I'm toying with an idea for this blog. A long time ago I wrote a post where I mentioned briefly that posts on this blog tend to be somewhere in the middle when it comes to length. Usually more than 500 words but rarely more than 1,000, the average being around 750 words for most posts. I'm playing around with the idea of making my goal become 1,000 words per post, again with a 500 word range so the shortest would be 750 and longest would be 1,250 words. I didn't do this in the past because I felt when posts get longer, people lose interest, that and I tend to ramble about the topic, it becomes very easy for me to lose focus, take a tangent, and end up talking about a completely different topic.
So what's changed? Well I've been thinking about the time I spend editing these posts, and how much content I actually remove. Believe it or not, posts often exceed 1,000 words when I draft them, but a lot gets gutted in the edit to make them a bit shorter. When it comes to movies I've often seen deleted scenes and wondered why they were removed, often they make sense of things that are never explained in what was left in place. I know from this experience it can be frustrating when you want to see the whole thing and don't want an edited version.
The shortest post you should write for a blog, or any website where you regularly update content is 200 words. Anything shorter than 200 words, and Google and other search engines will ignore it, either by ranking it as low importance, or by ignoring it completely. This is because with such brevity it is hard to get an idea of the content and analyse it.
The first two paragraphs of this post were 251 words long. That gives you an idea of how short a post would actually be if I only wrote around 200 words per post, and yes, I realise this post in itself has become very meta, but if you are a writer or a content creator I think this will help you, and if you are a reader it might be interesting to get an idea of the thought that I and others have to put into what we create online. I write posts for myself first and foremost, as a sort of diary for me to look back on and see the journey I have been on. I write posts to document my thought process and the change in my attitude over time, in essence I write in order to be able to judge whether or not I am growing and to identify what changed in my life as I grew. Having said all of that, I also format these posts and structure them in a way that is at least somewhat coherent, in the hope that you can follow them - they do have to be readable after all.
You are a reader of this blog, as are many others, there are also machines that read this blog. That might sound like an odd statement to make but it is true. The Internet is combed over by small programs called bots that read content. Some do so for the purposes of indexing the sites for search engines, others do so because they are looking for something in particular. Whether you come here as a human or as a machine, ultimately the thing that will help you most is to be met with content that at least reads as if there was some thought put into it, rather than a 1,000 word wall of text documenting the ramblings of someone's internal monologue - I try to avoid that as much as possible.
One thing that I have noticed however when I go back and read some of my old posts, is that they often have a beginning, a middle, and they don't always have an end. That is to say, they don't always have a conclusion or some point that brings the idea to a close. Some end with a question for you to contemplate, whilst others acknowledge the fact they are open ended, usually because they focus on a topic or question to which I personally can't give you an answer or give you any further insight.
Tying up every post in a way that gives closure isn't something I can promise. As much as I would like to be able to offer you that luxury, most of the topics I write about concern whatever is rolling around in my head at that moment. Sometimes they are things I thought of days ago and made a note to write about. Then there are a few topics, a handful at least that I always come back to because they are the things I think about in life most of all - Psychology, Religion, Politics, LGBT issues - although admittedly I haven't wrote that much on here about the last one which is surprising considering I am a gay man; it's just that I don't think about my sexuality that much if I am honest, it factors into very few things in life - most complications come down to social interactions which thankfully society seems to be moving forward in regards to, even if it can seem to be moving very slowly at times.
What I can promise however is to try and leave more content in my posts and stop editing them so heavily. I've realised that I often cut things out because they don't seem important to me, or at least not important enough to increase the word count. Like the deleted scenes from movies however I can't be sure that things that seem obvious to me are actually obvious to you the reader. I don't mean that in a condescending or arrogant manner, it's just a complication of the fact you're writing about yourself and you already know your life story, it's hard to remember what other people already know, and to be able to accurately judge what other people will be able to relate to.
The things I choose to cut might be of more interest to those reading than they are to me and since other people do read this blog then I should at least give you the opportunity to judge for yourself. If page views drop with the increased length then I'll go back to my old 500 - 1,000 range. For now the new range will be 750 - 1,250 in the hopes that you'll get a more complete view. Whilst there are some topics I could write a 10,000 word thesis worth of content for, I think that really would be extreme so I'll try to avoid exceeding the upper bounds on that range.
Your Story
In a recent post I mentioned that in life we often get involved in other people's story lines and how ultimately those aren't our stories to tell, there's something about this idea that keeps lingering in my mind. If you consider life as a whole to be one big never ending story that everyone is part of, like a soap opera with 7 billion actors playing their part, we only ever know our lines and the scenes we play a part in, as for the rest, most of the time we live in obliviousness. I've said before about how when you are younger and you meet people for the first time, there's a desire to catch up on their life story and know everything you can about them, and how, with age this desire begins to wane. You come to a point where there are only a handful of questions from their past you actually want to know the answer to before you start moving forward together. If you consider life to be a TV show, that one big soap opera then this is akin to asking another actor what their character's motivation is, in order to understand how they might play their part and get a feel for their energy before you start acting out together.
Maybe one reason why biographies and autobiographies actually sell so well is because they fill in the gaps. They let us see the life that other people lived, in a way this is like watching old episodes to get an idea of the story lines that repeat themselves. If you take the time to watch any soap opera on TV for long enough, sooner or later you begin to see repetition. You see the same script with a different cast, the same story retold, the same events happening but to different characters. There's very little along the way that you can truly consider "new" or "fresh" perhaps this is why some people grow tired of them and move on. Have you ever stopped and thought about the idea that soap operas although fictional actually tap into something incredibly real? The reality that everyone lives the same life, with the same events happening to most people. Some actors are lucky enough to miss out on scenes or unlucky as the case may be, so that their character never experiences something in particular.
I read a post online a long time ago, it was one of those sites like creepy pasta, where the story they wrote was about someone who died and when they got to the afterlife they were told that they would be sent back, reincarnated as another person, and then told that every single person alive on Earth both past and present was actually them, one soul, reliving life over and over, each time playing the part of another character. The horrible realisation was that every single person no matter how much you loved or hated them was in fact you, yourself, at another point on your journey. Your soul crisscrossed through space and time each time you died, being reborn as someone else, from the beginning until the end of time, and only then when you had lived every life there was to live would you be "ready" to move on.
Whilst I wouldn't take the idea to that extreme, there is a fascination in knowing other peoples' stories. When you walk down the street and you pass hundreds, or thousands, or if you live in a metropolis maybe even millions of people, every single one has a life they have lived and a life yet to live. The story each person could tell would fill a book. Very few people in life actually write a book, those that manage to do it often end up writing more than one. If every single person wrote their life story, what would that look like? It's easy to look at social media and say that people share their lives through their profiles but I beg to differ. 525,600 minutes measures a year, if you were 30 years old, then that would approximate to 15.8 million tweets, one for every minute of your life. If you're interested the limit would actually be 26.3 million for that time period. If you could tweet once a minute for your whole life, would that even document your life? I've written on here before about the disparity and the disconnect between online and offline personas and how accurate they are. There is also a question of how much of your life you can actually live whilst tweeting about it at the same time, that's before you even consider the fact that many people have more than one profile on more than one social network.
You have a story to tell, the story of your life. How interesting do you think it would be to others? If you think nothing interesting ever happened to you, do you think that means nobody would want to read it? If you answered yes, ask yourself if you think every tweet you ever read was interesting, or how many people have profiles filled with tweets you think are not, and ask yourself again if people might be interested in knowing your story. Even if you think the life you've lived would be too mundane to write about, think of the life you would like to live, and ask yourself who would find that interesting instead? Some of the greatest works of fiction were written by authors desperate to escape their reality by creating worlds filled with characters and hope they didn't have in their own life.
Write for yourself first of all, write something you would want to read, and then share it with the world and see how the world reacts. There are forums, there are websites, there are groups, there are profiles on social media, all dedicated to the craft filled with people who are eager to share, and remember one simple piece of advice, if you want to become a better writer, then read.
Maybe one reason why biographies and autobiographies actually sell so well is because they fill in the gaps. They let us see the life that other people lived, in a way this is like watching old episodes to get an idea of the story lines that repeat themselves. If you take the time to watch any soap opera on TV for long enough, sooner or later you begin to see repetition. You see the same script with a different cast, the same story retold, the same events happening but to different characters. There's very little along the way that you can truly consider "new" or "fresh" perhaps this is why some people grow tired of them and move on. Have you ever stopped and thought about the idea that soap operas although fictional actually tap into something incredibly real? The reality that everyone lives the same life, with the same events happening to most people. Some actors are lucky enough to miss out on scenes or unlucky as the case may be, so that their character never experiences something in particular.
I read a post online a long time ago, it was one of those sites like creepy pasta, where the story they wrote was about someone who died and when they got to the afterlife they were told that they would be sent back, reincarnated as another person, and then told that every single person alive on Earth both past and present was actually them, one soul, reliving life over and over, each time playing the part of another character. The horrible realisation was that every single person no matter how much you loved or hated them was in fact you, yourself, at another point on your journey. Your soul crisscrossed through space and time each time you died, being reborn as someone else, from the beginning until the end of time, and only then when you had lived every life there was to live would you be "ready" to move on.
Whilst I wouldn't take the idea to that extreme, there is a fascination in knowing other peoples' stories. When you walk down the street and you pass hundreds, or thousands, or if you live in a metropolis maybe even millions of people, every single one has a life they have lived and a life yet to live. The story each person could tell would fill a book. Very few people in life actually write a book, those that manage to do it often end up writing more than one. If every single person wrote their life story, what would that look like? It's easy to look at social media and say that people share their lives through their profiles but I beg to differ. 525,600 minutes measures a year, if you were 30 years old, then that would approximate to 15.8 million tweets, one for every minute of your life. If you're interested the limit would actually be 26.3 million for that time period. If you could tweet once a minute for your whole life, would that even document your life? I've written on here before about the disparity and the disconnect between online and offline personas and how accurate they are. There is also a question of how much of your life you can actually live whilst tweeting about it at the same time, that's before you even consider the fact that many people have more than one profile on more than one social network.
You have a story to tell, the story of your life. How interesting do you think it would be to others? If you think nothing interesting ever happened to you, do you think that means nobody would want to read it? If you answered yes, ask yourself if you think every tweet you ever read was interesting, or how many people have profiles filled with tweets you think are not, and ask yourself again if people might be interested in knowing your story. Even if you think the life you've lived would be too mundane to write about, think of the life you would like to live, and ask yourself who would find that interesting instead? Some of the greatest works of fiction were written by authors desperate to escape their reality by creating worlds filled with characters and hope they didn't have in their own life.
Write for yourself first of all, write something you would want to read, and then share it with the world and see how the world reacts. There are forums, there are websites, there are groups, there are profiles on social media, all dedicated to the craft filled with people who are eager to share, and remember one simple piece of advice, if you want to become a better writer, then read.
Not The First Time
In a previous post I mentioned a love story that I could tell, of a chain of love that I found myself bound to during my time at University. I've been reminiscing about that time in my life some 13 years ago now and I've made a realisation that I never made before. The guy I fell for I always assumed the first time we spoke we hit it off and everything went by so fast, but the truth is that I have realised we actually met once before, six months before everything happened. The meeting was by chance, a conversation that was brief, about nothing consequential, but it serves a purpose. Looking back on that first meeting, there was no chemistry, there was no connection. We spoke briefly, parted ways, and didn't speak again for almost six months.
There's a quote from a British Sci-fi series called Dr Who where the Tenth Doctor said: "People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff" - the episode was called Blink [Season 3, Episode 10] and featured the Weeping Angels a rather sadistic race that feed on time energy, their method of extracting it was to send people back in time ripping them out of their natural timeline and feeding on the energy that is released as a result.
The quote from Dr Who makes me imagine our lives as threads that weave through time, our path in life determining the movement of the threads. I wonder how many peoples' paths I crossed and how many threads became interwoven with mine. That first meeting I can imagine as two threads passing briefly but never connecting. The second meeting that led to all that happened I imagine in my mind as the two threads twisting around one another.
How many people do we meet by chance in life that could have turned out to be so much more had we made the connection there in that moment. We often think of people who enter our lives and become so much a part of it that we wish we had met them sooner, if we had, would we have connected at all? You met and you clicked because you were in the right place at the right time, you were both in the right mindset. If it had been another place or time, what might have been?
There isn't really a point to this post, like nostalgia in general, we indulge in it for the feelings it evokes, but when that nostalgia leads to realisations of our past that almost completely change our perceptions of it, we're thrown into a whole new world of possibilities and opportunities that create a fountain of new ideas and fantasies about what might have been. You can't rewrite the past, at least not through conscious choice, but realising things were not the way you recall them does indeed take that which we know, rewrite it, and present us with something different, something old, yet new all at the same time.
There's a quote from a British Sci-fi series called Dr Who where the Tenth Doctor said: "People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff" - the episode was called Blink [Season 3, Episode 10] and featured the Weeping Angels a rather sadistic race that feed on time energy, their method of extracting it was to send people back in time ripping them out of their natural timeline and feeding on the energy that is released as a result.
The quote from Dr Who makes me imagine our lives as threads that weave through time, our path in life determining the movement of the threads. I wonder how many peoples' paths I crossed and how many threads became interwoven with mine. That first meeting I can imagine as two threads passing briefly but never connecting. The second meeting that led to all that happened I imagine in my mind as the two threads twisting around one another.
How many people do we meet by chance in life that could have turned out to be so much more had we made the connection there in that moment. We often think of people who enter our lives and become so much a part of it that we wish we had met them sooner, if we had, would we have connected at all? You met and you clicked because you were in the right place at the right time, you were both in the right mindset. If it had been another place or time, what might have been?
There isn't really a point to this post, like nostalgia in general, we indulge in it for the feelings it evokes, but when that nostalgia leads to realisations of our past that almost completely change our perceptions of it, we're thrown into a whole new world of possibilities and opportunities that create a fountain of new ideas and fantasies about what might have been. You can't rewrite the past, at least not through conscious choice, but realising things were not the way you recall them does indeed take that which we know, rewrite it, and present us with something different, something old, yet new all at the same time.
Another Way
I don't have many friends who are the same age as me; most of my friends are either five years older or five years younger give or take a few. How that came to be, I am not so sure. In terms of my own age, most people you expect to fit that descriptor tend to be people you met in school; my experience of education for the most part was one of misery and for a time, self imposed isolation. I don't regret that choice because I know the anxiety I had to overcome in order to get through education in the first place would have been made worse with social pressure added on top, something which I don't deal with quite so well. I've alluded to some of these problems in my writing but I've never outright discussed them in depth and I'm still not willing to do that right now. Nevertheless, in recent weeks there have been a lot of events happening particularly on social media that are reminding me of my actual age.
I'm becoming more aware of the distance that is growing between me and the people that are older than me. I'm 31 years old right now but for the most part I'm not in the head space that other people reached by this age, whether that is good or bad is a debate we can have another time, for now all that is relevant is that the way I see the world is starting to diverge from the people who are older than me who I have engaged with for many years. There is a Tracy Ullman Sketch about a 'Woke Support Group' and one of the throwaway jokes from the whole scene is a line that says "...by the time you hit your thirties most of you will be massively right wing anyway" - joking aside, I think there's a ring of truth in that remark, as I've grown I've noticed the people around me shift their political opinions further and further to the right and I'm not comfortable with that. This goes beyond difference of opinion, I've noticed more and more that as people age they are less and less likely to consider the possibility they might be wrong.
I'm not a conservative when it comes to issues of social conscience, I wouldn't exactly call myself liberal either, my view point has more or less remained the same throughout my life, that is, do what you want, just don't make me do it. There are exceptions to that mentality, there always are, no belief can be held in an extreme without being thrown open to exploitation. Moderation is the only way to retain control and the freedom to choose and the freedom to contradict yourself. That last point seems to be where most people fall down. When you are younger it is often the case that you don't realise you contradict yourself until you're put in the position where you have to make a conflicting choice. With age however the awareness of self contradiction grows but the willingness to admit it seems to be fleeting, something that is only entertained briefly before people start to abandon it in favour of denial. They then grow older and hold beliefs that are contradictory but don't want that to be pointed out to them.
There's something to be said about discourse and whether there is an appetite for it that is slowly lost with age. I still hold onto the idea that even the things I believe with great passion are things that could completely change if a persuasive argument was made to the contrary. I'm becoming too aware of the doubling down that people do with age and it's reaching a point now where the divergence has grown wider than I can tolerate.
On the flip side, I am acutely aware of resistance - I choose to use that word rather than rebellion because I never really accepted the idea of youth being synonymous with being rebellious. Resistance on the other hand captures quite aptly what is happening on the other side of this generational divide. Younger people as they always have are growing up wide eyed seeing the world for what it is, seeing everything wrong with it, and crucially, wanting to change it, or 'fix' it. Whilst I admire that sentiment, it takes an awful lot of energy to devote yourself to those causes and it's energy that is slowly reduced in capacity with age. Complacency with the status quo that comes with age is not always about benefiting from the existing system because I sure as Hell don't benefit from it, no, most of the complacency I chalk up to exhaustion with the endless war you fight when you choose to fight against that system. Battles are often worth fighting, small victories and ground that is gained helps through attrition, but to fight every battle isn't possible, guidance and coordination is necessary, leadership is essential to success. Spontaneous cooperative action whilst effective in disrupting the status quo, rarely manages to rewire the underlying infrastructure. When the action ceases, the old order is restored.
This isn't going to make sense to many people, and that's the problem. The generation that is caught in the middle of these two sides is one that I feel is becoming increasingly disconnected from the world. If you can relate to this post then the chances are you are part of that generation - there will be exceptions of course, there always are. I wrote before about the nature of the Phoenix and how conflicts like this inevitably lead to both sides collapsing and the centre ground emerging once more from the ashes to rebuild. When I wrote that post, my mind mainly focused on politics but I've realised it goes much further than the world of politics, it runs deeper, into the veins of culture itself. With age you start to notice a new vernacular emerge, tentatively at first but with time it grows until both generations speak almost a completely different language to one another. I'm becoming more aware of the language divide that has emerged and it's making me realise that at this point in life most people make a choice.
The choice you're presented with at this point in your life is which side do you want to be part of more. I guess this is what most people would call a mid-life crisis, where stereotypically you would run out and try and do a bunch of things you perceive as youthful and impulsive if the choice you make is to try and be part of that generation. That does make you realise though that whilst that is the stereotype of a mid-life crisis, on the opposite side traditionally there would be people who chose the other option and essentially accelerated their perceived age to catch up with the generation above.
That's what used to happen at least, going from what I can tell from popular culture. The problem with this conversation is that it is for the most part anecdotal and since it revolves around issues of mental health and thought processes it's not something that's easy to collate as traditionally this conversation was censured by stigma. That's changing however which is something to be positive about at least.
There is of course the question that arises from this notion of choice, that is, what if you don't want to choose? What if you recognise the distinction between both generations but decide that you don't want to be part of either one entirely but wish to continue to bridge the gap? Whilst that is a possibility, the trouble with that choice is that you are essentially straddling two moving vehicles that are slowly drifting apart and sooner or later you won't be able to reach both at the same time. I think when this choice was thought about traditionally most people chose a side out of fear of being left behind. They wanted to keep moving so they chose one of the vehicles rather than choosing the ground below. That choice is the one I am entertaining now. I know that if I make that choice then I will move slower than either side, being forced to walk instead of being driven. The comfort and assurance of that choice, knowing where you stand and being sure of your footing as you walk forward is what appeals most. The unknown element however is the question of where that path would lead if you choose to walk it.
Where do people go and what do they do when they choose to bow out of the fray? Do they even go anywhere at all or do they just stand and watch? What do you do when you know how fucked up the world is and know you don't want to be part of it? I know the choice that others made in the past was that of ending it all, I've lost people to suicide before and I've been in that mentality myself in the past but if that's not the choice you want to make and neither is the alternative, what do you do? I know I could choose to die but I don't want to, I know how fucked up this world is and I don't want to be part of it, so what is the third option?
I'm becoming more aware of the distance that is growing between me and the people that are older than me. I'm 31 years old right now but for the most part I'm not in the head space that other people reached by this age, whether that is good or bad is a debate we can have another time, for now all that is relevant is that the way I see the world is starting to diverge from the people who are older than me who I have engaged with for many years. There is a Tracy Ullman Sketch about a 'Woke Support Group' and one of the throwaway jokes from the whole scene is a line that says "...by the time you hit your thirties most of you will be massively right wing anyway" - joking aside, I think there's a ring of truth in that remark, as I've grown I've noticed the people around me shift their political opinions further and further to the right and I'm not comfortable with that. This goes beyond difference of opinion, I've noticed more and more that as people age they are less and less likely to consider the possibility they might be wrong.
I'm not a conservative when it comes to issues of social conscience, I wouldn't exactly call myself liberal either, my view point has more or less remained the same throughout my life, that is, do what you want, just don't make me do it. There are exceptions to that mentality, there always are, no belief can be held in an extreme without being thrown open to exploitation. Moderation is the only way to retain control and the freedom to choose and the freedom to contradict yourself. That last point seems to be where most people fall down. When you are younger it is often the case that you don't realise you contradict yourself until you're put in the position where you have to make a conflicting choice. With age however the awareness of self contradiction grows but the willingness to admit it seems to be fleeting, something that is only entertained briefly before people start to abandon it in favour of denial. They then grow older and hold beliefs that are contradictory but don't want that to be pointed out to them.
There's something to be said about discourse and whether there is an appetite for it that is slowly lost with age. I still hold onto the idea that even the things I believe with great passion are things that could completely change if a persuasive argument was made to the contrary. I'm becoming too aware of the doubling down that people do with age and it's reaching a point now where the divergence has grown wider than I can tolerate.
On the flip side, I am acutely aware of resistance - I choose to use that word rather than rebellion because I never really accepted the idea of youth being synonymous with being rebellious. Resistance on the other hand captures quite aptly what is happening on the other side of this generational divide. Younger people as they always have are growing up wide eyed seeing the world for what it is, seeing everything wrong with it, and crucially, wanting to change it, or 'fix' it. Whilst I admire that sentiment, it takes an awful lot of energy to devote yourself to those causes and it's energy that is slowly reduced in capacity with age. Complacency with the status quo that comes with age is not always about benefiting from the existing system because I sure as Hell don't benefit from it, no, most of the complacency I chalk up to exhaustion with the endless war you fight when you choose to fight against that system. Battles are often worth fighting, small victories and ground that is gained helps through attrition, but to fight every battle isn't possible, guidance and coordination is necessary, leadership is essential to success. Spontaneous cooperative action whilst effective in disrupting the status quo, rarely manages to rewire the underlying infrastructure. When the action ceases, the old order is restored.
This isn't going to make sense to many people, and that's the problem. The generation that is caught in the middle of these two sides is one that I feel is becoming increasingly disconnected from the world. If you can relate to this post then the chances are you are part of that generation - there will be exceptions of course, there always are. I wrote before about the nature of the Phoenix and how conflicts like this inevitably lead to both sides collapsing and the centre ground emerging once more from the ashes to rebuild. When I wrote that post, my mind mainly focused on politics but I've realised it goes much further than the world of politics, it runs deeper, into the veins of culture itself. With age you start to notice a new vernacular emerge, tentatively at first but with time it grows until both generations speak almost a completely different language to one another. I'm becoming more aware of the language divide that has emerged and it's making me realise that at this point in life most people make a choice.
The choice you're presented with at this point in your life is which side do you want to be part of more. I guess this is what most people would call a mid-life crisis, where stereotypically you would run out and try and do a bunch of things you perceive as youthful and impulsive if the choice you make is to try and be part of that generation. That does make you realise though that whilst that is the stereotype of a mid-life crisis, on the opposite side traditionally there would be people who chose the other option and essentially accelerated their perceived age to catch up with the generation above.
That's what used to happen at least, going from what I can tell from popular culture. The problem with this conversation is that it is for the most part anecdotal and since it revolves around issues of mental health and thought processes it's not something that's easy to collate as traditionally this conversation was censured by stigma. That's changing however which is something to be positive about at least.
There is of course the question that arises from this notion of choice, that is, what if you don't want to choose? What if you recognise the distinction between both generations but decide that you don't want to be part of either one entirely but wish to continue to bridge the gap? Whilst that is a possibility, the trouble with that choice is that you are essentially straddling two moving vehicles that are slowly drifting apart and sooner or later you won't be able to reach both at the same time. I think when this choice was thought about traditionally most people chose a side out of fear of being left behind. They wanted to keep moving so they chose one of the vehicles rather than choosing the ground below. That choice is the one I am entertaining now. I know that if I make that choice then I will move slower than either side, being forced to walk instead of being driven. The comfort and assurance of that choice, knowing where you stand and being sure of your footing as you walk forward is what appeals most. The unknown element however is the question of where that path would lead if you choose to walk it.
Where do people go and what do they do when they choose to bow out of the fray? Do they even go anywhere at all or do they just stand and watch? What do you do when you know how fucked up the world is and know you don't want to be part of it? I know the choice that others made in the past was that of ending it all, I've lost people to suicide before and I've been in that mentality myself in the past but if that's not the choice you want to make and neither is the alternative, what do you do? I know I could choose to die but I don't want to, I know how fucked up this world is and I don't want to be part of it, so what is the third option?
Stealing Ideas
My University had many lecture theatres spread across several campuses, of these only a few actually required the use of ID cards to gain entry. In my first year of University I sat in one of these lecture theatres, surrounded by over 200 other students and listened to my lecturers speaking for hours at a time. It occurred to me whilst sitting listening that there was no attendance taken for lectures, no roll call, no verification or validation of who you were or what course you were studying.
On more than one occasion I attended lectures for my friends' courses since it was easier than arranging to meet up later. I live in the UK, and at the time that I studied at University, tuition fees for home students [UK and EEA nationals] were set at £3,000 a year [$6,000 at the time] and for overseas students they were £12,000 [$24,000 at the time] a year. This did lead me to a rather bizarre conclusion, one that seemed somewhat ludicrous in my mind, that namely, you could technically steal education.
You can argue how much of the tuition fees would be attributed to the lectures themselves versus the tutorial sessions - the latter did have attendance records. Nevertheless, those lectures formed part of the education for which we all paid. Tuition fees in the UK have since tripled and I know my University now charges £9,250 per year for home students [$11,300] and £16,000 a year [$21,000] for overseas students. I have visited my University since graduation and the campus that I used still does not require ID cards to access the majority of the lecture theatres except the smaller ones which was always the case.
To this day you could "steal" education quite easily from my University. If you were there from the start of the academic year people probably wouldn't even know you were not a student by the end of the year they would be familiar with your face.
I really do find the idea that you can steal something that is immaterial to be quite bizarre. It's one thing to steal through online piracy things which you can't see or touch etc but those all represent things which could be packaged and delivered via alternative means. Education however is the exchange of ideas, concepts, and understanding. To think that you can steal an idea is somewhat perplexing. When you think of stealing ideas, the notions that abound are those of patents and copyright and other corporate and commercial procedures aimed at preventing others from copying your products.
The University could reduce the risk of this happening by putting barriers at each entrance that require the use of ID cards - which do exist elsewhere on the campus for private use buildings and for areas where valuable equipment among other things are kept. That still wouldn't stop people from attending lectures that weren't part of their course - like I did, although to be fair I didn't follow any that I attended as you needed an understanding of the subject matter and I had none.
There is a debate to be had as to whether education should be free, for me personally I believe it should, but I also believe that most Universities need to earn money somehow and public funding alone wouldn't deliver the standard of education that is needed. I think like the healthcare system in the UK there should be two tiers, one provided through public funding that anyone can access freely and a separate one where people can pay if they choose then everyone gets a choice and can use whichever system they want to use. However I do also believe education in general needs radical reform not just in the UK but worldwide. In every country that I have read about in regards to education, that which is mandatory is essentially glorified daycare mixed with varying levels of discipline that are quite prison-like at times. Education should actually be about teaching and learning rather than holding onto something long enough to repeat it to pass an exam. Can I remember a single thing those lectures taught that I attended? No. I didn't learn a thing from them, you can argue that is because they were not part of my actual course but then that leads to the same question with the lectures I was supposed to attend, how much of their content can I still remember, the answer is very little. If I had to resit my exams today I would fail my degree entirely.
On more than one occasion I attended lectures for my friends' courses since it was easier than arranging to meet up later. I live in the UK, and at the time that I studied at University, tuition fees for home students [UK and EEA nationals] were set at £3,000 a year [$6,000 at the time] and for overseas students they were £12,000 [$24,000 at the time] a year. This did lead me to a rather bizarre conclusion, one that seemed somewhat ludicrous in my mind, that namely, you could technically steal education.
You can argue how much of the tuition fees would be attributed to the lectures themselves versus the tutorial sessions - the latter did have attendance records. Nevertheless, those lectures formed part of the education for which we all paid. Tuition fees in the UK have since tripled and I know my University now charges £9,250 per year for home students [$11,300] and £16,000 a year [$21,000] for overseas students. I have visited my University since graduation and the campus that I used still does not require ID cards to access the majority of the lecture theatres except the smaller ones which was always the case.
To this day you could "steal" education quite easily from my University. If you were there from the start of the academic year people probably wouldn't even know you were not a student by the end of the year they would be familiar with your face.
I really do find the idea that you can steal something that is immaterial to be quite bizarre. It's one thing to steal through online piracy things which you can't see or touch etc but those all represent things which could be packaged and delivered via alternative means. Education however is the exchange of ideas, concepts, and understanding. To think that you can steal an idea is somewhat perplexing. When you think of stealing ideas, the notions that abound are those of patents and copyright and other corporate and commercial procedures aimed at preventing others from copying your products.
The University could reduce the risk of this happening by putting barriers at each entrance that require the use of ID cards - which do exist elsewhere on the campus for private use buildings and for areas where valuable equipment among other things are kept. That still wouldn't stop people from attending lectures that weren't part of their course - like I did, although to be fair I didn't follow any that I attended as you needed an understanding of the subject matter and I had none.
There is a debate to be had as to whether education should be free, for me personally I believe it should, but I also believe that most Universities need to earn money somehow and public funding alone wouldn't deliver the standard of education that is needed. I think like the healthcare system in the UK there should be two tiers, one provided through public funding that anyone can access freely and a separate one where people can pay if they choose then everyone gets a choice and can use whichever system they want to use. However I do also believe education in general needs radical reform not just in the UK but worldwide. In every country that I have read about in regards to education, that which is mandatory is essentially glorified daycare mixed with varying levels of discipline that are quite prison-like at times. Education should actually be about teaching and learning rather than holding onto something long enough to repeat it to pass an exam. Can I remember a single thing those lectures taught that I attended? No. I didn't learn a thing from them, you can argue that is because they were not part of my actual course but then that leads to the same question with the lectures I was supposed to attend, how much of their content can I still remember, the answer is very little. If I had to resit my exams today I would fail my degree entirely.
The Story of Life
There's a story of love and loss and everything in between that I would like to tell, however I can't. Perhaps the word "can't" is not strictly accurate, "won't" is probably more precise. The reason I won't tell this story is that it involves a love chain. I fell in love with someone who was in love with someone else, and they were in love with someone else, and they were in love with themselves. The story wouldn't make sense as a narrative without retelling it from each person's point of view, unfortunately I am one man, I am not four men. The reason I can't or won't tell the story in its entirety is because most of it isn't my story to tell.
When you are a writer, there are choices you have to make in regards to writing about reality, or events that actually happened. For some they simply change names to save face, so that the story doesn't single out anyone in such a way that you could cause offence, or even be sued for libel or slander, the law in this regard is rather fuzzy, whilst you are allowed to write that which is true even if it casts others in a bad light, the onus is placed on the writer to be able to prove everything conclusively and when it comes to love and lust and loss the very experience is subjective and open to interpretation. Then there's the little fact that as of now, this all happened 12 almost 13 years ago and it's not entirely inconceivable that even my recollection is no longer entirely accurate.
The choice you make ultimately comes down to whether or not you think the people who you choose to write about will take issue with it. In terms of the story I would tell, only 2 of these men did I ever meet, the other I never had the displeasure of knowing. As far as the two I met are concerned I knew one well but the other I only knew briefly so I can only assume the response that I would get from 1 person in this chain.
Creativity and Copyright or other instruments of the law often clash and cause great conflict. The greatest story ever told if ever there was such a thing is likely to be a story that has never been printed, either because those involved sought to prevent such actions or because those who would write such would have waited long enough for those involved to pass on, a gamble you take with the risk being that of your own mortality.
Truth they so often say is stranger than fiction, this in my experience I can attest, but there is comfort and safety in fiction, in knowing that the characters of which you write whilst based in some modicum of reality are engaged in a world that does not, or even could not actually exist.
In over three decades of life that I have lived, I have been through a lot. More than you would expect someone to have experienced. In many ways I am somewhat glad that the last few years have brought a limitation to my life. My health problems whilst at times being a great burden to me and cause of great pain - emotional and physical, they have however given me time to rest and shelter myself from some of the things that life can throw at you. I am not immune by any means, the last few years have not been plain sailing there has been plenty of tumult but for the most part when it comes to other people and their drama and the inevitable impact it has on your life when you get caught up within it, that at least I have eluded.
We like to think of biographies as books written by an author to document the life of someone else, living or dead. We like to think by contrast that autobiographies are simply an account of our own lives written by ourselves and that therein lies their entirety but it is very difficult to live a life that does not influence others in some way no matter how anti social or reclusive you may become, life finds a way to pull you back into it. Short of living on an island or living in the middle of the woods on your own, you are inevitably going to be involved in a story that is much greater than yourself, much greater than your own, the first story, the only story, the story of life itself.
When you are a writer, there are choices you have to make in regards to writing about reality, or events that actually happened. For some they simply change names to save face, so that the story doesn't single out anyone in such a way that you could cause offence, or even be sued for libel or slander, the law in this regard is rather fuzzy, whilst you are allowed to write that which is true even if it casts others in a bad light, the onus is placed on the writer to be able to prove everything conclusively and when it comes to love and lust and loss the very experience is subjective and open to interpretation. Then there's the little fact that as of now, this all happened 12 almost 13 years ago and it's not entirely inconceivable that even my recollection is no longer entirely accurate.
The choice you make ultimately comes down to whether or not you think the people who you choose to write about will take issue with it. In terms of the story I would tell, only 2 of these men did I ever meet, the other I never had the displeasure of knowing. As far as the two I met are concerned I knew one well but the other I only knew briefly so I can only assume the response that I would get from 1 person in this chain.
Creativity and Copyright or other instruments of the law often clash and cause great conflict. The greatest story ever told if ever there was such a thing is likely to be a story that has never been printed, either because those involved sought to prevent such actions or because those who would write such would have waited long enough for those involved to pass on, a gamble you take with the risk being that of your own mortality.
Truth they so often say is stranger than fiction, this in my experience I can attest, but there is comfort and safety in fiction, in knowing that the characters of which you write whilst based in some modicum of reality are engaged in a world that does not, or even could not actually exist.
In over three decades of life that I have lived, I have been through a lot. More than you would expect someone to have experienced. In many ways I am somewhat glad that the last few years have brought a limitation to my life. My health problems whilst at times being a great burden to me and cause of great pain - emotional and physical, they have however given me time to rest and shelter myself from some of the things that life can throw at you. I am not immune by any means, the last few years have not been plain sailing there has been plenty of tumult but for the most part when it comes to other people and their drama and the inevitable impact it has on your life when you get caught up within it, that at least I have eluded.
We like to think of biographies as books written by an author to document the life of someone else, living or dead. We like to think by contrast that autobiographies are simply an account of our own lives written by ourselves and that therein lies their entirety but it is very difficult to live a life that does not influence others in some way no matter how anti social or reclusive you may become, life finds a way to pull you back into it. Short of living on an island or living in the middle of the woods on your own, you are inevitably going to be involved in a story that is much greater than yourself, much greater than your own, the first story, the only story, the story of life itself.
Becoming a Phoenix
Whenever something controversial happens, particularly something that spreads wildly on social media, there is a polarization that occurs between those who support that controversy and those that do not. This is natural, the whole point of the definition of controversy is that it represents something that contradicts what is deemed to be normal or what the majority believe. The trouble with the way people react in these situations is that inevitably there is the assertion that is made "if you don't agree with me you agree with them" which is a logical fallacy, there are very few topics of discussion in life that are black and white and can be reduced to simple binary choice. Advocating a third, fourth, fifth, or whatever ordinal view point is something that is supposed to be a natural progression of discourse, this progression however has died. There is no longer a tolerance for moderation or for view points that deviate from our own but do not agree with that of the opposing side.
Social media goes through waves of controversy where issues arise, those who are proponents make inflammatory statements, those who are opponents make equally inflammatory statements in response, and the whole discussion becomes so heated that anyone who takes up any position that doesn't conform to either extreme is therefore lead to be burned in the crossfire.
This extreme polarization creates a conflict which those in the centre do not support. The conflict rages, each side going to further extremes in opposite directions, with the centre growing as those from each side bow out of the fray when their comrades pursue an extremism they are not willing to support. The same issue of being caught in the crossfire pervades however and whilst the centre eventually becomes the majority once more, they are almost always silent due to the exhaustion they have with the conflict. The result is that those of each opposing side become even more vocal and dominate the discussion. Those in the centre stand back and watch both sides fight until there is nothing left. Only when the conflict has run out of fuel for the fire do those in the centre step forward and take control once again.
This has happened throughout history and you can see the snap backs and the progression that resulted as a consequence of the restoration of civility and reason. The trouble is this only happens when the conflict runs its course and when both sides have sufficient fuel to continue their fight that can lead to intensity, which looking at human history led to some of the darkest days that humanity has endured. No-one wants to endure such darkness but in a world where moderation is actively opposed by people who deem any deviation from their point of view as betrayal, we're left living in an extremist society.
If this is not the world you want to live in then together we need to be vocal, we need to step forward and say "I don't agree with either of you" and let those on each side fight it out, and when they turn on you, refuse to "debate" the issue on the grounds that it is not a debate it is an argument and that neither side is willing to see any point of view than their own. This will result in being hit in the crossfire, but that is the choice you have to make, or choose to remain silent and watch the world burn until the ashes remain and try and rebuild. Like a Phoenix you have to accept that fire is fate and ultimately fire cleanses. It is only from the ashes that you can be reborn.
Social media goes through waves of controversy where issues arise, those who are proponents make inflammatory statements, those who are opponents make equally inflammatory statements in response, and the whole discussion becomes so heated that anyone who takes up any position that doesn't conform to either extreme is therefore lead to be burned in the crossfire.
This extreme polarization creates a conflict which those in the centre do not support. The conflict rages, each side going to further extremes in opposite directions, with the centre growing as those from each side bow out of the fray when their comrades pursue an extremism they are not willing to support. The same issue of being caught in the crossfire pervades however and whilst the centre eventually becomes the majority once more, they are almost always silent due to the exhaustion they have with the conflict. The result is that those of each opposing side become even more vocal and dominate the discussion. Those in the centre stand back and watch both sides fight until there is nothing left. Only when the conflict has run out of fuel for the fire do those in the centre step forward and take control once again.
This has happened throughout history and you can see the snap backs and the progression that resulted as a consequence of the restoration of civility and reason. The trouble is this only happens when the conflict runs its course and when both sides have sufficient fuel to continue their fight that can lead to intensity, which looking at human history led to some of the darkest days that humanity has endured. No-one wants to endure such darkness but in a world where moderation is actively opposed by people who deem any deviation from their point of view as betrayal, we're left living in an extremist society.
If this is not the world you want to live in then together we need to be vocal, we need to step forward and say "I don't agree with either of you" and let those on each side fight it out, and when they turn on you, refuse to "debate" the issue on the grounds that it is not a debate it is an argument and that neither side is willing to see any point of view than their own. This will result in being hit in the crossfire, but that is the choice you have to make, or choose to remain silent and watch the world burn until the ashes remain and try and rebuild. Like a Phoenix you have to accept that fire is fate and ultimately fire cleanses. It is only from the ashes that you can be reborn.
Tranquility
Close your eyes, breathe in slowly, hold your breath for a moment, and then exhale. What do you feel in that moment? When you close your eyes, and think about nothing else but yourself, when you focus on nothing but your breath, when you feel that pressure and then the release, where does your mind go?
Sometimes we forget to breathe, it's an odd realisation, when you stop and think about the fact that your very survival is something that your body instinctively knows, and understands. When you stop and focus on your breath, you take control of something explicitly, that your body was doing for you anyway. You take control because you feel you have to in that moment because your attention is drawn to it, and because you have that feeling, of anxiety, of panic, or worry, that if you don't do it, you will die. The truth is, if you don't do it consciously, the body will fight against you to try and regain control.
Breathing is something that comes naturally to you, yet it represents much more than a need to survive, it represents the fact that in this life there is so much that we worry about that we really don't need to. You don't need to worry about making yourself breathe constantly, your body will do it for you, the same is true in life about many things. We beset ourselves with worry, we panic over things that we ought not to control, but try to desperately when we think things won't go the way we want them to. Learning to let go of that desire to control everything, to relax, and just breathe, is something that I've often struggled with.
There's a thought process that has guided me through life, and that thought process is to assume that the big things in life will solve themselves in time, I don't need to worry about them, the small things are what I need to focus on. For the most part, that mentality has served me well. With much of the trauma I have endured, this thought process has made it a lot easier to survive, because it is conducive to the same teachings that you are taught time and again through therapy and countless support groups "just take it one day at a time" - of course there are issues with some of those teachings, in particular the one where that saying originates, but we can save that topic of discussion for another day. What is relevant here however is that these teachings are truths that surface time and again for the same reason - they are universal. They are the conclusions we naturally draw when we stop trying to fight against our nature, when we accept the world for what it is and we accept our reality for what it is, before we learn how to live within that reality and be at peace with it.
Right now when I close my eyes I don't see anything. When I stop and breathe and let go of everything I see and feel nothing. That isn't intended to sound macabre, although I am aware that it might. What I intend for you to realise is that emptiness, the nothingness, the void that I feel, is not borne of a dark place, but rather of a place of solace and respite. I'm tired, physically, mentally, emotionally. That emptiness, the calm, and tranquillity that I see is borne of the desire to rest, recover, and be reborn. All of these things I know will take time, and all of these things I know I cannot control, they are not things that I can force, they must happen when they are meant to happen. It's taken me a long time to get to this place of peace in my mind, I want to stay here, for how long I would want to, I do not know, for how long I could, that I do not know either, but I do know the only way I will find out is to let go and embrace this feeling.
Sometimes we forget to breathe, it's an odd realisation, when you stop and think about the fact that your very survival is something that your body instinctively knows, and understands. When you stop and focus on your breath, you take control of something explicitly, that your body was doing for you anyway. You take control because you feel you have to in that moment because your attention is drawn to it, and because you have that feeling, of anxiety, of panic, or worry, that if you don't do it, you will die. The truth is, if you don't do it consciously, the body will fight against you to try and regain control.
Breathing is something that comes naturally to you, yet it represents much more than a need to survive, it represents the fact that in this life there is so much that we worry about that we really don't need to. You don't need to worry about making yourself breathe constantly, your body will do it for you, the same is true in life about many things. We beset ourselves with worry, we panic over things that we ought not to control, but try to desperately when we think things won't go the way we want them to. Learning to let go of that desire to control everything, to relax, and just breathe, is something that I've often struggled with.
There's a thought process that has guided me through life, and that thought process is to assume that the big things in life will solve themselves in time, I don't need to worry about them, the small things are what I need to focus on. For the most part, that mentality has served me well. With much of the trauma I have endured, this thought process has made it a lot easier to survive, because it is conducive to the same teachings that you are taught time and again through therapy and countless support groups "just take it one day at a time" - of course there are issues with some of those teachings, in particular the one where that saying originates, but we can save that topic of discussion for another day. What is relevant here however is that these teachings are truths that surface time and again for the same reason - they are universal. They are the conclusions we naturally draw when we stop trying to fight against our nature, when we accept the world for what it is and we accept our reality for what it is, before we learn how to live within that reality and be at peace with it.
Right now when I close my eyes I don't see anything. When I stop and breathe and let go of everything I see and feel nothing. That isn't intended to sound macabre, although I am aware that it might. What I intend for you to realise is that emptiness, the nothingness, the void that I feel, is not borne of a dark place, but rather of a place of solace and respite. I'm tired, physically, mentally, emotionally. That emptiness, the calm, and tranquillity that I see is borne of the desire to rest, recover, and be reborn. All of these things I know will take time, and all of these things I know I cannot control, they are not things that I can force, they must happen when they are meant to happen. It's taken me a long time to get to this place of peace in my mind, I want to stay here, for how long I would want to, I do not know, for how long I could, that I do not know either, but I do know the only way I will find out is to let go and embrace this feeling.
Safety in Fiction
Most writers will tell you they enjoy writing, that's why they do it, but to say that everything you write about is something you enjoy writing about would be a lie. Those writers that choose only to write about things they love and find happiness within will find it hard to write content that is believable because life isn't always a happy experience. There is both light and darkness in the world and when it comes to writing, to write about darkness is often something that we can find difficult. With some subjects, the act of writing can be cathartic, it allows you to process things in a way that is safe, in a way that is structured, in a way that you can give resolution to what you write, or simply delete it and start again - although admittedly with that last one there is less catharsis is pressing delete on a keyboard as there is in rolling up a piece of paper and firing it across the room or if you're more extreme, setting fire to it - which I know someone who actually did do that.
Darkness is perhaps the most perplexing thing to approach as a writer, you have to embrace a mindset and a mentality that you yourself do not promote, you have to become what you hate, and you have to take into yourself the thoughts of characters that want to behave in a way that you never would. The disturbing part of this whole experience isn't the invasion of intimacy that occurs when you invoke such character traits and entertain their thoughts but rather the moment when you read the product of that creative process and you find it believable, to read something so dark and to know that came from your own mind can be rather unsettling.
There is a description that is often applied to writers, that says all writers are people who are proficient at having conversations with themselves. Some people go further and say that truly talented writers are people who have more than one personality rolling around in their head that they can call upon. Setting aside the connotations of mental illness, which I might add is often associated with some of the greatest writers in history, something which is also rather unsettling, whether you see yourself as great or aspire to be great, the implication that such associations would be made with you again are unsettling. The act of talking to yourself and making the conversations believable when written down relies primarily on your exposure to other people and their mannerisms. In other words to be able to accurately portray a wide range of character traits and mannerisms you need to be exposed to a wide range of characters and mannerisms. Only so much of this can be achieved through reading alone, you will inevitably have to talk to other people, and I do mean talk to them, not in short conversations but in long flowing conversations that explore deep and meaningful discussion, you will never see someone's true character until you see them talk about something they have a deep emotional connection to.
There is one little implication that can be drawn from that last point, to make things believable you need a template upon which to base them, experience. Think then to yourself about all the books and TV shows and Movies that you have seen and pick out those characters that are the most vile cretinous people and realise the truth, that the characters you see whilst they may be extreme caricatures are indeed based in truth, people such as those actually exist. Think of the absolute worst character from fiction that you can imagine and consider that a person such as them, somewhere, really exists - now that, is unsettling.
We like to think of all fiction as being safe, because no matter how disturbing or distressing it may be, it's not real. We like to think the fact it isn't real is reassurance that the world we live in isn't as dark as the one depicted, but knowing that experience is what makes things truly believable, then the more believable fiction becomes, the closer to reality it actually is. Fiction therefore whilst telling stories that never happened, ultimately involve people that do exist, and elements that are entirely possible.
Darkness is perhaps the most perplexing thing to approach as a writer, you have to embrace a mindset and a mentality that you yourself do not promote, you have to become what you hate, and you have to take into yourself the thoughts of characters that want to behave in a way that you never would. The disturbing part of this whole experience isn't the invasion of intimacy that occurs when you invoke such character traits and entertain their thoughts but rather the moment when you read the product of that creative process and you find it believable, to read something so dark and to know that came from your own mind can be rather unsettling.
There is a description that is often applied to writers, that says all writers are people who are proficient at having conversations with themselves. Some people go further and say that truly talented writers are people who have more than one personality rolling around in their head that they can call upon. Setting aside the connotations of mental illness, which I might add is often associated with some of the greatest writers in history, something which is also rather unsettling, whether you see yourself as great or aspire to be great, the implication that such associations would be made with you again are unsettling. The act of talking to yourself and making the conversations believable when written down relies primarily on your exposure to other people and their mannerisms. In other words to be able to accurately portray a wide range of character traits and mannerisms you need to be exposed to a wide range of characters and mannerisms. Only so much of this can be achieved through reading alone, you will inevitably have to talk to other people, and I do mean talk to them, not in short conversations but in long flowing conversations that explore deep and meaningful discussion, you will never see someone's true character until you see them talk about something they have a deep emotional connection to.
There is one little implication that can be drawn from that last point, to make things believable you need a template upon which to base them, experience. Think then to yourself about all the books and TV shows and Movies that you have seen and pick out those characters that are the most vile cretinous people and realise the truth, that the characters you see whilst they may be extreme caricatures are indeed based in truth, people such as those actually exist. Think of the absolute worst character from fiction that you can imagine and consider that a person such as them, somewhere, really exists - now that, is unsettling.
We like to think of all fiction as being safe, because no matter how disturbing or distressing it may be, it's not real. We like to think the fact it isn't real is reassurance that the world we live in isn't as dark as the one depicted, but knowing that experience is what makes things truly believable, then the more believable fiction becomes, the closer to reality it actually is. Fiction therefore whilst telling stories that never happened, ultimately involve people that do exist, and elements that are entirely possible.
Musical Memories
Music can contain memories, or perhaps more accurately, music can trigger the recollection of memories. There are a few tracks that to this day I cannot hear without thinking of certain people. For me there are bittersweet tracks like Cuttin' Deep by Darren Styles which reminds me of a love that could have been if it weren't for all that happened; guilt ridden songs like Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol remind me of a love that jumped the gun and ended in misery for everyone involved; and melancholy tracks like The One That Got Away by Katy Perry remind me of quite literally the one that got away. There are many others but these three were the first to come to mind, all three dealing with love, one of the strongest emotions it isn't surprising then that these three connections are the strongest.
Music reminds me of places too, Nas Ne Dagoniat by t.A.T.u. oddly enough reminds me of standing waiting for a train in West Hampstead wondering if I made the right decision - cryptic I know, and the answer is I still don't know. Something by Lasgo reminds me so much of my time in College which I still regard to be one of the happiest periods in my life.
The connection between music and memory is not something that is easy to break, at least, I've never managed to do it. Having said that, I don't know if I would actually want to break it, even for those songs that evoke emotions that aren't happy or positive, they remind me of a time in my life when I had no idea what to do, and all I could do was what I thought was right at the time - no matter how terrible those decisions turned out to be, they were still what I felt was right and I can't be angry at myself for making that choice. Even now, in my life when I make decisions, I make them because I believe they are the right choice for me, here and now. In years to come if I look back and think they were the worst possible decisions I could have made, that judgement will be made in hindsight with knowledge I can't possess right now. If I was blessed with foresight I would probably be a very rich man by now.
There is a thought that does arise when thinking about music and the memories that are attached to them, that is, what do people associate with me? What tracks do people hear now and think of me? That may sound very self centred, and to be honest it is, but as they say it's my party. There are a few tracks I could guess people might associate with me, one or two of those I know I was the first to introduce them to, and the rest are tracks that they were the first to introduce me to them. Music was always something I found it easy to bond with other people over. I have an eclectic Music taste that stems from Kylie Minogue to Marilyn Manson, Enya to Ozzy Osbourne, Ke$ha to Frank Sinatra, Guns n Roses to Celine Dion, Madonna to Mama Cass - you get the picture. I'll try anything once and see where it goes. There have been very few people whose music taste has had absolutely no crossover with my own.
Styles of music do vary, but it is often lyrics that I connect with more than melody. Songs that I form the deepest connections to are those with lyrics that aptly capture thoughts and feelings that I have now or that I had when I first heard those songs. On apps and messengers when there is an opportunity to set a status my default choice is the lyric "I think we're alone now..." from The Birthday Massacre, or Tiffany, or Tommy James and the Shondells, depending on how old you are - we don't talk about the Girls Aloud cover, that never happened. The thing I love about this song is the playful nature of the lyrics, young, carefree, innocent, with an optimism that is so persistent when it comes to those days when you start falling for someone or when you start feeling a connection and all you want to do is be with them and share in that joy and fall head over heals, laugh, sigh, breathe, and lose yourself in their arms.
Music reminds me of places too, Nas Ne Dagoniat by t.A.T.u. oddly enough reminds me of standing waiting for a train in West Hampstead wondering if I made the right decision - cryptic I know, and the answer is I still don't know. Something by Lasgo reminds me so much of my time in College which I still regard to be one of the happiest periods in my life.
The connection between music and memory is not something that is easy to break, at least, I've never managed to do it. Having said that, I don't know if I would actually want to break it, even for those songs that evoke emotions that aren't happy or positive, they remind me of a time in my life when I had no idea what to do, and all I could do was what I thought was right at the time - no matter how terrible those decisions turned out to be, they were still what I felt was right and I can't be angry at myself for making that choice. Even now, in my life when I make decisions, I make them because I believe they are the right choice for me, here and now. In years to come if I look back and think they were the worst possible decisions I could have made, that judgement will be made in hindsight with knowledge I can't possess right now. If I was blessed with foresight I would probably be a very rich man by now.
There is a thought that does arise when thinking about music and the memories that are attached to them, that is, what do people associate with me? What tracks do people hear now and think of me? That may sound very self centred, and to be honest it is, but as they say it's my party. There are a few tracks I could guess people might associate with me, one or two of those I know I was the first to introduce them to, and the rest are tracks that they were the first to introduce me to them. Music was always something I found it easy to bond with other people over. I have an eclectic Music taste that stems from Kylie Minogue to Marilyn Manson, Enya to Ozzy Osbourne, Ke$ha to Frank Sinatra, Guns n Roses to Celine Dion, Madonna to Mama Cass - you get the picture. I'll try anything once and see where it goes. There have been very few people whose music taste has had absolutely no crossover with my own.
Styles of music do vary, but it is often lyrics that I connect with more than melody. Songs that I form the deepest connections to are those with lyrics that aptly capture thoughts and feelings that I have now or that I had when I first heard those songs. On apps and messengers when there is an opportunity to set a status my default choice is the lyric "I think we're alone now..." from The Birthday Massacre, or Tiffany, or Tommy James and the Shondells, depending on how old you are - we don't talk about the Girls Aloud cover, that never happened. The thing I love about this song is the playful nature of the lyrics, young, carefree, innocent, with an optimism that is so persistent when it comes to those days when you start falling for someone or when you start feeling a connection and all you want to do is be with them and share in that joy and fall head over heals, laugh, sigh, breathe, and lose yourself in their arms.
What are they doing now?
I don't have Facebook to casually stalk people. That's one of the reasons why I got rid of it in the first place, so that people could not do that to me. There are very few people who I spoke to through it who I do not have another way to contact now. As for those I have no contact with, most were people that I knew but wasn't that close to, they were "friends" as far as Facebook was concerned but they were really just people I knew existed who knew I existed, that was about it. There was an expectation that you should accept friend requests from people who you had actually met, and might see again. One of the reasons I was reluctant to do that when I did use the site was that I didn't feel any connection to those people, not in a sense that I didn't care what happened to them but just in a sense that I knew nothing about them they knew nothing about me, and neither of us made any attempt to change that.
When you think about the number of people you will meet in your lifetime, through where you live, where you study, where you work, to random encounters, both platonic and romantic - although in my experience the latter involved very little romance. This list grows far quicker than you would imagine. When you first created an account on a site like Facebook, one by one the requests start pouring in from people who you barely even knew. I say "when" here in the sense that I now question how often this actually happens now. Facebook supposedly had user growth of 22 million per month in the middle of 2018. The question that raises for me personally is, who is signing up? Almost everyone I know who is inclined to use the site already does, as for the rest like me they don't use it and have no intention of doing so. So the question remains, at what point can you reach everyone you can reach?
For Facebook that means they now focus on expanding within emerging markets, countries where the site doesn't do that well. For the individual however, there is a question of what point have you added everyone you are going to add? Do you actually have an interest in each person on your friends list? If I was to ask you what X is doing now - not in the literal sense but in a sense of having been to University or School years ago with X, where are they now and what are they doing, how many people in your friends list could you actually give an answer for, without going and looking? How many peoples' lives who you supposedly have a vested interest in, could you actually describe and relate to another person? If the answer is very few, then I would sincerely hope that you also spend very little time on the site, if the answer is very few and you spend a lot of time on the site, then what are you actually doing when you are on there?
One of the problems with social media, particularly when it comes to those sites where we connect with people we actually know, is that there is an inevitability that sees you gauging the success of failure of your life as you perceive it against the success or failure of other people as you perceive it through those sites. The trouble with making these comparisons is that you know your own life, but the snapshot of the lives of other people you are exposed to won't necessarily be accurate. Ask yourself how true to your life do you think your social media profiles really are? If there is any disparity, do you believe that same disparity exists for others?
When people think of social media and the term fake news, they often think of news stories that attempt to shape your perception of the world, very little thought is given to the posts made be other people about their lives and whether they are actually true and how those posts attempt to shape your perception of their lives. How hard would it be for you to convince other people of whatever you want to about your life through social media alone? Could you easily make them think you were rich? Could you easily make them think you were successful? Could you easily make them think you were happy? Do your social media profiles try and convey those messages and do they match up to reality? If there is disparity then it would be better to take a step back and think about who you are living your life for, is it for yourself or is it for the entertainment of others?
When you think about the number of people you will meet in your lifetime, through where you live, where you study, where you work, to random encounters, both platonic and romantic - although in my experience the latter involved very little romance. This list grows far quicker than you would imagine. When you first created an account on a site like Facebook, one by one the requests start pouring in from people who you barely even knew. I say "when" here in the sense that I now question how often this actually happens now. Facebook supposedly had user growth of 22 million per month in the middle of 2018. The question that raises for me personally is, who is signing up? Almost everyone I know who is inclined to use the site already does, as for the rest like me they don't use it and have no intention of doing so. So the question remains, at what point can you reach everyone you can reach?
For Facebook that means they now focus on expanding within emerging markets, countries where the site doesn't do that well. For the individual however, there is a question of what point have you added everyone you are going to add? Do you actually have an interest in each person on your friends list? If I was to ask you what X is doing now - not in the literal sense but in a sense of having been to University or School years ago with X, where are they now and what are they doing, how many people in your friends list could you actually give an answer for, without going and looking? How many peoples' lives who you supposedly have a vested interest in, could you actually describe and relate to another person? If the answer is very few, then I would sincerely hope that you also spend very little time on the site, if the answer is very few and you spend a lot of time on the site, then what are you actually doing when you are on there?
One of the problems with social media, particularly when it comes to those sites where we connect with people we actually know, is that there is an inevitability that sees you gauging the success of failure of your life as you perceive it against the success or failure of other people as you perceive it through those sites. The trouble with making these comparisons is that you know your own life, but the snapshot of the lives of other people you are exposed to won't necessarily be accurate. Ask yourself how true to your life do you think your social media profiles really are? If there is any disparity, do you believe that same disparity exists for others?
When people think of social media and the term fake news, they often think of news stories that attempt to shape your perception of the world, very little thought is given to the posts made be other people about their lives and whether they are actually true and how those posts attempt to shape your perception of their lives. How hard would it be for you to convince other people of whatever you want to about your life through social media alone? Could you easily make them think you were rich? Could you easily make them think you were successful? Could you easily make them think you were happy? Do your social media profiles try and convey those messages and do they match up to reality? If there is disparity then it would be better to take a step back and think about who you are living your life for, is it for yourself or is it for the entertainment of others?
Projection
When you study Psychology, one of the things you learn quite quickly is that everyone has the same basic set of problems in life, the only difference is the variables that are thrown into the equation. The solution to these problems often remains the same, although for many reasons it may be difficult or in some cases impossible for the individual to pursue those solutions. What you learn as a result of this revelation, is the same conclusion that is drawn when you start exploring things like Cold Reading, that most people have an inherent ability to take any comment, or criticism, and make it about them, even when it was never aimed at them specifically, their minds can perform incredible feats of mental gymnastics and contort the limits of language as far as they possibly can in order to make it about them. The most ironic part of this realisation is that in reality it is about them.
Projection is an interesting concept when it comes to Psychology, the idea is simple, if someone outwardly expresses anger, it can be deemed to be projection if the root cause of that anger can be traced back to emotions the person expressing that emotion secretly feels towards themselves. The easiest example of this is to take an individual who expresses anger at a person failing to understand a concept they deem to be simple - in reality it is rarely the perception of that person that is really the root cause of the expression of anger, in reality it is more often the case that the person expressing anger is insecure about their own intelligence and their own competence that they hold anger they direct at themselves so often when they fail to grasp simple concepts, then when they see that behaviour in other people it has been built up to be something so repugnant to themselves that they direct anger towards that person. What you learn in this situation is that almost all emotions people express, both positive and negative in life, are really coming from their own issues and their own internal conflict rather than being the result of outside stimuli.
This isn't to say that a person cannot be made angry by a given action or stimulus, that can still happen, this is simply to say that for the most part when you want to understand why a person behaves in a given way towards you, the answer the vast majority of the time is because of something going on in their head, in their life, not something you said or did. This can be difficult to accept, especially for people who struggle with self confidence who believe the lie they tell themselves that they are to blame for everything wrong in their life and the lives of everyone around them. Our impact on the world is tangible, but despite sentimentalities and our desire to change the world, the sad and simple truth is that for most of us our impact on the world is negligible.
What I find fascinating about this whole idea and the conclusions drawn is that it leads us on to the issue of people who want to make an impact that is deeper, one that will last beyond their lifetime. What motivates this desire is not easy to pin down. You can consider it in some instances to a fear of living a life of insignificance, or a fear of the fact that life is fleeting. You can also consider it to be plain and simple ego. You can posit that it is motivated by any number of things, but in all cases, what they attempt to achieve is to ultimately have an impact on other peoples' lives. The question then comes down to whether or not anyone ever has a right to do this.
If you are a revolutionary, you must by definition accept that you have the desire for others to adhere to your vision and your interpretation of the way the world should be. You must accept that you do not like the order that exists, that you believe your order would be better, and that you want to impose that order on others. No revolution was ever achieved without resistance - there will always be those who reject your vision, who do not like your order, and will actively fight against it. They don't have to like the way things are right now, all that is required is that they do not want your alternative. Herein lies the ultimate problem many people have in modern society with the concept of revolution - that it is really a question of authority, and which authority you want to accept and allow to define that to which others must conform. In modern society there is a growing displeasure and unease with the idea of one person having authority over another, this is a concept that is resisted almost everywhere it is imposed, the pursuit of liberty has lead to the emergence of an extremity in our society that believes that every single person should be completely free. The problem with this idea is that it can never be achieved in practice, or at least it would be incredibly difficult to achieve to the point where it is deemed impossible. In order to achieve this concept in totality, you would have to create over 7 billion micro nations, were each and every person in the world becomes their own independent sovereign state.
This idea is asinine, for the plain and simple reason that it is impossible for one person alone to meet all of the needs they would have in life. You can live "off grid" to an extent but basic needs such as the need for social interaction cannot be met by you alone, at some point you will need to engage with other people. Technology on the other hand, encourages this isolationist mentality. It is much easier now to live a life of isolation where everything is brought to you, where you never have to leave the house, and where you can interact with as few people as physically possible. This begs the question, if technology ever progressed to the point where it enabled everyone to live in a world of their own choosing, how long would the idea of organised society persist? If real life simulations akin to those depicted in moves like The Matrix were to come about, and people were to enter into worlds of their own design, how long would society persist outside of The Matrix, before it is abandoned entirely in favour of the virtual world where our ego is the centre of attention every second of every minute of every hour of every day until we die. It's funny, one of the questions that still persists about the world depicted in The Matrix is that of how it came to exist and how humans ended up trapped inside it - with our fascination with AI and our pursuit of technology that does more and more for us rather than doing it ourselves, it's not that hard to imagine that world coming to fruition not through conflict or some dystopian regime but voluntarily without any resistance.
Projection is an interesting concept when it comes to Psychology, the idea is simple, if someone outwardly expresses anger, it can be deemed to be projection if the root cause of that anger can be traced back to emotions the person expressing that emotion secretly feels towards themselves. The easiest example of this is to take an individual who expresses anger at a person failing to understand a concept they deem to be simple - in reality it is rarely the perception of that person that is really the root cause of the expression of anger, in reality it is more often the case that the person expressing anger is insecure about their own intelligence and their own competence that they hold anger they direct at themselves so often when they fail to grasp simple concepts, then when they see that behaviour in other people it has been built up to be something so repugnant to themselves that they direct anger towards that person. What you learn in this situation is that almost all emotions people express, both positive and negative in life, are really coming from their own issues and their own internal conflict rather than being the result of outside stimuli.
This isn't to say that a person cannot be made angry by a given action or stimulus, that can still happen, this is simply to say that for the most part when you want to understand why a person behaves in a given way towards you, the answer the vast majority of the time is because of something going on in their head, in their life, not something you said or did. This can be difficult to accept, especially for people who struggle with self confidence who believe the lie they tell themselves that they are to blame for everything wrong in their life and the lives of everyone around them. Our impact on the world is tangible, but despite sentimentalities and our desire to change the world, the sad and simple truth is that for most of us our impact on the world is negligible.
What I find fascinating about this whole idea and the conclusions drawn is that it leads us on to the issue of people who want to make an impact that is deeper, one that will last beyond their lifetime. What motivates this desire is not easy to pin down. You can consider it in some instances to a fear of living a life of insignificance, or a fear of the fact that life is fleeting. You can also consider it to be plain and simple ego. You can posit that it is motivated by any number of things, but in all cases, what they attempt to achieve is to ultimately have an impact on other peoples' lives. The question then comes down to whether or not anyone ever has a right to do this.
If you are a revolutionary, you must by definition accept that you have the desire for others to adhere to your vision and your interpretation of the way the world should be. You must accept that you do not like the order that exists, that you believe your order would be better, and that you want to impose that order on others. No revolution was ever achieved without resistance - there will always be those who reject your vision, who do not like your order, and will actively fight against it. They don't have to like the way things are right now, all that is required is that they do not want your alternative. Herein lies the ultimate problem many people have in modern society with the concept of revolution - that it is really a question of authority, and which authority you want to accept and allow to define that to which others must conform. In modern society there is a growing displeasure and unease with the idea of one person having authority over another, this is a concept that is resisted almost everywhere it is imposed, the pursuit of liberty has lead to the emergence of an extremity in our society that believes that every single person should be completely free. The problem with this idea is that it can never be achieved in practice, or at least it would be incredibly difficult to achieve to the point where it is deemed impossible. In order to achieve this concept in totality, you would have to create over 7 billion micro nations, were each and every person in the world becomes their own independent sovereign state.
This idea is asinine, for the plain and simple reason that it is impossible for one person alone to meet all of the needs they would have in life. You can live "off grid" to an extent but basic needs such as the need for social interaction cannot be met by you alone, at some point you will need to engage with other people. Technology on the other hand, encourages this isolationist mentality. It is much easier now to live a life of isolation where everything is brought to you, where you never have to leave the house, and where you can interact with as few people as physically possible. This begs the question, if technology ever progressed to the point where it enabled everyone to live in a world of their own choosing, how long would the idea of organised society persist? If real life simulations akin to those depicted in moves like The Matrix were to come about, and people were to enter into worlds of their own design, how long would society persist outside of The Matrix, before it is abandoned entirely in favour of the virtual world where our ego is the centre of attention every second of every minute of every hour of every day until we die. It's funny, one of the questions that still persists about the world depicted in The Matrix is that of how it came to exist and how humans ended up trapped inside it - with our fascination with AI and our pursuit of technology that does more and more for us rather than doing it ourselves, it's not that hard to imagine that world coming to fruition not through conflict or some dystopian regime but voluntarily without any resistance.
Robotic Surgery
Would you let a robot without being controlled by a human, perform surgery on you? I find this question fascinating not because of the hypothetical scenario it creates but because of the reactions people have. Having said that, it's not strictly hypothetical as there are already machines that perform surgery on humans, they have been around for a while, the most recent that I know of was the Versius System developed by the National Health Service in the UK, although like most driverless cars and other autonomous systems there is still a human present to intervene if anything goes wrong that the system can't respond to.
When it comes to the question of whether you would let a robot operate on you, most of the concerns come down to a few basic questions. The first, is which do you think would be more likely to make a mistake? You can make an argument for either side here, you can argue human error is sporadic, and you can argue that machines don't make mistakes, they only do what they were programmed to do, and the only mistake can be in the programming, again a human error. When you discuss mistakes however there is a follow-up question that arises, which would be more adaptive and able to respond if it made a mistake? Again there is an argument that can be made for either side here. On the side of a human you have adaptive intelligence which can learn in the moment, something which machine learning has not fully developed. On the side of the machine you can argue that a machine intelligence can compute each possible action it can take at a rate far quicker than any human could, so provided it had an algorithm that was able to respond, it could do so much quicker than a human.
There is also the issue of pre-empting mistakes. A human is limited in their ability to multi-task, to be able to both operate and consider what might happen next is difficult. Whilst humans are vigilant for signs of error whilst working, machines can split their focus onto many different tasks without affecting performance in each task. A machine could therefore predict things more accurately than a human could.
When it comes to machine intelligence, in the classical sense a robot could only do what it was programmed to do so will inherently be more restricted, it is only in the more contemporary sense that a machine intelligence is able to extend its own programming and do more than it was originally created to do.
When it comes to focus and the ability to maintain performance, machines also have the upper-hand here too. Machines don't get tired, and as long as they are kept in working order their performance should remain optimal. Humans on the other hand can get tired, and most human errors can be attributed to tiredness and misjudgements.
The question as a whole highlights the divide between those who trust machines and those who do not. For those that do, there is no element of fear or emotion involved. For those that do not, it is fear or emotion that override logic and reason to conclude that machines are the riskier choice. If you want evidence of this claim you can look at the statistics of the number of people who died as a result of vehicle accidents in the USA. In 2016, there were 37,461 deaths on US roads as a result of vehicle accidents. These were all human controlled vehicles. In the same year there were 2 fatalities as a result of driverless vehicles. In 2017 there were 40,200 deaths as a result of human controlled vehicles, and there were none as a result of driverless vehicles. Compare the coverage of human controlled vehicles in the news and in the media, with that of driverless cars. Compare the calls for all driverless cars to be banned outright because of 2 fatalities, as opposed to no-one calling whatsoever for all human drivers to be banned from driving despite the combined 77,661 deaths on US roads in the same period.
Fear of change because it is different is irrational. If every car on the road was driverless there would be substantially fewer fatalities as a result of vehicle accidents. As robot surgery becomes more widespread the same conclusions are likely to be drawn as to its efficacy, and inevitably, there will be the same emotional response from those who are reluctant to embrace change.
When it comes to the question of whether you would let a robot operate on you, most of the concerns come down to a few basic questions. The first, is which do you think would be more likely to make a mistake? You can make an argument for either side here, you can argue human error is sporadic, and you can argue that machines don't make mistakes, they only do what they were programmed to do, and the only mistake can be in the programming, again a human error. When you discuss mistakes however there is a follow-up question that arises, which would be more adaptive and able to respond if it made a mistake? Again there is an argument that can be made for either side here. On the side of a human you have adaptive intelligence which can learn in the moment, something which machine learning has not fully developed. On the side of the machine you can argue that a machine intelligence can compute each possible action it can take at a rate far quicker than any human could, so provided it had an algorithm that was able to respond, it could do so much quicker than a human.
There is also the issue of pre-empting mistakes. A human is limited in their ability to multi-task, to be able to both operate and consider what might happen next is difficult. Whilst humans are vigilant for signs of error whilst working, machines can split their focus onto many different tasks without affecting performance in each task. A machine could therefore predict things more accurately than a human could.
When it comes to machine intelligence, in the classical sense a robot could only do what it was programmed to do so will inherently be more restricted, it is only in the more contemporary sense that a machine intelligence is able to extend its own programming and do more than it was originally created to do.
When it comes to focus and the ability to maintain performance, machines also have the upper-hand here too. Machines don't get tired, and as long as they are kept in working order their performance should remain optimal. Humans on the other hand can get tired, and most human errors can be attributed to tiredness and misjudgements.
The question as a whole highlights the divide between those who trust machines and those who do not. For those that do, there is no element of fear or emotion involved. For those that do not, it is fear or emotion that override logic and reason to conclude that machines are the riskier choice. If you want evidence of this claim you can look at the statistics of the number of people who died as a result of vehicle accidents in the USA. In 2016, there were 37,461 deaths on US roads as a result of vehicle accidents. These were all human controlled vehicles. In the same year there were 2 fatalities as a result of driverless vehicles. In 2017 there were 40,200 deaths as a result of human controlled vehicles, and there were none as a result of driverless vehicles. Compare the coverage of human controlled vehicles in the news and in the media, with that of driverless cars. Compare the calls for all driverless cars to be banned outright because of 2 fatalities, as opposed to no-one calling whatsoever for all human drivers to be banned from driving despite the combined 77,661 deaths on US roads in the same period.
Fear of change because it is different is irrational. If every car on the road was driverless there would be substantially fewer fatalities as a result of vehicle accidents. As robot surgery becomes more widespread the same conclusions are likely to be drawn as to its efficacy, and inevitably, there will be the same emotional response from those who are reluctant to embrace change.
Describing Depression
As someone who has lived with depression for decades now, one question that pervades the ether is the act of describing it. For those who have experienced it there is an understanding of what it feels like but it is often difficult to convey in its fullest extent to those that have never experienced it. There is often a perception from those who have never experienced depression that it is synonymous with sadness and that pursuing something happy will remedy the situation. This is a fallacy, one which thankfully social media is quick to argue against when people try to draw such parallels - although the way some people try to defend mental illness is often destructive to the cause of getting others to understand it, and often ends up being an offensive with the intent of attacking the one who has seemingly shown ignorance rather than trying to educate them. There has to be a consciousness that when someone is wrong you want them to see why they are wrong, not to make them feel bad about the fact they are wrong without making any effort to allow the person to grow and learn.
To that end I thought I would take a shot at trying to explain what depression is, and what it feels like. I will do this from two perspectives, the first is from a metaphorical point of view and the second will be from a physiological and neurological context.
First off, life is filled with ups and downs. This is inescapable, and it is something that everyone has to deal with. You have happy days, you have sad days, you have days when you have a clear sky above your head, the sun is shining, the sky is blue, and there isn't a cloud in sight. You also have days where the sky is overcast, filled with dark clouds that are hanging over you, making you feel miserable. This is normal. This is life. This is not depression.
Depression is a state of mind where the sky above begins to descend, where it ultimately ends with those dark clouds that hung above your head enveloping you and making it impossible for you to see anything around you beyond a few feet. You find yourself in darkness, aware of your surroundings, you just can't see them. You can still hear the people around you, you can see those who come close, and you can hear those at a distance. You can see some things in your immediate surroundings, and you can move about a bit, but for the most part you can't see everything the world has to offer.
When you find yourself in this state, the act of carrying out simple tasks, like going to the shop to get milk can be incredibly difficult, you have to remember where it is, you have to navigate through darkness, you can't see what is ahead of you and can't protect yourself from the hazards that everyone approaches everyday - like crossing the road. When people ask you to engage in social situations there is a reluctance, you don't want to go to concerts or the cinema or even to restaurants because you can't see beyond a few feet and that makes you feel dismay. The storm that hung above your head rages around you and it makes you feel tired, drained, and all you want to do is retreat to somewhere you know is safe and stay there until it passes.
This is how depression feels to me. It will feel different to different people, and they will have different ways of explaining the concept and visualising it in their minds. There is much more to depression than the simplification that I have made here and the description I have given. To explain everything would take many posts and I could devote months if not years to talking about it.
"It's all in your head" - well, yes, and no. Yes it is, quite literally, but no it's not if you mean it is purely down to how someone thinks. When depression occurs in an individual there is a shift that happens physiologically. You can perform CAT scans to diagnose depression because a physiological change occurs in the brain. Whenever depression occurs, a significant portion of your brain goes into "standby" mode. Routine functions and things which require a lot of energy to maintain are shut down by the brain. All non-essential processing is halted. Your brain then enters a deep state of processing where the cause of your depression is processed intensely. This processing is not connected to the conscious mind. I have discussed the three levels of consciousness before, the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious. Whenever depression occurs, the bridges between the three distinct layers are broken. The unconscious mind stops communicating with the subconscious. The conscious mind continues to communicate with the subconscious but the is very little traffic.
To borrow an analogy, imagine a pit crew, a co-pilot, and a rally driver. The pit crew carries out all operations to support the team, this is your unconscious. The co-pilot gives immediate advice to the driver this is your subconscious. The rally driver is your consciousness and the car itself is your body. Whenever the communication is broken during depression you are left with a rally driver trying to navigate at speed with very little feedback from anyone else. Those that normally support them and keep them safe are gone. As you can imagine, a rally driver would often crash if this was the case. This happens in the body. Depression can cause physical illnesses because the systems that normally keep everything in the body in check are switched off. The immune system can miss infections, inflammation can occur when the immune system realises too late that an infection is present and has to react aggressively. Physical pain can occur, and in extreme cases you can develop long-term conditions as a result of your depression.
It's not something that is confined to your thought processes. It is not something that is confined to the mind. It is a physiological condition that has a neurological impact, and causes physical symptoms. Depression is something that needs to be treated, if you don't treat it then it will linger. There are debates about whether or not it can ever be cured, there is a considerable body of evidence that states the belief that those who suffer from depression will always have it in some form or another, and for me personally this is true. Depression for me has come and gone in waves in my life, they last between 6 months and a few years at a time.
I wish I could offer some grand insight here as something conclusive, but depression by its very nature is something that is ongoing. Coping mechanisms may be healthy or unhealthy, in my experience whilst many doctors and professionals will advise you against this, my view is to do whatever you have to in order to survive. Whatever works for you, stick with that. Seek professional help if you feel things have got to a point where your life has been impacted severely. Above all else, educate yourself. There are thousands if not millions of sources online that provide information. If you need somewhere to start try contacting one or more of the organisations identified by NHS Moodzone
To that end I thought I would take a shot at trying to explain what depression is, and what it feels like. I will do this from two perspectives, the first is from a metaphorical point of view and the second will be from a physiological and neurological context.
First off, life is filled with ups and downs. This is inescapable, and it is something that everyone has to deal with. You have happy days, you have sad days, you have days when you have a clear sky above your head, the sun is shining, the sky is blue, and there isn't a cloud in sight. You also have days where the sky is overcast, filled with dark clouds that are hanging over you, making you feel miserable. This is normal. This is life. This is not depression.
Depression is a state of mind where the sky above begins to descend, where it ultimately ends with those dark clouds that hung above your head enveloping you and making it impossible for you to see anything around you beyond a few feet. You find yourself in darkness, aware of your surroundings, you just can't see them. You can still hear the people around you, you can see those who come close, and you can hear those at a distance. You can see some things in your immediate surroundings, and you can move about a bit, but for the most part you can't see everything the world has to offer.
When you find yourself in this state, the act of carrying out simple tasks, like going to the shop to get milk can be incredibly difficult, you have to remember where it is, you have to navigate through darkness, you can't see what is ahead of you and can't protect yourself from the hazards that everyone approaches everyday - like crossing the road. When people ask you to engage in social situations there is a reluctance, you don't want to go to concerts or the cinema or even to restaurants because you can't see beyond a few feet and that makes you feel dismay. The storm that hung above your head rages around you and it makes you feel tired, drained, and all you want to do is retreat to somewhere you know is safe and stay there until it passes.
This is how depression feels to me. It will feel different to different people, and they will have different ways of explaining the concept and visualising it in their minds. There is much more to depression than the simplification that I have made here and the description I have given. To explain everything would take many posts and I could devote months if not years to talking about it.
"It's all in your head" - well, yes, and no. Yes it is, quite literally, but no it's not if you mean it is purely down to how someone thinks. When depression occurs in an individual there is a shift that happens physiologically. You can perform CAT scans to diagnose depression because a physiological change occurs in the brain. Whenever depression occurs, a significant portion of your brain goes into "standby" mode. Routine functions and things which require a lot of energy to maintain are shut down by the brain. All non-essential processing is halted. Your brain then enters a deep state of processing where the cause of your depression is processed intensely. This processing is not connected to the conscious mind. I have discussed the three levels of consciousness before, the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious. Whenever depression occurs, the bridges between the three distinct layers are broken. The unconscious mind stops communicating with the subconscious. The conscious mind continues to communicate with the subconscious but the is very little traffic.
To borrow an analogy, imagine a pit crew, a co-pilot, and a rally driver. The pit crew carries out all operations to support the team, this is your unconscious. The co-pilot gives immediate advice to the driver this is your subconscious. The rally driver is your consciousness and the car itself is your body. Whenever the communication is broken during depression you are left with a rally driver trying to navigate at speed with very little feedback from anyone else. Those that normally support them and keep them safe are gone. As you can imagine, a rally driver would often crash if this was the case. This happens in the body. Depression can cause physical illnesses because the systems that normally keep everything in the body in check are switched off. The immune system can miss infections, inflammation can occur when the immune system realises too late that an infection is present and has to react aggressively. Physical pain can occur, and in extreme cases you can develop long-term conditions as a result of your depression.
It's not something that is confined to your thought processes. It is not something that is confined to the mind. It is a physiological condition that has a neurological impact, and causes physical symptoms. Depression is something that needs to be treated, if you don't treat it then it will linger. There are debates about whether or not it can ever be cured, there is a considerable body of evidence that states the belief that those who suffer from depression will always have it in some form or another, and for me personally this is true. Depression for me has come and gone in waves in my life, they last between 6 months and a few years at a time.
I wish I could offer some grand insight here as something conclusive, but depression by its very nature is something that is ongoing. Coping mechanisms may be healthy or unhealthy, in my experience whilst many doctors and professionals will advise you against this, my view is to do whatever you have to in order to survive. Whatever works for you, stick with that. Seek professional help if you feel things have got to a point where your life has been impacted severely. Above all else, educate yourself. There are thousands if not millions of sources online that provide information. If you need somewhere to start try contacting one or more of the organisations identified by NHS Moodzone
What's the word...
My vocabulary is quite extensive and I am able to utilize it with a level of articulation that betrays the image of me that others perceive. It's easier to write with diction and acumen when addressing readers than it is to speak with the same level of coherence when addressing people face to face. On more than one occasion, others who know me have read things I have written and found it hard to believe that I was the one who wrote it. The main reason for this is because I choose to adapt my language and my lexicon to the audience that I find myself in the presence of in an attempt to make communication less ambiguous and easier to understand.
Two characters for me stand out among many others in works of fiction for an exemplification of the exquisite articulation of complex ruminations with little simplification. They are Sir Humphrey Appleby from the British sitcom Yes (Prime) Minister played by Nigel Hawthorne, the other is The Architect from the movie franchise The Matrix played by Helmut Bakaitis. Both characters had an unassailable ability to answer a question with such depth and complexity that those who ask are often unaware that the questions they asked were not actually answered. Both productions did have characters who were able to recognise this was the case however, though most would fail.
It is often said it is the mark of a true politician to be able to say a lot without saying anything at all, but perhaps it would be fairer to say that there are few jobs where someone with such an ability can put it to good use - depending on your point of view of course. Nevertheless the ability to speak with such a flow without pause is something I would like to possess however I am a mere mortal. It is worth pointing out that both actors had to learn their lines before speaking them so it's not realistic to hold their level of diction as aspirational.
The biggest barrier to achieving this goal is something affectionately known as a Brain Fart - a term one of my flatmates at University first introduced me to, in essence it means a momentary lapse in thought or a temporary disruption of one's mental faculties. When writing, there is no delay that is apparent to you the reader, when the flow is interrupted, the writer pauses, eventually resumes, and the final product is edited and reworked. Conversation on the other hand does not have this luxury. You can't go back and edit what you said and you can't make meaningful corrections without the original statements remaining in place. Nowhere is this more apparent than when you have a word in mind but you cannot recall it. You know a word exists that you know of which succinctly conveys the meaning you wish to impart but you cannot for the life of you recall what it was. Your mind then dances around amongst all the concepts and ideas and clusters of thought you would imagine to be connected to the concept in the hope of finding a path to it, sometimes you are successful and at other times you are not.
When you are writing you can simply reword what you were saying so as to use an alternate explanation. This isn't usually apparent to the reader. When speaking however you end up in that momentary silence where your mind goes blank and the more you try to recall the further your conscious thought fades to black and you are left in awkward silence. There's a word for this, and fate, not without a sense of irony has denied me the recollection of it.
Two characters for me stand out among many others in works of fiction for an exemplification of the exquisite articulation of complex ruminations with little simplification. They are Sir Humphrey Appleby from the British sitcom Yes (Prime) Minister played by Nigel Hawthorne, the other is The Architect from the movie franchise The Matrix played by Helmut Bakaitis. Both characters had an unassailable ability to answer a question with such depth and complexity that those who ask are often unaware that the questions they asked were not actually answered. Both productions did have characters who were able to recognise this was the case however, though most would fail.
It is often said it is the mark of a true politician to be able to say a lot without saying anything at all, but perhaps it would be fairer to say that there are few jobs where someone with such an ability can put it to good use - depending on your point of view of course. Nevertheless the ability to speak with such a flow without pause is something I would like to possess however I am a mere mortal. It is worth pointing out that both actors had to learn their lines before speaking them so it's not realistic to hold their level of diction as aspirational.
The biggest barrier to achieving this goal is something affectionately known as a Brain Fart - a term one of my flatmates at University first introduced me to, in essence it means a momentary lapse in thought or a temporary disruption of one's mental faculties. When writing, there is no delay that is apparent to you the reader, when the flow is interrupted, the writer pauses, eventually resumes, and the final product is edited and reworked. Conversation on the other hand does not have this luxury. You can't go back and edit what you said and you can't make meaningful corrections without the original statements remaining in place. Nowhere is this more apparent than when you have a word in mind but you cannot recall it. You know a word exists that you know of which succinctly conveys the meaning you wish to impart but you cannot for the life of you recall what it was. Your mind then dances around amongst all the concepts and ideas and clusters of thought you would imagine to be connected to the concept in the hope of finding a path to it, sometimes you are successful and at other times you are not.
When you are writing you can simply reword what you were saying so as to use an alternate explanation. This isn't usually apparent to the reader. When speaking however you end up in that momentary silence where your mind goes blank and the more you try to recall the further your conscious thought fades to black and you are left in awkward silence. There's a word for this, and fate, not without a sense of irony has denied me the recollection of it.
Everyone
I love counting things, statistics, analysing data, and finding out things I never knew or never realised in the process. This often leads me to ask questions that you instinctively give an answer to without really thinking about it, in this case the question is, how many people have you met? The answer instinctively is to say hundreds, maybe even thousands, but when you actually stop and think about it, that question isn't that easy to answer.
The first thing you must remove is the ambiguity of the question, that naturally leads you to ask what is defined as "meeting" someone? For the sake of this post I am going to define this as someone who you have spoken to, or interacted with, either physically or digitally, how well you know that person is irrelevant for now, we will discuss that aspect later.
Armed with this definition, the first thing to do is to break your life down into logical partitions, these can be places, or time periods, or any delimitation you desire, as long as it helps you process your life up until this point in a structured way. For me personally, I find it easiest to divide my life into partitions that are attached to places in particular, schools, college, university, neighbourhoods, workplaces, and training facilities. These account for most people I have met, on top of these I then added friends who don't fit into any of the above, family, people who I met through others, and sexual partners. Finally I added the people I met online through various websites, forums, social networks, and other places where I have engaged on a one-on-one basis with people.
Using approximate figures for each component and adding them all up to arrive at a final figure, I have concluded that I have met around 1,400 people. This doesn't include everyone that I knew of, or they knew of me, but we never interacted. It also does not include people who were present in the same places but we knew nothing of each other.
What I find interesting about this figure is that it isn't what I was expecting it to be. I don't know if I was expecting it to be lower, or to be higher, but still something about it surprised me. When you break it down further and split it into two groups, those you got to know well and those you only knew in passing, the split is around 10:90 with 140 people being those I knew well and the remaining 1,260 being people I didn't know that well. What's more, if you return to the question of how well you know people and extend the number to include everyone that was excluded above, you still arrive at a number that is surprisingly low to me, approximately 4,000 people.
I live in the UK, which has a population of approximately 66 million people. Even using the larger figure of 4,000 people, that represents 0.006% of the UK population I have met or known in passing, or have had the opportunity to meet if I had taken the chance. The minuteness of this number puts into perspective the incredulity we often attach to not having met certain people. Never having met "the one" for example, if you believe in that mentality, becomes less foreboding when you consider how few people you have actually met. Even if you were to draw at straws and include people from social media who you've never actually had a conversation with, and who probably don't even know you exist, you still barely scratch the surface in terms of reach.
There is a long held theory that you can connect any two people through six degrees of separation, whilst that can be hard to believe at first, it becomes less so when you consider the mathematics behind this concept. Using the figure of 4,000 people for example from above, you only need to raise it to the power of 4 before you have a number that is higher than the total number of people who have ever lived throughout the entirety of human history and by quite a margin.
The conclusion you can draw from this whole thought experiment is that the circle of people you will meet in your lifetime is incredibly small compared to the size of humanity as a whole but it doesn't take that many people to reach everyone. There is a statistic that I came across which I find interesting that says approximately 80% of tweets on Twitter are produced by 10% of Twitter users. Knowing this statistic changes your perception of the site quite a bit, for one it makes it a lot easier to understand how compressed the "source" material or "root" of the platform is and it makes it a lot easier to understand how much churn is involved when it comes to the way others interact with that content.
Applying this to real life you can say those 10% of Twitter users that produce so much content are akin to the handful of people in towns and cities that at least appear to know everything about everyone. These people exist even in large cities that have millions of people who live there, still bubbles and communities emerge and you eventually see that only a small number of people are very well connected, the rest are much more insular by comparison. In other words, your social network offline is likely to be either very small or disproportionately large compared to everyone you know.
The first thing you must remove is the ambiguity of the question, that naturally leads you to ask what is defined as "meeting" someone? For the sake of this post I am going to define this as someone who you have spoken to, or interacted with, either physically or digitally, how well you know that person is irrelevant for now, we will discuss that aspect later.
Armed with this definition, the first thing to do is to break your life down into logical partitions, these can be places, or time periods, or any delimitation you desire, as long as it helps you process your life up until this point in a structured way. For me personally, I find it easiest to divide my life into partitions that are attached to places in particular, schools, college, university, neighbourhoods, workplaces, and training facilities. These account for most people I have met, on top of these I then added friends who don't fit into any of the above, family, people who I met through others, and sexual partners. Finally I added the people I met online through various websites, forums, social networks, and other places where I have engaged on a one-on-one basis with people.
Using approximate figures for each component and adding them all up to arrive at a final figure, I have concluded that I have met around 1,400 people. This doesn't include everyone that I knew of, or they knew of me, but we never interacted. It also does not include people who were present in the same places but we knew nothing of each other.
What I find interesting about this figure is that it isn't what I was expecting it to be. I don't know if I was expecting it to be lower, or to be higher, but still something about it surprised me. When you break it down further and split it into two groups, those you got to know well and those you only knew in passing, the split is around 10:90 with 140 people being those I knew well and the remaining 1,260 being people I didn't know that well. What's more, if you return to the question of how well you know people and extend the number to include everyone that was excluded above, you still arrive at a number that is surprisingly low to me, approximately 4,000 people.
I live in the UK, which has a population of approximately 66 million people. Even using the larger figure of 4,000 people, that represents 0.006% of the UK population I have met or known in passing, or have had the opportunity to meet if I had taken the chance. The minuteness of this number puts into perspective the incredulity we often attach to not having met certain people. Never having met "the one" for example, if you believe in that mentality, becomes less foreboding when you consider how few people you have actually met. Even if you were to draw at straws and include people from social media who you've never actually had a conversation with, and who probably don't even know you exist, you still barely scratch the surface in terms of reach.
There is a long held theory that you can connect any two people through six degrees of separation, whilst that can be hard to believe at first, it becomes less so when you consider the mathematics behind this concept. Using the figure of 4,000 people for example from above, you only need to raise it to the power of 4 before you have a number that is higher than the total number of people who have ever lived throughout the entirety of human history and by quite a margin.
The conclusion you can draw from this whole thought experiment is that the circle of people you will meet in your lifetime is incredibly small compared to the size of humanity as a whole but it doesn't take that many people to reach everyone. There is a statistic that I came across which I find interesting that says approximately 80% of tweets on Twitter are produced by 10% of Twitter users. Knowing this statistic changes your perception of the site quite a bit, for one it makes it a lot easier to understand how compressed the "source" material or "root" of the platform is and it makes it a lot easier to understand how much churn is involved when it comes to the way others interact with that content.
Applying this to real life you can say those 10% of Twitter users that produce so much content are akin to the handful of people in towns and cities that at least appear to know everything about everyone. These people exist even in large cities that have millions of people who live there, still bubbles and communities emerge and you eventually see that only a small number of people are very well connected, the rest are much more insular by comparison. In other words, your social network offline is likely to be either very small or disproportionately large compared to everyone you know.
Fear and Gambling
A while ago I wrote about death and how I am not afraid of it. There's an implication there that some people draw, that is to say that I do not fear anything, that is not true. I do have fears but most of them are irrational. They relate to things that there is no rhyme nor reason to, and as they are not based in logic or reason they are hard to disprove.
It's odd to use the word "disprove" with fear as that implies belief but when you stop and think about fear and what it actually is, at its core fear is a belief that something bad or negative will happen if a given consequence occurs. For example, I have an irrational fear of wasps and bees. Now some who share my fear will argue that isn't irrational and give many arguments for why it is perfectly reasonable to be afraid of them. The trouble is, most of those arguments are based in eccentricity or hysteria. Take for example the belief that you can die from an allergic reaction to a wasp sting, whilst this is technically possible, the odds of you dying in a plane crash or a train derailment are much higher, and yet most people who are afraid of wasps are perfectly comfortable riding on planes or trains.
Fears inevitably involve statistics, experience, and most importantly, hearsay. There are those who posit that fears are in their entirety subject to nurture rather than nature. That every fear is learned and therefore if you prevent someone from ever learning to fear something then they would have no fear of it. That is easily disproved by unexpectedly popping a balloon or causing some other loud noise, there is a primal instinct to associate such sudden sensory overload with being something harmful. There is a rush of adrenaline to power the fight or flight mechanism, to give you the energy to fight whatever is a threat to you or to run away.
Truly irrational fears however have no basis in experience, nor do they have a basis in perception of others who share those fears. I have known people who were afraid of baked beans, or coleslaw. For my American readers, baked beans are a type of Haricot Bean or Boston Bean that's been boiled in tomato sauce. There's no reason whatsoever to fear these things, they can't cause you any physical harm, they are inanimate, and there's no prior experience you could envision where beans themselves attacked you or gave reason for you to hate them, still of all that fear remained for them.
None of my irrational fears involve food, which for anyone who knows me will come as no surprise as there are days when I eat everything in sight. Most people find it amusing that I am not afraid of the things you're meant to be afraid of - death for example - but I am afraid of things that most people are not. There inevitably comes the question of what the worst case scenario may be if those fears were fulfilled, most people assume that all fear is related to death and that any irrational fear is related to an irrational death scenario - being killed by baked beans. For me, there is no fear of what happens after, there is only the fear of the event itself. I'm not afraid of walking around with a red mark on my skin from a wasp sting etc, it's the event itself that I fear - in other words the anticipation of what might happen is what paralyses me, not what happens after nor the consequences.
With fears traditionally the way to overcome them is through confidence, reassurance, and exposure. With an irrational fear those three things aren't usually possible. The fear itself is not based in reason, so no amount of education about the reality of such experiences will cause any ease. Likewise exposure becomes an incredibly difficult topic to broach if there is a real negative side affect that could occur. In the case of the fear of wasps, being exposed repeatedly to wasps would not likely build confidence that they will not sting you, it would likely lead to you being stung. As for the outcome, however statistically unlikely it would be for you to have an allergic reaction, the more you expose yourself to that situation the higher the odds become of having such a reaction.
If one in a million planes crash, the more planes you ride, the closer you get to that statistic - of course like all forms of gambling there is no guarantee you would actually experience the event at all. Odds of 1 in 4 do not mean you will definitely win once every 4 times you play, but sooner or later with those odds you would win. Fear and Gambling therefore share a lot of similarities, both deal with statistics, both deal with hypothetical outcomes, and both reinforce your beliefs that such events will happen more frequently the more you take that risk. The only key difference is that gambling deals with something that you want to happen but almost always will not, whereas fear deals with something you do not want to happen, and again, almost always will not - despite how much we try to convince ourselves it will.
It's odd to use the word "disprove" with fear as that implies belief but when you stop and think about fear and what it actually is, at its core fear is a belief that something bad or negative will happen if a given consequence occurs. For example, I have an irrational fear of wasps and bees. Now some who share my fear will argue that isn't irrational and give many arguments for why it is perfectly reasonable to be afraid of them. The trouble is, most of those arguments are based in eccentricity or hysteria. Take for example the belief that you can die from an allergic reaction to a wasp sting, whilst this is technically possible, the odds of you dying in a plane crash or a train derailment are much higher, and yet most people who are afraid of wasps are perfectly comfortable riding on planes or trains.
Fears inevitably involve statistics, experience, and most importantly, hearsay. There are those who posit that fears are in their entirety subject to nurture rather than nature. That every fear is learned and therefore if you prevent someone from ever learning to fear something then they would have no fear of it. That is easily disproved by unexpectedly popping a balloon or causing some other loud noise, there is a primal instinct to associate such sudden sensory overload with being something harmful. There is a rush of adrenaline to power the fight or flight mechanism, to give you the energy to fight whatever is a threat to you or to run away.
Truly irrational fears however have no basis in experience, nor do they have a basis in perception of others who share those fears. I have known people who were afraid of baked beans, or coleslaw. For my American readers, baked beans are a type of Haricot Bean or Boston Bean that's been boiled in tomato sauce. There's no reason whatsoever to fear these things, they can't cause you any physical harm, they are inanimate, and there's no prior experience you could envision where beans themselves attacked you or gave reason for you to hate them, still of all that fear remained for them.
None of my irrational fears involve food, which for anyone who knows me will come as no surprise as there are days when I eat everything in sight. Most people find it amusing that I am not afraid of the things you're meant to be afraid of - death for example - but I am afraid of things that most people are not. There inevitably comes the question of what the worst case scenario may be if those fears were fulfilled, most people assume that all fear is related to death and that any irrational fear is related to an irrational death scenario - being killed by baked beans. For me, there is no fear of what happens after, there is only the fear of the event itself. I'm not afraid of walking around with a red mark on my skin from a wasp sting etc, it's the event itself that I fear - in other words the anticipation of what might happen is what paralyses me, not what happens after nor the consequences.
With fears traditionally the way to overcome them is through confidence, reassurance, and exposure. With an irrational fear those three things aren't usually possible. The fear itself is not based in reason, so no amount of education about the reality of such experiences will cause any ease. Likewise exposure becomes an incredibly difficult topic to broach if there is a real negative side affect that could occur. In the case of the fear of wasps, being exposed repeatedly to wasps would not likely build confidence that they will not sting you, it would likely lead to you being stung. As for the outcome, however statistically unlikely it would be for you to have an allergic reaction, the more you expose yourself to that situation the higher the odds become of having such a reaction.
If one in a million planes crash, the more planes you ride, the closer you get to that statistic - of course like all forms of gambling there is no guarantee you would actually experience the event at all. Odds of 1 in 4 do not mean you will definitely win once every 4 times you play, but sooner or later with those odds you would win. Fear and Gambling therefore share a lot of similarities, both deal with statistics, both deal with hypothetical outcomes, and both reinforce your beliefs that such events will happen more frequently the more you take that risk. The only key difference is that gambling deals with something that you want to happen but almost always will not, whereas fear deals with something you do not want to happen, and again, almost always will not - despite how much we try to convince ourselves it will.
Past vs Future
There's a photograph I have of me at school in 1993. I only recognise a handful of the kids in the photograph, the rest changed classes over the years or I have completely forgotten who they are. When I look at the photograph however, I don't just see the kids in it, I see what they grew up to become, and in one or two instances that wasn't anything good. Of the kids in the photograph there is one in particular I know of who went on to commit murder and he went to jail for it. Looking at the photograph however there's no indication of any of that, what he did or what anyone else did.
We can know our past, sometimes not in its entirety but we know most of what happened to us. We can know our present, again, sometimes not in its entirety as there can be things that we are blind to even now. When it comes to our futures, we can't know for certain what they will hold, not for us nor for anyone else. There are very few things in life we know are certain and most of them are pretty grim. There always comes a question when you speak of the past, of what you would have done had you known then what you know now. The difficult part of that question comes from whether or not we believe we can alter the future.
There's a tweet I saw long ago saying how everyone thinks if they went back in time they would be paranoid about changing the present by doing something small like stepping on a bug, and yet we don't worry about the future here in our present, we don't think about massive changes in our future happening because of small actions we make here in the moment. To believe that you could not change history no matter what you did if you went back in time, is to believe that your future cannot be changed no matter what you do. There's a greater will to believe this is true of the past and present than there is of the present and the future. The question is why?
Perhaps the question simply comes down to probability. We don't believe the possibility for us to go back in time is ever likely to happen and so because the circumstances are improbable we are much more willing to accept them as fixed. Whereas the flip-side is the present day, where the probability that you would be able to change the future seems a certainty to us, because we can take any action we want here in the moment and that will have an effect on our future. We know we can change the present for certain so we refuse to accept the future as something certain. Yet the real question isn't one being asked in the moment but one being asked in hindsight, in other words it is a question that can only be answered in the future, not here and now.
Consider if you will, a person who approaches you today, and claims to be your future self. Would you heed any warning they gave you? Assuming you could verify it is indeed them, and they do indeed have knowledge of future events. Would you actually listen? Consider the thing you want more than anything right now, whatever gives you the greatest pleasure and joy in your life, would you give it up if they told you that you should?
We can know our past, sometimes not in its entirety but we know most of what happened to us. We can know our present, again, sometimes not in its entirety as there can be things that we are blind to even now. When it comes to our futures, we can't know for certain what they will hold, not for us nor for anyone else. There are very few things in life we know are certain and most of them are pretty grim. There always comes a question when you speak of the past, of what you would have done had you known then what you know now. The difficult part of that question comes from whether or not we believe we can alter the future.
There's a tweet I saw long ago saying how everyone thinks if they went back in time they would be paranoid about changing the present by doing something small like stepping on a bug, and yet we don't worry about the future here in our present, we don't think about massive changes in our future happening because of small actions we make here in the moment. To believe that you could not change history no matter what you did if you went back in time, is to believe that your future cannot be changed no matter what you do. There's a greater will to believe this is true of the past and present than there is of the present and the future. The question is why?
Perhaps the question simply comes down to probability. We don't believe the possibility for us to go back in time is ever likely to happen and so because the circumstances are improbable we are much more willing to accept them as fixed. Whereas the flip-side is the present day, where the probability that you would be able to change the future seems a certainty to us, because we can take any action we want here in the moment and that will have an effect on our future. We know we can change the present for certain so we refuse to accept the future as something certain. Yet the real question isn't one being asked in the moment but one being asked in hindsight, in other words it is a question that can only be answered in the future, not here and now.
Consider if you will, a person who approaches you today, and claims to be your future self. Would you heed any warning they gave you? Assuming you could verify it is indeed them, and they do indeed have knowledge of future events. Would you actually listen? Consider the thing you want more than anything right now, whatever gives you the greatest pleasure and joy in your life, would you give it up if they told you that you should?
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