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.
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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