Ran Prieur

May 11.

2018-05-11T23:30:08Z

May 11. Not a lot of ideas this week, but I can riff off the last post, and point out that when we make the outer world less challenging, we make the inner world more challenging. If we all had to struggle to survive, then a lot of us would die; but if survival is easy, then whatever is left to struggle for is less important, and it's harder to care. If we continue on this line of progress, eventually nobody will do anything that needs to be done, and the only cause of death will be suicide.

I'm not against this -- I would love to eat from a sci-fi food fabricator and have nothing to do all day but play games and go for walks and do creative projects. My point is that it flies in the face of our deep biological history of struggling to survive, and there will be voices inside us that push for higher stakes.

The other day I had a thought about "terrorism". I don't like that word, and one reason is that it makes it all about us: the terrorists sit around thinking about our feelings and how to make us feel afraid. I think they're focused on their own feelings. They're mostly young people, from the middle class or higher, and they want life to be more interesting, so they want to believe that they're engaged in a struggle so important that it justifies killing.

Have you ever had a group of friends, or family, and you had to get away from them because they were constantly creating unnecessary drama? That's my new model of political violence: it's just people trying to suck us into their drama. My new definition of "world peace" is not a world with no conflict, but a world where you are never forced into someone else's conflict.

May 8.

2018-05-08T20:00:08Z

May 8. I was in Seattle over the weekend. It's having a problem that a lot of popular cities are having: the cost of housing is so high, that too many residents are either rich or homeless -- and both of those demographics suffer from mental illness. The difference is, homeless people are homeless because they're mentally ill, and rich people are mentally ill because they're rich.

Poverty is a smaller problem now than it has ever been, if you define problematic poverty as the percentage of humans who are suffering from scarcity. Meanwhile, more people than ever are suffering from abundance.

I want to avoid putting any kind of moral spin on this. If you count our prehuman ancestors, we've been living at the edge of scarcity for hundreds of millions of years, and only living with abundance recently, so we're still really bad at it. How well could birds fly only a few thousand years after evolving wings?

Of course culture evolves faster than biology. We've been aware of this problem for thousands of years now, and I think we'd be gaining on it if we didn't keep inventing new luxuries and comforts and choices. Maybe we're gaining on it anyway. This New Yorker article is about Japan and how they're on the cutting edge of finding subjective quality of life in this strange world.

May 4.

2018-05-04T16:20:25Z

May 4. A few more stray links. This was posted a week ago to the subreddit: A Short Lesson in Perspective, about how the creative process is distorted by money and hurry.

Lifefaker is a new site that skillfully mocks how other people's social media posts make us feel inadequate.

Sent to me by multiple readers: Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean

And some great electronic music from 1971: Mort Garson: Philosopher's Stone

May 2.

2018-05-02T14:00:04Z

May 2. A few links. This is one of the better woo-woo threads in the history of reddit, People that honestly believe they have been abducted by aliens, what was your experience like? There are lots of stories about missing time, and I believe these people are telling the truth, but I think the cause is something weirder and harder to understand than space aliens.

Gabriel sends this amazing Twitter feed, ctrlcreep. It's basically micro-scale sci-fi. Some of neotene's tweets are ideas you could hang a whole novel on, others would illuminate a sentence, but they're all interesting. It reminds me of what every writer says: that ideas are the easiest part. For me, writing is like building and steering a sailboat, and ideas are like the wind. If your sails are good, inevitably you will get more wind than you need; the challenge is to focus it into a journey.

This reddit thread, where people describe the experience of flow, makes me wonder if I've ever really been there. I can get deeply absorbed in creative work, but I've never felt the crystalline clarity, the sense of absolute competence, that some of these people describe. I've never felt like my body was doing the right thing on its own while my head just watched. At best, when I'm writing, words will just pop into my head and they're perfect. It feels great, but it also feels more like a sputtering engine than a train.