This reminds me of something I wrote in an email a couple weeks back, about an idea I call pan-solipsism -- somehow, through some hidden dimension of causality, the universe behaves for every person as if they're at the very center. Of course this is the popular new age "you create your own reality" thing, but new agers rarely face the hard philosophical problem: to reconcile the idea that the universe is all in your head, with the idea that we're all in the same universe.

My speculative solution is that the sharing of reality is mostly an illusion. It's like that thing where maybe we see colors differently, and what you see as red I see as blue. But expand that to everything: what you see as "house" or "book" or "money", I see as the incomprehensible components of my own bizarre alien world. And in the slack created by these hidden differences, we each live in an outer world that's largely a projection of our inner world. Even "the brain" is a projection, a symbolic user interface for hacking our own streams of experience.

Getting really weird, I wonder if that's how technology is causing the epidemic of depression and anxiety: by forcing us to inhabit the same world. Physics says there are events where it doesn't make sense to say what happens until they are observed. Maybe even if an event is observed, two observers could still see it differently, and be in partially different universes -- as long as they don't compare notes. Information technology has forced us to do too much note-sharing, and now we all have to compromise to a reality that's satisfying for fewer and fewer people.

Coincidentally, when a quantum function that could go either way is pinned down into being the same way for all observers, it's called collapse.

I believe that there is some overlap. Consciously training your body and senses to be receptive and responsive to your partner, then giving your partner movement, stimulus that has been smoothed, reduced, refined so that there is a clear 2-way conversation in (unconscious) body language. Dancing like this is not an intellectual activity, in fact feels opposite of intellectual, but only the greatest dance geniuses can do it without making the conscious effort to build the necessary skills.

Of course I should have known that. I'm not a good dancer, but as a writer, I have exactly that partnership inside myself. There's that voice that spits out words from who knows where, and if I were to put that stuff on the page unfiltered, it would be terrible. But I also couldn't ignore that voice and write anything good. Good art, and good living, are about skillfully walking the line between conscious and subconscious, or rational and sub-rational.

But if art and living are similar skills, then why are highly creative people so often bad at life? I think it's because their subconscious energy, which can illuminate invented worlds, is too wild to be integrated in a world shared with other people -- or at least this world.

On a personal note, I've been doing a lot of work lately to clean up bad subconscious habits, but I still haven't got to the core problem: the lack of overlap between what I feel like doing and what's good for me to do. I wonder what it's like for other people. I mean, every night I force myself to floss my teeth because I know it's good for me -- but most people don't, and if they can't even force themselves to floss, how are they forcing themselves to cook and clean and pay bills and do their jobs? That's why I've become so interested in channeling spontaneity, because I imagine that if I could learn to do it right, I could coast through life instead of having to drag it around.

...the silent spirit that dwelt in dim woodland, and walked unseen in open field, suddenly showing herself, Dryad-like and not afraid, because in his soul who sought for her there had been wakened that wonderful vision to which alone are wonderful things revealed; the mere shapes and patterns of things becoming, as it were, refined, and gaining a kind of symbolical value, as though they were themselves patterns of some other and more perfect form whose shadow they made real: how strange it all was!

Most people listen to music to feel at home with some human subculture, while I listen to music to talk to God -- typically after breathing cannabis vapors, and sometimes kneeling before two large vintage speakers.

Eric's second idea is that many genres of popular music have their roots in some kind of fringe dance music. As the sound becomes mainstream, people no longer dance to it.

This reminds me of something I often wonder: why are white people so bad at dancing? I think it's because dancing comes from the body, and European culture has been consistently heady for hundreds of years now. That's why Elvis was so popular. Just as television was emerging, he was the only white man whose movements were fluid and not stiff.

What would it take for everyone in the world to be good at dancing?

The Oscars obviously have blind spots, but with movies it's generally the authentic artistic endeavors that get recognized. But when you look at what gets nominated for a Grammy? I don't understand what the hell it's all about.

It's also interesting to compare music with TV, which has been in a golden age for a while now. The 1970's cannot hold a candle to the last ten years of television, so we're not talking about a general cultural decline. I think there's something about the medium of music, in the context of our economy and technology, where popularity has become strongly correlated with blandness.

Casablancas sees the evil music industry excluding the best artists, but I see it the other way around: with cheap home recording and internet distribution, the best artists no longer have to fight for a place at the table of big money. They're happy to stay independent and do exactly what they want, and big money is happy to go on with beautiful people and algorithmic songwriting.

Is it better this way? With all the great TV shows out there, there still has not been a single episode that speaks to my soul the way my favorite songs do. Maybe some future technology will enable visual storytelling to be cheap enough to take the risks to reach that level.

By the way, a 2018 album has emerged as my favorite non-Big Blood album of the decade: Insecure Men. That's the album on YouTube and here's an article about it. I would tag it as space lounge music. The songs have the structure and melody of classic pop, with so much strange beauty layered on top that I guess people find it hard to wrap their ears around it. For an argument that music is getting better, compare Dire Straits' 1985 hit "So Far Away" with Insecure Men's "I Don't Wanna Dance With My Baby".

You don't need to be on the autism spectrum to lack social tact or find yourself disgusted with the need to demonstrate social tact everywhere. When people talk about "neurodiversity" it's not because there's giant group of oppressed Aspies. It's because Aspergerdom is a cultural symbol of what it means to be undersocialized.

I like Starcraft but my reaction time is never going to get up to the level necessary to compete with the pros. So I play casually. I'd get destroyed if I played with people of even a moderate skill level. This is how undersocialized people see the world of oversocialized people.

I've never been to a professional for a diagnosis, so I don't know if I would come out neurotypical, aspie, or schizoid. But when I imagine my ideal culture, it's like social bumper cars: everyone is having fun, because no matter how big of a mistake you make, nothing bad can happen.