Ran Prieur

September 30.

2019-09-30T18:00:16Z

September 30. Continuing from last week, over on the subreddit I got some surprising pushback from an idea I thought was non-controversial: that it's better to ground yourself in your own stream of experience, than in how (you think) other people see you. So I probably need to explain myself better.

I see my role, as a writer, as reaching out into the unknown, looking for ideas that maybe nobody has had yet, or that nobody has put into words, and whatever I find, I put it out and see what happens. If people like it, that's great; if they don't like it, that's still okay. But what I don't want to do, is figure out what people want, and give it to them.

This subject reminds me of this essay from 2016, Confessions of a Failed Self-Help Guru. It starts with an anecdote about Deepak Chopra, getting ready for a presentation, asking if his pants make him look fat. The point is, no matter how enlightened your intentions are, that's what happens if you go down the road of grounding yourself in how other people see you.

Lately I've been thinking about fame. It started when I read about how Haruki Murakami reverse engineered his fiction for the American literary market, and that's why we've all heard of him and not other Japanese authors who are more creative. William James identified two opposing human drives, one toward surprise and one toward recognition. Fame is all about fit with social machinery that feeds recognition.

Now I'm thinking about popular music, and how much better it was for a few decades in the late 20th century. It's not that one generation was more creative, but that the mass culture became receptive to surprise, so that wild and raw music, which is always around, briefly became popular and influential, before slipping back into obscurity.

September 25.

2019-09-25T13:10:42Z

September 25. Quick loose end from the last post. Instead of talking about two different definitions of the self, it would have been more clear to talk about two different things that the word "self" points to. (That seems to be common for important words, that they point to different things and we don't notice.) I don't want to call them the true self and the false self -- that feels pompous. But I will say that it's a stronger position to define yourself in terms of your moment-to-moment experience, than to define yourself in terms of how other people see you.

One more link on the subject of attention: To Pay Attention, the Brain Uses Filters, Not a Spotlight

Moving on, a smart and very depressing article, Public Opinion in Authoritarian States. The main idea: "for many of the most effective authoritarian systems, controlling the thoughts of the ruled is secondary to shaping social cleavages in the population."

Then it goes on to explain how ordinary humans do not choose their political positions out of rational thinking or even self-interest, but for social reasons: they want to believe the same stuff as their in-group, and the opposite of their out-group. And even in a supposed democracy, the ruling interests understand this and use it to control us.

Finally, going into the weekend with something happy, The Village That Turns Bombs Into Spoons.

September 23.

2019-09-23T23:50:09Z

September 23. So the other day, after writing about pain, I started wondering about boredom. What exactly is it? Is it the opposite of pain, or another kind of pain?

Then I started thinking about attention again, and came up with this: boredom is the absence of anything that earns your attention; pain is the presence of something that demands your attention without earning it. So having to listen to your boring uncle at a family dinner is not actually boredom, but pain.

Now I'm thinking about attention as a dimension of power — or really two dimensions. Power can force you to give attention you don't want to give, like ads, and it can give you attention you don't want, like surveillance. I chose technological examples because high tech is the new frontier for the abuse of power. Old-fashioned abuses of power, like groping, are really uncool now.

Then I'm thinking, those two dimensions of attention can also make two different definitions of the self. I've written before about the "not that" meditation, where you ask yourself, "What am I?" And whatever answer you come up with, you keep saying "not that" and looking deeper. The deepest I can get is that I am an experiencing perspective, and on top of that I have a stream of actual experiences, and on top of that, expectations and desires about where the stream is going.

The other definition of the self, you can see developing in little kids, when they take great pleasure in hiding and popping out. "Where did she go? There she is!" They're learning to see the self as an object in other people's streams of experience.

This is not a new idea, and I'm not sure where I'm going with it. I just think it's strange that a concept as important as the self, which we think we understand, can have two attention-based definitions that don't overlap.

September 19.

2019-09-19T19:10:04Z

September 19. A reader wants me to say more about anxiety and depression being disorders of attention. Of course that's not all they are — sometimes there's actual brain damage. But I think a lot of us can go a long way toward mental health, just by practicing different habits of where and how we turn our attention.

Lately I've made some progress on managing anxiety, with a practice that I call expanding into pain. Every self-help guru will tell you, expansion is good and contraction is bad. What they don't tell you is what exact thing you're expanding, because it's really hard to explain. Another thing they don't tell you is that expansion feels terrible. If it felt good, we wouldn't have to be told to do it.

But for me, the pain is the key to the practice. I usually do it in the morning, when I'm still lying in bed, making the mental transition from the world of dreams to the world of earthly responsibilities. I'll be thinking about something that feels bad, and the practice is, never mind the thing, focus on the feeling, and amp it up, as strong as I can, as long as I can.

I'm sure a brain scan would reveal some action in the amygdala or wherever, but what it feels like, is that the world is made of needles and knives, and I'm expanding my astral body into them. I've started to call it my morning stretch. And after doing it enough, it becomes like a muscle that I can flex at will.

So if I'm out in the world, in some anxiety-causing situation (typically driving, which is so dangerous that if your attention lapses for half a second it can ruin your life) I can expand into it, and it's like the martial arts move, where someone throws a punch, and you move toward the punch, so that it hits you before it builds up any power.

Or it's like, anxiety is paying interest on pain, but if you catch it in time, you only have to pay the principal.

September 16.

2019-09-16T16:40:32Z

September 16. I'm in a weird place mentally, and also I'll be on the road this week without my laptop, so I might take the whole week off from posting.

September 12.

2019-09-12T12:00:30Z

September 12. Going early into the weekend with some happy links. The Future of Wind Turbines? No Blades. Do you ever drive past a dusty field, and see tiny funnel clouds? You might think those things only happen in dust, but the dust just makes them visible. They're everywhere, because air likes to do that, and this new design can harvest that motion.

Why industry is going green on the quiet. It often makes sense economically, but they don't talk about it because people are cynical about greenwashing.

Is the Modern Mass Extinction Overrated? It's an interview with a conservation biologist who argues that we might be gaining as many species as we're losing, if you count plants and insects, and hybrids adapting to climate change. More generally, the best way to increase biodiversity is to work with change, and not to try to keep things exactly as they were in the recent past. Related: Bring Back North American Elephants.

Glasgow Police Stop a 3000 Person Hide-and-Seek Game at an Ikea. I'm thinking, a hundred years in the future, if the human population is falling, there will be cool abandoned buildings everywhere to play hide-and-seek in.

September 9.

2019-09-09T21:30:28Z

September 9. I'm feeling uninspired this week, so I've gathered some one-liners that I've jotted (actually typed into Notepad++) over the last few months, while high:

Cannabis resets the kind of memory that causes boredom.

Ninety percent of wisdom is been-there-done-that.

Indecisiveness is grief: your options are your pets.

Anxiety and depression are disorders of attention.

A religion is a social organism that feeds on spiritual experience.

The presidential race is a reality TV show. They're all performers pretending to be authentic, and trying to avoid getting voted off.

Confidence is that which enables you to move on from mistakes as if you'd meant them.

September 6.

2019-09-06T18:00:38Z

September 6. A few health links. Burning Sage Kills 94% of Airborne Bacteria. They burned it for an hour, and "The room remained almost entirely disinfected for over 24 hours, and seven strains of disease-causing bacteria previously present in the room still could not be detected 30 days later."

The Fundamental Link Between Body Weight and the Immune System. Basically, your immune system decides which bacteria will be permitted to exist in your gut, and different gut bacteria digest food differently. So your immune system can make you fat or thin. I'm the rare person who can lose weight much more easily than I can gain it, which must mean that my immune system hates bacteria that are good at extracting calories from certain kinds of food.

That's probably why I hate fasting. Earlier this week I did a 36 hour fast, partly inspired by this new study about the benefits of short term fasting. Back in my 20's, during the excessive self-control phase I mentioned the other day, I did a four day fast, and I never reached the no-hunger plateau that other fasters report. For me the hunger just gets worse and worse. I'm sure the science is right that it's good for my body, but the only benefit that I personally experience, is that I don't have to floss.

Brain food: a nutrient vegans lack. It's a very short article about choline, and "an impending choline crisis brought about by the trend towards plant-based diets." Some fast food places are rolling out plant-based burgers, but those are highly processed, and not good for you. If you want to reduce your climate footprint, you can go a long way by just switching from beef to chicken. And I'm looking forward to burgers made from mealworms or other insects.

And some music for the weekend. In 1983, the Scottish post-punk band Altered Images recorded this cover of Neil Diamond's Song Sung Blue, and it sounds like children's music on acid. A great original by the same band: I Could Be Happy.

September 4.

2019-09-04T16:40:33Z

September 4. Over on the subreddit, Voidgenesis makes a serious attempt to answer Monday's questions. I think the root of the problem is that humans have pushed our power so far beyond our understanding, that it's hard to even figure out the right thing to do, let alone feel like doing it.

I've been thinking a lot lately about thinking vs feeling. After my social media post, Jeff sent this video, The Science of Internet Addiction and Brainpower, which frames the prefrontal cortex (thinking and willpower) as the angel on one shoulder, and the reward circuit (doing what feels right) as the devil on the other. That's fair enough if you're trying to quit Facebook, but as a general idea, it's dangerous.

In my 20's, I went so deep into forcing myself to do stuff I didn't feel like doing, that I started having nightmares about being dragged to death. Ever since then I've been skeptical about the value of willpower, and I've been struggling to integrate feeling into my decision making.

I'm still not sure what the difference is, if any, between following your gut, following your heart, and whatever feelings push us to do obviously harmful things. If only there were an actual angel and devil, so we could just look and know which voice was right.

September 2, Labor Day.

2019-09-02T14:20:38Z

September 2, Labor Day. Continuing from last week, Eric comments on what the author of the intentional community piece might have meant by restless dreamer syndrome: "What that phrase conjures for me is the person who floats into a group looking for some ideal experience, then wanders off when it is time to do some heavy lifting."

The more I think about this subject, the more questions I have. Why do we have so little faith in the dominant system, that we expect a better experience from a system that's new and untested?

How can there be a scarcity of people willing to do useful work, in a species that has done such an excess of useful work that we have turned forests to deserts and destabilized the climate?

Why do small communities always have a shortage of workers, while the big economy always has a shortage of jobs?

What if a community actually succeeded in building a way of living that was clearly better? How could they avoid being violently taken out by the dominant system?

Why is there so little overlap between what we feel like doing, and what's good for us to do? Why are humans the only species in the world that has this problem?