aren't careful then our obsession with that time period might become a self-fulfilling prophecy. With the rise of VR and our pursuit of evermore immersive experiences it's not hard to see how a Matrix like simulation would become something people actually want to create and experience and it's not hard to see that time period becoming the one most people want to relive. If we ever make that a reality and go back to lie in the poppy fields, what would that spell for the future of our species?
Resistance is futile
A while ago I wrote a post about suggestions for topics to write about. In that post I discussed the reasons why I write about certain things. There have been some events lately mostly political but some of them have just been part of life which have happened that seemingly everyone has been talking about. Whilst this blog is a representation of what is going on in my mind, it is a lot more controlled in terms of release schedules. I write posts for it and schedule them and try to keep the times I release new posts to something that resembles structure and routine. There is a forgiveness then when things happen and there isn't a post on here that addresses the issue, in fact posts on here are rarely about current events. Social media however seems to be the exact opposite.
Social media is a place where people expect immediate gratification, and depending on the platform, people often expect immediate replies. Social media is seen as being something that is more invasive, or pervasive as the case may be, when it comes to our personal lives. There is less tolerance for delay and very little forgiveness when you don't follow the herd mentality. When events of cultural significance happen, there is a pressure felt on social media for people to comment on those events. Even when events can be argued as insignificant, if enough people have already commented, you're expected to do so too. The peer pressure that can result in these situations is one of the things I dislike about having any sort of online presence whatsoever. It's not limited to an individual either, although I can only speak from personal experience as an individual, I do know from professional experience that those who work with social media and have a business with a significant online presence there is an expectation that they comment on things even when it has no relation to their business whatsoever.
I've come to the conclusion that the reason this has become such a prevalent part of online society is because humanity as a whole expects conformity. People don't like it when you don't conform. People really don't like it if rules and expectations that are placed upon them are not seen to be placed upon you too - even when arguably the only reason those expectations and constraints were placed upon them was because they asked for them or expected them.
Conformity is something that isn't easy to gauge in others when we have little exposure to their day to day lives, the result therefore is that people expect social media to be a place where you share every waking thought, and if you don't post it, you didn't think it. If you didn't think it, then "how dare you not care about this thing that I care so much about!" seems to be the immediate reaction. When did we as a society reach the point where we care so much about what other people think? I know there will be some that will argue that they don't care what others think and will give examples of how they set themselves apart from the rest of society, but the irony there is by actually comparing yourself to other people, you're demonstrating an awareness of what they do and how they think. You might not care what they think of you, but you care enough about what they think to try and distance yourself from what they think.
Short of bowing out of society as a whole and living in ignorance and isolation for the rest of your life I don't actually see how you can truly escape what other people think. As long as you have to remain part of society as a whole there will remain to be a comparison between you and it. Like a single pixel on a screen you will be seen whether you want to be part of the picture or not. It really comes down to how inconspicuous you are or how much you stand out from everyone else. That in itself is a measure of conformity, with the more you stand out being the more likely you are singled out.
Social media is a place where people expect immediate gratification, and depending on the platform, people often expect immediate replies. Social media is seen as being something that is more invasive, or pervasive as the case may be, when it comes to our personal lives. There is less tolerance for delay and very little forgiveness when you don't follow the herd mentality. When events of cultural significance happen, there is a pressure felt on social media for people to comment on those events. Even when events can be argued as insignificant, if enough people have already commented, you're expected to do so too. The peer pressure that can result in these situations is one of the things I dislike about having any sort of online presence whatsoever. It's not limited to an individual either, although I can only speak from personal experience as an individual, I do know from professional experience that those who work with social media and have a business with a significant online presence there is an expectation that they comment on things even when it has no relation to their business whatsoever.
I've come to the conclusion that the reason this has become such a prevalent part of online society is because humanity as a whole expects conformity. People don't like it when you don't conform. People really don't like it if rules and expectations that are placed upon them are not seen to be placed upon you too - even when arguably the only reason those expectations and constraints were placed upon them was because they asked for them or expected them.
Conformity is something that isn't easy to gauge in others when we have little exposure to their day to day lives, the result therefore is that people expect social media to be a place where you share every waking thought, and if you don't post it, you didn't think it. If you didn't think it, then "how dare you not care about this thing that I care so much about!" seems to be the immediate reaction. When did we as a society reach the point where we care so much about what other people think? I know there will be some that will argue that they don't care what others think and will give examples of how they set themselves apart from the rest of society, but the irony there is by actually comparing yourself to other people, you're demonstrating an awareness of what they do and how they think. You might not care what they think of you, but you care enough about what they think to try and distance yourself from what they think.
Short of bowing out of society as a whole and living in ignorance and isolation for the rest of your life I don't actually see how you can truly escape what other people think. As long as you have to remain part of society as a whole there will remain to be a comparison between you and it. Like a single pixel on a screen you will be seen whether you want to be part of the picture or not. It really comes down to how inconspicuous you are or how much you stand out from everyone else. That in itself is a measure of conformity, with the more you stand out being the more likely you are singled out.
Space Exploration
"What do you want to be when you grow up?" - I'm sure we can all remember being asked this question at some point when we were kids. For some of us we still get asked it now even as adults. What I find interesting about this question isn't the answer itself, but how the answer changes with age. When we are kids most reply with answers that are seen as somewhat stereotypical - fireman, doctor, policeman, astronaut, etc these are really professions children can pretend to be when playing make believe. They won't necessarily be realistic and in almost all cases they won't be accurate in terms of what the child thinks that job actually involves.
Innocence and naïvety aside, as we grow we become more aware of the world around us, we become more aware of these professions, and we become more aware of what work they actually involve. The more aware we become of all these things the more you start to see the answer to the question change.
I was born in 1988, and throughout my life one of my loves has been video games. In the last 30 years they have changed a lot, in one area in particular they have made leaps and bounds, that is realism. That's not something I play video games for personally, I play games to do things I can't do in real life, but there is one area where that realism lends itself well and that is the experience of doing things that are possible in real life which you would like to do but probably never will.
There's a game called No Man's Sky which is a game where you explore space. You travel to planets, gather resources, build bases, upgrade your technology, and generally just mess about. There is a story mode but it's not really worth it in the end. The game itself is interesting, but the novelty wears off quite quickly, the grinding nature takes its toll, and the game as a whole is generally seen as being a disappointment by all but a few dedicated fans.
One of the professions children often give when asked the question above is to say astronaut - and one reason why this aspiration fades with age is the realisation of how much work is involved to actually become an astronaut, another is the somewhat cynical acceptance of the reality that where you were born, how much money you have, and what opportunities are presented to you are not things we get to choose and by the time we have influence over them it is often too late to make decisions that can have a deep and long lasting effect on our lives. In other words most kids realise quite quickly becoming an astronaut is a pipe dream which the vast majority of people will never achieve and very few actually have the opportunity to even try to become one never mind whether you succeed or not in the end.
No Man's Sky is a game that, in a way, lets you see what it would be like to explore space and visit other planets. Of course the game isn't life like, the realism it employs has its limits, but one of the things I find interesting about the criticism of the game is the fact that many people say there's nothing to do in it. That makes me think about the real world and what would actually be involved in the real world profession of space exploration. Most peoples' perceptions of such a hypothetical career are based around the depictions we have from science fiction, but being more realistic, whilst it is a mathematical certainty that alien life exists due to the size of the Universe being infinite and the statistical fact that 1 in infinity is a certainty, the likelihood you would ever encounter any such life is almost a certain impossibility - but again with both there is a chance.
If you were to explore space for real as a career, No Man's Sky isn't far wrong in one crucial point - it would probably be boring. No matter how much you love your job, no matter how much passion you have for it, there is always a routine, and an eventual monotony that is achieved. It might not become the entirety of the job, but it will eventually creep in. I do not argue that these careers give you the opportunity to see and do things that nobody else ever will, and I do not argue that there will be many experiences, and sights, that will make you feel incredible and remind you why you chose to do it in the first place - but that doesn't change the fact those experiences will be a tiny part of the job you do. That last statement contains the most pertinent point of all - "the job you do" - the keyword being, "job" - the moment anything becomes a job it becomes methodical and structured, and repetitive.
Innocence and naïvety aside, as we grow we become more aware of the world around us, we become more aware of these professions, and we become more aware of what work they actually involve. The more aware we become of all these things the more you start to see the answer to the question change.
I was born in 1988, and throughout my life one of my loves has been video games. In the last 30 years they have changed a lot, in one area in particular they have made leaps and bounds, that is realism. That's not something I play video games for personally, I play games to do things I can't do in real life, but there is one area where that realism lends itself well and that is the experience of doing things that are possible in real life which you would like to do but probably never will.
There's a game called No Man's Sky which is a game where you explore space. You travel to planets, gather resources, build bases, upgrade your technology, and generally just mess about. There is a story mode but it's not really worth it in the end. The game itself is interesting, but the novelty wears off quite quickly, the grinding nature takes its toll, and the game as a whole is generally seen as being a disappointment by all but a few dedicated fans.
One of the professions children often give when asked the question above is to say astronaut - and one reason why this aspiration fades with age is the realisation of how much work is involved to actually become an astronaut, another is the somewhat cynical acceptance of the reality that where you were born, how much money you have, and what opportunities are presented to you are not things we get to choose and by the time we have influence over them it is often too late to make decisions that can have a deep and long lasting effect on our lives. In other words most kids realise quite quickly becoming an astronaut is a pipe dream which the vast majority of people will never achieve and very few actually have the opportunity to even try to become one never mind whether you succeed or not in the end.
No Man's Sky is a game that, in a way, lets you see what it would be like to explore space and visit other planets. Of course the game isn't life like, the realism it employs has its limits, but one of the things I find interesting about the criticism of the game is the fact that many people say there's nothing to do in it. That makes me think about the real world and what would actually be involved in the real world profession of space exploration. Most peoples' perceptions of such a hypothetical career are based around the depictions we have from science fiction, but being more realistic, whilst it is a mathematical certainty that alien life exists due to the size of the Universe being infinite and the statistical fact that 1 in infinity is a certainty, the likelihood you would ever encounter any such life is almost a certain impossibility - but again with both there is a chance.
If you were to explore space for real as a career, No Man's Sky isn't far wrong in one crucial point - it would probably be boring. No matter how much you love your job, no matter how much passion you have for it, there is always a routine, and an eventual monotony that is achieved. It might not become the entirety of the job, but it will eventually creep in. I do not argue that these careers give you the opportunity to see and do things that nobody else ever will, and I do not argue that there will be many experiences, and sights, that will make you feel incredible and remind you why you chose to do it in the first place - but that doesn't change the fact those experiences will be a tiny part of the job you do. That last statement contains the most pertinent point of all - "the job you do" - the keyword being, "job" - the moment anything becomes a job it becomes methodical and structured, and repetitive.
Long Time No See
Sometimes I Google people I knew in years gone by, just out of curiosity to see what I can find. I have a mild form of Prosopagnosia, which is a condition where it's difficult for me to recognise faces. I believe that is due to my Nystagmus but we can discuss that another time. In short though it means recognising people when I see them is difficult, to the point where I have passed my own parents and my brother in the street. People with this condition often end up using contextual clues to determine who people are, which is why when you meet people in unusual scenarios or in places you don't expect, you fail to recognise them even by those clues.
The Internet makes it easier to be sure you find the right person however because it allows you to find out other information in context beyond the picture alone. Profiles give you information depending on the site e.g. social networks usually give you a name, a rough location even if it's only the country, and a rough idea of age etc. Profiles on sites like LinkedIn give you a lot more specific information about a person that lets you pin them down even further.
I was looking up a guy I knew at University out of interest to see where he was now and what he is up to now. I scrolled through a few sites, and a countless pictures before I stumbled upon one, the location matched, as did the name the picture looked nothing like the person I remembered however. That's not unusual for me as I said above it's hard for me to recognise people at the best of times. I did some further digging and came to the conclusion that it was indeed him. The more I looked at the picture and the more I tried to stretch and fit the memory to it the more the face started to emerge. Slowly but surely I finally recognized the person in the picture.
It's been about 10 years since I saw him last, and one of the first things to come to mind, I must apologize, was to think "You look old" before remembering he's actually about six months younger than me if I recall correctly. I've spoken about ageing in past posts and how I find it hard to judge peoples' ages accurately, perhaps that's related to the Prosopagnosia, I've never actually made that link before, believe it or not. Regardless, he looks like he has grown up much more than I have. The site I found him on also stated his job which I won't state here for privacy reasons but suffice to say it's one I'd call a professional career rather than a job - the distinction between the two we can discuss another time but for simplicity I'll just say a professional career I generally define as one that requires certain qualifications before you can even apply for them.
All this combined made him seem more like an adult than I view myself. Yes, I am 30 years old, and yes that makes me an adult, but I don't really conform to what you expect an adult to be - or at least what I always thought an adult was when I was a kid. Someone who wears a suit, has lots of responsibilities, and "ticks the boxes" of what society expects you to do in your life, get married, buy a house, have kids, etc - although as a gay man I never really thought that applied to us that much even though we can do everything on that list. He's gay too but from the look of him you'd never know it - stereotypes aside he was never one I would consider "straight acting", as much as I hate that phrase.
We don't speak anymore it will come as no surprise given I had to search for him to find any of this information for myself; we don't speak anymore not because of any great rift or conflict etc, just because we grew apart, and even now I don't think we'd have that much in common - that was before seeing his picture, after seeing it I think I'd probably have even less in common with him, I couldn't be further from everything he is and does.
I do find it interesting how people change though with time. I do wonder whether he really did change and become the person he is now, or whether he is just doing what society expects of him? To try and put this in context if you've ever seen Will and Grace, he would always have been Jack when we were in University but he looks more like he's turned into Will now. It reminds me of that episode where Jack fears turning into Will by getting a real job, and settling down. That's another phrase I've always hated "settling down" - I don't like the implication that you have to give up on your hopes and dreams and settle for whatever you can get or whatever you have - I don't like the idea of being told to "know my place" and stay there. I really hate that and would encourage anyone to pursue their dreams and chase their passions, I'd hate for anyone to give up, probably because there are times I feel like giving up too but in the end I always manage to pull myself out of it. After seeing him I have to wonder if I didn't manage to pull myself out of it, is that where I would be? Not that there's anything wrong with it, he seems like he has a pretty decent life now, it's just not what I imagined, and I don't think it's what he imagined either.
The Internet makes it easier to be sure you find the right person however because it allows you to find out other information in context beyond the picture alone. Profiles give you information depending on the site e.g. social networks usually give you a name, a rough location even if it's only the country, and a rough idea of age etc. Profiles on sites like LinkedIn give you a lot more specific information about a person that lets you pin them down even further.
I was looking up a guy I knew at University out of interest to see where he was now and what he is up to now. I scrolled through a few sites, and a countless pictures before I stumbled upon one, the location matched, as did the name the picture looked nothing like the person I remembered however. That's not unusual for me as I said above it's hard for me to recognise people at the best of times. I did some further digging and came to the conclusion that it was indeed him. The more I looked at the picture and the more I tried to stretch and fit the memory to it the more the face started to emerge. Slowly but surely I finally recognized the person in the picture.
It's been about 10 years since I saw him last, and one of the first things to come to mind, I must apologize, was to think "You look old" before remembering he's actually about six months younger than me if I recall correctly. I've spoken about ageing in past posts and how I find it hard to judge peoples' ages accurately, perhaps that's related to the Prosopagnosia, I've never actually made that link before, believe it or not. Regardless, he looks like he has grown up much more than I have. The site I found him on also stated his job which I won't state here for privacy reasons but suffice to say it's one I'd call a professional career rather than a job - the distinction between the two we can discuss another time but for simplicity I'll just say a professional career I generally define as one that requires certain qualifications before you can even apply for them.
All this combined made him seem more like an adult than I view myself. Yes, I am 30 years old, and yes that makes me an adult, but I don't really conform to what you expect an adult to be - or at least what I always thought an adult was when I was a kid. Someone who wears a suit, has lots of responsibilities, and "ticks the boxes" of what society expects you to do in your life, get married, buy a house, have kids, etc - although as a gay man I never really thought that applied to us that much even though we can do everything on that list. He's gay too but from the look of him you'd never know it - stereotypes aside he was never one I would consider "straight acting", as much as I hate that phrase.
We don't speak anymore it will come as no surprise given I had to search for him to find any of this information for myself; we don't speak anymore not because of any great rift or conflict etc, just because we grew apart, and even now I don't think we'd have that much in common - that was before seeing his picture, after seeing it I think I'd probably have even less in common with him, I couldn't be further from everything he is and does.
I do find it interesting how people change though with time. I do wonder whether he really did change and become the person he is now, or whether he is just doing what society expects of him? To try and put this in context if you've ever seen Will and Grace, he would always have been Jack when we were in University but he looks more like he's turned into Will now. It reminds me of that episode where Jack fears turning into Will by getting a real job, and settling down. That's another phrase I've always hated "settling down" - I don't like the implication that you have to give up on your hopes and dreams and settle for whatever you can get or whatever you have - I don't like the idea of being told to "know my place" and stay there. I really hate that and would encourage anyone to pursue their dreams and chase their passions, I'd hate for anyone to give up, probably because there are times I feel like giving up too but in the end I always manage to pull myself out of it. After seeing him I have to wonder if I didn't manage to pull myself out of it, is that where I would be? Not that there's anything wrong with it, he seems like he has a pretty decent life now, it's just not what I imagined, and I don't think it's what he imagined either.
Political Persuasion
There are those that believe that politicians are people who reflect the views of others. People whose job it is to take the views of the people they represent and to argue their case and further their interests. I don't believe that is true. I think the only instance where this can actually be said to be true is in the case of lobbying, where a politician has been paid or has received donations from businesses and other interest groups to be a proponent of their interests. In most countries however this is illegal and can actually be punished with a prison sentence.
I would argue the real job of a politician is to influence people and change their point of view or control them, not the other way around. For as long as I have been politically aware, I have observed politicians very much campaigning on policies that were already decided. I have never seen a politician or their campaigners knock on a door and ask the constituent for input on their policies, I have however seen many knock on doors and try to convince the constituent that their manifesto is the answer to all of their problems.
Politics in general whilst at first can be viewed as a place to debate issues and a place that represents points of view that reflect voters, is not what it appears when you start to scrutinize it. Being disingenuous is one thing, but the job of a politician goes far beyond and actively involves manipulation. Issues are not debated with voters, they are decided by the party itself which is only a small number of people, and those people are almost always congruous in their viewpoints. A party will have a particular leaning in regards to key areas and those who are members will not deviate very far from that leaning. Even beyond the parties themselves, when you consider polling organizations and their job, one might at first buy into the belief that a polling organization carries out its job in order to inform policy creation, but again I would argue that is not the case. Polling organizations in reality are simply used to measure the effectiveness of the politicians' abilities to manipulate the view point of those who are potential voters. I have never seen a political party change its position based on polling, I have however seen parties ramp up their campaigning and their rhetoric in an attempt to win over public opinion to their side, and in some cases that proves successful and the polls shift.
While there are those that argue that you should vote and that you should always vote and that failing to do so is a failure on your part. The thing is, politics in general plays heavily on the idea of lesser evil. That their ultimate goal is to convince you the opposing side is entirely wrong and that there would be anarchy and economic ruin, and society would fall apart if the opposing side were to win. In other words you're pressured into taking a side that you might not even agree with just to avert disaster.
Personally I don't believe that voters are buying into that mentality anymore. I believe that the EU referendum in the UK and the 2016 Presidential election in the USA are two key examples of the failure of the lesser evil argument. There were people who campaigned intensively on the premise of convincing others that the opposing side would be a complete disaster, it didn't work though. In the case of the EU referendum there were those who did not want to leave who just didn't buy the case for remain. In the case of the US election there were those who did not want You Know Who to be President but they didn't like Hilary Clinton so they didn't vote at all.
Both of these things I think are demonstrative of the disillusion with politics that has been growing among those who could vote but choose not to. The argument of being the lesser evil option isn't enough, you actually have to be appealing now which hasn't been the case for many decades in politics if it ever was. You have to actually convince people to vote for you. The idea that voters are set in their view and will never change it is something which has been persistent in political commentary throughout my life, to the point where only those identified as "swing voters" are actually targeted. I don't believe that strategy has any merit any longer. I believe politics has now shifted to the point where a candidate has to appeal to as many people as they can, they can no longer depend on a traditional base to support them. The job of a politician is not to reflect the views of others, if it ever was, it is now a job of persuasion, and that persuasion needs substance. For people to shift from doing what they did before, you need to give them motivation to change, and the notion of lesser evil won't provide that motivation.
I would argue the real job of a politician is to influence people and change their point of view or control them, not the other way around. For as long as I have been politically aware, I have observed politicians very much campaigning on policies that were already decided. I have never seen a politician or their campaigners knock on a door and ask the constituent for input on their policies, I have however seen many knock on doors and try to convince the constituent that their manifesto is the answer to all of their problems.
Politics in general whilst at first can be viewed as a place to debate issues and a place that represents points of view that reflect voters, is not what it appears when you start to scrutinize it. Being disingenuous is one thing, but the job of a politician goes far beyond and actively involves manipulation. Issues are not debated with voters, they are decided by the party itself which is only a small number of people, and those people are almost always congruous in their viewpoints. A party will have a particular leaning in regards to key areas and those who are members will not deviate very far from that leaning. Even beyond the parties themselves, when you consider polling organizations and their job, one might at first buy into the belief that a polling organization carries out its job in order to inform policy creation, but again I would argue that is not the case. Polling organizations in reality are simply used to measure the effectiveness of the politicians' abilities to manipulate the view point of those who are potential voters. I have never seen a political party change its position based on polling, I have however seen parties ramp up their campaigning and their rhetoric in an attempt to win over public opinion to their side, and in some cases that proves successful and the polls shift.
While there are those that argue that you should vote and that you should always vote and that failing to do so is a failure on your part. The thing is, politics in general plays heavily on the idea of lesser evil. That their ultimate goal is to convince you the opposing side is entirely wrong and that there would be anarchy and economic ruin, and society would fall apart if the opposing side were to win. In other words you're pressured into taking a side that you might not even agree with just to avert disaster.
Personally I don't believe that voters are buying into that mentality anymore. I believe that the EU referendum in the UK and the 2016 Presidential election in the USA are two key examples of the failure of the lesser evil argument. There were people who campaigned intensively on the premise of convincing others that the opposing side would be a complete disaster, it didn't work though. In the case of the EU referendum there were those who did not want to leave who just didn't buy the case for remain. In the case of the US election there were those who did not want You Know Who to be President but they didn't like Hilary Clinton so they didn't vote at all.
Both of these things I think are demonstrative of the disillusion with politics that has been growing among those who could vote but choose not to. The argument of being the lesser evil option isn't enough, you actually have to be appealing now which hasn't been the case for many decades in politics if it ever was. You have to actually convince people to vote for you. The idea that voters are set in their view and will never change it is something which has been persistent in political commentary throughout my life, to the point where only those identified as "swing voters" are actually targeted. I don't believe that strategy has any merit any longer. I believe politics has now shifted to the point where a candidate has to appeal to as many people as they can, they can no longer depend on a traditional base to support them. The job of a politician is not to reflect the views of others, if it ever was, it is now a job of persuasion, and that persuasion needs substance. For people to shift from doing what they did before, you need to give them motivation to change, and the notion of lesser evil won't provide that motivation.
The Matrix Inception
There's something about the movie trilogy The Matrix that always bugged me. First off let me say I love the premise and it remains one of my favourite movie franchises of all time. I will still watch it and enjoy it, doubts and confusions aside. I love the series because of the questions that it raises, the debate it inspires, and the underlying philosophy that is carried throughout the three main movies of the Brain in a Jar.
I should point out now, this post will be heavily laden with spoilers for the movies so if you haven't seen them or have any intention of someday seeing them then I wouldn't continue reading unless you're content with spoilers.
There are many events that happen throughout the three main movies that all centre around Neo, and his ability as "The One" - the protagonist of the series. For those that haven't seen the movies, all of mankind live in pods connected to a massive machine that uses human bodies to generate electricity. The humans themselves are jacked in to the machine and in order to pacify them their minds are contained within a simulated world called the Matrix - a world modelled on the human world as it was at the end of the 20th century when the movies were made. The movies themselves take place in a hypothetical dystopian future where the machines rule the world and humans no longer have any control.
Neo possesses abilities within the simulation to be able to manipulate reality, to be able to modify it to his will. The ultimate purpose of this is not really explained, other than to say these abilities help him with his purpose fulfilling a prophecy which in itself was designed as a measure of control. There is however a point after he escapes the simulation and returns to the real world, where he appears to exhibit these powers in the real world. This scene I never fully understood. Some have argued that his power extends beyond the Matrix to the machines themselves and that is why he was able to control them - I don't accept that explanation. Instead, I can only draw two possible conclusions from that scene. The first is that the reason Neo possessed the powers within the Matrix is because the Architect who created the world within the Matrix was true to his word and created a world as accurate as he could - which would infer such powers are part of being human, that the psychic individuals that visited the Oracle - a character who can predict the future - were in fact humans who had realised their full potential. This explanation would mean those who are awake in the real world would be capable of the same abilities as Neo in the real world with time and effort.
The alternate explanation which I prefer, is that the real world in which Neo wakes alongside the others who have escaped the Matrix, is in fact a simulation. In the final Movie there are multiple scenes in which Neo, after being blinded by Agent Smith - the main antagonist - is able to "see" the world in the same way he saw the world as code within the Matrix. These scenes and the abilities which he shouldn't have in reality, make me conclude the real world isn't real. There are a myriad of plot holes and implausibilities associated with the movies to choose from that don't make sense but this one more than any other always stuck with me. If this were actually true then the Architect still would not have technically lied about anything, and the purpose of the One and their adventure would remain as a method of control. At one point in the movies it is explained that the first Matrix was a Utopia and that it was a disaster because humans rejected the programming because they needed to have a struggle to know they were alive. If this theory is true that the real world is also a simulation, it would conform to the concept that those who realise the Matrix isn't real also need a struggle to fight in order to be contained.
I should point out now, this post will be heavily laden with spoilers for the movies so if you haven't seen them or have any intention of someday seeing them then I wouldn't continue reading unless you're content with spoilers.
There are many events that happen throughout the three main movies that all centre around Neo, and his ability as "The One" - the protagonist of the series. For those that haven't seen the movies, all of mankind live in pods connected to a massive machine that uses human bodies to generate electricity. The humans themselves are jacked in to the machine and in order to pacify them their minds are contained within a simulated world called the Matrix - a world modelled on the human world as it was at the end of the 20th century when the movies were made. The movies themselves take place in a hypothetical dystopian future where the machines rule the world and humans no longer have any control.
Neo possesses abilities within the simulation to be able to manipulate reality, to be able to modify it to his will. The ultimate purpose of this is not really explained, other than to say these abilities help him with his purpose fulfilling a prophecy which in itself was designed as a measure of control. There is however a point after he escapes the simulation and returns to the real world, where he appears to exhibit these powers in the real world. This scene I never fully understood. Some have argued that his power extends beyond the Matrix to the machines themselves and that is why he was able to control them - I don't accept that explanation. Instead, I can only draw two possible conclusions from that scene. The first is that the reason Neo possessed the powers within the Matrix is because the Architect who created the world within the Matrix was true to his word and created a world as accurate as he could - which would infer such powers are part of being human, that the psychic individuals that visited the Oracle - a character who can predict the future - were in fact humans who had realised their full potential. This explanation would mean those who are awake in the real world would be capable of the same abilities as Neo in the real world with time and effort.
The alternate explanation which I prefer, is that the real world in which Neo wakes alongside the others who have escaped the Matrix, is in fact a simulation. In the final Movie there are multiple scenes in which Neo, after being blinded by Agent Smith - the main antagonist - is able to "see" the world in the same way he saw the world as code within the Matrix. These scenes and the abilities which he shouldn't have in reality, make me conclude the real world isn't real. There are a myriad of plot holes and implausibilities associated with the movies to choose from that don't make sense but this one more than any other always stuck with me. If this were actually true then the Architect still would not have technically lied about anything, and the purpose of the One and their adventure would remain as a method of control. At one point in the movies it is explained that the first Matrix was a Utopia and that it was a disaster because humans rejected the programming because they needed to have a struggle to know they were alive. If this theory is true that the real world is also a simulation, it would conform to the concept that those who realise the Matrix isn't real also need a struggle to fight in order to be contained.
Money
"People are funny about money"
I'm not rich by any means, but I am not poor either. I don't have enough money that I can buy things without looking at the price tag, but I can afford more than just the basics in life. I'm somewhere in the middle when it comes to the UK. However the fact I was born in the UK to begin with already puts me quite high up the ladder compared to most of the world. There are only a handful of nations that are developed and have a quality of life above what I have simply because of where I was born. That's not to say the UK isn't without it's problems, our economy is by no means top of the class and there are a lot of domestic issues that impact me and everyone else who lives here. Still, in the grand scheme of things we're quite well off as a nation and I think many people tend to forget that.
The thing about wealth is that it's a game of follow the leader, where you are encouraged to constantly look forward and look to whoever is doing the best and compare yourself to them, rather than look back and see how many people in the queue you're actually ahead of with what you already have.
I've gone through periods in my life where my wealth has fluctuated in the extremes. I've been homeless before and had to live in a caravan for a time as temporary accommodation. I've been so poor I couldn't afford to buy food, pay for utilities, and even for a time had to live without electricity or running water - that was perhaps the lowest point. In the extreme opposite I've also experienced the life I alluded to above, the amount of wealth to the point where I could walk into a shop pick whatever I wanted, go and pay for it without ever looking at the price and knew I'd not have to worry about having enough money to afford it. That was liberating to say the least having experienced the days walking around Sainsbury's with a calculator on my phone adding up everything as I went to make sure I got as much as I could for what little I had.
One thing I have learned from moving back and forward between the extremes - more than once I might add - is that through it all money never made me happy. It's true to say that having more of it certainly made some parts of my life easier and took certain worries away, but in their absence other concerns filled their place. The only thing that changed really was what you focus on in life. This made me realise that if you have the mentality of someone who worries about things a lot, no matter what they are, that is the mentality you will always have. Take those worries away and you'll fill their place with something else. In contrast if you are a person who never worries about anything, even if you lose it all and find yourself at the bottom, you're not likely to change your mentality, you're still as likely to continue wilfully ignorant of everything in life that you should be tending to - the problem with that, is that the things we use to drowned out the world, it has to be said are more dangerous the cheaper they are. We can argue about value for money another time but we can at least agree that the cheaper something is, the more likely it is to be poor quality - whether that be junk food, alcohol, drugs, or whatever else you try to use to escape the reality of your life.
Coco Chanel once said "The best things in life are free" - a quote many people know quite well, the thing is that's only half the quote, she actually said: "The best things in life are free. The second best things are very, very expensive" - that's the reality of the world we live in, only a handful of things are free that won't negatively impact your life, the rest you'll have to fork out for if you want it.
I've come to a point in my life where budgeting plays the biggest part of my finances. I have separated my money across three accounts, one for bills, one for savings, and one for disposable income. Over time I've managed to slowly but surely build up the account I pay my bills from and managed to give myself breathing space. Whenever I get any money the first thing I do is put some in there and mark off which bills it covers. Everything is paid by direct debit and I have a set amount for each bill budgeted, if ever a bill comes in that's higher than I expected I need only add in the difference, and any time a bill is lower I transfer out the difference. Over time I've managed to bank a few months ahead. Any time I add money to that account I forget about it afterwards and just pretend that account doesn't exist so I am not tempted to spend it.
The savings account I make it a point to put something into it every time I get money, no matter how big or how small as long as I move something into it. The rest stays in the main current account as disposable income and I can be safe in the knowledge that I can spend whatever is in that account without impacting my bills or savings. There have only been a few times in the last few years now that I've had to dip into my savings and those were mostly due to my health impacting my income and disrupting my budget.
I'm lucky to live in a country where I don't have to pay a penny for healthcare, but health can still impact your finances when it stops you from earning as you would have before. Given how adversely I've been affected in the past year and a half now with my health I am somewhat grateful I got a handle on my finances when I did, things could easily have turned out a lot worse for me financially right now if I hadn't.
The thing I find infuriating about finance in general however is that you are never taught these things - or I wasn't at least - in school or anywhere else really. We're expected to learn it for ourselves or from our parents. Neither of my parents were savers when I was a kid however and when it came to finance that was never really discussed with me. I never asked about my parents financial "health" as it were. I was a teenager before I got a glimpse at anything relating to it when I had to start managing my own. It was only really when applying to college that I first saw details of my parents finances when I had to fill out forms relating to it, my Dad had started a business several years earlier and by that point most of his finances were managed by an accountant - that was when, for the first time, I started to hear professional advice about managing money. A few years later applying to University I had another glimpse, at that point through a different accountant as my Dad's business had been growing. A few years later things took a turn for the worse around the time of the great recession, Dad lost his business and everything hit a new low.
Through all of this though, one thing remained - there was no guide, no handbook, no preparation. My parents didn't come from families that had a lot of money, they didn't know that much about money and finance. My Dad was the first in his family to start a business and Mum was the first in hers to even go through further and higher education. None of my schools despite being private actually covered money or finance in any depth, the closest thing to it was how to calculate tax and insurance in Maths class as well as learning about compound interest but that's about all I recall. As a nation with a population of about 66 million we collectively owe £1.6 trillion with no formal education in managing money or finance effectively, it's not hard to see why. Even the topic of money in general is something we're discouraged from talking to one another about. We live in a society where it's still considered a taboo to talk openly about wealth other than our aspirations to have more - the second you ask about what people actually have, the conversation runs dry. People don't like talking about money, and without talking about it you'll never learn how to manage it more effectively or how little things can change your life.
I'm not rich by any means, but I am not poor either. I don't have enough money that I can buy things without looking at the price tag, but I can afford more than just the basics in life. I'm somewhere in the middle when it comes to the UK. However the fact I was born in the UK to begin with already puts me quite high up the ladder compared to most of the world. There are only a handful of nations that are developed and have a quality of life above what I have simply because of where I was born. That's not to say the UK isn't without it's problems, our economy is by no means top of the class and there are a lot of domestic issues that impact me and everyone else who lives here. Still, in the grand scheme of things we're quite well off as a nation and I think many people tend to forget that.
The thing about wealth is that it's a game of follow the leader, where you are encouraged to constantly look forward and look to whoever is doing the best and compare yourself to them, rather than look back and see how many people in the queue you're actually ahead of with what you already have.
I've gone through periods in my life where my wealth has fluctuated in the extremes. I've been homeless before and had to live in a caravan for a time as temporary accommodation. I've been so poor I couldn't afford to buy food, pay for utilities, and even for a time had to live without electricity or running water - that was perhaps the lowest point. In the extreme opposite I've also experienced the life I alluded to above, the amount of wealth to the point where I could walk into a shop pick whatever I wanted, go and pay for it without ever looking at the price and knew I'd not have to worry about having enough money to afford it. That was liberating to say the least having experienced the days walking around Sainsbury's with a calculator on my phone adding up everything as I went to make sure I got as much as I could for what little I had.
One thing I have learned from moving back and forward between the extremes - more than once I might add - is that through it all money never made me happy. It's true to say that having more of it certainly made some parts of my life easier and took certain worries away, but in their absence other concerns filled their place. The only thing that changed really was what you focus on in life. This made me realise that if you have the mentality of someone who worries about things a lot, no matter what they are, that is the mentality you will always have. Take those worries away and you'll fill their place with something else. In contrast if you are a person who never worries about anything, even if you lose it all and find yourself at the bottom, you're not likely to change your mentality, you're still as likely to continue wilfully ignorant of everything in life that you should be tending to - the problem with that, is that the things we use to drowned out the world, it has to be said are more dangerous the cheaper they are. We can argue about value for money another time but we can at least agree that the cheaper something is, the more likely it is to be poor quality - whether that be junk food, alcohol, drugs, or whatever else you try to use to escape the reality of your life.
Coco Chanel once said "The best things in life are free" - a quote many people know quite well, the thing is that's only half the quote, she actually said: "The best things in life are free. The second best things are very, very expensive" - that's the reality of the world we live in, only a handful of things are free that won't negatively impact your life, the rest you'll have to fork out for if you want it.
I've come to a point in my life where budgeting plays the biggest part of my finances. I have separated my money across three accounts, one for bills, one for savings, and one for disposable income. Over time I've managed to slowly but surely build up the account I pay my bills from and managed to give myself breathing space. Whenever I get any money the first thing I do is put some in there and mark off which bills it covers. Everything is paid by direct debit and I have a set amount for each bill budgeted, if ever a bill comes in that's higher than I expected I need only add in the difference, and any time a bill is lower I transfer out the difference. Over time I've managed to bank a few months ahead. Any time I add money to that account I forget about it afterwards and just pretend that account doesn't exist so I am not tempted to spend it.
The savings account I make it a point to put something into it every time I get money, no matter how big or how small as long as I move something into it. The rest stays in the main current account as disposable income and I can be safe in the knowledge that I can spend whatever is in that account without impacting my bills or savings. There have only been a few times in the last few years now that I've had to dip into my savings and those were mostly due to my health impacting my income and disrupting my budget.
I'm lucky to live in a country where I don't have to pay a penny for healthcare, but health can still impact your finances when it stops you from earning as you would have before. Given how adversely I've been affected in the past year and a half now with my health I am somewhat grateful I got a handle on my finances when I did, things could easily have turned out a lot worse for me financially right now if I hadn't.
The thing I find infuriating about finance in general however is that you are never taught these things - or I wasn't at least - in school or anywhere else really. We're expected to learn it for ourselves or from our parents. Neither of my parents were savers when I was a kid however and when it came to finance that was never really discussed with me. I never asked about my parents financial "health" as it were. I was a teenager before I got a glimpse at anything relating to it when I had to start managing my own. It was only really when applying to college that I first saw details of my parents finances when I had to fill out forms relating to it, my Dad had started a business several years earlier and by that point most of his finances were managed by an accountant - that was when, for the first time, I started to hear professional advice about managing money. A few years later applying to University I had another glimpse, at that point through a different accountant as my Dad's business had been growing. A few years later things took a turn for the worse around the time of the great recession, Dad lost his business and everything hit a new low.
Through all of this though, one thing remained - there was no guide, no handbook, no preparation. My parents didn't come from families that had a lot of money, they didn't know that much about money and finance. My Dad was the first in his family to start a business and Mum was the first in hers to even go through further and higher education. None of my schools despite being private actually covered money or finance in any depth, the closest thing to it was how to calculate tax and insurance in Maths class as well as learning about compound interest but that's about all I recall. As a nation with a population of about 66 million we collectively owe £1.6 trillion with no formal education in managing money or finance effectively, it's not hard to see why. Even the topic of money in general is something we're discouraged from talking to one another about. We live in a society where it's still considered a taboo to talk openly about wealth other than our aspirations to have more - the second you ask about what people actually have, the conversation runs dry. People don't like talking about money, and without talking about it you'll never learn how to manage it more effectively or how little things can change your life.
Remember Tom?
A few months ago an article popped up on the Washington Post about plans that Twitter had to experiment with how tweets were fed to people through their timelines on Twitter. The motivation of such plans was to attempt to reduce online echo chambers and expose users to a greater variety of view points.
Whenever you see a product advertised, you generally expect it to do what it said it would do in the advertisement. If it doesn't, not only would you feel disappointment but you would also be able to sue the advertiser for false advertisement. There are regulations that govern what you can and cannot claim in an advertisement. In its most basic terms the advertisement has to be realistic about what you can expect and can only stretch the truth so far.
Twitter is a product which you consume, and which you do actually pay for. You don't fork out money for the service but you pay for the service through the data you give it, and the monetization that Twitter and others generate based on your activity on the platform. In order to convince you to use the service, it tells you what it does and what to expect from it. Twitter is a social network, and efficacy of its use aside, it is intended at least to be a place where you can be social and network with other people. In doing so you connect with people who share your interests, who you have things in common with, or who you elect to follow in order to consume what they contribute.
The whole point of a timeline, and the ability to follow people on Twitter is to be able to cater the content you see based on your interests. This is the same reason why YouTube has a subscription feature for you to follow channels and see the content they upload. However, that functionality which is fundamental to the functioning of the entire site is being increasingly manipulated. YouTube no longer shows you every video that a channel uploads even if you are subscribed, and the experimentation by Twitter is leading its users in the same direction. Twitter has already been inserting tweets into your timeline based on the activity of others, tweets which are liked or it thinks might be relevant to you are inserted into the feed - this was a major point of contention for many. By going further and inserting content into your timeline from sources you aren't even interested in at all, Twitter is effectively breaking the entire functionality of its site. In other words the product no longer does what it said it did in the advertisement.
Younger users have already been leaving Twitter for other social networks. Those that remain are people who have been on Twitter for some time or have a vested interest in using the platform. By reducing the functionality of that platform you will further drive away users as even those with vested interests will realise that the platform is no longer fit for purpose when it doesn't do what you need it to do.
The ultimate issue here is that Twitter, and YouTube, and other tech companies are now ignoring their users to the point where their pursuit of revenue has compromised the integrity of the product they were selling in the first place. This is like a farmer paying so little attention to his crops and no attention at all to what his customers want to buy, ultimately there will come a point where customers will leave and you will be left with a mountain of produce that you can't sell and you will pay the price for it.
Twitter and many other tech platforms are resource hungry and require a lot of infrastructure to support them, in the form of data centres etc. Those are not assets that are easy to dispose of and very few people would want to buy. If Twitter and other tech companies like it have to downsize their operations, quite a few of them will find that incredibly difficult to do. Their expansions were made with the belief that growth would continue and no thought was made of the possibility that they would have to deal with shrinkage too.
Twitter is on the brink of becoming another MySpace, a website that we look back on that was popular for what seemed like forever, which we didn't imagine going away, and yet we realise we've not used it in 10+ years because of the stupidity of those who ran it making decisions that took away each and every reason why people actually used it in the first place.
Whenever you see a product advertised, you generally expect it to do what it said it would do in the advertisement. If it doesn't, not only would you feel disappointment but you would also be able to sue the advertiser for false advertisement. There are regulations that govern what you can and cannot claim in an advertisement. In its most basic terms the advertisement has to be realistic about what you can expect and can only stretch the truth so far.
Twitter is a product which you consume, and which you do actually pay for. You don't fork out money for the service but you pay for the service through the data you give it, and the monetization that Twitter and others generate based on your activity on the platform. In order to convince you to use the service, it tells you what it does and what to expect from it. Twitter is a social network, and efficacy of its use aside, it is intended at least to be a place where you can be social and network with other people. In doing so you connect with people who share your interests, who you have things in common with, or who you elect to follow in order to consume what they contribute.
The whole point of a timeline, and the ability to follow people on Twitter is to be able to cater the content you see based on your interests. This is the same reason why YouTube has a subscription feature for you to follow channels and see the content they upload. However, that functionality which is fundamental to the functioning of the entire site is being increasingly manipulated. YouTube no longer shows you every video that a channel uploads even if you are subscribed, and the experimentation by Twitter is leading its users in the same direction. Twitter has already been inserting tweets into your timeline based on the activity of others, tweets which are liked or it thinks might be relevant to you are inserted into the feed - this was a major point of contention for many. By going further and inserting content into your timeline from sources you aren't even interested in at all, Twitter is effectively breaking the entire functionality of its site. In other words the product no longer does what it said it did in the advertisement.
Younger users have already been leaving Twitter for other social networks. Those that remain are people who have been on Twitter for some time or have a vested interest in using the platform. By reducing the functionality of that platform you will further drive away users as even those with vested interests will realise that the platform is no longer fit for purpose when it doesn't do what you need it to do.
The ultimate issue here is that Twitter, and YouTube, and other tech companies are now ignoring their users to the point where their pursuit of revenue has compromised the integrity of the product they were selling in the first place. This is like a farmer paying so little attention to his crops and no attention at all to what his customers want to buy, ultimately there will come a point where customers will leave and you will be left with a mountain of produce that you can't sell and you will pay the price for it.
Twitter and many other tech platforms are resource hungry and require a lot of infrastructure to support them, in the form of data centres etc. Those are not assets that are easy to dispose of and very few people would want to buy. If Twitter and other tech companies like it have to downsize their operations, quite a few of them will find that incredibly difficult to do. Their expansions were made with the belief that growth would continue and no thought was made of the possibility that they would have to deal with shrinkage too.
Twitter is on the brink of becoming another MySpace, a website that we look back on that was popular for what seemed like forever, which we didn't imagine going away, and yet we realise we've not used it in 10+ years because of the stupidity of those who ran it making decisions that took away each and every reason why people actually used it in the first place.
Do It Again
In one of my previous posts about originality, I said that one of the reasons remade content finds success despite being done before is simply because there's an entire generation that never witnessed it before. There are several movies and TV shows from my childhood that have not aged well, productions that I would love to see redone, so I've decided to make a list here of what I want to see and why I think it could work. I will avoid spoilers as best I can.
First off, to my surprise I have learned in 2010/11 Leonardo DiCaprio's Production company Appian Way Productions, alongside the Kennedy Marshall Company had planned to create a new movie based on the novel The Neverending Story. The movie trilogy that adapted and extended the original novel by Michael Ende are some of my favourite movies from my childhood. However the production that was planned wasn't to be a remake but was intended to create a new story based on the novel - I don't know how I feel about that. I would like to see the original trilogy redone but only if they stay true to the story, I wouldn't want it to diverge significantly. So the first three movies on my list are the original movie trilogy. The reason I think it would work today is because the movies are still referenced in pop culture, despite it being 34 years now since the first was released. The concepts and the story that the movies touch on I believe are just as relevant today as they were back then. The only part of the whole production that hasn't aged well are the visuals. It's hard to ignore the dated nature even with the nostalgia induced warmth they still inspire.
Next, one of my favourite TV shows when I was younger was Charmed. A series that followed a coven of Witches, all sisters, set in modern day. I loved this series so much as a kid but I have to say I have tried many times to go back and watch it again from start to finish and I just can't. It hasn't aged well, the acting at times feels awkward, some plot points don't make sense anymore given how much the world has moved on. I would like to see the series redone, but with a new cast. Unlike the Neverending Story, I would actually prefer it if the story-lines of the new series were entirely new, rather than trying to retell the originals as I don't believe many of them would hold up to a modern audience, even with references updated and modern plot holes filled.
If I can't have a remake of Charmed, then perhaps a series based on The Craft - the 1996 film about 4 girls who explore their magical abilities as a newly formed coven. The problem with this one is that a sequel was announced a few years ago but it was met with a tide of negative comments which I believe nixed the whole thing. I believe the reason it was met with such hostility though is because a sequel attempts to follow on from the original, and without the original cast that can be difficult and generally proves to be a bad idea. That, and most sequels unless part of a larger saga, prove to be disappointments. A TV series might be different, if not featuring the original characters, then loosely based on the premise of the original movie. The original cast would be unlikely to participate since they were among those that voiced objection to the sequel. I do believe the premise could still work though, in fact there are many similarities between the Craft and Charmed to the point where many believe the latter to be a whitewashed imitation - the latter even uses the same track for its title sequence as was used for the former - How Soon Is Now performed by Love Spit Love.
Finally, a series I loved as a kid which, I have actually rewatched and I think still holds up both in production and story - Popular. Its original run was from 1999 to 2001 and followed the lives of teenagers at High School and their struggle for or aversion to popularity with a particular focus on Brooke McQueen and Sam McPherson, one popular, and one not, who hate each other, whose parents meet and marry forcing the two together. Popular covered a wide range of story lines that I believe are still relevant today, that, and the extent to which the world has changed in the last 20 years almost since it was first aired, I think opens up a whole new world of opportunity for writers to explore with the characters. I would like to see the story retold in a more modern setting with references that are up to date. Popular at its core was about social interaction and the complexities of it. I think that is as relevant today as it ever was.
First off, to my surprise I have learned in 2010/11 Leonardo DiCaprio's Production company Appian Way Productions, alongside the Kennedy Marshall Company had planned to create a new movie based on the novel The Neverending Story. The movie trilogy that adapted and extended the original novel by Michael Ende are some of my favourite movies from my childhood. However the production that was planned wasn't to be a remake but was intended to create a new story based on the novel - I don't know how I feel about that. I would like to see the original trilogy redone but only if they stay true to the story, I wouldn't want it to diverge significantly. So the first three movies on my list are the original movie trilogy. The reason I think it would work today is because the movies are still referenced in pop culture, despite it being 34 years now since the first was released. The concepts and the story that the movies touch on I believe are just as relevant today as they were back then. The only part of the whole production that hasn't aged well are the visuals. It's hard to ignore the dated nature even with the nostalgia induced warmth they still inspire.
Next, one of my favourite TV shows when I was younger was Charmed. A series that followed a coven of Witches, all sisters, set in modern day. I loved this series so much as a kid but I have to say I have tried many times to go back and watch it again from start to finish and I just can't. It hasn't aged well, the acting at times feels awkward, some plot points don't make sense anymore given how much the world has moved on. I would like to see the series redone, but with a new cast. Unlike the Neverending Story, I would actually prefer it if the story-lines of the new series were entirely new, rather than trying to retell the originals as I don't believe many of them would hold up to a modern audience, even with references updated and modern plot holes filled.
If I can't have a remake of Charmed, then perhaps a series based on The Craft - the 1996 film about 4 girls who explore their magical abilities as a newly formed coven. The problem with this one is that a sequel was announced a few years ago but it was met with a tide of negative comments which I believe nixed the whole thing. I believe the reason it was met with such hostility though is because a sequel attempts to follow on from the original, and without the original cast that can be difficult and generally proves to be a bad idea. That, and most sequels unless part of a larger saga, prove to be disappointments. A TV series might be different, if not featuring the original characters, then loosely based on the premise of the original movie. The original cast would be unlikely to participate since they were among those that voiced objection to the sequel. I do believe the premise could still work though, in fact there are many similarities between the Craft and Charmed to the point where many believe the latter to be a whitewashed imitation - the latter even uses the same track for its title sequence as was used for the former - How Soon Is Now performed by Love Spit Love.
Finally, a series I loved as a kid which, I have actually rewatched and I think still holds up both in production and story - Popular. Its original run was from 1999 to 2001 and followed the lives of teenagers at High School and their struggle for or aversion to popularity with a particular focus on Brooke McQueen and Sam McPherson, one popular, and one not, who hate each other, whose parents meet and marry forcing the two together. Popular covered a wide range of story lines that I believe are still relevant today, that, and the extent to which the world has changed in the last 20 years almost since it was first aired, I think opens up a whole new world of opportunity for writers to explore with the characters. I would like to see the story retold in a more modern setting with references that are up to date. Popular at its core was about social interaction and the complexities of it. I think that is as relevant today as it ever was.
At The Same Time
The Human Eye is an incredible piece of technology, but the eye itself plays less part in your vision than you might think. For one, most of what you see, including that which is right in front of you, is pieced together by your brain guessing what should be there, not by what you actually see. Most people find this hard to believe when they first start learning about how the human eye works, but it is true, each eye has a blind spot which is almost straight in front of you. What you see in that region of your vision is filled in by your brain.
More than this, it is surprising how little detail we actually see until we stop and make a conscious effort to observe as much as we can. The concept of abstraction is one that is prevalent in the human mind - the idea that you do not need to know how everything works, you need only know how to use it - this concept is taken and extended and applied to almost everything we do. To process everything we can sense at every moment would overload our brains in an instant, instead the brain creates layers and uses abstraction to hide away the intricacies of those below. We are conscious of our breathing only when we focus on it, the same for the blinking of our eyes, these are functions that we don't notice in general, only when we stop and think about them. Your vision doesn't go black every few seconds when you blink, instead you see a constant image, you only see darkness when you start to pay attention to your eyes blinking and you actually notice the moments when you can't see. When you are ignorant of this mechanism, your brain shows you whatever it thinks you would see in that moment.
The remarkable thing about this whole process is that what we think and how we interpret the world, begins to shape how we literally see it. This can become so extreme that we can miss things entirely for long and many a day before we actually take the effort to see it. Like watching a movie when enough time has passed that we don't remember the detail, watching it again we often notice things we never noticed before.
One thing I like to do is multi-task, whenever I write I listen to ambient music, whenever I play games I listen to podcasts or music, I combine things that use different parts of my brain. If I play a game that doesn't require much thinking then I listen to a podcast that involves a discussion. If I want to play a game that requires concentration then I play music similar to that when I write. Whilst combining these together I have noticed things that I never noticed before because I am being forced to process things in a different way.
I have two screens on my desk and I usually play games on the first, and have other applications on the second. The game occupies my main focus and the second monitor occupies the periphery. If I play a game that requires some focus, and play a video series on the second for background, I tend to notice things in the video in my periphery that I never noticed when I actually watch the video. To give another example some games are repetitive and don't require much focus so sometimes I listen to audio books whilst I play, and often I end up taking in more of the story when listening with my subconscious whilst playing a game than I do when I just sit and listen to the audio book on its own.
This has got me wondering what other behaviours or tasks can be combined to create new experiences and how might that affect how I process them.
Music and writing are one of my favourite combinations, often I find inspiration in the music. There are a few of my short stories that I wrote almost entirely by playing a single track on repeat whilst writing each - which incidentally has caused an association between the two to the point where those tracks and those stories instantly make me think of the other.
More than this, it is surprising how little detail we actually see until we stop and make a conscious effort to observe as much as we can. The concept of abstraction is one that is prevalent in the human mind - the idea that you do not need to know how everything works, you need only know how to use it - this concept is taken and extended and applied to almost everything we do. To process everything we can sense at every moment would overload our brains in an instant, instead the brain creates layers and uses abstraction to hide away the intricacies of those below. We are conscious of our breathing only when we focus on it, the same for the blinking of our eyes, these are functions that we don't notice in general, only when we stop and think about them. Your vision doesn't go black every few seconds when you blink, instead you see a constant image, you only see darkness when you start to pay attention to your eyes blinking and you actually notice the moments when you can't see. When you are ignorant of this mechanism, your brain shows you whatever it thinks you would see in that moment.
The remarkable thing about this whole process is that what we think and how we interpret the world, begins to shape how we literally see it. This can become so extreme that we can miss things entirely for long and many a day before we actually take the effort to see it. Like watching a movie when enough time has passed that we don't remember the detail, watching it again we often notice things we never noticed before.
One thing I like to do is multi-task, whenever I write I listen to ambient music, whenever I play games I listen to podcasts or music, I combine things that use different parts of my brain. If I play a game that doesn't require much thinking then I listen to a podcast that involves a discussion. If I want to play a game that requires concentration then I play music similar to that when I write. Whilst combining these together I have noticed things that I never noticed before because I am being forced to process things in a different way.
I have two screens on my desk and I usually play games on the first, and have other applications on the second. The game occupies my main focus and the second monitor occupies the periphery. If I play a game that requires some focus, and play a video series on the second for background, I tend to notice things in the video in my periphery that I never noticed when I actually watch the video. To give another example some games are repetitive and don't require much focus so sometimes I listen to audio books whilst I play, and often I end up taking in more of the story when listening with my subconscious whilst playing a game than I do when I just sit and listen to the audio book on its own.
This has got me wondering what other behaviours or tasks can be combined to create new experiences and how might that affect how I process them.
Music and writing are one of my favourite combinations, often I find inspiration in the music. There are a few of my short stories that I wrote almost entirely by playing a single track on repeat whilst writing each - which incidentally has caused an association between the two to the point where those tracks and those stories instantly make me think of the other.
Write About This
I sometimes share my blogs with people I know and let them read what I write. When I do, there is the inevitable comment that always pops up, "You should write about this" and some topic they are interested in.
First off, I appreciate the sentiment, and I am always open to ideas, suggest whatever you want, I will think about. That's not me being flippant, that's an honest remark, I will actually think about any idea that people suggest. However that doesn't mean that I would write about it.
This blog serves a purpose, as do my others. They each have a specific "need" that they fulfil for me personally. They essentially serve as creative outlets for ideas and for thoughts that are rolling around in my head which I write down in an effort to process them and give them structure. Everything I write about is something that has been floating around in my head and has given me a lot to think about. When it comes to ideas that other people suggest for me to write about, the real determining factor is whether or not that idea hangs around in my head or not. I write about things that I have opinions on, or things that I feel a certain way about. Often when other people suggest things to me to write about, they are things that I either know nothing about or things which I don't actually have an opinion on - I know that might be hard to believe but it is actually true. I don't form an opinion on everything in life, there are many things I see and find curious but simply stand back and watch.
There are some things too though that I choose not to write about, even though I do have opinions on them, and for the most part they are issues where I know my point of view is contentious or controversial and that most people probably wouldn't want to hear it. Likewise I know that some opinions if expressed would attract certain people I don't want to attract. To give an example, I tend to avoid going into specific issues when it comes to Politics, my commentary when it comes to politics remains to be somewhat generalized. That's not because I am trying to hide my point of view on policies it's just quite simply that I don't want this to be a political blog, if it became that it would attract specific readers who would be here for politics alone and have no interest in anything else. There is also the fact that any time anyone ever expresses a political opinion about anything online it almost always descends into an argument usually with people you don't even know who never engaged with you before - those and the endless cacophony of bots that have been programmed to seek out key political terms and post nonsensical arguments about them.
There is no overarching theme on this blog, there is no common thread to every post, there really isn't anything that ties it all together apart from me as a person and the fact that everything here is an expression of my thoughts and my observations. I made that decision consciously so that this blog would attract a wide variety of readers rather than readers that only came and read posts about a specific topic. Add to that the fact that much of this blog is a form of self-therapy and what I write is as much for me as anyone else. Even if nobody ever read a single post on here it would still serve a purpose for me personally and still be useful. I would still write posts for it and I would still go back and read them every now and then as they give me an insight as to how my thought process evolves and how certain things consumed my mind at the time.
First off, I appreciate the sentiment, and I am always open to ideas, suggest whatever you want, I will think about. That's not me being flippant, that's an honest remark, I will actually think about any idea that people suggest. However that doesn't mean that I would write about it.
This blog serves a purpose, as do my others. They each have a specific "need" that they fulfil for me personally. They essentially serve as creative outlets for ideas and for thoughts that are rolling around in my head which I write down in an effort to process them and give them structure. Everything I write about is something that has been floating around in my head and has given me a lot to think about. When it comes to ideas that other people suggest for me to write about, the real determining factor is whether or not that idea hangs around in my head or not. I write about things that I have opinions on, or things that I feel a certain way about. Often when other people suggest things to me to write about, they are things that I either know nothing about or things which I don't actually have an opinion on - I know that might be hard to believe but it is actually true. I don't form an opinion on everything in life, there are many things I see and find curious but simply stand back and watch.
There are some things too though that I choose not to write about, even though I do have opinions on them, and for the most part they are issues where I know my point of view is contentious or controversial and that most people probably wouldn't want to hear it. Likewise I know that some opinions if expressed would attract certain people I don't want to attract. To give an example, I tend to avoid going into specific issues when it comes to Politics, my commentary when it comes to politics remains to be somewhat generalized. That's not because I am trying to hide my point of view on policies it's just quite simply that I don't want this to be a political blog, if it became that it would attract specific readers who would be here for politics alone and have no interest in anything else. There is also the fact that any time anyone ever expresses a political opinion about anything online it almost always descends into an argument usually with people you don't even know who never engaged with you before - those and the endless cacophony of bots that have been programmed to seek out key political terms and post nonsensical arguments about them.
There is no overarching theme on this blog, there is no common thread to every post, there really isn't anything that ties it all together apart from me as a person and the fact that everything here is an expression of my thoughts and my observations. I made that decision consciously so that this blog would attract a wide variety of readers rather than readers that only came and read posts about a specific topic. Add to that the fact that much of this blog is a form of self-therapy and what I write is as much for me as anyone else. Even if nobody ever read a single post on here it would still serve a purpose for me personally and still be useful. I would still write posts for it and I would still go back and read them every now and then as they give me an insight as to how my thought process evolves and how certain things consumed my mind at the time.
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