I was never a Goth, or an Emo, I never really bought into any subculture for that matter. That's not to say they didn't appeal to me, I've always had an interest in those sorts of things, just not enough to seek it out with conviction. The Occult however is something more specifically that I have dabbled in. The reason I have explored it was primarily out of curiosity, but also the desire to explain what I didn't have explanations for. I still keep an open mind and I have developed many personal beliefs based on my experience.
Whilst I never bought into those subcultures, that was mainly because my interest was passing and very much individual. I never met anyone else who had an interest in them who was part of my life, if I had then I might have taken the plunge and explored those communities with greater depth.
The belief I always held in the back of my mind for justifying my curiosity was simply the argument that everything we do as a species we start out with no understanding of it or how it works and uncover that understanding the more we explore. Modern medicine and all that it encompasses often looks down on folk remedies and herbal alternatives with disdain, but the thing is, most modern medicine in centuries past started out with the same beginnings. Primitive society discovers a condition can be eased with a given herb or plant, society and its technology evolve and a greater understanding emerges. We discover why that particular plant relieves the symptoms of that condition, then we refine the process. Technology and understanding develops further and we begin to synthesise the compounds to create more potent forms, add a caking agent, a bulking agent, sometimes a sweetener, or a flavouring, or a coating, mass produce it, patent it, and stick it in a box and sell it in a pharmacy.
With this belief in mind I try to explore things with an open mind with the caveat that what you explore might actually work for reasons that as yet are unknown, but one day will be explained in greater detail. In philosophy this mentality versus that of one where all new knowledge has to be immediately linked to existing knowledge and experience for it to be considered valid is known as the 'A Priori vs A Posteriori' knowledge debate. The former is defined as knowledge gained without prior experience which you won't be able to link to anything you already know and therefore inherently requires blind faith to accept, and the latter is defined as knowledge that is derivative or can be linked to existing knowledge and experience to reinforce it and verify its validity. Interestingly enough you can define the distinction between human intelligence and artificial intelligence by saying that humans can accept both whilst AI at present can only accept the latter and can't form new knowledge on their own which is independent of their established neural networks.
It's October, specifically tomorrow is the 31st of October, when we will celebrate All Hallows Eve more commonly known as Halloween. This time of year is particularly permeated with the occult, its imagery, and the traditions that are linked to it. It's easy to look past everything as fanciful and to dismiss any validity to it, but I wonder what some people would find, what they would discover if they were to explore out of curiosity, not out of desire to disprove or any other motivation that may cause cognitive bias, just simply to explore with an open mind and see just what exactly they can find.
Happy Halloween
Duality of Denial
I really hate the term "fake news" not just because it is associated with You Know Who, but also because of what it represents. The irony of the term is that many people if not the majority of people who use it, do so to undermine the content that they use it to describe, not because of any lack of validity, credibility, or journalistic integrity, but simply because it's something they don't like or don't want to accept so they claim it's not true.
You can deny gravity exists all you want, you can have the most fervent belief that you can fly, and you can convince as many people as you possibly can that you have that ability, but when you take that leap from somewhere tall when you finally convinced even yourself that your lie is true, you will still hit the ground, because the truth doesn't care what you think, and what you think, doesn't change the truth.
There is a rise in doubt online over almost everything we see and hear. Every time we read something online we no longer evaluate the facts of what we read, instead we make a judgement based on our experience as to the probability or likelihood that it is actually true. That means that our perception of reality has shifted from one of objectivity to one of subjectivity, where what is true to us is no longer defined by what we accept as true but what we believe to be true - the key difference there is that the latter requires prior experience, and the former does not. The former can accept that the world is round even though you have never actually been to space to see that for yourself. The latter will insist the world is flat because without the prior experience of seeing for themselves that the world is not flat, they can't accept it as true.
I have to wonder how we ever reached a point where this could happen. It's easy to blame the Internet but really the Internet in and of itself doesn't have a mind, a body, or a consciousness - not yet at least. What it is comprised of is almost in its entirety what we have contributed to it. With the remainder being data and information that has been generated by computers, bots, AI, and all the rest of the technology that is able to contribute information - all of which we gave that ability to in the first place. Really whilst the Internet can be blamed as a place of immorality, of animosity, a cesspool of hatred etc, the Internet in reality is simply a mirror, and it is reflecting humanity. These things did not come about because of the Internet, they always existed, the Internet has just made them much more visible especially to people who liked to live in denial that they ever existed in the first place. There was a time when I was growing up when we heard about people who thought the world was flat and we brushed it off as one of those urban legends of things that people make up but don't actually exist.
There is a duality there that exists, two sides of denial, those that deny truth claiming it false and those that denied falsehood believing it was self evident and so obvious that no one could actually draw such false conclusions and hold them with conviction. Fast forward to the present and we now live in a world where the divide of denial is a lot more visible. We can see those who deny truth and we can see those who still, even to this day, deny those falsehoods exist - there are people who believe that every single person who claims to believe the world is flat is a troll and that none of them actually believe what they say - that is incredibly dangerous.
We are living in a world where those who are realistic and choosing to live in reality and becoming increasingly separated from those who are unrealistic and don't accept reality. It's easy to say that's a good thing, but it's not. You can't control the numbers of either side, and despite the desire to compartmentalize the population they don't live in segregation, there is no country for those that believe and those that do not, they live side by side and it would be a very bad idea to try and separate society physically based on which side of that divide you are on.
Both sides are living with the belief that with enough time, and perseverance, their side will prevail. The deeper that divide becomes however the harder it becomes to bridge. When civilisation as a whole develops a rift such as this, which continues to grow such as this, with historical precedent it almost always leads to civil war. The goal of such wars have always been to wipe out the other side and leave behind a world were only one side remains.
You can deny gravity exists all you want, you can have the most fervent belief that you can fly, and you can convince as many people as you possibly can that you have that ability, but when you take that leap from somewhere tall when you finally convinced even yourself that your lie is true, you will still hit the ground, because the truth doesn't care what you think, and what you think, doesn't change the truth.
There is a rise in doubt online over almost everything we see and hear. Every time we read something online we no longer evaluate the facts of what we read, instead we make a judgement based on our experience as to the probability or likelihood that it is actually true. That means that our perception of reality has shifted from one of objectivity to one of subjectivity, where what is true to us is no longer defined by what we accept as true but what we believe to be true - the key difference there is that the latter requires prior experience, and the former does not. The former can accept that the world is round even though you have never actually been to space to see that for yourself. The latter will insist the world is flat because without the prior experience of seeing for themselves that the world is not flat, they can't accept it as true.
I have to wonder how we ever reached a point where this could happen. It's easy to blame the Internet but really the Internet in and of itself doesn't have a mind, a body, or a consciousness - not yet at least. What it is comprised of is almost in its entirety what we have contributed to it. With the remainder being data and information that has been generated by computers, bots, AI, and all the rest of the technology that is able to contribute information - all of which we gave that ability to in the first place. Really whilst the Internet can be blamed as a place of immorality, of animosity, a cesspool of hatred etc, the Internet in reality is simply a mirror, and it is reflecting humanity. These things did not come about because of the Internet, they always existed, the Internet has just made them much more visible especially to people who liked to live in denial that they ever existed in the first place. There was a time when I was growing up when we heard about people who thought the world was flat and we brushed it off as one of those urban legends of things that people make up but don't actually exist.
There is a duality there that exists, two sides of denial, those that deny truth claiming it false and those that denied falsehood believing it was self evident and so obvious that no one could actually draw such false conclusions and hold them with conviction. Fast forward to the present and we now live in a world where the divide of denial is a lot more visible. We can see those who deny truth and we can see those who still, even to this day, deny those falsehoods exist - there are people who believe that every single person who claims to believe the world is flat is a troll and that none of them actually believe what they say - that is incredibly dangerous.
We are living in a world where those who are realistic and choosing to live in reality and becoming increasingly separated from those who are unrealistic and don't accept reality. It's easy to say that's a good thing, but it's not. You can't control the numbers of either side, and despite the desire to compartmentalize the population they don't live in segregation, there is no country for those that believe and those that do not, they live side by side and it would be a very bad idea to try and separate society physically based on which side of that divide you are on.
Both sides are living with the belief that with enough time, and perseverance, their side will prevail. The deeper that divide becomes however the harder it becomes to bridge. When civilisation as a whole develops a rift such as this, which continues to grow such as this, with historical precedent it almost always leads to civil war. The goal of such wars have always been to wipe out the other side and leave behind a world were only one side remains.
The Ministry of Truth
We live in a divided world, where the flow of information can sometimes be overwhelming. Those producing that information have their own interests to promote and rarely publish anything that counters their prevailing view. Newspapers for example have long been biased, even before the internet became so widespread, for many decades prior, those publications had their own political affiliations and they weren't often subtle. Front pages have openly stated which political parties the publications support. With the rise of the internet and self publication however, the origin of information and the bias that it carries has become more nuanced. Through "churnalism" a story is published by one source, reworded and published again by another, and so on and so forth, often with the original source hard or impossible to find. It can be even harder to pin down a publication as to which way it leans more than the other, even articles that at first glance seem to support a given cause even with headlines that state this to be the case, often have a body that leads the reader to an alternative conclusion. The attempt to persuade a reader to accept a view point with arguments you know they will reject can be more effective at controlling opinion than sincerely trying to appeal to them with logic and reason - in other words poisoning the well can be easier than trying to get someone to drink poison.
The world is filled with outlets now which produce a constant stream of propaganda not just for political parties but also for nations, corporations, and even individuals themselves. This flow of information accumulates in time and solidifies to form mountains with nuggets of truth buried deep within. Finding that truth has become much harder as the mountains grow higher. So much so that it is a near impossible task to complete alone. That in itself can lead some people to give up on the search entirely and actively choose to live in ignorance. If you do however choose to keep searching for truth, the moment you introduce others into your search for truth, is the moment their opinions begin to influence what information is kept and what is discarded in search of truth.
In times of war, it was common place for governments to create entire departments dedicated to producing propaganda. In the UK during the First and Second World wars there were initially multiple departments and eventually a Ministry of Information created specifically to produce propaganda both within the UK and outside it. The Ministry of Information was also tasked with monitoring the populous as a whole to gauge the effectiveness of propaganda. The ultimate aim was to influence and control what people thought and felt.
Today, private companies deal with this as part of their marketing strategies. Mindshare is defined as the percentage of a person's mind you can occupy with your product, with your marketing strategy aimed at increasing that percentage and the percentage of people you can reach, and then finding a way to leverage that to sell more of your products.
There are organizations who in essence, attempt to find truth and catalogue it. Whilst the first examples many people will cite are Google and Wikipedia, neither is reliable. The former, despite its claims of not censoring the internet, does indeed manipulate the ranking of search results based on various criteria that it defines. In other words you see what Google wants you to see, and what Google deems to be relevant. There was a time when this was based on popularity of a website but that time has long since passed. Popularity alone does not get a website to the poll position in Google. Likewise whilst Wikipedia claims to strive to print only that which is true and verifiable, its rules that surround content prevent many sources from being used. The creator of a product, service, or company, or any other subject matter of articles on Wikipedia are not permitted to edit their own articles directly - so for example Google cannot provide information about Google for the article about Google. This is what is referred to as a primary source in Wikipedia and it is not allowed. Beyond rules such as these that effectively force content to be inaccurate, the moderation of content on Wikipedia is incredibly militant. If you have ever contributed to the website with regularity you will be aware that most pages end up with one or more users who treat them as pet projects and actively moderate every edit that is made to them.
At the heart of everything we are discussing here is the concept of community contribution and moderation. The idea that a collective is a better judge than an individual, despite evidence that shows a collective is much easier to manipulate than an individual. Nevertheless the principle prevails, but perhaps the only real reason it prevails is that it is cheaper to use thousands of volunteer unpaid moderators than to actually hire moderators that follow strict guidelines.
Regardless, the point remains that if you want to find an answer you can trust, the only real solution is to find it yourself - the trouble is that's not always easy and for many areas of our lives we often fail to trust even our own instincts and our own judgement. Where then can you turn to?
In George Orwell's classic dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Ministry of Truth was a government organization set up to find and deliver truth to the populous at large. The name is a misnomer, as in reality the task of the Ministry was to write and rewrite history as and when needed to fit the needs of the state. When Big Brother - the entity which controlled society - needed history to make one assertion, all references to it were changed in order to fit that assertion. When this assertion changed, all references needed to be updated in order to rewrite history to conform to the recollection the government mandated.
Whilst the Orwellian Ministry of Truth was a misnomer and didn't live up to its name, the concept of having a centralized entity or organization that was both accurate and reliable is something which we have been trying to create as a society for decades now. As the internet grows in size and the number of sources of information increases, there is a desire to simplify the process to the extreme and have one single intermediary that you can turn to who will answer all of your questions.
Initially, people used Google to find websites where they could find answers to their questions. If you wanted to know what date a holiday fell on then you looked up calendars of public holidays for your country and then looked at the calendar. In time however Google evolved, it did not simply direct you to information but it gained the ability to serve that information to you directly in its search results. Our behaviour was then modified, we stopped looking deeper and simply asked Google what date is this holiday and the very top of the search results page would display an information box that told you what date it was. This was convenient, but with convenience came complacency, whilst this is an objective fact - something that is empirically true, a date is either correct or incorrect, this feature of Google has evolved further still. Not only does it answer objective questions but it now answers subjective questions too, providing answers to questions that are not empirical. For example you can ask Google how long does it take to digest meat. Right now the answer it will give is a quote from the Mayo clinic stating that it takes 33 hours for men and 47 hours for women to digest meat. The trouble is that is not a definitive answer, and it is subjective as it will either be accurate or inaccurate depending on many different factors. The age of the meat, the quality of the meat, how it was cooked, how long it was cooked, whether you were almost full or had an empty stomach when you started as well as your overall health, the state of your stomach and the integrity of your gastrointestinal tract. None of that is provided in the information box at the top however.
The complacency of asking Google and accepting whatever answer it gives is something that has made our depth of reasoning become quite shallow. The evolution did not stop there however. Google along with many other tech companies developed virtual assistants, theirs being OK Google, whilst Apple has Siri, and Amazon has Alexa. In all cases these assistants take up the role of an intermediary. No longer do you type the question, and read the answer, and maybe read the background information if Google provides any, instead, you ask the assistant for the answer. This takes away even more information by removing the context it was originally published within and leaving you with an isolated statement that may have multiple caveats attached that may even be grossly optimistic or entirely unrealistic.
The Ministry of Truth has been realised in our everyday lives through our dependence on search engines and the information that they provide us. If you can manipulate the information people find online then you can manipulate people, period. We have opened ourselves up to an unparalleled and unprecedented level of control and the worst part about the whole thing is that we do so willingly and feel as though we can't live without this technology. The prospect of doing so is so huge and overwhelming that we give up at the thought of it and simply surrender to it. We can no longer live without Google.
The world is filled with outlets now which produce a constant stream of propaganda not just for political parties but also for nations, corporations, and even individuals themselves. This flow of information accumulates in time and solidifies to form mountains with nuggets of truth buried deep within. Finding that truth has become much harder as the mountains grow higher. So much so that it is a near impossible task to complete alone. That in itself can lead some people to give up on the search entirely and actively choose to live in ignorance. If you do however choose to keep searching for truth, the moment you introduce others into your search for truth, is the moment their opinions begin to influence what information is kept and what is discarded in search of truth.
In times of war, it was common place for governments to create entire departments dedicated to producing propaganda. In the UK during the First and Second World wars there were initially multiple departments and eventually a Ministry of Information created specifically to produce propaganda both within the UK and outside it. The Ministry of Information was also tasked with monitoring the populous as a whole to gauge the effectiveness of propaganda. The ultimate aim was to influence and control what people thought and felt.
Today, private companies deal with this as part of their marketing strategies. Mindshare is defined as the percentage of a person's mind you can occupy with your product, with your marketing strategy aimed at increasing that percentage and the percentage of people you can reach, and then finding a way to leverage that to sell more of your products.
There are organizations who in essence, attempt to find truth and catalogue it. Whilst the first examples many people will cite are Google and Wikipedia, neither is reliable. The former, despite its claims of not censoring the internet, does indeed manipulate the ranking of search results based on various criteria that it defines. In other words you see what Google wants you to see, and what Google deems to be relevant. There was a time when this was based on popularity of a website but that time has long since passed. Popularity alone does not get a website to the poll position in Google. Likewise whilst Wikipedia claims to strive to print only that which is true and verifiable, its rules that surround content prevent many sources from being used. The creator of a product, service, or company, or any other subject matter of articles on Wikipedia are not permitted to edit their own articles directly - so for example Google cannot provide information about Google for the article about Google. This is what is referred to as a primary source in Wikipedia and it is not allowed. Beyond rules such as these that effectively force content to be inaccurate, the moderation of content on Wikipedia is incredibly militant. If you have ever contributed to the website with regularity you will be aware that most pages end up with one or more users who treat them as pet projects and actively moderate every edit that is made to them.
At the heart of everything we are discussing here is the concept of community contribution and moderation. The idea that a collective is a better judge than an individual, despite evidence that shows a collective is much easier to manipulate than an individual. Nevertheless the principle prevails, but perhaps the only real reason it prevails is that it is cheaper to use thousands of volunteer unpaid moderators than to actually hire moderators that follow strict guidelines.
Regardless, the point remains that if you want to find an answer you can trust, the only real solution is to find it yourself - the trouble is that's not always easy and for many areas of our lives we often fail to trust even our own instincts and our own judgement. Where then can you turn to?
In George Orwell's classic dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Ministry of Truth was a government organization set up to find and deliver truth to the populous at large. The name is a misnomer, as in reality the task of the Ministry was to write and rewrite history as and when needed to fit the needs of the state. When Big Brother - the entity which controlled society - needed history to make one assertion, all references to it were changed in order to fit that assertion. When this assertion changed, all references needed to be updated in order to rewrite history to conform to the recollection the government mandated.
Whilst the Orwellian Ministry of Truth was a misnomer and didn't live up to its name, the concept of having a centralized entity or organization that was both accurate and reliable is something which we have been trying to create as a society for decades now. As the internet grows in size and the number of sources of information increases, there is a desire to simplify the process to the extreme and have one single intermediary that you can turn to who will answer all of your questions.
Initially, people used Google to find websites where they could find answers to their questions. If you wanted to know what date a holiday fell on then you looked up calendars of public holidays for your country and then looked at the calendar. In time however Google evolved, it did not simply direct you to information but it gained the ability to serve that information to you directly in its search results. Our behaviour was then modified, we stopped looking deeper and simply asked Google what date is this holiday and the very top of the search results page would display an information box that told you what date it was. This was convenient, but with convenience came complacency, whilst this is an objective fact - something that is empirically true, a date is either correct or incorrect, this feature of Google has evolved further still. Not only does it answer objective questions but it now answers subjective questions too, providing answers to questions that are not empirical. For example you can ask Google how long does it take to digest meat. Right now the answer it will give is a quote from the Mayo clinic stating that it takes 33 hours for men and 47 hours for women to digest meat. The trouble is that is not a definitive answer, and it is subjective as it will either be accurate or inaccurate depending on many different factors. The age of the meat, the quality of the meat, how it was cooked, how long it was cooked, whether you were almost full or had an empty stomach when you started as well as your overall health, the state of your stomach and the integrity of your gastrointestinal tract. None of that is provided in the information box at the top however.
The complacency of asking Google and accepting whatever answer it gives is something that has made our depth of reasoning become quite shallow. The evolution did not stop there however. Google along with many other tech companies developed virtual assistants, theirs being OK Google, whilst Apple has Siri, and Amazon has Alexa. In all cases these assistants take up the role of an intermediary. No longer do you type the question, and read the answer, and maybe read the background information if Google provides any, instead, you ask the assistant for the answer. This takes away even more information by removing the context it was originally published within and leaving you with an isolated statement that may have multiple caveats attached that may even be grossly optimistic or entirely unrealistic.
The Ministry of Truth has been realised in our everyday lives through our dependence on search engines and the information that they provide us. If you can manipulate the information people find online then you can manipulate people, period. We have opened ourselves up to an unparalleled and unprecedented level of control and the worst part about the whole thing is that we do so willingly and feel as though we can't live without this technology. The prospect of doing so is so huge and overwhelming that we give up at the thought of it and simply surrender to it. We can no longer live without Google.
Escaping Anxiety
Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is often described as a tingling feeling or sensation that starts in the head and travels down through the body.
ASMR videos are one of the ways I try to relieve anxiety and try and relax. My favourite content creators are ASMR Zeitgeist, Heather Feather, and DelucaASMR the latter two of which at time of writing haven't been very active lately.
I've always experienced ASMR but I never knew what it was, or that it had a name, until a few years ago when someone on twitter told me about it. I've experienced it in person, close personal contact or being very close but not actually making contact can trigger it in me. As for sounds I like rough or crinkly sounds most, ear to ear whispering, and soft blowing in each ear. My favourite video by Heather Feather is her ASMR Circle Time video.
Beyond the fact the sensation of ASMR is pleasant to me, the quiet and calm nature of the videos in itself is one of the reasons I return to them to relieve anxiety. ASMR Immunity is something I get quite often when I overdo these types of videos - ASMR Immunity is when you stop getting ASMR in response to triggers. The best way I can describe this is to say the only part of your body you should be able to tickle yourself is the roof of your mouth with the tip of your tongue. If you lightly flutter your tongue gently briskly touching the roof of your mouth and the back of your top row of teeth you'll feel a tickling sensation but after a while it becomes less intense until you can't actually cause the sensation anymore. At which point you have to take a break before you can do it again.
The other element that appeals to me in consuming this type of content is really the immersion you you feel when listening. Which is odd because I've always listened to music and for a long time the way I lost myself when I needed to was to play music that drowned out the world so I could feel immersed in my own world. ASMR videos achieve the same goal but with the exact opposite method - rather than being loud and overpowering and blocking out the world that way, they are crafted to be content that grabs your attention and draws your focus in a way that makes you forget everything else.
I think one of the reasons these videos became so popular is because people want to escape their lives but are less and less willing to do it in destructive ways. I have read various studies that have stated younger generations are doing less drugs and drinking less alcohol in the UK, I think perhaps part of the reason is that they are finding other ways to escape - I'm not saying ASMR alone is the reason for the decline, I think ASMR videos are in essence a "folk remedy" for something society is trying to treat.
ASMR videos are one of the ways I try to relieve anxiety and try and relax. My favourite content creators are ASMR Zeitgeist, Heather Feather, and DelucaASMR the latter two of which at time of writing haven't been very active lately.
I've always experienced ASMR but I never knew what it was, or that it had a name, until a few years ago when someone on twitter told me about it. I've experienced it in person, close personal contact or being very close but not actually making contact can trigger it in me. As for sounds I like rough or crinkly sounds most, ear to ear whispering, and soft blowing in each ear. My favourite video by Heather Feather is her ASMR Circle Time video.
Beyond the fact the sensation of ASMR is pleasant to me, the quiet and calm nature of the videos in itself is one of the reasons I return to them to relieve anxiety. ASMR Immunity is something I get quite often when I overdo these types of videos - ASMR Immunity is when you stop getting ASMR in response to triggers. The best way I can describe this is to say the only part of your body you should be able to tickle yourself is the roof of your mouth with the tip of your tongue. If you lightly flutter your tongue gently briskly touching the roof of your mouth and the back of your top row of teeth you'll feel a tickling sensation but after a while it becomes less intense until you can't actually cause the sensation anymore. At which point you have to take a break before you can do it again.
The other element that appeals to me in consuming this type of content is really the immersion you you feel when listening. Which is odd because I've always listened to music and for a long time the way I lost myself when I needed to was to play music that drowned out the world so I could feel immersed in my own world. ASMR videos achieve the same goal but with the exact opposite method - rather than being loud and overpowering and blocking out the world that way, they are crafted to be content that grabs your attention and draws your focus in a way that makes you forget everything else.
I think one of the reasons these videos became so popular is because people want to escape their lives but are less and less willing to do it in destructive ways. I have read various studies that have stated younger generations are doing less drugs and drinking less alcohol in the UK, I think perhaps part of the reason is that they are finding other ways to escape - I'm not saying ASMR alone is the reason for the decline, I think ASMR videos are in essence a "folk remedy" for something society is trying to treat.
Long Story Short
Even after Twitter doubled its character limit from 140 to 280 characters long there are still quite a lot of thoughts and ideas in my head that I can't express with such brevity, that's part of the reason why I have this and my other blogs to vent.
Even in person though I find it frustrating when people ask you to get to the point, like their attention spans have become so short they can't focus for longer than 30 seconds. There are a lot of things I could say which taken out of context would come across completely wrong. The idea that every sentence you utter should be able to be isolated and still present a positive message is somewhat laughable to me. Context is important and without it you get a message that is framed not by the person that said it in the first place but by whoever delivers it or if no framing at all is given, then it is framed by the person receiving it. The problem with both of these is that it leaves the message open to manipulation.
Let's take for example the question, what soft drink do you enjoy? I could answer: I like coke. That's a short statement, three little words, tells you I like Coca Cola. You get the question, you get the answer, and with the context it makes sense and the message is clear. However, those three words "I like coke" can be interpreted many different ways. Without the question that prefaced it and without the context of it being about soft drinks, the meaning can be manipulated. You could claim it to mean cocaine, or even coal - although why anyone would want to twist a narrative to give that impression is beyond me, the point is it is a very simple example of how one statement out of context can be manipulated to mean something very different.
Twitter and many platforms like it encourage us to be brief, it does this to keep people moving, to keep you scrolling through your timeline not dwelling on things too much so it can present more ads, more sponsored tweets, and monetize your activity. This too is part of the reason why platforms like Facebook are not content with ads being along the side of games but wants them placed inside the games themselves, because the more you focus on one thing the less you focus on the other and it still needs to be able to grab your attention. There's a fine line between getting you onto their site and getting you to keep moving around their site. This is also why social media campaigns and strategies obsess over engagement metrics to measure how much you interact with content because they feel that is a reliable way to see if you are paying attention.
I don't like being asked to dumb myself down and reduce complex issues to simple statements, the world is rarely black and white there are very few things you can make absolute statements about. When I was a kid there was a game we would play that was in many ways the antithesis of this mentality called the Yes/No game. The game was simple, one person would ask the other person questions that can be answered with simple yes or no answers, but the person answering wasn't allowed to say Yes or No, they had to avoid those two words, so they had to think of ways to answer that were more than one word answers.
I think with social media platforms like Twitter, there is a thought experiment to be had on contemplating what a minimum character limit would be. Twitter at present will let you make a tweet that is only 1 character long if you want, it will accept that tweet. The question to contemplate though is how short is too short, and how long is too long? There was a time 140 characters was based on underlying technical limitations but that has not been an issue for many years now and there had been calls for a long time for Twitter to up the character limit. They eventually give in and increased it, but the size was arbitrary, there is no technical reason for the limit being 280 characters, that was just a choice the developers made.
Even in person though I find it frustrating when people ask you to get to the point, like their attention spans have become so short they can't focus for longer than 30 seconds. There are a lot of things I could say which taken out of context would come across completely wrong. The idea that every sentence you utter should be able to be isolated and still present a positive message is somewhat laughable to me. Context is important and without it you get a message that is framed not by the person that said it in the first place but by whoever delivers it or if no framing at all is given, then it is framed by the person receiving it. The problem with both of these is that it leaves the message open to manipulation.
Let's take for example the question, what soft drink do you enjoy? I could answer: I like coke. That's a short statement, three little words, tells you I like Coca Cola. You get the question, you get the answer, and with the context it makes sense and the message is clear. However, those three words "I like coke" can be interpreted many different ways. Without the question that prefaced it and without the context of it being about soft drinks, the meaning can be manipulated. You could claim it to mean cocaine, or even coal - although why anyone would want to twist a narrative to give that impression is beyond me, the point is it is a very simple example of how one statement out of context can be manipulated to mean something very different.
Twitter and many platforms like it encourage us to be brief, it does this to keep people moving, to keep you scrolling through your timeline not dwelling on things too much so it can present more ads, more sponsored tweets, and monetize your activity. This too is part of the reason why platforms like Facebook are not content with ads being along the side of games but wants them placed inside the games themselves, because the more you focus on one thing the less you focus on the other and it still needs to be able to grab your attention. There's a fine line between getting you onto their site and getting you to keep moving around their site. This is also why social media campaigns and strategies obsess over engagement metrics to measure how much you interact with content because they feel that is a reliable way to see if you are paying attention.
I don't like being asked to dumb myself down and reduce complex issues to simple statements, the world is rarely black and white there are very few things you can make absolute statements about. When I was a kid there was a game we would play that was in many ways the antithesis of this mentality called the Yes/No game. The game was simple, one person would ask the other person questions that can be answered with simple yes or no answers, but the person answering wasn't allowed to say Yes or No, they had to avoid those two words, so they had to think of ways to answer that were more than one word answers.
I think with social media platforms like Twitter, there is a thought experiment to be had on contemplating what a minimum character limit would be. Twitter at present will let you make a tweet that is only 1 character long if you want, it will accept that tweet. The question to contemplate though is how short is too short, and how long is too long? There was a time 140 characters was based on underlying technical limitations but that has not been an issue for many years now and there had been calls for a long time for Twitter to up the character limit. They eventually give in and increased it, but the size was arbitrary, there is no technical reason for the limit being 280 characters, that was just a choice the developers made.
Meditation
Meditation is something which I have dabbled in many times in my life. I have read about various techniques and ways in which some people try to achieve a meditative state. For me personally none of these have worked for me. I am able to meditate however but that is only because I have found my own way of doing it which I would like to share.
This technique to achieve a meditative state is unorthodox. Whilst most if not all reference media on the subject will teach you how to clear you mind and quiet your thoughts I have found very little success with that approach, namely because the more I try to do so the more new ideas and new thoughts come to mind. The more I try to silence my mind the more it resists. I tried in vain for many years following countless exercises to try and achieve meditation through traditional means but it never worked.
I think. A lot. It's in my nature. I over think things to the point where they no longer make sense to me or anyone else and I then have to give it up. It was that realisation that the ability to let go of thoughts only comes for me when I have pursued them to their end that I came up with the idea of a potential path towards a clear mind - Hyper Thought.
Hyper Thought, also known as Racing Thoughts, is the act or behaviour of thinking excessively with rapidity, often involuntarily. It is associated with a number of medical conditions such as Bipolar Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder [ADHD], sleep deprivation, or hyperthyroidism among others.
Whilst this condition is a symptom of many others, there is a point that can be reached for those who exhibit this condition consciously.
The method that I use to achieve meditation is to find a space where I won't be disturbed for a while. I sit comfortably, but you can take any position as long as you are comfortably. You can listen to music or anything as a background noise so long as it doesn't distract your conscious thought, something repetitive can be beneficial, silence works too if you are okay with it.
Next you start with whatever is currently on your mind and you start to explore your thoughts, you allow as many as you want to pop into your head and as each one does you explore it deeper and deeper. The aim is to allow your mind to spew out everything it wants to spew and encourage it to do so as fast as it can. Don't fight the urge to think of things and don't dwell on anything. Keep your mind moving and add detail after detail and pursue each fork in the road as it appears. You can use imagery, or conversations between two imagined people, or any scenario in your mind that lets your might completely run free. The ultimately goal is to allow your mind to tire itself out and reach a point of exhaustion by unleashing everything it had bottled up.
For me personally it usually takes about half an hour maybe an hour before I start to lose steam and my mind begins to tire, the pace naturally slows and like a physical exercise that has been repeated ad nauseam the mind itself like your muscles eventually come to rest and give up, unable to continue. It is only in that moment can I personally achieve a state where my mind is completely clear and empty of thought. I then stay in that state as long as I can until I feel at ease or until my mind begins to wonder again at which point I get up and go do whatever else I want to do.
This technique to achieve a meditative state is unorthodox. Whilst most if not all reference media on the subject will teach you how to clear you mind and quiet your thoughts I have found very little success with that approach, namely because the more I try to do so the more new ideas and new thoughts come to mind. The more I try to silence my mind the more it resists. I tried in vain for many years following countless exercises to try and achieve meditation through traditional means but it never worked.
I think. A lot. It's in my nature. I over think things to the point where they no longer make sense to me or anyone else and I then have to give it up. It was that realisation that the ability to let go of thoughts only comes for me when I have pursued them to their end that I came up with the idea of a potential path towards a clear mind - Hyper Thought.
Hyper Thought, also known as Racing Thoughts, is the act or behaviour of thinking excessively with rapidity, often involuntarily. It is associated with a number of medical conditions such as Bipolar Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder [ADHD], sleep deprivation, or hyperthyroidism among others.
Whilst this condition is a symptom of many others, there is a point that can be reached for those who exhibit this condition consciously.
The method that I use to achieve meditation is to find a space where I won't be disturbed for a while. I sit comfortably, but you can take any position as long as you are comfortably. You can listen to music or anything as a background noise so long as it doesn't distract your conscious thought, something repetitive can be beneficial, silence works too if you are okay with it.
Next you start with whatever is currently on your mind and you start to explore your thoughts, you allow as many as you want to pop into your head and as each one does you explore it deeper and deeper. The aim is to allow your mind to spew out everything it wants to spew and encourage it to do so as fast as it can. Don't fight the urge to think of things and don't dwell on anything. Keep your mind moving and add detail after detail and pursue each fork in the road as it appears. You can use imagery, or conversations between two imagined people, or any scenario in your mind that lets your might completely run free. The ultimately goal is to allow your mind to tire itself out and reach a point of exhaustion by unleashing everything it had bottled up.
For me personally it usually takes about half an hour maybe an hour before I start to lose steam and my mind begins to tire, the pace naturally slows and like a physical exercise that has been repeated ad nauseam the mind itself like your muscles eventually come to rest and give up, unable to continue. It is only in that moment can I personally achieve a state where my mind is completely clear and empty of thought. I then stay in that state as long as I can until I feel at ease or until my mind begins to wonder again at which point I get up and go do whatever else I want to do.
The Death of Prophecy
In centuries past, people who were considered to be prophets saw the world, processed what they saw, and passed judgement on it. The judgement they passed often carried predictions of what they thought the future would entail based on the state of the world as it was, and the history that led to that point. We consider these predictions to be prophecies and we judge whether or not they came true as a measure of their credibility and merit. What I find fascinating about this concept is that we only attach the label of "Prophecy" to predictions that were made in the distant past. We do not consider articles in the New York Times or the Guardian that observe the world and make judgements and state predictions of the future to be prophecies. Why is that the case?
If a prophecy is essentially a prediction of the future, why do we only consider those made in the past to be the only predictions that can be referred to as such? Perhaps it is not the label attached to the prediction that is the crux of the problem, maybe it is the person making the prediction. "Prophet" is a word that is heavily laden with religious connotations despite the fact there have been countless prophets throughout history that had no connection to religion at all. Nevertheless the term prophet seems to be a moniker we have abandoned as a species, reserved only for use in archaic deference.
If the only requirements of the title of prophet are that you see the world, consider what you see, and pass judgement, then is it not fair to say that anyone who makes any prediction of the future is a prophet? If you go further and add conditions such as a greater understanding of the world and the way in which it works as a requirement, then again you must ask, how do you define such elevation of consciousness? The average school kid today learns many things which are far more complex than those learned by children of comparable age and standing in centuries past. If they have an understanding of the world albeit shallow in comparison to the populous at large today, which is much deeper than the populous at large of the past, why are they not considered prophets? Does the term demand relativism? Where it's definition requires a level of consciousness that is above average for the time period? Even then we can look to some of the greatest and brightest minds of our age and still yet we find people who have made countless predictions of our future, none of whom have been given the title of Prophet.
That begs the question, if it is a case of being a term used only in reference to those of the past, one that has become archaic, is Prophecy dead? Have we already experienced our last prophecies, and the last prophet? If we still make predictions of the future, what term do we now use to refer to those that make such predictions, if they are not prophets, are they simply predictors? The term isn't quite as illustrious.
If a prophecy is essentially a prediction of the future, why do we only consider those made in the past to be the only predictions that can be referred to as such? Perhaps it is not the label attached to the prediction that is the crux of the problem, maybe it is the person making the prediction. "Prophet" is a word that is heavily laden with religious connotations despite the fact there have been countless prophets throughout history that had no connection to religion at all. Nevertheless the term prophet seems to be a moniker we have abandoned as a species, reserved only for use in archaic deference.
If the only requirements of the title of prophet are that you see the world, consider what you see, and pass judgement, then is it not fair to say that anyone who makes any prediction of the future is a prophet? If you go further and add conditions such as a greater understanding of the world and the way in which it works as a requirement, then again you must ask, how do you define such elevation of consciousness? The average school kid today learns many things which are far more complex than those learned by children of comparable age and standing in centuries past. If they have an understanding of the world albeit shallow in comparison to the populous at large today, which is much deeper than the populous at large of the past, why are they not considered prophets? Does the term demand relativism? Where it's definition requires a level of consciousness that is above average for the time period? Even then we can look to some of the greatest and brightest minds of our age and still yet we find people who have made countless predictions of our future, none of whom have been given the title of Prophet.
That begs the question, if it is a case of being a term used only in reference to those of the past, one that has become archaic, is Prophecy dead? Have we already experienced our last prophecies, and the last prophet? If we still make predictions of the future, what term do we now use to refer to those that make such predictions, if they are not prophets, are they simply predictors? The term isn't quite as illustrious.
I saw the signs!
I have mentioned that I like to leave things up to chance and fate quite a bit in life. I wanted to provide some clarity to my comments as I think they might have given the false impression that I walk around with my head in the clouds. I pay attention in life but I focus on the moment, the present, here and now. I don't tend to dwell on my future all that much, part of the reason why I don't do that is actually ironically, because I don't like the feeling of not being in control - or to be more specific I don't like the feeling of being trapped, I react very badly in those situations. I don't look to the future much because I don't want to see myself boxed into a position with no way to avoid it. I am quite glad that we cannot see the future nor know what tomorrow will bring because like the legend of Cassandra I think that would be my undoing.
I pay attention to the moment, and make my choices and my decisions based on here and now and what I think is best for me. I do pay attention to the signs around me that those choices might not be the right ones to take. I read into things quite a bit as you can probably tell from my ramblings on here, and in a spiritual sense I believe that the Universe is rather like a book, with our lives we live being the lines of text that are being written as we live, but like any good book there's much more information being shared than what is written - you just need to look between the lines. I try to do this with life, it may sound like spiritual mumbo jumbo to some, but I like to let the Universe guide me. One thing I take to heart is the belief that the path of least resistance is probably the path you are supposed to take in life. There will be obstacles at times to overcome but when the path you walk becomes increasingly difficult and the journey gets harder, there has to come a point where you have to stop and ask yourself the question, is it meant to be this hard, or is the Universe trying to tell me something? Is it pushing me back on purpose trying to tell me that's not the way you're meant to go.
I am a programmer. I have mentioned this before. I also studied games technology at University and have developed many games over the years. In my time as a programmer I have come to understand one simple thing - you can reinvent the wheel every time you need a wheel, if you want to, nobody will stop you, but if you have to reinvent the wheel every time, you're probably doing it wrong. With regards to programming that comes down to the concept of reducing and reusing code from past projects. If your programs were well designed you should be able to reuse parts of them without much effort. There are a number of Game Engines which provide their own Integrated Development Environments [IDEs] for writing games. For those averse to these terms, in plain English there are a number of programs designed specifically for making games that allow you to use an existing skeleton in effect that you simply add your own flesh to. That's figurative - although to an extent it can be literal as well but that level of detail isn't relevant here.
What is relevant however is the fact these programs allow you to be more effective in your design. They allow you to package smaller parts of your programs to make them reusable. They don't stop you from doing everything from scratch every time you want to do it, but if you try to do that you quickly realise you're not doing it the way it expects you to. Sooner or later you discover for yourself that the tools to make things easier for you are there, you just need to look for them, and learn how to use them.
I take that mentality from my profession and apply it to my life. No matter what we do in life, almost everything we want to do has been done before, by someone, at some point, and they will have documented that process. There is a wealth of knowledge out there for you to tap into, you just need to learn how to access it. With technology and the Internet that becomes a lot easier. When it comes to life however and the journey we make it becomes a lot harder to find reliable sources of information. You quickly learn that most people offering you life advice are really only interested in selling you their books, or other products that the claim will make you happier, healthier, and make you live longer.
The conclusion you draw, or at least the conclusion that I came to, was that the only experience you can rely on is your own. That provides a foundation for you to build upon, incorporating the things you learn from others, and the advice they dispense, where both of these fit into what we already know, or they cause us to stop and question what we have already built. The hardest part of that whole process comes when you're presented with something that invalidates what you have already done, then you are presented with the choice, to tear it down and rebuild, or to ignore them completely and keep doing what you were doing.
The question then evolves, it's no longer a case of whether or not the signs are there - the answer to that one is simple, they are, the signs are all around us, the real question is how do you know which ones to read and which ones to pay attention to? How do you know what to incorporate into your own system of beliefs, and what to ignore?
I pay attention to the moment, and make my choices and my decisions based on here and now and what I think is best for me. I do pay attention to the signs around me that those choices might not be the right ones to take. I read into things quite a bit as you can probably tell from my ramblings on here, and in a spiritual sense I believe that the Universe is rather like a book, with our lives we live being the lines of text that are being written as we live, but like any good book there's much more information being shared than what is written - you just need to look between the lines. I try to do this with life, it may sound like spiritual mumbo jumbo to some, but I like to let the Universe guide me. One thing I take to heart is the belief that the path of least resistance is probably the path you are supposed to take in life. There will be obstacles at times to overcome but when the path you walk becomes increasingly difficult and the journey gets harder, there has to come a point where you have to stop and ask yourself the question, is it meant to be this hard, or is the Universe trying to tell me something? Is it pushing me back on purpose trying to tell me that's not the way you're meant to go.
I am a programmer. I have mentioned this before. I also studied games technology at University and have developed many games over the years. In my time as a programmer I have come to understand one simple thing - you can reinvent the wheel every time you need a wheel, if you want to, nobody will stop you, but if you have to reinvent the wheel every time, you're probably doing it wrong. With regards to programming that comes down to the concept of reducing and reusing code from past projects. If your programs were well designed you should be able to reuse parts of them without much effort. There are a number of Game Engines which provide their own Integrated Development Environments [IDEs] for writing games. For those averse to these terms, in plain English there are a number of programs designed specifically for making games that allow you to use an existing skeleton in effect that you simply add your own flesh to. That's figurative - although to an extent it can be literal as well but that level of detail isn't relevant here.
What is relevant however is the fact these programs allow you to be more effective in your design. They allow you to package smaller parts of your programs to make them reusable. They don't stop you from doing everything from scratch every time you want to do it, but if you try to do that you quickly realise you're not doing it the way it expects you to. Sooner or later you discover for yourself that the tools to make things easier for you are there, you just need to look for them, and learn how to use them.
I take that mentality from my profession and apply it to my life. No matter what we do in life, almost everything we want to do has been done before, by someone, at some point, and they will have documented that process. There is a wealth of knowledge out there for you to tap into, you just need to learn how to access it. With technology and the Internet that becomes a lot easier. When it comes to life however and the journey we make it becomes a lot harder to find reliable sources of information. You quickly learn that most people offering you life advice are really only interested in selling you their books, or other products that the claim will make you happier, healthier, and make you live longer.
The conclusion you draw, or at least the conclusion that I came to, was that the only experience you can rely on is your own. That provides a foundation for you to build upon, incorporating the things you learn from others, and the advice they dispense, where both of these fit into what we already know, or they cause us to stop and question what we have already built. The hardest part of that whole process comes when you're presented with something that invalidates what you have already done, then you are presented with the choice, to tear it down and rebuild, or to ignore them completely and keep doing what you were doing.
The question then evolves, it's no longer a case of whether or not the signs are there - the answer to that one is simple, they are, the signs are all around us, the real question is how do you know which ones to read and which ones to pay attention to? How do you know what to incorporate into your own system of beliefs, and what to ignore?
Do As I Say, Not As I Do
I'm one of those people that others find easy to talk to, a character trait that people in my family call "the gift", something that many people in my family have had. I get people telling me all manner of things about their lives that I assume they never tell anyone else. I've had a complete stranger on a bus turn to me and tell me she thought her marriage was ending. I listened to everything she had to say. That wasn't the first such experience, there have been many, but through it all I usually just sit or stand and listen to what people have to say, often times all they want is for someone to hear them out.
When it comes to people I know, who know me quite well, I often get to the end of their flow of everything they have to say and I am then met with that questions of all questions "What do you think I should do?" - I've grown tired of that question, not because I don't want to help, I do, it's just that those who ask it rarely want you to actually answer the question. When you do offer advice and say what you would do in their situation, sometimes they ponder it, but often they dismiss it, with some excuse lined up as to why they can't take that advice, therein lies the reality of the question - they've already drawn their own conclusions about what they can and cannot do, and what they are really asking for is an answer that they could not have possibly thought of before turning to you. The trouble with that as an honest question is that often the only answers you can give that they would not have thought of, are answers that won't solve their problem, if anything they will probably create more.
I'm not a therapist, I'm a pragmatist, and often my advice comes down to practicality and how to overcome, or get around, issues and the problems they create for us. My advice doesn't usually tackle the root cause and take it away, not because I don't know how but because I have learned from a very young age with this "gift" that people never tell you the full story. No matter how open they may seem, no matter how trusting of you they may claim to be, there is always more to every story than they tell you. It's not always a case of deliberate deception, if anything it's usually a case of them not connecting two things together in their mind that are relevant. In any case, deception or not, without knowing everything you can never make a fully informed response.
Ultimately therein lies the truth about life - we each live our own and only we alone know our whole story and only we alone can make informed decisions about our lives. The advice we seek of others is to see how their lives and their experience would shape their response to the same situation, but we often come to realise their advice would only work for them, not for us - the ultimate irony here is that they themselves rarely take their own advice which reduces the whole thing to a completely pointless exercise where everyone is simply asking you to do as they say, not as they do. The sad conclusion to all of this is that if you want to solve your problems, you really have to do it yourself. Seek therapy if you find that an overwhelming proposition but know in doing so that whatever they suggest you will always be the one to decide in the end, nobody can decide for you. I think that is one of the reasons some people are so averse to the idea of seeing a therapist, because they have the misconception that they are going to tell them what to do and they don't want someone to do that. The reality is a therapist won't do that - unless they're very bad at their job - they will instead explore the reasons why you have not been able to come to a solution yourself, and what is preventing you from doing so, and help you find a way to remove those obstacles.
When it comes to people I know, who know me quite well, I often get to the end of their flow of everything they have to say and I am then met with that questions of all questions "What do you think I should do?" - I've grown tired of that question, not because I don't want to help, I do, it's just that those who ask it rarely want you to actually answer the question. When you do offer advice and say what you would do in their situation, sometimes they ponder it, but often they dismiss it, with some excuse lined up as to why they can't take that advice, therein lies the reality of the question - they've already drawn their own conclusions about what they can and cannot do, and what they are really asking for is an answer that they could not have possibly thought of before turning to you. The trouble with that as an honest question is that often the only answers you can give that they would not have thought of, are answers that won't solve their problem, if anything they will probably create more.
I'm not a therapist, I'm a pragmatist, and often my advice comes down to practicality and how to overcome, or get around, issues and the problems they create for us. My advice doesn't usually tackle the root cause and take it away, not because I don't know how but because I have learned from a very young age with this "gift" that people never tell you the full story. No matter how open they may seem, no matter how trusting of you they may claim to be, there is always more to every story than they tell you. It's not always a case of deliberate deception, if anything it's usually a case of them not connecting two things together in their mind that are relevant. In any case, deception or not, without knowing everything you can never make a fully informed response.
Ultimately therein lies the truth about life - we each live our own and only we alone know our whole story and only we alone can make informed decisions about our lives. The advice we seek of others is to see how their lives and their experience would shape their response to the same situation, but we often come to realise their advice would only work for them, not for us - the ultimate irony here is that they themselves rarely take their own advice which reduces the whole thing to a completely pointless exercise where everyone is simply asking you to do as they say, not as they do. The sad conclusion to all of this is that if you want to solve your problems, you really have to do it yourself. Seek therapy if you find that an overwhelming proposition but know in doing so that whatever they suggest you will always be the one to decide in the end, nobody can decide for you. I think that is one of the reasons some people are so averse to the idea of seeing a therapist, because they have the misconception that they are going to tell them what to do and they don't want someone to do that. The reality is a therapist won't do that - unless they're very bad at their job - they will instead explore the reasons why you have not been able to come to a solution yourself, and what is preventing you from doing so, and help you find a way to remove those obstacles.
A Rhetorical Question
"Life isn't about the destination, it's about the journey"
Some people live by this, and others don't, but it got me thinking about the idea of closure, or the belief that a question needs an answer, that a question cannot exist without one.
Some questions we know don't expect an answer, as in a rhetorical question. These are questions that are asked with no expectation of an answer to be given, but is that because one does not exist or because the person who poses the question believes it's unfathomable for an individual to actually be able to find an answer?
I've struggled with this concept in my life as I am rather socially awkward and it's not that easy for me to tell when someone actually wants an answer to their question or not - to the point where on social media and in group settings if a question is not directed at me personally, even if I do know the answer, I'm reluctant to give it. I feel this way because when you are mistaken, and answer a question someone intended to be rhetorical, the reaction is usually one of judgement.
Here's the thing though, is it actually possible to ask a truly rhetorical question? I don't mean a question that is nonsensical, or deliberately designed to have no possible answer; instead I mean a question that could have an answer, but that answer could never reasonably be expected to be found, to the point where the person asking it doesn't actually want to know the answer?
It's easy to come up with questions that have been long unanswered, but almost all of those that I can think of, including the cliché "What is the meaning of life?" question, are all questions that people would actually want to know the answer to, if you found it. It's also easy to create nonsensical questions like the infamous "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" from Alice Adventures in Wonderland - which curious enough during research for this post I found out there was originally an intended answer to that question. The trouble with these questions is unless the creator at the time of creation also creates a canonical answer to the question, you can't verify whether you found the right one therefore making it an impossible question, not a rhetorical one.
So that brings us back to the original concept, what question do you think no-one can or will ever know the answer to, for which you don't actually want to know the answer?
The closest I can come to this is the question "What is the value of Pi?" as it is a question that an answer could exist for, but no-one is ever likely to find it as Pi is an irrational number and attempts to calculate it seemingly run to infinite decimal places so a precise value can not be found - the trouble with this as a rhetorical question is that it doesn't meet the criteria of being a question nobody would actually be interested in the answer to, as many people have dedicated their careers to researching it.
Some people live by this, and others don't, but it got me thinking about the idea of closure, or the belief that a question needs an answer, that a question cannot exist without one.
Some questions we know don't expect an answer, as in a rhetorical question. These are questions that are asked with no expectation of an answer to be given, but is that because one does not exist or because the person who poses the question believes it's unfathomable for an individual to actually be able to find an answer?
I've struggled with this concept in my life as I am rather socially awkward and it's not that easy for me to tell when someone actually wants an answer to their question or not - to the point where on social media and in group settings if a question is not directed at me personally, even if I do know the answer, I'm reluctant to give it. I feel this way because when you are mistaken, and answer a question someone intended to be rhetorical, the reaction is usually one of judgement.
Here's the thing though, is it actually possible to ask a truly rhetorical question? I don't mean a question that is nonsensical, or deliberately designed to have no possible answer; instead I mean a question that could have an answer, but that answer could never reasonably be expected to be found, to the point where the person asking it doesn't actually want to know the answer?
It's easy to come up with questions that have been long unanswered, but almost all of those that I can think of, including the cliché "What is the meaning of life?" question, are all questions that people would actually want to know the answer to, if you found it. It's also easy to create nonsensical questions like the infamous "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" from Alice Adventures in Wonderland - which curious enough during research for this post I found out there was originally an intended answer to that question. The trouble with these questions is unless the creator at the time of creation also creates a canonical answer to the question, you can't verify whether you found the right one therefore making it an impossible question, not a rhetorical one.
So that brings us back to the original concept, what question do you think no-one can or will ever know the answer to, for which you don't actually want to know the answer?
The closest I can come to this is the question "What is the value of Pi?" as it is a question that an answer could exist for, but no-one is ever likely to find it as Pi is an irrational number and attempts to calculate it seemingly run to infinite decimal places so a precise value can not be found - the trouble with this as a rhetorical question is that it doesn't meet the criteria of being a question nobody would actually be interested in the answer to, as many people have dedicated their careers to researching it.
I remember you!
I have met a lot of people in my life. Some I knew briefly, and some I knew for a long time. Only a few have managed to hang around for the long haul. When it comes to those with whom I parted ways long ago, every now and then I will see or hear something that makes me think of them. The latest moment of memory was triggered by seeing a trend on Twitter - "Monkey Dust" - the actual trend is about a drug and is rather grim and not the point of this post. The name however is shared with an animated TV show produced by BBC Three between 2003 and 2005. The series was very dark, very macabre, very black humour - in essence, very British.
The series was introduced to me by someone I met online through an online forum. We parted ways many years ago, mainly due to arguments that would crop up every now and then due to fundamental differences in opinion. Ultimately we parted ways before things descended into an abyss. The friendship we shared encompassed many more positives than negatives that I wouldn't want to take away or write off entirely. It was better for us not to talk anymore rather than let everything be torn apart.
I find it interesting though how pockets of memory can be isolated in our minds. This person doesn't cross my mind day to day as we never actually met face to face and we came from very different places and backgrounds to the point where it was conceivable that the two of us would never have actually met if it weren't by chance through that forum. It takes something just as random as this, a trend on Twitter, to actually trigger those memories and make me think of them and everything we bonded over.
I'm not one to fight the past. There are a lot of things I would never do again but in the moment they were always the decisions I thought were the right ones with what I knew and what I felt. I try not to regret anything in life for the simple reason that when I look back at myself and all the things that I did, I am doing so with the knowledge and the experience that I have now. I firmly believe, in most cases at least, if I had both of those things at the time I probably would have made different choices. That doesn't mean I should regret what I did or how things turned out, because I didn't have that knowledge or that experience at the time and arguably it was only by making the choices that I did, that would eventually lead me to the place where I am now, where I can look back and say yes, that was stupid, or I could have chose this or that and it would have went better.
How things ended were the way that I wanted them to end given all that I knew and felt at the time. I wouldn't go back and change that, no more than I would go back and change anything else in my life. I still have the capacity and the capability to reconnect now if I wanted to but I choose not to. The fact we have never crossed paths since, I take as a sign we aren't meant to. I leave a lot of things in life to chance and fate. I know that some people really hate that idea but it is something I have always tried to live my life by and for the most part it has served me well. I tend not to make big decisions, I focus on the small decisions and let the big ones take care of themselves.
The series was introduced to me by someone I met online through an online forum. We parted ways many years ago, mainly due to arguments that would crop up every now and then due to fundamental differences in opinion. Ultimately we parted ways before things descended into an abyss. The friendship we shared encompassed many more positives than negatives that I wouldn't want to take away or write off entirely. It was better for us not to talk anymore rather than let everything be torn apart.
I find it interesting though how pockets of memory can be isolated in our minds. This person doesn't cross my mind day to day as we never actually met face to face and we came from very different places and backgrounds to the point where it was conceivable that the two of us would never have actually met if it weren't by chance through that forum. It takes something just as random as this, a trend on Twitter, to actually trigger those memories and make me think of them and everything we bonded over.
I'm not one to fight the past. There are a lot of things I would never do again but in the moment they were always the decisions I thought were the right ones with what I knew and what I felt. I try not to regret anything in life for the simple reason that when I look back at myself and all the things that I did, I am doing so with the knowledge and the experience that I have now. I firmly believe, in most cases at least, if I had both of those things at the time I probably would have made different choices. That doesn't mean I should regret what I did or how things turned out, because I didn't have that knowledge or that experience at the time and arguably it was only by making the choices that I did, that would eventually lead me to the place where I am now, where I can look back and say yes, that was stupid, or I could have chose this or that and it would have went better.
How things ended were the way that I wanted them to end given all that I knew and felt at the time. I wouldn't go back and change that, no more than I would go back and change anything else in my life. I still have the capacity and the capability to reconnect now if I wanted to but I choose not to. The fact we have never crossed paths since, I take as a sign we aren't meant to. I leave a lot of things in life to chance and fate. I know that some people really hate that idea but it is something I have always tried to live my life by and for the most part it has served me well. I tend not to make big decisions, I focus on the small decisions and let the big ones take care of themselves.
Someone Else Will
"Well I wouldn't, but as with everything in life, there will always be somebody else who will"This was a line of dialogue I wrote in a novel I am working on, it fitted very well with the mentality of the character who said it, but no sooner had I written had I realised how much truth there really is to their words.
When we are young we are told not to do many things, mainly because of the negative repercussions those actions would have on us. We are told not to drink, not to do drugs, not go to certain places, or do certain things. Underneath all of these assertions that are made however there is something we often forget, that those who tell us not to do these things, whoever they may be, don't do so simply because they would be bad for us, but because someone else has already done it, and they didn't like the outcome.
When we are younger it is easier for us to accept that the negative outcome would be so bad that it alone motivates us to follow the advice we are given. As we grow however we become more critical, the more we learn about negative consequences of our actions the more we grade those consequences with our own scale of severity and what we deem to be the associated risk. As we grow, these two things can diverge far enough from those that were first suggested to us, that we begin to re-evaluate that advice and decide for ourselves whether to follow it or not.
The interesting thing here is that everyone will live their own lives with their own experiences and interpret the world based on those experiences. Two people can experience the same thing with the same starting conditions and come to separate conclusions and separate interpretations. Our individual outlook on life influences the decisions we make in life much more than what we are actually told and the experiences that others share with us. The end result is for those who try to instil some control and direction in the lives of people as they grow, ultimately the decisions they make will be their own, and whether or not they accept your guidance is ultimately up to them, not you.
That poses an interesting question about the nature of education. Some see it as a means to reinforcing behaviours that are desirable from a societal standpoint, but if people will decide which behaviours to exhibit themselves, should education actually focus on reinforcement at all? Would education be better equipped to shape society if it were centred instead around disclosure, giving students all the information they desire and all the evidence that is available, and encouraging the student to come to their own conclusions based on that information as opposed to forcing them to accept the answer to a given question is such, and if you don't accept that answer you are an idiot.
I'm talking here mainly of subjects whose content is subjective, i.e. questions which can be deemed to have answers that are not set in stone, as opposed to subjects whose content is objective such as mathematics where there is a right and wrong answer and one that does not satisfy the problem is not correct.
I find the evolution of education to be something of interest, namely because you can use it to determine what age someone is, and when they studied, based on their answers to certain questions. For example asking someone how many planets in our solar system whether they answer 8 or 9 will tell you a lot about when they learned about space in school, as there were 9 but Pluto was relegated to the status of a Dwarf Planet reducing the answer to 8. Other questions relating to biology, or technology, can give you an idea of when someone studied those as they too are subjects whose content evolves over time with increased understanding and new paradigms that emerge. Something as simple as asking someone how many bytes are in a kilobyte and whether they answer 1,024 or 1,000 will tell you whether they learned about computing a long time ago or studied in recent years, as the answer was previously 1,024 as this is an exponent of 2 given binary is a base 2 number system, however again, the term kilobyte was redefined to mean 1,000 bytes and the term kibibyte was introduced in 1998 by the IEC to preserve the binary counting system.
All of this demonstrates how as time progresses and each generation grows, there will always be someone who will do thing differently, sometimes others will follow suit leading to paradigm shifts, and at others they will remain as outliers and anomalies that society as a whole rejects and encourages those who conform not to follow suit.
Why do I write?
"What do you write about?" - I get this question a lot, or similarly, "Why do you write?" - usually from people who have never read anything I have written or from people who just have a genuine curiosity. I write a few blogs, one is about my Health, it was originally a blog similar to this where I wrote about the things that were on my mind but slowly my Health became such a focus that in the end I deleted all other posts and decided to devote the blog solely to my health. As for this blog, it has become the main outlet for my thoughts about all manner of things.
I write short stories, and I write longer fiction which usually caters to an LGBT audience, in particular Young Adult fiction which is basically another way of saying "not for children" and I also write technical documents and guides about things I know a lot about - for example I wrote a book about programming in Java and plan on writing others as part of a series.
In terms of the fiction I write, and this blog, they both represent a form of self-therapy. Writing allows me to process my thoughts and my feelings in a constructive way. It also lets me document how I think and how I feel in this moment, so that I can look back on it in the future. I often go back and read my old work and see how much I have grown as a person, how my priorities shift, and how much certain things occupied my mind and the impact they had on my knowing or unknowingly.
Some of the time a piece of writing can contain just one word somewhere within it that has a whole story pinned to it that isn't divulged within the piece but seeing it myself triggers all those memories to come flooding back. Words and places associated with certain people can bring back a flood of memories. I guess you could say in a way that I write as a method of organizing my mind and my memories into pieces that are easier to process. As for fiction and the characters I create, often times those character represent either parts of myself and my own personality or those of other people that I want to confront. By giving it a name and a structure you are able to deconstruct it in a way that lets you tear it apart and look inside without causing damage to the self.
Above all else I write for myself first and foremost. While it is nice to know that people read what I write, that's not why I do it. This is for me more than it is for you, I just happen to post it online for the world to see, in the hopes that other people might see it and recognise something within themselves and realise they're not alone in their thoughts or their feelings which can be very reassuring, to be able to say "well at least I'm not the only one who thinks that" is often enough to make things bearable and easier to get through.
I write short stories, and I write longer fiction which usually caters to an LGBT audience, in particular Young Adult fiction which is basically another way of saying "not for children" and I also write technical documents and guides about things I know a lot about - for example I wrote a book about programming in Java and plan on writing others as part of a series.
In terms of the fiction I write, and this blog, they both represent a form of self-therapy. Writing allows me to process my thoughts and my feelings in a constructive way. It also lets me document how I think and how I feel in this moment, so that I can look back on it in the future. I often go back and read my old work and see how much I have grown as a person, how my priorities shift, and how much certain things occupied my mind and the impact they had on my knowing or unknowingly.
Some of the time a piece of writing can contain just one word somewhere within it that has a whole story pinned to it that isn't divulged within the piece but seeing it myself triggers all those memories to come flooding back. Words and places associated with certain people can bring back a flood of memories. I guess you could say in a way that I write as a method of organizing my mind and my memories into pieces that are easier to process. As for fiction and the characters I create, often times those character represent either parts of myself and my own personality or those of other people that I want to confront. By giving it a name and a structure you are able to deconstruct it in a way that lets you tear it apart and look inside without causing damage to the self.
Above all else I write for myself first and foremost. While it is nice to know that people read what I write, that's not why I do it. This is for me more than it is for you, I just happen to post it online for the world to see, in the hopes that other people might see it and recognise something within themselves and realise they're not alone in their thoughts or their feelings which can be very reassuring, to be able to say "well at least I'm not the only one who thinks that" is often enough to make things bearable and easier to get through.
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