I love this time of year because there is so much food that I associate with it. A lot of that food is the kind that I don't eat all year round, things like mince pies I only eat around Christmas or the run up to it. I don't save everything for Christmas itself because if I did it would be far too much to eat at once. This time of year is filled with sweets, treats, and tradition. So here's a list of some of the things I love to eat at this time of the year.
Ever since I was a child I had a love of cooking. That has ranged from baking bread and pastries and tarts, through to roast dinners, savoury dishes, stir fry, and all sorts of things. Christmas is a time of year however where a few dishes have become a tradition for us and we prepare them each year. I will make Rum Truffles as a treat, usually the week before Christmas day. I first made these about 10 years ago now whilst I was at University they were one of the things I made when I came home to visit my family. These are sweet and have a bit of a kick to them and they leave you feeling warm and happy.
Desserts have a particular focus for us as a family, we usually buy or make a Bailey's Cheesecake which can be ate cold. This is something that is really more savoury than sweet. Other desserts include poached pears in a chocolate brandy sauce which I first had about 15 years ago now. The last major dessert of course is Christmas pudding, we get a chocolate variant that is a mix of a traditional Christmas pudding with chocolate added to the mix, with a melting middle chocolate centre the oozes out all gooey when you cut into it.
Most recipes we make this time of year come from a cookbook that I got when I was about 6 or 7 years old that was passed down to me, The Good Housekeeping Step-by-step Cook Book from 1980, the thing I love about that cook book is that it's from a by-gone era so most of the recipes are traditional. There probably isn't much in it which would still be considered healthy today if I am honest but of the many things we have made from it almost all were things we loved.
Aside from the things we make, we do buy a lot. As I said before mince pies are something I really only eat at this time of the year, so too are things like all-butter shortbread, apple and cranberry sauces, and for me Brussels Sprouts will always be a Christmas food even though you can buy them all year round, almost all of these foods you can, I just associate them with this time of year. Brussels Sprouts we prepare as roasted with buttered breadcrumbs, things as simple as carrots we turn into spiced carrots with a sprinkle of cinnamon, raisins, and sliced onions mixed in when boiling. Parsnips too get roasted instead of boiling, cut into quarters and drizzled with honey and a sprinkling of Rosemary.
Christmas dinner itself is always roast turkey and a roast ham, the latter is boiled first, then cut into two halves each roasted, one with a home-made orange and brown sugar marmalade glaze and the other coated in a honey and mustard glaze. To drink, as a kid this would always be the one time of the year we actually bought Shloer which is a non-alcoholic fizzy fruit press grape drink. Alcohol never really featured at Christmas for us apart from the Rum or Brandy used for some recipes when cooking.
As a kid I had my fill of chocolate at this time of year too, with tins of Roses, Quality Street, and Celebrations, which are all assortments of chocolate sweets. My favourite was always the Strawberry creme, Orange creme, or the Green Triangle which is a Hazelnut creme if I am not mistaken. Although not a treat as such I also usually get a bag of mixed nuts my favourites being the Walnuts which I like opening with a nutcracker. We never really had Chestnuts, I know that's a traditional food for this time of year but I can never remember having them, I'm not even sure how you prepare those, I assume they need to be cooked since the cliché is to have Chestnuts roasting on an open fire. I've also developed a penchant for pistachio nuts but I have to restrain myself with those because I'll sit and eat the whole bag in one sitting if I let myself. There's something therapeutic about splitting nuts, it's relaxing.
Another Argument
That time of year is almost upon us once again when families come together to celebrate the holiday season. Christmas is my favourite time of year, but there is something that I feel for many has become synonymous with that time of year and that is the inevitable arguments that they have either round the dinner table or during the season as a whole. I'd like to offer some advice if this is something you struggle with and it's something that has served me well over the years.
A long time ago I was very argumentative, I was angsty and felt like nobody understood me and that nobody ever would. There are times when I still feel that way but that's not really relevant here. The point was, I often had arguments with people because I felt they could not see my point of view and that they just couldn't see beyond their own perception. I still think this is true, but I think you eventually come to a realisation in life that some people will never change no matter how much logic or reason you present, they will hold onto their identity and their beliefs even if they come to think they are wrong they still hold onto what they know, reluctant to let go of that identity because there is a familiarity and a security in what they already know as opposed to embracing something new or unknown - especially when people are older they have less energy and enthusiasm to embrace anything new.
What changed for me was the realisation that the reason we argue with most people is something we don't like to think about or accept - we care what they think. You might start drawing in memories in your mind of arguments you have had with all manner of people, some complete strangers that you didn't even know and you might even argue that you didn't care what that person thought, I can see that sentiment but I don't accept it as true, I think you did care, the motivation might not be because you cared about that person, but rather they created an impression of you or your position that you didn't accept or didn't like or want to be associated with.
I've taken that realisation and extended it to become much more definitive and to become a guide for myself whenever I find myself in moments of conflict with other people. To hold onto this belief, that you only argue with the people whose opinion you actually care about, there are a number of reactions you can choose consciously when you experience conflict. The first is to stop and ask yourself "Do I really care what they think?" and be completely honest with yourself, if the answer is no, then ask yourself why you are wasting your time having an argument with someone you don't actually care about whose opinion ultimately doesn't matter? Learning to walk away or to just smile and nod and let people go is something that takes a long time to do, but it's worth it in the end if you can persevere.
The other reaction you can have in those moments of conflict when asking if you really care what they think, if the answer is yes, then stop and take a moment to recognise that the only reason you're having that argument in the first place is because you care about the other person and they probably feel the same way. Christmas time is a time for family and friends and togetherness, and that puts us together, but despite the fact that there is so much that binds us together we are still individuals, we are people, we have experiences, we have different points of view, and not everyone in life is going to agree with us. Our friends and family are no exception to this rule, what you have to decide is whether those differences are big enough that you can't be together or whether they really don't matter in the end. Recognise the love and the care you have for one another and if it gets too much just say "I don't want to argue about this" and try and move on.
You have a finite amount of energy, physically, mentally, emotionally, and figuratively in a spiritual sense, be conscious of what you expend that energy on, because you can't get it back. In everything you do that makes you feel bad, ask yourself is it worth it, and if you can walk away, and if you find that you think it's not worth it and you can walk away then do it, don't subject yourself to confrontation that you don't have to. There are a lot of expectations we place on ourselves and others at this time of year and the truth is that none of these are mandatory, everything is a choice. If you want to spend this time with hundreds of people around you or if you want to spend it on your own, that's your choice to make. Let your happiness guide you, and do whatever you think will make things easier for you. Pursue your happiness and listen to your own emotions to determine how you feel, do not let expectations and obligation determine your happiness. This time of year can be rough for many people because there are so many expectations thrown at us that it becomes nigh on impossible to meet them all, trying to do so will only make you crazy. The idea of a perfect Christmas is simply that, an idea, it should never be an absolute, and it should certainly never be a goal for perfection is an illusion you can never actually achieve it.
A long time ago I was very argumentative, I was angsty and felt like nobody understood me and that nobody ever would. There are times when I still feel that way but that's not really relevant here. The point was, I often had arguments with people because I felt they could not see my point of view and that they just couldn't see beyond their own perception. I still think this is true, but I think you eventually come to a realisation in life that some people will never change no matter how much logic or reason you present, they will hold onto their identity and their beliefs even if they come to think they are wrong they still hold onto what they know, reluctant to let go of that identity because there is a familiarity and a security in what they already know as opposed to embracing something new or unknown - especially when people are older they have less energy and enthusiasm to embrace anything new.
What changed for me was the realisation that the reason we argue with most people is something we don't like to think about or accept - we care what they think. You might start drawing in memories in your mind of arguments you have had with all manner of people, some complete strangers that you didn't even know and you might even argue that you didn't care what that person thought, I can see that sentiment but I don't accept it as true, I think you did care, the motivation might not be because you cared about that person, but rather they created an impression of you or your position that you didn't accept or didn't like or want to be associated with.
I've taken that realisation and extended it to become much more definitive and to become a guide for myself whenever I find myself in moments of conflict with other people. To hold onto this belief, that you only argue with the people whose opinion you actually care about, there are a number of reactions you can choose consciously when you experience conflict. The first is to stop and ask yourself "Do I really care what they think?" and be completely honest with yourself, if the answer is no, then ask yourself why you are wasting your time having an argument with someone you don't actually care about whose opinion ultimately doesn't matter? Learning to walk away or to just smile and nod and let people go is something that takes a long time to do, but it's worth it in the end if you can persevere.
The other reaction you can have in those moments of conflict when asking if you really care what they think, if the answer is yes, then stop and take a moment to recognise that the only reason you're having that argument in the first place is because you care about the other person and they probably feel the same way. Christmas time is a time for family and friends and togetherness, and that puts us together, but despite the fact that there is so much that binds us together we are still individuals, we are people, we have experiences, we have different points of view, and not everyone in life is going to agree with us. Our friends and family are no exception to this rule, what you have to decide is whether those differences are big enough that you can't be together or whether they really don't matter in the end. Recognise the love and the care you have for one another and if it gets too much just say "I don't want to argue about this" and try and move on.
You have a finite amount of energy, physically, mentally, emotionally, and figuratively in a spiritual sense, be conscious of what you expend that energy on, because you can't get it back. In everything you do that makes you feel bad, ask yourself is it worth it, and if you can walk away, and if you find that you think it's not worth it and you can walk away then do it, don't subject yourself to confrontation that you don't have to. There are a lot of expectations we place on ourselves and others at this time of year and the truth is that none of these are mandatory, everything is a choice. If you want to spend this time with hundreds of people around you or if you want to spend it on your own, that's your choice to make. Let your happiness guide you, and do whatever you think will make things easier for you. Pursue your happiness and listen to your own emotions to determine how you feel, do not let expectations and obligation determine your happiness. This time of year can be rough for many people because there are so many expectations thrown at us that it becomes nigh on impossible to meet them all, trying to do so will only make you crazy. The idea of a perfect Christmas is simply that, an idea, it should never be an absolute, and it should certainly never be a goal for perfection is an illusion you can never actually achieve it.
Listen to your body
A few posts ago I wrote that I only really eat when I am hungry, that I don't eat for the sake or eating and that I don't have a routine when it comes to food. This idea taps into something much deeper that doesn't just affect when and what I eat. I treat my body like it's not really part of me, which may sound weird at first but let me explain. I like to treat my mind and my body as being two spirits, two separate entities, they sometimes get along, sometimes they don't. I like to treat my body like I am a guest within it, that it has a mind of its own and that it does its own thing and that I'm here to guide it rather than controlling it. There is a mentality of symbiosis that persists for me through everything I do in terms of my health and my over all well-being.
To that end, I eat when I am hungry, I try and cool off if I feel too warm, I try and warm up if I feel too cold, and I sleep when I am tired amongst many other things. That last one as I have said before is something I have struggled with ever since I was a child. Insomnia has always been a part of my life and there was a time when I was obsessed with fighting against it but as I have grown older, whether I just don't have the energy or whether it has come about because of some great revelation I don't know but either way I have come to accept that if I can't sleep then I am not going to sleep so I may as well get up and do something. To that end I do feel like I sleep better when I can get it now than I did when I would lie in bed all night staring at the ceiling before passing out from exhaustion.
It's taken me a while to get here but I listen to what my body is trying to tell me. The more you start to think about this mentality though the more I think most people realise it makes sense. Your body does a lot without you having to tell it, your eyes blink, your lungs breathe, your heart beats, none of these things are consciously controlled, although some can be when you focus on them, a lot of them can't be controlled consciously. In that regard the divide between the part of you that is mechanical and the part of you that is spiritual is self evident.
I've wrote about past experiences with food and drink, notably the tequila story that left me throwing up for half the night and which led to my body to react quite violently when I tried it again a while later. The response demonstrated an awareness and a recognition, that my stomach in some way, maybe not in a literal sense, thought to itself "Oh no not that again, out now!" and threw it back up. That feeling though extends beyond negatives through to positive experiences too, your heartbeat stopping or skipping a beat when you see someone you have really fallen for, the butterflies you get when you are around them, and those experiences you have where you are overcome with joy or excitement when you're on a roller coaster or something else with great speed and you feel a rush that comes from your body's reaction more than your mind.
I don't know how long I will be here for, life can be short. In this life I only get one body and it has to last me as long as it can. I treat this body like I am a guest in it because I recognise that I can't control everything it does. I can tell it where to go, I tell it what to do, but I can't control how it reacts to so many things and this isn't just true for me this is true for everyone. Your biological processes are out of your conscious control.
It might sound weird to you but it's what works for me, and given all of the health problems that I have had in the last 2 years I've come to the realisation that my own mind probably doesn't know what's best for my body so I should trust it more, let it tell me what it wants, and it does have ways of letting you know if you do stop and pay attention to it. Most biological responses are simple enough to understand when you take the time to learn about them. I guess in many ways this is like the line you draw between those who can drive a car and those that know how it works and how to fix it, or those who just use a PC and those who can actually fix them when something goes wrong, there's a deeper understanding of what is happening, and an appreciation that all these things, cars, computers, and human bodies, are machines, the former made from metal and wires and the latter made from flesh and bone, but still a machine.
To that end, I eat when I am hungry, I try and cool off if I feel too warm, I try and warm up if I feel too cold, and I sleep when I am tired amongst many other things. That last one as I have said before is something I have struggled with ever since I was a child. Insomnia has always been a part of my life and there was a time when I was obsessed with fighting against it but as I have grown older, whether I just don't have the energy or whether it has come about because of some great revelation I don't know but either way I have come to accept that if I can't sleep then I am not going to sleep so I may as well get up and do something. To that end I do feel like I sleep better when I can get it now than I did when I would lie in bed all night staring at the ceiling before passing out from exhaustion.
It's taken me a while to get here but I listen to what my body is trying to tell me. The more you start to think about this mentality though the more I think most people realise it makes sense. Your body does a lot without you having to tell it, your eyes blink, your lungs breathe, your heart beats, none of these things are consciously controlled, although some can be when you focus on them, a lot of them can't be controlled consciously. In that regard the divide between the part of you that is mechanical and the part of you that is spiritual is self evident.
I've wrote about past experiences with food and drink, notably the tequila story that left me throwing up for half the night and which led to my body to react quite violently when I tried it again a while later. The response demonstrated an awareness and a recognition, that my stomach in some way, maybe not in a literal sense, thought to itself "Oh no not that again, out now!" and threw it back up. That feeling though extends beyond negatives through to positive experiences too, your heartbeat stopping or skipping a beat when you see someone you have really fallen for, the butterflies you get when you are around them, and those experiences you have where you are overcome with joy or excitement when you're on a roller coaster or something else with great speed and you feel a rush that comes from your body's reaction more than your mind.
I don't know how long I will be here for, life can be short. In this life I only get one body and it has to last me as long as it can. I treat this body like I am a guest in it because I recognise that I can't control everything it does. I can tell it where to go, I tell it what to do, but I can't control how it reacts to so many things and this isn't just true for me this is true for everyone. Your biological processes are out of your conscious control.
It might sound weird to you but it's what works for me, and given all of the health problems that I have had in the last 2 years I've come to the realisation that my own mind probably doesn't know what's best for my body so I should trust it more, let it tell me what it wants, and it does have ways of letting you know if you do stop and pay attention to it. Most biological responses are simple enough to understand when you take the time to learn about them. I guess in many ways this is like the line you draw between those who can drive a car and those that know how it works and how to fix it, or those who just use a PC and those who can actually fix them when something goes wrong, there's a deeper understanding of what is happening, and an appreciation that all these things, cars, computers, and human bodies, are machines, the former made from metal and wires and the latter made from flesh and bone, but still a machine.
My story
In a recent post when I wrote about struggling with my weight at the moment, I was reluctant to say a number of things because of the way I thought they would be perceived. That mentality was so pervasive that I wrote and rewrote the post until it reached a point I was comfortable with, and even then I still didn't feel completely comfortable posting it because I knew some people would probably react badly or roll their eyes at me when reading it. I've been thinking about this reluctance and I've come to question why I feel it at all. This blog after all is a diary of sorts where I document my thoughts and my feelings and I try to be as honest as I can about those. I thought that post in particular was self-indulgent but the truth is this whole blog is self-indulgent because it's meant to be.
When you read an autobiography or the story of someone's life and what it entails, you expect to hear about the person that wrote it. You don't expect the author to spend most of their time focusing on other people or one person in particular other than themselves, that's what biographies are for. An autobiography is meant to be their own life story from their point of view based on their experience and their observations and their conclusions - it's meant to be about them.
I grew up in the UK and there is often a joke that British people are repressed and that they don't talk about themselves or share their experiences or boast about themselves. There is truth to that stereotype as is the uncomfortable truth that most stereotypes whether we want to admit it or not usually stem from some grain of truth somewhere. The idea that you don't boast about yourself I feel is something that is learned at a young age. I've written before about my frustrations with education, the concept of conformity, and that feeling that you spend the first 16 years of your life being told it's wrong to be different and then you're expected as an adult to be able stand out, set yourself apart, and be different to be memorable.
If you spend your life behaving and thinking in a way that other people tell you to, in an effort to please them, you'll waste your life. That's the truth about pleasing other people and not putting yourself first, like that meme that did the rounds a few years ago that simply said "That's the problem with putting others first, you've taught them that you come second" which is something that struck a chord with me at the time and triggered a shift in my behaviour that I still find myself fighting against at moments like these. There should be no shame in telling your own story or talking about your life, it's your story, your life, you are the authority on it, nobody else can make that claim, no-one knows you better than you know yourself you just have to be willing to admit that to yourself and embrace it.
If you're here reading this blog in the first place it is because you have an interest in me, my life, or what I have to say. If none of those things apply to you, then I would have to ask why are you here in the first place?
I've said this is a definitively British attitude, and I stand by that judgement, that's not to say British people are the only ones that do it, they just have that expectation through the stereotype. I do think there is truth in the stereotypes of other nations that are regarded as being the opposite. The USA for example has spawned a stereotype of Americans that most of the world perceives as a nation of people who boast about themselves and their achievements, who want to be first in everything, who are loud, and who can be quite overbearing. The stereotype of the USA holds that every child from day one is taught to compete, that everything in life is a race, and that you're not doing good unless you're doing better than someone else and never be content if there is someone doing better than you then strive to best them.
I don't like either of these mentalities if I am completely honest, I don't like the idea that you have to repress yourself to fit in and I don't like the idea that you have to compete with anyone and everyone just to live. I want a middle ground, I want a balance, I want a world where we don't let people fall all the way to the bottom, we encourage them to compete but competition shouldn't be their purpose for being. Your self worth shouldn't be defined by where you are in regards to those around you. You shouldn't have to feel shame or embarrassment because you are different or that you have problems that other people don't. That which is right and that which is wrong shouldn't be defined by whether or not it's happening to you, and what is happening to others should not determine the validity of your feelings, every feeling is valid, every emotion no matter how positive or negative it is something that you feel and you need to own and confront.
When you read an autobiography or the story of someone's life and what it entails, you expect to hear about the person that wrote it. You don't expect the author to spend most of their time focusing on other people or one person in particular other than themselves, that's what biographies are for. An autobiography is meant to be their own life story from their point of view based on their experience and their observations and their conclusions - it's meant to be about them.
I grew up in the UK and there is often a joke that British people are repressed and that they don't talk about themselves or share their experiences or boast about themselves. There is truth to that stereotype as is the uncomfortable truth that most stereotypes whether we want to admit it or not usually stem from some grain of truth somewhere. The idea that you don't boast about yourself I feel is something that is learned at a young age. I've written before about my frustrations with education, the concept of conformity, and that feeling that you spend the first 16 years of your life being told it's wrong to be different and then you're expected as an adult to be able stand out, set yourself apart, and be different to be memorable.
If you spend your life behaving and thinking in a way that other people tell you to, in an effort to please them, you'll waste your life. That's the truth about pleasing other people and not putting yourself first, like that meme that did the rounds a few years ago that simply said "That's the problem with putting others first, you've taught them that you come second" which is something that struck a chord with me at the time and triggered a shift in my behaviour that I still find myself fighting against at moments like these. There should be no shame in telling your own story or talking about your life, it's your story, your life, you are the authority on it, nobody else can make that claim, no-one knows you better than you know yourself you just have to be willing to admit that to yourself and embrace it.
If you're here reading this blog in the first place it is because you have an interest in me, my life, or what I have to say. If none of those things apply to you, then I would have to ask why are you here in the first place?
I've said this is a definitively British attitude, and I stand by that judgement, that's not to say British people are the only ones that do it, they just have that expectation through the stereotype. I do think there is truth in the stereotypes of other nations that are regarded as being the opposite. The USA for example has spawned a stereotype of Americans that most of the world perceives as a nation of people who boast about themselves and their achievements, who want to be first in everything, who are loud, and who can be quite overbearing. The stereotype of the USA holds that every child from day one is taught to compete, that everything in life is a race, and that you're not doing good unless you're doing better than someone else and never be content if there is someone doing better than you then strive to best them.
I don't like either of these mentalities if I am completely honest, I don't like the idea that you have to repress yourself to fit in and I don't like the idea that you have to compete with anyone and everyone just to live. I want a middle ground, I want a balance, I want a world where we don't let people fall all the way to the bottom, we encourage them to compete but competition shouldn't be their purpose for being. Your self worth shouldn't be defined by where you are in regards to those around you. You shouldn't have to feel shame or embarrassment because you are different or that you have problems that other people don't. That which is right and that which is wrong shouldn't be defined by whether or not it's happening to you, and what is happening to others should not determine the validity of your feelings, every feeling is valid, every emotion no matter how positive or negative it is something that you feel and you need to own and confront.
Sensory Expansion
If you were sightless, tasteless, touchless, deaf, and you were incapable of smelling anything, then bereft of your five senses, would you still be able to perceive the world? The concept of existing through these five senses alone is rather archaic, the answer to the question above is yes you would still be able to perceive the world even without those senses your consciousness in and of itself would continue to exist and you would still be able to think and feel things even if you didn't have the ability to do that in a literal sense.
One of the things about Artificial Intelligence that I find fascinating is the fact that traditional approaches to its development took this idea in reverse, developing a consciousness first before giving it the ability to sense things. Perhaps this is why a truly sentient AI was something that we initially thought would never be possible, because we were going about the process in the wrong order. The algorithmic representation of evolution is incredibly simple, you make varying changes and if those changes do not hinder the progress of the subject then the algorithm continues. There is no verification nor validation with evolution, you can develop defects and hindrances which do not impede the advancement of the subject initially so they persist long after they first appear. Many genetic conditions are examples of this in practice, there was no part of the evolutionary algorithm that removed those defects when they occurred. There is a concept known as natural selection which is often paired with evolution as being a form of validation whereby only the strongest of a species survives and the weakest die off, but again that isn't an accurate definition in practice, it would be truer to say that only those who do not develop fatal flaws go on to reproduce. There's an important distinction to make here in that natural selection doesn't determine what is the best or most effective solution, just that which can survive, the two are not synonymous.
When you look at Humanity and the focus it has on the five senses that we traditionally use to define our perception of the world, there are many arguments made about possible additions to those senses. I'm not talking about extrasensory perception - ESP, the traditional descriptor of claimed psychic abilities - although there is something to be said about those claims, they aren't the focus here. Instead the focus is on things like intuition and spatial awareness, abilities that most human possess but in themselves are often deemed as secondary senses because they rely on one or more of the primary five senses. Spatial awareness as an example relies quite heavily on your sense of hearing and your sense of sight to be able to be aware of your surroundings and to be able to position yourself within a conceptual 3D space within your mind.
Other abilities that we possess like the ability to sense temperature, heat and cold, are extensions of our sense of touch and feeling, but beyond these extensions there are many things that we can do which cannot be explained by these five senses alone. The fact that you would still be aware of your existence even if you were to lose all five senses demonstrates that there is a sense of being that persists that goes beyond those five senses. Your sense of balance also persists in the absence of the first five senses, you can still tell if you are the right way up or not, and whether you can walk upright, although we associate these heavily with our other senses and we may rely on them in part for them, this sense would not disappear without them.
When it comes to machines and the potential they hold, one of the things I find intriguing to ponder is the idea what we will be able to give machines senses that we do not possess. We cannot hear radio waves, we cannot see radiation, we cannot feel magnetic fields, or see heat, yet these are all things it is trivial to enable a machine to be able to do. These are all things which we have been able to create sensors to measure for decades now. This does open up an interesting question about the limit of human progression and how much further machines will be able to go ahead of us with these abilities. If we have achieved all that we have as a species using those five basic senses and the others that we continue to debate, then what might a machine be able to achieve with these abilities?
Further still, the range of our perception within our five basic senses is limited, taking hearing for example most humans can hear between 20 Hz and 20 KHz, some people can hear beyond those limits, and many more hear much less. Our ability to hear diminishes with age, what advantage will be given to machines that can simply replace sensors when they are no longer efficient, or whenever more powerful sensors come along. How different would our experience of the world be if you could widen the bandwidth of electromagnetic radiation that we perceive as the visible spectrum, if you could expand human hearing form as low as 1 Hz to highs of MHz, or GHz? The limit of what we refer to as acoustic sound is that of human hearing, just as the limits of the spectrum of visible light within the electromagnetic spectrum is defined by what humans can see, both of these scales can go much higher than we can perceive. Sound for example in terms of acoustic frequency can in theory enter GHz, that's just difficult to produce. What might the world look like and sound like with perception expanded to such extreme limits?
One of the things about Artificial Intelligence that I find fascinating is the fact that traditional approaches to its development took this idea in reverse, developing a consciousness first before giving it the ability to sense things. Perhaps this is why a truly sentient AI was something that we initially thought would never be possible, because we were going about the process in the wrong order. The algorithmic representation of evolution is incredibly simple, you make varying changes and if those changes do not hinder the progress of the subject then the algorithm continues. There is no verification nor validation with evolution, you can develop defects and hindrances which do not impede the advancement of the subject initially so they persist long after they first appear. Many genetic conditions are examples of this in practice, there was no part of the evolutionary algorithm that removed those defects when they occurred. There is a concept known as natural selection which is often paired with evolution as being a form of validation whereby only the strongest of a species survives and the weakest die off, but again that isn't an accurate definition in practice, it would be truer to say that only those who do not develop fatal flaws go on to reproduce. There's an important distinction to make here in that natural selection doesn't determine what is the best or most effective solution, just that which can survive, the two are not synonymous.
When you look at Humanity and the focus it has on the five senses that we traditionally use to define our perception of the world, there are many arguments made about possible additions to those senses. I'm not talking about extrasensory perception - ESP, the traditional descriptor of claimed psychic abilities - although there is something to be said about those claims, they aren't the focus here. Instead the focus is on things like intuition and spatial awareness, abilities that most human possess but in themselves are often deemed as secondary senses because they rely on one or more of the primary five senses. Spatial awareness as an example relies quite heavily on your sense of hearing and your sense of sight to be able to be aware of your surroundings and to be able to position yourself within a conceptual 3D space within your mind.
Other abilities that we possess like the ability to sense temperature, heat and cold, are extensions of our sense of touch and feeling, but beyond these extensions there are many things that we can do which cannot be explained by these five senses alone. The fact that you would still be aware of your existence even if you were to lose all five senses demonstrates that there is a sense of being that persists that goes beyond those five senses. Your sense of balance also persists in the absence of the first five senses, you can still tell if you are the right way up or not, and whether you can walk upright, although we associate these heavily with our other senses and we may rely on them in part for them, this sense would not disappear without them.
When it comes to machines and the potential they hold, one of the things I find intriguing to ponder is the idea what we will be able to give machines senses that we do not possess. We cannot hear radio waves, we cannot see radiation, we cannot feel magnetic fields, or see heat, yet these are all things it is trivial to enable a machine to be able to do. These are all things which we have been able to create sensors to measure for decades now. This does open up an interesting question about the limit of human progression and how much further machines will be able to go ahead of us with these abilities. If we have achieved all that we have as a species using those five basic senses and the others that we continue to debate, then what might a machine be able to achieve with these abilities?
Further still, the range of our perception within our five basic senses is limited, taking hearing for example most humans can hear between 20 Hz and 20 KHz, some people can hear beyond those limits, and many more hear much less. Our ability to hear diminishes with age, what advantage will be given to machines that can simply replace sensors when they are no longer efficient, or whenever more powerful sensors come along. How different would our experience of the world be if you could widen the bandwidth of electromagnetic radiation that we perceive as the visible spectrum, if you could expand human hearing form as low as 1 Hz to highs of MHz, or GHz? The limit of what we refer to as acoustic sound is that of human hearing, just as the limits of the spectrum of visible light within the electromagnetic spectrum is defined by what humans can see, both of these scales can go much higher than we can perceive. Sound for example in terms of acoustic frequency can in theory enter GHz, that's just difficult to produce. What might the world look like and sound like with perception expanded to such extreme limits?
2020 and Beyond
The year is coming to an end soon, with Christmas as the last big hurdle before we bring 2019 to an end, but as the year draws to a close so too does this decade. The 2010s are to give way to the 2020s and a new era will begin. I was listening to the WOW Report Podcast on Youtube and James St James was talking about the delineation of decades and how when we look back at the 70s, 80s, and 90s it's very easy to say this is what it was, and define that in terms of fashions, music, movies and other elements of pop culture, but with the turn of the century and subsequently the turn of the millennium there has been a melding that occurred where the past 20 years has almost blurred into one - at least, at first glance.
James brought up an idea that I have been dwelling on for a few weeks now and it's beginning to click in my mind, that is the idea of taking the past twenty years and instead of dividing it into two decades of ten years as you would expect, instead dividing it into two brackets the first lasting from 2000 through to 2012 and the second lasting from 2013 through to 2019 - the logic here is that the latter form the "teen" years as with the time of adolescence for most people and the former being the infancy and childhood years. The more I think about this concept the more it starts to sound quite disturbing when you take a step back and look at the state of the world.
The Millennium essentially serves as a point of birth, when new life was created, when everything that came before was cast off and a new hopeful future emerged, something which quickly crumbled in 2001 in the second year of the Millennium the terrible twos came to full force and wreaked havoc with our lives, war broke out and emotions ran high. An age of ignorance dawned where we were divided into those who knew and those who didn't want to know. The former felt the tumult and rode every high and low whilst the latter distracted themselves with toys and games, the iPhone came along and gadgets and really even though the internet existed it really came into its own when people needed an escape, a deep dark endless abyss into which they could pour everything they loved and hated about the world and seal it all up in one big box - Pandora's Box became Pandora's Cloud.
2012 was foretold to be the end of time and civilisation as we know it, that the world would end and everything would fall apart and nothing would ever be the same again, and in a way, it did. 2013 brought the formative teenage years and with them the angst and the whirlwind of emotion. When you think of the years leading up to 2012 there was a childlike innocence, a sneering at the joke that the world would end, the funny side was seen by most with only a few actually believing it, but once 2012 passed there has been a darkening of our mentality as a society, hope has slowly ebbed away and for many it was sweet or perhaps bitter sixteen that brought this to the front more than any other year. Politics aside, of which two great upheavals occurred that for the moment are irrelevant to this narrative as they are partisan, but what is not partisan is death itself and 2016 brought, or rather took from us some of the greats. One by one they fell on all sides and by the end of the year a climate of fear prevailed where every time someone's name trended on twitter you were afraid to click for fear that they too were joining the list.
Depression took hold and society began to regress, teenage rebellion rose up to full force and we became a society that was and in many ways still is more divided than ever. As 2020 approaches however we have to realise that the teenage years are behind us, for most at this point in their lives college or University is the time when great experimentation occurs as the adult self emerges. We've had the highs, the lows, the austerity, the indulgence, we've let our inner child run amok and we've seen now where we have ended up because of it. If the 2020s are to mirror life then the next decade going forward I see a world that tries to rebuild, that takes all that it was promised and all it aspired to and tries to build a life that encompasses all of those things. We will inevitably fail, that's the point of your 20s, you approach with optimism and renewed naivety the task of creating the perfect life, it's not until the 30s that you realise perfection is an illusion and compromise is necessary.
What all this has to do with here and now and the state of the world is simple, we are tired, we have endured what we have been told was necessary to get us to this point, and now we expect the pay off, we expect the world going forward to give us what we were promised and if we don't get it from the adults in the room who are supposed to be older and wiser, then come the 30s we will take it, and that generational divide will deepen. Your day is done, a new day has come, a new decade is dawning, and with it that renewed sense of optimism must be delivered.
James brought up an idea that I have been dwelling on for a few weeks now and it's beginning to click in my mind, that is the idea of taking the past twenty years and instead of dividing it into two decades of ten years as you would expect, instead dividing it into two brackets the first lasting from 2000 through to 2012 and the second lasting from 2013 through to 2019 - the logic here is that the latter form the "teen" years as with the time of adolescence for most people and the former being the infancy and childhood years. The more I think about this concept the more it starts to sound quite disturbing when you take a step back and look at the state of the world.
The Millennium essentially serves as a point of birth, when new life was created, when everything that came before was cast off and a new hopeful future emerged, something which quickly crumbled in 2001 in the second year of the Millennium the terrible twos came to full force and wreaked havoc with our lives, war broke out and emotions ran high. An age of ignorance dawned where we were divided into those who knew and those who didn't want to know. The former felt the tumult and rode every high and low whilst the latter distracted themselves with toys and games, the iPhone came along and gadgets and really even though the internet existed it really came into its own when people needed an escape, a deep dark endless abyss into which they could pour everything they loved and hated about the world and seal it all up in one big box - Pandora's Box became Pandora's Cloud.
2012 was foretold to be the end of time and civilisation as we know it, that the world would end and everything would fall apart and nothing would ever be the same again, and in a way, it did. 2013 brought the formative teenage years and with them the angst and the whirlwind of emotion. When you think of the years leading up to 2012 there was a childlike innocence, a sneering at the joke that the world would end, the funny side was seen by most with only a few actually believing it, but once 2012 passed there has been a darkening of our mentality as a society, hope has slowly ebbed away and for many it was sweet or perhaps bitter sixteen that brought this to the front more than any other year. Politics aside, of which two great upheavals occurred that for the moment are irrelevant to this narrative as they are partisan, but what is not partisan is death itself and 2016 brought, or rather took from us some of the greats. One by one they fell on all sides and by the end of the year a climate of fear prevailed where every time someone's name trended on twitter you were afraid to click for fear that they too were joining the list.
Depression took hold and society began to regress, teenage rebellion rose up to full force and we became a society that was and in many ways still is more divided than ever. As 2020 approaches however we have to realise that the teenage years are behind us, for most at this point in their lives college or University is the time when great experimentation occurs as the adult self emerges. We've had the highs, the lows, the austerity, the indulgence, we've let our inner child run amok and we've seen now where we have ended up because of it. If the 2020s are to mirror life then the next decade going forward I see a world that tries to rebuild, that takes all that it was promised and all it aspired to and tries to build a life that encompasses all of those things. We will inevitably fail, that's the point of your 20s, you approach with optimism and renewed naivety the task of creating the perfect life, it's not until the 30s that you realise perfection is an illusion and compromise is necessary.
What all this has to do with here and now and the state of the world is simple, we are tired, we have endured what we have been told was necessary to get us to this point, and now we expect the pay off, we expect the world going forward to give us what we were promised and if we don't get it from the adults in the room who are supposed to be older and wiser, then come the 30s we will take it, and that generational divide will deepen. Your day is done, a new day has come, a new decade is dawning, and with it that renewed sense of optimism must be delivered.
Audio Books
I love the idea of audio books but I don't listen to them that much. The reason I don't embrace them as much as you would probably expect is because I don't know how much I would take in if I only ever listened to a book and never actually read it myself. The main appeal of audio books is the fact that someone read it to you which is a lot less effort than reading it yourself. The trouble with that concept is that you have to sit and listen to what they are saying if you really want to pay attention to it.
I am a multitasker and I can do more than one thing at a time, I frequently write and listen to music at the same time for example. When you do more than one thing at a time however your attention is divided and you inevitably end up focusing on one thing more than the other. When I write and listen to music for example it is the subconscious mind that is entertained by the music and it is the conscious mind that writes. I actually think this is incredibly beneficial as a writer because our own mind can be a distraction and this act preoccupies the subconscious with something to do like giving a child a toy to play with whilst you work on something else. You just need to ensure that toy isn't going to cause a distraction for your conscious mind and in regard to music that usually means ignoring any music that contains lyrics. I listen to instrumental music, classical music, trance music, or EDM [Electronic Dance Music] as these are melodious, repetitive, or ambient, and don't provide anything your conscious mind really needs to pay attention to.
Combining music and artistic expression is really something I started to do in High School because our Art teacher had a Radio CD player and she let us listen to music whilst we worked so there was always energy in the room. The music varied quite a bit and the class was never really quiet. I took this and extended it to my writing and I found it to be very beneficial for me so I just stuck with it over the years.
When it comes to hearing someone speak however, when there is a narrative, that's a little harder to ignore because the detail distracts you. It's not really possible to listen to an audio book and follow it whilst doing something else at the same time, at least for me it never was. Audio books are something that I feel require my focus and attention, that also involves sitting or lying down and doing nothing else whilst listening. Those last two things are quite hard for me to do.
"What are you thinking?" I ask people from time to time "Nothing" they will often reply - I hate that response with a passion that runs deep to my core. I do not believe you if you give that response to me, mainly because I have never in my life been able to completely switch off and think of absolutely nothing, from the moment I wake to the moment I fall asleep there is always something I am thinking about, my mind is never completely silent. Maybe I am not normal and it really is possible to sit and think of absolutely nothing, but I remain intensely sceptical of that claim until I experience it for myself and over thirty years and counting now it's never happened. When people give this response I assume the truth is quite simply "I don't want to say" rather than the idea that they are sitting staring into space thinking of nothing at all.
The fact that I would have to sit and do nothing to really get into the story is partly why I don't listen to audio books that often. The ones that I do listen to are of books that I have already read myself. I prefer to have the physical copy in front of me or at least and ebook to read through and form my own image of it in my mind.
For the sake of balance there are a few positives to audio books that I can at least give to demonstrate that I can see both sides of the argument for them. Apart from the fact that it's less effort to be read to rather than to read, you do at least gain a better representation of the writing through an audio book. The reason I say this is because whether the author narrates the book or whether someone else reads it, the author will be involved in the recording process somewhere along the way. To that end an audio book is perhaps a better representation of things like pronunciation, intonation, accent, and narrative progression. An audio book establishes a pace through the person that is reading it, which give a greater insight into the artistic vision of the person who wrote the book to begin with - that is of course as long as the author was involved in the recording process, I have had experiences where the person reading it pronounces some things wrong that I know for a fact are pronounced differently because the author themselves have given interviews about the book and they said the correct pronunciation - I'm not going to say which book it was because the arguments that people have over this sort of thing are ridiculous, it's like the hard of soft G of GIF, Yanny Laurel, and THAT dress.
There are also times where the person reading an audio book can end up becoming the canonical voice in your mind of the characters in the book - assuming it was never made into a movie. This isn't something unique to audio books either, where there are games that are heavily driven by dialogue but no voice acting is used, the people who play these games on YouTube and give voices to the characters can end up being your canonical voice. JackSepticEye's version of Undertale for example established for me in my mind what I believe many of the characters from the game would sound like, there's also the fact that his play-through was the first time I became aware of the game, if I had played it before seeing his voice acting, I don't know if I would have connected so deeply with the narrative.
I am a multitasker and I can do more than one thing at a time, I frequently write and listen to music at the same time for example. When you do more than one thing at a time however your attention is divided and you inevitably end up focusing on one thing more than the other. When I write and listen to music for example it is the subconscious mind that is entertained by the music and it is the conscious mind that writes. I actually think this is incredibly beneficial as a writer because our own mind can be a distraction and this act preoccupies the subconscious with something to do like giving a child a toy to play with whilst you work on something else. You just need to ensure that toy isn't going to cause a distraction for your conscious mind and in regard to music that usually means ignoring any music that contains lyrics. I listen to instrumental music, classical music, trance music, or EDM [Electronic Dance Music] as these are melodious, repetitive, or ambient, and don't provide anything your conscious mind really needs to pay attention to.
Combining music and artistic expression is really something I started to do in High School because our Art teacher had a Radio CD player and she let us listen to music whilst we worked so there was always energy in the room. The music varied quite a bit and the class was never really quiet. I took this and extended it to my writing and I found it to be very beneficial for me so I just stuck with it over the years.
When it comes to hearing someone speak however, when there is a narrative, that's a little harder to ignore because the detail distracts you. It's not really possible to listen to an audio book and follow it whilst doing something else at the same time, at least for me it never was. Audio books are something that I feel require my focus and attention, that also involves sitting or lying down and doing nothing else whilst listening. Those last two things are quite hard for me to do.
"What are you thinking?" I ask people from time to time "Nothing" they will often reply - I hate that response with a passion that runs deep to my core. I do not believe you if you give that response to me, mainly because I have never in my life been able to completely switch off and think of absolutely nothing, from the moment I wake to the moment I fall asleep there is always something I am thinking about, my mind is never completely silent. Maybe I am not normal and it really is possible to sit and think of absolutely nothing, but I remain intensely sceptical of that claim until I experience it for myself and over thirty years and counting now it's never happened. When people give this response I assume the truth is quite simply "I don't want to say" rather than the idea that they are sitting staring into space thinking of nothing at all.
The fact that I would have to sit and do nothing to really get into the story is partly why I don't listen to audio books that often. The ones that I do listen to are of books that I have already read myself. I prefer to have the physical copy in front of me or at least and ebook to read through and form my own image of it in my mind.
For the sake of balance there are a few positives to audio books that I can at least give to demonstrate that I can see both sides of the argument for them. Apart from the fact that it's less effort to be read to rather than to read, you do at least gain a better representation of the writing through an audio book. The reason I say this is because whether the author narrates the book or whether someone else reads it, the author will be involved in the recording process somewhere along the way. To that end an audio book is perhaps a better representation of things like pronunciation, intonation, accent, and narrative progression. An audio book establishes a pace through the person that is reading it, which give a greater insight into the artistic vision of the person who wrote the book to begin with - that is of course as long as the author was involved in the recording process, I have had experiences where the person reading it pronounces some things wrong that I know for a fact are pronounced differently because the author themselves have given interviews about the book and they said the correct pronunciation - I'm not going to say which book it was because the arguments that people have over this sort of thing are ridiculous, it's like the hard of soft G of GIF, Yanny Laurel, and THAT dress.
There are also times where the person reading an audio book can end up becoming the canonical voice in your mind of the characters in the book - assuming it was never made into a movie. This isn't something unique to audio books either, where there are games that are heavily driven by dialogue but no voice acting is used, the people who play these games on YouTube and give voices to the characters can end up being your canonical voice. JackSepticEye's version of Undertale for example established for me in my mind what I believe many of the characters from the game would sound like, there's also the fact that his play-through was the first time I became aware of the game, if I had played it before seeing his voice acting, I don't know if I would have connected so deeply with the narrative.
Fixing vs Replacing
Both my parents know how to sew and stitch, if a pair of trousers ripped, either one would be able to fix them up. I have a basic understanding of how to sew, but I wouldn't be able to fix a pair of trousers if they tore apart. I'm of the generation that would buy a new pair if that happened, partly because clothes are lower quality and cheaper today than they were in the past but also partly because there is a mentality that they're not worth fixing as a result or that if you do fix them they're only going to come apart again in future and it's less hassle in the long run just to replace them.
For me it's out with the old and in with the new, unless there is a deep sentimental attachment which for some pieces of clothing I own there is - although I don't actually wear any of those they are all folded away in drawers or hanging in a wardrobe as reminders and keepsakes rather than being anything I would actually wear, most of them don't even fit me anymore being from my late teenage years or early 20s.
I don't know where or when this shift in mentality occurred, even when I was a kid, if school uniforms got damaged then my Mum would sew them up, shoes would be repaired too rather than buying new. Around my college years the amount of money we had never really changed but I remember buying new clothes at that time when old ones became damaged. I don't know what caused the change in mentality for me personally. Beyond myself however, I know similar experiences are held by people like me that have one foot in the generation before and one foot in the generation after. Like the transition between old technology and new, I witnessed a world without the Internet and world with it. I've seen the mentality of fixing things rather than replacing them, and I've seen the mentality of upgrading rather than maintaining.
When I wrote about technology, particularly my old laptop that I still hold onto, I mentioned how technology has a lifespan, a length of time we expect it to last before it needs replacing. It's a lot harder to determine the lifespan of things like clothing. I tend to hold onto clothes for as long as I think it still looks okay or until it becomes damaged. To that end, I don't actually know how old most of my pieces of clothing are. I've moved houses six times in my life if you count the places I lived whilst studying at University, those moves are the only way I can determine how old anything is, I ask myself where I was living when I bought it. Beyond that rough time frame, I can't pin down a date not even to a year as to how old things are. I don't keep receipts of things most of those just get shredded when I know I don't need to keep it to return them.
If I actually knew how old some of my clothes were then perhaps I could be a better judge of how long I should expect something to last. Perhaps then I would be more willing to repair the old to get my money's worth out of them. What does surprise me however is something that contradicts what I said earlier. Above I said that clothes today are cheaper than they once were and there is a mentality that they are not worth fixing as a result. The surprising thing is that I have a range of clothing and shoes that are quite cheap to reasonably expensive, but there's absolutely no correlation between price and how long something lasts. I know for a fact that a pair of shoes I own are now 4 years old - I know this because I ordered them online and the website has an order history so I can see the date of those at least. I also know someone who bought a pair of shoes that were almost 4 times the price, not just 1 pair but 2, less than 2 years ago and they already need to be replaced. I remember when they bought them and thinking to myself I wouldn't pay that for a pair of shoes, their retort at the time was that they were high quality and they would last - not surprising this led to a very interesting conversation about the fact my shoes were still good, so I am not sure how much validity the argument about price actually has.
Then again maybe it's not about price, maybe it's about effort, it's just simpler to buy something new rather than put the effort into fixing something especially with the belief that if you fix it once, you'll have to fix it again in future and you don't know how many times that will happen, so in your mind you rationalise that the sum total of all the effort you would put into fixing it outweighs the effort of going to buy something new.
For me it's out with the old and in with the new, unless there is a deep sentimental attachment which for some pieces of clothing I own there is - although I don't actually wear any of those they are all folded away in drawers or hanging in a wardrobe as reminders and keepsakes rather than being anything I would actually wear, most of them don't even fit me anymore being from my late teenage years or early 20s.
I don't know where or when this shift in mentality occurred, even when I was a kid, if school uniforms got damaged then my Mum would sew them up, shoes would be repaired too rather than buying new. Around my college years the amount of money we had never really changed but I remember buying new clothes at that time when old ones became damaged. I don't know what caused the change in mentality for me personally. Beyond myself however, I know similar experiences are held by people like me that have one foot in the generation before and one foot in the generation after. Like the transition between old technology and new, I witnessed a world without the Internet and world with it. I've seen the mentality of fixing things rather than replacing them, and I've seen the mentality of upgrading rather than maintaining.
When I wrote about technology, particularly my old laptop that I still hold onto, I mentioned how technology has a lifespan, a length of time we expect it to last before it needs replacing. It's a lot harder to determine the lifespan of things like clothing. I tend to hold onto clothes for as long as I think it still looks okay or until it becomes damaged. To that end, I don't actually know how old most of my pieces of clothing are. I've moved houses six times in my life if you count the places I lived whilst studying at University, those moves are the only way I can determine how old anything is, I ask myself where I was living when I bought it. Beyond that rough time frame, I can't pin down a date not even to a year as to how old things are. I don't keep receipts of things most of those just get shredded when I know I don't need to keep it to return them.
If I actually knew how old some of my clothes were then perhaps I could be a better judge of how long I should expect something to last. Perhaps then I would be more willing to repair the old to get my money's worth out of them. What does surprise me however is something that contradicts what I said earlier. Above I said that clothes today are cheaper than they once were and there is a mentality that they are not worth fixing as a result. The surprising thing is that I have a range of clothing and shoes that are quite cheap to reasonably expensive, but there's absolutely no correlation between price and how long something lasts. I know for a fact that a pair of shoes I own are now 4 years old - I know this because I ordered them online and the website has an order history so I can see the date of those at least. I also know someone who bought a pair of shoes that were almost 4 times the price, not just 1 pair but 2, less than 2 years ago and they already need to be replaced. I remember when they bought them and thinking to myself I wouldn't pay that for a pair of shoes, their retort at the time was that they were high quality and they would last - not surprising this led to a very interesting conversation about the fact my shoes were still good, so I am not sure how much validity the argument about price actually has.
Then again maybe it's not about price, maybe it's about effort, it's just simpler to buy something new rather than put the effort into fixing something especially with the belief that if you fix it once, you'll have to fix it again in future and you don't know how many times that will happen, so in your mind you rationalise that the sum total of all the effort you would put into fixing it outweighs the effort of going to buy something new.
My struggle with weight
I wanted to write a post about weight and the struggle I have with it right now but the truth is I wrote 1,200 words and read it back and realised it was incredibly self indulgent even for me, so I've decided to scrap it and start again. This post is a lot better than the original but it's still self indulgent because it focuses on a problem I have that most people don't, so I want to add a disclaimer. If you struggle with your weight and trying to lose it, don't read on, you probably won't like what you read.
First things first, I have an auto-immune disease called Sarcoidosis. I was diagnosed with it in 2017. For the six months prior to my diagnosis I lost about 2 stone. After my diagnosis I was prescribed a course of corticosteroids called Prednisolone which caused my weight to go back up because those kind of steroids make you fat. I gained a stone and a half in the 3 months that I was on those tablets. That left me half a stone below my initial weight.
Those steroids stopped after 3 months and over the year that followed my weight began to decline again and I lost that stone and a half which left me 2 stone lighter than when I had started. That is more or less where I have been ever since. My weight now fluctuates, it rises by up to 7 pounds and falls again in waves. No amount of food that I eat results in any sustained weight gain. When I do drop to the lowest point I do feel compelled to eat to bring it back up again because I am afraid of going below that line.
I'm not the sort of person that feels comfortable doing this. I was never one to eat for the sake of eating. I love food but I eat when I am hungry generally speaking and when I am not hungry I don't eat. That means I have a very disorderly routine when it comes to eating, but my family are okay with this and so am I. The only time I really eat at a set time is whenever we have a meal together as a family or on special occasions like Christmas.
That covers the basics that you need to know before continuing. The rest of this post I will warn once again, for anyone who struggles with losing weight, you will likely feel despondent by the end if you continue reading.
I recognise that most people struggle with losing weight, it being something that they want and desire. I have the opposite problem right now and I know there are many people who would love to trade places with me but for all the pain and misery my Sarcoidosis has caused me I implore you to reason, you really wouldn't want to swap places it's really not worth it.
I get told at times that I look "really good" when I reach that low point of my weight and I've realised how disturbing that actually is, and the reality of that "compliment" people are giving. I have a disease and the reason I have lost that weight and got to that point is that I am not healthy, you're literally saying that you think looking sick is desirable. I know the people that say it really don't mean it in that way but that's the realisation it causes. That does make me think about the pressure that's put on people to lose weight to conform, people really do want you to look unhealthy.
First things first, I have an auto-immune disease called Sarcoidosis. I was diagnosed with it in 2017. For the six months prior to my diagnosis I lost about 2 stone. After my diagnosis I was prescribed a course of corticosteroids called Prednisolone which caused my weight to go back up because those kind of steroids make you fat. I gained a stone and a half in the 3 months that I was on those tablets. That left me half a stone below my initial weight.
Those steroids stopped after 3 months and over the year that followed my weight began to decline again and I lost that stone and a half which left me 2 stone lighter than when I had started. That is more or less where I have been ever since. My weight now fluctuates, it rises by up to 7 pounds and falls again in waves. No amount of food that I eat results in any sustained weight gain. When I do drop to the lowest point I do feel compelled to eat to bring it back up again because I am afraid of going below that line.
I'm not the sort of person that feels comfortable doing this. I was never one to eat for the sake of eating. I love food but I eat when I am hungry generally speaking and when I am not hungry I don't eat. That means I have a very disorderly routine when it comes to eating, but my family are okay with this and so am I. The only time I really eat at a set time is whenever we have a meal together as a family or on special occasions like Christmas.
That covers the basics that you need to know before continuing. The rest of this post I will warn once again, for anyone who struggles with losing weight, you will likely feel despondent by the end if you continue reading.
I recognise that most people struggle with losing weight, it being something that they want and desire. I have the opposite problem right now and I know there are many people who would love to trade places with me but for all the pain and misery my Sarcoidosis has caused me I implore you to reason, you really wouldn't want to swap places it's really not worth it.
I get told at times that I look "really good" when I reach that low point of my weight and I've realised how disturbing that actually is, and the reality of that "compliment" people are giving. I have a disease and the reason I have lost that weight and got to that point is that I am not healthy, you're literally saying that you think looking sick is desirable. I know the people that say it really don't mean it in that way but that's the realisation it causes. That does make me think about the pressure that's put on people to lose weight to conform, people really do want you to look unhealthy.
I'll never actually do that
I'm not a hoarder, to be one of those you need to be unwilling to dispose of anything, wanting instead to hold onto things for as long as you can because you either don't want to part with them or you convince yourself that they will serve a purpose at some point, that they may be useful or that there'll come a day when you'll need one of those. I can part with things that I no longer need, I do this quite often, once a year at least with my wardrobe I look at what no longer fits and give it to charity, I look at things I hold onto and ask whether I'll ever need it or whether it will actually serve a purpose one day. I can at least be realistic about that question and its answer when I want to be.
There are still a lot of things I hold onto. The reason I hold onto those things is because I tell myself that I will do something with them at some point in the future. For example I hold onto an old laptop that is broken, it needs the CPU fan replaced and it needs a RAM upgrade because it can't keep up with the demands of the latest version of Windows 10. Realistically I will never actually do any of this if I am honest. The PC I am using right now is a desktop and it is my main computer. This PC was built in stages, over the course of 2 years it eventually cost around £700 [$900] all things factored in. I use this PC for quite a bit, from low utilization tasks like writing, listening to music, watching videos, through to more intensive tasks like games development, 3D rendering, and gaming in general. If anything happened to this machine I would pay to get it fixed, for another few years at least because there is a lot of life left in this machine. If I ever had to travel however I wouldn't risk taking this machine with me, I wouldn't want to damage it. I would actually need a laptop again and to be completely honest I would probably end up buying a new one before I would actually get the old one fixed.
My old laptop is about 8 years old now, it lasted longer than I expect most laptops to last. A desktop I expect to last about 5 years on average, you can extend the lifetime if you look after it, which I hope to do with this desktop. As for laptops I expect them to last around 3 years, again with care you can get them to last a lot longer and the fact that laptop lasted around 7 years before it started to develop problems was remarkable in itself. The point I am trying to make here is that the laptop has realistically surpassed its life expectancy and although I could get it fixed, if I did need a laptop I would want it to last quite a while so I'd be more likely to buy a new one - assuming I could afford to do that.
There's a distinction to be drawn here between this mentality and that of procrastination. In he case of the latter, procrastination implies something we eventually do, we just keep putting off when we actually do it. If you never do the thing in question then it's not really procrastination. You could argue that you eventually intend to do it, but again there is a distinction to be drawn here in that you will admit if you stop and really think about it that you actually have no intention of doing it, you're only convincing yourself you will so that you hold onto the things that are the focus of that mentality - that's the dangerous part because that mentality is the one that leads to hoarding if you let it take hold.
The fact we can convince ourselves of things so easily, even when we know it's not true on some level, and even when the only person that this really has any impact on is ourself is perhaps one of the most intriguing parts of this whole behaviour and thought process. It makes you wonder what else in your life you have convinced yourself of so easily when on some level you know it's not true. With things like that old laptop there is at least a physical reminder, a token of sorts that can be used to make you see and realise what you've done, but what about the things that don't have physical manifestations, the beliefs and the thoughts that we have not out of conviction but simply because we didn't put any effort or energy into challenging the thought process that led us to forming them in the first place. I've said before that I often stop and think about what I say or my behaviour and ask myself if it is the way I really want to behave, this whole mentality is one reason why I do this, in essence I audit my behaviour and beliefs to check that there is a real reason behind my motivation or if it's just something I am doing for the sake of doing it or because it's something I've always done - it's perhaps not surprising that there aren't many things I do that I would consider habits as this process is quite good at preventing them from forming or taking hold. I recognise it's not easy to do at first, it takes time to develop this mentality and to think in this way.
There are still a lot of things I hold onto. The reason I hold onto those things is because I tell myself that I will do something with them at some point in the future. For example I hold onto an old laptop that is broken, it needs the CPU fan replaced and it needs a RAM upgrade because it can't keep up with the demands of the latest version of Windows 10. Realistically I will never actually do any of this if I am honest. The PC I am using right now is a desktop and it is my main computer. This PC was built in stages, over the course of 2 years it eventually cost around £700 [$900] all things factored in. I use this PC for quite a bit, from low utilization tasks like writing, listening to music, watching videos, through to more intensive tasks like games development, 3D rendering, and gaming in general. If anything happened to this machine I would pay to get it fixed, for another few years at least because there is a lot of life left in this machine. If I ever had to travel however I wouldn't risk taking this machine with me, I wouldn't want to damage it. I would actually need a laptop again and to be completely honest I would probably end up buying a new one before I would actually get the old one fixed.
My old laptop is about 8 years old now, it lasted longer than I expect most laptops to last. A desktop I expect to last about 5 years on average, you can extend the lifetime if you look after it, which I hope to do with this desktop. As for laptops I expect them to last around 3 years, again with care you can get them to last a lot longer and the fact that laptop lasted around 7 years before it started to develop problems was remarkable in itself. The point I am trying to make here is that the laptop has realistically surpassed its life expectancy and although I could get it fixed, if I did need a laptop I would want it to last quite a while so I'd be more likely to buy a new one - assuming I could afford to do that.
There's a distinction to be drawn here between this mentality and that of procrastination. In he case of the latter, procrastination implies something we eventually do, we just keep putting off when we actually do it. If you never do the thing in question then it's not really procrastination. You could argue that you eventually intend to do it, but again there is a distinction to be drawn here in that you will admit if you stop and really think about it that you actually have no intention of doing it, you're only convincing yourself you will so that you hold onto the things that are the focus of that mentality - that's the dangerous part because that mentality is the one that leads to hoarding if you let it take hold.
The fact we can convince ourselves of things so easily, even when we know it's not true on some level, and even when the only person that this really has any impact on is ourself is perhaps one of the most intriguing parts of this whole behaviour and thought process. It makes you wonder what else in your life you have convinced yourself of so easily when on some level you know it's not true. With things like that old laptop there is at least a physical reminder, a token of sorts that can be used to make you see and realise what you've done, but what about the things that don't have physical manifestations, the beliefs and the thoughts that we have not out of conviction but simply because we didn't put any effort or energy into challenging the thought process that led us to forming them in the first place. I've said before that I often stop and think about what I say or my behaviour and ask myself if it is the way I really want to behave, this whole mentality is one reason why I do this, in essence I audit my behaviour and beliefs to check that there is a real reason behind my motivation or if it's just something I am doing for the sake of doing it or because it's something I've always done - it's perhaps not surprising that there aren't many things I do that I would consider habits as this process is quite good at preventing them from forming or taking hold. I recognise it's not easy to do at first, it takes time to develop this mentality and to think in this way.
That's too easy
In the previous post I wrote about our reluctance to believe corporations and the claims they made in advertisements. I believe this lack of trust extends far beyond the world of advertising. In our day to day lives whenever we are confronted with a problem, we often assume that the simplest solution is the correct solution, this leads us to solve many of our problems ourselves without the help of others, but when we are met with problems that we can't find a simple solution to, we seek help from others. If you have come across a problem that you can't find a simple solution to however, an expectation arises that because it seems like a complex problem, there must be a complex solution, even though with every other problem in our lives we accept simplicity, we still insist that it has to be complicated because we couldn't figure it out on our own.
If you come across a problem that you couldn't figure out on your own, then whenever you seek help and ask others for solutions, the immediate predictable response is to reject any solution that is simple. If we couldn't solve it ourselves, a simple solution won't work, we convince ourselves this has to be true, even to the point where we deny all evidence to the contrary.
You might be thinking that you are the exception and that you would accept a simple solution so let's take a basic example. Most people in their lives will struggle with weight at some point. They'll carry more than they want and they will seek a way to lose it. There is one simple way to lose weight and it is the only way to lose weight: you must expend more calories than you consume. That's it, that's the only truth about weight loss, if you want to get thinner, then you need to burn more calories than you are consuming. Now ask yourself whether or not you accept that simple truth or whether like everyone else when it comes to weight loss you seek out more complex solutions. Do you seek out weight loss programmes, exercise routines, nutritional advice? Do you try and find "super foods" that will make you shed pounds of weight because you eat it? If you said yes to any of these things was there always a caveat or a disclaimer or something buried deep within the information you were provided that simply said that you had to have a balanced diet and exercise along with the programme?
We refuse to accept simple solutions to problems we haven't been able to solve ourselves. We utter the words "That's too easy" or "It's not that simple" in retort, I've done it myself, I openly admit that. The question is why are we so reluctant to accept a simple answer? Is it just a case of not wanting to feel stupid or incompetent for not figuring that out for ourselves? When someone gives you a riddle and you spend ages trying to find the answer and eventually give in and they give you a simple one word answer, do you react the same way? Is it different because we knew before we even tried that the answer would be simple? Is the real reason we won't accept simplicity as a solution to problems we couldn't solve simply that we have convinced ourselves that a simple answer can't possibly exist? If that's all it is, then how can you convince yourself that a simple answer does exist even if you can't find it, before you seek advice from other people so you are more open to simple solutions?
There's a concept that you will be aware of if you have ever been through a self-help section of a book store or Amazon, or if you've ever watched Oprah, that is the concept of applying the Law of Attraction to your life in general. This law as popularized by books such as The Secret by Rhonda Byrne take the idea that if you have positive thoughts then positive things will happen to you and if you have negative thoughts then negative things will happen to you, that ultimately you attract into your life that which you focus your energy on. Whilst there is little or no evidence to say that there is any actual force involved by doing this, there are reasons in psychology why this would actually work if you tried it with determination. This in essence is a demonstration of merging the conscious and subconscious minds in pursuit of a goal, and depending on how fixated on that goal you become you can merge the unconscious mind as well into a single collective drive to achieve your goal. This won't in and of itself guarantee success but it will create a stronger motivation and much deeper desire to pursue that goal and if you have a particularly strong cognitive bias then you will hold on to the thoughts and experiences that reinforce your belief and accelerate your progress and quickly discard those that don't.
Is it really that simple? Well, no, nothing in life is ever without complications but again like losing weight this is a simple idea that has a basis in truth. Whilst your success is not guaranteed because it depends on your actions more than anything else, it does show that the concept and the approach are easy enough to understand, the real question is whether you have the determination to follow through with it, or whether you will spend more time convincing yourself that there has to be more to it than that and making excuses not to try, or even worse, trying with the expectation of failing only to have those expectations validated and your own negative mentality reinforced for the exact same reason, that your consciousness is focusing on one expected outcome and you are actively working towards it, whether you want to admit it to yourself or not.
We can be our own worst enemies, nobody knows what to say to us to convince us we will fail better than ourselves, if only we could find a way to encourage ourselves so easily then we would be our own greatest allies.
If you come across a problem that you couldn't figure out on your own, then whenever you seek help and ask others for solutions, the immediate predictable response is to reject any solution that is simple. If we couldn't solve it ourselves, a simple solution won't work, we convince ourselves this has to be true, even to the point where we deny all evidence to the contrary.
You might be thinking that you are the exception and that you would accept a simple solution so let's take a basic example. Most people in their lives will struggle with weight at some point. They'll carry more than they want and they will seek a way to lose it. There is one simple way to lose weight and it is the only way to lose weight: you must expend more calories than you consume. That's it, that's the only truth about weight loss, if you want to get thinner, then you need to burn more calories than you are consuming. Now ask yourself whether or not you accept that simple truth or whether like everyone else when it comes to weight loss you seek out more complex solutions. Do you seek out weight loss programmes, exercise routines, nutritional advice? Do you try and find "super foods" that will make you shed pounds of weight because you eat it? If you said yes to any of these things was there always a caveat or a disclaimer or something buried deep within the information you were provided that simply said that you had to have a balanced diet and exercise along with the programme?
We refuse to accept simple solutions to problems we haven't been able to solve ourselves. We utter the words "That's too easy" or "It's not that simple" in retort, I've done it myself, I openly admit that. The question is why are we so reluctant to accept a simple answer? Is it just a case of not wanting to feel stupid or incompetent for not figuring that out for ourselves? When someone gives you a riddle and you spend ages trying to find the answer and eventually give in and they give you a simple one word answer, do you react the same way? Is it different because we knew before we even tried that the answer would be simple? Is the real reason we won't accept simplicity as a solution to problems we couldn't solve simply that we have convinced ourselves that a simple answer can't possibly exist? If that's all it is, then how can you convince yourself that a simple answer does exist even if you can't find it, before you seek advice from other people so you are more open to simple solutions?
There's a concept that you will be aware of if you have ever been through a self-help section of a book store or Amazon, or if you've ever watched Oprah, that is the concept of applying the Law of Attraction to your life in general. This law as popularized by books such as The Secret by Rhonda Byrne take the idea that if you have positive thoughts then positive things will happen to you and if you have negative thoughts then negative things will happen to you, that ultimately you attract into your life that which you focus your energy on. Whilst there is little or no evidence to say that there is any actual force involved by doing this, there are reasons in psychology why this would actually work if you tried it with determination. This in essence is a demonstration of merging the conscious and subconscious minds in pursuit of a goal, and depending on how fixated on that goal you become you can merge the unconscious mind as well into a single collective drive to achieve your goal. This won't in and of itself guarantee success but it will create a stronger motivation and much deeper desire to pursue that goal and if you have a particularly strong cognitive bias then you will hold on to the thoughts and experiences that reinforce your belief and accelerate your progress and quickly discard those that don't.
Is it really that simple? Well, no, nothing in life is ever without complications but again like losing weight this is a simple idea that has a basis in truth. Whilst your success is not guaranteed because it depends on your actions more than anything else, it does show that the concept and the approach are easy enough to understand, the real question is whether you have the determination to follow through with it, or whether you will spend more time convincing yourself that there has to be more to it than that and making excuses not to try, or even worse, trying with the expectation of failing only to have those expectations validated and your own negative mentality reinforced for the exact same reason, that your consciousness is focusing on one expected outcome and you are actively working towards it, whether you want to admit it to yourself or not.
We can be our own worst enemies, nobody knows what to say to us to convince us we will fail better than ourselves, if only we could find a way to encourage ourselves so easily then we would be our own greatest allies.
Corporate Faith
Most people hate advertising, even when it's not intrusive to the extent that it has become online, it still sits as a point of contention for most people because there is a distinct lack of trust between consumers and advertisers. As is the case in politics, over many decades of politicians making promises that were never kept, people came to an expectation that a politician's word is worthless so too is the expectation of advertisers, over many decades there has been a mentality that has become ingrained in society as a whole where people don't expect adverts to actually live up to the claims they make. That doesn't mean people don't complain about being mis-sold things when they don't do what they were advertised to do, but in those cases I don't think the advert is really responsible for their reaction, I think it's just a case of being dissatisfied with a product and knowing that you can use legislation that governs advertisements as a means to getting a refund - if their expectations garnered from the advert were probed in depth I think most people reluctantly would admit they never expected the product to actually deliver.
There is perhaps an irony that although those laws are often a bane to many advertisers when they are held to account for the claims they made, if those laws didn't exist and advertisements were allowed to say anything they wanted as was the case in decades past, people would actually be even less willing to take risks on products they never bought before knowing that if they don't like it they can't use the advertisement as a justification to claim a refund. I think when it comes to the claims most advertisers make, it's not a case of the consumer actually believing what is said in the advert, but rather more simply the advert raised the consumer's awareness of the brand. I'd love to see how effective an advertising campaign would be if their advert on TV consisted only of one short 10 second clip where someone simply said the brand name and product name, what it was and where to get it "Bing Bong Shampoo available at Walmart" with a picture of the shampoo bottle, that's all, absolutely no effort to try and sell you it, just one short 10 second clip that lets you know it exists, what it's called, and where you can get it - how much impact would that have?
The idea of trusting a company and what it says is something that I feel is dying, and I think that's a good thing because corporate entities are rarely held to account for anything they do, being that they are incorporeal and that there's no individual that can be charged, the corporation gets told off by a regulator, pays a fine if one is levied and that's it, they move on with nothing stopping them from doing the same thing again. It's rare that a regulator would impose a fine or consequence that posed any existential risk to the business as governments do not want to be seen as the cause of a liquidation and ultimately be to blame for job losses. In effect, corporations use their employees in this regard as a ransom against governments to limit their punitive responses. In 2018 there was a study conducted by BBC News into the trust of consumers in regards to banks after the 2008 financial crisis which found after 10 years from the crisis, consumer trust had not been regained by the banks and most people still felt the same animosity they did after the crash happened, they just didn't act on it or be as vocal as they were in the immediate aftermath.
There is of course another element at play here, that is the element of information or misinformation depending on your point of view. Companies have behaved in ways for decades where they twist the truth as far as they can within the law, some even cross that line as I said above and simply pay the fine and move on when they get caught. There is however an abundance of sources of information online that are more than willing to take corporate claims and put them under scrutiny. One such example of this is a series of YouTube videos called Honest Ads, a series of spoof adverts that show you what you'd actually see if adverts were honest and told you the truth, these aren't all intended to be funny, some of them are intended to be brutally honest and shed light on the inanity of the methods used in advertisements to make you buy their products. Nevertheless they highlight the disconnection and disassociation we have between product and performance as a direct result of the mentality that advertising has created, in essence we recognise that advertisements are no longer intended to inform but simply to entertain and like any form of entertainment you can only achieve true enjoyment when you suspend disbelief and buy into the fantasy - the trouble is that last part actually costs us money when we buy the products as a result.
When did someone decide that people weren't able to process the truth? This isn't something new or unique to advertising for that matter, it's happened for as long as adverts have been around, you can even argue that it is present in various socioeconomic structures, political structures, and even arguably within religious institutions. Even adverts from the 1950s and 1960s made spurious claims about the health benefits of cigarettes and alcohol at a time when laws weren't as strict about what they could get away with. Advertising from its inception was never about truth and honesty it was about convincing you to buy a product by telling you whatever they thought you needed to hear to make you do just that. When people ask "Why don't you trust companies?" the simplest answer is to ask in retort when was the last time a company actually give you a reason to trust it? - the same retort applies in all instances above, many criticise society as it evolves and sheds old beliefs and claim society is declining as a result, one could simply arguing that society is sobering up, yes we're coming down from a high but that come down isn't a decline in society, it is the realisation of the world we have created that we are seeing through clear sight for the first time and the horror that evokes and the anger and depth of the reaction to it is not the result of the come down but the result of decades of stupor spent oblivious to our impact.
There is perhaps an irony that although those laws are often a bane to many advertisers when they are held to account for the claims they made, if those laws didn't exist and advertisements were allowed to say anything they wanted as was the case in decades past, people would actually be even less willing to take risks on products they never bought before knowing that if they don't like it they can't use the advertisement as a justification to claim a refund. I think when it comes to the claims most advertisers make, it's not a case of the consumer actually believing what is said in the advert, but rather more simply the advert raised the consumer's awareness of the brand. I'd love to see how effective an advertising campaign would be if their advert on TV consisted only of one short 10 second clip where someone simply said the brand name and product name, what it was and where to get it "Bing Bong Shampoo available at Walmart" with a picture of the shampoo bottle, that's all, absolutely no effort to try and sell you it, just one short 10 second clip that lets you know it exists, what it's called, and where you can get it - how much impact would that have?
The idea of trusting a company and what it says is something that I feel is dying, and I think that's a good thing because corporate entities are rarely held to account for anything they do, being that they are incorporeal and that there's no individual that can be charged, the corporation gets told off by a regulator, pays a fine if one is levied and that's it, they move on with nothing stopping them from doing the same thing again. It's rare that a regulator would impose a fine or consequence that posed any existential risk to the business as governments do not want to be seen as the cause of a liquidation and ultimately be to blame for job losses. In effect, corporations use their employees in this regard as a ransom against governments to limit their punitive responses. In 2018 there was a study conducted by BBC News into the trust of consumers in regards to banks after the 2008 financial crisis which found after 10 years from the crisis, consumer trust had not been regained by the banks and most people still felt the same animosity they did after the crash happened, they just didn't act on it or be as vocal as they were in the immediate aftermath.
There is of course another element at play here, that is the element of information or misinformation depending on your point of view. Companies have behaved in ways for decades where they twist the truth as far as they can within the law, some even cross that line as I said above and simply pay the fine and move on when they get caught. There is however an abundance of sources of information online that are more than willing to take corporate claims and put them under scrutiny. One such example of this is a series of YouTube videos called Honest Ads, a series of spoof adverts that show you what you'd actually see if adverts were honest and told you the truth, these aren't all intended to be funny, some of them are intended to be brutally honest and shed light on the inanity of the methods used in advertisements to make you buy their products. Nevertheless they highlight the disconnection and disassociation we have between product and performance as a direct result of the mentality that advertising has created, in essence we recognise that advertisements are no longer intended to inform but simply to entertain and like any form of entertainment you can only achieve true enjoyment when you suspend disbelief and buy into the fantasy - the trouble is that last part actually costs us money when we buy the products as a result.
When did someone decide that people weren't able to process the truth? This isn't something new or unique to advertising for that matter, it's happened for as long as adverts have been around, you can even argue that it is present in various socioeconomic structures, political structures, and even arguably within religious institutions. Even adverts from the 1950s and 1960s made spurious claims about the health benefits of cigarettes and alcohol at a time when laws weren't as strict about what they could get away with. Advertising from its inception was never about truth and honesty it was about convincing you to buy a product by telling you whatever they thought you needed to hear to make you do just that. When people ask "Why don't you trust companies?" the simplest answer is to ask in retort when was the last time a company actually give you a reason to trust it? - the same retort applies in all instances above, many criticise society as it evolves and sheds old beliefs and claim society is declining as a result, one could simply arguing that society is sobering up, yes we're coming down from a high but that come down isn't a decline in society, it is the realisation of the world we have created that we are seeing through clear sight for the first time and the horror that evokes and the anger and depth of the reaction to it is not the result of the come down but the result of decades of stupor spent oblivious to our impact.
Skills
How would the world change if people were assigned jobs based on their ability and their skill set rather than your career being a personal choice? There is the argument that some people would react very badly to this imposition, citing the infringement of civil liberty and making a case that those who were made to work in jobs they did not want to do would become resentful of their positions. Let's assume for a moment that those people could be catered to and exceptions made but for everyone else who was happy enough to go along with the new system, they were to conform. How would the world change?
This is a fascinating question for me because really it deals with the idea of whether or not you think people today are in the "right" jobs or whether the "wrong" people are doing those jobs. You can dismiss those that are entrenched in controversy and public opinion already such as positions of a political nature and focus instead on those jobs where there is a measurable performance or efficiency, in other words, jobs where you can actually determine with statistics whether or not the person doing that job is good at that job. When you start to look into things a little deeper you realise that the reason most people who are bad at their jobs manage to hold onto them is because their employer either can't get rid of them easily or they can't find someone else easily to fill that post if they did manage to do so.
The idea of skills and ability as an indicator of the types of job people pursue is something that is easy to demonstrate as being an inaccurate indicator of motivation. You will find that people can be divided into two categories when you think about the jobs they should do objectively, those categories are, people who could but choose not to, and people who would but really shouldn't. By these distinctions I mean, the former are people who have the skills and qualifications to pursue a given career but choose not to because they have no interest in it. The latter on the other hand are people who will pursue a given career and do what they can to get into it despite not having the skills necessary to do those jobs effectively, even if they manage to get the qualifications that say they do, most education systems only require you to pass an exam to get a qualification, and for the vast majority of students in any subject if you were to give them the exact same exam right now, they wouldn't pass it.
There comes a question of why people pursue the careers they choose to pursue, and I think for the most part there are two motivating factors, the first is an interest in that career which drives the person to want it in the first place, and the second which is perhaps more prominent is the belief that there is a given salary attached to that career that they would like to earn and the belief that if they could only get into that job they could make it almost impossible for the employer to then get rid of them regardless of how good or bad they are at that job as evidence by how many people lie on their CVs about all sorts of skills and abilities including those that are integral to the role they are applying for.
If people were assigned jobs based on objective assessments of which jobs they are most able and most suitable for, whether or not people would accept these jobs I think would ultimately come down to whether the person thinks that job is beneath their social standing and whether or not the salary is agreeable to them. Most people who would oppose such a system would likely turn around and agree to that system if they were told they would be assigned an executive position that was paid very well because it would affirm the impression of themselves that they have, not because they would actually think about whether or not they could actually do that job.
When I wrote about interviews I said one of the reasons why I hated them was because they don't assess you based on your ability to do the job as they are supposedly designed to do, if recruitment processes were changed to involve a practical element that was weighted so that no person could be appointed to the position who didn't pass the practical, I wonder what impact that would have on the outcome of those recruitment processes, would people who are best suited for a job based on what the work actually involves be successful or would people still find a way to game the system to ensure they got the post even when they aren't really fit for it.
This is a fascinating question for me because really it deals with the idea of whether or not you think people today are in the "right" jobs or whether the "wrong" people are doing those jobs. You can dismiss those that are entrenched in controversy and public opinion already such as positions of a political nature and focus instead on those jobs where there is a measurable performance or efficiency, in other words, jobs where you can actually determine with statistics whether or not the person doing that job is good at that job. When you start to look into things a little deeper you realise that the reason most people who are bad at their jobs manage to hold onto them is because their employer either can't get rid of them easily or they can't find someone else easily to fill that post if they did manage to do so.
The idea of skills and ability as an indicator of the types of job people pursue is something that is easy to demonstrate as being an inaccurate indicator of motivation. You will find that people can be divided into two categories when you think about the jobs they should do objectively, those categories are, people who could but choose not to, and people who would but really shouldn't. By these distinctions I mean, the former are people who have the skills and qualifications to pursue a given career but choose not to because they have no interest in it. The latter on the other hand are people who will pursue a given career and do what they can to get into it despite not having the skills necessary to do those jobs effectively, even if they manage to get the qualifications that say they do, most education systems only require you to pass an exam to get a qualification, and for the vast majority of students in any subject if you were to give them the exact same exam right now, they wouldn't pass it.
There comes a question of why people pursue the careers they choose to pursue, and I think for the most part there are two motivating factors, the first is an interest in that career which drives the person to want it in the first place, and the second which is perhaps more prominent is the belief that there is a given salary attached to that career that they would like to earn and the belief that if they could only get into that job they could make it almost impossible for the employer to then get rid of them regardless of how good or bad they are at that job as evidence by how many people lie on their CVs about all sorts of skills and abilities including those that are integral to the role they are applying for.
If people were assigned jobs based on objective assessments of which jobs they are most able and most suitable for, whether or not people would accept these jobs I think would ultimately come down to whether the person thinks that job is beneath their social standing and whether or not the salary is agreeable to them. Most people who would oppose such a system would likely turn around and agree to that system if they were told they would be assigned an executive position that was paid very well because it would affirm the impression of themselves that they have, not because they would actually think about whether or not they could actually do that job.
When I wrote about interviews I said one of the reasons why I hated them was because they don't assess you based on your ability to do the job as they are supposedly designed to do, if recruitment processes were changed to involve a practical element that was weighted so that no person could be appointed to the position who didn't pass the practical, I wonder what impact that would have on the outcome of those recruitment processes, would people who are best suited for a job based on what the work actually involves be successful or would people still find a way to game the system to ensure they got the post even when they aren't really fit for it.
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