Once or twice I went trick or treating as a kid, this wasn't something we really did, it was just something we tried for the novelty of it. My parents would buy us a lot of sweets for Halloween night and would have a party where we would invite cousins and friends over to celebrate so there was never any real need for us to go door to door to get more. When it came to costumes, everything was rather basic, a few plastic masks here and there, I think one year we bought costumes but most years we made them, it was a sort of tradition to plan out what we would be. I always wanted to be a Vampire or a Witch - not a Wizard, a Witch, how my parents didn't know I was gay I don't know. Hocus Pocus was one of my favourite Halloween movies and I wanted to be Bette Midler more than anything.
Two reasons why I loved Halloween more than anything else were the fact that it celebrated the occult and the fact that being different or weird for once was a good thing. Unlike people who would say it's the one night of the year where they get to behave a certain way, for me that really was true. I always knew I was a bit of a weird kid and that never really bothered me, but Halloween was a time to shine, the weirder you could be the more it was applauded.
I have a very sweet tooth too so the abundance of sweets that were on offer made me a very happy child. From toffee apples, apple pies. crisps [potato chips], dips, toffee popcorn, to jelly babies, jelly beans, and of course every kind of Haribo imaginable. I loved Halloween movies although I don't ever remember actually watching them on Halloween night, we were always too busy either with the party or being outside somewhere. In many ways that's like Christmas most movies you associate with it you watch at that time of year but not often on the day itself.
Also like Christmas, we would decorate our house for Halloween each year, we would use black bin liners taped up to make places dark, we had glow in the dark cardboard skeletons that we would hang up, fake cobwebs, glowing pumpkin torches, and a motion activated pumpkin with a speaker inside that would cackle when you walked past. Every year we would buy an actual pumpkin, draw out our design on its face, and carve it for the night itself, gutting the interior and putting a candle inside. I remember visiting my Granny every year before the evening began to show her the pumpkin and our costumes and masks. We would have the party that night and close to midnight there would always be a firework display that had been organized by the estate where I lived so we would watch that to end the night.
Halloween remains to be one of my favourite times of the year, although I am not as keen on fireworks as I once was, I think because most people used them in excess to the point where they lost their lustre. Still the celebration of the occult remains with me, and the meaning of Halloween being the night when the walls between the living world and the spirit world are at their weakest still holds a tenderness in my heart, whether there is any truth to it I don't really care, the symbolism, the tradition, and the way it makes me feel are what matter more to me, in many ways I feel the same about Christmas, the original meaning is remember for me but it has come to mean so much more to the point where even if I lost all faith I would still celebrate it as a time of togetherness.
The other reason I love Halloween so much is because I love winter and in many ways Halloween marks the end of Autumn, I know in an astronomical sense that's not true but I grew up in Northern Ireland and in Celtic tradition All Hallows Eve or Samhain marks the end of the harvest season so for me it means winter has finally arrived. I love winter, I love the dark nights, the cold weather, the clothes you get to wear because it's cold enough to put them on, and the snow which is usually a disappointment if I am honest, the UK doesn't really get the kind of snow I would like it to get, and we can't even handle the dusting that we do occasionally get, the country grinds to a halt despite the fact there are many other parts of the world that get feet upon feet of snow and still manage to go on about their lives. Nevertheless, the period of Halloween through to New Year's and into Spring is my favourite time of year and I look forward to it every year.
Order and Chaos
If you take a look around my room, it's a mixture of organization and chaos, part of it is neat and tidy, and then part of it is an area where everything gets put until I deal with it later. This reflects my mentality and my attitude to a lot of things in life, I put things in order and make sense of the world, and anything that doesn't fit gets put to one side in one big pile until I come back to it at some point and figure out where in my world it's supposed to fit.
I have known people who live in complete chaos, people whose bedrooms I have stepped into and they look like an episode of hoarders and yet, to them, they knew where everything is, and there was a method to the madness. I couldn't live like that personally, I can tolerate a certain level of disorder but if things get too much I do get to a point where I can't sleep and I have to get up and tidy things before I can actually lie down and sleep in that environment.
I do believe our environment represents our internal state to an extent, however I am not sure how much the opposite can be said to be true, that is, that our environment affects our internal state. I don't feel a disorganization in my mind when I am surrounded by clutter or when that pile of things to sort gets a little too high. The act of organizing does provide some catharsis for me. Whenever I feel like things are getting a bit hectic in my life, I take some time to organize things around me and it does make me feel better but I don't think that environment is what causes that feeling, if anything it's usually something completely unrelated that has made me feel that way, and the act of organization gives me something to distract myself with in a way that means I don't have to think about whatever caused me distress.
I know some people who take this idea to extremes, where they create time tables, lists, and schedules to live their life by. I can't commit to that level of routine, it's not conducive to a mentality that relies on creativity and spontaneity. If I were to engage in that level of routine and organization of my life I would feel dead inside, that's not hyperbole, that's speaking from prior experience.
My time spent in High School is a very good example of a time where there was an almost military precision to the routine I had to follow. Everyone wore the same colour uniform, the same design, no individuality, there were policies that dictated everything from hair styles to footwear. Classes were a set duration punctuated by a bell that rang every 40 minutes signalling a time to move from there to the next class. Everyone followed time tables, attendance was recorded, behaviour monitored, merits given for consistency, demerits given for breaches, penalties given for consistent violations. The whole experience was miserable, it's not surprising then that this was a time of my life when I started to write more often. I created an entire world of fantasy that came with background and lore that covered 7,000 years of history - none of which will ever see the light of day partly because it was lost when a hard drive died and partly because even if I could recover it, I know it would be incredibly embarrassing if anyone was to read it now.
I need a level of freedom in my life that balances order and chaos keeping the two in harmony. I need to be able to do whatever I want whenever I want and meet my obligations at the same time. The only way that I can achieve this is by grouping together tasks in such a way that they can be processed in batches. Things like mail get thrown into a pile where I can sort it all in one go at a later date. I know some people will argue that you should do things daily as you go along, but to me that distributes workloads to an extent where you create redundancy. It's much more efficient at least for me to be able to do it all in one go rather than spending parts of my time here and there doing something with a focus that isn't dedicated to the task at hand but is preoccupied with how much time there is to achieve the task.
If you took this mentality and applied it to school work then I would have thrived much more if you had devotes a few hours on one day to one subject, a few hours later to another, and so on and so forth rather than splitting one subject up into five classes or more spread over five days. You never spent long enough in one subject to be able to latch on mentally to what you were trying to learn. I would go so far as to say that the things I have had the most success learning later in life were things that I sat down and focused on without dividing my attention between them and anything else. To quote Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory, "The best way to achieve a goal is to devote 100% of your energy to it" this is something I realised a long time ago and that is something I continue to live by.
I have known people who live in complete chaos, people whose bedrooms I have stepped into and they look like an episode of hoarders and yet, to them, they knew where everything is, and there was a method to the madness. I couldn't live like that personally, I can tolerate a certain level of disorder but if things get too much I do get to a point where I can't sleep and I have to get up and tidy things before I can actually lie down and sleep in that environment.
I do believe our environment represents our internal state to an extent, however I am not sure how much the opposite can be said to be true, that is, that our environment affects our internal state. I don't feel a disorganization in my mind when I am surrounded by clutter or when that pile of things to sort gets a little too high. The act of organizing does provide some catharsis for me. Whenever I feel like things are getting a bit hectic in my life, I take some time to organize things around me and it does make me feel better but I don't think that environment is what causes that feeling, if anything it's usually something completely unrelated that has made me feel that way, and the act of organization gives me something to distract myself with in a way that means I don't have to think about whatever caused me distress.
I know some people who take this idea to extremes, where they create time tables, lists, and schedules to live their life by. I can't commit to that level of routine, it's not conducive to a mentality that relies on creativity and spontaneity. If I were to engage in that level of routine and organization of my life I would feel dead inside, that's not hyperbole, that's speaking from prior experience.
My time spent in High School is a very good example of a time where there was an almost military precision to the routine I had to follow. Everyone wore the same colour uniform, the same design, no individuality, there were policies that dictated everything from hair styles to footwear. Classes were a set duration punctuated by a bell that rang every 40 minutes signalling a time to move from there to the next class. Everyone followed time tables, attendance was recorded, behaviour monitored, merits given for consistency, demerits given for breaches, penalties given for consistent violations. The whole experience was miserable, it's not surprising then that this was a time of my life when I started to write more often. I created an entire world of fantasy that came with background and lore that covered 7,000 years of history - none of which will ever see the light of day partly because it was lost when a hard drive died and partly because even if I could recover it, I know it would be incredibly embarrassing if anyone was to read it now.
I need a level of freedom in my life that balances order and chaos keeping the two in harmony. I need to be able to do whatever I want whenever I want and meet my obligations at the same time. The only way that I can achieve this is by grouping together tasks in such a way that they can be processed in batches. Things like mail get thrown into a pile where I can sort it all in one go at a later date. I know some people will argue that you should do things daily as you go along, but to me that distributes workloads to an extent where you create redundancy. It's much more efficient at least for me to be able to do it all in one go rather than spending parts of my time here and there doing something with a focus that isn't dedicated to the task at hand but is preoccupied with how much time there is to achieve the task.
If you took this mentality and applied it to school work then I would have thrived much more if you had devotes a few hours on one day to one subject, a few hours later to another, and so on and so forth rather than splitting one subject up into five classes or more spread over five days. You never spent long enough in one subject to be able to latch on mentally to what you were trying to learn. I would go so far as to say that the things I have had the most success learning later in life were things that I sat down and focused on without dividing my attention between them and anything else. To quote Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory, "The best way to achieve a goal is to devote 100% of your energy to it" this is something I realised a long time ago and that is something I continue to live by.
Language
I love language, not just my native English language but languages in general. I would love nothing more than to be a polyglot who could speak dozens of languages at a fluent level with ease. I've studied many languages over the years not just in an academic setting as was the case with Irish, but in a personal setting too as was the case with Spanish, French, German, Greek, Italian, and many others that I have taken an interest in. The only languages that I would say I had any real success in learning however were Irish and Spanish. The former was something I learned in school in structured education but having not used it since leaving fifteen years ago my knowledge of it has faded quite significantly. As for Spanish, I can read and write and to an extent I can have conversations in it with relative ease. As for my continued development, I think I have reached a plateau where I can't improve my understanding and my proficiency without exposure to native speakers which I don't have.
I mentioned in my previous post that I have a condition called Nystagmus, and that this caused me to be short-sighted. Learning a language is one of the areas of my life where my eyesight unexpectedly proves to be a barrier for me. This shouldn't really be a surprise to me given that my time in Primary school wasn't exactly an enjoyable experience when it came to reading and writing due to my visual impairment. Simple things stand out in my mind like one instance of a teacher refusing to spell the word "Leaf" because there was a large diagram of a tree on a wall with each part labelled, no understanding at all given to the fact I couldn't read what was written there because I couldn't see it.
When it comes to learning, not just languages but anything in general, you need to have resources that are accessible. When it comes to languages themselves, there is no greater resource than examples of the language, and that is where you first run into problems when you have a visual impairment. Certain languages are more accessible than others. I happen to think those that use Latin based alphabets are the most accessible, and those that do not are the least accessible. For example when I first took an interest in learning Hebrew, I didn't make it past learning the alphabet for the simple reason that I realised I would have difficulty seeing it before you even got to what it meant. This difficulty was repeated when I looked at Arabic, a language with beautiful calligraphy but one that relies on observation of intricate detail. I had similar experiences with Mandarin Chinese and a number of other languages that used logographic writing systems.
I rely quite heavily on computers and the accessibility functions they provide, being able to change the size of fonts, and zoom in and out is essential for me to be able to read with ease. You would think this would mean I hate physical books but that's not the case. I like having a book that I can see and touch and smell, there's something incredibly satisfying about having that tactile connection. I just need it to be big enough for me to be able to read. When it comes to other languages, most references come in standard sizes, and if you can't read them comfortably then you don't often get an alternative. Your only hope of having that option is if you stick to text books that are intended for academic use as most of those at least do come with large print varieties or they use font sizes that are big enough to be read easily, especially if they are intended for children.
Over the years I have used many resources, from games for my Nintendo DS like My Spanish Coach which teaches vocabulary and some basic grammar, to websites like Duolingo which uses crowd-sourced translations to give more accurate translations and will accept anything that conveys the same meaning even if it's not a literal translation rather than relying on literal translations or machine translation. Duolingo also helps translate the web by feeding users content from the web that needs translated into their own language and using crowd based validation to confirm whether that translation is accurate. I've also used News websites written in other languages as a means to practice reading, this can help as the stories covered are often stories similar to those I have read that day in English so I at least have an idea of what the article is meant to be about before I start reading this makes it easier to know if I am reading it correctly or not.
One of the most useful resources I have found online however is the use of podcasts which provide natural conversations in other languages which gives you exposure to the language in a way you would actually expect to hear it, rather than an academic variant. If you only ever studied English in an academic setting for example you would probably get lost quite quickly having a normal conversation with people in the UK, that is if you can get around the accents which vary quite significantly from those you would hear through academic reference media.
The hardest thing to learn when learning another language however is the informal language, the slang, and colloquialisms, idioms, and the influence the culture of other countries have in shaping the language. Understanding a language at a native level involves living it, which if you can't completely immerse yourself in that environment is very hard to achieve.
I mentioned in my previous post that I have a condition called Nystagmus, and that this caused me to be short-sighted. Learning a language is one of the areas of my life where my eyesight unexpectedly proves to be a barrier for me. This shouldn't really be a surprise to me given that my time in Primary school wasn't exactly an enjoyable experience when it came to reading and writing due to my visual impairment. Simple things stand out in my mind like one instance of a teacher refusing to spell the word "Leaf" because there was a large diagram of a tree on a wall with each part labelled, no understanding at all given to the fact I couldn't read what was written there because I couldn't see it.
When it comes to learning, not just languages but anything in general, you need to have resources that are accessible. When it comes to languages themselves, there is no greater resource than examples of the language, and that is where you first run into problems when you have a visual impairment. Certain languages are more accessible than others. I happen to think those that use Latin based alphabets are the most accessible, and those that do not are the least accessible. For example when I first took an interest in learning Hebrew, I didn't make it past learning the alphabet for the simple reason that I realised I would have difficulty seeing it before you even got to what it meant. This difficulty was repeated when I looked at Arabic, a language with beautiful calligraphy but one that relies on observation of intricate detail. I had similar experiences with Mandarin Chinese and a number of other languages that used logographic writing systems.
I rely quite heavily on computers and the accessibility functions they provide, being able to change the size of fonts, and zoom in and out is essential for me to be able to read with ease. You would think this would mean I hate physical books but that's not the case. I like having a book that I can see and touch and smell, there's something incredibly satisfying about having that tactile connection. I just need it to be big enough for me to be able to read. When it comes to other languages, most references come in standard sizes, and if you can't read them comfortably then you don't often get an alternative. Your only hope of having that option is if you stick to text books that are intended for academic use as most of those at least do come with large print varieties or they use font sizes that are big enough to be read easily, especially if they are intended for children.
Over the years I have used many resources, from games for my Nintendo DS like My Spanish Coach which teaches vocabulary and some basic grammar, to websites like Duolingo which uses crowd-sourced translations to give more accurate translations and will accept anything that conveys the same meaning even if it's not a literal translation rather than relying on literal translations or machine translation. Duolingo also helps translate the web by feeding users content from the web that needs translated into their own language and using crowd based validation to confirm whether that translation is accurate. I've also used News websites written in other languages as a means to practice reading, this can help as the stories covered are often stories similar to those I have read that day in English so I at least have an idea of what the article is meant to be about before I start reading this makes it easier to know if I am reading it correctly or not.
One of the most useful resources I have found online however is the use of podcasts which provide natural conversations in other languages which gives you exposure to the language in a way you would actually expect to hear it, rather than an academic variant. If you only ever studied English in an academic setting for example you would probably get lost quite quickly having a normal conversation with people in the UK, that is if you can get around the accents which vary quite significantly from those you would hear through academic reference media.
The hardest thing to learn when learning another language however is the informal language, the slang, and colloquialisms, idioms, and the influence the culture of other countries have in shaping the language. Understanding a language at a native level involves living it, which if you can't completely immerse yourself in that environment is very hard to achieve.
Déjà vu
The words "Déjà vu" come from French meaning "already seen" and they express a feeling that we often get when we have experiences that we are convinced we have had before. Things begin to feel familiar to us, often with the ability to predict how things will progress and when they do progress as we predicted we end up in a state of mind similar to confusion where we wonder how or why we are apparently able to predict the future. There are of course many different explanations for this feeling and some attempt to give concrete reasons as to why it happens. Not all of these explanations are able to address the feeling in its entirety however and in some cases I do believe there is no suitable explanation that can be given other than to say that the truth is nobody really knows why it occurs in those instances.
One popular explanation for why the feeling occurs is that supposition that it is a momentary lapse in the brain's processing where something passes into long term memory before it is passed into short term memory this results in the normal process being interrupted, when the information is finally processed in the short term memory it connected to our long term memory making us feel like this is something we have prior experience of when in fact it is this experience itself that we are remembering just by different parts of the brain in the wrong order.
Whilst this explanation can be satisfactory for momentary feelings, it doesn't explain those situations where you experience an extended feeling of Déjà vu. In other words it doesn't explain an experience that is continuing to happen where we can predict what is going to happen some time before it does, then we sit and observe and it then occurs. There are alternate explanations that do attempt to address these situations however. In a previous post I discussed the nature of three brains, the structure of the human mind posed by Sigmund Freud where the mind is split into the conscious, subconscious and unconscious mind, each with its own purpose. One explanation of Déjà vu is that it occurs when we experience with our conscious mind a scenario that the unconscious mind has anticipated, already run through all the permutations of what might happen, and is feeding our conscious mind through the subconscious, information about what is going to happen next. In other words our unconscious mind realizes "hey I've seen this before, this happens next..." and our subconscious then suggests what might happen next, and as each event occurs the unconscious mind continues "and then this happened..." and the whole scenario plays out with the feeling of Déjà vu ending when we reach the limit of the unconscious mind's prior simulation.
I really like this explanation because to me it fits most succinctly with my experiences of Déjà vu. There is one other type of experience however that I feel the need to mention, that is the scenario where we realise we have actually experienced these events before, not just because they feel familiar but because they really did happen before. This whole post was inspired by an app I installed on my phone thinking it was the first time I had done so. It was a game and I played through it for some days with varying degrees of success. I eventually hit a wall where I could not progress and spent some time trying to overcome the obstacle. In the repetition of that time, I began to feel frustrated, it was only then when I was becoming fixated on the game that I had a sudden realisation that I had played this game before, and I had never managed to pass that level. I believe in that moment the frustration of the game had passed the content to my unconscious mind to process at which point it recognised it and simply responded "we've done this before and we couldn't solve it last time either" which led to the realisation I had installed the app many years ago on a different phone. I had completely forgotten that fact. So sometimes Déjà vu isn't something mystical or mysterious, sometimes it really does just mean, you have seen it before, maybe you just don't remember where or when, but you have.
Déjà vu represents something enigmatic about the way we process our experiences. We have made many advances in medical science and we have advanced fields like psychology by a great deal in recent decades, but there is still so much about our minds that we do not understand. In particular when you begin to study psychology to any great extent, either academically or out of interest like I did, you begin to realise that many of the theories and the approaches that are still dominant within the field today are decades old and whilst they have been challenged many times, those that have hung around have done so because they are often the simplest explanations that make the least assumptions. Whilst our technology may be progressing, we as human beings have changed very little in terms of the way we work inside. Evolution in this regard is incredibly slow, and there is an argument that can be made that would posit that human evolution has effectively halted in terms of our physiology because we no longer engage in natural selection - the latter of which most people agree is a good thing, the former however poses an interesting question of what our future holds if we aren't adapting internally to a changing world.
One popular explanation for why the feeling occurs is that supposition that it is a momentary lapse in the brain's processing where something passes into long term memory before it is passed into short term memory this results in the normal process being interrupted, when the information is finally processed in the short term memory it connected to our long term memory making us feel like this is something we have prior experience of when in fact it is this experience itself that we are remembering just by different parts of the brain in the wrong order.
Whilst this explanation can be satisfactory for momentary feelings, it doesn't explain those situations where you experience an extended feeling of Déjà vu. In other words it doesn't explain an experience that is continuing to happen where we can predict what is going to happen some time before it does, then we sit and observe and it then occurs. There are alternate explanations that do attempt to address these situations however. In a previous post I discussed the nature of three brains, the structure of the human mind posed by Sigmund Freud where the mind is split into the conscious, subconscious and unconscious mind, each with its own purpose. One explanation of Déjà vu is that it occurs when we experience with our conscious mind a scenario that the unconscious mind has anticipated, already run through all the permutations of what might happen, and is feeding our conscious mind through the subconscious, information about what is going to happen next. In other words our unconscious mind realizes "hey I've seen this before, this happens next..." and our subconscious then suggests what might happen next, and as each event occurs the unconscious mind continues "and then this happened..." and the whole scenario plays out with the feeling of Déjà vu ending when we reach the limit of the unconscious mind's prior simulation.
I really like this explanation because to me it fits most succinctly with my experiences of Déjà vu. There is one other type of experience however that I feel the need to mention, that is the scenario where we realise we have actually experienced these events before, not just because they feel familiar but because they really did happen before. This whole post was inspired by an app I installed on my phone thinking it was the first time I had done so. It was a game and I played through it for some days with varying degrees of success. I eventually hit a wall where I could not progress and spent some time trying to overcome the obstacle. In the repetition of that time, I began to feel frustrated, it was only then when I was becoming fixated on the game that I had a sudden realisation that I had played this game before, and I had never managed to pass that level. I believe in that moment the frustration of the game had passed the content to my unconscious mind to process at which point it recognised it and simply responded "we've done this before and we couldn't solve it last time either" which led to the realisation I had installed the app many years ago on a different phone. I had completely forgotten that fact. So sometimes Déjà vu isn't something mystical or mysterious, sometimes it really does just mean, you have seen it before, maybe you just don't remember where or when, but you have.
Déjà vu represents something enigmatic about the way we process our experiences. We have made many advances in medical science and we have advanced fields like psychology by a great deal in recent decades, but there is still so much about our minds that we do not understand. In particular when you begin to study psychology to any great extent, either academically or out of interest like I did, you begin to realise that many of the theories and the approaches that are still dominant within the field today are decades old and whilst they have been challenged many times, those that have hung around have done so because they are often the simplest explanations that make the least assumptions. Whilst our technology may be progressing, we as human beings have changed very little in terms of the way we work inside. Evolution in this regard is incredibly slow, and there is an argument that can be made that would posit that human evolution has effectively halted in terms of our physiology because we no longer engage in natural selection - the latter of which most people agree is a good thing, the former however poses an interesting question of what our future holds if we aren't adapting internally to a changing world.
Send in the Clowns, actually don't
I hate interviews for many different reasons, but I don't think my hatred can be easily dismissed as an opinion, I believe there is scientific evidence that backs up my position and justifies my point of view. When you think about what an interview is meant to be, it's meant to be a meeting between people who work for a company and someone who wants to work for that company, designed to assess whether or not that person is the right person to fill a vacancy within that company. At least, that's what they are meant to be for, but I would argue most interviews don't actually do this.
In Psychology there is a principle known as the Hawthorne effect, this principle simply states that an individual's behaviour will alter whenever that individual believes they are being studied. In other words, if you feel like you are being scrutinized then you will behave in a way you think the person who is scrutinizing you would want you to behave. This principle comes from research that was gathered by a company known as Hawthorne Works. The principle has other names, often simply referred to as the Observer Effect, and there is a substantial body of evidence that backs up this principle and how it works in practice.
Psychological theories aside, apart from the fact that I don't feel people act naturally in interviews, there are other issues I have with the concept. For example, whenever you go through courses aimed at training people in interview techniques, one of the first things you learn is that what you actually say has very little relevance, how you say it determines everything. The percentage of relevance of what you say is inconsequential, the bulk of a person's judgement is comprised of the way they read your body language, your attitude, your diction, your accent, and all the non-verbal communication that you engage in with other people. In this regard, the conclusion I draw is that most interviewers are not judging you as to whether or not you can do the job or whether you are qualified but that they are simply grading you based on your interaction with others, how well you get along with others, and how well they think you would fit into their organization.
Cohesion is important and there is a balance to be found, but I think given how heavily the practice of interviewing people is weighted towards everything else but your experience there is very little surprise when you see people in jobs who are absolutely horrible at them and you are left asking how they ever got them in the first place - the answer is simple, they weren't interviewed based on whether or not they could do the job, they were chosen because they got along with the people who interviewed them or because those people thought they would get along with the people who worked there already.
This deficiency in judgement and identification of most qualified candidates is something that has been growing in our society, and I believe is one of the reasons why youth unemployment around the world is so high - because of the generational divide and the culture shift that those who are older fear if they were to employ too many young people in their organisations. The visibility of this deficiency in judgement has however grown to an inordinate size where it can't be ignored any longer. When you look at jobs that are incredibly high profile, in the public eye constantly, and under immense scrutiny, you can easily see how those who are not qualified and are not proficient in their field have taken those jobs. This isn't something that is simply a matter of opinion any longer, the fact that some of the highest profile jobs in the world have been filled by people who have no experience whatsoever demonstrates this is true objectively. The fact the President of the USA could ever be someone with zero political experience and zero real world experience of anything the job entails demonstrates that nobody actually cares whether you can do the job, all they care about is how convincing you can be towards those who have the power to put you into that position.
This isn't just true of the USA but of the UK and many other countries too. Those who would be best equipped to undertake the roles never make it anywhere near those positions. In many ways I do look to the future with anticipation, with the rise of Artificial Intelligence there is a guarantee that the most adept algorithm will be the one that prevails, that the most efficient processor will be the one that is used, that the most accurate results will be those that are eventually realised. When human bias is removed, then efficiency will be achieved because it will no longer be a case of likeability or popularity, it will be a case of technical expertise.
In Psychology there is a principle known as the Hawthorne effect, this principle simply states that an individual's behaviour will alter whenever that individual believes they are being studied. In other words, if you feel like you are being scrutinized then you will behave in a way you think the person who is scrutinizing you would want you to behave. This principle comes from research that was gathered by a company known as Hawthorne Works. The principle has other names, often simply referred to as the Observer Effect, and there is a substantial body of evidence that backs up this principle and how it works in practice.
Psychological theories aside, apart from the fact that I don't feel people act naturally in interviews, there are other issues I have with the concept. For example, whenever you go through courses aimed at training people in interview techniques, one of the first things you learn is that what you actually say has very little relevance, how you say it determines everything. The percentage of relevance of what you say is inconsequential, the bulk of a person's judgement is comprised of the way they read your body language, your attitude, your diction, your accent, and all the non-verbal communication that you engage in with other people. In this regard, the conclusion I draw is that most interviewers are not judging you as to whether or not you can do the job or whether you are qualified but that they are simply grading you based on your interaction with others, how well you get along with others, and how well they think you would fit into their organization.
Cohesion is important and there is a balance to be found, but I think given how heavily the practice of interviewing people is weighted towards everything else but your experience there is very little surprise when you see people in jobs who are absolutely horrible at them and you are left asking how they ever got them in the first place - the answer is simple, they weren't interviewed based on whether or not they could do the job, they were chosen because they got along with the people who interviewed them or because those people thought they would get along with the people who worked there already.
This deficiency in judgement and identification of most qualified candidates is something that has been growing in our society, and I believe is one of the reasons why youth unemployment around the world is so high - because of the generational divide and the culture shift that those who are older fear if they were to employ too many young people in their organisations. The visibility of this deficiency in judgement has however grown to an inordinate size where it can't be ignored any longer. When you look at jobs that are incredibly high profile, in the public eye constantly, and under immense scrutiny, you can easily see how those who are not qualified and are not proficient in their field have taken those jobs. This isn't something that is simply a matter of opinion any longer, the fact that some of the highest profile jobs in the world have been filled by people who have no experience whatsoever demonstrates this is true objectively. The fact the President of the USA could ever be someone with zero political experience and zero real world experience of anything the job entails demonstrates that nobody actually cares whether you can do the job, all they care about is how convincing you can be towards those who have the power to put you into that position.
This isn't just true of the USA but of the UK and many other countries too. Those who would be best equipped to undertake the roles never make it anywhere near those positions. In many ways I do look to the future with anticipation, with the rise of Artificial Intelligence there is a guarantee that the most adept algorithm will be the one that prevails, that the most efficient processor will be the one that is used, that the most accurate results will be those that are eventually realised. When human bias is removed, then efficiency will be achieved because it will no longer be a case of likeability or popularity, it will be a case of technical expertise.
Dying is Profitable
A letter arrived in the mail yesterday from a life insurance company offering me a life insurance policy. I'm 31 years old and this is the first time anything like this has been sent to me, up until now I wasn't part of the demographic that these advertising campaigns focus on. After the initial shock of being sent this offer, I stopped to think about why it got to me so much. The easy answer is to say that it is a reminder that you are getting old and that life insurance is a way of gently reminding you that you are going to die some day. I don't think that's what caused such a response from me personally though because I've never really focused on my age that much, I'm not the sort of person that dreads their next birthday and being another year older, it really is just a number to me.
So what was it about this letter that got to me so much? Well when I give myself a day or two to think about it and all that it entailed something dawned on me. The amount the policy would cover me personally for was around £60,000 [$77,000] at a premium of £6 [$7] per month. I've had a lot of things on my mind lately and most of them are not positive. Life is a bit of a struggle right now at times and having another worry to add to the list isn't something that is appreciated. I've noticed my finances slowly grow tighter and things are getting harder to balance, so much to the point that I've had to dip into savings to pay down some bills which I don't feel good about because honestly right now I feel like I will never get that money back, my savings will never be that high again.
When I think about how much debt I am in, there is a negative spiral of emotions that are evoked, to the extreme this leads to a feeling of complete despair. The past few years have not been easy as anyone who has been following my health journey on my other blog will know and attest to. My career prospects right now are quite bleak and the UK as a whole is teetering on the edge of recession and Northern Ireland where I live has already entered recession based on feedback from many businesses and knowing how my own finances are constricting I would assert that to be true too, even though official data does not acknowledge it, you can see the signs if you look. Shops are closing, restaurants are closing, prices are rising and the consumer can't keep up, even if wages are rising on paper, their purchasing power is not.
Add to all of the above the fact that today there is a summit in Brussels intended to try and reach a deal for the UK in its Brexit negotiations, will that happen? I honestly don't know and at this point I don't think it will make any difference whether there is a deal or not, remaining is the only course that could save our economy both in Northern Ireland and the UK as a whole but that now seems unlikely. Any Brexit in any form is going to fuck this country financially and at this point I think it is now inevitable.
Signs of hope for the future are few and far between. I've been actively avoiding the news, rationing my access to it because I know it only makes me feel worse and right now what I need is escape not further doses of reality that are too much to bear. I know I am not alone in all of this and that isn't a consolation, it only extends your worry by adding the people you love and care about to the list of things you worry about. My concern for the future and for my finances are not limited to my own but extend to my family's finances too because I know they are also struggling.
I have been suicidal in my past, and at one point I acted upon that, I am still here. The reason I am still alive I believe is because I am meant to be. I don't know why, but I have accepted that isn't an option for me, even if I went down that router one day again I believe something would happen that would keep me here. I realise how dark this sounds and I would like to allay the fears of anyone reading this I have no intention of going anywhere. I am going through a low point right now but I know I will survive, that doesn't make it any easier to endure though.
That letter that arrived got to me so much because if I am brutally honest with you and myself, the thought when I saw the £60,000 was that financially at least, my family and the people I care about would be better off if I was dead. That is an incredibly dark thought, and it is one that I recognise as incredibly dangerous. I know my family would miss me, and I know they love me and I know that they would never swap me for that money, if anything happened to me they'd probably give that and much more to bring me back, if they knew it could they'd find a way. What this made me realise though is that I am stronger in mind than I give myself credit for, and it also made me genuinely concerned for other people who might not be.
These advertisements are purely to generate revenue for the companies that send them out, but at what cost? When you offer credit to people there is a requirement in UK law to be a responsible lender and determine that the credit being offered is affordable to the person it is being offered to, as a means of protecting people who are vulnerable to exploitation. If such a thing exists for credit lines, why is there no equivalent precautions in place for life insurance? I understand that the company that sent this probably never even considered the mental health of the person they were sending it to, and I also understand that it's only an offer and maybe during the application process for the policy itself there would be some sort of evaluation that would recognise that this would be a very bad idea to offer something like this to someone like me, with my history. That doesn't change the fact that they sent this without considering any of this, and it doesn't change the fact that it has clearly had an effect on me.
Suicide is something that I don't really talk about, beyond the semicolon in my twitter name which was part of Project Semicolon a not for profit organisation that ran a campaign where those who participate would use a semicolon ';' as an indicator for those who knew about the project. The semicolon was a way of showing people you were a survivor and that you were there to talk if they were going through something similar or had been through it. The project I am unsure is still active as their website at time of writing was unresponsive and their social media profiles haven't been updated in some time.
Beyond the semicolon there isn't much indication that this is something I have been through. There isn't a register that companies can search, medical records aren't accessible to private companies without explicit consent granted by the patient and even government initiatives that share some medical information for research purposes conform to DPA and GDPR legislation by anonymising the data before it is shared so there's no way a company like this can check before they send this type of marketing information out.
What can you do then to remedy the negative consequences of this type of advertising? There are two main options I can think of, the first is to ban it completely which would be using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut and would likely be met with backlash and protest from the industry. The other means of reducing the impact of this type of marketing would be to remove the figures from the letter. Allow life insurance companies to continue to send out their letters informing people about their service but do not include individual tailored quotes with figures.
You might argue that you could simply opt out of this type of marketing, and my response to that is simple - I never opted in. When I sign up for anything online and fill out forms etc I always read that section about marketing and untick or tick the relevant boxes to opt out, I am certain I never signed up to this. What's more, I am 31 years old and the letter they sent has my age as 30 so I know they didn't get my details from any of my banks, or credit card companies or any other financial company and as for the electoral register I am opted out of the public register and only listed on the full register which companies can't use for marketing. So I have no idea where they got my details from, and having asked companies in the past for details as to where their data comes from, the same response is usually given which is a stock reply telling you they don't keep an individual record of the source of each piece of data they have and offer you a list of partners as long as your arm of who they share data with. It sounds lazy and I admit it is, but I don't have the energy to find out, it's much easier just to shred the letter.
So what was it about this letter that got to me so much? Well when I give myself a day or two to think about it and all that it entailed something dawned on me. The amount the policy would cover me personally for was around £60,000 [$77,000] at a premium of £6 [$7] per month. I've had a lot of things on my mind lately and most of them are not positive. Life is a bit of a struggle right now at times and having another worry to add to the list isn't something that is appreciated. I've noticed my finances slowly grow tighter and things are getting harder to balance, so much to the point that I've had to dip into savings to pay down some bills which I don't feel good about because honestly right now I feel like I will never get that money back, my savings will never be that high again.
When I think about how much debt I am in, there is a negative spiral of emotions that are evoked, to the extreme this leads to a feeling of complete despair. The past few years have not been easy as anyone who has been following my health journey on my other blog will know and attest to. My career prospects right now are quite bleak and the UK as a whole is teetering on the edge of recession and Northern Ireland where I live has already entered recession based on feedback from many businesses and knowing how my own finances are constricting I would assert that to be true too, even though official data does not acknowledge it, you can see the signs if you look. Shops are closing, restaurants are closing, prices are rising and the consumer can't keep up, even if wages are rising on paper, their purchasing power is not.
Add to all of the above the fact that today there is a summit in Brussels intended to try and reach a deal for the UK in its Brexit negotiations, will that happen? I honestly don't know and at this point I don't think it will make any difference whether there is a deal or not, remaining is the only course that could save our economy both in Northern Ireland and the UK as a whole but that now seems unlikely. Any Brexit in any form is going to fuck this country financially and at this point I think it is now inevitable.
Signs of hope for the future are few and far between. I've been actively avoiding the news, rationing my access to it because I know it only makes me feel worse and right now what I need is escape not further doses of reality that are too much to bear. I know I am not alone in all of this and that isn't a consolation, it only extends your worry by adding the people you love and care about to the list of things you worry about. My concern for the future and for my finances are not limited to my own but extend to my family's finances too because I know they are also struggling.
I have been suicidal in my past, and at one point I acted upon that, I am still here. The reason I am still alive I believe is because I am meant to be. I don't know why, but I have accepted that isn't an option for me, even if I went down that router one day again I believe something would happen that would keep me here. I realise how dark this sounds and I would like to allay the fears of anyone reading this I have no intention of going anywhere. I am going through a low point right now but I know I will survive, that doesn't make it any easier to endure though.
That letter that arrived got to me so much because if I am brutally honest with you and myself, the thought when I saw the £60,000 was that financially at least, my family and the people I care about would be better off if I was dead. That is an incredibly dark thought, and it is one that I recognise as incredibly dangerous. I know my family would miss me, and I know they love me and I know that they would never swap me for that money, if anything happened to me they'd probably give that and much more to bring me back, if they knew it could they'd find a way. What this made me realise though is that I am stronger in mind than I give myself credit for, and it also made me genuinely concerned for other people who might not be.
These advertisements are purely to generate revenue for the companies that send them out, but at what cost? When you offer credit to people there is a requirement in UK law to be a responsible lender and determine that the credit being offered is affordable to the person it is being offered to, as a means of protecting people who are vulnerable to exploitation. If such a thing exists for credit lines, why is there no equivalent precautions in place for life insurance? I understand that the company that sent this probably never even considered the mental health of the person they were sending it to, and I also understand that it's only an offer and maybe during the application process for the policy itself there would be some sort of evaluation that would recognise that this would be a very bad idea to offer something like this to someone like me, with my history. That doesn't change the fact that they sent this without considering any of this, and it doesn't change the fact that it has clearly had an effect on me.
Suicide is something that I don't really talk about, beyond the semicolon in my twitter name which was part of Project Semicolon a not for profit organisation that ran a campaign where those who participate would use a semicolon ';' as an indicator for those who knew about the project. The semicolon was a way of showing people you were a survivor and that you were there to talk if they were going through something similar or had been through it. The project I am unsure is still active as their website at time of writing was unresponsive and their social media profiles haven't been updated in some time.
Beyond the semicolon there isn't much indication that this is something I have been through. There isn't a register that companies can search, medical records aren't accessible to private companies without explicit consent granted by the patient and even government initiatives that share some medical information for research purposes conform to DPA and GDPR legislation by anonymising the data before it is shared so there's no way a company like this can check before they send this type of marketing information out.
What can you do then to remedy the negative consequences of this type of advertising? There are two main options I can think of, the first is to ban it completely which would be using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut and would likely be met with backlash and protest from the industry. The other means of reducing the impact of this type of marketing would be to remove the figures from the letter. Allow life insurance companies to continue to send out their letters informing people about their service but do not include individual tailored quotes with figures.
You might argue that you could simply opt out of this type of marketing, and my response to that is simple - I never opted in. When I sign up for anything online and fill out forms etc I always read that section about marketing and untick or tick the relevant boxes to opt out, I am certain I never signed up to this. What's more, I am 31 years old and the letter they sent has my age as 30 so I know they didn't get my details from any of my banks, or credit card companies or any other financial company and as for the electoral register I am opted out of the public register and only listed on the full register which companies can't use for marketing. So I have no idea where they got my details from, and having asked companies in the past for details as to where their data comes from, the same response is usually given which is a stock reply telling you they don't keep an individual record of the source of each piece of data they have and offer you a list of partners as long as your arm of who they share data with. It sounds lazy and I admit it is, but I don't have the energy to find out, it's much easier just to shred the letter.
Selling The News
Journalism was once a job that involved research, investigation, and the ability to communicate complex information in an easy to read way. The breadth and depth of the vocabulary, and the articulation employed by the journalist was determined by their target audience. Newspapers were divided into tiers, their physical form factor was an indication of the intended audience with tabloid sized newspapers intended for the widest audience and broadsheet newspapers intended for a more specific audience; it is quite ironic that this inverse relationship existed given the state of journalism as it exists today.
I would argue ever since the birth of 24 hour news channels the purpose of televised news shifted away from being a source of information provided as a public service to being a product in itself that began to focus on ratings. When this shift occurred, news sources essentially went from being a source of information to being a source of entertainment. That assertion at first glance reads as an incredibly perverse idea, however when you realise that entertainment in the broadest sense throughout history has always encompassed both comedy and tragedy perhaps best epitomised by the sock and buskin of ancient times, symbols which even today still serve as icons that represent theatre in the broadest sense which at its heart is about entertainment.
The growth of the internet as a means of accessing information accelerated this shift rather than reversing it. With instant access to information whenever you wanted it, these sources of news had to provide something more for the consumer to choose them over the swell of sources that were provided by the internet. As mass media grew as a concept, providing a plenitude of choice, so too did competition and the pursuit of ratings as a means of determining success. The lack of profitability from websites as services that were provided to consumers for free forced the providers of these services to turn to advertising as a means of revenue generation.
The online advertising industry exploded. Established brands with reputations that drew in visitors made the most money from online advertising in the early days with independent content creators struggling to make any income from their endeavours at all. This changed as the internet grew but we have now reached a point where a bell curve has emerged and we have returned once more to this division of revenue. Perhaps the best example of this curve in practise can be seen in YouTube, a website that was initially only profitable to established brands, which then expanded and proved lucrative for creators in a much wider sense but has now returned once more to being only viable to those established brands and those creators who have been successful at employing marketing strategies to achieve market penetration.
Despite this shift back towards the restoration of dominance by these established brands, the psyche of the consumer has not changed. As advertising grew and became evermore pervasive, consumers reached a point where they became desensitised to dishonesty. Seeing advertisements so often that made ostentatious claims that never held up to scrutiny caused consumers to come to expect a modicum of delusion, a complacency if you will. Consumers developed a mentality where they would buy into the claim yet embrace the cognitive dissonance of knowing the products they bought would not deliver on those promises.
There was a time when news programmes and websites provided the viewer with information about events and incidents after they had occurred in a reactive manner, as opposed to being proactive making predictions about what might happen. The latter was known specifically as speculative journalism and was primarily the focus of non-mainstream sources of news as they ultimately dealt with opinion and interpretation rather than fact. In this regard mainstream news sources could be interpreted as in essence supplying the viewer or reader with pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Over time you would collect the pieces and place them together in an attempt to form a more complete picture of the world. This is no longer the case, instead what we have is an industry that manufactures pieces of the puzzle and competes to sell those pieces to what has become a consumer.
The consumer in this regard still collects the pieces but rather than being encouraged to look at the picture that they create when put together, we are encouraged to buy the piece that is being offered to us. There are still those who focus on facts and reality who supply the pieces that you need to put together to create the picture that the puzzle actually depicts. However, we have reached a point now where rather than looking for the piece we actually need, we decide whether we like the piece that is being offered. Do we like the colour, does it appeal to us, do we like the person selling it to us, all of these questions now play a part in whether we buy the piece that we are being offered. There was a time when we understood that we didn't have to like the news for it to be true, if anything there was the expectation that we wouldn't like what we heard but that was the point. CNN, MSNBC, BBC, ABC, Fox News, Sky News, and have transformed into QVC and HSN.
I would argue that the USA is further gone than the UK in this regard as you can clearly see the sexualisation of news anchors on US networks as further attempts to sell the news to consumers as one of the cornerstones of modern marketing is the mantra that sex sells. The UK hasn't quite reached that level yet, but the same behaviour exists and the same relationship between the viewer and the newsreader as a question of likeability exists. As for those companies and organisations that provide news to the masses, they have recognised that their content is a product, information is a commodity. They also recognise that the consumer now sits with an incomplete puzzle and as they continue to reject the pieces that they don't like, there is a market to present alternative pieces that they do like. The result is a market where the consumer no longer cares about the picture they are assembling and only cares about two things, the first is that the pieces fit, and the second is that they like those pieces. What you end up with is a society filled with people whose puzzles now sit as a mash of pieces depicting many different images.
In the extreme, when you have a consumer that likes the pieces being offered to them by one source in particular you end up with someone whose puzzle depicts an entirely different image to the one it was meant to depict in the first place. As for the question of which picture is the right one, the answer is quite simply the truth. If all news sources reported the truth and nothing more then it wouldn't matter which source you used, the picture would be close enough to make out. In reality we don't get the luxury of being given the box showing the right image, and we don't get all of the pieces at once - at least not when it comes to things that are happening now. History books on the other hand are written and revised as new information comes to light and piece together everything with the benefit of hindsight to create a more complete picture of the world. This too is open to exploitation by those who want to push a narrative in that they provide the whole picture with all the pieces at once so it is much easier to manipulate the picture to include bits you want and exclude the bits you don't which only reinforces the point I made above, when all sources report the truth then the images are consistent when put side by side for comparison.
Without the benefit of hindsight, how then can you be sure that the information you rely on is accurate? How can you trust the news sources that you turn to so often? With addiction to this information and the fervent belief that we cannot function without knowing what is happening in the world, how can we protect ourselves from being manipulated? Again this comes back to the idea of consistency, you need to have multiple sources and they need to convey information that is broadly aligned. The trouble with trying to achieve this goal is that we live in a world of conglomerates, there is an illusion of choice when in reality those brands which at first appear distinct are in reality linked.
The best example I can give of this concept can be seen by a well known image in the UK which you can find here which depicts the illusion of choice in respect of consumer brands - there are essentially 10 companies that produce almost every thing we eat and drink despite there being hundreds of brands to "choose" from. This image dates back several years and went viral at the time of its publication. This illusion is common amongst many different industries and the publishing industries and broadcast industries in this regard are no different. To ensure that the narrative you are following is not biased then you need to ensure your sources of information are widespread and not simply sources of "churnalism" whereby the same story is rewritten many times and reposted with little or no verification of the claims made.
The most astute readers and those who are the most critical will already have realised there are still a number of flaws with this strategy, namely that it is easy to use this against the consumer by continuing to lie but ensuring the lie is consistent. Therein lies the biggest problem, we have reached a point where we doubt everything, whether we have good reason to or not, and have no motivation to put any effort into checking what we are told is actually true. Perhaps then the best advice is to accept reality and acknowledge that news as a source of information is a concept that has died and news as a form of entertainment is the world we now live in. If that is what you want to use as a foundation then there must be a recognition that you can't let news influence how you live your life, you wouldn't make life decisions based on the events of a soap opera as you know it's not real, why then would you make life decisions based on something you've come to accept isn't reliable and therefore cannot be trusted to be real either?
I would argue ever since the birth of 24 hour news channels the purpose of televised news shifted away from being a source of information provided as a public service to being a product in itself that began to focus on ratings. When this shift occurred, news sources essentially went from being a source of information to being a source of entertainment. That assertion at first glance reads as an incredibly perverse idea, however when you realise that entertainment in the broadest sense throughout history has always encompassed both comedy and tragedy perhaps best epitomised by the sock and buskin of ancient times, symbols which even today still serve as icons that represent theatre in the broadest sense which at its heart is about entertainment.
The growth of the internet as a means of accessing information accelerated this shift rather than reversing it. With instant access to information whenever you wanted it, these sources of news had to provide something more for the consumer to choose them over the swell of sources that were provided by the internet. As mass media grew as a concept, providing a plenitude of choice, so too did competition and the pursuit of ratings as a means of determining success. The lack of profitability from websites as services that were provided to consumers for free forced the providers of these services to turn to advertising as a means of revenue generation.
The online advertising industry exploded. Established brands with reputations that drew in visitors made the most money from online advertising in the early days with independent content creators struggling to make any income from their endeavours at all. This changed as the internet grew but we have now reached a point where a bell curve has emerged and we have returned once more to this division of revenue. Perhaps the best example of this curve in practise can be seen in YouTube, a website that was initially only profitable to established brands, which then expanded and proved lucrative for creators in a much wider sense but has now returned once more to being only viable to those established brands and those creators who have been successful at employing marketing strategies to achieve market penetration.
Despite this shift back towards the restoration of dominance by these established brands, the psyche of the consumer has not changed. As advertising grew and became evermore pervasive, consumers reached a point where they became desensitised to dishonesty. Seeing advertisements so often that made ostentatious claims that never held up to scrutiny caused consumers to come to expect a modicum of delusion, a complacency if you will. Consumers developed a mentality where they would buy into the claim yet embrace the cognitive dissonance of knowing the products they bought would not deliver on those promises.
There was a time when news programmes and websites provided the viewer with information about events and incidents after they had occurred in a reactive manner, as opposed to being proactive making predictions about what might happen. The latter was known specifically as speculative journalism and was primarily the focus of non-mainstream sources of news as they ultimately dealt with opinion and interpretation rather than fact. In this regard mainstream news sources could be interpreted as in essence supplying the viewer or reader with pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Over time you would collect the pieces and place them together in an attempt to form a more complete picture of the world. This is no longer the case, instead what we have is an industry that manufactures pieces of the puzzle and competes to sell those pieces to what has become a consumer.
The consumer in this regard still collects the pieces but rather than being encouraged to look at the picture that they create when put together, we are encouraged to buy the piece that is being offered to us. There are still those who focus on facts and reality who supply the pieces that you need to put together to create the picture that the puzzle actually depicts. However, we have reached a point now where rather than looking for the piece we actually need, we decide whether we like the piece that is being offered. Do we like the colour, does it appeal to us, do we like the person selling it to us, all of these questions now play a part in whether we buy the piece that we are being offered. There was a time when we understood that we didn't have to like the news for it to be true, if anything there was the expectation that we wouldn't like what we heard but that was the point. CNN, MSNBC, BBC, ABC, Fox News, Sky News, and have transformed into QVC and HSN.
I would argue that the USA is further gone than the UK in this regard as you can clearly see the sexualisation of news anchors on US networks as further attempts to sell the news to consumers as one of the cornerstones of modern marketing is the mantra that sex sells. The UK hasn't quite reached that level yet, but the same behaviour exists and the same relationship between the viewer and the newsreader as a question of likeability exists. As for those companies and organisations that provide news to the masses, they have recognised that their content is a product, information is a commodity. They also recognise that the consumer now sits with an incomplete puzzle and as they continue to reject the pieces that they don't like, there is a market to present alternative pieces that they do like. The result is a market where the consumer no longer cares about the picture they are assembling and only cares about two things, the first is that the pieces fit, and the second is that they like those pieces. What you end up with is a society filled with people whose puzzles now sit as a mash of pieces depicting many different images.
In the extreme, when you have a consumer that likes the pieces being offered to them by one source in particular you end up with someone whose puzzle depicts an entirely different image to the one it was meant to depict in the first place. As for the question of which picture is the right one, the answer is quite simply the truth. If all news sources reported the truth and nothing more then it wouldn't matter which source you used, the picture would be close enough to make out. In reality we don't get the luxury of being given the box showing the right image, and we don't get all of the pieces at once - at least not when it comes to things that are happening now. History books on the other hand are written and revised as new information comes to light and piece together everything with the benefit of hindsight to create a more complete picture of the world. This too is open to exploitation by those who want to push a narrative in that they provide the whole picture with all the pieces at once so it is much easier to manipulate the picture to include bits you want and exclude the bits you don't which only reinforces the point I made above, when all sources report the truth then the images are consistent when put side by side for comparison.
Without the benefit of hindsight, how then can you be sure that the information you rely on is accurate? How can you trust the news sources that you turn to so often? With addiction to this information and the fervent belief that we cannot function without knowing what is happening in the world, how can we protect ourselves from being manipulated? Again this comes back to the idea of consistency, you need to have multiple sources and they need to convey information that is broadly aligned. The trouble with trying to achieve this goal is that we live in a world of conglomerates, there is an illusion of choice when in reality those brands which at first appear distinct are in reality linked.
The best example I can give of this concept can be seen by a well known image in the UK which you can find here which depicts the illusion of choice in respect of consumer brands - there are essentially 10 companies that produce almost every thing we eat and drink despite there being hundreds of brands to "choose" from. This image dates back several years and went viral at the time of its publication. This illusion is common amongst many different industries and the publishing industries and broadcast industries in this regard are no different. To ensure that the narrative you are following is not biased then you need to ensure your sources of information are widespread and not simply sources of "churnalism" whereby the same story is rewritten many times and reposted with little or no verification of the claims made.
The most astute readers and those who are the most critical will already have realised there are still a number of flaws with this strategy, namely that it is easy to use this against the consumer by continuing to lie but ensuring the lie is consistent. Therein lies the biggest problem, we have reached a point where we doubt everything, whether we have good reason to or not, and have no motivation to put any effort into checking what we are told is actually true. Perhaps then the best advice is to accept reality and acknowledge that news as a source of information is a concept that has died and news as a form of entertainment is the world we now live in. If that is what you want to use as a foundation then there must be a recognition that you can't let news influence how you live your life, you wouldn't make life decisions based on the events of a soap opera as you know it's not real, why then would you make life decisions based on something you've come to accept isn't reliable and therefore cannot be trusted to be real either?
Think before you speak
When you first meet me, I can seem like a very shy person. If you get passed that initial barrier however you'll find that I'm anything but shy. The reason I seem shy at first is because there is so much that I think about, and so much that I have an interest in, that if I was to put it all out there from the start, it would be overwhelming. Beyond the scope of the things that interest me and occupy my mind, there's also a depth of feeling that I attach to those thoughts. The more you get to know me the more you come to understand that there are some things I feel very strongly about, some things that I am incredibly passionate about, and some things that bore the Hell out of me which I find it hard to hide. If I'm not interested in something, you'll usually be able to tell quite quickly.
When I am confident, when I feel secure in my surroundings and the company I keep, then I can be free and uninhibited. I say and do a lot of things without thinking, because I know the people around me, and I know they will understand when something is said with the intention to cause offence or insult, as opposed to things that really weren't premeditated. When it comes to meeting new people though, I often appear shy not because I don't know what to say, but because I am putting a lot more thought into what I say and I am observing much more than I am engaging, in an effort to judge the ground and be much more sure footed. This doesn't always work, even with people I know a little bit about, I can put my foot in it quicker than anyone and I deserve a medal for that.
The idea of stopping and thinking before you speak or react to other people is admirable in some respects, but it does make things awkward. When you are slow to react, other people get frustrated. There is a concept that I am my friends refer to as "the point of silence" which we use to gauge how comfortable someone is around us or other people. If you can endure silence, and not feel awkward then you have reached that point. If however you feel awkward in silence and feel the need to fill it then your relationship to those people is still insecure and hasn't reached the point where you feel truly comfortable. You can't force someone to arrive at this point before they are ready - that's one of the reasons why I think seeing a movie is one of the worst ideas for a date, because you sit in silence for an hour or two and can't talk to one another which doesn't alleviate the anxiety, if anything it can make it worse.
Whilst we can feel the desire and feel comfort in speaking without any inhibition, there can be times when even those we feel no judgement from might benefit from us taking a moment to think before we speak. This is really more about other people than it is about you after all, whatever comes to mind first for you is in your nature, it's not something you're intentionally doing, there is rarely true malice in words that are said with no premeditation. There can of course be offence, and there can be behaviours and language that are grossly inappropriate, and those shouldn't go unchallenged, but to bring about a change where you don't instinctively say those things or behave in those ways requires time, effort, and a bit of education before it sinks in, and above all else, the person has to want to change in the first place otherwise it just won't take.
The reason I stop and think about what I say when I am around people I know, who I don't think I could easily offend, is because I am assessing whether or not what I say is right - not in the sense of accuracy and truth, but in the sense of being something I actually feel right about. I've never been one to believe the idea that the way you have always done something is the way you should continue to do it - the world changes, we change, our lives grow, and we have to grow with them. You have to stop and think in life sometimes whether you want to keep walking down the path you have already walked, making the same choices you have already made a thousand times before. You'll never grow as a person without experiencing something new, and the same is true of your relationships with other people, and your relationship with yourself, you have to be willing to take a step further or a step in another direction if you ever want to end up somewhere new, somewhere you've never been before.
Think about the people in your life and think about the things you talk about most often, ask yourself why those things became the dominant topics of conversation between you, and then ask why you never talk about anything else to the same extent. Our opinions change, our experiences shape us as we grow, it's necessary to check in with each other once in a while about how you both feel about certain things to see if your assumptions still hold true. As people grow, you need to "update" the representation of them that you hold inside your head.
When I am confident, when I feel secure in my surroundings and the company I keep, then I can be free and uninhibited. I say and do a lot of things without thinking, because I know the people around me, and I know they will understand when something is said with the intention to cause offence or insult, as opposed to things that really weren't premeditated. When it comes to meeting new people though, I often appear shy not because I don't know what to say, but because I am putting a lot more thought into what I say and I am observing much more than I am engaging, in an effort to judge the ground and be much more sure footed. This doesn't always work, even with people I know a little bit about, I can put my foot in it quicker than anyone and I deserve a medal for that.
The idea of stopping and thinking before you speak or react to other people is admirable in some respects, but it does make things awkward. When you are slow to react, other people get frustrated. There is a concept that I am my friends refer to as "the point of silence" which we use to gauge how comfortable someone is around us or other people. If you can endure silence, and not feel awkward then you have reached that point. If however you feel awkward in silence and feel the need to fill it then your relationship to those people is still insecure and hasn't reached the point where you feel truly comfortable. You can't force someone to arrive at this point before they are ready - that's one of the reasons why I think seeing a movie is one of the worst ideas for a date, because you sit in silence for an hour or two and can't talk to one another which doesn't alleviate the anxiety, if anything it can make it worse.
Whilst we can feel the desire and feel comfort in speaking without any inhibition, there can be times when even those we feel no judgement from might benefit from us taking a moment to think before we speak. This is really more about other people than it is about you after all, whatever comes to mind first for you is in your nature, it's not something you're intentionally doing, there is rarely true malice in words that are said with no premeditation. There can of course be offence, and there can be behaviours and language that are grossly inappropriate, and those shouldn't go unchallenged, but to bring about a change where you don't instinctively say those things or behave in those ways requires time, effort, and a bit of education before it sinks in, and above all else, the person has to want to change in the first place otherwise it just won't take.
The reason I stop and think about what I say when I am around people I know, who I don't think I could easily offend, is because I am assessing whether or not what I say is right - not in the sense of accuracy and truth, but in the sense of being something I actually feel right about. I've never been one to believe the idea that the way you have always done something is the way you should continue to do it - the world changes, we change, our lives grow, and we have to grow with them. You have to stop and think in life sometimes whether you want to keep walking down the path you have already walked, making the same choices you have already made a thousand times before. You'll never grow as a person without experiencing something new, and the same is true of your relationships with other people, and your relationship with yourself, you have to be willing to take a step further or a step in another direction if you ever want to end up somewhere new, somewhere you've never been before.
Think about the people in your life and think about the things you talk about most often, ask yourself why those things became the dominant topics of conversation between you, and then ask why you never talk about anything else to the same extent. Our opinions change, our experiences shape us as we grow, it's necessary to check in with each other once in a while about how you both feel about certain things to see if your assumptions still hold true. As people grow, you need to "update" the representation of them that you hold inside your head.
Real Life Stories
I love autobiographies and I love hearing peoples' life stories. I know that some people have no interest in this sort of thing, but for me there's a reason why I find this so interesting. When I was younger and I moved from Primary School to High School, I knew I was gay, and I also knew that not everyone who found out would react in a positive way, in fact I was convinced at the time that most people if they knew would react badly. I deliberately sought to distance myself from everyone around me. I was a loner kid, there were a few people I spoke to who I considered friends but almost all of these boys weren't in my class. I went to an all male high school, and I felt that if anyone knew that I was gay they would bully me, ostracize me, and that really school wouldn't be a safe place. The irony here is that I was still bullied just not for being gay, and I was still ostracized, both by others and through my own self imposed isolation, and school was never a safe space for me not until college at least, so whether it was worth it or not seems like a moot point now.
During my high school years I watched other people around me and made observations. I learned a lot about people by the things they said and did when they thought no-one was listening or that nobody was watching. I also learned a lot about people through the realisation of the impact their actions had on those around them. This didn't stop when I left high school. Although I came out of my shell again in college and became a much more open person throughout college and University, I still watched people intently. The idea of "people watching" is a concept that some people claim to love but they don't do it in a way that they perceive natural behaviour. You can't deliberately watch someone and expect them to behave in a way as if they were not being watched. Observing people in this manner makes most people uncomfortable. Likewise you can't stalk a person and follow them around and expect to get a sense of who they are. You have to see them in normal social situations and you need to disinterested.
The easier path however is to find people that want to be watched, or that want to share as much as they can. I don't mean in an exhibitionist or voyeuristic way, unless you're both into that and it's consensual then have at it, I'm not one to judge. What I actually mean though is that you will find more people than you would expect who are willing to share everything with the world. Despite the fact I write this blog and the others detailing my thoughts on many topics and my journey through my health troubles, I share very little about my actual life. That's a conscious choice, I only share what you can find out on your own if you really wanted to, or what I want you to know. There is still plenty to consume however, as I've been quite productive in writing posts here. There are others who write blogs of their own, and there are those who go further and write autobiographies that detail their lives in a much more succinct and structured way.
The reason I love autobiographies more than anything else is because whilst our lives are long and filled with a plenitude of opportunities, we all live our own lives. We are not as different as we like to think, we all think in a similar way and we all behave in a similar way, my own observations have proven that to be true as far as I can tell, everyone has more or less the same insecurities and they feel self conscious for the same reasons. What can vary greatly however are our life experiences, this is where the autobiographies come into play. Right off the bat before you consider writing one, the idea that someone would want to read it is usually spurred on by the fact that you think something happened to you that doesn't happen to many people or that something set your life apart from everyone else. In other words most people who write an autobiography think their lives are interesting enough in the first place to even consider writing one, and for the most part this is usually true, although not always.
You have only one life to live, and there is a limit to what you can experience for yourself in that life. If you want to experience much more than this, then your only real option is to live vicariously through another, either through people you know who can tell you what it's like, or through another person documenting their experience. I hesitate to suggest social media as a tool in this regard as the world they paint a picture of through their social media profiles is often very inaccurate. As for an autobiography of course there is no guarantee that it will be any better or that it won't be a lie from start to finish, but at least the content is sufficient in length that the person who created it had to at least put thought and effort into producing it. There will be a narrative or an overarching theme to provide consistency and you'll get to see things as the writer sees them, this can be more illuminating than a social media post as it actually tells you their point of view rather than presenting something to you and expecting you to react to it. Social media after all is intended to be a place to engage and be social, although even that I think is a misnomer.
Nevertheless, I love autobiographies because they detail experiences that I will never have, and lives that I will never live, and they give me an insight into how other people think, feel, and react to events in their lives. The interesting thing about that as I said above is the fact that we're not as different as you would think, and we all approach things in a similar manner, so often you get to see how things would play out, either by reading and thinking "I would have done that too" or "What were you thinking, why would you do that!?" when presented with the scenarios they found themselves in and how they chose to respond.
During my high school years I watched other people around me and made observations. I learned a lot about people by the things they said and did when they thought no-one was listening or that nobody was watching. I also learned a lot about people through the realisation of the impact their actions had on those around them. This didn't stop when I left high school. Although I came out of my shell again in college and became a much more open person throughout college and University, I still watched people intently. The idea of "people watching" is a concept that some people claim to love but they don't do it in a way that they perceive natural behaviour. You can't deliberately watch someone and expect them to behave in a way as if they were not being watched. Observing people in this manner makes most people uncomfortable. Likewise you can't stalk a person and follow them around and expect to get a sense of who they are. You have to see them in normal social situations and you need to disinterested.
The easier path however is to find people that want to be watched, or that want to share as much as they can. I don't mean in an exhibitionist or voyeuristic way, unless you're both into that and it's consensual then have at it, I'm not one to judge. What I actually mean though is that you will find more people than you would expect who are willing to share everything with the world. Despite the fact I write this blog and the others detailing my thoughts on many topics and my journey through my health troubles, I share very little about my actual life. That's a conscious choice, I only share what you can find out on your own if you really wanted to, or what I want you to know. There is still plenty to consume however, as I've been quite productive in writing posts here. There are others who write blogs of their own, and there are those who go further and write autobiographies that detail their lives in a much more succinct and structured way.
The reason I love autobiographies more than anything else is because whilst our lives are long and filled with a plenitude of opportunities, we all live our own lives. We are not as different as we like to think, we all think in a similar way and we all behave in a similar way, my own observations have proven that to be true as far as I can tell, everyone has more or less the same insecurities and they feel self conscious for the same reasons. What can vary greatly however are our life experiences, this is where the autobiographies come into play. Right off the bat before you consider writing one, the idea that someone would want to read it is usually spurred on by the fact that you think something happened to you that doesn't happen to many people or that something set your life apart from everyone else. In other words most people who write an autobiography think their lives are interesting enough in the first place to even consider writing one, and for the most part this is usually true, although not always.
You have only one life to live, and there is a limit to what you can experience for yourself in that life. If you want to experience much more than this, then your only real option is to live vicariously through another, either through people you know who can tell you what it's like, or through another person documenting their experience. I hesitate to suggest social media as a tool in this regard as the world they paint a picture of through their social media profiles is often very inaccurate. As for an autobiography of course there is no guarantee that it will be any better or that it won't be a lie from start to finish, but at least the content is sufficient in length that the person who created it had to at least put thought and effort into producing it. There will be a narrative or an overarching theme to provide consistency and you'll get to see things as the writer sees them, this can be more illuminating than a social media post as it actually tells you their point of view rather than presenting something to you and expecting you to react to it. Social media after all is intended to be a place to engage and be social, although even that I think is a misnomer.
Nevertheless, I love autobiographies because they detail experiences that I will never have, and lives that I will never live, and they give me an insight into how other people think, feel, and react to events in their lives. The interesting thing about that as I said above is the fact that we're not as different as you would think, and we all approach things in a similar manner, so often you get to see how things would play out, either by reading and thinking "I would have done that too" or "What were you thinking, why would you do that!?" when presented with the scenarios they found themselves in and how they chose to respond.
Pity Dating
So right off the bat I have to acknowledge this is a strange concept and serves as one of those things that I didn't personally think was a thing until I came across other's experiences of it. I also have to admit that I was naive in that regard but we live and learn. It's also important to clarify before we begin that this concept goes beyond having a "type" - this goes much deeper.
When you think of the reasons you might want to date someone, the first and perhaps most common reasons are superficial for example you think they're hot, or you find something appealing about their physical appearance, or perhaps you go a little deeper and are attracted to their personality, maybe they make you laugh, or maybe they are someone who you have known for some time but have come to see in a different light. All of these things are pretty benign as motivations, most people would consider them normal and nothing untoward and that these motivations will lead to varying degrees of success when it comes to the longevity of the connection you establish with the other person.
Take a step beyond the benign however and into the more manipulative and vindictive world of dating and there are darker motivations that drive people, for example people who specifically look for signs of wealth, or others who treat the whole process like a job application and vet their potential partners by their perceived pedigree based on their employment record and future job prospects, people who pursue relationships with others out of spite for a third person, there are many more reasons that are undoubtedly unhealthy and one would hope would be doomed to failure although the cynic in me has to wonder how many people get so deep into relationships that they reach a point where they feel it's no longer possible to leave - that's a very heavy topic which needs an entire post in and of itself to discuss.
All of these concepts however seem pretty straight forward and easy to understand. Go beyond these base motivations however and venture even deeper and you will begin to find some surprising reasons that people are drawn to someone. The most surprising to me is the concept of pity dating, that is, to want to date someone because of the express belief that no-one else would. That might seem strange and illogical to some people, and to be honest it did to me too, until I took the time to break down exactly what's going on when someone does this. To be clear this isn't about the reality of whether or not these people can find someone interested in them, it's purely about the seeker's perception.
After discussing this with a friend, we developed a few hypotheses; she used a turn of phrase which I think best describes the motivations of some people who do this, namely that they are looking for a "project" or a "fixer upper" - treating dating like buying a house, rather than looking for someone they are interested in they look for someone they can "fix" which also implies they perceive that person to be "broken" as it were and that their vision or their ideals are the definition of perfection.
For me personally, one of the reasons this makes me so uncomfortable is that I am aware that I have quite a few issues that stem from various traumatic events that I have endured and that many people wouldn't be able to handle the difficulties and complications that these issues cause. I am all too aware of the perception others have that any deviation from what they define as normal is something to be avoided. I do not see myself as weak, or broken, or something that needs to be "fixed" and I find the concept incredibly insulting. I don't think anyone has wanted to date me for these reasons, at least if they did then that was never something I realised, neither in the moment nor here and now with the benefit of hindsight, still paranoia attached to the revelation that this is a thing has now left me wondering about some of the people I have met over the years and what their motivations really were. I've written before about the idea that your history can be rewritten when your perception of it changes and you see events that you experienced in an entirely new light, I think in this regard I am still processing a lot of my past and re-evaluating it with this new information.
My own experiences aside, part of the reason I feel uncomfortable with this concept is because no matter the intent the person is displaying, no matter how harmless their motivation might be - if that's even possible in this situation - is that this whole concept heavily implies that the seeker in this scenario is a controlling person, and that they want to control another person and whether they openly admit it or not or whether they even realise it - maybe some genuinely don't, although again perhaps that is naivety - they are targeting people they perceive as weak and easier to manipulate whether they are conscious of it or not. As a side note I think this is misguided as in my experience people like me who have issues are usually the ones who react the strongest against the idea of controlling other people and can usually see attempts to do so quite plainly for what they are, however emotions can cloud our judgements and it's possible to be love-drunk even when that love isn't reciprocated.
The idea of dating someone because you think no one else would tells you a lot about the seeker. Whatever the criteria they use ultimately they are being guided by what they perceive to be abnormal in respect of what they define as normal. This can be anything, whether it's physical characteristics, medical conditions, mental health issues, this can even extend to race and religion in some instances - in effect any characteristic that places you in a minority. Using any of these and many more as motivations to date someone reflects a belief that they'd find it harder to find someone to date because of those things, and as I said before whether that's an accurate assumption is beside the point. This predatory behaviour is something quite perverse and has a lot in common with the realm of people who fetishize you for these attributes. These people who prey on others in this way are predatory, even if you do find it difficult to find someone who is interested in you, a predator is not the sort of person you would want a relationship with, and they are not the sort of person you could even hope to have a healthy relationship with at that.
What all of this says about those who possess this mentality is that there are many unresolved issues at play, without knowing more about them it would be difficult to understand why they behave in this way but it's important to recognise that these are not behaviours that can be simply changed with self awareness - cognitive behavioural therapy is necessary to identify why they are behaving in this way and try to resolve it, in other words, they need professional health, it's not something you can help them with personally if you come across someone who does this to you. To behave in such a way there must be a deep rooted insecurity if they believe their only chance of being with someone would only be with someone they think would have no other option. I said this implies that they are a controlling person and the reason for this assertion is that their behaviour tells you a lot about their concept of a pecking order or a caste system, and despite their own insecurities they perceive you to be beneath them.
I could go further but I don't think I should. This whole concept is to be blunt quite fucked up. Like I said at the beginning of this post, this is something I didn't think was real until I started reading much more about it. I said before, I have many issues, some of those are obvious when you first meet me whilst others you only learn about when you get to know me. I don't think anyone has done this to me but I do believe that the best way to protect yourself against people like this is to be aware that they exist and be aware of what they do as it will hopefully help you to spot the signs before it's too late.
When you think of the reasons you might want to date someone, the first and perhaps most common reasons are superficial for example you think they're hot, or you find something appealing about their physical appearance, or perhaps you go a little deeper and are attracted to their personality, maybe they make you laugh, or maybe they are someone who you have known for some time but have come to see in a different light. All of these things are pretty benign as motivations, most people would consider them normal and nothing untoward and that these motivations will lead to varying degrees of success when it comes to the longevity of the connection you establish with the other person.
Take a step beyond the benign however and into the more manipulative and vindictive world of dating and there are darker motivations that drive people, for example people who specifically look for signs of wealth, or others who treat the whole process like a job application and vet their potential partners by their perceived pedigree based on their employment record and future job prospects, people who pursue relationships with others out of spite for a third person, there are many more reasons that are undoubtedly unhealthy and one would hope would be doomed to failure although the cynic in me has to wonder how many people get so deep into relationships that they reach a point where they feel it's no longer possible to leave - that's a very heavy topic which needs an entire post in and of itself to discuss.
All of these concepts however seem pretty straight forward and easy to understand. Go beyond these base motivations however and venture even deeper and you will begin to find some surprising reasons that people are drawn to someone. The most surprising to me is the concept of pity dating, that is, to want to date someone because of the express belief that no-one else would. That might seem strange and illogical to some people, and to be honest it did to me too, until I took the time to break down exactly what's going on when someone does this. To be clear this isn't about the reality of whether or not these people can find someone interested in them, it's purely about the seeker's perception.
After discussing this with a friend, we developed a few hypotheses; she used a turn of phrase which I think best describes the motivations of some people who do this, namely that they are looking for a "project" or a "fixer upper" - treating dating like buying a house, rather than looking for someone they are interested in they look for someone they can "fix" which also implies they perceive that person to be "broken" as it were and that their vision or their ideals are the definition of perfection.
For me personally, one of the reasons this makes me so uncomfortable is that I am aware that I have quite a few issues that stem from various traumatic events that I have endured and that many people wouldn't be able to handle the difficulties and complications that these issues cause. I am all too aware of the perception others have that any deviation from what they define as normal is something to be avoided. I do not see myself as weak, or broken, or something that needs to be "fixed" and I find the concept incredibly insulting. I don't think anyone has wanted to date me for these reasons, at least if they did then that was never something I realised, neither in the moment nor here and now with the benefit of hindsight, still paranoia attached to the revelation that this is a thing has now left me wondering about some of the people I have met over the years and what their motivations really were. I've written before about the idea that your history can be rewritten when your perception of it changes and you see events that you experienced in an entirely new light, I think in this regard I am still processing a lot of my past and re-evaluating it with this new information.
My own experiences aside, part of the reason I feel uncomfortable with this concept is because no matter the intent the person is displaying, no matter how harmless their motivation might be - if that's even possible in this situation - is that this whole concept heavily implies that the seeker in this scenario is a controlling person, and that they want to control another person and whether they openly admit it or not or whether they even realise it - maybe some genuinely don't, although again perhaps that is naivety - they are targeting people they perceive as weak and easier to manipulate whether they are conscious of it or not. As a side note I think this is misguided as in my experience people like me who have issues are usually the ones who react the strongest against the idea of controlling other people and can usually see attempts to do so quite plainly for what they are, however emotions can cloud our judgements and it's possible to be love-drunk even when that love isn't reciprocated.
The idea of dating someone because you think no one else would tells you a lot about the seeker. Whatever the criteria they use ultimately they are being guided by what they perceive to be abnormal in respect of what they define as normal. This can be anything, whether it's physical characteristics, medical conditions, mental health issues, this can even extend to race and religion in some instances - in effect any characteristic that places you in a minority. Using any of these and many more as motivations to date someone reflects a belief that they'd find it harder to find someone to date because of those things, and as I said before whether that's an accurate assumption is beside the point. This predatory behaviour is something quite perverse and has a lot in common with the realm of people who fetishize you for these attributes. These people who prey on others in this way are predatory, even if you do find it difficult to find someone who is interested in you, a predator is not the sort of person you would want a relationship with, and they are not the sort of person you could even hope to have a healthy relationship with at that.
What all of this says about those who possess this mentality is that there are many unresolved issues at play, without knowing more about them it would be difficult to understand why they behave in this way but it's important to recognise that these are not behaviours that can be simply changed with self awareness - cognitive behavioural therapy is necessary to identify why they are behaving in this way and try to resolve it, in other words, they need professional health, it's not something you can help them with personally if you come across someone who does this to you. To behave in such a way there must be a deep rooted insecurity if they believe their only chance of being with someone would only be with someone they think would have no other option. I said this implies that they are a controlling person and the reason for this assertion is that their behaviour tells you a lot about their concept of a pecking order or a caste system, and despite their own insecurities they perceive you to be beneath them.
I could go further but I don't think I should. This whole concept is to be blunt quite fucked up. Like I said at the beginning of this post, this is something I didn't think was real until I started reading much more about it. I said before, I have many issues, some of those are obvious when you first meet me whilst others you only learn about when you get to know me. I don't think anyone has done this to me but I do believe that the best way to protect yourself against people like this is to be aware that they exist and be aware of what they do as it will hopefully help you to spot the signs before it's too late.
Talking to yourself
In a previous post I wrote about how I approach writing as a project. There was another motivation that I often have which I never mentioned in that post, and that is quite simply curiosity. As a writer you get to tell a story, but when you are sitting writing the story telling the reader what happens, you are present and you are following that time line that you are depicting without ever being fully conscious of where it is going. It is very dangerous to take a story and plan out in your mind or on paper how it will play out in every detail before you even write it. The reason this is dangerous is because you lose the curiosity of what happens next. "I'm not going to read it, I know how it ends"
I like to write as much as I can and then leave my work for quite some time. Part of the reason for this as I have mentioned before is so that I can proof read it and see my mistakes as the content fades in my mind sufficiently for me to actually have to read what I wrote and see what it says rather than what I think it says. Another reason why I do this is because it allows me as a writer to experience my work as a reader. When I return to something I haven't looked at in months or even years, I get to see how a reader would approach my work. I get to see whether they can follow it on first reading, because if even I can't follow it when reading it and I am the one who wrote it, then you as the reader have no hope in Hell.
Curiosity therefore plays a major part in the creative process for me. I don't like to plan things out in too much detail. I document things as I go along for reference, I record little bits of ideas and future plot points but I only ever create a skeleton when planning, I leave the meat to be added later during the writing process. I keep in mind a general direction of where I want a story to go and the narrative I want to create but I let the story tell itself. This does lead to dialogue between characters that I feel is more organic. Characters having conversations is one of the most interesting things about writing for me because when it comes down to it, you're really just talking to yourself. You let two characters with distinct personalities have a conversation and you see different thought processes emerge, and you witness a conversation that at times can be very surprising.
Some pearls of wisdom I have discovered over the years have come from my writing, when characters that I have an affinity with talk to characters who challenge their point of view, this allows me to challenge my own point of view by extension, but in a way that is safer to process. I get to displace the discomfort that I would normally feel in that situation onto the character I have an affinity with, this does lead to confrontations that play out arguments that I would never actually have with people in real life because in most situations I simply come to the conclusion that most people aren't worth the effort. In my experience people rarely change their minds, and most people just like to hear themselves speak, the irony in writing these conversations however is that both sides are extensions of you the writer so you're really hearing yourself speak all the time through your work - which I openly admit is incredibly egotistical and maybe that will give you an idea of the kind of mentality most writers have.
One such example is a conversation between two characters in one of my fantasy novels, where one character that I had an affinity with was making excuses as to why they never did something they could have always done, and the other simply responded by saying that "the ease or difficulty of making a choice does not change the fact it is a choice" - this is something that struck a chord with me when I wrote it because it made me rather uncomfortable when I had to accept that although they may have been incredibly difficult paths to take, there were paths I could have taken. If you had said this to me in person as someone else challenging my internal beliefs, your words would likely have fell on deaf ears. You can consider my closed minded for saying that, but I would argue this is the way most people react. This isn't about whether or not you are willing to listen to other people, listening in and of itself doesn't mean you have to agree, you just have to hear what they have to say, I would have heard those words but I wouldn't have accepted them said by anyone else, the fact that came from another part of me makes it much easier to accept. This mentality has been something that has stayed with me ever since, I recognise now that there are many things I do have a choice over, I simply choose the easier option.
It's a strange thing to have a conversation with yourself, and there is a question I have which I can't answer - do other people do this? I know that writers do, it's part of the job description, if you ever want to write a piece of work that incorporates more than one character you'll need to be able to have a conversation with yourself. As for everyone else, I don't know what goes on inside your minds so I can't answer that question. I do know that if you asked most people if they talk to themselves they'll look at you as if you're crazy, or as if you think they are crazy, that does make me wonder about whether or not you have to have certain mental predispositions to be able to become a writer. There have certainly been many writers through history who struggled with mental health problems, that makes me wonder if writing is more than just an art or a craft, maybe it is an affliction.
I like to write as much as I can and then leave my work for quite some time. Part of the reason for this as I have mentioned before is so that I can proof read it and see my mistakes as the content fades in my mind sufficiently for me to actually have to read what I wrote and see what it says rather than what I think it says. Another reason why I do this is because it allows me as a writer to experience my work as a reader. When I return to something I haven't looked at in months or even years, I get to see how a reader would approach my work. I get to see whether they can follow it on first reading, because if even I can't follow it when reading it and I am the one who wrote it, then you as the reader have no hope in Hell.
Curiosity therefore plays a major part in the creative process for me. I don't like to plan things out in too much detail. I document things as I go along for reference, I record little bits of ideas and future plot points but I only ever create a skeleton when planning, I leave the meat to be added later during the writing process. I keep in mind a general direction of where I want a story to go and the narrative I want to create but I let the story tell itself. This does lead to dialogue between characters that I feel is more organic. Characters having conversations is one of the most interesting things about writing for me because when it comes down to it, you're really just talking to yourself. You let two characters with distinct personalities have a conversation and you see different thought processes emerge, and you witness a conversation that at times can be very surprising.
Some pearls of wisdom I have discovered over the years have come from my writing, when characters that I have an affinity with talk to characters who challenge their point of view, this allows me to challenge my own point of view by extension, but in a way that is safer to process. I get to displace the discomfort that I would normally feel in that situation onto the character I have an affinity with, this does lead to confrontations that play out arguments that I would never actually have with people in real life because in most situations I simply come to the conclusion that most people aren't worth the effort. In my experience people rarely change their minds, and most people just like to hear themselves speak, the irony in writing these conversations however is that both sides are extensions of you the writer so you're really hearing yourself speak all the time through your work - which I openly admit is incredibly egotistical and maybe that will give you an idea of the kind of mentality most writers have.
One such example is a conversation between two characters in one of my fantasy novels, where one character that I had an affinity with was making excuses as to why they never did something they could have always done, and the other simply responded by saying that "the ease or difficulty of making a choice does not change the fact it is a choice" - this is something that struck a chord with me when I wrote it because it made me rather uncomfortable when I had to accept that although they may have been incredibly difficult paths to take, there were paths I could have taken. If you had said this to me in person as someone else challenging my internal beliefs, your words would likely have fell on deaf ears. You can consider my closed minded for saying that, but I would argue this is the way most people react. This isn't about whether or not you are willing to listen to other people, listening in and of itself doesn't mean you have to agree, you just have to hear what they have to say, I would have heard those words but I wouldn't have accepted them said by anyone else, the fact that came from another part of me makes it much easier to accept. This mentality has been something that has stayed with me ever since, I recognise now that there are many things I do have a choice over, I simply choose the easier option.
It's a strange thing to have a conversation with yourself, and there is a question I have which I can't answer - do other people do this? I know that writers do, it's part of the job description, if you ever want to write a piece of work that incorporates more than one character you'll need to be able to have a conversation with yourself. As for everyone else, I don't know what goes on inside your minds so I can't answer that question. I do know that if you asked most people if they talk to themselves they'll look at you as if you're crazy, or as if you think they are crazy, that does make me wonder about whether or not you have to have certain mental predispositions to be able to become a writer. There have certainly been many writers through history who struggled with mental health problems, that makes me wonder if writing is more than just an art or a craft, maybe it is an affliction.
Keep Going
I write a lot of short stories, some of these were compiled and published as an anthology, whilst others sit on my hard drive gathering dust. The latter are stories that I intend to take at some point and extend them in an effort to make them into full-length novels. When it comes to writing things which are longer, I need a routine, inspiration, and motivation. When it comes to these three things they are surprisingly hard to find when you want to write, especially when you want to take on a project that is a lot of work.
The first of the three is the idea of routine, by that I don't mean writing at a set time every day for however many weeks it takes to finish the project. As I have said before on this blog, creativity isn't something that you can switch on and off at will - at least for me it has never been like that. For me creativity has always been something that is fleeting, it comes, it stays briefly and then it leaves. I have bursts of energy and bursts of creativity and when they strike I create as much as I can. When it comes to writing short stories of novels for me this means writing for hours on end, for days on end until I hit a wall and have to take a break. I don't sleep very well at the best of times, primarily due to health problems so I at least have the luxury of being able to write long into the night when I am in that zone. Being able to do this repeatedly however is something that still eludes me. Often when I have a big project I want to work on I will write intensely for days maybe weeks and then stop, my work will sit for months, and in some cases for years before I return to it and continue where I left off. Not surprisingly you can probably tell this isn't my main source of income, if you wanted it to be then you would need to find some way of reliably tapping into your creativity, if you figure out how to do that, let me know.
Inspiration in many ways is like creativity itself, it is something that you can't reliably invoke. Inspiration is something that occurs to you in the moment. For me personally I use music quite a lot, podcasts of people talking, and I read every day - all of these things create avenues if you will, channels for ideas and thoughts to come to me. Music evokes feelings, emotions, and can change your state of mind. Music helps set a mood, happy music elevates, and sad music mediates. Podcasts open up a world of conversations and topics where lots of little things get introduced. Often the most interesting things you hear in podcasts that are centred around discussions are not the topic of discussion itself but all of the other little things that get mentioned in passing, all the ideas and experiences that filter through via a form of informative osmosis. Reading too opens up a whole world of thoughts, feelings, and emotions that aren't your own, but expose you to a wider reality than the one you find yourself within.
Motivation is perhaps the hardest of the three to find. The main motivation people assume you would have in order to pursue writing is income. There is the idea that if you can write you will be rich. Sadly the world doesn't work like that. Everyone by now knows the story of JK Rowling and how she became a billionaire through writing, the trouble with that storyline is that she didn't become a billionaire through writing alone. Her books did sell quite well, and she made a lot of money from them, but arguably she made much more from the fact they were later turned into movies. Most books never get turned into movies, and even those that do don't go on to be the success that the Harry Potter movie franchise went on to be. Ask Rowling if she could do it again and she'd probably be the first to tell you how unlikely it would be for her or anyone else to do that.
The other problem with this story line is that Rowling herself disputed the claim she was a billionaire and claimed it wasn't actually true. There is also the urban legend that she was a billionaire and gave so much away that she dropped off the billionaire rich list because of it, again as Rowling herself points out, she had a lot of money but she was never a billionaire. Most of the claim that she was centres around estimations and approximations of her wealth, that's all secondary information and guesswork, if she herself says it was never true, she's the person best qualified to inform you about her personal wealth.
When you write, if you choose to do it, there has to be a deeper motivation that money alone, if there is not then your work will be transparent and people will be able to tell the only reason you're doing it is to try and make money. This isn't just true of writing either, you can look at YouTube and see all of the channels where people are creating content. Those that have been truly successful and made it to the top, got there because they had a motivation greater than financial gain. Whilst you may make the argument that isn't the case, I think the fact that most of those who made it big on that site are still there, still producing content, even though they have supposedly made millions long ago from doing it, demonstrates a deeper commitment. If the only motivation you had was to make money and you make money then that motivation would die. There would be no motivation to keep going.
You can say that greed would drive people to want even more, but the truth is when it comes to money most people think it will solve all of their problems and it won't. There is an incline that you struggle against when you have no money, but once you earn enough or have enough to satisfy all of your basic needs and enable you to realistically buy anything you would like to buy, you reach a plateau which I like to refer to as the plateau of complacency. This represents a point where there is no net gain to you as an individual by furthering your own wealth. Increasing the amount doesn't have any impact on your quality of life. The only thing that changes is a number on a screen or on a piece of paper that says how much you have. If you can already buy anything you want to buy, can afford anything life throws at you, then there's nothing to really gain from furthering your own wealth.
You might then ask why people keep going after they have "made it" and don't simply retire, the answer to that is simple, they were driven by more than money, and that drive doesn't stop just because they get money. What you do, you must do because you want to do it, or because you need to do it, either way, there has to be something that motivates you. If you don't already have that motivation, it's hard to create it. If you aren't driven by desires of fame, fortune, success, notoriety, or acclaim, then it's hard to convince yourself that you should be, or to make yourself want those things. There is of course the inevitable question you have to ask yourself, should you want those things in the first place? The main reason most people who do want those things want them to begin with is because society has already convinced them they are things they want. If society never managed to convince you to want them by now, you're probably not going to have much success trying to convince yourself that you should want them.
The first of the three is the idea of routine, by that I don't mean writing at a set time every day for however many weeks it takes to finish the project. As I have said before on this blog, creativity isn't something that you can switch on and off at will - at least for me it has never been like that. For me creativity has always been something that is fleeting, it comes, it stays briefly and then it leaves. I have bursts of energy and bursts of creativity and when they strike I create as much as I can. When it comes to writing short stories of novels for me this means writing for hours on end, for days on end until I hit a wall and have to take a break. I don't sleep very well at the best of times, primarily due to health problems so I at least have the luxury of being able to write long into the night when I am in that zone. Being able to do this repeatedly however is something that still eludes me. Often when I have a big project I want to work on I will write intensely for days maybe weeks and then stop, my work will sit for months, and in some cases for years before I return to it and continue where I left off. Not surprisingly you can probably tell this isn't my main source of income, if you wanted it to be then you would need to find some way of reliably tapping into your creativity, if you figure out how to do that, let me know.
Inspiration in many ways is like creativity itself, it is something that you can't reliably invoke. Inspiration is something that occurs to you in the moment. For me personally I use music quite a lot, podcasts of people talking, and I read every day - all of these things create avenues if you will, channels for ideas and thoughts to come to me. Music evokes feelings, emotions, and can change your state of mind. Music helps set a mood, happy music elevates, and sad music mediates. Podcasts open up a world of conversations and topics where lots of little things get introduced. Often the most interesting things you hear in podcasts that are centred around discussions are not the topic of discussion itself but all of the other little things that get mentioned in passing, all the ideas and experiences that filter through via a form of informative osmosis. Reading too opens up a whole world of thoughts, feelings, and emotions that aren't your own, but expose you to a wider reality than the one you find yourself within.
Motivation is perhaps the hardest of the three to find. The main motivation people assume you would have in order to pursue writing is income. There is the idea that if you can write you will be rich. Sadly the world doesn't work like that. Everyone by now knows the story of JK Rowling and how she became a billionaire through writing, the trouble with that storyline is that she didn't become a billionaire through writing alone. Her books did sell quite well, and she made a lot of money from them, but arguably she made much more from the fact they were later turned into movies. Most books never get turned into movies, and even those that do don't go on to be the success that the Harry Potter movie franchise went on to be. Ask Rowling if she could do it again and she'd probably be the first to tell you how unlikely it would be for her or anyone else to do that.
The other problem with this story line is that Rowling herself disputed the claim she was a billionaire and claimed it wasn't actually true. There is also the urban legend that she was a billionaire and gave so much away that she dropped off the billionaire rich list because of it, again as Rowling herself points out, she had a lot of money but she was never a billionaire. Most of the claim that she was centres around estimations and approximations of her wealth, that's all secondary information and guesswork, if she herself says it was never true, she's the person best qualified to inform you about her personal wealth.
When you write, if you choose to do it, there has to be a deeper motivation that money alone, if there is not then your work will be transparent and people will be able to tell the only reason you're doing it is to try and make money. This isn't just true of writing either, you can look at YouTube and see all of the channels where people are creating content. Those that have been truly successful and made it to the top, got there because they had a motivation greater than financial gain. Whilst you may make the argument that isn't the case, I think the fact that most of those who made it big on that site are still there, still producing content, even though they have supposedly made millions long ago from doing it, demonstrates a deeper commitment. If the only motivation you had was to make money and you make money then that motivation would die. There would be no motivation to keep going.
You can say that greed would drive people to want even more, but the truth is when it comes to money most people think it will solve all of their problems and it won't. There is an incline that you struggle against when you have no money, but once you earn enough or have enough to satisfy all of your basic needs and enable you to realistically buy anything you would like to buy, you reach a plateau which I like to refer to as the plateau of complacency. This represents a point where there is no net gain to you as an individual by furthering your own wealth. Increasing the amount doesn't have any impact on your quality of life. The only thing that changes is a number on a screen or on a piece of paper that says how much you have. If you can already buy anything you want to buy, can afford anything life throws at you, then there's nothing to really gain from furthering your own wealth.
You might then ask why people keep going after they have "made it" and don't simply retire, the answer to that is simple, they were driven by more than money, and that drive doesn't stop just because they get money. What you do, you must do because you want to do it, or because you need to do it, either way, there has to be something that motivates you. If you don't already have that motivation, it's hard to create it. If you aren't driven by desires of fame, fortune, success, notoriety, or acclaim, then it's hard to convince yourself that you should be, or to make yourself want those things. There is of course the inevitable question you have to ask yourself, should you want those things in the first place? The main reason most people who do want those things want them to begin with is because society has already convinced them they are things they want. If society never managed to convince you to want them by now, you're probably not going to have much success trying to convince yourself that you should want them.
Scary Movies
The simplest definition of fear that most people will give is to say anything you are afraid of, or makes you feel scared, that is fear. I have to question whether this is actually true however because I've come to realise that there are things that I am afraid of, but I wouldn't consider them scary, and likewise there are things I consider scary that I am not afraid of which seems to negate that simple definition.
What can you find scary that you aren't afraid of? Well as it turns out, there's quite a lot that you can find scary which you aren't afraid of in itself, but you are afraid of the ramifications or the implications. For example, I find the rise of populist politics that mirror those of the second world war to be something that is scary, not because politics in itself is scary and not because the people that hold those views are scary but simply because the fact it has become so prevalent demonstrates the willingness of humanity to abandon its history and to discard the lessons of the past. The second world war reshaped the world in many ways, countries were born that didn't exist before it, and countries that existed before it faded into history. There were a lot of actions that were carried out by people which we looked back on with horror and asked how such extremism could ever become a reality, and yet we are now creeping ever closer to that reality once again, with the ultimate irony being that many of those people who were the most outspoken objectors to such actions are now riding that wave of populism - the opponents have become the proponents.
There is a quote, often attributed to Franklin D. Roosevelt, that says the only thing to fear is fear itself. There is wisdom in that regard because it recognises that fear is fluid, it takes many forms and it changes form at will. What we fear today we may not fear tomorrow, likewise what we love today may one day cause us fear. In the world of Harry Potter created by JK Rowling, a being exists known as a Boggart, a magical entity that takes the form of whatever the person fears most when they approach it. There's an interesting question to be asked about what we would see if we approached it ourselves. For me personally I don't know what it would turn into. That is not to say that I do not have fears, I have discussed that topic before on this blog, I do have fears they just aren't those that most normal people have e.g. death doesn't scare me. In terms of what physical manifestation of fear a Boggart could assume, I have no idea.
There are things I am afraid of, spiders etc, but those are not things I am incapable of overcoming. They are things that make me uneasy, and they do evoke a response of panic, but they are things that I can confront with relative ease. Something large enough to capture it under, take it outside, and release it, is sufficient for me, if there's no alternative then killing it is also an option. Fear in the true sense of the word I would consider to be something that paralyses us, something that we cannot confront. By that definition I don't know what would actually fit that descriptor.
When you separate the concept of being scared from the concept of fear, you inevitably turn to the former and ask yourself what it means to be scared of something. Most people will see "scary" movies when they are growing up. These movies are horror films, or thrillers that were designed to make the viewer feel uneasy but in a consensual way. Where fear is traditionally something we do not want, scary movies are something we elect to subject ourselves to with the active desire that they will scare us. This is inherently difficult to achieve because you are entering into a state of mind willingly which by it's nature is meant to be something you instinctively want to avoid.
I believe one of the reasons why movies particularly those released around Halloween are no longer seen as being scary is not because they aren't created with the same effort or creativity as they once were, but simply that the novelty has worn off. When these types of movie first came about, they had never been seen before, there was a novelty to them, and most people I know who witnessed them for the first time in their youth they never thought they were particularly scary. There is greater scrutiny that is placed on media as it has evolved and there are greater expectations of production value and realism. I believe one of the reasons why scary movies devolved to being synonymous with gore was because this was something that people generally never experience for themselves in real life, so they can't accurately judge whether it is realistic or not. Whereas classic horror movies showed depictions which people could more easily dismiss because they could ask themselves how likely the events would ever be to happen to them.
When you think of classic scary movies and ask people what their favourites are, most people will name Halloween type movies that objectively are not scary and arguably they never were. Ask people to name classic scary movies and your typical responses will be from the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, Friday the 13th franchise, or maybe those from the Scream franchise, all of which people will give varying degrees of fear they attributed to their first experiences but ask them if they are scary and you'll get a mixed response. Some people won't even name movies that are intended to be serious, they'll give franchises that incorporated degrees of dark humour and the occult, like the Child's Play franchise, or they'll name spoof movies that were designed to ridicule the genres like the Scary Movie franchise. Some people won't name movies that are scary at all but rather movies that were simply set at Halloween like Hocus Pocus.
There was a movement that sought to transform the dominance of scary movies with content that rather than inspiring fear in the audience, they just made them feel uncomfortable. If you could make the audience feel disturbed then that was a shortcut to notoriety. Movie series like Hostel and Saw took this idea to extremes, but again ask me if I would consider them scary movies and I'd still say no, they are disturbing I'll concede that much at least but that's not fear that you feel when you watch them. That begs the question, what movie are you actually afraid to watch? Some people are afraid to watch certain movies because of the occult nature and the topics they touch upon, for example the The Omen franchise, or The Exorcist but is that aversion really fear or is it just a desire not to dabble in something they perceive as dark. What is a scary movie?
What can you find scary that you aren't afraid of? Well as it turns out, there's quite a lot that you can find scary which you aren't afraid of in itself, but you are afraid of the ramifications or the implications. For example, I find the rise of populist politics that mirror those of the second world war to be something that is scary, not because politics in itself is scary and not because the people that hold those views are scary but simply because the fact it has become so prevalent demonstrates the willingness of humanity to abandon its history and to discard the lessons of the past. The second world war reshaped the world in many ways, countries were born that didn't exist before it, and countries that existed before it faded into history. There were a lot of actions that were carried out by people which we looked back on with horror and asked how such extremism could ever become a reality, and yet we are now creeping ever closer to that reality once again, with the ultimate irony being that many of those people who were the most outspoken objectors to such actions are now riding that wave of populism - the opponents have become the proponents.
There is a quote, often attributed to Franklin D. Roosevelt, that says the only thing to fear is fear itself. There is wisdom in that regard because it recognises that fear is fluid, it takes many forms and it changes form at will. What we fear today we may not fear tomorrow, likewise what we love today may one day cause us fear. In the world of Harry Potter created by JK Rowling, a being exists known as a Boggart, a magical entity that takes the form of whatever the person fears most when they approach it. There's an interesting question to be asked about what we would see if we approached it ourselves. For me personally I don't know what it would turn into. That is not to say that I do not have fears, I have discussed that topic before on this blog, I do have fears they just aren't those that most normal people have e.g. death doesn't scare me. In terms of what physical manifestation of fear a Boggart could assume, I have no idea.
There are things I am afraid of, spiders etc, but those are not things I am incapable of overcoming. They are things that make me uneasy, and they do evoke a response of panic, but they are things that I can confront with relative ease. Something large enough to capture it under, take it outside, and release it, is sufficient for me, if there's no alternative then killing it is also an option. Fear in the true sense of the word I would consider to be something that paralyses us, something that we cannot confront. By that definition I don't know what would actually fit that descriptor.
When you separate the concept of being scared from the concept of fear, you inevitably turn to the former and ask yourself what it means to be scared of something. Most people will see "scary" movies when they are growing up. These movies are horror films, or thrillers that were designed to make the viewer feel uneasy but in a consensual way. Where fear is traditionally something we do not want, scary movies are something we elect to subject ourselves to with the active desire that they will scare us. This is inherently difficult to achieve because you are entering into a state of mind willingly which by it's nature is meant to be something you instinctively want to avoid.
I believe one of the reasons why movies particularly those released around Halloween are no longer seen as being scary is not because they aren't created with the same effort or creativity as they once were, but simply that the novelty has worn off. When these types of movie first came about, they had never been seen before, there was a novelty to them, and most people I know who witnessed them for the first time in their youth they never thought they were particularly scary. There is greater scrutiny that is placed on media as it has evolved and there are greater expectations of production value and realism. I believe one of the reasons why scary movies devolved to being synonymous with gore was because this was something that people generally never experience for themselves in real life, so they can't accurately judge whether it is realistic or not. Whereas classic horror movies showed depictions which people could more easily dismiss because they could ask themselves how likely the events would ever be to happen to them.
When you think of classic scary movies and ask people what their favourites are, most people will name Halloween type movies that objectively are not scary and arguably they never were. Ask people to name classic scary movies and your typical responses will be from the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, Friday the 13th franchise, or maybe those from the Scream franchise, all of which people will give varying degrees of fear they attributed to their first experiences but ask them if they are scary and you'll get a mixed response. Some people won't even name movies that are intended to be serious, they'll give franchises that incorporated degrees of dark humour and the occult, like the Child's Play franchise, or they'll name spoof movies that were designed to ridicule the genres like the Scary Movie franchise. Some people won't name movies that are scary at all but rather movies that were simply set at Halloween like Hocus Pocus.
There was a movement that sought to transform the dominance of scary movies with content that rather than inspiring fear in the audience, they just made them feel uncomfortable. If you could make the audience feel disturbed then that was a shortcut to notoriety. Movie series like Hostel and Saw took this idea to extremes, but again ask me if I would consider them scary movies and I'd still say no, they are disturbing I'll concede that much at least but that's not fear that you feel when you watch them. That begs the question, what movie are you actually afraid to watch? Some people are afraid to watch certain movies because of the occult nature and the topics they touch upon, for example the The Omen franchise, or The Exorcist but is that aversion really fear or is it just a desire not to dabble in something they perceive as dark. What is a scary movie?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)