I have written before about the concept of the fourth wall, the idea that you see a fake wall in the form of a stage whilst in truth the real fourth wall is the illusive wall behind the stage you are never meant to see as an observer. You are instead meant to pay attention to all that is on the stage. I've written about the ways in which the fourth wall can be broken and you get to see the reality behind the stage. There is another application of this theory which fascinates me and that is the disappointment in being given an answer.
I never copied anyone in school, from day one of primary school right through to University. The reason I never copied anyone was because I wanted to learn how to answer the question myself. If I was simply given the answer, I would not learn why it was the answer and would struggle to be able to do it myself afterword. There were a mix of people I knew throughout my time in education, there were those who shared my point of view and wanted to figure it out for themselves, and there were those who took the opposing view, who just wanted the answer and sought value in knowing the answer without needing to understand how it was found - these were the people who ended up struggling later when they had to do it themselves.
As far as school was concerned, I wouldn't necessarily say I enjoyed the process of finding the answer, namely because for the most part I had little interest or passion for any of the subjects I studied. As I said before, it wasn't until college for me really that I actually got to study the things I was really interested in - personally that remains one of the reasons why I believe the education system needs fundamental reform.
Beyond school however there have been many things over the years that I did not know how to do, or questions I did not know the answer to, which I devoted time and energy to learning of my own accord. Time and again however when you run into the stumbling block that is the limitation of our own deductive reasoning we have to resort to the use of references written by other people and in the extreme we have to resort to actually asking someone who knows more about the things we wish to learn more about. In doing so however there is often one of three types of people you encounter, the first and most prevalent is the type of person that doesn't want to share their knowledge and expects you to go and figure it out for yourself. I hate these types of people because no matter how much self study and self teaching you went through to learn what you know, you will have relied on the information compiled by others at some point and if they had taken the same attitude then you would know nothing. No-one learns what they do through original research and experimentation alone, we build upon the knowledge of others.
The second type of person you will meet is the type that will just give you the answer, but with no explanation as to why this is the case. If this is because the person who answers isn't able to explain it or relate it to another person, then I can forgive that bluntness. There is a lot to be said about the limitation of our understanding and how we can know how to do something but not be able to explain it, that is a valid reason for simply giving the answer. Language is often an example of this, when a native English speaker talks to someone for whom English is their second language, the native speaker will be able to correct grammatical errors but won't necessarily be able to explain why there is an error, unless the native speaker has an academic background in linguistics or a very firm understanding of the technicalities of the language, in all other cases "it just is" or "we don't say that" is all the speaker can hazard in reply.
The third and final type of person is the type that knows the answer, and is able to explain it - these often take one of two approaches to explanations, the first is to explain it in their way, and the second is to feed you information and ask you questions to lead you to discovering it yourself with their guidance - I don't mind either as the former might not necessarily be easy to comprehend and the latter can relate things more to what you already know. The former although complete in their reply can often flood the asker with a plenitude of information that although relevant to the answer, may not necessarily be relevant to the asker. Admittedly the latter can also be frustrating if they are not forthcoming with help when they see the asker struggle to find the solution even with guidance.
I've not included the types of people who don't know the answer, they're not really relevant here except for one, those that don't know but claim they do, this irritates me profusely. I don't understand why some people seem incapable of simply saying "I don't know" - this isn't that hard to do and there's no shame in admitting it. I admit it all the time. It's often the opening statement I will make in response to a question but then I'll follow it with my theories or my ideas and we can discuss the topic together and see if we can find the answer together.
I enjoy the process of finding answers to questions. I enjoy the practice of analysing information and data and trying to see what conclusions can be drawn. I enjoy observation and documenting what I see. I enjoy seeing other people think, it is a form of entertainment for me quite literally. I like to watch people on YouTube play puzzle games like The Witness because I get to see their thought process in action and I find that fascinating. I do not enjoy simply being given an answer. The purpose of a riddle is to make you think, if you are given an answer to the riddle it negates its purpose. The whole point is to figure it out.
This changes everything
I'm the one that people come to when they want advice with anything complicated. When they need things fixed or when they haven't got a clue where to begin, I'm usually the first person they come to, not always because I have a background in whatever problem they have, but because I have a problem-solver mentality. I have always been this way ever since I was a child. I have loved puzzles and riddles, they let my mind run wild and most importantly they let me indulge in curiosity. For anyone that knows me well it would be fair to say that I am an incredibly curious person, and when I put my mind to it, if I am determined to find something out, I will usually find a way.
One thing that annoys me however, is when people approach me with problems they want to solve, but they are not forthcoming with the truth. This isn't always a case of someone being dishonest, lying to me about details that they claimed were true, no, the biggest problem is when people withhold information, they tell you the truth but not the whole truth, important details are omitted which can completely change the dynamic of the problem you are trying to grapple with. This frustrates me because they often act on the advice I give, then come back and tell me it didn't work, only then to reveal what they withheld in the first place.
To that end, over the years I have taken to asking much more probing questions, those that pin the person to a corner where answering with anything other than the complete truth would necessitate dishonesty. As a programmer, abstraction is an important concept, it's an important part of life, it is the concept that you do not need to know every detail in order to proceed, you need only know what is relevant, the trouble in these situations is that the decision as to what is relevant is ultimately being made by the person who is asking you for help, rather than you as the person who is trying to help. That's a difficulty, and more importantly, an implication that needs to be addressed. Before you give any advice you need to know everything that is relevant to the problem at hand, that requires you as the problem-solver to look beyond the problem and look at the information you have been given to help you solve it and ask, what have you not been told, and what could completely change the outcome without changing the problem?
There is a very basic equation that is often cited in the world of computing that demonstrates the importance of this meta information:
What is 1 + 1 equal to?
This is a fairly simple question, and there is a presumptive answer "2" before you answer this question however, there are a few things you need to know, as a programmer you need to know if this is a mathematical question as all, if it is not, then 1 + 1 may result in 11 if '+' is being used as a concatenation operator, second, you need to know, if, assuming it is a mathematical question, what base are the two numerals expressed in, is it base 10, in which case the answer is 2, or is it base 2, in which case the answer is 10.
Assumptions only make sense and lead to reliable outcomes when both people are so attuned that they will always make the same assumptions, any deviation in this attunement will result in errors, the extremity of the consequence of those deviations will depend on how critical the original problem was, and often leads to the creation of others.
I realise this whole post may not make a lot of sense right now, I can't add greater clarity without going into the specifics of the situation that inspired it. Suffice to say I am feeling irritated right now; what I chose to do in this scenario was to tell the other person the potential solutions and their outcomes and add the caveat that a number of factors could change the outcome drastically and left it at that for them to decide what to do themselves. If you're not willing to tell me everything I need to know in order to make an informed decision, then don't expect the advice given to be reliable, that's not a complicated concept to understand.
One thing that annoys me however, is when people approach me with problems they want to solve, but they are not forthcoming with the truth. This isn't always a case of someone being dishonest, lying to me about details that they claimed were true, no, the biggest problem is when people withhold information, they tell you the truth but not the whole truth, important details are omitted which can completely change the dynamic of the problem you are trying to grapple with. This frustrates me because they often act on the advice I give, then come back and tell me it didn't work, only then to reveal what they withheld in the first place.
To that end, over the years I have taken to asking much more probing questions, those that pin the person to a corner where answering with anything other than the complete truth would necessitate dishonesty. As a programmer, abstraction is an important concept, it's an important part of life, it is the concept that you do not need to know every detail in order to proceed, you need only know what is relevant, the trouble in these situations is that the decision as to what is relevant is ultimately being made by the person who is asking you for help, rather than you as the person who is trying to help. That's a difficulty, and more importantly, an implication that needs to be addressed. Before you give any advice you need to know everything that is relevant to the problem at hand, that requires you as the problem-solver to look beyond the problem and look at the information you have been given to help you solve it and ask, what have you not been told, and what could completely change the outcome without changing the problem?
There is a very basic equation that is often cited in the world of computing that demonstrates the importance of this meta information:
What is 1 + 1 equal to?
This is a fairly simple question, and there is a presumptive answer "2" before you answer this question however, there are a few things you need to know, as a programmer you need to know if this is a mathematical question as all, if it is not, then 1 + 1 may result in 11 if '+' is being used as a concatenation operator, second, you need to know, if, assuming it is a mathematical question, what base are the two numerals expressed in, is it base 10, in which case the answer is 2, or is it base 2, in which case the answer is 10.
Assumptions only make sense and lead to reliable outcomes when both people are so attuned that they will always make the same assumptions, any deviation in this attunement will result in errors, the extremity of the consequence of those deviations will depend on how critical the original problem was, and often leads to the creation of others.
I realise this whole post may not make a lot of sense right now, I can't add greater clarity without going into the specifics of the situation that inspired it. Suffice to say I am feeling irritated right now; what I chose to do in this scenario was to tell the other person the potential solutions and their outcomes and add the caveat that a number of factors could change the outcome drastically and left it at that for them to decide what to do themselves. If you're not willing to tell me everything I need to know in order to make an informed decision, then don't expect the advice given to be reliable, that's not a complicated concept to understand.
Insignificant Detail
Anton Chekhov was a Russian writer who is best known for his short works of fiction. He is also known for the advice and remarks he shared for those who intend to develop this craft themselves. Amongst the many pieces of advice that he is attributed, none is more synonymous than the trope for which he is the namesake - Chekhov's Gun. This trope simply put states that if a detail is included in a piece of fiction it must be relevant to the plot and to the story, if it is not, it should not be included. This is explained by a hypothetical gun, for which the trope is named. If you are to include detail in a piece of fiction that there is a loaded gun placed in the scene, then that gun must later be used in the the scene or subsequent scenes, otherwise it is irrelevant to even mention it.
Whilst this advice serves writers well when writing short stories which the reader inherently understands will not be as in depth as a full length work, the advice does not stand up when it comes to longer works. The reason this is the case is because there is an expected level of detail from the writer in order for the reader to become immersed and believe the environment could exist. This requires the writer to add details about the environment, most of which will never come into play as the story progresses.
To put it another way, when you read a work of fiction you are limited in what you can picture of the environment by what the writer tells you of that environment. When you watch a video based production you are limited in your perception of the environment by what is exchanged between characters and what the set designers have included in the set that can be seen on-screen. The level of detail you incorporate into a written work as opposed to a visual work is comparable to that of the effort undertaken by the set designer. In short, your writing needs to dress a hypothetical set in the mind of the reader so they know where the characters are. Omission of this entirely would lead to piece of work that was hard to follow or lacked depth. There is therefore a balance to be found between the two approaches, between what is essential, and what adds depth. The bare necessity approach only works in short story writing.
If you were to take this mentality and apply it to life itself, you would argue that nothing in life is ever down to chance, and that everything has a purpose. You would be able to argue that every single detail you can perceive is relevant, and that you should pay attention to everything that you possibly can. This of course is not possible to do in life, for a start the mental capacity needed to undertake such an endeavour would be immense. In addition, the human brain is not designed to function in this way. At any given time when you are watching or observing something, for the most part your brain is simply showing you what it thinks you are seeing, it doesn't process the visual input constantly. Your vision in reality has a frame rate and in between frames your brain is filling in the gaps by rendering what it approximates to be the interim animations. This frame rate is not constant, it fluctuates based on how much attention your brain thinks it needs to pay, and even at that this is not determined by conscious effort - intending to take in as much detail as you can won't actually produce that result.
If you want to increase the amount of detail you perceive, it becomes necessary to experience the observation multiple times, each time picking an element to focus on. To this end your brain will add new levels of detail, like painting a wall with a roller, each pass adding more paint, until you have an even coating. The only drawback to this approach is that your brain constantly works against you by evaluating predictability and using that metric as a deciding factor in what you perceive. As a writer this can be demonstrated by the act of writing and missing mistakes you make whilst writing, and missing those mistakes when proof reading. You know the content before you write, and in writing you transfer the content into the media you are working with, and when reading it back or observing it your brain predicts what it should say, the result being that you read what you think you wrote as opposed to what you actually wrote, leading you to miss the mistakes, even if you proof it several times. The only way to overcome this in the end is to have someone else proof it or to leave it long enough that the content has become sufficiently degraded in your short term memory that you actually have to read it to follow it.
The challenge in life is the same as the challenge when writing, you need to know what details are relevant, what are insignificant, and ultimately what details are actually being presented to you as opposed to what you are convincing yourself you are seeing.
Whilst this advice serves writers well when writing short stories which the reader inherently understands will not be as in depth as a full length work, the advice does not stand up when it comes to longer works. The reason this is the case is because there is an expected level of detail from the writer in order for the reader to become immersed and believe the environment could exist. This requires the writer to add details about the environment, most of which will never come into play as the story progresses.
To put it another way, when you read a work of fiction you are limited in what you can picture of the environment by what the writer tells you of that environment. When you watch a video based production you are limited in your perception of the environment by what is exchanged between characters and what the set designers have included in the set that can be seen on-screen. The level of detail you incorporate into a written work as opposed to a visual work is comparable to that of the effort undertaken by the set designer. In short, your writing needs to dress a hypothetical set in the mind of the reader so they know where the characters are. Omission of this entirely would lead to piece of work that was hard to follow or lacked depth. There is therefore a balance to be found between the two approaches, between what is essential, and what adds depth. The bare necessity approach only works in short story writing.
If you were to take this mentality and apply it to life itself, you would argue that nothing in life is ever down to chance, and that everything has a purpose. You would be able to argue that every single detail you can perceive is relevant, and that you should pay attention to everything that you possibly can. This of course is not possible to do in life, for a start the mental capacity needed to undertake such an endeavour would be immense. In addition, the human brain is not designed to function in this way. At any given time when you are watching or observing something, for the most part your brain is simply showing you what it thinks you are seeing, it doesn't process the visual input constantly. Your vision in reality has a frame rate and in between frames your brain is filling in the gaps by rendering what it approximates to be the interim animations. This frame rate is not constant, it fluctuates based on how much attention your brain thinks it needs to pay, and even at that this is not determined by conscious effort - intending to take in as much detail as you can won't actually produce that result.
If you want to increase the amount of detail you perceive, it becomes necessary to experience the observation multiple times, each time picking an element to focus on. To this end your brain will add new levels of detail, like painting a wall with a roller, each pass adding more paint, until you have an even coating. The only drawback to this approach is that your brain constantly works against you by evaluating predictability and using that metric as a deciding factor in what you perceive. As a writer this can be demonstrated by the act of writing and missing mistakes you make whilst writing, and missing those mistakes when proof reading. You know the content before you write, and in writing you transfer the content into the media you are working with, and when reading it back or observing it your brain predicts what it should say, the result being that you read what you think you wrote as opposed to what you actually wrote, leading you to miss the mistakes, even if you proof it several times. The only way to overcome this in the end is to have someone else proof it or to leave it long enough that the content has become sufficiently degraded in your short term memory that you actually have to read it to follow it.
The challenge in life is the same as the challenge when writing, you need to know what details are relevant, what are insignificant, and ultimately what details are actually being presented to you as opposed to what you are convincing yourself you are seeing.
Drugs and Creativity
Following on from my previous post and the topic of creativity, there is one issue or debate that I would like to address, that is the use of drugs and alcohol, the latter of which is often separated from the former but which is itself a drug. There are a wide array of drugs, both legal and illegal, that have an effect on the human consciousness, this much we can all agree on. We can also agree that some of the greatest writers have been notorious alcoholics and manic depressives. Ernest Hemingway for example, one of the most renowned writers was a very heavy drinker and it had a substantial negative impact on his life. Hemingway sadly took his own life in the end, but given his declining health, had he lived he probably would have ended up killing himself anyway albeit at a much slower pace.
I do not believe personally that creativity comes from the use of these drugs. I believe creativity is something that is inherent, that is, you are either predisposed or you are not, and that ultimately it is our own inhibitions and mental opposition that limits the extent to which we can channel it. I believe drugs in this regard only enable behaviours, they don't cause them. In other words if you were not a creative person and you took those drugs conflated with creativity, the product would not be a creative output like you expect.
There is also something to be said about the commonality of many great writers suffering from mental health problems, depression, anxiety, and other conditions. Again I do not believe these represent causation - creativity is not caused by these, nor are these caused by creativity. I believe there again simply exists a correlation, and as is self evident there are many people who demonstrate this to be the case.
When it comes to the use of drugs to enable what the individual perceives to be a desirable behaviour, my concern would be with the reasons why they believe they can't achieve that state of mind without using them. In some cases this can simply be down to effort, or expendable energy, in that the use of drugs is seen by some as a shortcut to a state of mind that whilst achievable without, would take significantly longer and considerably more effort to reach.
For me personally I do not pass judgement on those who choose to take these routes, and I do not consider it to be a determining factor in the credibility or the validity of the output. I don't use drugs myself to stimulate my creative output. Everything I write and everything I create comes about through my own exploration of my thoughts and feelings and my desire to express myself. As discussed in a previous post there are techniques I have developed to help stimulate the creative process but I accept that these don't always work and there are times when I can't tap into that creative energy at all. This is one of the reasons why I never pursued creative outlets as a career, I would not be able to maintain creativity on demand within a 9 to 5 environment, or to be able to produce creativity to a deadline. I believe both of these things are not conducive to creative energy and that they can in fact kill it entirely.
This blog for example uses scheduled posts, that's why they are released at exactly the same time on a regular basis. The posts for this blog are written in batches when my creativity flows, this allows me to maintain a level of consistency and continuous output, however the work itself is sporadic and comes in bursts of varying intensity. What you read may have been written that day, that week, that month, or it may have even been written a year before, it all depends on how many posts I wrote when I was on a high with my creative flow. I understand that some people don't have the luxury of allowing themselves to wait until this happens naturally, and that they see drugs as the only option to reach that state. This blog is after all a hobby and there is no more pressure on me to maintain it than I choose to place on myself. If I wanted to stop or if I wanted to go weeks or months without posting anything I could without any negative repercussions.
My advice to those who use drugs or those who contemplate drugs as a means to reach such a state is to take the time to assess why you can't do it without. It won't always be possible to figure out why it is the case, or to even find an alternative means of overcoming those mental blocks that hold us back. Nevertheless, the exploration in and of itself can be enlightening, so long as you do it in a mindset where you do not fear the possible outcome or the answers you might find to the questions you ask when probing your unconscious. Ultimately though, I believe any behaviour which is perceived to be self-destructive can be justified if you know and understand what it is you are doing, why you do it, what you gain from it, and are willing to make that sacrifice. That's not healthy, not even in the slightest, but the magnitude of behaviours that others engage in which are not healthy, in full knowledge of what they are doing, and still continue to do so, I think makes it very difficult for anyone to criticise anyone for this type of behaviour without being a hypocrite.
I do not believe personally that creativity comes from the use of these drugs. I believe creativity is something that is inherent, that is, you are either predisposed or you are not, and that ultimately it is our own inhibitions and mental opposition that limits the extent to which we can channel it. I believe drugs in this regard only enable behaviours, they don't cause them. In other words if you were not a creative person and you took those drugs conflated with creativity, the product would not be a creative output like you expect.
There is also something to be said about the commonality of many great writers suffering from mental health problems, depression, anxiety, and other conditions. Again I do not believe these represent causation - creativity is not caused by these, nor are these caused by creativity. I believe there again simply exists a correlation, and as is self evident there are many people who demonstrate this to be the case.
When it comes to the use of drugs to enable what the individual perceives to be a desirable behaviour, my concern would be with the reasons why they believe they can't achieve that state of mind without using them. In some cases this can simply be down to effort, or expendable energy, in that the use of drugs is seen by some as a shortcut to a state of mind that whilst achievable without, would take significantly longer and considerably more effort to reach.
For me personally I do not pass judgement on those who choose to take these routes, and I do not consider it to be a determining factor in the credibility or the validity of the output. I don't use drugs myself to stimulate my creative output. Everything I write and everything I create comes about through my own exploration of my thoughts and feelings and my desire to express myself. As discussed in a previous post there are techniques I have developed to help stimulate the creative process but I accept that these don't always work and there are times when I can't tap into that creative energy at all. This is one of the reasons why I never pursued creative outlets as a career, I would not be able to maintain creativity on demand within a 9 to 5 environment, or to be able to produce creativity to a deadline. I believe both of these things are not conducive to creative energy and that they can in fact kill it entirely.
This blog for example uses scheduled posts, that's why they are released at exactly the same time on a regular basis. The posts for this blog are written in batches when my creativity flows, this allows me to maintain a level of consistency and continuous output, however the work itself is sporadic and comes in bursts of varying intensity. What you read may have been written that day, that week, that month, or it may have even been written a year before, it all depends on how many posts I wrote when I was on a high with my creative flow. I understand that some people don't have the luxury of allowing themselves to wait until this happens naturally, and that they see drugs as the only option to reach that state. This blog is after all a hobby and there is no more pressure on me to maintain it than I choose to place on myself. If I wanted to stop or if I wanted to go weeks or months without posting anything I could without any negative repercussions.
My advice to those who use drugs or those who contemplate drugs as a means to reach such a state is to take the time to assess why you can't do it without. It won't always be possible to figure out why it is the case, or to even find an alternative means of overcoming those mental blocks that hold us back. Nevertheless, the exploration in and of itself can be enlightening, so long as you do it in a mindset where you do not fear the possible outcome or the answers you might find to the questions you ask when probing your unconscious. Ultimately though, I believe any behaviour which is perceived to be self-destructive can be justified if you know and understand what it is you are doing, why you do it, what you gain from it, and are willing to make that sacrifice. That's not healthy, not even in the slightest, but the magnitude of behaviours that others engage in which are not healthy, in full knowledge of what they are doing, and still continue to do so, I think makes it very difficult for anyone to criticise anyone for this type of behaviour without being a hypocrite.
Creative Trunks
Quite a lot of things that I do involve creative energy. Whether it is writing for this blog, my short stories, or working on my latest design project, I have to tap into a creative energy to be able to drive my productivity forward. Creativity has never been something that I can demand from myself however, I have to be in the right mind set otherwise I find it difficult to get things moving. When it comes to writing, the only way I can try and summon this energy is to write something I don't think is creative at all and then begin to vary it. Through the process of adding variance and diversity to the work I am able to create a trunk and start branching off from it, exploring each new idea and seeing how far they will go.
This process is a lot easier with writing than it is with other things in my life, not least of all those things that are visual, as the only way to start creating something visual that you can vary is to use a technique known as greyboxing - this is where you use concept or placeholder art with the intent of replacing it with something better. Those placeholder assets are often uniform and uninspiring. They don't really serve well as a starting point for anything visual.
The same principle however is at work when you create complex artistic expressions. Those who paint portraits for example often start with basic geometric shapes and then develop their artwork around those. Whilst computer models share some of that form, they aren't as fluid and easy to manipulate. To borrow a phrase, you have to reinvent the wheel every time otherwise you end up producing content that looks too similar. For some projects like games that use a shared game engine this is excusable as there is an expectation of a shared visual style when you use the same engine, however with things that are linguistic in nature that's harder to incorporate. Visually similar artwork is pleasing to the eye and the human brain is fond of patterns but there is a fine line between familiarity and predictability. The former is preferred, but the latter is abhorred as it makes the content boring and rarely engaging. From a linguistic point of view this is like the difference between using the same genre and narrative tropes and simply retelling the same story or using the exact same characters.
There are of course times when you want to intentionally extend the original, but without the new creation being part of the original. This is perhaps best demonstrated in gaming through the modding community which modifies existing games to add new features, variance, or to add new content as an extension for further enjoyment. In a literary sense this is best demonstrated by fan-fiction, which in the same vein attempts to take the existing work and extend it, adding new content or in some cases "fixing" things that the reader took issue with in the original.
Whether you use modding as an example, or fan-fiction I think both demonstrate the purpose of a trunk and branch mentality. These are people who have a lot of creative potential but often have a lack of structure and inspiration to create things from scratch themselves. They take that which already exists as a trunk and then branch off from it as it is much easier for them to channel their creative energy.
As a writer, one of the problems with using this approach is the issue of copyright and consequently the legal issues that abound from doing so. Whether you publish the work for free or whether you sell it, in either case, if the originator takes issue or anyone involved in their production it can often lead to legal consequences and monetary cost so it's not worth pursuing. Having said that, there are a few creative works which started off life as fan-fiction but were later reworked to remove references to the original content. There are even theories about some creative works that never officially acknowledged this as the process behind their development but is widely believed to be the case. I can't name any for legal reasons as it can be construed as libel to accuse someone of plagiarism when you don't have enough evidence to back up the claim. If you have ever delved deeper into the development process and seen the background to some productions however then you will likely be aware of examples, you could probably name about 50 of them with ease, each using varying shades of complexity in their writing to mask their use of an existing universe and established characters as opposed to grey boxing.
This process is a lot easier with writing than it is with other things in my life, not least of all those things that are visual, as the only way to start creating something visual that you can vary is to use a technique known as greyboxing - this is where you use concept or placeholder art with the intent of replacing it with something better. Those placeholder assets are often uniform and uninspiring. They don't really serve well as a starting point for anything visual.
The same principle however is at work when you create complex artistic expressions. Those who paint portraits for example often start with basic geometric shapes and then develop their artwork around those. Whilst computer models share some of that form, they aren't as fluid and easy to manipulate. To borrow a phrase, you have to reinvent the wheel every time otherwise you end up producing content that looks too similar. For some projects like games that use a shared game engine this is excusable as there is an expectation of a shared visual style when you use the same engine, however with things that are linguistic in nature that's harder to incorporate. Visually similar artwork is pleasing to the eye and the human brain is fond of patterns but there is a fine line between familiarity and predictability. The former is preferred, but the latter is abhorred as it makes the content boring and rarely engaging. From a linguistic point of view this is like the difference between using the same genre and narrative tropes and simply retelling the same story or using the exact same characters.
There are of course times when you want to intentionally extend the original, but without the new creation being part of the original. This is perhaps best demonstrated in gaming through the modding community which modifies existing games to add new features, variance, or to add new content as an extension for further enjoyment. In a literary sense this is best demonstrated by fan-fiction, which in the same vein attempts to take the existing work and extend it, adding new content or in some cases "fixing" things that the reader took issue with in the original.
Whether you use modding as an example, or fan-fiction I think both demonstrate the purpose of a trunk and branch mentality. These are people who have a lot of creative potential but often have a lack of structure and inspiration to create things from scratch themselves. They take that which already exists as a trunk and then branch off from it as it is much easier for them to channel their creative energy.
As a writer, one of the problems with using this approach is the issue of copyright and consequently the legal issues that abound from doing so. Whether you publish the work for free or whether you sell it, in either case, if the originator takes issue or anyone involved in their production it can often lead to legal consequences and monetary cost so it's not worth pursuing. Having said that, there are a few creative works which started off life as fan-fiction but were later reworked to remove references to the original content. There are even theories about some creative works that never officially acknowledged this as the process behind their development but is widely believed to be the case. I can't name any for legal reasons as it can be construed as libel to accuse someone of plagiarism when you don't have enough evidence to back up the claim. If you have ever delved deeper into the development process and seen the background to some productions however then you will likely be aware of examples, you could probably name about 50 of them with ease, each using varying shades of complexity in their writing to mask their use of an existing universe and established characters as opposed to grey boxing.
Getting To Know You
I'm not a people person; for most people reading this, that won't come as much of a surprise, or at least it shouldn't if you know me at all. If you don't know me that well or at all, then you can be forgiven. Whilst I am not a people person, I can be personal. By that I mean, I do much better when I interact with people one-on-one, where what we talk about and what we think or feel stays between us in that moment; there aren't other people adding in their opinions and warping the conversation or twisting the narrative. I'm not a people person, but I do like getting to know people, one-on-one.
I am an incredibly curious person, I always have been, ever since I was a child. I liked to take things apart and look inside, then put them back together - that didn't always work out so well in the end. Some things I would take apart, and put back together the way it was to begin with and it wouldn't work anymore, in hindsight that was sometimes because I did something wrong, or didn't fully understand what I was doing, but more often than not, the reason things didn't work when you put them back together was because they were never designed to be taken apart in the first place.
People have always fascinated me, but from a distance. I was an extroverted wild child until a very traumatic experience that left me distrusting of anyone and everyone. That happened at a young age, during a time when my social skills should have been developing. I missed out on much of that normal stage of social development because of what happened to me. To this day I still have difficulty interacting with people in general, and engaging in group situations because I am still uncomfortable. It's not that I think what happened to me could or would happen again - although there have been two instances where things came dangerously close which understandably destroyed much of the progress I had made and sent me almost back to square one to start over again.
The reason above all else that I prefer one-on-one interaction is because it's harder for people to lie to you - that might seem counter intuitive, you might be thinking the more people someone lies to the more likely they will be to trip up and make a mistake but I would actually argue in large groups of people, the metaphorical water they decant from their bottle of lies dribbles out in tiny bits, everyone gets a bit but no-one gets enough to take a gulp and notice the taste. When you're one-on-one, you've got the bottle to yourself and you get to drink it all, and when you do that it's much easier to spot that it doesn't taste right.
I am an incredibly curious person, and I like to get to know people, because I like to see how things work, the three go together perfectly. When you meet someone for the first time and you know nothing about one another, there is nothing untoward or discourteous about asking questions, if anything, it is encouraged. Moreover, the one thing that most people feel comfortable talking about with authority is their own life, because no-one can know your life as well as you do and no-one can correct you when you relate your experience because it is your experience you are relating. The only real discomfort in these situations that arises is when you ask someone to tell you about themselves because that question is so open ended the other person doesn't know where to begin. To get around that I never ask questions so generalised, instead I ask specifics and see where they want to lead the conversation.
When I spent years as a loner kid I sat and watched other people and took everything in. During the time I spent watching everyone else I began to see what others didn't; I could see the moments when the people who smiled all the time would crack their faces when they thought no-one was looking, I would see the moments people would look worried or nervous, the unconscious impulses people had, and I would read their body language, I would notice the way they sat, who they faced, whether they were open or closed off or unconsciously defending themselves with protective postures.
I like to get to know people because most of the time the conversations you have are completely irrelevant when it comes to the subject matter; what is relevant however is the way they talk, their inflections, what they focus on, what excites them and what despairs them. Even when your interaction is limited only to being via text based communication, instant messages, text messages, emails, social media et al, you can tell a lot about a person by what they choose to share, and what they choose not to share. If anything, what the other person chooses not to say, can tell you much more about them than what they do. Much more than this, most people feel more empowered behind a keyboard to write things that don't come so easily to them when they have to say it out loud - that has its merits and also its detriment as I am sure you will already know first hand, if you're reading this post you've used the internet and if you've used the internet then you've seen unadulterated hate at some point, it's almost inescapable now.
When I talk about this love I have with other people, one of the questions they ask the most is quite simply what do I talk about? They want to know what I talk to people about or what I ask them that can reveal so much. The starting point for most people is to identify an interest, that can be easy for some and hard for others. There are generics, of music, movies, games, books, and TV shows, those all can uncover some clues as to what a person really has an interest in, but they are generic, it's like asking someone about the weather it doesn't get you far. I tend to avoid politics until I am very comfortable with a person, you can usually get an inkling of their leaning anyway through general conversation. It can be tempting to talk about what someone does for work or as a job, but truth be told, in my experience most people hate their jobs and they often have little bearing on what they are actually interested in; this doesn't hold true for everyone, that's a given, but it holds true for the vast majority in my experience. Those who actually like their jobs, or who work in fields that relate to their interests are quite rare; of those that do fit that description, most will be people who spent half their life in unrelated careers before they give it up to pursue what they really wanted to - again that doesn't apply to everyone in that group but in my experience it covers the majority.
The more people you get to know, the more you begin to realise that we are not that different. You are not as unique as you would like to think, and for some people that can be very hard to accept because they want to hold onto that mantra "But I'm different" or "I'm not like other guys/girls/people" etc, whilst for others it can be a comfort to know they're not as far removed from society as they thought they were. Getting to know people gets much easier the more you do it, but conversely, the more you do it the less motivation there can be to get to know more people. You really can get to a point where you feel like you've heard it all before, and that you're just meeting the same person over and over again. Trying to overcome that exhaustion can be difficult, especially if you don't feel as connected to the world as other people appear to be. My only advice if you feel that way is to say that you don't actually have to do it. There is a perception that you need to have large groups of friends or know many people to be happy but in my view and my experience, the depth of the connection you make with people is what matters. I'd rather be alone with no-one than be surrounded by people who don't actually care about me, or that I have shallow connections with who I know when push comes to shove they'd sacrifice any semblance of a friendship with me.
So I guess the only real advice I can give based on that, is to try not to worry about how many people you know or how many people you connect with; instead take the time to really get to know people when you do meet them, and make the judgement call of whether you think you can really connect, and if the answer is no, then don't feel bad about stepping back, no healthy friendship or relationship was ever borne of guilt or obligation, that will only lead to resentment, don't force a connection if it isn't there.
I am an incredibly curious person, I always have been, ever since I was a child. I liked to take things apart and look inside, then put them back together - that didn't always work out so well in the end. Some things I would take apart, and put back together the way it was to begin with and it wouldn't work anymore, in hindsight that was sometimes because I did something wrong, or didn't fully understand what I was doing, but more often than not, the reason things didn't work when you put them back together was because they were never designed to be taken apart in the first place.
People have always fascinated me, but from a distance. I was an extroverted wild child until a very traumatic experience that left me distrusting of anyone and everyone. That happened at a young age, during a time when my social skills should have been developing. I missed out on much of that normal stage of social development because of what happened to me. To this day I still have difficulty interacting with people in general, and engaging in group situations because I am still uncomfortable. It's not that I think what happened to me could or would happen again - although there have been two instances where things came dangerously close which understandably destroyed much of the progress I had made and sent me almost back to square one to start over again.
The reason above all else that I prefer one-on-one interaction is because it's harder for people to lie to you - that might seem counter intuitive, you might be thinking the more people someone lies to the more likely they will be to trip up and make a mistake but I would actually argue in large groups of people, the metaphorical water they decant from their bottle of lies dribbles out in tiny bits, everyone gets a bit but no-one gets enough to take a gulp and notice the taste. When you're one-on-one, you've got the bottle to yourself and you get to drink it all, and when you do that it's much easier to spot that it doesn't taste right.
I am an incredibly curious person, and I like to get to know people, because I like to see how things work, the three go together perfectly. When you meet someone for the first time and you know nothing about one another, there is nothing untoward or discourteous about asking questions, if anything, it is encouraged. Moreover, the one thing that most people feel comfortable talking about with authority is their own life, because no-one can know your life as well as you do and no-one can correct you when you relate your experience because it is your experience you are relating. The only real discomfort in these situations that arises is when you ask someone to tell you about themselves because that question is so open ended the other person doesn't know where to begin. To get around that I never ask questions so generalised, instead I ask specifics and see where they want to lead the conversation.
When I spent years as a loner kid I sat and watched other people and took everything in. During the time I spent watching everyone else I began to see what others didn't; I could see the moments when the people who smiled all the time would crack their faces when they thought no-one was looking, I would see the moments people would look worried or nervous, the unconscious impulses people had, and I would read their body language, I would notice the way they sat, who they faced, whether they were open or closed off or unconsciously defending themselves with protective postures.
I like to get to know people because most of the time the conversations you have are completely irrelevant when it comes to the subject matter; what is relevant however is the way they talk, their inflections, what they focus on, what excites them and what despairs them. Even when your interaction is limited only to being via text based communication, instant messages, text messages, emails, social media et al, you can tell a lot about a person by what they choose to share, and what they choose not to share. If anything, what the other person chooses not to say, can tell you much more about them than what they do. Much more than this, most people feel more empowered behind a keyboard to write things that don't come so easily to them when they have to say it out loud - that has its merits and also its detriment as I am sure you will already know first hand, if you're reading this post you've used the internet and if you've used the internet then you've seen unadulterated hate at some point, it's almost inescapable now.
When I talk about this love I have with other people, one of the questions they ask the most is quite simply what do I talk about? They want to know what I talk to people about or what I ask them that can reveal so much. The starting point for most people is to identify an interest, that can be easy for some and hard for others. There are generics, of music, movies, games, books, and TV shows, those all can uncover some clues as to what a person really has an interest in, but they are generic, it's like asking someone about the weather it doesn't get you far. I tend to avoid politics until I am very comfortable with a person, you can usually get an inkling of their leaning anyway through general conversation. It can be tempting to talk about what someone does for work or as a job, but truth be told, in my experience most people hate their jobs and they often have little bearing on what they are actually interested in; this doesn't hold true for everyone, that's a given, but it holds true for the vast majority in my experience. Those who actually like their jobs, or who work in fields that relate to their interests are quite rare; of those that do fit that description, most will be people who spent half their life in unrelated careers before they give it up to pursue what they really wanted to - again that doesn't apply to everyone in that group but in my experience it covers the majority.
The more people you get to know, the more you begin to realise that we are not that different. You are not as unique as you would like to think, and for some people that can be very hard to accept because they want to hold onto that mantra "But I'm different" or "I'm not like other guys/girls/people" etc, whilst for others it can be a comfort to know they're not as far removed from society as they thought they were. Getting to know people gets much easier the more you do it, but conversely, the more you do it the less motivation there can be to get to know more people. You really can get to a point where you feel like you've heard it all before, and that you're just meeting the same person over and over again. Trying to overcome that exhaustion can be difficult, especially if you don't feel as connected to the world as other people appear to be. My only advice if you feel that way is to say that you don't actually have to do it. There is a perception that you need to have large groups of friends or know many people to be happy but in my view and my experience, the depth of the connection you make with people is what matters. I'd rather be alone with no-one than be surrounded by people who don't actually care about me, or that I have shallow connections with who I know when push comes to shove they'd sacrifice any semblance of a friendship with me.
So I guess the only real advice I can give based on that, is to try not to worry about how many people you know or how many people you connect with; instead take the time to really get to know people when you do meet them, and make the judgement call of whether you think you can really connect, and if the answer is no, then don't feel bad about stepping back, no healthy friendship or relationship was ever borne of guilt or obligation, that will only lead to resentment, don't force a connection if it isn't there.
Not Allowed To Age
There's a singer, who I won't name because this post is generalized and isn't about them specifically. This singer had many hits in decades past but hasn't been able to maintain their success as they once did. It is a consequence of our physicality that our voices change as we age, they get deeper and the range that we can reach becomes narrower. You can stave this off to an extent but you cannot restore the vocal chords once damaged. This is a part of life we just have to live with.
This singer in particular has recently been revisiting their old work, performing their classic hits for modern audiences. This isn't going well for them and some are saying it is because a modern audience just doesn't have the taste or the desire to consume that type of music anymore. Whilst I admit that plays a factor, I think the greater impact on their success or lack thereof, is the fact that they can't perform it the way they did decades ago. They sound nothing like they did when they originally recorded them.
Whenever you are a singer, and a performer, there are two main classifications that are applied, and it is rare that an artist will exceed expectations in both. The first is as a recording artist, and the second is as a performing artist. The former is an artist who records their work and it is primarily consumed as such, and the latter is an artist who performs their work, either live or lip syncing. The latter leads to a slew of criticism in itself which another prominent artist from their era gets a lot of flack for but that's another topic of discussion.
There was a time when an artist could be one, or the other, and be successful without having to do both. That is no longer the case. Revenue from music sales declined over the years, in part due to the fact the industry got so greedy and put extortionate profit margins on their products which encouraged people to pirate them. We can debate that another time but suffice is to say that legitimate streaming services have led to a decline in music piracy which in itself demonstrates when music is affordable, people will pay for it. Moving on. As revenue from sales has declined, the main source of income for most artists now is their tours, which arguably are doing the same thing again, maximizing price to a level of extortion and I believe like all industries that pursue this business model a crash will inevitably ensue when consumers are exhausted by it.
If you can't perform live or create a production on stage that is entertaining enough for people to pay to watch it, then you won't succeed as an artist anymore. This artist in particular is one that was known for being a recording artist, they did tour, but it was their record sales at the time which made them famous. Being treated as a recording artist your first stop to experience their work was to listen to the recording. In a modern world where the first stop to experience their work is a live performance, there is an obvious disparity. They can't perform as well as they did when they recorded - partly because you can redo a recording as many times as you want until you get it right and release the best version, whereas performing you only get once shot at it. The other part is down to the fact that the best recording was likely the one it took the most effort to achieve, an effort that cannot be consistently recreated.
For this artist in particular, decades have passed since they first recorded their hits. In the decades that passed, they have changed quite a bit, both in appearance, and vocal style. Asking them to perform their hits from decades past and holding them to the same standard as they did is like asking you to put on your jeans that you had when you were 16 and expecting them to fit you - good luck with that, at 16 I was about a 26 inch waist, I've added about 12 inches to my waist since then on a bad day and about 10 inches on a good day.
I don't think age is really a factor in and of itself in this judgement, it's not the fact they are older that is the problem, if another artist could perform the songs they recorded for them instead with the same vocal performance as they once did, they would likely do very well from it. The real factor here I think is the fact the person has aged. People don't want to see the people they idolized when they were younger grow old because it is a reminder that they too have grown older. People want the idols from their youth to remain timeless and ageless, so they can pretend they are still that age. I feel this is why some people don't like to see live performances at all even those they watch recordings of as opposed to going to see them in person. It's a reminder of how old they have become.
This singer in particular has recently been revisiting their old work, performing their classic hits for modern audiences. This isn't going well for them and some are saying it is because a modern audience just doesn't have the taste or the desire to consume that type of music anymore. Whilst I admit that plays a factor, I think the greater impact on their success or lack thereof, is the fact that they can't perform it the way they did decades ago. They sound nothing like they did when they originally recorded them.
Whenever you are a singer, and a performer, there are two main classifications that are applied, and it is rare that an artist will exceed expectations in both. The first is as a recording artist, and the second is as a performing artist. The former is an artist who records their work and it is primarily consumed as such, and the latter is an artist who performs their work, either live or lip syncing. The latter leads to a slew of criticism in itself which another prominent artist from their era gets a lot of flack for but that's another topic of discussion.
There was a time when an artist could be one, or the other, and be successful without having to do both. That is no longer the case. Revenue from music sales declined over the years, in part due to the fact the industry got so greedy and put extortionate profit margins on their products which encouraged people to pirate them. We can debate that another time but suffice is to say that legitimate streaming services have led to a decline in music piracy which in itself demonstrates when music is affordable, people will pay for it. Moving on. As revenue from sales has declined, the main source of income for most artists now is their tours, which arguably are doing the same thing again, maximizing price to a level of extortion and I believe like all industries that pursue this business model a crash will inevitably ensue when consumers are exhausted by it.
If you can't perform live or create a production on stage that is entertaining enough for people to pay to watch it, then you won't succeed as an artist anymore. This artist in particular is one that was known for being a recording artist, they did tour, but it was their record sales at the time which made them famous. Being treated as a recording artist your first stop to experience their work was to listen to the recording. In a modern world where the first stop to experience their work is a live performance, there is an obvious disparity. They can't perform as well as they did when they recorded - partly because you can redo a recording as many times as you want until you get it right and release the best version, whereas performing you only get once shot at it. The other part is down to the fact that the best recording was likely the one it took the most effort to achieve, an effort that cannot be consistently recreated.
For this artist in particular, decades have passed since they first recorded their hits. In the decades that passed, they have changed quite a bit, both in appearance, and vocal style. Asking them to perform their hits from decades past and holding them to the same standard as they did is like asking you to put on your jeans that you had when you were 16 and expecting them to fit you - good luck with that, at 16 I was about a 26 inch waist, I've added about 12 inches to my waist since then on a bad day and about 10 inches on a good day.
I don't think age is really a factor in and of itself in this judgement, it's not the fact they are older that is the problem, if another artist could perform the songs they recorded for them instead with the same vocal performance as they once did, they would likely do very well from it. The real factor here I think is the fact the person has aged. People don't want to see the people they idolized when they were younger grow old because it is a reminder that they too have grown older. People want the idols from their youth to remain timeless and ageless, so they can pretend they are still that age. I feel this is why some people don't like to see live performances at all even those they watch recordings of as opposed to going to see them in person. It's a reminder of how old they have become.
Google+
Google+ has finally been retired as of the 2nd of April. I think now that it has been laid to rest [for consumers at least] it is a good opportunity to step back and look at it for what it was and evaluate the whole experience. I would like to share my interpretation of what it was, what it did right, what it did wrong, and perhaps most of all, why it failed.
What was it?
This question is both very easy and very hard to answer at the same time. On the face of it, Google+ was a social network, intended to be a place where you could connect, share posts, network, and engage with other people. Of course that is what it was marketed as in the public eye but privately Google+ was much more than this. The reality behind the marketing was that Google+ was a content farm, intended as a means to enable Google to accumulate vast amounts of data that up until that point it could on glimpse at through its crawlers and through what little information is shared with it via its AdSense programme. Services like GMail provide Google with much more information about us than the public sites we use on a day-to-day basis. What we share privately through third party social networks was hidden from Google and for the most part obfuscated even when it had access to those services from inside through complicated API structures intended to prevent the mass collection of data of their users - although we all know now that those attempts at obfuscation failed miserably and provided no protection to the end user at all, case in point the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
No, it is quite clear despite being marketed as a social network, Google+ was ultimately a service intended to integrate Google much more intimately within our online interactions by trying to provide yet another service in-house that users had relied on third parties to provide - much in the same way that Google acquired many different services over the years and integrated them into their family of products in an attempt to make the Google Ecosystem your one-stop-shop for everything.
What did it do right?
You might find yourself asking, if the invasive nature of this endeavour was so Machiavellian then what good could possibly have come of it? Well, the answer to this question lies in another - who used it? The answer to the latter is quite simple, they were people who were already heavily integrated into the Google Ecosystem that this perceived level of intrusion was of no concern to them at all. At least, those are the people who used the service first, others eventually followed but its user base remained limited. Those who used the service found it useful, that much is clear. As an early adopter I explored Google+ for many reasons, not least of all that I didn't care much for Facebook even back then and most other social networks had their limitations too. What Google+ offered for me personally was the demographic that adopted it, namely that those who used it were predominantly tech-minded or had an interest in web development, programming, or computer science related fields in general. This didn't apply to everyone of course, but it was easy to meet new people who you had no connection to beforehand through it. One of the ways it enabled this and which other social networks today still lack, is the identification of audiences and targeting content based on those audiences.
Within Google+ nomenclature the creation of audiences was referred to as circles, and worked by asking you as a user to group other people into circles or to be added to circles. These made it easy to post content that you could target to that specific audience. So for example I could create a circle for people who might be interested in posts of an LGBT nature this allowed me to post LGBT centred content that wasn't pushed to everyone else. Other social networks have attempted similar concepts perhaps the closest analogue would be Facebook Groups but the two were really not comparable. Google+ did have separate functionality that more closely mimicked what Facebook Groups provided. The best use-case scenario to demonstrate the limitation of other social networks that do not incorporate this functionality would be to consider someone on Twitter who may have a few thousand followers. The chances are many of those followers will be following you for a similar reason, but the others who follow you have no interest in that same reason. Again taking me personally, many of my followers are LGBT and have an interest in the LGBT related content I post, namely tweets about LGBT pop culture; those outside the LGBT community who follow me will likely have little or no interest in these tweets. Therein lies the limitation of twitter, every single tweet you send is sent to a one-for-all audience, where everyone who follows you can see it, there's no distinction as to why they follow you.
There are some people I follow on twitter whose content 90% of the time I am interested in, and 10% of the time I am not. That 10% essentially clutters my timeline, likewise the inverse is true for some people I do not follow, where 90% of their content I have no interest in, and 10% of it I do, but I do not follow them because the vast majority of the time I would see content I had no interest in. That's a limitation of posting content without being able to target it to a specific audience. Twitter is limited by the fact that you only really connect with people who share almost all of your interests, the lack of targeted content means you don't make potential connections with others become a reality if the overlap isn't sizeable enough.
What did it do wrong?
Without a doubt the thing Google+ did wrong most of all was actually something Google did rather than the service itself - that was to push it onto people. When Google essentially forced anyone with a Google Account to have Google+ profile whether they liked it or not, and integrated those profiles into all other Google services, they destroyed the platform they had created and arguably poisoned many of the other services they provided - the best example of this is Youtube which many people regard as having its peak just before Google+ comments were introduced, after the integration was forced onto its users, Google destroyed many of the communities that had existed on the site and to be quite frank they fucked themselves over in the process.
Those who had no interest in Google+ were never going to use it, trying to force them to use it was a massive mistake, both because of the sociopolitical backlash as a result but also because it actively discouraged those who had a genuine interest in Google+ from engaging with it any longer. When content began pouring into Google+ from the other services Google provided which it integrated with the platform, it became increasingly difficult to use the platform for what it had been used for initially. This isn't something unique to Google either, this also happened with Facebook as I have discussed in other posts, when the site first started out it was limited only to students and it provided a number of features like network pages that were centred around community development and meeting new people and engagement. However, when Facebook opened itself to the public as a whole, one by one each of these features were removed and the content that flooded into the site made it increasingly difficult to actually use the site for networking, it ultimately ended up as a place for connecting only with people you already knew and has progressed now to a point where users are actively discouraged from engaging with people they don't know because of privacy and safety concerns. The lesson here is that you need to know your purpose, your audience, and your niche and serve it well; the second you attempt to make it generic or mainstream is the second you ruin the unique selling point that you had in the first place.
Why did it fail?
After Google took something that had a defined use, a demographic, and a utility, then turned it into something with no clear purpose, marketed towards everyone they possibly could, and left its users with no real benefit, the service died. The platform that had been created was dismantled, Google's greed and underlying desire to farm content was exposed, the social networking aspect of the service was irrelevant, Google simply wanted data, as much of it as it could get, from as many people as it could get, and when organic growth did not satisfy that greed they pursued underhanded tactics to try and force that growth and it failed. Google Buzz in much the same way also failed as a predecessor to Google+ its downfall was the fact Google pushed integration with GMail, again intended to fast-track the service to a larger audience with no concern whatsoever as to whether that audience actually had an interest in the service to begin with.
Google+ failed for the same reason many of Google's other endeavours also failed - Google isn't good at growing. That might seem like an incredulous statement to make considering the size of their search engine and their market dominance but I stand by this assertion, Google sucks at growing. When you look at the long list of services that Google has launched over the years and how many failed, you can see time and again that they were unable to take those services from their infancy and nurture them into something mature and well developed. When you look at the wealth of successful services today that Google offers beyond search, many of these services such as Youtube and Blogger as prime examples were not Google creations. They were created by third party companies and existed as products in their own right and continued to grow until Google took an interest and bought those services. What these two services as prime examples also demonstrate is that Google never made the mistake with them of trying to integrate them into other Google services to the point where they did not retain their identity. Youtube retained its branding as did Blogger and each service continued to serve their intended audiences and provided the features that their respective user bases desired. It really wasn't until the Google+ debacle that Google overstepped its mark and encroached on Youtube to a point where its influence became invasive, and as we have already discussed above, this was a poison pill moment for the platform, something which Google in the end finally backtracked on, although it took them an unreasonably long time to actually admit defeat and try and restore the site to what it was - something which arguably they still have not been able to do as the impact of Google+ is still felt within the communities on Youtube that were so badly impacted by it.
Google sucks at growth, and when you look at its attempts to expand in markets like China you can see how difficult it is for them to achieve organic growth. Their search engine remains their flagship product and whilst you can make many arguments as to why it retains its market dominance, arguably the positive feedback loop assessment fits most easily, that is to say it is popular because it is popular, and it's difficult for any newcomer or existing alternative to challenge that popularity. There is an article at CBS News by Erik Sherman from 2010 which I feel is still relevant today, which highlights Google's inadequacies when it comes to marketing, notably raising the point that Google seemingly has no emotional intelligence. This however, I do not believe is something unique to Google. Some large tech companies that grew quite rapidly do not seem to have learned much about their users rationale and reasoning despite the magnitude of data they hold belonging to those users.
There was a TEDTalk recently where Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter discussed the future of the platform and possible upcoming changes, notably the desire to remove the counters for Likes and Retweets, possibly removing the functionality entirely, as well as a move away from the current structure of the platform by potentially scrapping the follower and following functions entirely, the rationale being that users would instead follow topics or trend and engage with those rather than following individuals. I do fear that the same Google+ moment is approaching for Twitter as that which hit Youtube where functionality will be forced onto users who do not want it, and the functionality that they currently use and find appealing will be removed. Youtube still hasn't recovered from this fundamental mistake that Google made and if Twitter follows through with some of the changes that Dorsey discussed then I think it could be the end for Twitter.
I am not alone in this fatalistic assessment of Dorsey's comments, Wired published an article by Emily Dreyfuss titled 'Jack Dorsey Is Captain of the Twittanic at TED 2019' where she also discusses his comments in much greater detail and crucially notes that Dorsey, like Google, is more concerned with what he wants, rather than what the users of the platform want. The article details a long list of concerns that users of the platform have, and how Dorsey avoided almost all of these questions when they were put to him. For someone who portrays themselves as having empathy he seems disturbingly incapable of expressing it. Google exists for the most part as a faceless entity, there are a few key people associated with it who sometimes speak at events but for the most part there is no one person in particular that embodies Google, it is perhaps easier to accept it as being void of a human connection then, more so than other platforms. Facebook and Twitter by contrast have Mark Zuckerbeg and Jack Dorsey respectively as the faces of those platforms, as people who the negativity that exists on those platforms is becoming increasingly attached to and associated with, not just by the public but by politicians and by regulators.
It can be hard to imagine that these platforms might one day be gone, but that would not be unprecedented. Larger corporations have collapsed, Facebook employs approximately 30,000 people and Twitter employs approximately 4,000 people. They are both relatively large companies but they are by no means the largest. Walmart and McDonald's for instance employ 2.3 million and 1.9 million people respectively which dwarves both of these companies. Facebook and Twitter have revenues of $56 billion, and $3 billion respectively, and again by comparison, Walmart and McDonald's have revenues of $514 billion and $21 billion respectively. These are just two examples, but whilst both of these can be considered healthy companies, by contrast, in 2001 when Enron declared bankruptcy it had 29,000 employees - comparable in size to Facebook, and had revenue of $100 billion, twice that of Facebook yet it still filed for bankruptcy due to the scandal that hit the company, the specifics of which aren't relevant here, what is relevant is the point that bigger companies than Facebook and Twitter have gone down in flames before now, it is not a given that any company will be around forever, size is not salvation, if anything it puts the company at a much greater risk, particularly since both of these companies had to invest as they scaled upward and it isn't so easy to scale downward and dispose of much of the infrastructure they invested in if it were no longer needed - that at least is one area where Google still thrives, its pockets are deep and it can for now at least still afford to make expensive mistakes without suffering austerity as a result, so Google+ in that vein will leave no great economic impact on the company as a whole, if anything, the restructuring of Google Inc into Alphabet Inc safeguarded the company by compartmentalising its services to the point where individually they can fail completely without having a contagion effect on other services the company provides.
What was it?
This question is both very easy and very hard to answer at the same time. On the face of it, Google+ was a social network, intended to be a place where you could connect, share posts, network, and engage with other people. Of course that is what it was marketed as in the public eye but privately Google+ was much more than this. The reality behind the marketing was that Google+ was a content farm, intended as a means to enable Google to accumulate vast amounts of data that up until that point it could on glimpse at through its crawlers and through what little information is shared with it via its AdSense programme. Services like GMail provide Google with much more information about us than the public sites we use on a day-to-day basis. What we share privately through third party social networks was hidden from Google and for the most part obfuscated even when it had access to those services from inside through complicated API structures intended to prevent the mass collection of data of their users - although we all know now that those attempts at obfuscation failed miserably and provided no protection to the end user at all, case in point the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
No, it is quite clear despite being marketed as a social network, Google+ was ultimately a service intended to integrate Google much more intimately within our online interactions by trying to provide yet another service in-house that users had relied on third parties to provide - much in the same way that Google acquired many different services over the years and integrated them into their family of products in an attempt to make the Google Ecosystem your one-stop-shop for everything.
What did it do right?
You might find yourself asking, if the invasive nature of this endeavour was so Machiavellian then what good could possibly have come of it? Well, the answer to this question lies in another - who used it? The answer to the latter is quite simple, they were people who were already heavily integrated into the Google Ecosystem that this perceived level of intrusion was of no concern to them at all. At least, those are the people who used the service first, others eventually followed but its user base remained limited. Those who used the service found it useful, that much is clear. As an early adopter I explored Google+ for many reasons, not least of all that I didn't care much for Facebook even back then and most other social networks had their limitations too. What Google+ offered for me personally was the demographic that adopted it, namely that those who used it were predominantly tech-minded or had an interest in web development, programming, or computer science related fields in general. This didn't apply to everyone of course, but it was easy to meet new people who you had no connection to beforehand through it. One of the ways it enabled this and which other social networks today still lack, is the identification of audiences and targeting content based on those audiences.
Within Google+ nomenclature the creation of audiences was referred to as circles, and worked by asking you as a user to group other people into circles or to be added to circles. These made it easy to post content that you could target to that specific audience. So for example I could create a circle for people who might be interested in posts of an LGBT nature this allowed me to post LGBT centred content that wasn't pushed to everyone else. Other social networks have attempted similar concepts perhaps the closest analogue would be Facebook Groups but the two were really not comparable. Google+ did have separate functionality that more closely mimicked what Facebook Groups provided. The best use-case scenario to demonstrate the limitation of other social networks that do not incorporate this functionality would be to consider someone on Twitter who may have a few thousand followers. The chances are many of those followers will be following you for a similar reason, but the others who follow you have no interest in that same reason. Again taking me personally, many of my followers are LGBT and have an interest in the LGBT related content I post, namely tweets about LGBT pop culture; those outside the LGBT community who follow me will likely have little or no interest in these tweets. Therein lies the limitation of twitter, every single tweet you send is sent to a one-for-all audience, where everyone who follows you can see it, there's no distinction as to why they follow you.
There are some people I follow on twitter whose content 90% of the time I am interested in, and 10% of the time I am not. That 10% essentially clutters my timeline, likewise the inverse is true for some people I do not follow, where 90% of their content I have no interest in, and 10% of it I do, but I do not follow them because the vast majority of the time I would see content I had no interest in. That's a limitation of posting content without being able to target it to a specific audience. Twitter is limited by the fact that you only really connect with people who share almost all of your interests, the lack of targeted content means you don't make potential connections with others become a reality if the overlap isn't sizeable enough.
What did it do wrong?
Without a doubt the thing Google+ did wrong most of all was actually something Google did rather than the service itself - that was to push it onto people. When Google essentially forced anyone with a Google Account to have Google+ profile whether they liked it or not, and integrated those profiles into all other Google services, they destroyed the platform they had created and arguably poisoned many of the other services they provided - the best example of this is Youtube which many people regard as having its peak just before Google+ comments were introduced, after the integration was forced onto its users, Google destroyed many of the communities that had existed on the site and to be quite frank they fucked themselves over in the process.
Those who had no interest in Google+ were never going to use it, trying to force them to use it was a massive mistake, both because of the sociopolitical backlash as a result but also because it actively discouraged those who had a genuine interest in Google+ from engaging with it any longer. When content began pouring into Google+ from the other services Google provided which it integrated with the platform, it became increasingly difficult to use the platform for what it had been used for initially. This isn't something unique to Google either, this also happened with Facebook as I have discussed in other posts, when the site first started out it was limited only to students and it provided a number of features like network pages that were centred around community development and meeting new people and engagement. However, when Facebook opened itself to the public as a whole, one by one each of these features were removed and the content that flooded into the site made it increasingly difficult to actually use the site for networking, it ultimately ended up as a place for connecting only with people you already knew and has progressed now to a point where users are actively discouraged from engaging with people they don't know because of privacy and safety concerns. The lesson here is that you need to know your purpose, your audience, and your niche and serve it well; the second you attempt to make it generic or mainstream is the second you ruin the unique selling point that you had in the first place.
Why did it fail?
After Google took something that had a defined use, a demographic, and a utility, then turned it into something with no clear purpose, marketed towards everyone they possibly could, and left its users with no real benefit, the service died. The platform that had been created was dismantled, Google's greed and underlying desire to farm content was exposed, the social networking aspect of the service was irrelevant, Google simply wanted data, as much of it as it could get, from as many people as it could get, and when organic growth did not satisfy that greed they pursued underhanded tactics to try and force that growth and it failed. Google Buzz in much the same way also failed as a predecessor to Google+ its downfall was the fact Google pushed integration with GMail, again intended to fast-track the service to a larger audience with no concern whatsoever as to whether that audience actually had an interest in the service to begin with.
Google+ failed for the same reason many of Google's other endeavours also failed - Google isn't good at growing. That might seem like an incredulous statement to make considering the size of their search engine and their market dominance but I stand by this assertion, Google sucks at growing. When you look at the long list of services that Google has launched over the years and how many failed, you can see time and again that they were unable to take those services from their infancy and nurture them into something mature and well developed. When you look at the wealth of successful services today that Google offers beyond search, many of these services such as Youtube and Blogger as prime examples were not Google creations. They were created by third party companies and existed as products in their own right and continued to grow until Google took an interest and bought those services. What these two services as prime examples also demonstrate is that Google never made the mistake with them of trying to integrate them into other Google services to the point where they did not retain their identity. Youtube retained its branding as did Blogger and each service continued to serve their intended audiences and provided the features that their respective user bases desired. It really wasn't until the Google+ debacle that Google overstepped its mark and encroached on Youtube to a point where its influence became invasive, and as we have already discussed above, this was a poison pill moment for the platform, something which Google in the end finally backtracked on, although it took them an unreasonably long time to actually admit defeat and try and restore the site to what it was - something which arguably they still have not been able to do as the impact of Google+ is still felt within the communities on Youtube that were so badly impacted by it.
Google sucks at growth, and when you look at its attempts to expand in markets like China you can see how difficult it is for them to achieve organic growth. Their search engine remains their flagship product and whilst you can make many arguments as to why it retains its market dominance, arguably the positive feedback loop assessment fits most easily, that is to say it is popular because it is popular, and it's difficult for any newcomer or existing alternative to challenge that popularity. There is an article at CBS News by Erik Sherman from 2010 which I feel is still relevant today, which highlights Google's inadequacies when it comes to marketing, notably raising the point that Google seemingly has no emotional intelligence. This however, I do not believe is something unique to Google. Some large tech companies that grew quite rapidly do not seem to have learned much about their users rationale and reasoning despite the magnitude of data they hold belonging to those users.
There was a TEDTalk recently where Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter discussed the future of the platform and possible upcoming changes, notably the desire to remove the counters for Likes and Retweets, possibly removing the functionality entirely, as well as a move away from the current structure of the platform by potentially scrapping the follower and following functions entirely, the rationale being that users would instead follow topics or trend and engage with those rather than following individuals. I do fear that the same Google+ moment is approaching for Twitter as that which hit Youtube where functionality will be forced onto users who do not want it, and the functionality that they currently use and find appealing will be removed. Youtube still hasn't recovered from this fundamental mistake that Google made and if Twitter follows through with some of the changes that Dorsey discussed then I think it could be the end for Twitter.
I am not alone in this fatalistic assessment of Dorsey's comments, Wired published an article by Emily Dreyfuss titled 'Jack Dorsey Is Captain of the Twittanic at TED 2019' where she also discusses his comments in much greater detail and crucially notes that Dorsey, like Google, is more concerned with what he wants, rather than what the users of the platform want. The article details a long list of concerns that users of the platform have, and how Dorsey avoided almost all of these questions when they were put to him. For someone who portrays themselves as having empathy he seems disturbingly incapable of expressing it. Google exists for the most part as a faceless entity, there are a few key people associated with it who sometimes speak at events but for the most part there is no one person in particular that embodies Google, it is perhaps easier to accept it as being void of a human connection then, more so than other platforms. Facebook and Twitter by contrast have Mark Zuckerbeg and Jack Dorsey respectively as the faces of those platforms, as people who the negativity that exists on those platforms is becoming increasingly attached to and associated with, not just by the public but by politicians and by regulators.
It can be hard to imagine that these platforms might one day be gone, but that would not be unprecedented. Larger corporations have collapsed, Facebook employs approximately 30,000 people and Twitter employs approximately 4,000 people. They are both relatively large companies but they are by no means the largest. Walmart and McDonald's for instance employ 2.3 million and 1.9 million people respectively which dwarves both of these companies. Facebook and Twitter have revenues of $56 billion, and $3 billion respectively, and again by comparison, Walmart and McDonald's have revenues of $514 billion and $21 billion respectively. These are just two examples, but whilst both of these can be considered healthy companies, by contrast, in 2001 when Enron declared bankruptcy it had 29,000 employees - comparable in size to Facebook, and had revenue of $100 billion, twice that of Facebook yet it still filed for bankruptcy due to the scandal that hit the company, the specifics of which aren't relevant here, what is relevant is the point that bigger companies than Facebook and Twitter have gone down in flames before now, it is not a given that any company will be around forever, size is not salvation, if anything it puts the company at a much greater risk, particularly since both of these companies had to invest as they scaled upward and it isn't so easy to scale downward and dispose of much of the infrastructure they invested in if it were no longer needed - that at least is one area where Google still thrives, its pockets are deep and it can for now at least still afford to make expensive mistakes without suffering austerity as a result, so Google+ in that vein will leave no great economic impact on the company as a whole, if anything, the restructuring of Google Inc into Alphabet Inc safeguarded the company by compartmentalising its services to the point where individually they can fail completely without having a contagion effect on other services the company provides.
Bad Science
In a previous post I mentioned 'bad science' and wanted to clarify exactly what I meant by that. When you pursue scientific study, there is a method you are supposed to follow - the scientific method. There are a few stipulations that are made about what you can and cannot do when you follow that method. One of the stipulations that people often disregard is the principle that you cannot assert a negative statement as true. If you attempt to do that then you are not following the scientific method, and you are ultimately expressing a belief, not a conclusion that is backed by evidence. Likewise you cannot present evidence to back up a negative claim, these are fundamental principles of scientific endeavour.
Bad science can easily be identified when sweeping statements are made which express a negative. "X does not exist" - this is not a statement you can ever make if you follow the scientific method, in reality to convey a scientific standpoint you should state "There is no evidence that X exists" - you can not rule out the possibility that it does just because there is no evidence to support it, by doing so you are fundamentally undermining the scientific process because you are making a statement which you have no evidence to back up - which is a belief not a conclusion.
Bad science is perhaps at its most difficult to spot when it seemingly follows the scientific method but the conclusions drawn are fundamentally flawed but not enough information is given when the conclusions are reported for you to be able to assess its validity, this is where scepticism is most important, and why it is important to find multiple sources that can verify a claim as opposed to relying on one alone - that is of course at odds with journalism and the main stream media's obsession with breaking news, being first, and getting the scoop as it were.
If you follow the scientific method, your goal should always be to find evidence that reinforces a theory, or to disprove the evidence that has been presented that is claimed to support that theory. In other words if someone claims X exists and cites evidence for that claim, then you take that evidence and examine it and find reason why the conclusion drawn was drawn in error, or you find evidence that contradicts the claim so as to discredit the position. Again this is often at odds with mass media as it is intended to be consumed quickly and there is a price placed on brevity; publications seek to push out work that is long enough for search engines but short enough for people - which says a lot about our sometimes toxic relationship with technology.
The trouble with both of these approaches to evidence discovery is that they are defined by the pursuit of something in particular, in other words you know roughly what it is you are looking for before you set out to look; that approach in itself is vulnerable to cognitive bias - where you pay more attention to the things that you are looking for and less attention to the things that contradict it. This is one of the reasons why those scientific theories that are considered to be most sound are those that are subjected to peer review, they are presented in journals where other members of the scientific community take what is published and examine it further.
Bad science is something that has become more prevalent in modern society, and whilst it is easy to point to mass media as the cause for this, I think this is misguided. I think mass media is a symptom but not the cause of this issue; for me personally I believe the reason for the rise of bad science is what I refer to as "authoritative refugees" - namely people who were once religious or hold a religious mindset, that is the desire to defer judgement to that of an authority figure. This mindset is further defined by the belief in things which either cannot be proven or which followers accept even with evidence to the contrary, simply because the authority figure asserts it to be true - in other words, beliefs that require faith rather than evidence. The abandonment of religion by many people has not caused a shift from these religious mentalities to that of a scientific mentality, instead it has simply caused the focus of the individuals to shift from a religious interest to a scientific interest, their bad habits and thought processes which were incompatible with the scientific method have come with them and have not changed, instead they infiltrate the scientific community and slowly move it closer to what they once knew in religion.
This doesn't solely apply to people who were a member of a religion and are no longer, it also applies to people who were never religious to begin with but who probably would have ended up being so eventually due to the way they approach the concepts of belief and reasoning. Finding a solution to this problem is difficult, it requires limitation of those who can profess to be scientific authority figures. I am not proposing that science be exclusionary, instead I am proposing that there be greater control over what is considered to be a scientific resource - this requires those who control the dissemination of information, namely the mainstream media, to prescribe to a list of sources that can be considered credible. When you are a student who studies any scientific subject, one of the things you are told quite early in your studies are which sources are regarded as reputable and those which are not. Some Universities for example will flat out refuse to accept citations from certain sources entirely.
The scientific method itself can be used in compiling that list, and keeping it peer reviewed would allow greater transparency, and allow it to grow over time. There have been some attempts at doing this through browser extensions to combat fake news by guiding users with metadata about the site they are viewing and advising them whether it is generally considered to be trustworthy - this is not without its flaws admittedly and it has already run into a few legal hurdles as some large media outlets in the UK for instance challenged the fact they were listed as unreliable and managed to get delisted, despite the fact those particular media outlets have been openly criticised and shown to have reported many things that were complete fabrications.
Beyond this concept however, there is also far too much exposure through mass media given to "Think Tanks" and "Policy Studies" that do not conform to the scientific method in their research and time and again have been proven to show bias in their conclusions, still of all they appear on mainstream media as credible sources of information which in turn misleads the public. Their conclusions are reported as facts, without context, and without challenge. These influences are at their most insidious when they centre around political issues, particularly those which are contentious issues. Worse still, there are those outlets that claim to be scientific such as Wikipedia, which no person of a truly scientific mindset would ever take seriously, yet they serve as the first point of reference for the majority of the general public, and despite better resources existing, those such as Google who direct people to these resources and make no effort to countermand the inaccuracy. Therein lies a greater problem with Google - it finds an answer to a question, it makes little to no attempt at all to check the answer is actually true, only that the majority of people accept it, or that it comes from a source that the majority of people use - neither of which guarantees even a modicum of accuracy. Admittedly Google has at least tried to add some level of verification but the problem is that almost all interaction people have with Google is automated, if you've ever tried to find a contact number for Google you'll know how difficult it can be to actually speak to someone, better yet, you will know how difficult it is to counteract false information - an example of something trivial here would be a Google Map listing with incorrect information, something I personally know was an issue for a small charity in the UK whose listing showed information relating to a watch company in the USA and took several months to rectify as the information was being pulled by an algorithm, not something manually input into the listing.
If you are interested in the ideas that have been raised in this post, there is a book dedicated to the subject aptly titled 'Bad Science' by Ben Goldacre which explores the concept. Also at this point to pre-empt any of the ire that may be directed at me I would like to reassert what I have said many times before - I do not expect you to take anything written on this blog as gossip, I do not claim it to be exhaustive or an authority on anything; my posts are written to share my thoughts and my interpretation of the world, my posts are intended only to make you think, and inspire you to go beyond and learn more for yourself, there will inevitably be a myriad of conclusions and interpretations expressed here that are wrong or misguided, this isn't a scientific blog - if were intended to be, I would put a lot more effort into it.
Bad science can easily be identified when sweeping statements are made which express a negative. "X does not exist" - this is not a statement you can ever make if you follow the scientific method, in reality to convey a scientific standpoint you should state "There is no evidence that X exists" - you can not rule out the possibility that it does just because there is no evidence to support it, by doing so you are fundamentally undermining the scientific process because you are making a statement which you have no evidence to back up - which is a belief not a conclusion.
Bad science is perhaps at its most difficult to spot when it seemingly follows the scientific method but the conclusions drawn are fundamentally flawed but not enough information is given when the conclusions are reported for you to be able to assess its validity, this is where scepticism is most important, and why it is important to find multiple sources that can verify a claim as opposed to relying on one alone - that is of course at odds with journalism and the main stream media's obsession with breaking news, being first, and getting the scoop as it were.
If you follow the scientific method, your goal should always be to find evidence that reinforces a theory, or to disprove the evidence that has been presented that is claimed to support that theory. In other words if someone claims X exists and cites evidence for that claim, then you take that evidence and examine it and find reason why the conclusion drawn was drawn in error, or you find evidence that contradicts the claim so as to discredit the position. Again this is often at odds with mass media as it is intended to be consumed quickly and there is a price placed on brevity; publications seek to push out work that is long enough for search engines but short enough for people - which says a lot about our sometimes toxic relationship with technology.
The trouble with both of these approaches to evidence discovery is that they are defined by the pursuit of something in particular, in other words you know roughly what it is you are looking for before you set out to look; that approach in itself is vulnerable to cognitive bias - where you pay more attention to the things that you are looking for and less attention to the things that contradict it. This is one of the reasons why those scientific theories that are considered to be most sound are those that are subjected to peer review, they are presented in journals where other members of the scientific community take what is published and examine it further.
Bad science is something that has become more prevalent in modern society, and whilst it is easy to point to mass media as the cause for this, I think this is misguided. I think mass media is a symptom but not the cause of this issue; for me personally I believe the reason for the rise of bad science is what I refer to as "authoritative refugees" - namely people who were once religious or hold a religious mindset, that is the desire to defer judgement to that of an authority figure. This mindset is further defined by the belief in things which either cannot be proven or which followers accept even with evidence to the contrary, simply because the authority figure asserts it to be true - in other words, beliefs that require faith rather than evidence. The abandonment of religion by many people has not caused a shift from these religious mentalities to that of a scientific mentality, instead it has simply caused the focus of the individuals to shift from a religious interest to a scientific interest, their bad habits and thought processes which were incompatible with the scientific method have come with them and have not changed, instead they infiltrate the scientific community and slowly move it closer to what they once knew in religion.
This doesn't solely apply to people who were a member of a religion and are no longer, it also applies to people who were never religious to begin with but who probably would have ended up being so eventually due to the way they approach the concepts of belief and reasoning. Finding a solution to this problem is difficult, it requires limitation of those who can profess to be scientific authority figures. I am not proposing that science be exclusionary, instead I am proposing that there be greater control over what is considered to be a scientific resource - this requires those who control the dissemination of information, namely the mainstream media, to prescribe to a list of sources that can be considered credible. When you are a student who studies any scientific subject, one of the things you are told quite early in your studies are which sources are regarded as reputable and those which are not. Some Universities for example will flat out refuse to accept citations from certain sources entirely.
The scientific method itself can be used in compiling that list, and keeping it peer reviewed would allow greater transparency, and allow it to grow over time. There have been some attempts at doing this through browser extensions to combat fake news by guiding users with metadata about the site they are viewing and advising them whether it is generally considered to be trustworthy - this is not without its flaws admittedly and it has already run into a few legal hurdles as some large media outlets in the UK for instance challenged the fact they were listed as unreliable and managed to get delisted, despite the fact those particular media outlets have been openly criticised and shown to have reported many things that were complete fabrications.
Beyond this concept however, there is also far too much exposure through mass media given to "Think Tanks" and "Policy Studies" that do not conform to the scientific method in their research and time and again have been proven to show bias in their conclusions, still of all they appear on mainstream media as credible sources of information which in turn misleads the public. Their conclusions are reported as facts, without context, and without challenge. These influences are at their most insidious when they centre around political issues, particularly those which are contentious issues. Worse still, there are those outlets that claim to be scientific such as Wikipedia, which no person of a truly scientific mindset would ever take seriously, yet they serve as the first point of reference for the majority of the general public, and despite better resources existing, those such as Google who direct people to these resources and make no effort to countermand the inaccuracy. Therein lies a greater problem with Google - it finds an answer to a question, it makes little to no attempt at all to check the answer is actually true, only that the majority of people accept it, or that it comes from a source that the majority of people use - neither of which guarantees even a modicum of accuracy. Admittedly Google has at least tried to add some level of verification but the problem is that almost all interaction people have with Google is automated, if you've ever tried to find a contact number for Google you'll know how difficult it can be to actually speak to someone, better yet, you will know how difficult it is to counteract false information - an example of something trivial here would be a Google Map listing with incorrect information, something I personally know was an issue for a small charity in the UK whose listing showed information relating to a watch company in the USA and took several months to rectify as the information was being pulled by an algorithm, not something manually input into the listing.
If you are interested in the ideas that have been raised in this post, there is a book dedicated to the subject aptly titled 'Bad Science' by Ben Goldacre which explores the concept. Also at this point to pre-empt any of the ire that may be directed at me I would like to reassert what I have said many times before - I do not expect you to take anything written on this blog as gossip, I do not claim it to be exhaustive or an authority on anything; my posts are written to share my thoughts and my interpretation of the world, my posts are intended only to make you think, and inspire you to go beyond and learn more for yourself, there will inevitably be a myriad of conclusions and interpretations expressed here that are wrong or misguided, this isn't a scientific blog - if were intended to be, I would put a lot more effort into it.
Changing Times
Which generation is the most resistant to change? There is a stereotype perhaps you could call it, that portrays younger people as more liberal and revolutionary therefore willing to embrace change, and paints older people as more resistant to change and conservative in nature. I'm not convinced this is actually true however, the realisation that things aren't so black and white ironically came with age, or to be more precise, the moment I could look at the generation that came after my own and note the divergence was so significant that I could no longer consider myself part of it.
With that realisation however came another, that each generation has its own set of beliefs, and whilst they may purport to be flexible in those beliefs, they really aren't in practice. This judgement is something I resisted when I was younger, insisting that forward momentum and progress were the things I wanted more than anything and those that my generation professed to desire too, but in hindsight what I now recognise that sentiment to be is shallow. The reality is that the true motivation for that desire is to demarcate the previous generation and its relation to your own, and likewise I recognise this motivation remains, with much of the judgement held by my own generation for that which has come after being the same desire to define the limits of your own generation. Whilst people may not openly admit it, this idea harkens back to labelling which I mentioned in a previous post; people want to place themselves in a box because they find a degree of security and certainty from doing so.
So if we return to the original question of asking which generation is the most resistant to change, I would actually argue that every generation is conservative with the definition of who they are and what they were, but when it comes to moving forward there is a liberal approach. This is something that will immediately be argued as untrue by those who are younger, even those within my generation will argue with me that those who came before us are "stuck in their ways" and "will never change" but I would argue that's a misconception. With age I have found myself increasingly asking the question "Is this what we're doing now?" and when the answer is "Yes, get on board" for the most part I'll just go with it - and I know I'm not alone. You pick and choose the battles you want to fight, and you become more aware of what it is and is not worth pushing back against. I would argue that every generation is equally open, and equally closed to the concept of change, the only thing that actually changes over time is where your main focus is placed.
I would argue that those who are younger desire revolution and new order with the things that matter most to them, the things that have the greatest influence on their lives, and whilst most older people won't want to admit it, the vast majority of young people are fully aware that their lives are controlled by politics, government, laws, and what is generally referred to as "the establishment" it is therefore natural that this is the focus of their efforts to change and reform. Most older people don't like to admit this because they don't like the idea that young people are more politically aware than they are - but the truth is they are, they just haven't conformed to the conventional definition of that awareness as defined by involvement in party politics, electioneering, and activism - there are exceptions of course. That conventional definition of political awareness is a misnomer however, it is not an awareness of the impact of politics, how policy actually influences peoples' lives, or what it's like to endure the burden of legislation that limits your life to such extremes. Instead the conventional definition could be argued to the contrary to in reality be political complacency rather than awareness. Involvement in these ways are in essence conformity. Party politics is very much about labelling your views and your positions and putting yourself in yet another proverbial box.
Move beyond politics however and you will see with age that much of the shift in focus moves towards the reality of life beyond politics. People start to care more about how much their bills cost, and the practicalities of life, rather than policy and debate. Which again can be argued as ironic as the former influences the latter, but there we are. With this shift in focus, you begin to see how older generations give up much quicker than younger generations. Instead of resisting change, they embrace it. As trends change, behaviours change, pop culture evolves, and fashions emerge, you see older generations move with that change - again there are exceptions as there always will be.
Returning to the question once more, which generation is the most resistant to change? The answer in conclusion then seems to be that it depends on what you want to change. In general no generation resists more than any other, but each generation has something it cares about more than anything else where they will stand their ground and resist - sometimes successfully, but more often than not unsuccessfully so by mere virtue that the sum total of every other generation will always outnumber your own, and with time every generations' size naturally declines. The only societal changes that gain traction and manage to persist in the end are those that bridge generations, if you want to change the world you need more than just your own generation to care about your issue.
With that realisation however came another, that each generation has its own set of beliefs, and whilst they may purport to be flexible in those beliefs, they really aren't in practice. This judgement is something I resisted when I was younger, insisting that forward momentum and progress were the things I wanted more than anything and those that my generation professed to desire too, but in hindsight what I now recognise that sentiment to be is shallow. The reality is that the true motivation for that desire is to demarcate the previous generation and its relation to your own, and likewise I recognise this motivation remains, with much of the judgement held by my own generation for that which has come after being the same desire to define the limits of your own generation. Whilst people may not openly admit it, this idea harkens back to labelling which I mentioned in a previous post; people want to place themselves in a box because they find a degree of security and certainty from doing so.
So if we return to the original question of asking which generation is the most resistant to change, I would actually argue that every generation is conservative with the definition of who they are and what they were, but when it comes to moving forward there is a liberal approach. This is something that will immediately be argued as untrue by those who are younger, even those within my generation will argue with me that those who came before us are "stuck in their ways" and "will never change" but I would argue that's a misconception. With age I have found myself increasingly asking the question "Is this what we're doing now?" and when the answer is "Yes, get on board" for the most part I'll just go with it - and I know I'm not alone. You pick and choose the battles you want to fight, and you become more aware of what it is and is not worth pushing back against. I would argue that every generation is equally open, and equally closed to the concept of change, the only thing that actually changes over time is where your main focus is placed.
I would argue that those who are younger desire revolution and new order with the things that matter most to them, the things that have the greatest influence on their lives, and whilst most older people won't want to admit it, the vast majority of young people are fully aware that their lives are controlled by politics, government, laws, and what is generally referred to as "the establishment" it is therefore natural that this is the focus of their efforts to change and reform. Most older people don't like to admit this because they don't like the idea that young people are more politically aware than they are - but the truth is they are, they just haven't conformed to the conventional definition of that awareness as defined by involvement in party politics, electioneering, and activism - there are exceptions of course. That conventional definition of political awareness is a misnomer however, it is not an awareness of the impact of politics, how policy actually influences peoples' lives, or what it's like to endure the burden of legislation that limits your life to such extremes. Instead the conventional definition could be argued to the contrary to in reality be political complacency rather than awareness. Involvement in these ways are in essence conformity. Party politics is very much about labelling your views and your positions and putting yourself in yet another proverbial box.
Move beyond politics however and you will see with age that much of the shift in focus moves towards the reality of life beyond politics. People start to care more about how much their bills cost, and the practicalities of life, rather than policy and debate. Which again can be argued as ironic as the former influences the latter, but there we are. With this shift in focus, you begin to see how older generations give up much quicker than younger generations. Instead of resisting change, they embrace it. As trends change, behaviours change, pop culture evolves, and fashions emerge, you see older generations move with that change - again there are exceptions as there always will be.
Returning to the question once more, which generation is the most resistant to change? The answer in conclusion then seems to be that it depends on what you want to change. In general no generation resists more than any other, but each generation has something it cares about more than anything else where they will stand their ground and resist - sometimes successfully, but more often than not unsuccessfully so by mere virtue that the sum total of every other generation will always outnumber your own, and with time every generations' size naturally declines. The only societal changes that gain traction and manage to persist in the end are those that bridge generations, if you want to change the world you need more than just your own generation to care about your issue.
Nutrition
You can pick any food or drink you want and you will be able to find a thousand articles that tell you it is good for you and a thousand more that tell you it is bad for you. These contradictions are one of the reasons why people find nutrition to be one of the hardest things to grasp in life and get a handle on it. One of the reasons why this is the case is because everything we learn about nutrition is subjective, and based on generalized answers to generalized questions in the hope that they will apply to us specifically.
A general answer to a general question will never satisfy a specific question because it requires a specific answer. Let's take for example one of the basic facts about nutrition which most people mistakenly believe to be objective rather than subjective. How many calories per day do you need to consume? You will likely answer 2,500 for a male, and 2,000 for a female. This is because this is the answer that most nutritionists, and sources of information about nutrition will give as a general answer to the question. This is sufficient if you want a subjective answer to the question. If however you want an objective answer to the question, that is to say a specific answer, you need to factor in who is asking the question and about whom is it being asked. In order to give an empirical answer to this question you need to use a calculator such as this one which will take your age, gender, height, weight, and level of physical activity to produce an answer that is specific to you personally. As these variable fluctuate, the answer to the question also fluctuates quite a bit.
When it comes to nutrition, in order to get answers that are specific to us, we need much more information and a deeper understanding of the science behind it in order to find accurate answers to our questions, or better yet, turn to someone who will work with us on a one on one basis who understands these principles and can give us the answers we need. Most people don't do this. We are forever fascinated, if not obsessed, with the idea of finding the answers ourselves and in doing so we look for the quickest answer or most readily available which doesn't conflict with our own opinions and points of view that we accept or respect. This is open to an incredible amount of cognitive bias which also explains why you can find a thousand articles that argue for and against each side - because those who created those articles did not equally factor in both sides and come to an empirical conclusion - this isn't limited to the general public, it applies to people who work within these industries too and amounts to "bad science" as it is known.
I should point out at this stage everything expressed on this blog is a point of view and is ultimately an opinion, I've never claimed anything I hold as being something that is beyond refute, which is partly why I usually add disclaimers to state these posts are based on experience. There will be many who would point to this blog as bad science - the reason that would be the case is because this blog doesn't claim to be scientific, so it's never going to conform to the level of rigour that would be needed to do so, that's far too much effort for something that is a hobby and amounts to a diary more than anything else.
When it comes to my personal journey with nutrition, the realisation of what I wrote above came about when my weight loss reached a plateau and exploration of the reasons why produced an explanation that basically says in a nutshell: in order to lose weight you need a calorie deficit, where you consume less calories than you need in order to reduce your weight, as your weight reduces however the total amount of calories needed also reduces and that deficit diminishes causes weight loss to stall. If you want to maintain continued weight loss through calorie reduction alone, you would have to continuously reduce the amount you eat which in the long run is impractical and can cause a lot more damage to your health than being overweight ever would. You then need to increase the amount of calories you need instead if you don't want to reduce your intake any further - which in plain English means once you reach the diet deadlock you need to exercise more otherwise you will just stay the same weight.
A general answer to a general question will never satisfy a specific question because it requires a specific answer. Let's take for example one of the basic facts about nutrition which most people mistakenly believe to be objective rather than subjective. How many calories per day do you need to consume? You will likely answer 2,500 for a male, and 2,000 for a female. This is because this is the answer that most nutritionists, and sources of information about nutrition will give as a general answer to the question. This is sufficient if you want a subjective answer to the question. If however you want an objective answer to the question, that is to say a specific answer, you need to factor in who is asking the question and about whom is it being asked. In order to give an empirical answer to this question you need to use a calculator such as this one which will take your age, gender, height, weight, and level of physical activity to produce an answer that is specific to you personally. As these variable fluctuate, the answer to the question also fluctuates quite a bit.
When it comes to nutrition, in order to get answers that are specific to us, we need much more information and a deeper understanding of the science behind it in order to find accurate answers to our questions, or better yet, turn to someone who will work with us on a one on one basis who understands these principles and can give us the answers we need. Most people don't do this. We are forever fascinated, if not obsessed, with the idea of finding the answers ourselves and in doing so we look for the quickest answer or most readily available which doesn't conflict with our own opinions and points of view that we accept or respect. This is open to an incredible amount of cognitive bias which also explains why you can find a thousand articles that argue for and against each side - because those who created those articles did not equally factor in both sides and come to an empirical conclusion - this isn't limited to the general public, it applies to people who work within these industries too and amounts to "bad science" as it is known.
I should point out at this stage everything expressed on this blog is a point of view and is ultimately an opinion, I've never claimed anything I hold as being something that is beyond refute, which is partly why I usually add disclaimers to state these posts are based on experience. There will be many who would point to this blog as bad science - the reason that would be the case is because this blog doesn't claim to be scientific, so it's never going to conform to the level of rigour that would be needed to do so, that's far too much effort for something that is a hobby and amounts to a diary more than anything else.
When it comes to my personal journey with nutrition, the realisation of what I wrote above came about when my weight loss reached a plateau and exploration of the reasons why produced an explanation that basically says in a nutshell: in order to lose weight you need a calorie deficit, where you consume less calories than you need in order to reduce your weight, as your weight reduces however the total amount of calories needed also reduces and that deficit diminishes causes weight loss to stall. If you want to maintain continued weight loss through calorie reduction alone, you would have to continuously reduce the amount you eat which in the long run is impractical and can cause a lot more damage to your health than being overweight ever would. You then need to increase the amount of calories you need instead if you don't want to reduce your intake any further - which in plain English means once you reach the diet deadlock you need to exercise more otherwise you will just stay the same weight.
Just Checking In
I like the people in my life, but I hate people in general. I try to expect the best from them until I have reason to expect the worst, but the trouble is, in my life to date purely from an objective point of view, the amount of people who turned out to be horrible is far higher than that who turned out to be good. This is not only based on my own experience but others' observations of my experience in kind, it is in part what led me to the mindset I now have. I wasn't always this way. At first I was a very outgoing, extroverted child. I spoke to everyone without apprehension, maybe even to a fault; I got along with everyone, there was no great conflict at first, and it was hard to shut me up. However over the years more and more people mistreated me, abused me, bullied me, ridiculed me, to a point where the more people I met who turned out to be horrible, the more my confidence was knocked and the more my faith in humanity was eroded until I reached a point where I not only thought that humanity is horrid as a whole, but I actively expected everyone I met to turn out to be just as horrid. The few people who never made me feel that way were bastions of light in the darkness but they alone could not illuminate the vast emptiness that surrounded me.
This expectation was, and still is one of the reasons I keep myself to myself. I have a circle of friends I talk to often and some I talk to every day whilst a few others I speak to with rarity. I have people that have similar interests to me who I can turn to when I want to discuss something on my mind, and I have people whose interests hardly overlap with mine at all who I can turn to when I need a different perspective or just when I want to learn more about life through the experiences of others. My friends' political opinions vary greatly, from those who are so liberal they are practically anarchists, to those who are so authoritarian that they would give Thatcher a run for her money; I know those who are so tight they wouldn't spend Christmas, to those who are bougie as fuck, right through to those who have more money than sense who think nothing of the price of anything. The one thing that is common to all of my friendships however is the fact that they are all open minded and respectful of differing opinions, even when those differences are in the extreme. For me personally, the best example of polar opposite views would be that of my own and that of one of my dearest friends who supported Trump in the US election, something which we have discussed at length many times. I understand his rationale and reasoning behind his position but I think he was mistaken in that position, nevertheless we can still have a conversation without it ending in hostility. I think one of the reasons some people find differences intolerable is that those differences would often emerge in the beliefs of people who they agreed with on so many things in life in other areas but had opposing views when it came specific issues, in this case politics. There was and still is a tendency to believe that if you agree with everything someone says on so many things then they therefore must hold the same political outlook as you - this isn't the case however. That belief is born of the conclusion that your own political belief is the "right" or "natural" outcome of the experience, knowledge, and opinions on others issues you hold being combined together. This in turn leads people to the conclusion that any other choice is wrong, or an unnatural conclusion that must be the result of a mistake made somewhere along the way. Ultimately the reason this belief emerges is because people don't want to consider the possibility that someone else who thinks and feels the same way they do, who had the same experience and possess the same knowledge came to a different conclusion because it threatens their interpretation of the world and implies that they themselves are wrong - this is erroneous of course, as it assumes all human decisions are made based in logic and reason and that isn't the case.
There is a website called iSideWith which you can use to check your position on various political issues against those of political parties from various countries. On a country by country basis, you fill out a reasonably short survey and submit it. The site then shows you which political party you should side with, if you were to vote based on policy alone. One of the most fascinating parts of the website is the analysis of the results, and the demonstration that despite how people should vote based on policy, they often vote for parties that don't actually represent their views at all - sometimes to the extreme of voting for parties that support policies representing the exact opposite. Which party you vote for is as much an emotional choice as it is a logical one. Reason alone is not an indicator of which way you will vote.
This is one of the reasons I find people in general to be exhausting, the fact that their thoughts, feelings, and their actions do not align often makes them unpredictable. There aren't many people I know of beyond my circle of friends who actually act upon the thoughts and feelings they profess to have, as opposed to acting in conflict with them. The fact people do this takes a lot of energy out of me personally when most conversations come back to that fact. "I'm not racist but..." et al are pet hates, these prefixes are an acknowledgement that they are fully aware of what they are doing and choose to do it anyway. People demonstrating why they shouldn't do something, then doing it, and then asking why they did it or complaining about it and regretting the decision they made is insufferable at times. I can at least understand these moments of weakness when they are related to things that revolve around willpower, knowing you shouldn't eat certain foods for example and caving in and eating it anyway then regretting it, that's understandable because there is something to be gained from the experience that reinforces the behaviour which can be hard to resist, but when it comes to behaviours that have no clear reward, that repetition is frustrating. What is to be gained from behaviour that is fundamentally destructive, either of the self or of others, with no benefit or reward at all? I find this exhausting to deal with and I am glad that my circle of friends don't act in this way, signs that people do are a red flag to me and usually encourage me to stay away from them.
People in general take a lot of energy and don't give you much in return. I'm not in a position where I have a lot of energy to waste at the moment due to my health, although my physical symptoms have all but passed, the mental strain and dark cloud of depression is proving difficult to emerge from; but even when I have the energy to expend, I would still be reluctant to devote so much of it to other people. I am of the belief that you need to be aware of how much energy you waste on various things in life, that you should identify those things that drain your energy, and eliminate them from your life if you can - and yes that includes people, although in their case I don't mean you should eliminate the actual person, but rather the interaction you have with them, or reduce it if you're not in a position where you can eliminate it completely.
I need time to recharge when I have been around people for too long, or when I have had to engage in social situations more than I am comfortable doing. The best way to do that for me personally is to cut myself off completely. Those in my circle of friends know and understand why I do this and why it is necessary; I can relate to others who do this and I can be completely understanding of that need. For my friends and I, we choose to operate a "check in" system where we send a simple message to each other every now and then asking if everything is ok or not, and if we need time. I am grateful that I have people in my life that I can say "I don't want to talk right now" without having to explain myself and they don't take any offence - they do this too and I know how much it means to them by the fact we are so close and always have been. For any of my friends I know we could go months without speaking and resume as if no time at all had passed - thankfully we have never gone through any periods that any of us actually needed to do that. We usually check in after a few days. It takes time to get to that place with people though, it takes time to understand another person's mentality and to recognise their coping mechanisms, and the signs that they are under pressure.
As I have said however, I wasn't always like this. I was incredibly needy when I was younger, to the point where I needed to talk to people every single day and if I couldn't then I panicked and worried, and if anyone ever wanted to go for any extended period of time without talking I was afraid it meant they didn't want to talk to me at all and that we'd stop speaking entirely and I would never see them again. I've come to understand with age that this was borne out of a fear of abandonment, and a belief that nobody had a true friendship with me, that most people were just entertaining me because they had to, not because they actually wanted to. This mentality first emerged as I entered my teenage years after experiencing one of the most traumatic experiences of my life that caused my personality to shift from one of extroversion to one of introversion, from one of implicitly trusting everyone at first, to one of explicitly distrusting everyone. There's a very deep rabbit hole would could fall down in discussing this, I do not mean to trivialise the topic here but for the sake of brevity it's enough to know this was something it has taken me decades to overcome - and I'm still not quite "there" yet.
The only way I was able to take steps to overcome that fear and break that inner saboteur's hold on me was to step back and let it happen to see if it was true, like someone stepping out onto the ice for the first time, the only way to get over the fear of falling is to let it happen, then get up and do it again - it's important to note here this only works with some fears, for many others this is an incredibly bad idea so don't take this as a one-size-fits-all solution. When it came to the fear of abandonment I would stop speaking to other people so much and I would gauge whether I felt they were drifting away. The more I did it, slowly over time, the more confident I became in realising this was something I was telling myself and convincing myself of, and paying attention only to the things that reinforced that belief, people made the same effort they always had to keep me in their lives and that made me recognise the fear was irrational and unfounded. Eventually the confidence built up enough through the exposure to the point where that mentality was all but abandoned; the evidence that it wasn't true outweighed the counter, this negated the paranoia that people secretly hated me, and made me recognise I didn't need to talk to them every single day for them to like me, which led me to where I am today, with friendships that have virtually no concept of time attached to them.
If you find yourself sharing these thoughts, it's important to take a step back and think about why you think this way, and for all the evidence you have built up in your mind to support your case, you need to put that to one side for a moment and say to yourself, "okay, I have enough evidence to convince me of that, now what can I find to convince me of the opposite" and start to seek out evidence to the contrary, ignore everything that would reinforce what you already convinced yourself of, and start to focus on anything and everything that contradicts it. Slowly build up the evidence to the contrary and continue until you have enough to be able to judge for yourself whether you were right in the first place or if you had just convinced yourself of a lie you had repeated ad nauseam.
This can apply to any belief really, and underlines something I have tried to live by, that you should not hold onto a belief for the sake of holding onto it - I refer to this simply as "The Taste Of Olives" named so for the fact as a young child I tried olives and hated them; for years I refused to eat them, I avoided them like the plague, until one day I had food containing them without realising and enjoyed the taste, which led me to the realisation that I actually liked the taste of olives as an adult - I had held onto a belief for so long and never challenged it, denying myself experience in the process. I try to avoid this mentality now by questioning everything when there is a time and a place to question it; I have tried to abandon the notion of predicating beliefs on conclusions I made long ago and try to remain open to the reality that I am not the same person I was however many years ago, and in that time something might have changed.
This expectation was, and still is one of the reasons I keep myself to myself. I have a circle of friends I talk to often and some I talk to every day whilst a few others I speak to with rarity. I have people that have similar interests to me who I can turn to when I want to discuss something on my mind, and I have people whose interests hardly overlap with mine at all who I can turn to when I need a different perspective or just when I want to learn more about life through the experiences of others. My friends' political opinions vary greatly, from those who are so liberal they are practically anarchists, to those who are so authoritarian that they would give Thatcher a run for her money; I know those who are so tight they wouldn't spend Christmas, to those who are bougie as fuck, right through to those who have more money than sense who think nothing of the price of anything. The one thing that is common to all of my friendships however is the fact that they are all open minded and respectful of differing opinions, even when those differences are in the extreme. For me personally, the best example of polar opposite views would be that of my own and that of one of my dearest friends who supported Trump in the US election, something which we have discussed at length many times. I understand his rationale and reasoning behind his position but I think he was mistaken in that position, nevertheless we can still have a conversation without it ending in hostility. I think one of the reasons some people find differences intolerable is that those differences would often emerge in the beliefs of people who they agreed with on so many things in life in other areas but had opposing views when it came specific issues, in this case politics. There was and still is a tendency to believe that if you agree with everything someone says on so many things then they therefore must hold the same political outlook as you - this isn't the case however. That belief is born of the conclusion that your own political belief is the "right" or "natural" outcome of the experience, knowledge, and opinions on others issues you hold being combined together. This in turn leads people to the conclusion that any other choice is wrong, or an unnatural conclusion that must be the result of a mistake made somewhere along the way. Ultimately the reason this belief emerges is because people don't want to consider the possibility that someone else who thinks and feels the same way they do, who had the same experience and possess the same knowledge came to a different conclusion because it threatens their interpretation of the world and implies that they themselves are wrong - this is erroneous of course, as it assumes all human decisions are made based in logic and reason and that isn't the case.
There is a website called iSideWith which you can use to check your position on various political issues against those of political parties from various countries. On a country by country basis, you fill out a reasonably short survey and submit it. The site then shows you which political party you should side with, if you were to vote based on policy alone. One of the most fascinating parts of the website is the analysis of the results, and the demonstration that despite how people should vote based on policy, they often vote for parties that don't actually represent their views at all - sometimes to the extreme of voting for parties that support policies representing the exact opposite. Which party you vote for is as much an emotional choice as it is a logical one. Reason alone is not an indicator of which way you will vote.
This is one of the reasons I find people in general to be exhausting, the fact that their thoughts, feelings, and their actions do not align often makes them unpredictable. There aren't many people I know of beyond my circle of friends who actually act upon the thoughts and feelings they profess to have, as opposed to acting in conflict with them. The fact people do this takes a lot of energy out of me personally when most conversations come back to that fact. "I'm not racist but..." et al are pet hates, these prefixes are an acknowledgement that they are fully aware of what they are doing and choose to do it anyway. People demonstrating why they shouldn't do something, then doing it, and then asking why they did it or complaining about it and regretting the decision they made is insufferable at times. I can at least understand these moments of weakness when they are related to things that revolve around willpower, knowing you shouldn't eat certain foods for example and caving in and eating it anyway then regretting it, that's understandable because there is something to be gained from the experience that reinforces the behaviour which can be hard to resist, but when it comes to behaviours that have no clear reward, that repetition is frustrating. What is to be gained from behaviour that is fundamentally destructive, either of the self or of others, with no benefit or reward at all? I find this exhausting to deal with and I am glad that my circle of friends don't act in this way, signs that people do are a red flag to me and usually encourage me to stay away from them.
People in general take a lot of energy and don't give you much in return. I'm not in a position where I have a lot of energy to waste at the moment due to my health, although my physical symptoms have all but passed, the mental strain and dark cloud of depression is proving difficult to emerge from; but even when I have the energy to expend, I would still be reluctant to devote so much of it to other people. I am of the belief that you need to be aware of how much energy you waste on various things in life, that you should identify those things that drain your energy, and eliminate them from your life if you can - and yes that includes people, although in their case I don't mean you should eliminate the actual person, but rather the interaction you have with them, or reduce it if you're not in a position where you can eliminate it completely.
I need time to recharge when I have been around people for too long, or when I have had to engage in social situations more than I am comfortable doing. The best way to do that for me personally is to cut myself off completely. Those in my circle of friends know and understand why I do this and why it is necessary; I can relate to others who do this and I can be completely understanding of that need. For my friends and I, we choose to operate a "check in" system where we send a simple message to each other every now and then asking if everything is ok or not, and if we need time. I am grateful that I have people in my life that I can say "I don't want to talk right now" without having to explain myself and they don't take any offence - they do this too and I know how much it means to them by the fact we are so close and always have been. For any of my friends I know we could go months without speaking and resume as if no time at all had passed - thankfully we have never gone through any periods that any of us actually needed to do that. We usually check in after a few days. It takes time to get to that place with people though, it takes time to understand another person's mentality and to recognise their coping mechanisms, and the signs that they are under pressure.
As I have said however, I wasn't always like this. I was incredibly needy when I was younger, to the point where I needed to talk to people every single day and if I couldn't then I panicked and worried, and if anyone ever wanted to go for any extended period of time without talking I was afraid it meant they didn't want to talk to me at all and that we'd stop speaking entirely and I would never see them again. I've come to understand with age that this was borne out of a fear of abandonment, and a belief that nobody had a true friendship with me, that most people were just entertaining me because they had to, not because they actually wanted to. This mentality first emerged as I entered my teenage years after experiencing one of the most traumatic experiences of my life that caused my personality to shift from one of extroversion to one of introversion, from one of implicitly trusting everyone at first, to one of explicitly distrusting everyone. There's a very deep rabbit hole would could fall down in discussing this, I do not mean to trivialise the topic here but for the sake of brevity it's enough to know this was something it has taken me decades to overcome - and I'm still not quite "there" yet.
The only way I was able to take steps to overcome that fear and break that inner saboteur's hold on me was to step back and let it happen to see if it was true, like someone stepping out onto the ice for the first time, the only way to get over the fear of falling is to let it happen, then get up and do it again - it's important to note here this only works with some fears, for many others this is an incredibly bad idea so don't take this as a one-size-fits-all solution. When it came to the fear of abandonment I would stop speaking to other people so much and I would gauge whether I felt they were drifting away. The more I did it, slowly over time, the more confident I became in realising this was something I was telling myself and convincing myself of, and paying attention only to the things that reinforced that belief, people made the same effort they always had to keep me in their lives and that made me recognise the fear was irrational and unfounded. Eventually the confidence built up enough through the exposure to the point where that mentality was all but abandoned; the evidence that it wasn't true outweighed the counter, this negated the paranoia that people secretly hated me, and made me recognise I didn't need to talk to them every single day for them to like me, which led me to where I am today, with friendships that have virtually no concept of time attached to them.
If you find yourself sharing these thoughts, it's important to take a step back and think about why you think this way, and for all the evidence you have built up in your mind to support your case, you need to put that to one side for a moment and say to yourself, "okay, I have enough evidence to convince me of that, now what can I find to convince me of the opposite" and start to seek out evidence to the contrary, ignore everything that would reinforce what you already convinced yourself of, and start to focus on anything and everything that contradicts it. Slowly build up the evidence to the contrary and continue until you have enough to be able to judge for yourself whether you were right in the first place or if you had just convinced yourself of a lie you had repeated ad nauseam.
This can apply to any belief really, and underlines something I have tried to live by, that you should not hold onto a belief for the sake of holding onto it - I refer to this simply as "The Taste Of Olives" named so for the fact as a young child I tried olives and hated them; for years I refused to eat them, I avoided them like the plague, until one day I had food containing them without realising and enjoyed the taste, which led me to the realisation that I actually liked the taste of olives as an adult - I had held onto a belief for so long and never challenged it, denying myself experience in the process. I try to avoid this mentality now by questioning everything when there is a time and a place to question it; I have tried to abandon the notion of predicating beliefs on conclusions I made long ago and try to remain open to the reality that I am not the same person I was however many years ago, and in that time something might have changed.
Alcohol
The first time I tasted alcohol was when I was 9 years old. It was at a wedding and it was pint of Lager that I tried - I drank a mouthful and thought it was horrible. It tasted like battery acid - which yes, I had tasted before unintentionally, when I was a kid I put a lot of things in my mouth which is surprising considering I'm actually a bit of a germophobe now. It's not surprising however that given my first experience of alcohol was negative, it wasn't until I was 18 years old that I tried it for a second time. Nearing the end of my second year of college I and a few other friends went to a pub to play some pool. We bought alcopops, which are premixed soft drinks with alcohol in them. I had a WKD Blue which I actually enjoyed.
I should point out that here in the UK the legal drinking age for public drinking is 18 years of age, as for private drinking which the wedding covered, there is no legal requirement, you can drink from any age unless you are in England or Wales where the minimum age for private drinking is 5 years old.
Despite my second experience being positive, it wasn't until I was living at University that I really started to explore alcohol. There was only one occasion that I actually drank in excess and that was a night that involved a drinking contest - which is a very bad idea, but I was a student and like many others it was the first time I really lived an unsupervised life with no-one to keep an eye on me so I indulged in many things to excess and with almost all of them came to understand intimately why I was never allowed to do that before, and in most cases I never elected to do again.
That night of excessive drinking at one stage involved 7 shots of Tequila over the space of an hour on top of many other drinks I had already had earlier that night. Needless to say this did not end well. I had to be carried back home by two friends which was not a high point for me, and I never lived that moment down. I spent most of the early hours of the next morning in my bathroom hunched over a toilet throwing up. To this day even a tiny bit of Tequila goes down and comes right back up again, my stomach has a zero tolerance for it now, it's like a night club with the bouncer outside who just says "Oh no not you, out, now!" when it sees it coming.
There is however a peculiarity when it comes to alcohol for me. Throughout my life to date any time I have ever consumed it, including that night, I have never had a hangover. I don't drink now except for special occasions like Christmas and social functions and things like that. I don't buy alcohol, partly because I have little desire and partly because it's expensive as Hell for anything decent. Nobody I live with drinks it so there isn't even any of it around me on offer that I don't have to pay for. The only thing I really drink now is Bailey's Irish Cream at Christmas time which is more a tradition than anything. Other than that when at functions that involve alcohol I drink Rum mainly.
I think when it comes to alcohol in life, people have to find their own balance, and their own tolerance. For some that incorporates moderation, and for some that means abstention. Whatever you choose, be safe, be sure, and drink responsibly. My only real advice is to avoid drinking for the sake of it, and avoid drinking alcohol for which the only appeal is its strength and the fact it will get you hammered quickly. The alcohol I indulge in is anything I genuinely like the taste of and enjoy drinking - there's quite a lot of alcohol out there and the range of flavour and strength varies greatly, experiment and you will find something you like.
I should point out that here in the UK the legal drinking age for public drinking is 18 years of age, as for private drinking which the wedding covered, there is no legal requirement, you can drink from any age unless you are in England or Wales where the minimum age for private drinking is 5 years old.
Despite my second experience being positive, it wasn't until I was living at University that I really started to explore alcohol. There was only one occasion that I actually drank in excess and that was a night that involved a drinking contest - which is a very bad idea, but I was a student and like many others it was the first time I really lived an unsupervised life with no-one to keep an eye on me so I indulged in many things to excess and with almost all of them came to understand intimately why I was never allowed to do that before, and in most cases I never elected to do again.
That night of excessive drinking at one stage involved 7 shots of Tequila over the space of an hour on top of many other drinks I had already had earlier that night. Needless to say this did not end well. I had to be carried back home by two friends which was not a high point for me, and I never lived that moment down. I spent most of the early hours of the next morning in my bathroom hunched over a toilet throwing up. To this day even a tiny bit of Tequila goes down and comes right back up again, my stomach has a zero tolerance for it now, it's like a night club with the bouncer outside who just says "Oh no not you, out, now!" when it sees it coming.
There is however a peculiarity when it comes to alcohol for me. Throughout my life to date any time I have ever consumed it, including that night, I have never had a hangover. I don't drink now except for special occasions like Christmas and social functions and things like that. I don't buy alcohol, partly because I have little desire and partly because it's expensive as Hell for anything decent. Nobody I live with drinks it so there isn't even any of it around me on offer that I don't have to pay for. The only thing I really drink now is Bailey's Irish Cream at Christmas time which is more a tradition than anything. Other than that when at functions that involve alcohol I drink Rum mainly.
I think when it comes to alcohol in life, people have to find their own balance, and their own tolerance. For some that incorporates moderation, and for some that means abstention. Whatever you choose, be safe, be sure, and drink responsibly. My only real advice is to avoid drinking for the sake of it, and avoid drinking alcohol for which the only appeal is its strength and the fact it will get you hammered quickly. The alcohol I indulge in is anything I genuinely like the taste of and enjoy drinking - there's quite a lot of alcohol out there and the range of flavour and strength varies greatly, experiment and you will find something you like.
The Forgotten Consumer
When you are a writer, one of the hardest things to gauge is whether or not the things that seem obvious to you as a writer will be obvious to the reader. This isn't just restricted to fiction, it applies to all forms of writing really. I write fiction and non-fiction. The fiction I write features LGBT characters, as a gay man I want to increase representation in literature, but one of the pitfalls that many writers encounter, myself included, is the realisation that experience is not universal, what you assume everyone has gone through at some point might not be as universal as you think.
When it comes to non-fiction that too has the same pitfall, once again experience comes into play when creating a structure and adding detail for others to follow. One area of non-fiction that I focus on for example is teaching others how to program, this is something that heavily incorporates abstraction - the idea that you don't need to know exactly how something works, just how to use it - which can encourage you to gloss over the finer details of the inner workings of some mechanisms and concepts. The trouble in both situations arises when that deeper level of understanding is either necessary but is glossed over, or is unnecessary and bogs down the reader in trying to grasp concepts they really don't need to dwell on as much as they do.
Being able to gauge the experience of others, and determine what others will find easy to follow or too confusing to follow is one of the many reasons why feedback and criticism is important. Without it, you only have your own impression of your work to rely on which is unavoidably biased, no matter how objective you think you are, you can never truly judge your own work without any bias at all. In situations where this is crucial to the integrity of the work, there exist communities which can peer review those publications. These are most prevalent within non-fiction, particularly anything of a scientific background. Finding people to review fiction however, is not as easy as you might think. This is one reason why most independent authors don't get very far, whereas those who are signed to publishing companies have the benefit of the experience of their editors, publishers, and their marketing departments all of which give you access to a wider view than your own narrow viewpoint. It's important to note here "narrow" is not intended as an insult, the use is not intended to be derogatory, it is deliberately grating to make you realise that one person alone cannot accurately represent the views of many.
The question inevitably arises as to why creators pursue independent publishing at all then, if conventional publishing routes are preferable. There are two main reasons why people pursue this route as a preference, the first is control, as this route allows the creator to produce content that stays as close to their original vision as they can get, with no interference from any outside source imposing changes or revisions. The second reason, which I think is the most prevalent, is the failure to find a publisher that likes your work and wants to publish it. This isn't always a case of the standard of the content you have created, it can simply be the inability to accurately identify your niche, or your target audience, and match with a publisher that focuses on such content.
Conventional publishing is not as lucrative as it once was, the industry has many issues, but the rise of self publishing and the ease of its use is often regarded as one reason why it is in decline. I would argue however this isn't technically true. Whilst I recognise the threat that it poses to their continuity, I would actually argue the focus is misplaced. I believe in reality the reason self publishing is becoming more and more dominant is actually because of the concept of a universal marketplace. If you consider apps for example, when Apple came along with their App Store, they created a unified marketplace, a one stop shop where all consumers were directed to; such was the success of the marketing of this approach that the App Store, and the others of rivals became the first place their consumers go without even thinking about it. When it comes to publishing in a conventional sense, I believe the real issue is the disorganisation of the industry and the complexity that authors have to overcome if they want to succeed. To put it more bluntly, it's easier to submit a work once to Amazon for approval for Kindle Direct Publishing [KDP], than it is to research dozens of publishers, determine their focus, submit your work, and wait for the inevitable back and forth discussing the work - if you even make it that far.
If you wanted to save conventional publishing, I don't believe KDP is the problem, the problem is the lack of a Publishing Marketplace, a single central entity that creators can submit their work to, and all publishers who participate in the marketplace can then view it and approach the author or bid for their work. One of the reasons that this does not exist (to my knowledge), or has not gained a greater presence if it does, is the fact that conventional publishers are still competing with themselves, as well as Amazon and others, whereas Amazon really isn't competing with them. In my experience those who prefer physical books aren't easily persuaded to embrace digital, and vice versa. I don't believe there is as much crossover between the two consumer groups as the industry believes. Focus on your own product, and address its shortcomings. Publishing in a conventional sense is as much about selling the publishing service to the author, if not more so, than selling a book to a consumer. In this regard I think the author is the forgotten consumer in this business model, KDP et al are services explicitly marketed to those authors, they are the focus of the product.
When it comes to non-fiction that too has the same pitfall, once again experience comes into play when creating a structure and adding detail for others to follow. One area of non-fiction that I focus on for example is teaching others how to program, this is something that heavily incorporates abstraction - the idea that you don't need to know exactly how something works, just how to use it - which can encourage you to gloss over the finer details of the inner workings of some mechanisms and concepts. The trouble in both situations arises when that deeper level of understanding is either necessary but is glossed over, or is unnecessary and bogs down the reader in trying to grasp concepts they really don't need to dwell on as much as they do.
Being able to gauge the experience of others, and determine what others will find easy to follow or too confusing to follow is one of the many reasons why feedback and criticism is important. Without it, you only have your own impression of your work to rely on which is unavoidably biased, no matter how objective you think you are, you can never truly judge your own work without any bias at all. In situations where this is crucial to the integrity of the work, there exist communities which can peer review those publications. These are most prevalent within non-fiction, particularly anything of a scientific background. Finding people to review fiction however, is not as easy as you might think. This is one reason why most independent authors don't get very far, whereas those who are signed to publishing companies have the benefit of the experience of their editors, publishers, and their marketing departments all of which give you access to a wider view than your own narrow viewpoint. It's important to note here "narrow" is not intended as an insult, the use is not intended to be derogatory, it is deliberately grating to make you realise that one person alone cannot accurately represent the views of many.
The question inevitably arises as to why creators pursue independent publishing at all then, if conventional publishing routes are preferable. There are two main reasons why people pursue this route as a preference, the first is control, as this route allows the creator to produce content that stays as close to their original vision as they can get, with no interference from any outside source imposing changes or revisions. The second reason, which I think is the most prevalent, is the failure to find a publisher that likes your work and wants to publish it. This isn't always a case of the standard of the content you have created, it can simply be the inability to accurately identify your niche, or your target audience, and match with a publisher that focuses on such content.
Conventional publishing is not as lucrative as it once was, the industry has many issues, but the rise of self publishing and the ease of its use is often regarded as one reason why it is in decline. I would argue however this isn't technically true. Whilst I recognise the threat that it poses to their continuity, I would actually argue the focus is misplaced. I believe in reality the reason self publishing is becoming more and more dominant is actually because of the concept of a universal marketplace. If you consider apps for example, when Apple came along with their App Store, they created a unified marketplace, a one stop shop where all consumers were directed to; such was the success of the marketing of this approach that the App Store, and the others of rivals became the first place their consumers go without even thinking about it. When it comes to publishing in a conventional sense, I believe the real issue is the disorganisation of the industry and the complexity that authors have to overcome if they want to succeed. To put it more bluntly, it's easier to submit a work once to Amazon for approval for Kindle Direct Publishing [KDP], than it is to research dozens of publishers, determine their focus, submit your work, and wait for the inevitable back and forth discussing the work - if you even make it that far.
If you wanted to save conventional publishing, I don't believe KDP is the problem, the problem is the lack of a Publishing Marketplace, a single central entity that creators can submit their work to, and all publishers who participate in the marketplace can then view it and approach the author or bid for their work. One of the reasons that this does not exist (to my knowledge), or has not gained a greater presence if it does, is the fact that conventional publishers are still competing with themselves, as well as Amazon and others, whereas Amazon really isn't competing with them. In my experience those who prefer physical books aren't easily persuaded to embrace digital, and vice versa. I don't believe there is as much crossover between the two consumer groups as the industry believes. Focus on your own product, and address its shortcomings. Publishing in a conventional sense is as much about selling the publishing service to the author, if not more so, than selling a book to a consumer. In this regard I think the author is the forgotten consumer in this business model, KDP et al are services explicitly marketed to those authors, they are the focus of the product.
Meaningful Connections
I hated High School. I've never been invited to a reunion, I am not even sure they have them, but regardless, even if I was, I would not go. The same applies to most places I have been and left, through school, college, University, and various jobs I have had. I like to leave a lot of things in life up to fate and for the most part I try not to ignore it. If I meet someone by chance once, I will generally be pleasant and as sociable as I can be - usually not very, because of my social anxiety. If I meet someone by chance more than once however, I tend to take a step back and think about it more. I will usually try and engage more with that person because I take it as a sign that we were meant to meet.
On the flip side of this, if we knew each other for a while and we parted ways, if we haven't spoken or met again since, then there's very little chance I would actually seek you out. The reason is the same as above, if I haven't spoken to you in years, there's probably a reason why. This ignores a handful of people who I could not contact even if I wanted to as I have no means, although one could argue with the internet and Google by my side, if I really wanted to find them I probably could.
The idea of reunions always perplexed me. I think it's rather archaic, and stems from a time where if you did part ways and lost touch with one another it was fully conceivable that you would never meet again and even if you tried you'd never be able to find each other. A reunion in that respect most likely served a purpose in reconnecting people. With Facebook and other social networks maintaining dominance, the amount of people who don't use them is relatively small. Everyone you have ever met in the vast majority of cases will have a Facebook profile by now - unless like me they deleted it years ago out of protest and never looked back.
Most people in life that we will meet are people we meet through incidence and circumstance, there are very few we can truly say we met randomly. We meet most people in situations we have been put in by others, or through shared experiences. If you even set out to try and connect with random people who you have never spoken to before, and have absolutely no connection to at all, then you would likely be met with a lot of cynicism and scepticism. The immediate assumption people would make is that you wanted something and for most people it won't take long before they outright ask what it is you want.
I take the view that if we have not spoken in years, there's no reason to change that fact until life puts us in a situation where we meet again and have a reason to actually engage with each other. I know many people who make it an ambition to have a large circle of friends, and many more who put a prize on the longest friendship to the extent where they try to reconnect with people for the purpose of claiming they were friends for years. I never saw the point in either of these. My desire in life when it came to friendship and the connections I establish with other people was to make them deep and meaningful - this is one of the reasons I hate small talk and find it incredibly difficult, because I prefer to speak to people I actually care about or have shared interests with that we can discuss. Say "Hi" to me and a conversation that ensues probably won't go very far. Say "Hey, do you like xyz" and the conversation that would follow could last hours - and in more than a few cases it has. So if you ever meet me or want to get to know me, then when you talk to me, actually talk to me about something. Whatever it is you're interested in, start with that, as you probably won't know enough about me to find something I'm really interested in to ask about first - unless you've read quite a few posts on here.
On the flip side of this, if we knew each other for a while and we parted ways, if we haven't spoken or met again since, then there's very little chance I would actually seek you out. The reason is the same as above, if I haven't spoken to you in years, there's probably a reason why. This ignores a handful of people who I could not contact even if I wanted to as I have no means, although one could argue with the internet and Google by my side, if I really wanted to find them I probably could.
The idea of reunions always perplexed me. I think it's rather archaic, and stems from a time where if you did part ways and lost touch with one another it was fully conceivable that you would never meet again and even if you tried you'd never be able to find each other. A reunion in that respect most likely served a purpose in reconnecting people. With Facebook and other social networks maintaining dominance, the amount of people who don't use them is relatively small. Everyone you have ever met in the vast majority of cases will have a Facebook profile by now - unless like me they deleted it years ago out of protest and never looked back.
Most people in life that we will meet are people we meet through incidence and circumstance, there are very few we can truly say we met randomly. We meet most people in situations we have been put in by others, or through shared experiences. If you even set out to try and connect with random people who you have never spoken to before, and have absolutely no connection to at all, then you would likely be met with a lot of cynicism and scepticism. The immediate assumption people would make is that you wanted something and for most people it won't take long before they outright ask what it is you want.
I take the view that if we have not spoken in years, there's no reason to change that fact until life puts us in a situation where we meet again and have a reason to actually engage with each other. I know many people who make it an ambition to have a large circle of friends, and many more who put a prize on the longest friendship to the extent where they try to reconnect with people for the purpose of claiming they were friends for years. I never saw the point in either of these. My desire in life when it came to friendship and the connections I establish with other people was to make them deep and meaningful - this is one of the reasons I hate small talk and find it incredibly difficult, because I prefer to speak to people I actually care about or have shared interests with that we can discuss. Say "Hi" to me and a conversation that ensues probably won't go very far. Say "Hey, do you like xyz" and the conversation that would follow could last hours - and in more than a few cases it has. So if you ever meet me or want to get to know me, then when you talk to me, actually talk to me about something. Whatever it is you're interested in, start with that, as you probably won't know enough about me to find something I'm really interested in to ask about first - unless you've read quite a few posts on here.
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