Ran Prieur

May 24.

2017-05-24T12:00:52Z

May 24. Quick note on daydreaming. I can't believe this is the first I've heard of this, but there's a thing called "active imagination", and that page sounds like New Age hot air except for the Carl Jung section:

Key to the process of active imagination is the goal of exerting as little influence as possible on mental images as they unfold. For example, if a person were recording a spoken visualization of a scene or object from a dream, Jung's approach would ask the practitioner to observe the scene, watch for changes, and report them, rather than to consciously fill the scene with one's desired changes.

Yeah, I've only ever managed that when I'm high, and even then only for a few seconds at a time. But it's awesome, like halfway between regular imagination and lucid dreaming (something I'm also bad at). They should really call it passive imagination, but that doesn't sound as cool.

May 22.

2017-05-22T22:40:53Z

May 22. On a recommendation, I read the book The Craving Mind by Judson Brewer. It doesn't tackle my main problem, which is how to do things I don't feel like doing. Instead it's all about how to quit smoking and other bad habits: by looking curiously inward at your own cycles of compulsive behavior and reward.

I was hoping the book would answer my question from a few weeks ago, about whether daydreaming is bad for us. Brewer thinks it's bad, but his arguments against daydreaming are anecdotal, speculative, and imprecise. The closest he comes to a good answer is in another context where he describes two kinds of feeling good: one that brings "restlessness and a contracted urge for more," and another that "results from curiosity" and is "open rather than contracted."

Brewer treats the brain's default mode network as the Great Satan, probably because that simple view fits Buddhism as he understands it. This article has a more balanced view: Your Brain Can Only Take So Much Focus, and it describes a practice called positive constructive daydreaming.

Near the end, the book has a promising metaphor about our internal compass. I would extend it like this: deep inside we all have a compass that can sense the subtle magnetism of the right thing to do in almost any situation. But we can't read it because we're surrounded by artificial magnets that constantly give us wrong directions. I'm tempted to list some of them, but I'll just speculate that seeing past them, to the truer magnet, is a skill that anyone can learn in 20-30 years.

May 19.

2017-05-19T19:10:28Z

May 19. I'm busy today, but here's a subreddit thread about determinism, and I want to briefly hit the subject from another angle:

Determinism is a hyper-rational philosophy that oddly leads to compassion. A determinist will never solve a problem by saying "that guy's an idiot" or "those people are trash," because how did they get that way? By the coldest of logic, everyone has been doing exactly the best they could have done from the day they were born. Then the question becomes: How can I use my illusory choice to change the world so that people doing their best is good enough?

May 17.

2017-05-17T17:50:26Z

May 17. Continuing from Monday, what are the deep differences between people who are good at life and people who are bad at life? Previously I've bashed the idea of "magical virtue", which is when we see people living well or living badly, and we assume it's just because they're good people or bad people, without looking deeper.

If we look deeply enough, we have to consider determinism, a philosophy based on archaic physics, in which the whole universe is like a giant clockwork whose every motion was fixed from the beginning of time, and choice is an illusion.

This leads to a radical idea: not only is it luck whether you're born into wealth or poverty, it's also luck whether you have the "initiative" to climb out of poverty, or the "wisdom" to use power well. What do those words mean without choice? Even the difference between Hitler and Mister Rogers was one hundred percent luck.

I prefer to believe that we make choices that can actually go either way, and I want to know: When someone makes that pivotal choice to lie or to be honest, to be mean or to be nice, to indulge a habit or to break it, to focus on the flaws of others or on their own flaws, what is the choice that underlies that choice?

For now, I have three hypotheses. 1) The right choice is to face into the pain, not away from the pain. 2) The right choice is to expand, not to contract. Expand what exactly? I don't think we have the language to be more specific. 3) The right choice is to cast off the self, to take things that seem like an absolute part of who you are, and view them as optional.

May 15.

2017-05-15T15:30:15Z

May 15. Over the weekend I watched some NWSL games, and the second half of Boston at Chigago was phenomenal. (You can watch it here if you have Go90 or if you connect from a server outside the USA.) They had been playing evenly, and then around the 60th minute Boston just rose to another level and were totally dominant until they got a goal. Then, I don't know if Chicago raised their game, or if Boston lost confidence, or if their coach made a bad decision. If I were the coach I would have been shouting "Finish them!" But instead they settled into uneasy defense, and the story changed to whether Christen Press could break her long goal drought against Boston's talented young keeper who had the jitters. There was also a fluke play that resulted in a crazy free kick from deep inside the box.

I've half-joked that it's better to follow sports than politics. For one thing, you have more influence over sports, because it has never happened that a single voter has swung an election for national office, but it has happened that a single fan has swung a baseball playoff game by interfering with a fly ball.

But now I have a more serious argument. Wherever you turn your attention, you tend to internalize the rules of that world. For example, if you grew up in a family where people got what they wanted by being pushy, or by complaining, or by using a particular flavor of subtle communication, you're going to expect that same strategy to work in the larger world.

In politics, what strategies lead to success? Bullshitting everyone all the time, using subconscious mind control tricks on the voters, making secret deals with big donors, and generally being as cynical as possible. The more you follow politics, the more you will expect that those strategies are universally effective, and that being honest and selflessly serving the greater good will lead to failure. And I think the corporate world is almost as bad.

But in sports, not all the time but more than in any other public event, success is a function of being really good at fully transparent skills. Since I cut back on following politics, and started following a few sports closely, I've been asking less often, "How did the world get so fucked up?" and asking more often, "What are the deep differences between people who are good at life and people who are bad at life?"

May 12.

2017-05-12T12:00:46Z

May 12. Yesterday I ate my usual dose of cannabutter after a five day break, but I did something different. I ate it on an empty stomach, and then rode my bike to the store and back, and then ate a big meal. And I got so high that I couldn't read! Now we're getting into the philosophy of science, because I'm tempted tell a story about the inner workings of the body, but that way of thinking is not necessary and can even get in the way. The important thing is not whether I can explain it, but whether the pattern repeats, so I'm going to continue testing and see if that sequence -- dose, exercise, meal -- consistently brings a stronger high.

I also came up with a model of how tolerance works: My subconscious mind is constantly generating stuff that I can access high but not sober. And every time I get to a given level of "high" (it's more like going deep than going up) I harvest what's been generated at that level since the last time I was there. So if I get to a [7] every day, it doesn't feel like a [7] because my "creative department" only has a day's worth of stuff. Yesterday I rated myself [8.5], and looking at my journal, I haven't been there since January 15, when I jotted nuggets like "Acting is dancing with your face" and "Power is the right to be weak."

And yesterday I clearly saw the solution to depression and motivation -- but it's not the first time I've noticed this, and it's easier said than done. My inner dialogue, on the boundary between conscious and subconscious, is extremely inefficient, like a clunky machine that half the time works against itself. Now we're coming back to Monday's subject, because it can be useful to look at my personal history and see how my mind got that way, but that can also be a distraction. The important thing is just to go in there and fix it, which requires moment after moment, hour after hour, month after month, of practicing metacognition.

That's one reason I think sitting meditation is overrated. Of all the stuff in your head that needs to be fixed, most of it will never come up when you're trying to do nothing, only when you're going about your normal day, so that should be the main focus of inner attention. Gurdjieff was saying that more than a hundred years ago.

I also want to point out that the practice of metacognition has to be completely non-judging, because if it's even a little big judging, you fall into a recursive loop: judging yourself for judging yourself and so on.

May 10.

2017-05-10T22:40:08Z

May 10. With the weather getting warmer, I'm going barefoot as much as possible. Last night I dreamed that I was in some kind of office and realized that I'd forgotten to wear shoes, so I was trying to go discreetly outside to put my shoes on and come back in.

Suddenly I understand what's going on with kids who dream they're naked at school. Just as I know there's nothing wrong with not wearing shoes, they know there's nothing wrong with not wearing clothes. The dream is about being in an insane world, a world full of rules that you can't reason out from anything practical or ethical -- you just have to learn the rules one by one, and there's always a fear that you'll get a big one wrong. It's not a shame dream -- it's a Kafka dream!

And if adults stop dreaming that they're naked, it's because they've internalized the rule.

May 8.

2017-05-08T20:20:18Z

May 8. I'm busy and don't have a post ready, so I'll run with something I just wrote on the subreddit, answering this post and James Hillman's argument that we shouldn't look at childhood trauma to solve psychological problems, because other cultures don't do that.

Everyone I know has been damaged by their childhood, and a lot of people get better by looking into that. It's not a myth -- we think that way because it works. I agree that Freud pulled a lot of ideas out of his ass, but that doesn't invalidate the whole idea of looking at your deep personal history.

Now, if it's true that traditional cultures never do that, then there are two possibilities. 1) Those cultures are raising kids much better than us. 2) The way they're raising kids is so universal and so ingrained in their culture that questioning it is impossible.

Another way to look at it: in a time of cultural flux, we can't afford to take the way we were raised for granted. We have to look into how our identity was formed, we have to take apart that black box and see if it still serves us. And I'd rather live in a world where we try different ways of raising kids and make mistakes, than a world where there's only one way that's never questioned.

By the way, that same subreddit post leads with the idea that we shouldn't fight bad feelings -- we should embrace and explore them. I totally agree.

May 5.

2017-05-05T17:50:34Z

May 5. As promised, a suicide playlist. Most of these songs came from Leigh Ann, and she also had a bunch that I didn't use, including "I'm Afraid of Japan" by Owen Pallett and "Good Day To Die" by Travis. The list could be better, but I'm happy with what I could patch together in a couple days.

I've never seriously considered suicide, but selling most of my stuff and moving out of my house is like the worst of dying and living -- letting go, doing all the work, and no resolution.

Big Star - What's Going Ahn (1973)

Nothing here about dying, but it's very sad, and it leads into the next song, by a band that sounds a lot like Big Star's third album.

Money - You Look Like A Sad Painting On Both Sides Of The Sky (2016)

Benjamin Clementine - Cornerstone (2015)

Again, the lyrics don't mention a suicide, but I like that interpretation.

Carissa's Wierd - So You Wanna Be A Superhero (2002)

That edge in her voice is so unsettling.

Badly Drawn Boy - A Minor Incident (2002)

The band has said that the lyrics are a suicide note from a mother to her son.

Bob Dylan - Ballad of Hollis Brown (1962)

The best known version is not on YouTube, but this is pretty close.

Violent Femmes - Country Death Song (1984)

This is so similar to Ballad of Hollis Brown that it's almost a cover, and a really good one.

The Decemberists - We Both Go Down Together (2005)

Okkervil River - John Allyn Smith Sails (2007)

About the poet John Berryman, incorporating the traditional song Sloop John B, made famous by the Beach Boys.

Get Well Soon - If This Hat Is Missing I Have Gone Hunting (2008)

I love that weird crescendo.

Band of Horses - The Funeral (2006)

About living on the edge of death as a heroin addict.

Orphans & Vandals - Terra Firma (2009)

A long and challenging song that I didn't appreciate until listening several times.

Nick Drake - Saturday Sun (1969)

This must be the saddest song possible, because it also has so much beauty.

May 3.

2017-05-03T15:30:38Z

May 3. Continuing from Monday, a reader reminds me that jungle tribes are almost never repressive, because everyone knows how to survive on their own, so if they don't like the way things are run, they can just walk away.

We can't do that. I know because I spent most of my thirties trying to walk away, and it turned out that homesteading requires a ton of driving, and intentional communities default to the highest and most expensive standard of living of all their members and the workload to support it. Now my advice is to get an income of $10-15k a year by any means available, and find a city with dirt cheap housing where you don't have to own a car. But to truly walk away, you have to die.

The nice thing about keeping unhappy people alive, is that they're more perceptive than happy people. They understand better how the world needs to change. There are valuable things that you can only learn at the edge of darkness, and we need some people to go there and come back. Or, seriously considering suicide enables you to consider a whole range of less extreme options.

This subreddit thread has some thoughts about suicide, and some songs, so on Friday I plan to post a suicide playlist.

But now I'm going to annoy you all by writing about sports. My new favorite NWSL team is the Boston Breakers, who have always been terrible but this year they rebuilt, and I predicted they'd make the playoffs with world class midfielder Rose Lavelle and three other rookie first rounders. But it turns out their most dangerous player is Adriana Leon, a fifth year veteran whose pro career until now has been disappointing. After regaining confidence in Europe, she's been on fire this year, and she was just player of the week with a goal, two assists, and two near-goals. That one-touch assist at 25 seconds is brilliant, and you can tell that the whole team is in sync like no other American team except North Carolina, who they play on Sunday.

May 1.

2017-05-01T13:10:11Z

May 1. A reader correctly pointed out that my mental struggles are situational, not chronic. I was a happy little kid, and I'm confident that I'll regain my full capacity for pleasure, and adequate motivation, when I get some stuff sorted out. So don't worry if I go deeper into the subject of depression by writing about suicide.

Super-smart blogger Sarah Perry, who lately has been posting on Ribbonfarm, wrote a pro-suicide book called Every Cradle is a Grave. It's mostly philosophical arguments that don't work for me -- and yet I agree that suicide should be fully legal and fully socially accepted.

My argument is practical. If suicide is normalized, it will become a very powerful form of social protest. Right now I can think of only two contexts where suicide is an effective protest: when a teenager is being bullied, and when a Buddhist monk sets himself on fire. But when tens of thousands of Americans with shitty lives overdose on opioids, everyone blames the drugs. It's not acceptable for us to say, "Despite having all these doodads of progress, my life is psychologically so hopeless that my best option is to gamble with death."

Imagine if suicide were part of the toolkit for making a better world, like a more drastic form of going on strike. Citizens could tell the government, workers could tell employers, kids could tell parents and schools: meet our demands or we'll check out. Now, maybe meeting the demands would just move the pain somewhere else. But we would all quickly stop arguing about stupid symbolic measures of quality of life, and start looking hard at subjective happiness.

Yes, I'm being glib about death. I have a strong feeling that death is better than a bad life, and I think this world has gone all the way to the other extreme, making death so forbidden, and making life so painful for so many people, that it's almost like a big torture prison. Only in this bizarre local anomaly could we entertain the philosophy that nonexistence is generally better than existence.

My favorite argument against suicide is that certain moments are worth staying for. From a reddit thread last year:

A sunny spring day, and the rain clouds were moving in. I went past a daycare where a little girl was dancing around, away from all the kids, by herself. You just never know, I thought to myself. What if I had killed myself, all that long time ago.